We begin this edition of the 5QT with a poll. Which perhaps necessitates an apology, because this column is highly skeptical of poll results. But seeing as though most pollsters are either leftists or are employed by them, polls can sometimes be taken seriously as an admission against interest. And with that, we have… 1. Very Sad Donkeys So here’s a poll that the AP, in conjunction with the University of Chicago’s polling center, released on Wednesday… In contrast, Democrats have become more pessimistic about their party’s future, the state of the country’s politics, and the country’s process for choosing political leaders. Only 35 percent of Democrats say they are optimistic about the future of the Democratic Party, down sharply from 57 percent in the July 2024 poll. About 7 in 10 Democrats are pessimistic about the state of politics in this country, up from 60 percent last summer. And 55 percent of Democrats are pessimistic about the way our leaders are chosen under our political system, up from last summer when Joe Biden was still in the White House. Yikes. The Republican numbers were a good bit better, but Republicans are never particularly happy about politics — if you like government, what on earth are you doing as a Republican?… Republicans have grown slightly more optimistic about the future of the Republican Party than they were last summer. In July 2024, 47 percent said they were optimistic about their party. Now, three months into Donald Trump’s second term, 55 percent are hopeful about their party’s future. While half of Republicans are pessimistic about the state of politics in the United States, that is down from 73 percent last July. And they have grown slightly more optimistic about the way our leaders are chosen under the country’s political system. The guess is that if House Speaker Mike Johnson can get the Big Beautiful Bill off the floor this week and over to the Senate, and if the RINOs in the Senate don’t gut the bill before they pass it, those GOP numbers will go up. And the Democrat numbers will plummet even more. This is actually a good thing. Today’s activist modern Democrat is someone who substitutes radical politics for religion, morality, and a positive social life, and when the Democrats are politically ascendant, they don’t stop and think of how they can make things better for the American people. Instead, they indulge in ever-greater messianic fetishes to satisfy their lust for imposing their will on their fellow man. (RELATED: ‘Get Laid’ and ‘Have Fun’: The Democrats (Still) Don’t Get It) If you don’t agree with that, then feel free to explain how we could possibly have gone from gay marriage to transgenderism over the course of a decade, or the utter madness of climate-change alarmism, or any number of utterly fringe policy initiatives they’ve allowed their party to be captured by. (RELATED: Democrats’ ‘Trans’ Intransigence) Or the suicidal idea of paying reparations for slavery, 160 years after it ended. More on that below. The point being that these guys need to be demoralized and despondent. If they are, perhaps some will turn away from radical politics and take up something more productive to fill their schedule. (RELATED: The Masochistic Democrats Hate You — And Beg You to Hate Them Back) Or if not, they’ll realize the current set of messianic causes to which they’re wedded are losers, and, so badly needing a win somewhere in their lives, jettison those in favor of more attainable things which don’t horrify the bulk of their countrymen. Either way, hopped-up Dems who think the great revolution is just around the corner are a disastrous thing, and that AP poll suggests there isn’t so much of that right now. Let’s be thankful for it. 2. Look How Awful This Is Have you seen James O’Keefe’s exposé about the Biden HHS and its eager placement of illegal immigrant kids with sex traffickers? This doesn’t need a whole lot of commentary. It just is. And it’s, well… HHS Whistleblower Tara Lee Rodas says she raised concerns about sending so many illegal migrant children “to the same address” “I was told, Tara, we only get sued if we keep kids in care too long. We don’t get sued by traffickers” This is the HHS under the Democrat Party pic.twitter.com/8nH11LvpKl — Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) May 13, 2025 3. Doom-Spinning of an Economy Which Has Surprisingly Little Doom In It You don’t see a whole lot of reportage about the markets anymore, for some reason. And you don’t see a whole lot of reportage about the performance of the economy, either. It’s amazing the difference a few weeks will make, no? What reportage you do see has a lot of the typical elements. This…is…CNN… U.S. wholesale prices sank in April, logging their biggest monthly drop since COVID stifled the economy, as tariffs put a squeeze on profit margins, according to new data released Thursday. The Producer Price Index, a closely watched measurement of wholesale inflation, showed Thursday that the prices paid to U.S. producers dropped 0.5 percent in April from the month before, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Hey, that seems pretty good. Weren’t we going to get big inflationary problems because of Trump’s tariffs? Economists were expecting monthly prices to rise in April by 0.2 percent and to slow to 2.4 percent on an annual basis, according to FactSet. A driving force behind the downward monthly swing was a 1.7 percent plunge in trade services, a category that measures gross margins for wholesalers and retailers. Although it’s a volatile category, the sharp downward swing in trade services indicates that companies’ margins are being eaten away by higher costs from President Donald Trump’s tariffs, Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM U.S., told CNN on Thursday. “We are beginning to see the impact of trade policy filtering into the hard data in such a way that it’s impossible to deny that it is now affecting revenues and profit margins for firms,” Brusuelas said. Oh, right. Sure. But weren’t the expectations that those tariffs would be passed on to the consumer and, as a result, there would be tons of inflation? Guess not. So the importers are eating the tariffs? Those higher costs will likely start spilling over to consumers soon, he said. And the economy-powering consumers are already showing some signs of fatigue: Sales at U.S. retailers slowed sharply in April to 0.1 percent after a surge of 1.7 percent in March, when shoppers rushed to beat the slew of new tariffs. “Sharply?” From 1.7 percent growth to 0.1 percent, and it’s “sharply.” OK, I guess. Then CNN gives us this… Separately on Thursday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned that “supply shocks” could force the central bank to keep rates higher over the long term. “We may be entering a period of more frequent, and potentially more persistent, supply shocks — a difficult challenge for the economy and for central banks,” Powell said. He noted that “inflation could be more volatile going forward than in the inter-crisis period of the 2010s.” On Tuesday, the latest Consumer Price Index data showed that overall inflation cooled further for the goods and services Americans commonly purchase. However, some economists pegged some of that softening to weaker demand. Trump’s bevy of tariffs is widely expected to make items more expensive in the months to come and drive inflation higher. Wait, here comes the fun part… On the surface, the April PPI report appeared to portray a welcome decline in key areas, notably energy and food — including a continued plummeting of egg prices, which dropped 39.3 percent in April after falling 21.3 percent in March. Excluding food and energy, which can be volatile, core PPI also showed some softness, largely due to the big negative swing from trade services: Prices fell 0.4% for the month and annual inflation slowed to 3.1% from 4%. So, much less inflation. (RELATED: Inflation Report Has Journalists Wiping Egg Off Their Faces) No, says CNN. Much MORE inflation! Despite the seemingly cool reading, tariffs are making their mark, Chris Rupkey, chief economist at FwdBonds, told CNN. “Goods prices are picking up,” he said. Stripping out food and energy, prices for goods have been steadily on the rise. After posting a 0.1 percent increase in December, that category rose 0.2 percent in January, 0.3 percent in February and March, and 0.4 percent in April, Rupkey noted. The 0.4 percent increase is the fastest monthly inflation for that category in more than two years, BLS data shows. “It looks like some of the fears of what is going to happen from these import tariffs is becoming a reality, and that is goods prices going up,” he said. “That’s a worrisome sign for inflation down the road, meaning it could be only a couple of months away.” This, from the same people who were just way off on the April numbers. There’s an interview with a guy from Walmart who says they’re about to jack up their prices because they can’t eat Trump’s China tariffs. Of course, while that might be true to an extent, and for a while, nobody really knows what high Walmart prices will do to Walmart’s customer base. Or, consequently, to Walmart’s supply chain, which is the whole point of the tariffs. These numbers they’re throwing around, though, don’t look much like the advertised catastrophe. We’ll have to see how it goes. But it’s not like you really want to take CNN seriously — on this topic or any other. 4. The Pfizer Election Manipulation We Already Knew Existed Is Now Pretty Much Proven It was obvious at the time that Pfizer held the rollout of their COVID vaccine until after the 2020 election, though that was denied as absurd. Just as obvious was the reason why: while then-President Donald Trump had made Pfizer and a few of the other drug companies filthy rich by throwing government money at the development of those ultimately-useless vaccines, Trump wasn’t going to force anybody to take Pfizer’s jab. Unlike Joe Biden, who was happy to ruin millions of lives in doing so. No sooner was the election over than Pfizer triumphantly announced they had the vaxx ready to roll. Now we know that wasn’t a coincidence, as though we didn’t already know it… HUGE New Information Suggests Senior Pfizer Executives Conspired to Delay COVID-19 Vaccine Clinical Testing to Influence 2020 Election. One exec was so scared about this being investigated that he asked to be relocated to Canada! MASSIVE SCANDAL uncovered by @Jim_Jordan. pic.twitter.com/pZKLAz1Wmx — House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) May 15, 2025 No, it’s exceptionally unlikely anybody goes to jail over this. But I talked about Trump’s drug-price cramdown in Tuesday’s column, and in light of this, it’s pretty hard to give a fig about any complaints these guys might have over getting stomped by the federal government. (RELATED: Trump’s Drug-Price EO Should Have Happened Decades Ago) Mess with the bull, you get the horns, fellas. We’ll see how many Pharma Pets in the Senate, like Bill Cassidy, for example, wet their pants over the choice between sticking with Trump or following the Pharma path for the rest of the year when the budget and other bills come through. 5. The House’s Sweet Summer Child She has a name which sounds like it should come from an old 1960s hippie folk song, but that’s not who Summer Lee, Democrat from Pennsylvania, is at all. Not much peace or love with this nasty woman… REPARATIONS: Democrat Rep Summer Lee opposed allowing white refugees to resettle in the United States and now she’s introducing a bill that would require white taxpayers to pay black citizens trillions of dollars as reparations. Are you feeling generous? pic.twitter.com/DseHo1Rmyu — @amuse (@amuse) May 14, 2025 This isn’t going anywhere, obviously, but it’s glorious nonetheless. It’s one more spark to that racial powderkeg the Dems are irresponsibly playing around with, and that’s inherently dangerous except for the fact that even black people in America are dog-tired of all the racial crap the Democrats won’t leave alone. Pimping a reparations bill in 2025 is the absolute height of “out of touch.” 2025 isn’t 2020. You have no George Floyd, Summer — you have Karmelo Anthony. And nobody is interested. Between this idiocy and the likely ongoing conniption fit the race-hustlers in the Democrats’ political class are going to have over white South African asylees coming off planes, they’re going to cement the public’s perception that they’re the anti-white party. (RELATED: The Plight of the Afrikaners Is a Clarifying Moment for Western Civilization) Or, put the way Thomas Sowell put it years ago, they’re not interested in putting an end to racism but rather in putting it under new management. Which they’ve done. And everybody’s sick of it. So good luck with your bill, Summer. And thank your crack political consultants for their rock-solid advice in making this your brand right now. READ MORE from Scott McKay: The Plight of the Afrikaners Is a Clarifying Moment for Western Civilization Trump’s Drug-Price EO Should Have Happened Decades Ago Five Quick Things: Habemas Trumpam? The post Five Quick Things: America Needs Despondent Democrats, and We Have Them appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Ya gotta love the sheer, decidedly out front, hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump, the sitting president of the United States, has accepted the gift of a plane from the government of Qatar. A gift that will go to the U.S. Department of Defense. And yet his decidedly forgetful critics — with Hillary Clinton at the top of the list — go crazy. Says Hillary: “No one gives someone a $400 million jet for free without expecting anything in return. Be serious.” Hello? Let’s be serious. To refresh the memories of these critics, let’s take a stroll down memory lane with the Clintons and gifts. Here is a CBS report from back there in 2002. The headline: “Clinton Gifts Called ‘Disturbing.’” CBS reported as follows, with bold print for emphasis supplied: Expensive gifts poured into the Clinton White House in the weeks between Hillary Rodham Clinton’s election to the Senate from New York and her swearing-in last year, according to a new congressional investigation. The congressman who oversaw the investigation called Sen. Clinton’s acceptance of the gifts “disturbing at best.” At a Tuesday hearing, Rep. Doug Ose, R-Calif., said, “The current system is broken and needs to be fixed.” He said his investigators found undervalued gifts, others that were never reported and still more that disappeared. The examination of gifts to the Clintons also found that 17 separate gifts of china, cutlery and furniture worth more than $75,000 arrived in December 2000 alone, at a time when the Clintons were looking to furnish two newly purchased homes, one each in Washington and Chappaqua, N.Y. … The Clintons took with them $360,000 worth of large gifts when they left the White House in January 2001, according to the yearlong investigation by a House Government Reform subcommittee. The Clintons also left with additional gifts too small to trigger public disclosure. Got that? Hillary Clinton attacks Trump, saying: “No one gives someone a $400 million jet for free without expecting anything in return. Be serious.” OK. Let’s be serious. Nobody gives Hillary and Bill “$360,000 worth of large gifts when they left the White House in January 2001 without expecting anything in return.” Then there was this from Red State: “Hillary Clinton Rips Trump Over Qatar Plane, Gets Slapped With Reminder of the Gifts She Accepted.” The story reports, with, again, bold print for emphasis supplied: Clinton, ever the grizzled political veteran, had to know that critics’ responses were going to come flying in fast and furious, even with the comments on her posts being turned off. And they most certainly did, many of which involved gentle reminders that Clinton was embroiled in countless pay-to-play donation controversies while serving as Secretary of State under President Barack Obama. Not to mention, while preparing to run for President.  One such gift came from — you guessed it — Qatar. Reuters reported on a $1 million donation sent in 2011 by Qatari officials to the Clinton Foundation in honor of her husband’s birthday. The Foundation was forced to confirm that it received the gift from Qatar “without informing the State Department,” while Clinton was Secretary of State, after hacked emails published by Wikileaks years later revealed they wanted to meet Bill in person to hand him the check. According to the same report, the Qatari government had donated up to $5 million to the foundation over the years, which were significant gifts to a former and, what many thought at the time, future President. One could go on and on and on with this particular Clinton hypocrisy. But it all boils down to the hard fact that President Trump, unlike the Clintons and his other critics, is a self-made billionaire from his career in business, not from using political office to get paid for favors. And he already has not one but two planes — a 757 emblazoned with his name and a Citation jet. (Seen here is the 757). The status of the plane from Qatar in question is accurately reported as follows by Fox News: “The Boeing 747 offered to the United States by Qatar will be given to the Department of Defense, President Donald Trump said Tuesday, responding to questions about the legality of accepting a gift from a foreign power.” Which is to say, the president, as commander in chief, accepted the plane as a gift to the United States and as such it “will be given to the Department of Defense.” Well, of course. Did Hillary Clinton understand all of this before issuing her baseless attack on her old rival? Well, of course. But she played the game anyway. Which might explain why she will never be president. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Trump Wins Hostage Edan Alexander’s Release Stunning: An American Pope Yes, Flag Day Is Trump’s Birthday — and the Army’s 250th Anniversary The post Hillary Accepted Foreign Gifts appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

After six decades, Buffett is retiring from a legendary career that’s made him the most famous investor in the world. With just six years until his 100th birthday, we wish the Oracle of Omaha a peaceful retirement in his remaining twilight years. Perhaps he can spend them pondering his less-known and less-celebrated legacy: Funneling more money into the abortion industry than perhaps anyone else in human history. I’ve called Buffett the secret patron of Abortion Inc. for pumping perhaps $5.3 billion over two decades into abortion providers as well as the constellation of activist, lobbying, and policy groups insulating the baby-killing industry in Washington. That’s a conservative estimate, by the way. Or — in Buffett’s spirit of keeping philanthropy local — it’s also enough to abort all the people living in Nebraska, his home state, five times over. $5.3 billion is chump change to a man worth $168 billion. But it’s enough to pay for 10 million abortions at $550 a pop, according to estimates from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute — about the populations of Portugal, Greece, or 10 U.S. states together. That fact is all the more stunning given Buffett’s carefully cultivated image of a respectable, mild-mannered, coupon-cutting businessman. He lives in the same house he purchased in 1958 and drives an 11-year-old Cadillac: how radical could he really be? “You mean you didn’t know Warren Buffett’s foundation has been funding abortion rights organizations?” NPR wrote facetiously in 2006. “Well, that’s just the way the Buffetts wanted it.” The billionaire’s secret is masking his abortion funding as “philanthropy.” Since 2002, he’s poured a vast fortune into a set of foundations deeply involved in bankrolling abortion-on-demand groups — including Planned Parenthood — and the United Nations’ population control crusade in poor, non-white countries. One of these you know: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 39 percent of whose revenues actually come from Buffett. Much of that wealth goes toward anti-human advocacy groups such as the Population Council, created in the 1950s to depopulate the Third World. (RELATED: America’s Abortion Blind Spot: How Liberals Convinced Americans to Ignore the Fetus) The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, however, does a much better job of hiding its radicalism. The group’s website advertises “college scholarships for Nebraska students” and “does not respond to other inquiries.” This same “benign” education philanthropy has poured $76 million into Marie Stopes International (MSI), a far-left purveyor of abortions overseas for girls as young as 16 — some of them illegal. MSI, incidentally, is named for Britain’s version of Margaret Sanger, a eugenicist who wrote love poetry to Adolf Hitler. (Really.) Virtually all of its clinics are based in African and Asian countries that restrict abortion or enshrine the right to life for the unborn in their national constitutions, such as Kenya. In 2020, Kenyan police caught MSI abortionists dumping the decomposing corpses of 10 babies they’d illegally aborted in a dumpster. Police later arrested two unregistered medical practitioners for performing unlawful abortions in MSI’s Nairobi facility after the government kicked them out. (RELATED: Defunding USAID: Trump’s Biggest Gift to Pro-Lifers After Dobbs) The Buffett Foundation was also one of the top donors to Gynuity Health Projects: A New York nonprofit that conducts horrifying experiments on women in Burkina Faso, a destitute West African country (GDP per person: $715). Gynuity provides mail-order abortifacients in the U.S. designed to induce a miscarriage in the first trimester; the drugs tested in Africa would extend that to the second trimester (28 weeks). Excessive bleeding is a common side effect, requiring large quantities of blood bags to stave off lethal hemorrhaging. Is that “philanthropy,” the biblical love of one’s fellow man? Warren Buffett must think so, because he keeps funding groups that abort his fellow man using U.S. charity laws — and he’s been doing it for a long time. Even before Roe v. Wade codified abortion “rights” in 1973, Buffett and his liberal Republican business partner, Charlie Munger, organized a fake church to arrange abortions in states where it was legal. “I called Warren and asked him to help me establish our own church,” Munger explained in a 2003 interview. “That we did. For years this minister ran the thing. That was our contribution, trying to help so that society didn’t force women to give birth — to be held in a system [ecologist and overpopulation alarmist] Garrett Hardin called ‘mandatory motherhood.’” Munger later folded the faux-church into the Los Angeles chapter of Planned Parenthood, where he was chief financial officer. Buffett’s biographer wrote that the Omaha billionaire shares Munger’s “Malthusian dread” of global overpopulation, so naturally wants to reduce it. So does his daughter, Susie: “[Population control] was what my father has always believed was the biggest and most important issue,” she told the Chronicle of Philanthropy in 1997, “so that will be the [foundation’s] focus.” In the 1990s, that led the Buffett Foundation to finance the development of mifepristone pills to induce chemical abortions — killing the fetus and forcibly expelling it from the uterus. Today, Planned Parenthood and others on the Left market mifepristone as an at-home, DIY abortion drug — a pill a day to make the baby go away — while downplaying the incredible risks to women’s health. Chemical abortion has exploded in use in recent years — representing 63 percent of all abortions in 2023, up from just 31 percent in 2014, and almost certainly driving the increase in abortions nationwide from 2020 to 2023. Pro-abortion groups use it to continue their war on the unborn even after the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022. The Biden Food and Drug Administration (FDA) greenlit companies in 2023 to distribute mifepristone by mail, citing its supposedly strong safety record. A recent bombshell report by my colleagues at the Foundation for the Restoration of America (FFROA) reveals that mifepristone abortion pills are 22 times more dangerous than the FDA admits, risking sepsis, infection, uterine rupture, hemorrhage, or even death. (RELATED: Abortion Drug Black Market Is Booming. Will Pam Bondi Intervene?) For women who escape the most serious adverse events, fully 85 percent will experience nausea, fever, chills, vomiting, headaches, or diarrhea. But a little discomfort or the odd death is a small price to pay for ridding the world of excess babies. Right? Warren Buffett is undoubtedly America’s most brilliant investor and deserves high marks on Wall Street. But he also deserves to rank among the most evil men America ever produced, using his God-given wealth to snuff out innocent lives on an unbelievable scale. (RELATED: Why Trump Should Act Against Abortion) That’s the real Buffett legacy — and it’s written in blood. Hayden Ludwig is the founder of Restoration News. READ MORE from Hayden Ludwig: Defunding USAID: Trump’s Biggest Gift to Pro-Lifers After Dobbs Decriminalizing Drugs Failed Abysmally in Portland The post Warren Buffett Walks Away From Wall Street — But Not From Butchering Unborn Babies appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The time is now for a permanent halt to the naggingly recurring and seriously unhealthy chatter about Republicans raising the top tax rate on millionaires. Like psoriasis, this irritating talk erupts, reassuringly subsides, and then reappears days later, resuming this cycle of needless pain. Over the last few weeks, anonymous White House sources, undisciplined GOP congressmen, and — shockingly — even President Donald J. Trump have flirted with a new, higher tax rate for $1 million-plus tax filers. Trump wrote on Truth Social that he “would graciously accept” a “‘TINY’ tax increase for the RICH … in order to help the lower and middle income workers.” Trump, who normally is clearer and easier to read than the Hollywood Sign, then transmitted this baffling signal: “Republicans should probably not do it, but I’m OK if they do!!!” Huh? Trump’s uncharacteristic ambiguity aside, one wonders: has Bernie Sanders invaded the White House? Has Maxine Waters suddenly become Chief Economic Advisor? As this Wall Street Journal chart clearly illustrates, “the RICH” already pay more than their fair share of taxes. According to a Tax Foundation analysis of 2022 IRS data, the top 1 percent of tax filers (who made at least $663,164) earned 23 percent of national income and paid 40 percent of all federal income taxes. If that is not enough, what is? God created Republicans to cut taxes, not raise them — and especially not when the GOP controls the House, the Senate, and the White House. (RELATED: Down With GOP Tax-Hike Talk!) Imagine if Democrats possessed these three levers of power. Would they even contemplate, for three seconds, ending federal funds for abortion? OF COURSE NOT! So, why are Republicans even muttering about something equally alien to the GOP’s very existence? A Republican tax hike would be entirely unnecessary, ill-conceived, and a bitter betrayal of the party’s base and all the independents and even Democrats who voted Republican last November. The notion of the GOP drop-kicking its No. 1 signature issue, its Unique Selling Proposition, indeed, its raison d’être into the Potomac — in exchange for NOTHING from Democrats — is so boneheaded that bones recoil in disgust. “Raising the top tax rate is a Biden–Harris idea,” says John Kartch, communications director for Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). “They lost. No need to adopt their tax hike.” The record confirms Kartch’s comment: “If we just took the tax rate back to what it was when Bush was president, the top rate paid 39.6 percent of federal taxes,” Joe Biden said. “That would raise $230 billion.”  Trump won overwhelmingly after pledging to make the 2017 Trump/GOP tax cuts permanent. That means leaving those rates where they are, perhaps cutting them, but at the very least not increasing them. Trump was consistent on the campaign trail. (RELATED: Keeping the Tax Cuts and Rebooting the Tax Code) “Instead of a Biden tax hike, I’ll give you a Trump middle-class, upper-class, lower-class, business-class, big tax cut,” Trump told some 100,000 voters at a New Jersey rally. “You’re gonna have the biggest tax cut.” (RELATED: Tax Hikes and Upset Voters Could Be Clincher for GOP in New Jersey’s Governor Race) Trump spoke similarly in Portsmouth, New Hampshire: “I will make the Trump tax cuts the largest ever, larger than Reagan’s. I’m going to make them permanent. We have to make them permanent.” ATR’s video supercut shows Trump promising to make his tax cuts permanent (i.e., not higher) on these and 14 other occasions. In his Truth Social post, Trump correctly predicted that if Republicans raised taxes, “the Radical Left Democrat Lunatics would go around screaming, ‘Read my lips,’ the fabled Quote by George Bush the Elder that is said to have cost him the Election.” Yes, this is exactly what the Democrats would do. So, why hand them that Louisville Slugger? Trump then added: “NO, Ross Perot cost him the Election!” In fact, long before he faced Perot in 1992’s general election, Daddy Bush’s demolition of his “Read my lips” pledge already had enraged Republicans and ignited a full-throated primary challenge from conservative pundit Pat Buchanan. Indeed, Trump himself has said as much: “The last thing we need is another Bush,” Trump told one interviewer. “I feel strongly about that. I was not happy with the last one, that I can tell you. ‘Read my lips.’ I wasn’t happy with that, either. You know, there was a big problem: ‘Read my lips.’” Trump said on the hustings: “Remember the ‘Read my lips, no more taxes’? — And I like the father. But do you remember that? ‘Read my lips, no more -’ That was the end of him, when he gave one of the largest tax increases in history.” Bush’s shattered tax promise did in 1992 exactly what a Trump tax hike would do today: devastate the Republican base, neutralize the GOP’s number-one weapon (tax reduction), and inspire independents and low-propensity voters to stay home, since there would no discernable difference between the parties on this bedrock issue. Vote Democrat, and they raise taxes. Vote Republican, and they raise taxes, too. So, stop voting. Not good! Thankfully, an invisible wall separates this holistically unhelpful GOP tax-hike talk from its implementation: ATR’s anti-tax pledge. “By signing the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, candidates and incumbents make a written commitment to oppose any and all tax increases,” ATR’s website explains. “Since the Pledge is a prerequisite for many voters, it is considered binding as long as an individual holds the office for which he or she signed the Pledge.” According to ATR’s TPP database, 44 sitting U.S. senators signed the TPP, including Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota). Meanwhile, 191 current House members signed, including Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana). Each of these 235 incumbent lawmakers vowed, in ink, to “oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses.” Even IF a tax hike were smart, which it is NOT, it could pass only if 90-plus percent of these Republicans trampled their anti-tax principles and breached this solemn pact in order to perpetrate a tax hike — the worst Republican sin, short of authorizing federal abortion funds. Since, in their stunning totality, these 235 anti-tax pledges obviate the potential adoption of the Benedict Arnold Act of 2025, no such tax increase could pass. So, why is any Republican spending any time talking about this? (asked the columnist who wrote a whole op-ed on this matter, but I digress). Every Republican should stop helping the GOP’s enemies, hurting their friends, and cremating priceless time, energy, and political capital talking about something for which the required votes do not exist. And, no, a handful of renegade Republicans will not join enough Democrats to pass a bipartisan tax increase. The Big, Beautiful Bill is Trump’s No. 1 legislative priority. So, if RINO moles in Trump’s White House, congressional Republican turncoats, the Lincoln Project, or anyone else thinks that sufficient Democrats would support Trump’s permanent-tax-cut bill, if it boosted the top tax rate, please stop chewing the magic mushrooms and switch to truffles. Image of GOP press conference, generated by Deroy Murdock using ChatGPT. The best way to silence this GOP tax-hike gibberish is for all 235 TPP signatories to hold the mother of all press conferences. They should muster beneath a giant banner that reads: “GOP Tax Increase? HELL NO!” A dozen or so should step up to the microphone and say: “Tax rates will rise over our dead bodies!” The media would speed this message worldwide. This news would make it severely obvious that any GOP tax-increase effort would be futile, a fool’s errand, completely impossible, and otherwise a mind-blowing waste of America’s time and focus. After that, Republicans should burn 100 percent of their calories to cut taxes, which is why their mothers and fathers put them here in the first place. Errant Republicans should stop trying to stuff a bomb into the Big, Beautiful Bill that will explode and incinerate it on the House and Senate floors. Instead, they should craft a Big, Beautiful Bill that cuts taxes, passes Congress, and then gets signed into law by President Trump. A unified Republican government is a terrible thing to waste. READ MORE from Deroy Murdock: The Dinosaur Media Lies Again Make Medicaid Great Again With Diego Garcia Military Base in the Balance, ‘The Chagos Farce’ Is No Laughing Matter Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor. The post No More GOP Tax-Hike Talk! Silence Is Golden. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Who, I ask, is afraid of Christian nationalism? From the looks of it, quite a few. Many of whom, it must be said, don’t fully understand what they’re reacting to. Christian nationalism has become the latest bogeyman of elite opinion. It’s routinely denounced from pulpits, condemned on cable panels, and dissected in classrooms by professors who treat it as a contagion. It has been painted as theocratic extremism, likened to white supremacy, and cast as a domestic analogue to radical Islam. But this hysteria says more about the cultural panic of the professional class than it does about Christian nationalism itself. Let’s begin with an obvious but crucial point: Christian nationalism is not a plot to install a pope in the Oval Office or rewrite the Constitution in Leviticus. It’s not calling for holy war or demanding a church-run state. At its core, it is a political and cultural movement that insists America’s values, laws, and institutions are not neutral. They emerged from a particular moral and religious tradition, and that tradition was overwhelmingly Christian. That’s not fascism. That’s fidelity to the facts of American history. Christian nationalists argue that public life should reflect this legacy, that faith is not just private, that the Founders were not secular technocrats or moral relativists, and that family, tradition, and religious conviction should shape the moral architecture of the nation, not just market values or bureaucratic trends. But try telling this to critics like Amanda Tyler, who would have you believe otherwise. The lawyer and executive director of BJC (Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty) has compared the movement to Roman imperialism, Confederate race theology, and anti-Semitic conspiracies. She warns of “Judeo-Christian” slogans in public schools as if they’re hate speech, and equates long-standing theological views on gender, marriage, or life with extremism. But Tyler isn’t defending pluralism. She’s redrawing the boundaries of acceptable belief. She’s arguing — not implicitly, but explicitly — that traditional Christianity becomes dangerous the moment it leaves the pew and enters the public square. (RELATED: Is the ACLU Crazy?) The irony couldn’t be richer. The progressive crusading against dogma is enforcing one of her own. Whether she knows it or not, Tyler is pushing a sort of soft theocracy in reverse — where only state-approved faith is welcome, and everything else is marked for containment. The irony deepens when one realizes that America’s Founders never envisioned a public square scrubbed clean of religion. They opposed state churches, yes. But many of them openly embraced the role of faith in public life. George Washington spoke of religion and morality as “indispensable supports” to political prosperity. Congress held Christian worship services in its chambers. Public schools taught the Bible alongside civics. Today’s Christian nationalists, whether one agrees with them or not, are trying to recover that historical continuity. They’re not burning crosses. They’re running for school boards. They’re not storming courthouses. They’re passing legislation. They’re not calling for violence. They’re voting. That’s not insurrection. That’s civic engagement, even if Tyler thinks otherwise. (RELATED: Is Religion Threatening American Democracy?) What terrifies Tyler and others most, I suggest, isn’t the supposed threat of violence. It’s the quiet, steady threat of real effectiveness. Christian conservatives have made tangible, measurable gains on abortion, school choice issues, parental rights, and curriculum reform. They’ve organized. They’ve built lasting networks. They’ve taken local politics seriously, understanding that power doesn’t just reside in Washington but in school boards, statehouses, and courtrooms. They look at the ideological excesses of gender politics, radical DEI orthodoxy, and the erosion of parental authority and say, enough. They want liberty, yes — but an ordered form of liberty, not the kind that worships impulse or drifts into a libertine free-for-all. And perhaps most importantly, they’ve dropped the purity tests that once made them easy to sideline. They’ve grown pragmatic. None of this makes the Christian nationalist movement immune to critique. Like any political force, it can become insular, reactionary, or overconfident in its mandate. But to smear it as proto-fascist is not only lazy; it’s disingenuous and dangerous. So, I ask the question again: Who’s afraid of Christian nationalism? Those who fear a public square shaped by conviction rather than compliance. Those who believe religious belief is virtuous when it’s progressive and violent when it’s not. And those who believe freedom of religion means freedom from religion. Christian nationalism isn’t going away. The more it’s demonized, the more it organizes. If that frightens the gatekeepers of modern discourse, maybe the problem isn’t with the faithful. Maybe it’s with a culture that tolerates everything, except belief that refuses to bend the knee. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: Controversial Atheist Sam Harris Confesses The Carbon Aristocracy: How the Rich Engineered the Climate Crisis — And Made You Pay for It Beyond DEI: How a Top US University Became a Marxist Factory The post Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

DÜSSELDORF, Germany — The general state debt spiral should be a constant feature in daily headlines. Its prominence should force policymakers into a radical fiscal turnaround. Yet while Germany is working under immense pressure to ban the AfD, forming alliances with left-wing extremists, and eroding the political culture, on the other side of the Atlantic, preparations are underway for the approaching storm. We live in record-breaking times. In the first quarter of this year, global debt surged to a record high of $324 trillion. This milestone becomes significant when compared to global GDP, which currently hovers around $110 trillion. Governments worldwide now owe 100 percent of GDP — an alarming reality, as no modern state has ever managed to free itself from the ensuing fiscal bind once this threshold is reached. Debt levels of 80-90 percent mark the “point of no return.” The Tipping Point of the Debt Spiral At this scale, debt reaches a critical mass. It inevitably forces an escalating debt service burden that drains scarce capital from the private sector to finance bloated social funds, ultimately leading to the same scenario we faced 15 years ago during the last severe sovereign debt crisis. Back then, Greece’s impending default sent shockwaves across credit markets. Central banks intervened with trillions, and governments stepped in to rescue debt-laden pension funds and banks with taxpayers’ money. Greece’s national debt stood at 143 percent at the onset of this crisis, and it is now about 155 percent — no debt consolidation has occurred. The southern European countries are, quite frankly, sinking into a swamp of debt. Italy, with 140 percent, Spain at 120 percent, and France’s budget deficit at 7 percent, leave much to be desired. On average, the EU’s debt-to-GDP ratio is now approaching 95 percent, closing in on the global benchmark of 100 percent. Bond Vigilantes Lurk in the Markets We must now prepare for the moment when a tipping point in bond markets triggers a series of sovereign defaults. This will occur when a growing crisis of confidence among investors, banks, and investment funds translates into a sell-off cascade in the bond markets. Let’s keep an eye on interest rates: if they rise with high volatility and market volume, general unrest is on the horizon. We have already witnessed the emergence of “bond vigilantes” this year — critical bond investors who pull the plug when debt levels rise. On the day it was announced that Germany would borrow about a trillion euros over the next four years and issue corresponding bonds, the interest rates on German bonds surged by more than 40 basis points. (RELATED: The Euro’s Paper Empire: Germany’s Big Bond Gamble) This was a quantum leap in typically sluggish bond markets, particularly for the highest-rated bonds, such as those issued by Germany (still considered a safe bet). And it served as an unmistakable warning shot from the bond vigilantes: “Up to here, and no further!” Under Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s fiscal policies, Germany’s national debt would rise from 63 percent to 95 percent. Germany would join the ranks of high-debt nations, without reason and without economic logic. Friedrich Merz, who stumbled into office as a “fiscal expert,” would be responsible for the largest debt binge Germany has experienced since World War II. It would also be his doing if Germany’s already shaky fiscal consensus, previously undermined by the Ampel coalition government, completely collapsed. The principle of only incurring debts that can be controlled by a strong economy would disappear entirely. The Economy in Crisis As for the state of this economy, which has been in a perpetual recession for three years, it is well known: €65 billion in direct investments fled abroad last year alone, seeking refuge from Germany’s burgeoning welfare state and its increasing regulatory burden and tax appetite. A significant portion of these investments likely found their way to the United States — still viewed by global capital as the last bastion of economic freedom and entrepreneurial resilience. (RELATED: How Germany and the EU Slept Through Trump’s Watershed Moment) These days, Germany is politically isolating itself. On the geopolitical front, no one cares that Berlin is raising the firewall against the AfD. The moral gymnastics of German politicians and media resonate mostly in Brussels, where the same agenda is followed and political opposition is harshly confronted, as seen in Romania and Hungary. (RELATED: Germany’s Suicide Pact with Green Ideology) More important matters are at hand: for example, the trade dispute with the U.S. Just two days ago, India made a first move largely unnoticed in the media, offering the Trump administration to eliminate all tariffs on industrial metals and automobiles. New Delhi is seeking the first-mover advantage and positioning itself as a strategic partner of the U.S. in Asia. This could lead to industrial growth and domestic political stability — something worth building upon! USA: Tax Cuts on the Horizon Meanwhile, in the U.S., a major round of tax cuts is on the horizon. And it’s not just about the successful campaign slogan, “No Tax On Tips” (in the U.S., campaign promises are taken seriously). The U.S. government is working on a broad reform program aimed at shrinking the state and providing new opportunities for the private sector. Regulations are being rolled back, and unnecessary budget items are being eliminated — proof that America, unlike Europe, still holds the political will to fight Leviathan before it devours the republic. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already proven a success: the octopus-like media machine is being systematically dismantled, and propaganda vehicles such as USAID are being axed. (RELATED: The Trump Administration Sets Its Sights on the Parallel Government) While Washington prepares for the approaching sovereign debt crisis and works on the revival of its own industry — and a debt crisis is inevitable given the dynamics of credit markets — Berlin is desperately searching for a lever to remove its only political competitor, the AfD, from the game. It seems that Germany has sunk into a monothematic pit of ignorance. Whether it’s the collapse of the automotive industry, the burgeoning migration crisis, or the growing hyper-state with an extraordinary state share of 49.5 percent — nothing can free Berlin from its discursive AfD prison. In Berlin’s ideological bubble, daily crises are ignored in favor of moral crusades — an ominous lesson for any free nation tempted to follow the same path. READ MORE from Thomas Kolbe: Trump Exposes Fractures in the Global Order The Race for Space: Europe Bets on Eutelsat to Challenge Musk’s Starlink Europe’s Energy Suicide: Brussels Trades Industry for Ideology The post German Decline: A Warning From Across the Atlantic appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Despite their recent breakthrough, U.S.–China trade negotiations should end with America’s strategic decoupling from China. This is not simply in the Trump administration’s interests, but America’s. Only by eliminating our nation’s strategic overreliance on our biggest adversary can the U.S. solidify its security against the conflict with China that is approaching. This past weekend, the Trump administration’s trade team reached a 90-day tariff pause with their Chinese counterparts. After the two nations’ back and forth of levies had taken tariffs to exorbitantly high rates (roughly 145 percent by the U.S. on Chinese goods), effectively threatening to end the two nations’ trade. However, as CBS News reported: “Beginning May 14, the U.S. will lower its maximum tariff rate on Chinese imports from 145 percent to 30 percent, including a 10 percent baseline levy plus a fentanyl-specific 20 percent levy. China will reduce its 125 percent tariff on American goods to 10 percent.” Market euphoria greeted this dramatic short-term reduction. Yet, such a simple, permanent outcome would be the worst long-term solution for America. China’s CCP has been a repeat offender in virtually every sphere of international relations for decades. What’s more, under Xi Jinping, China is getting worse and clearly has no intention of ceasing to be so. Therefore, America’s best interests — for security, foreign relations with our allies, and even our own economic ones — lie on a path to strategically decouple from China as soon as possible. China’s internal actions alone argue for such a decoupling. Both Democrat and Republican administrations have routinely labeled the CCP’s actions against its Uyghur minority “genocide.” That alone should be enough to cause a severance, just as apartheid once did for South Africa. Yet, the CCP’s oppressive actions against its own people extend beyond this. Internal surveillance of its citizens is routine and growing. The one-child policy was enforced on everyone and lasted for decades. Any dissent — internal or external — is immediately squashed. There is religious persecution. And its deal with Hong Kong was quickly abrogated, and political freedoms there were erased. (RELATED: China Ratchets Up Espionage War Against Taiwan) The CCP is growing increasingly belligerent toward its neighbors. Of course, Taiwan is squarely in the CCP’s crosshairs and is daily made to feel the threat of imminent invasion. China’s belligerence extends throughout the Pacific region — to the Philippines, Japan, Australia, and more. It also extends to its contiguous neighbors as well, with India being a prime example. (RELATED: China’s Threat to Taiwan: Intentions and Capabilities) China’s zealous military buildup, far beyond anything it needs for legitimate defense purposes, only adds to its threat. At the same time, it is a facilitator of the world’s worst malefactors, such as Iran’s terrorist regime, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. In its trade relations, China has long been a notorious participant.Its IP theft, both inside and outside its borders, has long been known, deplored, and called out — only to be ignored by the CCP. To unfairly enhance its competitiveness, the CCP has long manipulated China’s currency. It also subsidizes its own state-owned enterprises and then dumps its products (steel regularly) abroad. (RELATED: China’s ‘Low Human Rights’ Advantage) The CCP’s aggressive military and economic ends come together in its massive Belt-and-Road initiative where it seeks to use its economic power to make investments abroad and secure strategic footholds globally. It also takes the more openly aggressive form of espionage, cyber hacking, and electronic surveillance. These means are pursued to boost itself, but also to undermine its prospective adversaries. Such malevolent attacks are not simply limited to spying. China’s role in America’s fentanyl crisis has long been known. And its cavalier dismissal of this crisis speaks volumes about how the CCP views America and its by-all-possible-means approach to undermining our nation through addiction. And of course, there is the CCP’s still unexplained role in the COVID pandemic. Even by the most charitable description, China facilitated the global spread of the virus by refusing to acknowledge the severity of the virus, alert world health authorities of its existence, and then not cooperating in combating its spread. At worst, and increasingly accepted, the CCP was responsible for the dangerous gain-of-function research that leaked from the WIV lab in Wuhan. From no other country would any one of these actions be so tolerated. Yet, the CCP has played its hand of being too-big-to-sanction to the hilt. While the danger of too-big-to-fail is universally recognized in finance, it has been allowed, in the case of the CCP, to continue on the far more important world stage. The takeaway from this should be for the U.S., its companies, and the West as a whole, is that China is at best an unreliable partner for trade. Based on the CCP’s actions, there will come a time when it will be more than willing to exert any economic advantage it possesses to achieve its hegemonic goals. It therefore is incumbent on the U.S. to strategically decouple from China: items of strategic importance (rare earth mineral, electric batteries, pharmaceuticals, etc.) should face tariffs so high that it forces U.S. businesses to either produce the items at home, or at least to source them from secure, non-adversarial nations. If America insists on maintaining its trade with China for cheap socks, so be it. However, for items of critical importance — as drugs and medical equipment were during COVID — it is time that our dependence was removed from our primary adversary’s control. And we should leave a tariff regime in place to ensure that it is. # # # J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left, from RealClear Publishing and has over three decades’ experience working in Congress, the Department of the Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, and representing a Fortune 20 company READ MORE from J.T. Young: The Left, Radical Left, and Democrats: Three Peas, One Pod The Trump Government Cuts Overturn Democrats’ Entitlement Mentality Trump’s First Quarter Resiliency The post Time to Strategically Decouple From China appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

“We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.,” a Wednesday New York Times headline read. Sure, plenty of well-known Democrats (mostly from Hollywood and the media) vowed to leave the U.S. in the event of a second Trump presidency: Sharon Stone, Cher, Barbra Streisand, Raven-Symoné, Whoopi Goldberg, Elon Musk’s gender-confused son Xavier Wilson, and even Cardi B rank among those who’ve at least hinted at that kind of radical action. But few of them have actually done anything about it. But even the New York Times knows that nobody takes the vague premonitions of actors, entertainment media figures, and models seriously. To have three Yale professors who actually study the tragic events of the past century leave the U.S. because they think their country is going in the direction of Nazi Germany — well, that’s sensational. (READ MORE: The Plight of the Afrikaners Is a Clarifying Moment for Western Civilization) The New York Times piece was a video opinion by history professors Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore who are married, and philosophy professor Jason Stanley, in which the threesome explained that they’d relocated to the University of Toronto, and they thought the U.S. was turning into a fascist state with President Donald Trump as its burgeoning supreme leader. They cited ICE’s detention of Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk, whose student visa had been revoked alongside thousands of other international students, after the federal government accused her of engaging “in activities in support of Hamas.” They explained that “American exceptionalism is basically a way to get people to fall into line.” After all, if America is an exceptional place where fascism can’t happen, then “you don’t have to do anything. Whatever is happening, it must be freedom.” For Stanley, Columbia University’s decision to give in to the Trump administration’s demands to counteract antisemitism on its campus was the last straw. “I just became very worried because I didn’t see a strong enough reaction in other universities to side with Columbia. I see Yale trying not to be a target … that’s a losing strategy.” For Snyder, moving wasn’t as much about getting away from Trump (although he’s repeatedly said he sympathizes with that position), but about supporting his wife, Shore, who does seem to have left because of Trump. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink…. And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink,” Shore said in the NYT opinion. Trump, these professors asserted (at least by implication), is on the fast track to becoming an American authoritarian. “The lesson of 1933,” Shore said, “is that you get out sooner rather than later.” It’s tempting to roll our eyes, mutter “good riddance” under our breath, and move along from this kind of story. If a particular segment of this country with whom we disagree strongly has decided to end all our quibbles with them by making themselves absent, who are we to stop them? But there is a broader problem underlying their likening Trump’s America to fascism, and it’s worth uncovering. (READ MORE: Another Ivy League University Living in Woke Fairyland) At the heart of the issue is a redefinition of the word “fascism” in such a way as to make it sound like it means the same thing as “patriotism.” These Yale professors — and a good many people who think like them — find the American assertion that this country, with its quasi-sacred founding and its insistence on the rights of man given him by God, is an exceptional one a troubling concept. They seem to equate “Make America Great Again” with Adolf Hitler’s “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.” But to do so ignores the very close association between fascism and racism, specifically antisemitism. Hitler, as you will remember, was virulently opposed to any race other than his Aryan one. He imagined a world in which blue-eyed, blond-haired giants ruled the earth, and Jews, Roma, and his detractors no longer existed. It’s this connection with racism that Snyder, at least, hasn’t quite fit into the picture. In a recent piece with the Free Press, Peter Savodnik noted that Snyder’s depiction of Yale as a cloister of free speech and acceptance simply defies the reality that has unfolded at Yale after October 7, where pro-Hamas demonstrators antagonized Jewish students and even poked one woman in the face with a Palestinian flag. As a progressive, Snyder, according to one of his colleagues at Yale, may find it hard or even impossible to “imagine that those on the left could hate Jews.” (READ MORE by Aubrey Harris: Australia and Canada Reject Trumpism by Embracing Trumpism) To the historian, Trump’s decision to investigate antisemitism on campus is merely an excuse to bully universities. “Nobody ever goes after universities in order to help Jews,” he told Savodnik. The result is that fascism has become a cheapened term that, at least in popular progressive parlance, has become confused with patriotism. The love of one’s country is a duty, Cicero affirms. That’s not to say that the country should become a god in the popular imagination, but that we should be proud of it, work for its benefit, and wish it well. READ MORE from Aubrey Harris: Trump Is the Reason Democrats Aren’t Talking About Abortion Australia and Canada Reject Trumpism by Embracing Trumpism Kids Don’t Need to Be ‘Dancing With Robots’ in School The post The Real Reason Yale Professors Are Leaving Trump’s America appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Congress Should Restore Full Interest Deductibility in the Tax Code