▶️ VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: HOW IRAN COMMITTED SUICIDE
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VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: HOW IRAN COMMITTED SUICIDE
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ow does the supposedly most fearsome regime in the violent Middle East now find itself on the verge of an utter economic and military collapse? Iran’s half-century-long deadly terrorist reputation peaked with the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel that it helped fund and coordinate.
Iran’s terrorist ambitions of running the Middle East had accelerated after witnessing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and his administration’s distancing itself from Israel. Biden’s humiliation by a series of Chinese slights and the Russian invasion of Ukraine further eroded American deterrence. European appeasement was another force multiplier of Iranian hubris.
The theocracy apparently assumed that its supposed “ring of fire” terrorist proxies; in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen, could lethally squeeze Israel, now reeling from the greatest single-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust.
The theocrats further conjectured that, like most incumbent presidents, Biden would be reelected and continue to revive the disastrous Obama-era appeasement.
Once Biden had begged Iran to reenter the Iran deal, lifted sanctions, sent cash, and removed terrorist designations from some of its proxies, the Khamenei regime, now flush with new oil revenues, logically stepped up its nuclear enrichment.
Tehran was assured that not even Israel would dare strike its nuclear labyrinth, given its reputedly state-of-the-art Chinese and Russian air defenses; and its own retaliatory armada of thousands of ballistic missiles and drones, augmented by perhaps 200,000 short-range rockets of its Arab terrorist clients. But Iran sorely miscalculated.
The cognitively challenged Biden reelection candidacy imploded, replaced by the anemic Kamala Harris nomination; and with it, the Democrats lost power.
Worse, the supposedly politically dead and buried Trump pulled off the most amazing political return in modern American history.
Benjamin Netanyahu survived the political implosions following October 7 and now had a supportive American presidency.
A cleverer Iran would have stopped the bombast, downplayed its terrorist connections, and returned to its trademark delay-delay-delay style of negotiations; in hopes that the Europeans, the terrified Gulf monarchies, the anti-Israel Democrats, and the paleo-Right would combine to prevent Trump from doing what seven prior presidents had claimed was essential but had never dared to do.
But instead, Iran kept bragging about its air defenses and its vast missile fleet and egged on its expendable Arab surrogates.
It had no inkling that October 7 had reminded Israel that it could never trust its Islamic enemies and that its extinction, not mere defeat, was the aim of the Iranian nexus.
In truth, Iran’s ferocious reputation was never based on any actual success on the battlefield. Its forte had always been enlisting Arabs and other Middle Easterners to kill Israelis, Americans, and other Westerners in Europe, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
When Israel preempted this and destroyed the Iranian air defenses during the 12-Day War in 2025, and the Americans pounded its multi-billion-dollar nuclear facility, the world saw for the first time how hollow the theocracy had always been.
Even its patrons, Russia and China, privately despised Iran and considered it only a useful anti-American and anti-Western tool. But once Russia got mired in Ukraine and lost Syria, it was forced to cut Iran loose.
The Chinese; who have turned a million Muslim Uyghurs into indentured serfs; saw Iran merely as a cut-rate gas station. As long as it was free to buy sanctioned Iranian oil on the sly, China sold Iran almost every weapons system Tehran wanted. But again, the Chinese connection was predicated only on Iranian utility—which has now mostly evaporated.
The Gulf sheikdoms loathed and feared Iran but were too close to the monster to dare poke it. And so they appeased and bribed Iran and hoped their money, oil, and the US military would deter the mullahs.
That strategy, too, has imploded, Iran having blasted the Gulf with more missiles (5,000) than it had sent (500) even against the hated Zionist entity.
Europe for decades appeased Iran to buy its oil, to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, and to protect itself from Iranian-funded terrorists. Now that the US has defanged Iran, Europe is likely to pile on.
Iran has no government. Freelancing apparatchiks from the military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the government, and the theocracy fear being dubbed soft by their competitors, but all of these fear a popular uprising and an overdue noose strung over the collective neck of the regime even more.
They have no idea what Trump will do. Their signature methods of delaying and bartering won’t work with him, especially when time is no longer on Iran’s side, and they have no military left.
The bankrupt regime is bleeding over $400 million a day in revenue. It faces a loss of half a trillion dollars from its half-century-long investment in a vast and now obliterated military-nuclear-industrial complex and arsenal.
In sum, Iran can no longer credibly bluff, threaten, or delay. Iran’s decades-long bluff; built on terror proxies, nuclear brinkmanship, and Western appeasement, collapsed the moment it faced direct force and a changed geopolitical landscape. Not even the American Left and the European appeasers can save it. Its 47-year façade is in ruins. ✪
▶️ JB SHURK: WHY DO DEMOCRATS HATE AMERICA?
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JB SHURK: WHY DO DEMOCRATS HATE AMERICA?
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emocrats and their ideological allies really do hate America.Earlier this week, Democrat Senator Chris Murphy highlighted a disputed news story claiming that a shadow fleet of several dozen Iranian vessels had successfully eluded the U.S. Navy’s blockade near the Strait of Hormuz. Above what appears to have been Iranian propaganda, Murphy wrote one word: “Awesome.” How much does a Democrat senator have to hate the country he putatively represents to root for a foreign enemy presently engaged in battle with the United States?
Murphy’s choice to side with Iran’s Islamic terrorists over American servicemembers should surprise no-one. As commenters quickly pointed out, the Democrat was caught meeting with members of an Iranian spy ring a few years back (most likely a crime under the plain statutory meaning of the Foreign Agents Registration Act for which Murphy was never prosecuted), and he actively lobbied the Biden Administration to remove Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; the same group that slaughtered over 40,000 Iranian protesters a few months ago, from the list of U.S. sanctioned terrorist organizations. A normal person who had engaged in potentially criminal conduct by secretly working with Iranian spies and who had shamefully defended Iran’s brutal regime in the recent past would take pains not to be seen as cheering for Iran to defeat the United States in battle. But Senator Murphy is a Democrat, so cheering for America’s enemies does seem perfectly normal.
On Tuesday, Virginians narrowly passed a congressional redistricting amendment that will allow Democrats to replace their current 6-5 advantage in the House with a 10-1 drubbing that entirely ignores the state’s rather evenly split electorate. As of yet, Republican-led states have done nothing that so disenfranchises voters as what Democrats just did in Virginia.
In framing Republican efforts to alter congressional districts in other states, former President Obama recently got on his high horse (which must be tired from carrying the man with a questionable birth certificate around all these years) to proclaim to his legions of serfs: “For too long, gerrymandering has contributed to stalled progress and warped our representative government.”
For once, Obama actually told the truth. Gerrymandering has long been a problem in the United States. What Obama failed to point out, though, is that Democrats depended on gerrymandering schemes to control the House of Representatives for most of the Twentieth Century. Until voters in the South began voting more solidly Republican in the ’94 midterm elections of President Clinton’s first term, Democrats had controlled the House for all but four years since 1931! They didn’t hold on to their congressional majority for sixty years because Americans overwhelmingly supported the party of slavery and Jim Crow. The Democrats maintained power because their state-level political machines were extremely effective at gerrymandering district maps.
Because Democrats rewrite history as effortlessly as normal people breathe air, they routinely fail to mention that no political party in the history of the United States has abused congressional districting more than the Democrat Party. Case in point: Even though Obama had previously denounced Republicans’ attempts to pick up a few House seats across the country, he immediately celebrated the Democrats’ gerrymandering victory in Virginia and howled, “Congratulations, Virginia! Republicans are trying to tilt the midterm elections in their favor, but they haven’t done it yet. Thanks for showing us what it looks like to stand up for our democracy.”
Ah, yes, “standing up for democracy” requires Democrats to disenfranchise the roughly 50% of Virginians who are Republican by forcing them to have Democrat “representatives” in the House. When Obama says, “our democracy,” he means the Democrat Party’s undemocratic rule. Until they succeed in gerrymandering enough state maps to take back the House for another sixty years, everything Republicans do to try to balance the scales will be denounced as a “threat to democracy.” As Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton observed of Obama: “Notorious, corrupt president who tried to rig multiple elections by abusing power and jailing his political opponents says an abusive gerrymander promotes democracy.” Democrats running corporate newsrooms will continue to pretend not to know the truth.
You’d think that Senator Murphy’s cheerleading for Iran’s Islamic terrorists (the same ones who have murdered hundreds of Americans over the years) and Divider-in-Chief Obama’s disenfranchisement of Virginians would take the cake in this week’s installment of Democrats’ never-ending war against Americans. But Democrats’ showcased hate for the United States was just getting started.
On Tuesday evening, the Justice Department announced the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center for wire fraud, money laundering, and false statements. The FBI and DOJ allege that the Democrat-controlled SPLC has secretly funneled millions of dollars to “white supremacist” groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, Aryan Nation, and Unite the Right (the group behind the Charlottesville, Virginia, “white supremacy” riot that Democrats have hung around the neck of President Trump and MAGA voters since 2017). In other words, the SPLC has been actively funding neo-Nazis, racists, extremists, and domestic terrorists in order to manufacture incidents of “racism, hate,” and “right-wing” threats. Democrats who have given money to the SPLC have, in effect, been donating directly to the KKK and the Nazi Party.
How much do you have to hate America to finance racial hatred, chaos, animus, and social division? Apparently the Democrat Party and its friends hate America enough to financially support all the groups they pretend to oppose. Ponder that: Democrats financially support the very “hate” groups that they claim are destroying America. By their own words, they are destroying America.
In truth, this revelation should not be a surprise. So many of us have said for years that it is impossible to find these “white supremacist” groups that the Democrat-controlled corporate news media pretend are lurking around every Republican neighborhood. If you go to one of President Trump’s MAGA rallies, you find the nicest, most considerate, and most accommodating Americans one could imagine. If you turn on CNN, MS-NOW-(What’s-Its-Name), PBS, or any other Democrat-controlled news outlet, the lying “journalists” on those propaganda networks make it seem as if “white supremacist” groups are everywhere.
Now we know why. It’s pretty easy for Democrats to track down “white supremacists” when it is Democrats who are funding their activities. It’s easy to find Nazis and racists when you have Nazis and racists in your cellphone contacts. Democrats fund “extremist” groups, so that they can label them “right-wing” and then raise new funds from “useful idiot” Democrat donors who don’t understand that their donations are going to neo-Nazis and the KKK. The Democrat Party’s whole business model essentially runs on hate.
What’s especially atrocious is that the SPLC has spent decades falsely labeling anybody who disagrees with Democrats as an “extremist, racist,” or “domestic terrorist.” They describe anybody who doesn’t toe the Democrat Party line as an “agent of hate.” They defamed Charlie Kirk and designated Turning Point USA a “hate group.” They slander people without any consideration for the harm they inflict upon their victims. The SPLC has no moral compass of any kind. And now we know that it has likely been financing the operations of the very groups that it pretends to oppose. The Democrats who run the SPLC are evil.
Sometimes people say that Democrats and Republicans are too divided to remain together in one nation. Perhaps that is so. But before we start warring with each other, we should first take the evil propagandists to task. How much division would still organically exist in America today if the same evil people weren’t bankrolling so much animosity, disagreement, estrangement, and mutual hate?
Democrats who wish to censor “hate speech” should start by silencing themselves. Unfortunately for us, too many are addicted to hate. Their business model runs on hate. ✪
▶️ STEVE HILTON CAN WIN IN NOVEMBER
STEVE HILTON CAN WIN IN NOVEMBER
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n less than two weeks, by law, a ballot must be in the mail and on its way to every registered voter in California. Some counties mail ballots before the May 4 deadline. This means that within days, voters in California will begin returning completed ballots, locking in their choice for who will be the next governor.
Meanwhile, in the state’s so-called “Jungle Primary,” where all voters, regardless of their party affiliation, select their choice from a single list of candidates, the race for the top two spots remains completely up for grabs. Eric Swalwell may be gone, but plenty of other Democrat candidates are still in the race. The latest poll on April 19 showed Tom Steyer at 16 percent, with Xavier Becerra and Katie Porter both at 10 percent, Matt Mahan at 4 percent, and Betty Yee at 2 percent. Kevin Wen, CEO of the polling organization Kreate Strategies, accurately summed up the result of frontrunner Swalwell’s dropping out, saying, “The field reflects redistribution without consolidation.” Fully 23 percent of California’s voters remain undecided.
If anything appears likely in the California governor’s race, it’s that Republican Steve Hilton will collect enough votes to finish in one of the top two spots, where he will oppose a Democrat on the November ballot. Having always run slightly ahead of Republican rival Chad Bianco, Hilton now polls at 18 percent, pulling away from Bianco, who is down to 14 percent. Trump’s recent endorsement of Hilton carries with it two messages. First, it was never realistic to expect the Democrat field to remain so split that two Republicans could earn the top two spots in the primary. Second, of the two Republican candidates, Hilton has the best chance of beating a Democrat in November.
These two factors were always true. Despite the Democrats’ failure to coalesce behind one candidate, the chances that they are going to permit multiple viable campaigns to split the vote so much that two Republicans could end up #1 and #2 in the primary outcome have always been about zero. Swalwell is the first casualty, but he won’t be the last. The danger was, and remains, the opposite. Steyer, with virtually unlimited funds and a formidable campaign staff, is going to probably buy his way to a top spot. If only one other Democrat were to pull away from the pack, and the Republican vote had remained equally split between Hilton and Bianco, Californians would be choosing between two Democrats in November to be their next governor.
One potential spoiler in the contest between Democrats is San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. He is attracting million-dollar–or–more donations from wealthy individuals who could be reasonably stereotyped as business-friendly moderate Democrats. They include Sergey Brin, Rick Caruso, Reed Hastings, Steve Huffman, Michael Moritz, Neil Mehta, and others. These names are recognized by anyone familiar with California politics and business, and they run the gamut from left of center to right of center. And as for Mahan’s appeal? They believe it is impossible for a Republican to win in California. Period. That’s it. That is the only reason they support Mahan.
This is a self-defeating, self-fulfilling misconception. The reason a Republican like Steve Hilton is fighting an uphill battle to be competitive in November is because donors who have chosen Mahan as their preferred candidate have chosen Mahan as their preferred candidate. It is a tautology. It is only true because they’ve chosen to make it true. It is the political equivalent of the theory in quantum physics that the observer creates reality.
The political reality that California’s centrist billionaire donors are ignoring is blatantly obvious. The chances that they can propel Matt Mahan into a top two finish, when voting starts in less than two weeks, and Mahan is only polling at 4 percent, are lower, lower than the chances that Steve Hilton, who is almost certain to be on the ballot in November, can actually beat his Democrat opponent.
There is nothing about Matt Mahan that makes him an appealing practical choice apart from the fact that he is (1) not a Republican, and (2) not as bad as every other Democrat. This is a lousy reason to burn through tens of millions of dollars. Mahan is not going to get the nod from Democratic voters. And any rational pro-business donor, whether they’re right of center or left of center, ought to be disgusted with Mahan, who talks like a moderate, but—following the Spanberger strategy—will govern like a hack. Consider his record.
Matt Mahan’s tenure as San Jose’s mayor has seen him do nothing to replace the city’s homeless industrial complex, a corrupt ecosystem of grifters who have squandered billions on “permanent supportive housing” when congregate shelters that mandate sobriety and treatment are a far more effective and far less expensive solution. Mahan has done nothing to dismantle the inept transportation agencies that are doubling down on spending for intercity and light rail at a time when ridership is in terminal decline and new vehicle technologies are fast rendering these legacy projects obsolete. And Mahan has shown no ability to stand up to the city’s powerful public sector unions and has supported every proposed tax increase, even as the city fails to improve services at any level. Mahan even supports a national wealth tax, although he’s savvy enough to stay neutral on the proposed state wealth tax.
In short, Matt Mahan is both a fraud and a candidate with no hope of winning the primary. Steyer is going to buy one of the top two spots, and there are too many other determined Democrats in contention to give Mahan any chance of overtaking Steve Hilton for the other top spot.
What Mahan’s well heeled supporters lack is something completely out of character for people with such obvious competence. These are not risk averse individuals. These are people who have created billion dollar companies from scratch, people who can’t imagine failure. These are visionaries whose innovations are the reason California—despite all the havoc created by the very Democrats among whom they have deluded themselves into thinking Mahan is an exception—continues to change the world. So why can’t they see the virtues of a Republican like Steve Hilton?
There is not one issue on which Hilton has taken a position that is disagreeable to California’s business community. Moreover, there is a sea change occurring in California’s political culture that is being led by the fact that high tech entrepreneurs are broadening their scope. Their investments and their focus have moved from chips and software and social media to transforming industry. Early examples of this are Elon Musk with Tesla and SpaceX, along with Palmer Luckey with Anduril. These men are no longer techies; they are industrialists, and they are defining and ensuring American economic leadership in the 21st Century. Culturally, they are the precise opposite of the hidebound bureaucrats, consultants, attorneys, and activist NGOs that have skimmed the wealth from and scammed the taxpayers of California for decades, tying positive development up in knots and making the state unaffordable in the process.
The people backing Matt Mahan ought to know better. Because these are people who are accustomed to moving from project concept to product launch in 18 months, not 18 years. From data centers to housing developments, California’s new generation of builders coming out of the tech industry are not going to accept timelines denominated in decades and project costs that are heavier on process compliance than direct construction expenses. They need a governor who will change the rules, vetoing more bad laws from the state legislature, and using the power of the governor’s office to replace members of oversight boards, fire heads of state agencies, and issue aggressive executive orders to cleanse and deregulate a bloated and destructive system.
California’s voters get the message. They are not only living the nightmare, they are also hearing it every day on the commercials that Tom Steyer is spending tens of millions on to saturate the airwaves and the internet. Affordability! Competition! End corruption! But Tom Steyer is also a fraud. If Steyer were not a fraud, he would be getting millions of dollars from California’s politically moderate billionaires, instead of Mahan. Tom Steyer epitomizes everything wrong with California. He is a fanatic whose idea of abundance requires destroying California’s energy industry, mandating only infill housing, and rationing water instead of investing in more water supply infrastructure. He is an oligarch who will see to it that this “abundance” strategy only involves huge, politically connected corporations. And yet he is promising anything and everything to California’s public sector unions, ensuring that whatever vitality is left in California’s economy will accrue to the public sector, further impoverishing California’s small businesses and low- and middle-income households.
Perhaps the only thing Mahan’s supporters have gotten right is that Mahan would do less harm than Steyer. That’s scant comfort to California’s millions of residents who deserve better.
Steve Hilton, on the other hand, is a moderate Republican with policy ideas that embrace an authentic abundance agenda. Making California affordable again requires deregulation so businesses can compete with each other on price and performance. At the same time, tax revenues need to reprioritize funding practical infrastructure, because these investments will decrease the cost of energy, water, and transportation for everyone. With these two objectives fulfilled—deregulation and practical infrastructure investment—fewer people are dependent on government, and the money then saved can be redirected to infrastructure or returned to the taxpayers.
This is the virtuous political and economic cycle that breaks California’s current spiraling descent into insolvency, failed institutions, and chaos. Steve Hilton understands this thoroughly. Matt Mahan does not.
Electing a Republican in California is not impossible. With effectively no donor support, in 2022, Republican candidate Brian Dahle captured 41 percent of the vote. Steve Hilton is a candidate with more charisma, bringing a moderate but forceful policy agenda. To win, he only needs to swing another 5 percent from blue to red. But to do that, he needs money.
Industrialists in the Silicon Valley should recognize by now that their interests coincide with every Californian who has ever made so much as a scratch in the ground, from the oil in Kern County to the vineyards in the Delta. Once this primary is in the books, and Hilton faces Steyer for governor, California’s politically moderate billionaires are invited to take a hard look at what they’re going to do next. ✪
▶️ JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER: SHOWDOWN
JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER: SHOWDOWN
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he closer this Iran war comes to a favorable resolution, the more garishly negative the puling Lefty-left gets, wishing fervently for the enemy to prevail. Why? Because the Lefty-left is also an enemy of our country. They want the operation to fail so they can reclaim power and resume wrecking and looting the USA.
By the way, what exactly would a favorable outcome of this war look like? An Iran that doesn’t threaten nuclear jihad and doesn’t sponsor endless terror operations here, there, and everywhere. It looks like we are going to get to that. Iran’s choice is how deep do they want to take their own economic collapse before capitulating? If they’ll just stop now, they’ll still keep the lights on. They can be a normal, modern, developed nation without a death wish.
Anyway, the paradigm Iran was operating in as a rogue state is dead, especially the malign influence of Britain’s banking and MI6 intel matrix. Britain, proven by its actions to be not a friend of America. . . Britain, a wretched little has-been island empire with bad teeth, overrun by wrathful Islamists; and alas, soon to be a caliphate.
President Donald Trump has rearranged the geopolitical landscape with startling speed and efficacy. Much of Europe, it turns out, are not our friends, either. They would not let us use the NATO bases we pay for to conduct air operations over Iran. Hence, NATO is four dead letters. They can go dangle while they figure out how to live without oil, possibly go back to their centuries-long condition as a nonstop slaughterhouse, besetting each other with stupid, age-old feuds. Not our problem anymore.
China? Their Belt-and-Road isn’t what it was just six months ago. Mr. Trump has kicked them out of South America. Their oil supply is suddenly sketchy. Notice, they didn’t lend a hand helping to clear the Strait of Hormuz. Turned out that the radars and air defenses they gifted Iran didn’t work too well. Uncle Xi Pooh Bear will have to re-think situation.
Mr. Trump says he might travel to Pakistan this weekend if there are papers to sign with Iran. Israel and Lebanon announced a ten-day truce to sort out where things stand. Both of them want Hezbollah expelled for good. Anyway, Hezbollah can no longer enjoy financial support from Iran, meaning no more munitions or salaries for Hezbollah warriors, meaning Hezbollah is out of business; a major regional irritant neutralized. Can you dare to imagine a peaceable Middle East?
So, things have changed-up greatly in this long-volatile corner of the world, and that will leave Mr. Trump freer to attend to the discord and animus at home, namely the psychopathic Democratic Party’s non-stop demolition of political norms, with assistance from the bureaucratic Deep State and the NGO underworld. Just at hand this week, we have Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard sending criminal referrals to the DOJ on two key players (both liars) in Trump Impeachment No. 1: former Intel Inspector General Michael Atkinson and CIA agent “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella; whose name the news media still fears to speak.
That impeachment, over the so-called “Ukraine phone call,” was from start to finish a complete fake, a criminal conspiracy. It involves a much larger cast-of-characters including then House Intel Committee Chair (now senator) Adam Schiff, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, CIA Director Gina Haspel, Chief Justice John Roberts, and virtually the whole Kiev US embassy staff at the time. Everybody involved was lying about one thing or another. The case is on Acting AG Todd Blanche’s desk now. Do you suppose it can just sit there?
It’s rumored that in the weeks ahead, Mr. Trump is fixing to conduct a declassification orgy of evidence unearthed by DNI Gabbard in the serial seditions run by US color revolutionists over the past decade. The presidential declass will obviate the usual tedious process of extracting declass permissions from every agency silo with a stake in the documents; meaning the evidence will go straight to US attorneys, including Jason Reding Quiñones, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, now running a grand jury out of Fort Pierce on the RussiaGate hoax.
Many of the players in that treasonous episode were involved in subsequent crimes against the nation: the 2020 election fraud; the Jan. 6 fed-provoked “insurrection” at the US Capitol; the fake House committee set up to pretend to investigate it; the Mar-a-Lago Raid; the multiple Trump prosecutions of 2024, the censorship campaign; and the manifold perfidious turpitudes of the “Joe Biden” Administration, including the massive invasion of illegal immigrants.
It’s all going to come out now in one overwhelming puke-stream channeled into actual prosecutions. Only question is: will the massive revelation of truth prompt the millions of successfully brainwashed Americans to finally get their minds right over what has been perpetrated on our country? ✪
▶️ GERMANY TO BECOME ‘STRONGEST EUROPEAN ARMY’ BY 2039
GERMANY TO BECOME ‘STRONGEST EUROPEAN ARMY’ BY 2039
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ermany has announced a new military strategy with the goal of building “Europe’s strongest conventional army” by 2039. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius revealed the proposal speaking to the German Parliament on Wednesday; and detailed a public outlining for the “future direction” of the Bundeswehr, the German Armed Forces. One of the goals of the plan, the German Defense Ministry said in a statement, is for Germany to take “more responsibility” within NATO.
Pistorious said, per Politico:
“We are developing the Bundeswehr into the strongest conventional army in Europe. In the short term, we are increasing our defense and resilience, in the medium term we are aiming for a significant increase in overarching capabilities and in the long term we will establish technological superiority.”
According to Politico, the new German military plan states that while the United States is indispensable for NATO, it notes “Washington is increasingly oriented toward the Indo-Pacific.”
The Defense Ministry said the new German military strategy calls for a “fundamental rethink” on the “overall concept of military defense” consisting of the military strategy and capability profile of the German Armed Forces, a personnel growth plan for the Bundeswehr,and a new strategy for the nation’s military reserve in addition to a new agenda that amins to “reduce bureaucracy and modernize the system.”
“The starting point for this is a fundamentally changed international environment. The security situation has deteriorated significantly—especially since Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine,” The Ministry’s statement read in part.
“Growing multipolarity and systemic rivalry are also putting pressure on the rules-based international order and increasing volatility, uncertainty, and instability,” the text continued.
The plan calls for a military personnel expansion that aims to go from around 185,000 active-duty soldiers to at least 460,000 active and non-active troops. Pistorius pointed out that the new strategy will not focus on fixed numbers but rather on specific capabilities and what the forces can actually do.
The German Defense Minister reportedly stressed that parts of the new military strategy are deliberately being kept under wraps and potential deployments plants will not be made public, and said, “Otherwise we might as well add Vladimir Putin to our email distribution list.”
Euronews reports Germany’s plans to reshape its armed forces aims to turn the Bundeswehr into a “faster, more capable and more technologically advanced” force with the ability to “strike targets precisely at longer range.”
Bundeswehr Inspector General Carsten Breuer said during an interview on Wednesday, “The situation has never been this serious,” and, as such, Germany is “assuming greater military responsibility in response to the current security threat.”
Breuer explained during the interview that the Bundeswehr assumes that Russia could be capable of “launching a large-scale attack against NATO territory starting in 2029.
“I’m not saying that will automatically happen — certainly not. But the possibility exists. And that is exactly what we must prepare for and arm ourselves against,” Breuer said.
Per the German Armed Forces, the Inspector General described Russia as the main threat to Germany and the Euro-Atlantic region, and said Russia is “rearming at a pace he has never seen in his entire career.” ✪
▶️ WHAT MADE US AMERICAN BEFORE AMERICA TURNED LEFT
WHAT MADE US AMERICAN BEFORE AMERICA TURNED LEFT
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y father worked on the docks of New York City when America’s economy was booming before 1929. As with many Europeans of economically depressed countries at the end of World War I, he left his native country to seek a new life in America, which was calling for the extra muscle needed to build a brand new, modern infrastructure . . . from subways and skyscrapers in New York to infinitely more from coast to coast.
Then came the Great Crash of ’29, stopping the great momentum, dramatically illustrated in 1931 when New York’s fantastic new Empire State Building opened its doors in the middle of the Great Depression.
Pop stopped working at the docks and started shining shoes on the streets, while mom was tested to the top of her capacity raising three kids in their dingy Brooklyn tenement. (I was the latest to arrive in the family.) It was a rough ride that made life all the more valuable for overcoming each obstacle, day-to-day and hand-to-hand.
America was in a storm of productivity, early in the 20th Century, with creative advances in every field. Breathless innovations in technology, industry, transportation, communications, and the arts were remaking the landscape and changing American homes almost overnight from primitive to modern.
The daring, the drive, the originality that delivered a vigorous and vibrant America to the world were still in force following the devastation of World War II. Excellence was still taken for granted in industry, education, sports, in the performing arts. In my Brooklyn high school, over 90% of students graduated regularly, having dealt successfully with far tougher standards than today.
Exceptions kept aside, as with any frank discussion, the following observations are intended to depict typical American life before the middle of the 20th Century:
Up until about 1960, children that were not orphans had fathers and mothers living together, secure in bonds of love, and rules inspired by the Word of God. That life is sacred was taken as a fact, not an opinion. Women were respected and cherished by men. No high IQ was needed to understand that a man could not be identical to a woman, and no woman could be identical to a man. Respect was common for each other’s actual differences. Men and women would laugh at the notion that male and female are interchangeable, whether in function or psyche. Such an absurd idea, as held by post-Friedan feminists and today’s gender-confused, reveals a mind tangled in abstractions and lost in wish lists — frequent with liberals.
Reality, not science, informed the actions of the typical pre-1960s American, whether living in Manhattan or the boondocks. He and she knew in the bones scientific knowledge is not wisdom, that opinion and fact are not equal. The alert of every generation knew — and still know — emotions do not substitute for thinking. Solutions to real problems, not artificial ones from pressure groups, need clear heads anchored in reality.
It was generally understood that freedom comes with a responsibility to use it wisely and accept the results, good or bad, from their source: me. Any needed guidance in difficult matters came from pastors and rabbis, not (as today) from celebrities, think tanks, and professionals that serve sponsors instead of truth and justice.
The foregoing take on life generated a beneficial social atmosphere; friendlier, warmer, more open than today. Schools were free of drugs and violence; and none of them required armed security guards. In spite of the presence of every form of corruption and deceit known to man, life in America was nevertheless upbeat. People generally succeeded in living their lives as they saw fit, not as agenda peddlers thought they should.
In short, before 1960, America was; it’s been said often, “another planet.” Having lived in that freer, far more open and natural environment, I can report from personal experience as a resident of New York City that after 1960 the level of social wellbeing in that great urban center dropped fast.
The atmosphere all over America soured, as a slew of prescriptions for speech, behavior, even thought; so-called “political correctness” began to stifle initiative and creativity, while a culture of “victim class” versus “oppressor class” was descending on Americans that did not reflect the American character. That it followed Marxist dogma was not “news fit to print,” and the mainstream media remained dutifully silent.
So, as with the “invasion of the body-snatchers,” Americans found themselves living in a different, rather fretful and contentious country.
The closing of an open mind and the collapse of morals accelerating after mid-twentieth century were not “evolutionary” or inevitable, as imagined or reported. The truth is that America’s decline was in fact anticipated by well-funded change agents infiltrating publication and entertainment media, schools, colleges, churches and seminaries, spreading Marxist tenets through American culture; an amalgam of anti-American beliefs stemming from the Left, which is an appropriate title considering its relation to Marxism, communism, and socialism, none of them democratic. To put it bluntly, leftists are not American.
What possible improvement can a leftist change to America be? Were we no longer American? Did the Constitution cease to be America’s Law of the Land? Were issues of social and political justice to be henceforth decided by vote, judicial decree, or executive signature — as in dictatorships?
Was anything-goes to replace judgment based on moral principle? Was life no longer sacred? Was the family obsolete? When did right become wrong? When did up become down?
When I came home from the war in Korea (1950–53) I found that the cultural atmosphere in America was deteriorating. Americans would soon find themselves facing the deadly rioting of 1960s young rebels obsessed with Marxist doctrine, on a mission to destroy the country we had fought for to protect from communism.
Had Americans forgotten not only about the war in Korea but about the threat to their homeland from domestic enemies as well as foreign enemies?
In mid-century a majority of Americans; especially among the young, had no clue about what happened to their country and to their minds, thanks to the “progressive” dumbing in the public schools after World War II and to well-funded operatives infiltrating media, college administrations, political and public service venues in focused efforts to advance a new world order modeled on collectivism. A “conspiracy theory” smear against those who noticed was effective until the fact was no longer secret but even a feature of President Gorge H. W. Bush’s New World Order Speech of September 11, 1990.
Those who minimize or dismiss the adverse side effects of America’s “transformation” reveal a failure to regard social and political progress with the seriousness it demands. For starters, when it becomes “legal” to kill a baby on the day of its birth, or mutilate one’s body to “change it to the opposite sex,” or it becomes valid to harm a human being for whatever reason; when it becomes “justice” to lose one’s job, reputation, liberty, even one’s life for speaking the truth, then the line of sanity has been crossed.
Stepping away from that dangerous line affirms the inherent smarts of real Americans. It is always appropriate for real Americans to exercise their smarts by loudly denouncing and vigorously opposing activity that threatens human life or attacks motherhood, fatherhood and family, or mocks God and the Creation. ✪
▶️ TRUMP STOPPING WORTHLESS TAXPAYER FUNDED DEGREES
TRUMP STOPPING WORTHLESS TAXPAYER FUNDED DEGREES
ppp
he U.S. Department of Education announced last Friday it will be stripping federal student loan funding from any college program that does not yield a high salary after the student graduates.
Stereotypically worthless degrees in areas like “women’s and gender studies” have become the standing joke that jabs at how unserious college has become. However, under new proposed rules from the Department of education, if schools want to offer degrees which bury their students in debt while giving them poor job prospects, the institutions will have to fund those programs themselves.
Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in a press release:
“The Trump Administration’s proposed accountability framework is grounded in common sense: if postsecondary education programs do not leave graduates better off, taxpayers should not subsidize them,. This consensus-backed framework will drive meaningful change in postsecondary education, ending years of regulatory whiplash and addressing student debt that has left too many students worse off.”
Under the new proposed rule, undergraduate programs will have to prove degree recipients earn at least as much as a high school graduate before being eligible for student loan funding. Similarly, graduate school programs will need to prove higher earnings than an average bachelor’s degree. The average high school graduate is estimated to earn about $40,000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
“Programs that routinely fail to provide students with a reliable return on investment would lose access to federal student loans, and in certain cases, Pell Grants,” the Department said.
Though the average high school graduate salary target is a fairly low bar, a Department of Education official said there are college programs which will get cut because the return on investment is so low. It also means that important degrees like liberal arts, philosophy, and history; areas where conservatives are severely lacking, leaving leftists in control of the American historical narrative; will likely be safeguarded.
According to a 2024 survey from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, 23 percent of Bachelor’s programs and 43 percent of Master’s programs have a negative return on investment. Student loan debt is now close to doubling the size of all U.S. university endowments combined. Student loan debt also outpaces Americans’ credit card debt and is roughly equal to automobile loan debt.
Meanwhile, the average net price for attending an undergraduate program; after grant and scholarship funding, rose by 93 percent from 1990 to 2020, when accounting for inflation. Department of Education data shows that the unlimited lending of taxpayer dollars has increased graduate tuition by 340 percent.
Schools can increase the sticker price of tuition knowing that no student is actually going to pay for it; but rather American taxpayers will foot the bill through Education Department student loans. One of the goals of the Trump Administration is to stop that scam.
Right now, the Department of Education’s student loan portfolio, funded by the American taxpayer, is nearly $1.7 trillion. It is estimated that fewer than 40 percent of borrowers are in repayment, and nearly 25 percent of borrowers are in default.
“More students are left financially worse off than if they had never attended college,” the Department stated, adding that “now is the time for a hard reset in higher education.”
The new rule would apply across the board for all types of postsecondary education; from colleges and universities to career and technical schools. It comes as a major shift from the Biden and Obama Administrations policy, which selectively targeted career and technical schools, as well as religious schools like Grand Canyon University, in order to destroy them while shielding their friends at universities from accountability.
Biden’s Department of Education only threatened financial aid funding to places like technical schools through its “gainful employment” metric; while asking traditional four-year universities to share financial information with prospective students with zero threat to their funding.
The new rule “will better protect students and taxpayers by requiring institutions to sunset programs that do not deliver a strong financial return or to seek funding outside the federal financial aid system,” the Department said.
The rule will be open for a public comment period for 30 days before becoming finalized, and is planned to take effect in July. ✪
▶️ AN UNSUPPORTIVE NATO HAS NO REASON TO EXIST
AN UNSUPPORTIVE NATO HAS NO REASON TO EXIST
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resident Donald Trump’s declaration that, for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, “the party is over” was treated like a barbarian shout in the salon. Yet his statement has the impolite virtue of being true. For 75 years, Europe has hosted the most expensive open bar in history, all of it paid for by the United States, and called this dependency an “alliance.” Now, when the bill is presented and the host suggests perhaps the guests might behave as if they own something besides opinions, they are scandalized.
Nothing has exposed this charade more clearly than the recent confrontation with Iran. The most revealing actor was NATO Europe, which, at the precise moment when it had the strongest interest in American protection, chose instead to lecture, obstruct, and deny access to bases that exist only thanks to American power and American money.
By obligingly parading its missile capabilities, Iran reminded the world of a basic geographic fact: Europe is closer to it than the United States. Those sleek Iranian rockets can reach European cities more easily and more quickly than they can cross the Atlantic.
Whatever else may be said of them, the Ayatollahs have done the math. From their vantage point, London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome lie far nearer than New York or Washington. If anyone has a direct, existential interest in seeing Iran’s capacity contained, deterred, and destroyed, it is Europe.
Yet when the United States seeks to use NATO-linked bases, built, supplied, and effectively guaranteed by American taxpayers to confront precisely this threat, Europe responds not with urgency but with sanctimony. Washington must ask permission, fill out forms, and submit to debates in parliaments that cannot fund their own armies, much less fight their own wars. America carries the burden; Europe holds the clipboard.
✪ Harnessing American Power
The absurdity would be comic if the stakes were not deadly. The continent that cannot defend itself against Iran’s missiles insists on the right to constrain the one power that might actually do so. NATO has become the strange arrangement in which the guardians must ring the doorbell at the very house they underwrite, while the children decide if they may enter.
This, more than anything, demonstrates that NATO is not our friend in any serious political sense. Friendship implies shared risk, shared burden, and reciprocity. What we have instead is dependence disguised as partnership, veto power disguised as consultation. The alliance serves increasingly as a mechanism for Europeans to domesticate American power: to harness it for their security while subjecting its use to their sensibilities. The United States provides the missiles; Europe provides the misgivings.
The strategic reality beneath all this theater is simple enough: the United States does not merely “constitute” NATO, it is NATO. Remove American nuclear guarantees, American command-and-control, American intelligence, American air and naval power, and American satellites, and what remains is a conference schedule.
Trump’s “paper tiger” metaphor flatters; a paper tiger at least suggests the outline of a beast. NATO without the United States would be a filing cabinet with good branding.
✪ Direct Obstruction On Iran
Europe’s behavior during the Iran crisis is particularly revealing; because for once, the threat is more obviously aimed at Europe than the United States. In the Russian case, they oscillate between fear and commerce. In public, Europe strikes a heroic pose against Moscow with denunciations of aggression, solemn invocations of the rules-based order, stern declarations “Ukraine must win.” In practice, however, it has spent years bankrolling the very Russian war machine it deplores through its purchases of Russian energy.
However, with Iran’s missiles, the trajectory is simple and the target clear. Those trajectories arc toward Europe.
Yet still the Europeans obstruct. Still, they insist the United States must not use “their” bases, “their” territories for operations which might inflame opinion in Tehran or among their own delicate electorates. The same leaders who cannot field serious forces, who cannot meet even the modest 2 percent defense spending goal, suddenly discover the courage to say no to the only nation that stands between them and the consequences of their evasions.
At this point, the language of “shared values” becomes farcical. What value, precisely, is shared when the nation willing to act must plead with nations unwilling even to allow access to airfields that they did not fund, cannot defend, and could not operate without American support? The real shared value is comfort. Europe values its comfortable moralism; America has so far valued the comfortable illusion that this arrangement is equal and noble.
The Iran episode also exposes the deeper insult in NATO’s current form: that the United States should require European permission at all. The United States underwrote the deterrent and alone possesses the capacity to project power beyond the continent. Yet it is a supplicant before parliaments which could not, if left alone, defend themselves against precisely the threats they now ask the United States to confront more “responsibly.”
✪ Inversion Of Dependence
This inversion of dependence into authority is the essence of the problem. NATO was originally conceived as a way for the United States to extend its power to fortify a devastated but serious Europe against a mortal Soviet threat. Today, it functions as a device whereby an unserious Europe channels, constrains, and when convenient, repudiates the very power that keeps it alive. Thus an ally becomes the leash-holder.
All the while, the basic hard fact remains: the only thing standing between Europe and potential Russian or Iranian annihilation is the same American power they so enjoy condemning. Their militaries, hollowed out by decades of welfare-state priorities and philosophic pacifism, could not withstand a determined onslaught for long. This is as obvious in Moscow and Tehran as it is in the Pentagon. Only in Brussels is it politely ignored.
Trump’s truth that the party is over invites a sober reconsideration. Alliances are not sacred relics but political arrangements. An alliance in which one party finances, supplies, and risks everything while the others preen, obstruct, and moralize is not an alliance; it is a liability. NATO must put up or shut up.
If Europe wishes to be protected while reserving the right to sabotage its protector’s actions, let it build and fund its own shield. ✪
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