A significant moment. The post The Deep Purple album that had Bruce Dickinson “hooked” on metal first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

A couple weeks ago, a media narrative — which I’ll admit I agreed with at the time — making the rounds claimed that because of the lawfare-generated indictments and court cases that Donald Trump is having to wade through, it’s crucial that he name a vice-presidential nominee soon so that he’ll have a surrogate to take to the road as spring turns to summer. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: Did Biden Betray Israel, Or Did Biden’s Brain Betray Him? After all, the ridiculous New York “hush-money” trial that local Soros District Attorney Alvin Bragg and left-wing activist Judge Juan Merchan are orchestrating, complete with practically daily nuggets of prosecutorial malfeasance and judicial error, will likely go on for at least another six weeks. And Merchan seems determined to keep Trump off the campaign trail. Normally, you’d see a situation like that, and you’d say it puts Trump at a real disadvantage. If he can’t make regular campaign appearances because he’s tied to New York, a state he’s unlikely to make competitive, then how is he going to drum up the kind of support without which a presidential campaign can’t survive? But, of course, nothing is normal anymore. And the VP narrative that seemed eminently rational two weeks ago right now doesn’t hold as much water as you’d think. After all, CNN’s Harry Enten is in a panic over a poll that shows Trump has taken commanding leads in Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia, putting him on the cusp of locking up 270 electoral votes if things continue to go as they’re going: "AN ABSOLUTE DISASTER": President Trump post MASSIVE leads in battleground states over Crooked Joe Biden in New York Times poll. NEVADA: Trump +13GEORGIA: Trump +9ARIZONA: Trump +6PENNSYLVANIA: Trump +3WISCONSIN: Trump +1 pic.twitter.com/f92WSa7i4l — Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) May 13, 2024 RedState’s Nick Arama interprets Enten’s analysis accurately, explaining that these poll numbers demonstrate why Team Biden is so busy with otherwise inexplicable foreign-policy moves: Enten then looks at the Electoral College numbers and declares it “Advantage: Donald Trump.” And you can see why Biden is in so much trouble. If you accord Trump the Sun Belt states, Enten puts Trump at 268 to Biden at 225. That would mean if Trump wins any of the other three states where it’s too close to call, he would reach 270. That’s why Biden has been freaking out over Michigan and his position on Israel — because that could be the race right there. If I’m reading Enten’s numbers right and looking at what Biden needs to have, he would also need to pull down all of those in question: Wisconsin 10, Michigan 15, and Pennsylvania 19, plus Nebraska’s Second Congressional district to get to 270. So he would have to pull off the hat trick, while Trump would only need one. With those trends, not to mention this: You start to realize that traditional political analysis doesn’t work anymore. The purveyors of that analysis are now comically out of touch with the realities of 2024. You’ve probably seen this hilarious, not-safe-for-work meltdown by James Carville over the inability to sell Joe Biden to the American people despite tens of millions of dollars’ worth of messaging about, for example, how fabulous the economy is: James Carville having a nervous breakdown pic.twitter.com/BqmKO45EeL — Monica Crowley (@MonicaCrowley) May 10, 2024 But back to the underlying question: Does it matter who Trump’s vice-presidential nominee is? Of course it does. Actually, it’s colossally important. It’s important because while Trump is nowhere near as decrepit as is the mentally invalid and physically incontinent Joe Biden, he’s still in his mid-70s, and that’s old for a politician. It’s also important because the Left wants him dead, and there is a very real risk one of its crazies will make him that way. Oh, you think I’m out of line with that statement? Fine. Explain this: JEN PSAKI: “Maybe Donald Trump will go away. Maybe he'll go to jail. Maybe he will die. Not to be too morbid. But maybe. He's not a young man.” pic.twitter.com/DR3yMp2Y5b — ALX (@alx) May 7, 2024 Jen Psaki isn’t just a bad MSNBC host with an underwhelming audience — she’s literally a mouthpiece for the Democrat Party. She was the official mouthpiece for Joe Biden before the current tag-team combination of laughable spokeslesbian Karine Jean-Pierre and Baghdad Bob–style prevaricator John Kirby. So when she throws out a “maybe Trump might die” drive-by wish cast, it isn’t nothing. What also isn’t nothing is that the Biden Secret Service, having already denied coverage to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is actively seeking to drain Biden voters with his radical leftist position on abortion, is now allowing protesters to force Republican convention attendees to walk a gauntlet into the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee despite multiple demands by the RNC for at least the same security perimeter that the Democrats’ convention is getting. And Team Biden is now floating the idea of a virtual convention to protect its delegates from protesters sure to descend on Chicago for its convention. Trump needs a VP nominee because there is a real not-zero possibility of a James Hodgkinson lunatic’s being ginned up enough by Team Biden’s rhetoric about how Trump’s a “dictator” and how his winning would make 2024 the “last election” and what a threat he is to “our democracy” to act on that incitement. What’s becoming clear is that Trump doesn’t need is a VP nominee who would add votes to his ticket. The votes are there. Or, better put, the votes for Team Biden are increasingly not there. Biden is failing to hold the Democrats’ core coalition together as black, Hispanic, and Asian voters fall off and as even groups like single women begin to bleed. And if Trump can draw 100,000 rallygoers in New Jersey, a number that proves it isn’t impossible he could expand the map and put that state in play (and clearly Team Biden is worried about Minnesota, which it absolutely ought to have been long ago given the mess Democrats like Ilhan Omar, Keith Ellison, and Tim Walz have made of that state) — and let’s not count out New Mexico, either, given how atrocious Biden’s approval numbers are in that state — then it’s very clear that these lawfare cases aren’t having the effect on Biden’s electability that Democrats hoped for and Trump’s supporters feared. So long as the GOP isn’t slaughtered when it comes to getting out the vote — something the Trump campaign and the Republican Party are honor-bound to get right this fall after several cycles of abysmal performance in that regard — he’s going to win. So his vice-presidential nominee doesn’t have to win it for him. What’s important is that Trump’s VP is someone to whom he can entrust the movement propelling his candidacy. This is something the Wall Street Journal got completely wrong in an editorial on Sunday. In a piece that extolled the virtues of Mike Pence as a “steady hand” — yes, it actually said that — the WSJ’s editors claimed that Nikki Haley was Trump’s best possible vice-presidential pick. It also named a pair of not-altogether-horrible possibilities, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, as alternatives. The idea is that Trump should moderate himself and his agenda by selecting a George H.W. Bush as Ronald Reagan did. No, no, and absolutely not. I would argue that Reynolds, who was a key Ron DeSantis surrogate, would actually make a very good VP pick. As Iowa’s governor, she has implemented a great deal of the MAGA agenda at the state level, has very much changed the Republican Party in Iowa into more of an offensive force and has done in Iowa something of what DeSantis has done in Florida in terms of crushing the Democrats’ ability to successfully compete statewide. Iowa has thus gone from purple to fairly red, based on Reynolds successfully governing as an unapologetic conservative, and there is currency in that. She would govern as an effective implementer of Trump’s agenda. Would Youngkin? In some respects, possibly. In others, maybe not so much. As for Haley, the idea that she would bring her voters over to Trump isn’t supported by much evidence. And we know that Nikki Haley wouldn’t govern according to the MAGA (or revivalist, if I can put a plug in for my own term) philosophy. We know that because she wasted an awful lot of time and Democrat donor money telling us that during her failed primary campaign. Are there others worth examining? Certainly. Vivek Ramaswamy might be more Trumpian than even Trump is, though there are some who question his sincerity. DeSantis would be a viable choice but for the complicated nature of a president and VP nominee both coming from the same state and what implication that has in the case of a close Electoral College vote. That’s the same problem Marco Rubio would bring to the table, though Rubio, especially given his recently discovered populist and anti-globalist streak, would be an otherwise credible choice. What’s important is that Trump honor the movement that puts 100,000 in a rally for him in New Jersey. He’s the face of that movement, but it’s what he represents, which is more important. Americans want the Swamp drained. We want our sovereignty back from a federal government and a globalist/socialist elite that actively despises us. We want an end to DEI and ESG madness. We want something done about widespread corruption in the administrative state and judicial system. We want a market economy back, rather than the corporate oligopoly we’re given. And we want escape valves from woke hegemony in education and culture. Those things are attainable, but it takes a level of courage and pluck that your average Republican — the “steady hand” Mike Pence–type that the corporate media organists at the WSJ likes so much — can’t summon up. So, no. Let’s not squander the moment by finding a modern-day George H.W. Bush who’ll plunge the GOP back into the stupid-party doldrums after Trump is gone. He needs a vice president who the Left is even more afraid of than it is of Trump. And Nikki Haley is not it. It’s ridiculous even to suggest her for that job. The post Should Trump Follow the <i>WSJ</i>’s Vice-Presidential Advice? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Last Sunday, Jen Psaki — having retired from her position as a Biden mouthpiece in the White House in favor of a more glamorous, better-paid position as a Biden mouthpiece on MSNBC — took to the airwaves to denounce the most recent dangerous right-wing conspiracy theory: noncitizens voting in U.S. elections. Blasting the SAVE Act — a new GOP bill that would “requir[e] proof of citizenship for voter registration” — as “the latest chapter in the MAGA effort to spread doubt about the integrity of our elections,” Psaki scoffed: [Republicans] were introducing a bill at that press conference that criminalizes something that is already very illegal: noncitizens voting in federal elections. But more notable than some completely unnecessary legislation — and the press conference accompanying it — is the narrative they’re trying to push.… The Speaker of the House and his fellow Republicans are falsely claiming that millions of noncitizens illegally vote. MSNBC’s @jrpsaki claims illegal immigrants voting in elections is a right-wing “conspiracy theory” that Republicans will weaponize if Trump loses in Nov: “That’s crazy! That theory is not only false and racist and dangerous…” pic.twitter.com/dd20qFg8Np — The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) May 12, 2024 It is true that, under existing law, it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal U.S. elections — for now. But to say something is “illegal” in principle is not the same as saying it is prohibited in practice. (Just ask the millions of ostensibly “illegal immigrants” flooding across the southern border how much they were inhibited by the technical meaning of unenforced U.S. immigration laws.) As Sen. Mike Lee, one of the cosponsors of the SAVE Act, wrote in the Federalist on Monday: Those making this argument [that noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal] ignore a glaring problem: the government officials who register voters and conduct federal elections aren’t allowed to require proof of citizenship. It’s therefore shockingly easy for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, leaving our elections dangerously vulnerable to foreign interference. Anyone — even an illegal alien or other noncitizen — can register to vote in federal elections, just by checking a box and signing a form. This is all on the honor system. No proof of citizenship is required. If noncitizens voting in federal U.S. elections is as baseless a claim as Democrats say, then surely there’s no harm in passing the SAVE Act — just to be extra sure. But don’t hold out hope for overwhelming bipartisan support. Some of the Left’s opposition to the SAVE Act, to be fair, is simply the result of rank partisanship: It’s a Republican bill and thus the subject of immediate suspicion — another right-wing attempt to demonize immigrants, or undermine trust in our elections, and so on. But it’s also true, in spite of Psaki’s smirking dismissal, that there is underway a concerted effort across the country to weaken citizenship requirements and open up our elections to noncitizen voters. In some of the largest cities in the country, left-wing activists have pushed for — and, in many cases, successfully secured — noncitizen voting rights in local and municipal elections: Oakland, California; San Francisco, California; the District of Columbia; Burlington, Vermont; New York City, New York; and numerous others have all approved such measures over the course of the past few years. (Although New York’s law was overturned in court after being passed.) The ranks of newly enfranchised non-American voters are not insubstantial. As a 2023 analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies noted, “over 42,000 non-citizens, including perhaps 20,000 illegal immigrants,” can now vote in elections in D.C. alone. In San Francisco, local leaders recently went so far as to appoint a noncitizen to sit on the city’s election oversight board. If there is a limiting principle here, Democrats have yet to articulate it. If it is good and just to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, why would it be acceptable to prevent them from voting in federal ones? The idea that this will somehow stop at the municipal level defies the logic of the initiative itself. Once we’ve accepted, as a premise, that anyone who happens to reside in America should be able to vote in American elections, the inevitable conclusion is that they should be able to vote in all elections. Anything else is incoherent. The post The Left’s Noncitizen Voting Gambit appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Student radicals turning out in droves to protest for Palestine seem to expect that their organized mass demonstrations will foment revolutionary change. They are inspired by the example of the 1960s, and the civil rights marchers and Vietnam War protesters are their muses. These were the heroes who put their bodies on the line facing fire hoses and club-wielding cops to bend the arc of history toward good. At least that’s the myth they’ve been taught, sometimes by aged protesters themselves, or by student activists who morphed into professors and never left campus for the real world. READ MORE from James S. Robbins: The Clock Is Ticking on TikTok The ’60s myth was written by the generation that took part in these demonstrations, so it’s no wonder that they exaggerated their impact. However, then as now, protesters were never particularly popular, and there is little evidence that the 1960s demonstrations had the impact that liberal historians later claimed they had. Protesters regard the civil rights movement as the gold standard of civic activism, but opinion at the time was mixed. Polling after the 1963 March on Washington showed 60 percent disapproved of the event, many saying it would “cause violence and would not accomplish anything.” A 1964 poll showed Martin Luther King toward the bottom of the list of most respected Americans, while now-reviled FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was at the top by a wide margin. In fact, MLK became less popular over time, until his tragic assassination in 1968. History has been kind to King’s efforts largely because the civil rights movement was at its core aspirational, a call to national self-betterment that could appeal to all citizens. The movement sought to unite people behind a righteous American cause. The Selma marchers carried the American flag and sang the “Star Spangled Banner.” This is a far cry from today’s angry protesters who vandalize George Washington’s statue, burn the flag, and chant, “Death to America.” Then there is the widespread belief that massive student protests helped end the Vietnam War. This idea is an unquestioned part of the narrative of those times. But there is no empirical evidence to suggest this is true, and much to show it was false. A central aspect of the myth is that young people were almost universally opposed to the war effort. Not so. A May 1967 Gallup poll showed pro-war Hawks outnumbered Doves on college campuses by 49 percent to 35 percent, and among draft-aged young men, the Hawks had a 26-point edge. A July 1967 poll — conducted during the much-hyped Summer of Love — showed that 67 percent of young people wanted the military to finish the job in Vietnam, compared to 28 percent who wanted to “get out soonest.” In fact, young people were more hawkish than the national average. Antiwar radicals skillfully dominated media coverage with their outlandish stunts — would Yippies really levitate the Pentagon? But such antiwar antics did nothing actually to alter Vietnam War policy. For example, Nov. 15, 1969, saw the Washington, D.C., “Moratorium March,” part of a series of what were the largest antiwar demonstrations in history to that time. However, the White House was unmoved. “As far as this kind of activity is concerned, we expect it,” President Richard Nixon said of the student uprisings. “However, under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it.” Nixon had no need to take notice of the marchers, since a Gallup poll showed 77 percent support for his Vietnam War policies.  The public, then as now, has little tolerance for radical excesses and supported the authorities when they restored order. A new Morning Consult poll shows 76 percent support for colleges “ask[ing] the police to protect campuses from violence.” Back in 1968, after Chicago police used brutal methods to deal with demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention, a Gallup survey showed that 56 percent approved of the crackdown. Current Democratic leaders may well be expecting a replay of 1968-style protests at this year’s Chicago democratic convention, but without a Mayor Richard J. Daley keeping order. Even after the fatal Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970, polling showed that 58 percent of Americans held the student demonstrators chiefly responsible for the tragedy, while only 11 percent blamed the Ohio national guardsmen who pulled the triggers. “Four dead in Ohio” remains an enduring refrain for the antiwar crowd, but Neil Young was no barometer of public opinion. Today the country is facing a new series of well-organized, coordinated campus uprisings in support of — at least judging by the endless chanting — freeing Palestine, having an intifada, supporting Hamas, destroying Israel, and backing a broad menu of progressive social causes. None of these issues enjoy broad public support, and campus tantrums won’t change that. There is no compelling reason for the public to be swayed by self-important young people throwing a fit. When you see African American law enforcement officers joyfully raising an American flag after having contemptuously disposed of a Palestinian banner erected by privileged white radicals, you know the activists have lost the narrative. So what good are the protests? They won’t lead to a ceasefire in Gaza or a Palestinian state or make Israel vanish. But the radicals can claim some victories. At Northwestern, Brown, and Rutgers, weak-willed administrators caved to student demands, virtually ensuring further protests in the future. And the protests themselves — with cult-like chanting, programmed rituals, masks, costumes, and endless self-righteousness — give impressionable students a sense of belonging. It provides meaning to their lives, grafting them to a cause greater than themselves. And the terrorist training materials and indoctrination sessions at the encampments will keep this dynamic rolling. So the main targets of the protests are the protesters themselves. Campus rallies are a form of mobilization, indoctrination, and radicalization. The experience can induce long-lasting psychological effects, and once these impressionable kids are hooked on extremism, it will be hard to get them back. The organizers, funders, and outside agitators involved with this movement understand this dynamic very well. It is the reason they are doing it. We are watching them in real-time mint the next generation of true believers to keep the myth and the revolution alive. James S. Robbins is Dean of Academics at the Institute of World Politics in Washington DC and author of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive. The post The Myth of Student Protest appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Writing in this space five months ago, I argued that an anti-woke counterrevolution was starting on American campuses. While that is certainly even more true today, I am seeing increased signs of a more widespread revolt against relentless attacks on traditional American values such as respect for free speech and private property, as well as a reverence of God, hard work and assessing people on the basis of meritorious accomplishment. Many revolutions are ultimately followed by a counterrevolution: the Russian Revolution was ultimately reversed, albeit after seven decades; the Protestant Reformation sparked a Counter Reformation; France went through several dramatic regime changes in the two centuries after its Revolution of 1789, including five forms of democratic republics. Similarly, in America a progressive movement contemptuous of traditional American values has captured college campuses, spreading to other sectors of life including churches and private business, but now the collegiate counterrevolution is beginning to take hold. As progressive-provoked excesses multiply on campuses and well beyond, many ordinary citizens are saying “enough is enough.” (READ MORE from Richard K. Vedder: The Age of the Lazy American) Let’s start with the oldest continuous Western institution, the Roman Catholic Church. News stories are appearing how young Catholics are yearning for a return to traditions prevailing before the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, wanting fewer guitars at masses and more traditional rituals, including the use of Latin. In the leftist college town in which I live, Athens, Ohio, even the priests are amazed at the growth in young person mass attendance and their push for reviving old traditions dating back centuries. New Protestant denominations that emphasize God and traditional values like the Ten Commandments, and that downplay political activism, are booming, with local students telling me services are very well attended. Old-line large Protestant denominations like the Methodists that have increasingly tolerated values inconsistent with traditional Christian practices are suffering membership losses and undergoing internal civil war, especially over whether to sanction same sex marriages. I am told that attendance at meetings of college Republicans vastly outnumber that of the college Democrats in my university where leftish control of both the town and gown levers of power has been strong. Nationally, wealthy donors have made it clear that they are withdrawing sizable support from woke-infested universities like Harvard, Penn, and Columbia.  A group of federal judges have served Columbia University on notice that they will not be hiring as law clerks Columbia graduates. As Judge Matthew Solomson put it in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The reputational costs from our boycott ought to provoke some soul-searching at the school.” The smarter college campuses are starting to back down from some of the more outrageous manifestations of woke supremacy. MIT said it was no longer requiring faculty applicants to submit diversity statements where applicants are expected to show their allegiance to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) ideologies such as emphasizing race in making important human judgments. The sharp decline in early admission applications at woke-infested Harvard probably was a sobering wake-up call to some elite schools.  Similarly, a number of Ivy League institutions are reinstating the SAT test requirement for applicants, a move decried by many on the left because of its perceived likely negative effect on some racial groups, most notably blacks. Turning to American business, companies trying to demonstrate fealty to woke ideals have paid a high price. Bud Light sales went into a tailspin after it partnered with a transgender influencer to demonstrate its support of non-traditional values. As of this writing, the stock of the Walt Disney Company has fallen more than 20 percent over the past five years, at a period in which the Dow-Jones Industrial Average rose over 50 percent. Why? At least part of the reason relates to Disney’s vocal opposition to the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, leading to a big fight with popular Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. As a consequence, Disney has lost power over policy relating to some governmental services at its important Florida resort and had to fend off a costly battle for control of the company.  While the ultra-woke ice cream maker Ben and Jerry’s is a very small part of giant Unilever’s business, a Newsweek headline in July 2023 read “Ben & Jerry’s Owner Stock Falls After Boycott Calls,” referring to its anti-Israeli pronouncements. (READ MORE: The Retreat From Academic Excellence: It’s Not Just the Ivy Leagues) I am not predicting a dramatic move to the right in this year’s election. This is a gradual, long-run move back to normalcy, where traditional values largely prevail over radical interference by forces on either the left or right. Richard Vedder is Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Ohio University and Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute. His next book on higher education is due out early next year. The post The Anti-Woke Counterrevolution Is Spreading appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance By Michael Sobolik (Naval Institute Press, 161 pages, $22) Sometimes small books can have big impacts — one thinks of Machiavelli’s The Prince, Halford Mackinder’s Democratic Ideals and Reality, Norman Podhoretz’s The Present Danger, and, more recently, Robert Kaplan’s The Tragic Mind. Michael Sobolik’s Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance is a mere 161 pages of text, but if policymakers in Washington read it and broadly follow its suggestions, the United States may be in a better position to ultimately prevail in our current Cold War with China.  READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: The US Has Never Pivoted to the Indo-Pacific Sobolik is a senior fellow in Indo-Pacific Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council who previously served on the staff of Sen. Ted Cruz. China’s “great game” that the United States needs to counter, he writes, is its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which he rightly describes as a geopolitical offensive to extend China’s influence throughout Eurasia and beyond. Sobolik invokes Mackinder in warning that President Xi Jinping’s goal is to supplant the U.S. as “the dominant force across the entirety of Eurasia” and to extend its political influence to Africa to achieve predominance on what Mackinder called the “World-Island” (Eurasia-Africa). The BRI, he writes, is designed to “unite[] Eurasia on China’s terms.”  Sobolik explains that Xi’s BRI began with both a land and maritime component (the Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road) but has since expanded to include a Digital Silk Road, Polar Silk Road, and Health Silk Road. Sobolik also places the BRI in the context of China’s imperial past — its history of geopolitical expansion long before it was governed by the Communist Party. China, he writes, has its own unique “strategic culture” that dates back to at least 221 B.C., when the Qin unified China under one emperor under the “Mandate of Heaven.” Under the successor Han dynasty, Chinese rulers embraced the ideology of “imperial Confucianism,” which included a “quest for hegemony.” “While dynasties rose and fell,” Sobolik writes, “China continued to expand its borders and colonize its neighbors in pursuit of heaven’s mandate.” The CCP, he explains, has continued that strategic culture. Sobolik’s analysis of the sources of Chinese strategic culture is reminiscent of George Kennan’s famous “X” article, which in 1947 traced the sources of Soviet conduct to Russia’s imperial past. Kennan wrote that Soviet foreign policy derived from a combination of Russian strategic culture and communist ideology. The same is true of China. The BRI is today’s version of China as the “Middle Kingdom,” the center of the world with other nations as part of a “tribute system.” China seeks a “sinocentric world,” which can only come about with America’s decline. The BRI is the geopolitical offensive designed to usher in that sinocentric world order. Sobolik views China’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea, western Pacific Ocean, and Indian Ocean as a direct challenge to American sea power. China’s extension of the BRI to Africa, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere indicates that China’s “manifest destiny” is global in nature. Sobolik notes that China claims a Monroe Doctrine–like exclusivity in the western Pacific while simultaneously seeking to undermine the U.S. Monroe Doctrine in Latin America. American policymakers who view the BRI as simply an infrastructure and economic program instead of an “imperial project” misread China’s goals and will likely fail to formulate and implement policies designed to counter it. For far too long, Sobolik writes, the United States engaged China as a result of a “triumphalist hangover” after winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Western political leaders thought China was abandoning communism and would integrate into the “rules-based international order.” Western businessmen invested heavily in China, helping to fuel its economic and military rise. Some of that hangover endures as the Biden administration attempts both to engage and compete with China. There is no policymaker in the current administration who is sympathetic to Sobolik’s proposed Reaganite approach of implementing a “whole of government” approach to countering China’s imperial designs. Sobolik suggests that we need to end our fixation with the Middle East and Ukraine — they are of secondary importance compared to China. That means not ending assistance to Israel or Ukraine but instead prioritizing our struggle with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He acknowledges the need to win the military balance vis-à-vis China, but by itself that will not bring victory without war. We need to attack the BRI at its source by sanctioning Chinese companies and conducting effective public diplomacy against the CCP and its human rights abuses. We should pour more resources into “information warfare” by working to pierce China’s internet firewall and censorship regime. We should exploit the vulnerabilities of the BRI and undermine CCP rule in China. Like Reagan, we need a president and a national security team who will seek victory without war — “we win, they lose.”    The post Defeating China’s ‘Great Game’ in Cold War II appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

If ever there were a snapshot of serious political message being sent, it would be that coming from the estimated 100,000 Americans who gathered this past Saturday in Wildwood, New Jersey, to hear and cheer on former President Donald Trump. Trump’s detractors called the attendees a cult, which is not only designed to insult but also wrong. What was in evidence in vivid fashion in Wildwood — in decidedly blue-state New Jersey — can only be described as a movement. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: The Pennsylvania Chase Is On: An Interview With Cliff Maloney American history has seen movements before. Most prominently there was the “civil rights movement” of the 1960s. It existed because millions of Americans came to see that black Americans were being deliberately discriminated against. They were not allowed to vote, to prosper economically, or to share in what was known as “the American Dream.” The civil rights movement demanded change — and, in time, it got it. So, too, were the anti-Vietnam War protests a movement, one that wound up having a serious impact on the 1968 election and ending the presidency of the once popular Democrat President Lyndon Johnson. The base of the Trump movement is, unsurprisingly, motivated in part by economics. For example, contrary to the blatant lie Joe Biden likes to tell, inflation was not 9 percent when he took over from Trump. It was 1.4 percent. As FactCheck.org notes, under Biden: Inflation surged to its highest level in over 40 years. Despite recent moderation, consumer prices are up nearly 19% overall. Gasoline is up 54%. Yet even those dismal economic numbers are not enough to inspire the passion seen on vivid display in Wildwood. There is something else at work — a big something else. It is, safe to say, cultural. It’s symbolized by a decided contempt for average Americans and the values they hold dear. This would include patriotism. Liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. writes: In affluent neighborhoods around Washington, New York and Los Angeles — and, for that matter, Paris, London and Berlin — it’s common to denounce nationalism, to disdain supposedly mindless, angry populists, and to praise those with an open-minded, cosmopolitan outlook. Note that those involved are praising themselves…. Across the democratic world, an enormous divide has opened between affluent metropolitan areas and the smaller cities, towns and rural regions far removed from tech booms and knowledge industries. Globalization married to rapid technological change has been very good to the well-educated folks in metro areas and a disaster for many citizens outside of them. This is now a truism, but it took far too long for economic and policy elites to recognize what was happening. It should not have taken the Brexit referendum victory, the election of Donald Trump and the nationalist surges in Hungary, Poland, France, Germany and Scandinavia to bring home the cost of these regional inequalities. Bingo. It is exactly that “enormous divide” that “has opened between affluent metropolitan areas and the smaller cities, towns and rural regions far removed from tech booms and knowledge industries” that drove 100,000 Americans to show up en masse to cheer on Donald Trump in, of all places, blue-state New Jersey. And it’s safe to say that these Americans are decidedly angry at seeing the former president repeatedly targeted by the lawfare establishment of the nation’s elites and forced to sit for endless hours in a courtroom while trumped up (so to speak) charges are hurled against him. It may amaze some that a New York Republican billionaire would receive such passionate support from working-class and blue-collar Americans. They forget that Trump’s parents raised him in an environment that had him spending lots of time at his father’s construction sites teeming with hard hats, a sea of blue-collar construction workers. He knows then — and he knows them well. And, in his heart of heart, he considers himself to be one of them. America has seen this before — in 1980 with another Republican with a working-class background, who grew up to be not simply a movie and TV star but the seven-times head of the union for working actors — the Screen Actors Guild. Like Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan got working Americans — and they got him. As former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said Monday on Sean Hannity’s radio show, there has been a shift of the political tectonic plates, with a slow, steady move away from the political left. And the results of that shift were on vivid display 100,000 Americans strong at this past Saturday’s Trump rally in Wildwood, New Jersey. As the November elections grow closer. The post Trump and the Significance of the Wildwood Rally appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.