At Least He Paid his Losing Bet

Following the loss of 5 million U.S. industrial jobs from 2000 through 2017, Joel Kotkin in Spiked writes of the growing consensus – alone among Western countries, and despite the U.S. left’s hatred of Donald Trump – to revive America’s industries by “reshoring” manufacturing. Today, writes Kotkin, even some of the famously globalist “tech bros” are opening new facilities back home to manufacture tangible, advanced products. One sign of success: China is measurably bleeding in its manufacturing output.

About US$16 trillion has been wasted “feeding the climate change industrial complex,” writes Stephen Moore in Real Clear Politics. The “shameful and colossal misallocation of human resources,” Moore writes with disgust, delivered “not a penny of measurable payoff.” As he notes, since climate policies began ramping up “30 years ago, the temperature of the planet has not been altered by one-tenth of a degree.”

In City Journal, Christina Buttons describes the wreckage caused by the precipitous decline in residential treatment beds for mentally ill teens. Where do they end up? Increasingly, in “juvenile detention”, i.e., jail. Buttons’ detailed report offers a cautionary tale for Canada, where provinces are also grappling over whether to force the mentally ill and/or drug-addicted to undergo treatment (as Alberta is now doing) or simply leave them to suffer (and often endanger others) on the street.

City Journal’s Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo investigate the personal destruction wrought by (genuinely) far-right influencer Nicholas Fuentes. The founder of “Groypers” – a cult-like following of angry young men who will do virtually anything for Fuentes – doesn’t just hate Jews, praise Hitler and Stalin, and oppose inter-racial marriage. As Thorpe and Rufo report, Fuentes betrays his own followers, lies about how he uses the money supporters send him, and defends pedophiles.

In a cautionary tale with pointed lessons for Canada’s deepening swoon towards China, James E. Fanell in American Greatness chronicles how the Communist regime shamelessly exploited its invitation to the biennial RIMPAC international naval exercises off Hawaii to both gather intelligence and humiliate its U.S. hosts and their Asian allies – brusquely sailing five armed warships right into Pearl Harbour. Donald Trump uninvited the Chinese in 2018, and Fanell urges the U.S. President not to give in to the current Chinese propaganda effort to relent this year.

Daniel Greenfield cheers UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ recent warning the institution is facing “imminent financial collapse” – while lamenting that the claim is a lie. Why Greenfield’s glee? As he notes in The Jewish Edition, the UN spends an insane 25 percent of its enormous budget on air travel – sometimes more than on AIDS or malaria programs. Greenfield’s suggestion: “Let the UN leave New York and take its headquarters down to whichever Third World hellhole it’s sending money to.”

The 11,000-member American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) – which includes hundreds of Canadian members – “has come out unequivocally against ‘gender-affirming’ surgeries in adolescents under age 19,” writes Leor Sapir in City Journal. The ASPS has also joined a growing number of international organizations in warning about the potential physical and psychological damage to children and teens of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. [Editor’s note: Two days after the ASPS’s announcement, the American Medical Association announces it now agrees that gender-altering “surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”]

Laura Hollis at Arcamax knits together U.S. Democrats’ over-the-top terror at modest budget cuts and criminal probes of welfare fraud with Barack Obama’s 2008 promise about “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Looting public finances to support waves of illegal and semi-legal immigrants from impoverished countries with no history of democracy or economic self-reliance, Harris argues, are foundational phases in “transforming” the U.S. into an anarchic socialist hellhole.

A recent conference on anti-Semitism in Jerusalem was oddly welcoming to members of ultra-conservative European parties. For Dov Maimon of Jewish News Syndicate, it is a “dizzying paradox” that European Jews are feeling safer in “illiberal” democracies such as Hungary, Poland and Czechia, where civic order is imposed firmly and street violence is not tolerated, than in traditional liberal havens like the UK and France.

Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.

Steven Hayward at the Civitas Institute charts the remarkable transformation of the U.S. from energy beggar importing 75 percent of its crude oil into the world’s foremost producer and a major exporter of oil and natural gas. Out the window are “Peak Oil” theory, ever-higher energy prices and the green energy obsession. Plentiful affordable energy is now driving an American industrial revival and enabling the U.S. to lead the AI revolution.

Ann Coulter, writing on her own website, compares the current “massive resistance” to federal immigration officers by law-breaking Democratic governors and activists – particularly in Minnesota – to the past illegal attempts by Democrats to sabotage racial integration in the Deep South. Then, two presidents deployed the military to force compliance. Coulter urges the current President to once again invoke the federal Insurrection Act to ensure the laws of the land are followed.

At Blacklisted, Eve Barlow reminds us of the mainstream media’s long shilling for the wrong side in the great saga of Iran. Consumed by hatred for the Shah, the CIA and the U.S. government, leading outlets like the New York Times promoted a murderous totalitarian – the Ayatollah Khomeini – as a reasonable answer to Iran’s problems. Barlow notes how the media have remained trapped in their moral inversion – to the very moment the mullahcracy finally appears set to topple.

At Pundicity, Bostonian Jeff Jacoby compares a city that builds to one that doesn’t. Dallas, Jacoby notes, has unapologetically expanded its road system and, consequently, the average Dallas resident wastes just 44 hours per year stuck in traffic. That’s barely half the average time spent idling in Jacoby’s famously congested hometown whose leaders, he notes pointedly, despise the automobile and halted major roadbuilding 50 years ago.

In The European Conservative, John Rosenthal warns of a broadening European censorship complex that’s attempting not just to muzzle Europeans or control American tech platforms operating in the EU, but is going after the free speech of Americans in the U.S. Rosenthal profiles HateAid, a supposedly “independent” outfit that operates as “trusted flaggers” of suspect content for tech platforms, but is in fact supervised by government, funded by government and staffed by people with deep ties to the EU superstate.

Who produces vastly more energy than it needs right now? The United States. So who needs Venezuela’s oil? Basically, nobody. That cold fact, writes Ben Cahill in Barron’s, is enabling the Trump Administration to further squeeze dictator Nicolas Maduro by blockading the nation’s oil exports. For decades, other countries used oil as a weapon against the U.S. Today the tables are turned and, Cahill notes, Venezuela’s decrepit industry is the one crying out for reinvestment.

Twice before, Western civilization has collapsed utterly, triggering half a millennium of darkness. At The Blade of Perseus, Victor Davis Hanson wonders whether our current iteration, which delivered “constitutional government, rationalism, liberty, freedom of expression, self-critique, and free markets,” is due for its own catastrophic fall. “Salad-bowl tribalism replacing assimilation” is among the issues gripping Hanson, as is that “fertility has dived well below 2.0 in almost every Western country.”

The propensity of politicians to misuse the seasonal Menorah lighting to propound liberal messages greatly irritates Josh Hammer. Writing for Jewish World Review, Hammer reminds readers that Chanukah commemorates a historical triumph: the Jewish Maccabees’ military revolt against their Greek Seleucid overlords, regaining self-rule and reclaiming the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. And that, Hammer writes, carries a universal message: love your people and your country – and fight for them when they’re threatened.

Two decades ago leftists described Mary and Joseph as “homeless”. Now, they’re pushing the narrative that the Holy Family were equivalent to today’s “migrants” and “refugees”. As Maisey Jefferson explains in The Federalist, a church in the Boston suburb of Nedham has defiled its Nativity scene, replacing Baby Jesus with a sign denouncing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That’s not only offensive and blasphemous, writes Jefferson, but historically illiterate.

It seems a reasonable question: if you love your homeland, fled only because a vicious civil war made you fear for your life, and now the war’s over, why haven’t you booked tickets home? But as Rafael Pinto Borges writes in The European Conservative, more than a year after the toppling of the murderous Assad regime, most of Europe’s 1.4 million Syrian “refugees” are apparently intent on staying put.

Although it’s giving transatlantic elites the vapours, the Trump Administration’s new National Security Strategy has much to commend it, writes The American Conservative’s Eldar Mamedov. “It grounds American foreign policy in the unvarnished realities of power, risk, and strategic focus,” Mamedov writes. In practice, this likely will mean expeditiously ending the war in Ukraine to restore strategic equilibrium with Russia, halting further NATO expansion, and pushing America’s European allies to stand on their own two feet.

What might Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan be driving at during his private “interminable monologues” with Pope Leo XIV, wonders Fiamma Nirenstein in Jewish News Syndicate. The Pope, no doubt, wants to avert a Third World War and sees Turkey as a bridge between West and East. But having embraced Islamism and purged Turkey of nearly all its 4 million Christians, Nirenstein writes, the Turkish tyrant appears ever-less amenable to that role.

Following an “Allahu-Akbar”-yelling Afghan’s shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. – one of whom subsequently died – Ammon Blair in UnHerd lauds President Donald Trump’s planned “permanent pause” on immigration from “Third World” countries. Blair notes the move ties into the Administration’s recent declaration that “mass migration poses an existential threat to Western civilization” and that governments “have the right – and obligation – to protect their people.”

Marxists are often chided for prizing theory over reality, but Kevin Schmiesing’s assessment in Law & Liberty of Andrew Hartman’s 550-page Karl Marx in America finds this author largely does the opposite. Hartman’s descriptions of communism’s rancorous currents flowing through America are interesting and largely accurate, writes Schmiesing, but his evaluation of Marxism as philosophy is weak. This in turn blinds Hartman to the key question: why did Communism never really catch on in America?

The EU may have banished the “‘inhuman,’ ‘degrading,’ and ‘irreversible’” death penalty for criminals, writes Frank Haviland in The European Conservative – but its member states’ soft-on-crime, easy-on-illegal-immigrants policies are making violent death an increasingly common fate for innocent Europeans. In a world gripped by barbarian forces, writes Haviland, it’s time for Great Britain to hold a national referendum on restoring an older form of justice.

Gareth Roberts pronounces the 250,000 fellow citizens who’ve fled Britain since Labour’s election “wimps”. The escapees, Roberts notes in Spiked, are missing “a buffet of black comedy gold” – like the current alliance of transgenderism and radical Islam. While Roberts evokes Noël Coward’s advice to “laugh at everything,” in that particular case it might not really be the best medicine.

In the category of “who knew” should be filed the insight by former U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama that millions of black people “run away from water” and “can’t swim” because of their desperation to maintain the straightened hair they feel (racist) whites expect of them. As Larry Elder notes in Jewish World Review, Obama helpfully used much of a recent podcast to “explain” to “white people” that blacks have naturally curly hair.

John R. Grove commemorates the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald with a moving meditation on Gordon Lightfoot’s song memorializing the disaster and its 29 forever-lost victims. Lightfoot’s poetry and melody in The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald not only hauntingly convey the tragedy’s essential elements but, Grove writes in Law & Liberty, open a window to the sublime.

In The European Conservative, Jonathon Van Maren explores the case of a pink-haired German female pastor marrying four men from three countries and at least two different religions “in the eyes of God” outside Berlin’s St. Paul the Apostle Church. Writes Van Maren with formidable restraint: “It is a snapshot of cultural collapse.” The union is known as a “polycule” and, some suspect, is aimed at gradually normalizing polygamy.

Victor Davis Hanson in The Epoch Times answers his self-posed question whether Americans are better off since Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. In contrast to the litany of defeat and decline under Joe Biden – like the deadly, costly, bungled bug-out from Afghanistan – Hanson lists a veritable avalanche of Trumpian accomplishments, including regaining control over the southern border, surging energy exports, forging multiple peace agreements, presiding over robust economic growth and rolling back DEI/wokism.