Journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook summit, sponsored by the New York Times, made a lot of news yesterday, though it felt more like 1975 than 2025, particularly when it came to “women’s issues”. We were one degree of separation from participants arguing over galleys of Ms. Magazine or getting into shouting matches with Norman Mailer.
In the role of Phyllis Schlafly, the beautiful right-wing career woman leading a charge for a return to traditional values, was Erika Kirk, CEO of Turning Point USA and recent widow of Charlie Kirk. She claimed it was “ironic” that women in New York City had voted for Zohran Mamdani, given that many of them are childless but voiced support for his promise to provide free childcare for children under six years old. Kirk said that women were using government as a “replacement” for marriage and family.
This was somewhat ironic in itself because Erika Kirk didn’t marry Charlie until she was 32, with an already successful career and a full life – and is now a major public figure, studying for a PhD. Also, there’s the fact that women might have voted for Mamdani because their other choices were Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, neither of whom have a lot of curb appeal to young female voters. Regardless, the right looked at the comments and continued to consider Erika Kirk a hero of the revolution, and the left looked at them and continued to consider her some sort of sinister she-devil, so the needle didn’t actually move.
More surprising was the appearance of actress Halle Berry, in a new role as some sort of hybrid version of Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm. Berry ripped into California Governor and potential 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsom for not supporting a Menopause Care Equity Act in California. “With the way he’s overlooked women, half the population, by devaluing us in midlife, he probably should not be the next president,” Berry said. She said that menopause and perimenopause are staggering health problems that affect the entire national economy, causing one of six women to leave the workforce. If men “had a medical condition that disrupted their sleep, brain function and sex life, we’d be calling that a health crisis on par with Covid, and the whole world would shut down.”
“I need every woman in this country to fight with me,” Berry said. “But the truth is, the fight isn’t just for us women. We need men too. We need all of the leaders, every single one of you in this room – this fight needs you.”
Newsom himself appeared at the DealBook summit, but spent his headline-making moment by claiming that if Hakeem Jeffries somehow doesn’t become Speaker of the House just over a year from now, the United States will descend into permanent autocracy – with show elections like the ones in Russia. Newsom urged the people in the crowd, most of whom were Democrats, to wake up from their stupor and elect Democrats, the only way to save America. This seemed like a bit of an exaggeration, a reach, and a fear tactic, Gavin Newsom specialties, given that he has his own authoritarian tendencies.
Halle Berry couldn’t have been too pleased, as Newsom didn’t once mention menopause, though he did decry the bill earlier this year as too expensive. Governor Newsom, Bella Abzug and Germaine Greer would like to have a word with you. Even Erika Kirk might like to have a word. And Halle Berry isn’t going to cede ground. She said, “At this stage of my life, I have zero fucks left to give.”
Category: Policy
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Halle Berry vs. Erika Kirk
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Trump’s cabinet is a liberal’s nightmare
“Some people will correct me. They love to correct me. Even though I’m right about everything,” President Trump was saying, but no one was about to correct the President at this December cabinet meeting, the last in a series of extremely long such affairs that TV has carried this year. At this point, YouTube might as well set up a 24-hour livestream from inside the White House, like the sorts of stunts that were popular at the dawn of the personal video era. Trump is always with us, and talking at us.
Before the roundtable of cabinet members listing their accomplishments and kissing the boss’s butt, Trump talked for nearly 30 minutes. Some highlights: “affordability” is a “fake narrative that Democrats talk about”; Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is “incompetent,” a “real dope” and “a stubborn ox who probably doesn’t like your President, your favorite President”; prices have come down substantially for “the fat drug for fat people”, and, stop the presses, “at some point in the not-so-distant future you’re not going to have income tax to pay.”
And lest someone test Donald Trump’s mental acuity, he put all doubt to rest by saying, “I sit here and do four news conferences a day and answer questions from very intelligent lunatics, you people. I’ll let you know when there’s something wrong with me. There will be some day. It happens to all of us. I think I’m sharper now than I was 25 years ago. I took a cognitive test. I asked “is it hard?” Biden didn’t have a news conference for eight months and you said he was fine. I went one day without doing a news conference and you all went back and wrote “what’s wrong with the President?” I read in the New York Times, ‘Is Trump sharp?’ Trump is sharp. They’re not sharp.”
The cabinet meeting was a liberal’s nightmare, with all their villains taking turns speaking. War Secretary Pete Hegseth used the word “lethality” several times, saying, “We’ve only just begun striking narco boats and putting terrorists at the bottom of the ocean.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick extolled the virtues of the tariff regime, while Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that people were no longer wearing pajamas and slippers on airplanes, to which Trump said, “We’re saving our country. I don’t want to be braggadocious. Our country was down and it was never coming back.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi said her department was keeping men out of women’s sports, fighting DEI, antifa and sanctuary cities, and helping free J-6 rioters from prison. Over in Homeland Security, Kristi Noem said Joe Biden “used this department to flood the country with terrorists. It’s our job to get them out. We’re going to send more home for the holidays, to make sure they can spend the holidays with their families.” Meanwhile, the head of the Small Business Administration invited everyone to join her in daily Bible study, and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said “the Green New Scam is dead.” RFK Jr. said the Trump administration is defeating “the mercantile interests of Big Pharma and the medical-industrial complex” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this was “the most transformational year in American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War.”
That all took more than an hour, after which Trump said, “I hope it wasn’t too long but it was very concise.” Then came everyone’s favorite segment, Q&A. An early question was about Elon Musk, whose hyperactivity was often a focus of the early-year cabinet meetings, before Trump tossed DoGE into the dustbin of history. A reporter asked if Trump and Musk were still friends. Trump said, sort of, he guesses. “We had one problem, I didn’t want everyone to have an electric car. And he makes electric cars.”
Of the attacks on Venezuelan boats, Trump said, “I want those boats taken out, and if we have to we’ll attack on land as well, just like we attacked on sea.” That was sort of ominous, and Hegseth added that even though he didn’t witness the “second strike” on a boat that’s creating controversy and congressional investigations, he hardly apologized for the action. He said, “We will eliminate that threat, and we’re proud to do it… these white bales are not Christmas gifts from Santa.”
“This is what’s called the fog of war,” Hegseth said, even though, technically, we’re not at war. “This is what you the press don’t see. You sit in your air conditioned offices or on Capitol Hill… while we’re doing dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people.”
The gathering ended with Trump talking about Minnesota welfare fraud to benefit Somali terrorist groups, which had him incensed, as it does all right-thinking people. “When I see what’s happening in Minnesota, the land of a thousand lakes, I don’t know how many lakes, they got a lotta lakes, it makes me mad. Our country’s at a tipping point. We could go bad. We could go one way or another. We’re going to go bad if we keep taking garbage into our country… if they come from hell and they complain and they do nothing but bitch, we don’t want ‘em in our country.”
Around the room, people pounded the table at that piece of closing rhetoric. The President had spoken on behalf of the American people. Trump, leading the greatest cabinet the world has ever seen from “the most transparent administration in history,” was very sharp indeed.
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America needs an ‘all-of-the-above’ approach to energy
While the House of Representatives has understandably been quiet during the government shutdown, not everyone has been idle.
While most members of Congress were home in their districts, Representative Troy Balderson, an Ohio Republican, quietly introduced a short, potentially consequential piece of energy legislation called “The Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy Security Act.”
“We the People” will celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday next Independence Day. And truth be told, we are crossing this milestone birthday showing our age. We are politically bipolar. We are in debt. Our infrastructure is crumbling and our schools are a mess. We are in need of several new leases on life.
For starters, if America is to be made great again – by anyone’s definition – it will require a commonsense reordering of our approach to energy and electricity generation. Troy Balderson’s approach offers the kind of clear-eyed vision we need.
Aimed as a corrective to the “Green New Deal” priorities that took hold during the Biden administration, the ARC would direct federal agencies to reorder their policies with attainable objectives aimed at increasing attainable and cost-effective domestic energy production – and providing benchmarks allowing for effective congressional oversight.
The bill would formally require government regulators to prioritize these three words when evaluating energy projects: is it affordable? Is it reliable? Is it clean? Most politicians give lip-service to these concepts, but under current law they are left open to interpretation by the executive branch and they shift from one administration to the next, Balderson points out. His bill would essentially codify a true “all of the above” energy approach – and would benefit all Americans regardless of their ideological leanings.
If enacted by Congress and signed by the President, his legislation would require the Department of Energy, Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency to submit a report to Congress within 180 days documenting what they are doing to incorporate all-of-the-above into our national energy strategy. Windmills and solar farms wouldn’t be suddenly sidelined. (On the other end of the energy scale, neither would coal.) But this bill would virtually assure that all viable, affordable, and reliable energy sources – including nuclear power and natural gas – remain in the nation’s energy mix. In other words, it replaces old habits and ideological fads with practicality as a way of supporting American families and businesses.
I don’t question liberals’ commitment to a cleaner environment. But Democrats campaigned this fall on the need for “affordability” – and found a receptive electorate. This legislation would turn that rhetoric into action. And just as important to poor and middle-class families, it fuels our nation’s efforts to rebuild and onshore the energy sector that fuels economic growth.
Greater reliance on natural gas and nuclear power will deliver green and clean dividends. ARC is a win, win, win. The status quo is a lose, lose, lose.
Mine is a nonpartisan appeal for making this bill law. Legislators of America, let’s meet in the middle of the aisle. Without the re-ordering of energy interests in this bill – affordability first, reliability second, and clean third – our rate cards are going to go through the roof. The economy, the hopes of the American people, and their pursuit of happiness are predicated on considerably lower rates.
The American ratepayer is the American family. And “We the People” – the payers – are suffering unnecessarily, and it is not by the hand of foreign actors beyond our democratic reach and control. It is being done by those who are supposed to represent us.
My fellow Americans, lend me your ears for an ADHD minute. In the recent past, we have been governed by a shackling set of priorities. Clean energy has been in the driver’s seat, followed by affordability, and then reliability. This “CAR” approach has not delivered on its promises. And it is structurally incapable of getting us over the fast-approaching AI demand hill.
The status quo CAR approach and mindset can’t even service the status quo. Look no further than New Jersey, which is having a voter revolt partly because of rising electricity costs. This is not a only a blue state problem. Georgia sent an affordability message on November 4 that should be a wake-up call for all red states, which like Texas have chased green subsidies. The rate increases are coming due for all.
If we continue to follow our current energy priorities, brown-outs, economic stagnation and out-migration to energy-rich states will follow. “We the People” will all benefit from the passage of ARC Energy Security. Democrats, Republicans and independent voters will all benefit.
What is our short-term future if we do nothing new? Take your present energy bill and multiply it by 2.3, which is the variance between American and British ratepayers in the business sector.
New Jersey, what’s the midterm future of sticking with CAR? Give your present rate card woes about a 100 percent increase. This is what German ratepayers are gouged for – around 40 cents per kilowatt hour – to underwrite their country’s march towards deindustrialization.
Texas and Florida – states with lower energy costs and the beneficiaries of out-migration from blue states that have gone green crazy – deduct money from your energy bill and think about what that money can do in the hands of citizens spending it in your state, and investing for retirement.
AI’s appetite for reliable energy will require an energy-capacity building boom. The ARC approach will get us there; CAR will not. John Fetterman, Congressman Balderson needs a co-sponsor in the Senate. Senate Republicans will likely support this approach, but energy affordability and reliability should not be partisan concerns.
In the second Trump administration, the President has issued various executive orders, and cabinet secretaries have put out their directives while incoming Democratic governor Mikie Sherrill has vowed to freeze utility costs. There’s a better way to govern – a better way to promote the general welfare and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
Affordable, reliable and clean energy should be an issue that unites us at a time when unity is in short supply.
David DesRosiers is the publisher of RealClear. This article is derived from a salon with Representative Balderson and a diverse group of reporters and energy experts.
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China has quietly taken over America’s food supply
For all the talk about artificial intelligence and quantum supremacy, the fate of civilizations still depends on breakfast. ChatGPT can’t grow corn. Empires rise on stomachs as much as on silicon. And America’s food system – long dismissed as safe and self-sufficient – has quietly become a front line in the US-China rivalry. We act as if lunch is inevitable, but Beijing knows that food is power.
A new report from the America First Policy Institute should wake us up. Washington long treated agriculture as a post-political space where globalization could do no harm, and was therefore happy to let much of the nation ship its growth to China. As Ambassador Kip Tom and Royce Hood argue, China has thus taken over critical pieces of the US agricultural system and food supply. That’s created an obvious strategic vulnerability.
Through state-owned giants such as WH Group and SinoChem, the CCP has spent the last decade spreading its tentacles through America’s food production. Its means of doing so have been so patient and banal that it’s gone mostly unnoticed.
Consider Smithfield Foods. Once a model of American agribusiness, it was bought in 2013 by WH Group, then called Shuanghui – a Chinese conglomerate financed by state banks and guided by Beijing’s Five-Year Plan directive to “go abroad.” At the time, as Tom and Hood indicate, it was the largest-ever acquisition of an American company by a Chinese firm.
The Obama administration approved the deal despite some bipartisan objections. In one stroke, China gained control over roughly a quarter of US pork processing. At the time, the story barely registered beyond the business pages. Now it reads like an opening chapter in a longer, scary story. Say what you will about the CCP, but dumb they are not.
Smithfield’s market power lets it shape prices and standards across the industry, and the profits flow neatly back to China. During the pandemic, as American grocery shelves emptied, the company still managed to ship thousands of tons of pork to Chinese ports each month.
Then there is Syngenta. The seed and agrochemical titan was acquired in 2017 by ChemChina, a state-owned enterprise that later merged into SinoChem. Despite being headquartered in Switzerland, Syngenta is now an organ of Chinese industrial policy. Its Chinese subsidiaries are linked – through a thicket of shell companies – to Xinjiang entities accused of using forced labor.
One of them, the report notes, sells seeds directly to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, the paramilitary conglomerate that anchors Beijing’s campaign of “re-education” aimed at the region’s Uyghur population. So while American farmers buy Syngenta products to improve yields, the profits feed into a system of repression half a world away. That is globalization at its bleakest.
Then there’s the question of data – which matters more now than ever, considering that data-access is the CCP’s greatest advantage in the AI race. Modern farms are sensor-laden, drone-mapped, and algorithm-advised. Syngenta and its partners, including Chinese drone manufacturers DJI and XAG, sell “smart agriculture” platforms that collect torrents of data on American soil composition, crop patterns, and yields. Under China’s National Intelligence Law, all that information can be requisitioned by the state. Imagine handing a rival superpower a continuously updated MRI of your own food system – and calling it efficiency.
China views American openness as weakness – and its own opacity as strength. We’d do well to understand that mindset without arrogance. While we assumed moral superiority would carry the day, China stayed focused on the simpler, harder truths of power.
It would be funny if it weren’t true. While our media spent years fixating on TikTok tracking teenagers – a real concern, to be sure – China nonchalantly secured access to the datasets that actually keep people alive.
None of this is accidental. The CCP’s economic blueprints explicitly instruct its companies to secure global agricultural assets to achieve self-sufficiency through overseas acquisition. What Beijing calls “food security,” Washington calls “foreign direct investment.” One phrase belongs to a civilization that thinks in centuries; the other, to one that thinks – if it does at all – in dollar signs.
Our policymakers should compel divestiture of strategic assets and restrict our fiercest geopolitical competitor from owning American land. If “dominance” sounds too impolite, we can at least strive for symmetry. The alternative is to tolerate theft and give up the defense of our own farmland.
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Mini-Mamdani is (finally) new mayor of Seattle
Perhaps living in Seattle should inure you to shock. This is the city where, in the name of the George Floyd riots of mid-2020, armed fanatics took over a four-block chunk of downtown, a development Seattle’s moonbeam mayor of the day said reminded her fondly of the Summer of Love, only for the good vibes to dissipate when the commune’s residents started shooting one another on a nightly basis. And the squalor: in recent years, the general look of America’s Emerald City has passed from one characterized by its backdrop of snow-capped mountains and sparkling lakes to something more like one imagines central Berlin to have been after a particularly hard night of bombing in April 1945.
Even so, the news that 43-year-old Katie Wilson had defeated the incumbent Bruce Harrell to become Seattle’s next mayor came as something of a jolt. The result of the race was only made known on November 13, nine days after the polls closed. It took that long because Washington is one of the states where people vote exclusively by mail, and it apparently takes a week or more for the USPS to successfully convey a ballot from one side of town to the other. Each day at 4pm we were given the latest running count, at which point election officials went home again before beginning their next grueling six-hour shift the following morning, with time off for holidays and weekends. This is how we do business in our part of the world.
For anyone not previously familiar with Mayor-elect Wilson, she’s the mini-Mamdani in these parts: against homelessness (is anyone in favor of it?), and having the police deal with ‘mental-health disturbances’, such as that occasioned by the raving lunatic who accosts you on the street; and all for something called news vouchers, which her campaign has said would extract another $9 million from Seattle taxpayers to create jobs for fifty new reporters to balance the well-known right-wing media bias in these parts. That works out at a salary of $180,000 per hack, so perhaps I should apply.
Wilson was raised in Binghamton, New York, where her college-professor father David Sloan Wilson once wrote a book by the title of The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time, and another one called Atlas Hugged, his riposte to Ayn Rand. One dimly begins to see the picture: a household steeped in the belief that human nature is essentially benign, and that all it takes is sufficient community goodwill to beat the corporate greedheads. Katie went off to read philosophy and physics at Oxford, but, displaying that whimsical spirit we may all yet come to know, chose to drop out six weeks before graduation. After that she drifted out to the west coast, married a fellow activist who supported himself by busking on the San Francisco light-rail system, and embarked with him on a Greyhound tour of the country to determine where they might start their new life together. Somehow unsurprisingly, they hit on Seattle. It’s traditionally the place where generations of the nation’s failed, felonious, or fed-up have gone to disappear, and, perhaps not coincidentally, where there hasn’t been a Republican mayor since the days of the LBJ administration.
To make ends meet, Wilson painted boats, worked construction, and played her guitar around the Pike Place Market for spare change. A non-driver, she then started a group called the Seattle Transit Riders Union to improve services and lower fares on public transportation, paying herself a token $73,000 a year to keep the show on the road. Next it was campaigning for a payroll tax to subsidize low-income housing, one of several such initiatives to face the electorate each November. It’s a strange thing about the homelessness issue in these parts. The more politicians throw our money at the problem, the worse it gets. If you drive from my blue-collar suburb to downtown, as I do most days, it’s as if you leave a Norman Rockwell painting and abruptly enter one by Hieronymus Bosch. There’s an authentic touch of Dunkirk about the final stretch of the journey as you pass by bedraggled-looking campers hunched together around braziers or stretched out on army-surplus cots. It’s a dreadful prospect, on a number of levels, and one’s heart naturally goes out to the public-compassion zealots who display yard signs that read: ‘In this town we believe Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights are Human Rights, no Human is illegal’, and whose essential solution to the homelessness epidemic is, like our new mayor’s, for all of us to continue to spend much, much more on community-outreach services.
We’re always told that the outcome to each election is of “existential” significance, but perhaps Katie Wilson truly did have an opportunity for change during her recent campaign. She could have argued, for instance, that devoting more taxpayers’ money to Seattle’s destitution crisis is a snake-oil remedy that shows no signs of actually solving the problem. She might have added that pressing for a higher minimum hourly wage is good as far as it goes, but that someone has to pay for this munificence, and that the hardworking Seattle resident already faces the nation’s highest chain-restaurant prices and the second-highest gas prices, behind only California. She might even have found it in her heart to note that the city currently boasts a violent crime rate of 775 per 100,000 residents, which is more than double the national average of 359, and that one possible solution to this state of affairs might be to significantly enhance the local police force, instead of further defunding it, as she’s loudly proposed in the past.
Back in the mid-1970s, a couple of local real-estate agents paid to erect a huge billboard in downtown Seattle, in response to the city’s Boeing-led economic nosedive. ‘Will the last person to leave town turn out the lights?’ the slogan read. Fifty years later, its time may have come again. -
Gavin Newsom flies to UN climate summit
“We’re in Brazil,” California Gavin Newsom said. “One of our great trading partners. One of the world’s great democracies. I mean, hell, you need rare Earth minerals, this is the country we should be engaging with. Instead, middle finger with 50 percent tariffs. That’s shameful.”
That’s certainly a point to argue, but the question is why, exactly, was Newsom in Brazil, telling the gathered at a UN climate summit that the Trump administration had “disrespected” them?
“I’m here in the absence of leadership of Donald Trump,” he told a Sky News reporter. “He’s abdicated responsibility on a critical issue. I’m here to show up on behalf of my country. I’m here to showcase California’s leadership, dominance in the low-carbon greenco space. I’m here because it’s about more than electric power, it’s about economic power, and I’m not going to cede America’s economic leadership to China.”
Newsom was all over the summit, meeting with Sonia Guajajara, Brazil’s minister of indigenous peoples, appearing on a panel saying that his zero-emissions vehicle mandate has “shifted consciousness,” and saying in regards to green energy competition from China, that “the United States of America is dumb as we wanna be on this topic, but the state of California is not.” He also blamed the Los Angeles wildfires on climate change, even though authorities recently arrested an arson suspect in connection with the Palisades Fire.
As he usually does, Newsom got the White House’s attention. In a statement, the press office said, “Governor Newscum flew all the way to Brazil to tout the Green New Scam, while the people of California are paying some of the highest energy prices in the country. Embarrassing! If Gavin Newscum’s support for the climate agenda was sincere, he would not be attending a climate summit that required chopping down thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest for a special purpose highway. It’s time for Newscum and other countries to drop the climate façade! President Trump will not allow the best interest of the American people to be jeopardized by the Green Energy Scam. These Green Dreams are killing other countries, but will not kill ours thanks to President Trump’s commonsense energy agenda.”
It’s not as though Newsom’s critiques lack substance. China is dominating the green-energy space while the Trump administration provides endless carveouts for big oil. There’s also something deeply disingenuous about Newsom’s endless climate crowing, in his behavior as a self-appointed shadow President to the corners of world politics who don’t like what Trump is up to on climate and other issues. Right-wing populism and Democratic socialism may be ascendant and may garner all the headlines and headspace, but there’s still a lot of money behind Great Reset neoliberalism. Newsom is its slick-haired, alarmist American avatar, a harbinger for a set of policies that people won’t like much when they arrive at their doorsteps.
Even though Newsom’s fire-management policies helped exacerbate an unprecedented disaster in America’s second-largest city, he still had the nerve today to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with a Brazilian territorial governor on wildfire prevention and response. “We’re identifying areas of risk, enhancing forest monitoring, and sharing research and expertise for emergency response.” Ask the people of Altadena how “enhanced forest monitoring” went for them.
“We’re on the tip of the spear of climate change,” Newsom said. The wildfires in LA occurred “in the middle of winter,” which, mind you, can often be warm and dry and windy in Southern California. But Shadow President Newsom, preening about Brazil, doesn’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
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The new Epstein Files are no smoking gun
The House Oversight Committee released some Jeffrey Epstein emails this morning, and, sure enough, Donald Trump is in the Epstein Files. Like a malignant ghost that haunts the President’s dreams, Epstein has risen from the great beyond to point his bony finger at Donald Trump, saying, “it was you all along.” Or has he?
In an April 2, 2011 message to his associate and fixer Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein wrote “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.” Then, the word VICTIM appears in a black box, followed by “he has never once been mentioned. police chief, etc. im 75% there.”
Never mind that the late financier who didn’t kill himself never seemed to use punctuation or capitals in his personal communication. This message does appear to be damning, if kind of vague. “I have been thinking about that…” Maxwell said, but what, exactly, remains unclear.
The VICTIM in the note is Virginia Giuffre, who earlier this year said Trump had committed no improprieties for her. And The White House, naturally, has issued a blanket denial. “The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club decades ago for being a creep to his female employees, including {Virginia} Giuffre,” said Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in a statement to the press. “These stories are nothing more than bad-faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense sees right through this hoax and clear distraction from the government opening back up again.”
Also in play now is the Master of Whisperers, the journalist Michael Wolff, who in 2015 warned Epstein, before a Presidential campaign debate that CNN was “planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you — either on air or in scrum afterwards.” “If we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?” Epstein responded.
“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff said. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable P.R. and political currency.”
Like the rest of you, Cockburn finds this very juicy. But he also doesn’t necessarily see these emails as some sort of smoking gun that reveals the President to be a malignant pedo.
They’re a trickle, not a torrent, and are really more revealing of the power dynamics behind Trump’s first election than they are of any shenanigans at Mar-a-Lago or on Epstein Island.
As Wolff told Epstein, “of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.”
“Political correctness” is now called “woke,” but that’s very prescient. “Democrats continue to carelessly cherry-pick documents to generate click-bait that is not grounded in the facts,” said a Republican on the House Oversight Committee. In last year’s interview with deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, Maxwell said of Trump that she “she never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.” Angel Trump or Devil Trump? Cockburn honestly can’t guess anymore. Only the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein knows for sure.
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The Heritage Foundation’s exodus of experts
Under Kevin D. Roberts, the Heritage Foundation is unraveling the remarkable legacy Edwin Feulner built. Once known as “the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement,” Heritage’s moral and philosophical clarity has yielded to confusion, populism and personality-driven politics. The damage to Heritage’s mission and credibility is becoming irreparable.
Much of the recent outcry focuses on Roberts’s decision to maintain Heritage’s partnership with Tucker Carlson after Carlson’s now-infamous interview with Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes. During that exchange, Carlson ridiculed Christians who affirm the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, sneering that figures such as Ambassador Mike Huckabee and Senator Ted Cruz were “seized by this brain virus.” He derided Christian Zionism as “heresy” and declared, “I dislike them more than anybody.” Carlson even proposed stripping US citizenship from young Americans serving in the Israel Defense Forces.
The record is long and damning. In March 2025, Carlson hosted Qatar’s prime minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who defended his regime’s financial support for Hamas as a “mediation tool.” Carlson offered virtually no challenge. In February 2024, he traveled to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin, allowing the Russian dictator to justify his invasion of Ukraine as a response to NATO expansion and to describe Ukraine as “an artificial state.” Carlson listened approvingly. In July 2025, he sat down with Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian, who denied nuclear ambitions and whitewashed his regime’s repression.Rather than condemn Carlson’s antisemitic tirades, Roberts chose to defend him – blaming “the globalist class” and “their mouthpieces in Washington” for supposedly forcing conservatives to “reflexively support” Israel. He dismissed those alarmed by Carlson’s anti-Semitic rhetoric as part of a “venomous coalition.” This is not an isolated misstep. For years, Roberts has aligned Heritage with Carlson even as the broadcaster has platformed dictators, historical revisionists and antisemites hostile to American interests and values.
Equally revealing is Roberts’s claim that he doesn’t keep up with Carlson’s content because of his sports-viewing habits – as if ignorance excused negligence. A CEO who neglected developments in his own industry would be dismissed. The Heritage board’s duty of care requires ensuring that its president is informed and aligned with the organization’s founding principles.
This builds on other troubling decisions by Roberts threatening the reputation of the institution. Its sprawling “Project 2025” document places pro-market and interventionist ideas side by side, creating ideological confusion rather than clarity. Even more troubling, Roberts has weaponized Heritage’s “one-voice” policy to pressure fellows to remove social-media posts defending capitalism or criticizing unconstitutional executive overreach. In doing so, he has effectively “canceled” Heritage’s own scholars.
Under Roberts, Heritage has abandoned much of the philosophical fusionism that once defined modern conservatism: the Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, social conservatism and a strong national defense. Roberts’s Heritage now flirts with tariffs, industrial policy and even capital controls – positions antithetical to economic freedom. He condemned tariff critics as “globalist elites” and celebrated Trump-era protectionism as a “tool of statecraft.” That is a sharp break from the tradition that rightfully regards economic liberty as inseparable from political liberty. Roberts threatens to replace Reagan conservatism with Buchanan’s nativism, protectionism, isolationism and central planning.
The exodus of respected experts on free trade, financial regulation and macroeconomics, international relations and first principles speaks volumes. Their departures symbolize not only a collapse of institutional expertise but the silencing of the intellectual backbone that once made Heritage formidable. Meanwhile, Kevin Roberts hired Mario Enzler, who was forced to resign as Dean of the St. Augustine Business School after the university became aware of multiple falsified academic degrees. Roberts also hired Mark Meador, a critic of both the “consumer-welfare” antitrust standard and the esteemed Judge Robert Bork who championed it.
Roberts proudly claims he “does not take direction from members or donors.” In the corporate world, a CEO with such arrogance would face swift action from the board and shareholders. Roberts’ alliances and rhetoric have damaged Heritage’s reputation and alienated its donor base. He is using Heritage as a personal platform for ideological experimentation and personal self-aggrandizement.
Donors have entrusted Heritage with hundreds of millions of dollars, often through endowments meant to safeguard Western civilization and the US-Israel alliance. Those intentions deserve respect, not betrayal.
A continued institutional alliance between Heritage and Tucker Carlson normalizes the antisemitism promoted weekly on Tucker’s show. It’s for this reason leading members of the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism (NTFCA) publicly announced their departures from this Heritage project including Combat Antisemitism Movement, Young Jewish Conservatives, Coalition of Jewish Values, ZOA and the Israel Innovation Fund. The loss of the organization’s moral and intellectual capital under Kevin Roberts is increasingly clear.
The Heritage Foundation once stood as a bulwark of principled conservatism by confronting Soviet tyranny, championing tax reform and deregulation, and defending the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilization. Today, Kevin Roberts aligns Heritage with a demagogue who flatters dictators and scorns allies, and he muzzles Heritage fellows from speaking out. In so doing, Roberts is dismantling not just a think tank’s reputation but a generation’s work of conservative institution building.
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Has Trump finally shut down Schumer?
The end of the Democrats’ government shutdown is at last in sight, and so too is the final act of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
On Sunday night, eight Senate Democrats finally broke with Schumer and voted in favor of a procedural step necessary to eventually pass a continuing resolution to end the more than monthlong standoff.
“Democrats have been fighting for months to address America’s healthcare crisis,” tweeted Schumer, who vowed that they would “keep fighting.” It was the kind of weak, empty gesture that has come to define Schumer’s tenure at the helm of his conference.
Because regardless of what spin Schumer might like to put on this turn of events, the truth is that it represents yet another unambiguous failure on his part. The deal that his colleagues went around him to negotiate failed to extract the key concession that Democrats had professed to be holding out for: an extension of what were originally meant to be short-term Obamacare subsidies. Instead, their defectors settled for an agreement to force the Trump administration to rehire the federal workers it let go during the shutdown, as well as a promise that Republicans will hold a vote on the subsidies after the government is reopened.
That’s the bad news for Schumer. The worse news is that much of his party is blaming him for his failure to hold the Democrats together.
“Senator Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced. If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?” asked Representative Ro Khanna.
“Chuck Schumer has not met this moment and Senate Democrats would be wise to move on from his leadership,” asserted Representative Mike Levin.
Representative Seth Moulton, who is challenging Senator Ed Markey for his seat in Congress’s upper chamber, declared that “Tonight is another example of why we need new leadership.”
“If @ChuckSchumer were an effective leader,” he argued, “he would have united his caucus to vote ‘No’ tonight and hold the line on healthcare.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom, quite possibly the next Democratic standard bearer, didn’t mention Schumer, but called the deal “pathetic” and characterized it as “surrender.”
This result should hardly be surprising, though. Even if the shutdown helped Democrats expand their margin of victory in last week’s off year election in November, Republicans were always going to hold the cards in this fight picked by Schumer. With control of Congress and the White House in hand, the GOP was never going to allow the Democrats to win by taking hostages.
Schumer picked it anyway, though, not only because his party demanded it, but because his party demanded it or else. The loss the septuagenarian suffered in this particular fight was not the first crack in his armor, but it could be among the final ones.
As a leader, Schumer leaves much to be desired. He’s among the worst orators in the Senate, and he’s compounded his grating voice and uneven delivery with shouting habit. As a pro-Israel senior, he is out of touch with the energetic, activist base of his party, which demands not only allegiance to the Palestinian cause, but is openly, if not self-awarely, antisemitic. And as a tactician, he was routinely routed by Mitch McConnell, and shows no signs of being able to best his successor, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, despite the fact that his caucus is far less ideologically diverse – and difficult –– than theirs.
For those reasons, polls indicate that Schumer finds himself in troubled waters not just nationally, but with the constituents he’s spent his entire career representing. Should Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decide to run for the Senate instead of the White House come 2028, she would be the favorite in a race against Schumer. A Data for Progress survey conducted in March showed her with a 19-point lead over the incumbent. Another poll conducted in May found that she had a 21-point advantage.
Of course, Schumer’s predicament is one not just of his own making, but his party’s. Democrats have been on a sprint leftward in the years since Donald Trump first won the presidency, leaving the Schumers of the world with no choice but to exhaust themselves trying to keep up. The demands – for both ideological conformity and no-holds-barred tactics – are either ill-advised, unrealistic, or both, yet men like Schumer who have made a career of their lack of principle are happy to comply if it means a few more years in the spotlight. Consider, as another example of his flexibility, his ill-fated call for the toppling of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year.
And so when Schumer gives up or is forcibly removed from his post – an eventuality that is surely in motion even if it’s not imminent – his downfall will be attributable not only to his shortcomings as a political talent, but his habitual appeasement of the progressives who revile him. -
Why is Trump sending an aircraft carrier to Venezuela?
Venezuela has been on tenterhooks for weeks, waiting as the United States gathers an armada of warships. The world’s largest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, looks likely to arrive in the Caribbean from the Mediterranean early next week to join the assortment of destroyers, frigates, amphibious assault vessels and a nuclear-powered submarine.
No one seems to know exactly what this magnificent display of American naval firepower is all about. Has it been sent to destroy the cocaine smuggling networks in Venezuela, or topple President Nicolás Maduro, the egregious leader of that poor country? Or is its purpose to remind the Latin American region that the US under Donald Trump could come in guns a-blazing whenever it wants?
Whatever the answer, Trump is currently examining all the options for some form of possible military action over and above the target practice granted the US Navy to knock out any speedboat coming out of Venezuela suspected of carrying cocaine. So far at least 17 vessels have been destroyed, including one semi-submersible, resulting in the death of 70 people.
This, however, is not the sort of mission appropriate for the mighty Gerald R. Ford, a carrier with space for up to 90 aircraft on board. There has to be a grander plan. This, at least, will be the thinking of President Maduro, who has been appealing for military help from his backers, including Vladimir Putin.
Apart from Maduro himself, his regime flunkies, the police and the army who get paid high wages to stay loyal, there can’t be many people in Venezuela who would not welcome US intervention to get rid of a president who has destroyed the country’s economy through gross mismanagement, corruption and greed since he came to power in April 2013. Nearly eight million people have already fled the country, leaving behind their unsellable homes and businesses.
The options in front of Trump are said to include: comprehensive strikes within Venezuela on the known drug cartels’ strongholds; attacks on the military protecting Maduro; seizing the country’s oil fields; and going for Maduro directly, just like the US did in Panama three decades ago, when Mmore than 26,000 US troops swept in by helicopter and landing vessels to capture General Manuel Noriega, the country’s leader. Noriega, like Maduro, was designated by Washington as a drug trafficking baron.
Trump, however, is already being criticized for the attacks on drug boats. They are not justified under international maritime law, experts have said. The Trump administration has argued that the US is engaged in an armed conflict against drug cartels and that those killed were “unlawful combatants.” This was the phrase used by President George W. Bush’s administration to justify the extra-judicial capture and detention in Guantanamo of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists following 9/11.
The Trump administration has reportedly been seeking advice from the Justice Department about the legality of attacking facilities in Venezuela associated with the drug cartels, as well as, potentially, a direct targeting of Maduro.
Judging by leaks in Washington, it would seem the advice was that the administration does not have legal justification for strikes on Venezuela. Officials have been quoted as telling Congress that Trump was not currently planning to launch strikes inside the country.
If this is the case, then the arrival of USS Gerald R. Ford and its accompanying warships presents Trump with a conundrum. Deploying a carrier from the Mediterranean via the Atlantic to the Caribbean Sea, a journey of around 2,700 nautical miles, is not done for fun. It’s a deliberate and provocative move, authorized by the president to send the most potent warning that the US means business.
The US Navy already has at least 13 surface warships and a nuclear-powered submarine operating near Venezuela. Some of the warships and the submarine are armed with Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles, the weapon system favoured by previous US presidents to carry out strikes without the need for sending troops. In addition to warships, the US has reactivated a Cold War era naval base in Puerto Rico, about 500 miles from Venezuela’s coast, and sent troops, F-35B stealth fighters, Marine Corps helicopters and heavy transport aircraft.
The US is essentially facing off against not just the Venezuelan cartels, but Maduro’s military too. There is intelligence evidence that the Venezuelan army plays a role in ensuring the successful trafficking of drugs out of the country. The biggest cartel, the Cartel de los Soles, is allegedly led by high-ranking members of the Venezuelan armed forces. Military facilities identified as being linked to the drug cartels could be targets for Tomahawks.
But will Trump go this far? Having deployed so much firepower to the Caribbean, is he going to give the order to launch strikes, or will he listen to the Justice Department lawyers, counselling caution?
The sudden announcement last month of the early retirement of Admiral Alvin Holsey, commander of Southern Command, which oversees American operations in the South Caribbean and Latin America, suggests there may be growing internal concerns about what the Commander in Chief has in mind.