Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’ve had a lot of incidents worldwide of Islamic terrorism or threats of Islamic terrorism. The most egregious is in Bondi Beach, Australia, where two gunmen, a father and son, killed 16 people and wounded 40. How that happens in front of police who reacted very quickly I don’t know. They were only stopped by a heroic Syrian immigrant who tackled one of the shooters and disarmed him. The problem with all of this is that there was no needed reaction from the prime minister of Australia. We didn’t hear: We have to be very careful about radical Islam. These two people got two guns legally that they should not have had since they were on a watch lists with terrorist activity, and there was no reason that he, this one shooter, the father, had six guns, among them semi-automatic weapons. One of the most gun-controlled societies in the world. We didn’t hear that. Instead, we heard that they condone all extremism. This is not who we are. In the utmost—you know, the whole boilerplate. And then they said, we oppose all extremism. And it was a nanosecond before they said white extremism that had nothing to do with this. The second incident was in the Champs-Élysées in Paris, they canceled the annual Christmas celebration because they were afraid of radical Islamic protests. This is a French, predominantly at one time, Catholic country, and they’re afraid of 10% to 12% of their population, can cancel the entire celebration. Would they ever do that for an Islamic celebration? Would the majority say, “We’re the majority and you can’t—” no, they wouldn’t. And then we come to the United States, we lost two soldiers overseas, stationed in Syria, that were executed, ambushed by a supposedly ISIS murderer. Details are still out. Back home, Brown University had a shooter who went into a classroom, yelled something—people are disagreeing whether it was “Al Akbar,” what it was—but he executed two students and may have wounded nine others. And again, the same mystery. How can a university with thousands of feet taking a video every hour not have him on their video records? How did he know where the classroom was? How did he know his way around Providence, Rhode Island? Why did they get another suspect who was a white male, former army recruit, blasted his name everywhere as a likely suspect? He had nothing to do with it. And now we’re told to be very, very careful about this suspect. He may, may, may, allegedly, allegedly, be a Palestinian student. What am I getting at with all of these situations? I could multiply them tenfold. They are indicative of three or four pathologies in the West right now. No. 1, the borders of, it’s hard to say Australia because it is an island continent, but they are open. Europe’s are open. Ours had been open until President Donald Trump. By open, I mean thousands of people are coming from the poorest and sometimes the most antithetical of societies into Western countries. And they are not assimilating, not acculturating, and not integrating. In fact, they’re creating enclaves of resistance mostly. In the case of those from the Middle East, the Oct. 7 slaughter of Jews and the reaction against the perpetrators in Gaza set off a whole new round where our Western university campuses were literally taken over by foreign nationals on student visas that were rooting for Hamas, a terrorist designated organization, or chanting “River to the sea,” the erasure of Israel and the Jews entirely in the Middle East, etc., etc. So, there are no borders. Second problem was there was a diversity, equity, inclusion ideology in the West that said that society is binary and 30% of the non-white population is a perpetual victim of these victimizers. There’s no proof needed that the 70% victimizers have done anything. It’s just that their heritage was oppressive and therefore the 30% deserve reparatory action. That can be affirmative action. It can be DEI admittance, preference in hiring. It can mean awards are given disproportionately. It can mean that merit will not be a criteria. It can mean a lot of stuff. But in the case of these incidents, it means, if the perpetrator is from the Middle East, there’s a feeling, a general feeling, that you cannot identify him. Or, if you do identify him or you say it’s a radical, Muslim, you have to then say, “We deplore all violence. We don’t—we deplore antisemitism”—which is the case in point in Australia—“but we also deplore Islamophobia, of which there is no examples of people mass shooting Muslims in the case that we have seen.” The third catalyst for all this is, let’s be honest, it’s Western decline. The West is in spiritual, emotional, psychological, sociological, economic decline. The fertility rate is 1.4 in Europe, 1.7-something in the United States. Green energy, ideology, and zealotry has made energy almost unaffordable in Western Europe and, to a degree, in the United States, partly on the prompt of the Chinese, who sell cheap solar, wind, and green advocacy so they can build nuclear plants, coal plants, import embargoed oil, and have an edge competitively in economic rivalry. In addition to that, the West is not defended. The military budget in Europe, until recently, was anemic. And I think Germany at one time recently had only eight operable tanks, as we see in Ukraine. And the world doesn’t stop because Europe says it’s going to disarm. And we, to a greater extent, under the Obama and Biden administration, were disarmed. We were short almost 50,000 recruits. I could go on. But the combination of a lack of confidence in the West—in their culture, their tradition, their values, their heritage, their ancestors—coupled with this utopian idea that you’re gonna change the demographic by bringing in poor people from antithetical societies, with the false multiplier that you’re gonna be racially and sexually and gender-fixated and oppressed and dole out special beneficia to people based on their superficial appearance, it was a perfect storm. And if we didn’t have these catastrophes, we’d have to invent them. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Leaders Fail When the Threat of Radical Islam Is Ignored appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In the coming year, President Trump may meet Xi Jinping up to a half dozen times, an intense period of high-level diplomacy amid unprecedented mutual trade and supply chain warfare with China. The stage was set by the leaders’ Oct. 2025 summit in Korea which President Trump described as a convening of the “G2,” recalling a discarded diplomatic idea that that U.S. and China stand as peers above other countries and groupings like the G7 and G20, and should partner together to govern the world. However, China has conspicuously declined to join Trump’s revival of the “G2” label, even though Xi has sought to establish such global power-sharing arrangements with the United States in the past. Xi’s change of heart is a reminder that, no matter how many times the leaders convene in 2026, the United States and China are headed for more conflict, rather than a turn toward cooperation.   China “embraced” the G2 concept early in the Obama administration as a potential means to “make major global decisions without other U.S. partners present.” Later, China promoted a “New Type of Great Power Relations,” a similar concept which emphasized curtailing U.S. influence over the CCP’s so-called “core interests.” Then and now, China’s own behavior ruled out such an arrangement. Instead, China’s actions continue pushing the world towards a bipolar order of competing techno-economic blocs, much like the first Cold War. China continues to deindustrialize the rest of the world by doubling down on state-subsidized industrial overcapacity and an unsustainable attempt to prop up its struggling economy by dumping unprofitable exports around the world. In November, Xi Jinping reiterated his longstanding directive for China’s industry and government to pursue one-sided decoupling from the U.S. and other advanced economies. China is currently attempting to “tighten international production chains’ dependence on China,” while severing its reliance on foreign technology. These strategies, unanswered for far too long, have allowed China to pursue its own economic and technological autonomy while cultivating Western economies’ dependence on China, both of which China is now leveraging to exercise veto power over all of the world’s technological supply chains. The economic coercion China has deployed through its dominance of rare earths has, in effect, constrained U.S. sovereignty–leading to compromises on critical national security actions. Senior U.S. officials, who should be fully focused on advancing U.S. national security, have instead been tasked with “ensuring that departments do not take actions that could threaten the détente [with China].” China’s economic coercion leaves the United States—and ultimately, the free world—with only two options. The first is surrender: Flinch away from the pain of weaning off decades of addiction to Chinese industry. Allow China continued access to Western markets while it decouples on its own terms. Permit the continued concentration of critical technologies and industrial capacity inside China. Become compliant vassals who export capital and commodities to China’s factories, ever fearful China will cut dissenters off from its manufactures. The second option is to fight back: Reclaim American sovereignty. Purge our supply chains of dependencies on adversaries with the same speed and purpose that China has purged Western suppliers from its own. Close our markets to China’s overcapacity. Reestablish secure supply chains. Reindustrialize the free world. The trend toward mutual decoupling between the United States and China seems to be all but guaranteed. Both countries perceive decoupling as urgently necessary for their vital interests. This decoupling is unlikely to be confined to specific advanced technologies. Commodity trade could have been an exception, but China has begun restricting both the import and export of commodities to coerce the U.S. and the world at large. By comparison, exploiting foreign reliance on China’s manufactures would generate less backlash and consequences for the Chinese state than restricting commodity exports. Such sanctions can be more targeted and have already been used to attack Western companies. Any critical industry, large employer, or politically important company dependent on China now faces existential sanctions risk. Until one country or the other fundamentally reconsiders its interests—or folds and accepts reliance on the other—this process will increasingly separate the world into two rival techno-economic blocs. There will be ambiguity, contestation and differing degrees of alignment. Ultimately, only the United States and China have the heft to act as centers of gravity in this century. There will be exceptions, but firmly delineated bipolarity, not multipolarity, will be the prevailing geo-economic paradigm going forward. Xi Jinping and the CCP seem to understand this trajectory. Despite U.S. policy paralysis stemming from China’s rare earth coercion, despite the second Trump administration’s openness to a mutually beneficial relationship with China and despite genuine attempts at reaching a trade deal, the coming years will more closely resemble a fight than an embrace. The United States can either accept China’s dominion or will have to deprive China of the thing it needs most to fuel its economy and enable its blackmail: access to the world’s most important consumer and capital markets. This process will indeed forge a sort of “G2” world—one characterized by technological rivalry, competition for industrial scale and a less open field for China’s predatory industrial policy. That’s not the kind of “G2” that Xi wants. The post Why China Rejects Trump’s ‘G2’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A new Christmas ad aims to expose the “greedy criminals targeting vulnerable kids” with illegal vapes.   Illegal vapes, largely from China, have flooded the U.S. market in recent years with flavors and advertising specifically aimed at enticing children.    “This Christmas, it’s time to get those who profit from illegal vapes a supersized dose of Kevin,” the ad tells viewers, referring to Kevin McCallister, the lead character in the 1990 Christmas classic “Home Alone.”   “Illegal vape distributors, get your illegal vapes away from our kids and out of our homes,” the ad warns as a scene similar to Kevin McCallister defending his home from the “wet bandits” in “Home Alone” plays across the screen.   Communities United for Smart Policy, the non-profit policy advocacy group that sponsored the ad, recently found that 70% of parents want stronger enforcement aimed at removing illegal vapes from their communities.   The survey, conducted of over 1,000 parents, found “overwhelming concern about the spread of illegal vape products and strong bipartisan support for tougher enforcement against the stores that sell them,” according to Communities United for Smart Policy. “Parents view illegal vapes not as a niche regulatory issue, but as a direct threat to community safety.”   The poll also found that “73% of parents agree that stores selling illegal vapes pose safety concerns in their community,” and 78% of parents are in favor of “legislation that supports enforcement efforts to combat illegal vape distribution.”   As of September, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Customs and Border Protection had “stopped more than 6 million unauthorized e-cigarettes worth over $120 million from entering the country,” according to the policy group.   Most e-cigarettes contain nicotine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and pose a danger to young people.   “Aerosol from e-cigarettes can also contain harmful and potentially harmful substances. These include cancer-causing chemicals and tiny particles that can be inhaled deep into lungs,” according to the CDC.  Member of Congress have taken action to stop the flow of the illicit materials into the U.S.   Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas put forward the Ensuring the Necessary Destruction of (END) Illicit Chinese Tobacco Act. The act, which passed in November, allows the FDA to destroy counterfeit vapes and other tobacco products, including those from China.   “China is raking in the dough at the expense of American teens and young adults by lining U.S. shelves with illegal vapes and e-cigarettes,” Cornyn said. “This legislation would crack down on China’s counterfeit cash cow that’s corroding our nation’s health and extend the FDA’s destruction authority to these dangerous imported tobacco products.”  Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has urged the FDA to do more to crackdown on the illegal drugs entering the U.S. market.   “To combat Chinese influence, FDA should increase the number of regulated, legal, American products available to consumers,” Cotton wrote in a letter to the FDA in November.   Even as the CDC saw a decline in the use of e-cigarettes among youth in 2024 compared to 2023, Congress continues to push the FDA to do more to crackdown on illicit vapes.   The post EXCLUSIVE: Christmas Ad Draws Inspiration From ‘Home Alone’ to Unwrap Dangers of Illegal Vapes   appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A recent report from Defending Education has found more than half of collegiate social work programs appear to embed anti-racism and diversity, equity and inclusion standards into their core competencies, admissions requirements and field work evaluations. This is not by accident. The sole accreditor of these schools, the Council on Social Work Education, requires adherence to these standards. This means, in practice, that left-wing ideologies—many of which promote discrimination on the basis of race—are de facto orthodoxy in most of the nation’s social work programs, just so the institution can remain accredited. This accreditation is required for graduates of these programs to gain licenses necessary to work in their fields. So, what are students in college and graduate school learning in their social work programs? At the University of Alaska Anchorage, applicants are evaluated on their “demonstration of social work values, ethics, and commitment to social justice, diversity, and anti-racism.” California State University Dominguez Hills proudly states that its program is “grounded in Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality.” Most Americans rightfully think social work is about improving the lives of others, not promoting a political ideology. Both students in social work programs, as well as parents of students in K-12 schools, have reason to be concerned. Politicizing of these social work programs by their accreditor, the CSWE is failing students who are pursuing degrees in social work in multiple ways. Before students are even admitted to their programs, schools are encouraged to evaluate them on ideological alignment instead of academic readiness. For example, at the University of Maine, applicants to their school of social work must write an essay describing their “commitments to anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion and plans to advance them through graduate study in social work and professional practice as a social worker.” Instead of evaluating a student’s readiness for their programs, these programs administer a litmus test of ideological conformity. The failings only continue once students are accepted. To be accredited by the CSWE, programs are required to “recognize the pervasive impact of White supremacy and privilege and prepare students to have the knowledge, awareness, and skills necessary to engage in anti-racist practices.” At Arizona State’s school of social work, this includes direct evaluation of a student’s ability to “demonstrate anti-racist and anti-oppressive social work practice at the individual, family, group, organizational, community, research, and policy levels.” Yet again, these programs demonstrate a commitment to encourage a specific ideology—pushed by their sole accreditor—as opposed to pursuing excellence in the skills and practices required to be a competent and effective social worker. But how do woke college programs impact K-12 schools? As the youth mental health crisis worsens, parents, teachers and administrators are scrambling for solutions. Many school districts are hiring more school social workers, hoping that increased individualized support will help students both emotionally and academically. As districts expand their social work staff, these new hires are required to have a degree from programs steeped in critical race theory and harmful DEI ideology. Do we really think they just check that bias at the school gates? If college programs train social workers to “understand and identify white supremacy,” is it realistic to assume they won’t start seeing it everywhere once they enter a school setting? If they are taught to “radically shift dominant narratives which often obscure and constrain BIPOC expressions and insights” why wouldn’t they attempt exactly that once employed at an elementary school? The CSWE has ensured that anti-racism, DEI and “anti-oppressive” ideology is embedded in most social work programs across the country, making it a near certainty that families will encounter social workers who prioritize ideology over wellbeing. This isn’t just a problem in higher education it’s an urgent K-12 issue as well. The post Accreditation Mandates Bring CRT Into Colleges and K-12 Schools appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Most conservatives are likely familiar with John Adams’ insightful observation, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” For years, we have accepted the obvious implication of that statement: If the system isn’t working as intended, the problem is with the people. It’s the “if you can keep it” part of Ben Franklin’s description of the republic the Founders gave us.Until recently, even those frustrated by our national decline generally accepted that understanding. They diagnosed the disease—cultural rot, moral confusion, the collapse of institutional trust—and argued, rightly, that renewal must begin there. But something has shifted. Increasingly, some post-liberal voices on the right suggest the solution is not to reform the people, but to revise–or replace–our system of government itself. The American experiment has not failed. It was hijacked by the progressive movement more than a century ago. Over the past 100 years, the federal government has usurped roles never intended for it: family formation, moral instruction, income distribution, education, overregulation, even meaning itself, aided and abetted by the media/entertainment/advertising-industrial complex. As the state grew more behemoth, church and community institutions were hollowed out; which was the cause and which the effect may be arguable, but the correlation is indisputable. The “little platoons” that once formed Americans into responsible citizens have been crowded out by self-perpetuating bureaucracies fueled by massive, unsustainable debt. The challenge of our time is to return the government to its constitutional limits, enabling families, churches and community organizations to once again fulfill their historical responsibilities. We can take encouragement from the Trump administration’s reductions in regulatory overreach, shrinking of the federal workforce and dismantling of the Department of Education—among other smaller-government outcomes—along with the Supreme Court’s rediscovery of judicial humility. But there is a danger in the populist moment in which we find ourselves. It has brought necessary corrective energy but, unmoored to enduring principles, could lead us down a slippery slope towards a post-liberal version of the utopia the Left has been pursuing for a century. Conservatives have always recognized that utopia (from the Greek, meaning “no place”) does not—and cannot, exist—and its pursuit always leads to tyranny. Now is not the time to fool ourselves into thinking our version of it might work. The answer is neither the totalitarianism towards which we have been slowly but inexorably heading nor a benevolent authoritarianism for which some now advocate, but a strong civil society and a limited, non-interventive state. That was, and remains, the genius of the American system of government. Yes, the law is a teacher, and the more our laws reflect the Judeo-Christian ethic that formed the basis of Western Civilization, the better. But as a Christian, my religion doesn’t allow me to force anyone into my religion. Freedom of conscience is essential. The consent of the governed is foundational. Separation of powers is necessary. Checks and balances are prudent. The Bill of Rights is indispensable. We don’t need a new form of government; we need a moral and cultural renewal worthy of the one our forefathers gave us. Fortunately, there is much we can do in arenas conservatives have, until recently, virtually abandoned—journalism, education, the arts, entertainment, and advertising—and in which we are seeing a nascent creative resurgence gaining momentum. The more we move back into pre-political and non-political spaces, the more we will affect the hearts and minds—and ultimately the votes—of the people. Every step we manage to make along the path of religious and cultural revival will move us in the right direction. Dismissing constitutional limits in pursuit of even well-intended outcomes will only increase our peril. Right-minded leaders who wield the power of the federal government must also steadily weaken it, for we can be certain it will again fall into the wrong hands. Renewal, not reinvention, is the answer. As we return to our roots, as we recommit to constitutional limits, as we reinvigorate federalism and the pre-New Deal subsidiarity Alexis de Tocqueville found so remarkable, we will restore the blessings of liberty and regenerate little platoons in every corner of America. That work is slower, less exhilarating and more difficult than knocking down Constitutional pillars and hoping America will remain standing. But it’s the only way to ensure this nation of the people, by the people, and for the people will remain subject to the people. The post Slippery Slopes Have Two Sides appeared first on The Daily Signal.