Early next week, there will be a classified briefing to Senators on Iran, in which skeptical Congressional leaders will demand answers to fundamental questions. It will also be incumbent upon the White House to demonstrate to the American people that attacking Iran would be an act of necessity, with a plan for the aftermath, before launching the B-2 heavy bombers from Diego Garcia laden with GBU-57 30,000-pound bunker busters. First, how good is the intelligence that indicates that Iran is on the verge of possessing a nuclear weapon? Israel has been saying for years that Iran was close to the 90 percent enrichment threshold. As recently as March, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to Congress that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. However, earlier this week, President Trump repudiated Gabbard’s view, positioning himself with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fear of an imminent threat. (RELATED: Trump Isn’t Looking for a Ceasefire. He Wants a No-Nukes Iran.) Skepticism about the quality of intelligence is justified: Going to war against Iraq in 2003 based on the view that Saddam Hussein had WMDs was a massive intelligence failure, leading to chaos after the Battle of Baghdad and ultimately the rise of ISIS. Further, the resilience of the Taliban was underestimated before the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, another intelligence failure. (RELATED: Avoiding the Third World Wars) Second, how cohesive is Iran, and what is the risk that it will become an ungoverned space, should the mullahs be ousted? Iran has a sense of Persian identity extending to the ancient world, and does not have the Shiite–Sunni fault line that divided Iraq. While much of the country is Persian, the coastal region of Iran has a significant Arab population, and roughly 20 percent of Iran is of Turkic ethnicity, and there are non-Turkic ethnic groups such as the Baloch, Kurds, Assyrians, and Armenians, to name some. (RELATED: Basic Thoughts on Iran) End of Iran: Long-Term Plan? Third, what is the plan for “the day after”? The U.S. was particularly inept at the reconstruction of Iraq, having dismissed thousands of Iraqi managers, military personnel, and officials controlling the security and infrastructure of the country to eliminate the Ba’athist Party — over 400,000 people by one estimate. In the case of Iran, the opposition must be well-defined and empowered to take over. So, who are they and how well do we know them — and can they be trusted to dismantle all WMD infrastructure? Fourth, if the U.S. is seen symbolically as Israel’s “sword of Gideon,” how will it engage the Muslim world in the future? There may be rage in the streets from the Philippines to Morocco, and blood may well prove to be thicker than what was the fear of Iran. Moreover, the U.S. Central Command is based in Qatar, and we have military bases in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and other countries of the Middle East. Fifth, what is the plan to respond to attacks by Iranian forces or proxies on U.S. embassies, NGOs, corporations, and maritime assets in the Gulf, and how do we assure that after the potential destruction of Fordow, the U.S. engagement will be short? Not only that, but how is the U.S. homeland protected against Iranian retaliation by means of sleeper cells that are activated? Finally, will the destruction of Fordo and its centrifuge halls, which is by no means certain, and other damage to Natanz and other sites really be enough? Iran is also believed to be in non-compliance with the requirements of the Chemical Weapons Convention — there is more WMD capability besides nuclear weapons. (RELATED: Ending the Ayatollah’s Nuclear Threat: No Better Time Than Now) The world needs an Iran integrated into trade and capital flows. Ranking third in oil reserves after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, Iran has a relatively large industrial base for a Middle East oil producer, as well as an accomplished scientific community. A moderate, secular Iran would be a relief and stabilizing force in the region, with a vested interest in integration with the West, reminiscent of earlier Pahlavi times when Iran was a bulwark against Russian influence and was America’s gendarme in the Gulf region. The power of the American presidency, regardless of party affiliation, can inspire, influence, and fascinate abroad, and Iran is no exception. President Trump should appeal to the Iranian people to remove their theocratic leadership and rejoin the world community, ending years of isolation, sanctions, and pariah status. It is well known that the merchants, women, students, middle class, and remnants of the Iranian aristocracy despise their government. Civil disobedience — when people refuse to cooperate with their government — brought down the British Raj in India. A personal appeal by President Trump to the Iranian national security apparatus not to suppress the will of their citizens would also go a long way to embolden opponents of the regime. READ MORE from Frank Schell: Defang Iran and Support the Iranian Good Guys The U.S. Needs Street Smarts to Deal With Iran Iran: Is the Worm Turning? Frank Schell is a business strategy consultant and former senior vice president of the First National Bank of Chicago. He was a Lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, and is a contributor of opinion pieces to various journals. The post Iran: The US Needs a Plan for the Day After appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Google’s profits keep climbing. OpenAI — the same company that fueled a wave of chatbot cheating — now wants to embed AI into every crevice of college life. Not to be outdone, Mark Zuckerberg just announced a new superintelligence lab, backed by nine-figure salaries and blind ambition. But somehow, the New York Times wants you to believe that “Big Tech Is Finally Losing.” If there’s a more laughable sentence in American media this year, I haven’t seen it. We are not witnessing the collapse of Big Tech. We are witnessing its coronation. Julia Angwin’s opinion piece clutches at courtroom verdicts and minor regulatory wins like a child gripping a plastic sword in the middle of an actual war. Yes, there are lawsuits. Yes, there are murmurs about monopoly abuse and transactional penalties. However, to suggest that these amount to anything more than speed bumps in Big Tech’s imperial march is to fundamentally misunderstand the scale, scope, and philosophy of power in 2025. (RELATED: Should We Believe Facebook on Free Speech?) Meta isn’t trembling. It’s cloning you. OpenAI isn’t worried. It’s wiring your children’s curriculum. Google isn’t hurting. It’s metabolizing the internet. The fantasy that competition is “finally” coming ignores the structural fact: these companies are not traditional monopolies. They are data sovereigns. Rulers not of oil or railroads but of thought itself. What Exxon was to Texas, OpenAI is to language. What AT&T once controlled with copper wires, Palantir now pilots through predictive warfare models. (RELATED: The Big Beautiful Bill’s Moratorium on AI Regulation Is Dangerous) And while Angwin dreams of cheaper books on Kindle and a “cooler” search engine, the actual frontier is generative dominance — AI agents crawling your inbox, rewriting your memories, anticipating your fears. While she celebrates Proton shaving a few dollars off its pricing, Sam Altman is quietly amassing the digital scaffolding to steer not just queries, but cognition. (RELATED: Self-Reliance: The Lost Trail of Silicon Valley) This isn’t just regulatory naïveté. It’s a category error of the highest order. You don’t bring a court order to an existential war. You don’t tame Leviathan with paperwork. And yet somehow, the Times let Julia Angwin, a longtime contributor and one of tech’s more housebroken critics, publish a piece so staggeringly off-base it reads like satire. The fact that this take made it past editors without someone pulling the emergency brake raises more than eyebrows. It raises one all-caps acronym: WTF. The notion that a search engine is simply a marketplace of results — and that more competition will somehow fix it — misses the forest, the trees, and the axe being swung. Google is no longer a search engine. It is the filter through which billions interpret reality. You don’t compete with that by launching a shinier tab bar. As for Perplexity, the much-hyped AI “competition” Angwin notes, it’s built on OpenAI’s infrastructure and trained on its models. Funded by venture capital firms that also bankroll OpenAI and its competitors. It’s not a rival — it’s a subsidiary in everything but name. This isn’t disruption. It’s stagecraft. These companies emerge from the same bloodstream, speak the same jargon, and answer to the same oddball gurus. They exist to give the appearance of competition while reinforcing the same core power structure. What Angwin calls a “technology revolution” is not the dismantling of Big Tech. Not less powerful, just less visible. Less corporate suit, more neural implant. It’s a mutation into something more intimate, more permanent, more inside you than ever before. Because this isn’t 1999. There’s no plucky startup in a garage about to dethrone Microsoft. There’s no elegant antitrust cavalry coming over the hill. The code is no longer the product — you are. Your face, your voice, your habits. Scraped, compressed, and repackaged for maximum extraction. And what’s being extracted isn’t just data — it’s foresight. Today, prediction is power. When they know what you’ll do before you do, they don’t need to manipulate you. They just need to wait. The truth is, Big Tech has never been stronger. It has never had more money, data, compute, talent, or ideological cover. It has never been closer to becoming a state within a state, a parallel government answerable to no one but shareholders and the whims of its techno-priests. And while the author gleefully recalls Apple being “forced” to let Fortnite (a wildly popular online video game) back on the App Store — as if that signals some great reckoning — Sam Altman is quietly pitching digital nationhood. Not a company. A country. One with no borders, no ballots, no constitution — just algorithms, loyalty points, and biometric onboarding. A world where governance isn’t elected, it’s engineered. Where obedience is gamified, and citizenship is something you earn by behaving the way the system predicts you will. This isn’t disruption. It’s domination dressed in futurism. And the idea that a turf war over a video game somehow outweighs that is laughable. This is the delusion we face: that because a few courts have started nibbling at the ankles of tech giants, the beasts are in retreat. They are not. They are evolving. And while the media hails procedural victories, the real work is happening elsewhere — in backrooms, in black sites, in code none of us are allowed to read. It seems like only yesterday BlackRock looked like our biggest problem. Don’t get me wrong — it’s still problematic. But compared to what OpenAI, Meta, and the rest are now building, even BlackRock starts to look quaint. This isn’t the twilight of tech. It’s just the part where it stops pretending. So no, Big Tech isn’t finally losing. If anything, it’s just getting started. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: The Curious Case of the Castro-Cuddling, Trump-Hating Humanitarian America’s Dumbest Refugees Pick God’s Cruelest Joke Soap, Sex, and Simulacra: Hollywood’s Latest Moment of Madness The post Is This the Stupidest Sentence of 2025? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Here we go again. One of the recurring problems in humanity is that periodically someone (or multiple someones) shows up determined to run all of humanity, or at least all of humanity as understood in their day. A mere sampling of these names over the centuries conveys the problem. From Julius Caesar, (he the dictator of the Roman Empire BC — Before Christ!) and on to, eventually, Britains’s King George III to France’s Napoleon, to World War I Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II to Russia’s Lenin and Stalin to World War II Germany’s Hitler and on to Italy’s Mussolini, Japan’s General Tojo, China’s Mao and an assortment of various others sprinkled around the globe with names like Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), Kim Il-sung (North Korea), Fidel Castro (Cuba), Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (Chile), and oh so many more, humanity’s dictator problem never goes away. The ideals of freedom and democracy championed so vigorously in the Western world and on occasion elsewhere have never yet eliminated the obsessive human urge to total power over others. This time around, the world is in trouble again, potentially on the precipice of not just war but nuclear war, because of Iran’s self-titled “Supreme Leader,” Ali Khamenei. Who is he? Khamenei is described, as here at Fox, as “the modern day Hitler.” He runs Iran as a police state, his first target being the Iranian people themselves. (And to their credit, rebellion against their Supreme Leader stirs.) (RELATED: Exclusive: Anti-Regime Iranians Speak Out, Discuss Widespread Discontent With the Mullahs’ Rule) And from his actions thus far, the description of the “Supreme Leader” seems apt. While Israel has made it its mission to target Iran’s nuclear program, Khameini has made it his business to do things like targeting an Israeli hospital with conventional bombs — this is but one step in his long-term goal of wiping Israel off the face of the earth. The inevitable question, of course, now arises. That would be: What the heck does the world do now? Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has at least one, if a decidedly defensive answer. Yet another Fox headline reads: “1,500 Jewish Americans evacuated from Israel as DeSantis sponsors rescue flights to Tampa,” with the subtitle, “Florida is said to have the U.S.’s 3rd-largest Jewish population behind New York and California.” The obvious answer to what America and the world should do now is: Take out Khameini. Send one of those Israeli flying rockets to oh-so-precisely land on the roof of wherever Israeli or American intelligence says Khamenei is hanging his turban. (RELATED: Iran Miscalculated. The Ayatollahs Must be Removed.) Which is where President Trump comes in. What does he — or, for that matter, any American president — do? And do now? The DeSantis remedy of evacuating American Jews from Israel is good as far as it goes. But there is far more at stake here than that defensive move. Like — the world. Without question, the last thing President Trump wants is to launch, either by design or by accident, a new world war. The president, it needs to be said, was elected in the first place by campaigning as an opponent of what he saw as the “forever wars” of the Bushes and, more generally, some in the American foreign policy establishment. This is something he clearly deeply believes. Yet as this is written, the headline leading Fox News is: “Israel says Iran’s top leader ‘should not continue to exist’ after hospital strike.” There is, one suspects, no panacea here. But it would seem that whatever the next step, that step should be organized and executed by more than President Trump and the American military. Just as the world dealt with those earlier dictators — and yes, Hitler comes to mind — the free world and a few others should unite as one to deal with Iran’s Khamenei. Recall, Hitler finally lost to a combination of American, British, French, and Russian militaries. Writing in The New York Post, former U.S. Secretary of State (in the first Trump era) Mike Pompeo headlines: “Israel is doing the world a favor – now the US must give any help necessary to end Iran’s nuclear threat.” Pompeo writes: A nuclear Iran would pose a threat to peace everywhere. It would enable the regime to effectively hold the world hostage, with the power to disrupt the global economy or coerce other powers into bending to its will. It would insulate the dictatorship from popular pressure for change and allow the mullahs to continue their role as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. Exactly. Without question, one suspects President Trump will be — and should be — in the lead on whatever comes next. The real shame here is that after all the history of this world, human beings have not yet learned to live in peace. But in the 21st century, all it takes is one determined evildoer to open the door to global disaster. And without doubt, right this moment, there is that one human being in our time hard at work to do that job and join his name to the historical record of global tyrants. That would be, of course, Iran’s Islamic Republic Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The question now is just how long the rest of the world — and President Trump — will stand for Khamenei’s quest for nuclear weapons and his ability to use them. One suspects it won’t be long. Buckle in. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Trump: The Success of the Outsider President Flag Day, and President Trump’s Birthday Arrives: The Left Recoils Is It Time to Dox Hakeem Jeffries’s Security? The post Iran’s Khamenei v. Trump — And the World appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

As impressive as the recent military celebration of its 250-year founding was, it was necessarily focused upon its history, upon its past. The challenge is for the future. The good news is that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth promised Congress that the new commander in chief is committed to “cleaning house” to effectively modernize his military. And unlike in much of the past, the new defense leader is actually following through to reorient the world’s largest bureaucracy and reverse decades of decline, especially at the top. (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 232: Making the Military Great Again) Hegseth started at the very top by directing a 20 percent reduction in the number of four-star general and flag officer positions across the Pentagon, Army, Navy, Airforce and the rest, including one-star general officers in the National Guard. His plan is to cut nine top four-stars, 80 three-stars, and 33 National Guard stars to simplify the chain of command and speed combat readiness, weapons modernization, and warfighting capabilities. (RELATED: Some Generals Should Be Fired. Start With Eric Smith.) DOGE analysis found $10 billion in Pentagon waste, which Hegseth promised to reinvest in “readiness, capability, training, and the troops.” He pledged to target the contractors and consultants who actually outnumber civilian employees and were found to produce most of the waste. (RELATED: Real Military Reform Begins) Hegseth promised in April to “streamline” the whole “force structure” right down to the battlefield. But the fundamental problem is deeper. Too many in the Pentagon’s entrenched bureaucracy still support such backward-looking plans as found in the Army of 2030 program rather than emphasizing the month-to-month flexibility needed in real wars. The Air Force is still too set on manned aircraft. The Navy still favors big-target but vulnerable carriers rather than smaller ships, robots, and drones. Space Force prefers big and expensive rather than simple, like the radar plane. Much of the problem is Congress, which writes projects into law locally and then supports the status quo. The war in Ukraine has forced the Army to understand that today’s battlefield is more like World War I than the WWII open tank battlefield still in place today. 21st Century Warfare vs. Department of Defense The Army is forced to pay for tanks now available, but were requested in 2015, that they cannot use today. As we noted in February, five years ago, a pre-Trump Elon Musk warned the Air Force that the manned airplane was obsolete and must be replaced by drones. Today, the manufacturer is at least trying to sell a version of the new F-35 that could be both manned and unmanned. The Navy is more open to the idea that many small ships might be better than big targets like airplane carriers, but the new John F. Kennedy version, due since 2024, is still in process, and another is planned for 2029. The naval war to protect one of the world’s top shipping lanes through the Red Sea is especially revealing. A single Houthis factional force within little Yemen has basically fought the U.S. Navy to a standstill since 2023. It began with destroyers and, as Houthis ship attacks continued, moved up to one and then to two carrier groups of five ships with 7,000 sailors. No U.S. warships were hit, but three airplanes and two crew members were lost at sea. (RELATED: Why the Marines Can’t Fix the Houthi Problem) The Houthis survived incoming U.S. air attacks and downed a dozen $30 million Reaper drones. When President Donald Trump took office, he authorized the second carrier, a half dozen B-2 bombers, a squadron of F-35 fighters, and 53 days of bombardment. That resulted in a cease-fire agreement with Houthis but only for U.S. ships, not safety for the main Red Sea traffic, which was the reason for the intervention. The Army has pretty much avoided such active confrontations, but almost everyone, including Hegseth, concedes a major restructuring would have to occur to successfully fight a modern land war like the one in Ukraine. But Army Chief of Staff Daniel Driscoll conceded to Congress that “there will not be one date” for even the “first batch” of reforms to be completed. A congressman supported the administration’s “dynamic movement” that included an 8 percent reduction in personnel but reminded the chief that such “significant changes will impact people’s lives” and the Pentagon needed to “get their story straight.” As far as air and space, the surprise Ukrainian attack on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet destroyed 41 of its warplanes across four far-flung airfields with inexpensive, mostly land-based drones that question the whole strategic response structure, especially for homeland U.S. missile defense. (RELATED: Putin Caught in an Expanding Spiderweb) The recent Israel drone attacks — some from Iran’s own territory — raise similar issues. A new Golden Dome national missile defense — first proposed 40 years ago — has been approved by the president with a four-year deadline that all the experts expect will take much longer. (RELATED: Could Trump’s Golden Dome Fulfill Ronald Reagan’s Dream?) The Pentagon has issued plans to create and update drone training and supply, but one expert noted that even such rushed efforts “often take years to make it through the requirements writing process.” “Then they’ll need to get budgetary approval. That’ll be another two to three years,” he said. “And that’s the definition of fast within DoD today: five years to even start prototyping — not delivery, but prototype.” Even worse, Ukraine has shown that keeping drones effective over time requires that the drone manufacturer not be in the U.S. but must be close to the battlefield to adjust to the changes needed to thwart the enemy’s changing defenses. Hegseth has made an excellent start challenging the bureaucracy, but, as he knows, there is a long way to go, and he urgently needs support rather than second-guessing from the status quo. READ MORE from Donald Devine: A ‘War’ on the Civil Service or Controlling a Powerful Union Political Machine? Law Schools, Court Supremacy, and the Real Constitution To Govern in Mankind’s Foreign Policy Interest or in Trump’s America First Interest? Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles, and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator. The post Pitfalls and Obstacles Plague Defense Modernization appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In a virtue-signaling display of institutional Trump Derangement Syndrome, the city of Burlington, Vermont, passed a resolution to spend $3,000 to rename its main shopping corridor from Church Street to Canada Street. The silly effort is premised on the goal of attracting more shoppers to the progressive Gotham’s dying commercial sector in a spiteful swipe at President Trump. Burlington is cutting off its nose on its path to self-destruction. The Resolution recites its “shared values with Canadian neighbors” and data suggesting “Canadian visitors are vital to our local economy, particularly in the downtown where small businesses, restaurants, hotels, and retail shops rely on cross-border tourism.” Burlington has experienced a sharp drop-off in foot traffic to its downtown Church Street Marketplace following years of Seattle-like progressive policies. (RELATED: Vermont Pedophile Weekend Retreat Draws Parental Ire) Burlington’s street renaming solution to its economic woes blames Donald Trump for its decline: “WHEREAS, recent reporting indicates a noticeable decline in Canadian travel to Vermont, with travelers citing concern about the Trump administration’s political rhetoric and immigration policies that expose them to risk of detention as reasons for canceled or postponed visits “WHEREAS, these policies from the Trump administration do not reflect the views and values of city leaders and residents, and the City of Burlington wishes to make sure our Canadian neighbors know this loud and clear;”  The truth is obscured from Burlington’s Progressives by the self-immolating ideology that has steadily destroyed the once-vibrant Green Mountain metropolis. Illegal immigrants populate the sanctuary city; gang violence is reflected in street shootings and the ubiquitous graffiti staining once-beautiful architecture; free needle sites ensure dirty syringes litter the shopping sidewalks. Drastically defunding the Burlington police and repeatedly electing far-left prosecutor Sarah George to set “marginalized” criminals at large have led Vermonters to shun the city for recreation or shopping. A September 2024 article, bluntly titled “Burlington businesses sound the alarm over declining foot traffic, sales,” described the glaring reasons Canadians stayed home long before Donald Trump could be scapegoated: Many Burlington businesses report a decline in revenues this summer amid an array of struggles downtown. Store owners are often reluctant to say business is bad for fear it will make the situation worse. But many are frustrated over declining revenues caused by visitors’ concerns about public safety and an exodus of downtown workers. The situation is prompting businesses to hit the panic button and ask people to shop locally because they are worried about closing … Th[e] challenges include crime, open drug use and other bad behavior. Vermont’s Continued Decline A recent letter, signed by over 100 Burlington business owners, petitioned the city to relocate a longstanding food shelf away from the public parking garage, where posting police at taxpayer expense has failed to control crime. This created a backlash and capitulation by the progressive-coddling Burlington mayor elected for her gay virtues to implement a “renewed sense of community empowerment.” (RELATED: Vermont Free Food Fracas Exposes Progressive Folly) The city continues to sink in the quicksand of progressive folly while city councilors shift blame to Donald Trump and solicit rescue from Canadians chased away by crime, decline, and city taxes. Burlington can’t balance its books due to overspending, despite increasing property taxes and a sales surtax on businesses that is shrinking the city’s revenues.   Now the city is spending $3,000 on “bilingual signage, including street signs, Canadian flags and other marketing materials” to attract Canadians, it claims have been scared away by fears of arrest and deportation. A gaslighting Olympian has championed the street renaming ruse: “Symbolism is important. It shows that we care,’ said Councilor Becca Brown McKnight (D-Ward 6), the resolution’s primary sponsor, who wore a Canadian flag-themed T-shirt to commemorate the vote.  Councilor McKnight said the name change is a playful way of showing appreciation to Canadians. It’s also a dig at Trump’s own penchant for rebranding national landmarks, such as the Gulf of Mexico, which the president renamed the Gulf of America on the first day of his second term. Councilor Gene Bergman (P-Ward 2) said the gesture is also a rejection of the xenophobia perpetuated by recent unprecedented immigration raids. Burlington is a self-proclaimed refuge for illegals and indigents that rolls out the red carpet for fentanyl-dealing street gangs while treating police like criminals. Now it proposes to solve these visible failures by “encouraging Canadian tourism, and celebrating our shared values and borderless friendship.” (RELATED: Sanctuary Cities: The Dangerous Illusion of Virtue) The border between the U.S. and Canada remains intact, as does the border between economic reality and Marxist Utopia. Burlington is no friend to the businesses it is slowly strangling in its empty quest to fault Trump for its pernicious fatuity. (RELATED: The Scandinavian Lesson: What Malmö Warns Us About America’s Sanctuary Cities) Burlington businesses are suffering the wokester ills that have infested progressive cities nationwide. Burlington is banking on Canadians risking their lives and treading where Vermonters eschew walking. French-language signs won’t conceal the stench. READ MORE from John Klar: Vermont Free Food Fracas Exposes Progressive Folly A Legal Analysis of Climate ‘Science’ Vermont Pedophile Weekend Retreat Draws Parental Ire The post Burlington Vermont Renames Church Street to Canada Street in Anti-Trump Snub appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the White House have announced that blue-collar workers saw almost 2 percent real wage growth during the first five months of President Donald Trump’s second term. The occasion represents the first time that any president — with the exception of Trump’s first term — has recorded positive growth in the first five months since President Richard Nixon in 1969. The 1.7 percent real wage increase outperformed the first administration’s 1.3 percent real wage growth for blue-collar jobs in 2017. The start of both of Trump’s terms has provided a stark contrast to the negative 1.7 real wage growth in the first months of the Biden administration. Bessent told the New York Post in an interview that “the only other time it has been this high … was during President Trump’s first term.” He added, “[W]e’ve seen real wages for hourly workers, non-supervisory workers, rise almost 2 percent in the first five months. No president has done that before.” Trump’s Blue-Collar Agenda Bessent speculated that real wages have increased because of Trump’s pro-manufacturing agenda and immigration and deportation policies. He contrasted Trump’s policies with previous years under the Biden administration, which saw floods of illegal immigration that proved to be a “disaster” for working Americans. The 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants in the country have put pressure on Americans’ wages, whereas Trump’s new policies have halted and begun to reverse that trend. U.S. Customs and Border Protection released May’s operational statistics on Tuesday, announcing that “Border Patrol released zero illegal aliens into the interior of the U.S.” this May. In contrast, the Biden administration released 62,0000 illegal aliens into the country during May 2024. Further, the Border Patrol encountered 8,725 illegal aliens crossing the southwest border between ports of entry last month. This figure represents a 93 percent decrease from May 2024, when Border Patrol encountered 117,905 aliens. The other integral component to real wages for blue-collar workers is falling inflation. Despite the expectations of those who feared that tariffs would bring higher prices, the U.S. experienced muted May inflation as consumer prices rose only 0.1 percent in May over the previous month. Year-over-year inflation was 2.4 percent, representing nearly a four-year low. The result of lower inflation tends to be increased take-home pay, leading to higher real wages and living standards. Trump celebrated the historic increase in real wages for blue-collar workers in a post on Truth Social, writing, “Wow!!! U.S. Wage Growth BEST IN 60 YEARS!” READ MORE from Jonah Apel: A Tale of Two Father’s Days: This Year, Media Outlets Denigrated Fatherhood Liberals Pounce on RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Committee Appointments Three More States Join MAHA by Banning Candy and Soda From SNAP The post Blue-Collar Real Wages Experience Monumental Growth Under Trump Administration appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Africa’s history is a tapestry of innovation, resilience, and grandeur, yet so often, the continent’s ancient kingdoms are overshadowed by more familiar global narratives. From the golden savannas to lush river valleys, powerful civilizations flourished—setting standards in culture, trade, and governance that still echo today. These kingdoms shaped not only Africa but the world, contributing ...

by Ron Paul, Ron Paul Institute: Israel’s airstrikes on Iran and US involvement shatter the illusion that America First guides President Trump’s Middle East policy. The hijacking of “America First” for hawkish goals is clear as Trump treads the same failed interventionist path in the Middle East. Beyond policy, these attempts to co-opt the legacy of America […]

by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project: (Common Dreams) For nearly 30 years, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has driven the Middle East into war and destruction. The man is a powder keg of violence. Throughout all the wars that he has championed, Netanyahu has always dreamed of the big one: to defeat and overthrow the […]