Donald Trump has announced that he’s reopening Alcatraz as a federal prison for the worst of the worst in America. I couldn’t be more delighted, because it’s a wonderful idea at both practical and symbolic levels.

Trump made the announcement on Truth Social:

REBUILD, AND OPEN ALCATRAZ! For too long, America has been plagued by vicious, violent, and repeat Criminal Offenders, the dregs of society, who will never contribute anything other than Misery and Suffering. When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. No longer will we tolerate these Serial Offenders who spread filth, bloodshed, and mayhem on our streets. That is why, today, I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders. We will no longer be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and Judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals, who came into our Country illegally. The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Read more...

The decade-old age of fables like Russian collusion, laptop disinformation, or the pangolin/bat cause of COVID is not over; it is just hitting midstream.

For much of April, amid stock downturns, in the classical paranoid style, we were assured by the Wall Street Journal news reporters and the liberal press that Trump had either a) guaranteed an inevitable recession, b) engineered a losing trade war he likely regretted, c) crashed the stock market, d) lost his once majority favorability ratings, e) mostly had a failed first 100 days, or f) all of the above.

Some of us thought these diagnoses and prognoses were absurd. How in mediis rebus, during a radical counterrevolution never quite seen before, could anyone issue such bleak predictions? Would these same observers have said the U.S. was doomed to lose World War II after the bleak first five months of mostly failure in the Pacific, or North Africa, after the utter U.S. army disaster at the Kasserine Pass?

Read more...

How foolish are Canadian voters? They have just kept a politically inexperienced prime minister and largely discredited Liberal minority government in power because of their frustration with a US president.

That, in a nutshell, is what happened in Monday’s election yesterday (4/28) in the Great White North.

Liberal Mark Carney barely proposed any original ideas during the campaign, preferring to maintain Trudeau-era policies and steal proposals from the Conservatives. His long-standing support for far-Left policies such as net zero climate solutions and a fixation on wealth inequality never came to the forefront during this campaign, for obvious reasons.

Conservative Pierre Poilievre, in contrast, believes in lower taxes, smaller government and more individual rights and freedoms. He wanted to tackle the affordability crisis caused by the Liberals, and to bring down the high costs of food, housing, energy and more for Canadians and their families.

Poilievre was the superior choice for Prime Minister. Now he’s not even in Parliament, having lost his seat yesterday. What happened?

Read more...

I realize this may blow Democrats' minds, but 100 days into President Donald Trump’s second term, almost all of the millions of Americans who cast their vote for him are still happy they did.

And Trump has not been twiddling his thumbs in these first months back in the Oval Office.

There’s plenty to like or dislike, from his large number of executive orders to his federal cost-cutting bonanza with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

So, it’s telling that a recent poll shows the vast majority of Trump supporters would vote for him again now, if given the opportunity for a do-over.

And significantly more people are happy with the direction of the country now than they were before Trump took office. The gap between those who think the country is on the wrong track and those who think it's on the right track has shrunk from 36 points in November to fewer than 12 now.

Trump is delivering on what he said he would do, and, for the vastly most part, his voters appreciate it.

Read more...

How cool is this?

POTUS and Team Trump have pulled off an incredibly creative move to humiliate an activist judge trying to stop them from deporting dangerous illegal aliens.

As Axios reported, Team Trump revealed yesterday (4/23) how they managed to avoid violating a federal judge’s restraining order barring them from deporting certain illegals.

U.S. District Court Judge Brian E. Murphy, a Biden appointee, ordered the Trump administration to ensure that people with final removal orders have a chance to argue that deportation to a country other than their own could jeopardize their safety.

The Trump White House, though, exploited a loophole in the ruling and deported several illegal aliens anyway. It turns out Murphy’s order only applied to the Department of Homeland Security, not any other federal agencies.

Read more...

“Ukraine will not legally recognize the occupation of Crimea. There’s nothing to talk about here. This is against our constitution.” –Volodymyr Zelensky in response to Trump’s plan, Kyiv, April 22.

US president Donald Trump’s seven-point proposal for ending the Ukraine conflict may be many things, but it most certainly is not a peace plan. It is a blueprint for more war.

Surrender, capitulation, betrayal, appeasement, abandonment. These are the words that better describe the egregious apology of a peace deal that the Trump administration is currently hawking around Europe.

For, rather than attempting to address the fundamental causes of the conflict – namely Russia’s unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state – Trump and his band of fellow travellers have reached the perverse conclusion that the best way to achieve peace in Ukraine is by rewarding Russian president Vladimir Putin for his blatant act of military aggression.

That certainly seems to be the essence of the terms presented in the one-page document given to Western diplomats meeting in London on Tuesday (4/22).

It proposes allowing Putin to keep nearly all the Ukrainian territory he has seized since launching his initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, while giving the Ukrainians – who are unquestionably the innocent party in the conflict – next to nothing in return.

Read more...

“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus has it ever been.” — The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, circa 1400, attributed to Luo Guanzhong.

At some point, Xi’s Chinese Communist Party will either 1) productively address America’s trade grievances, 2) start military action that risks global thermonuclear war, or 3) itself collapse and throw China into chaos.

The first two possibilities have been discussed broadly elsewhere, but let’s think through scenario three because it seems this is Trump’s goal. Trump has backed Xi into a corner and here’s why Xi’s options are bad.

Read more...

Political developments among the elite are beginning to point to a dramatic truncation of the power of the “core of the party center”, Xi Jinping.

A recent article from the official mouthpiece of the military, the PLA Daily, reminds readers that “our principle is that the Party commands the gun” (我们的原则是党指挥枪) (PLA Daily, March 10). Another from the Party’s primary newspaper, the People’s Daily, urges readers to “ensure that the ‘knife handle’ is firmly held in the hands of the Party and the people” (确保“刀把子”牢牢掌握在党和人民手中) (People’s Daily, January 12).

The “gun” and the “knife handle” are metonyms for the Party’s two sources of hard power, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the domestic security apparatus. For over 18 months, Xi’s protégés—or at least people appointed under Xi—have been disappearing from leadership positions across both these systems.

Read more...

I am chagrinned that it has taken me this long to understand the emptiness of Democrat dogma.

I started realizing this some years ago when I began building a curriculum for the college logic class I was going to teach; I was searching for debates that were won by left-leaning apologists, thinking I should present examples from both sides of the social/economic/religious worldviews.

But I began to suspect that such examples weren’t to be found. I found people -- mostly men -- who could slide around from one logical fallacy to another with slippery skill, but none did any convincing.

Then came the Biden administration, when we watched the Democrat hollowness reverberate around in poor Joe’s empty head. It became even more evident in the addled speech of Ms. Significance-of-Time.

Now here we are in the Trump administration, and the reveal is staggering: the Democrat/Leftist agenda just isn’t there. The evidence can be laid out in seven different points:

Read more...

To use a great American sport as an analogy, baseball, the United States is playing tee-ball when it comes to drones, while Ukraine is winning the World Series of drone warfare.

Washington is sleepwalking through the most significant military transformation of our generation. Ukraine is not just defending its territory; it is rewriting the rules of combat in real time. This is not theory. It is raw, adaptive, high-stakes drone innovation playing out daily over Sumy, Kherson, and Kharkiv.

Over the past two and a half years, I have been on the ground in Ukraine, cutting my teeth by studying and understanding battlefield technology firsthand and forming close relationships with those serving at the front.

These experiences have fundamentally reshaped my understanding of modern warfare and the pivotal role drones now play. Understand: Ukraine is not just deploying drones. It is reinventing drone warfare across every dimension. The scale and sophistication of their ecosystem is staggering.

Read more...

For well over a century, Harvard was considered the crown jewel of American education. Presidents came from its halls, and Nobel laureates filled its lecture rooms.

It was the kind of place that turned ambition into achievement and ambition into legacy. It symbolized something enduring: excellence, discipline, and elite leadership. The very name carried an air of unimpeachable credibility.

Those days are gone. Long gone.

What was once a training ground for future statesmen and scientists has become a bloated, self-satisfied bureaucracy. Harvard’s leaders now prioritize activism over academics, show greater loyalty to foreign interests than their own government, and are more focused on preserving a brand than protecting the country that created it.

If in doubt, consider Harvard’s outright defiance of the Trump administration’s call to rein in campus activism, antisemitism, and ideological extremism. The response from the administration was swift.

Read more...

[Another extraordinary must-read by VDH!]

China's trade war bluff may backfire as the U.S. pushes allies to choose between a rogue economic actor and a flawed but fairer partner with unmatched global power. Here’s why.

No one wants a “trade war” with China, or for that matter with any nation. Nonetheless, China has been waging one for years and is now locked in a tariff recalibration with the Trump administration.

In this American effort to find trade parity and equity, China can do some short-term damage to the U.S., especially in terms of ceasing exports of some pharmaceuticals, phones, and computers. But ultimately, it cannot win—and will eventually lose catastrophically. It will likely accept that reality sooner rather than later.

For openers, try this on: China is running a nearly $1-trillion trade surplus with the world. Its mercantilism is the result of market manipulations, product dumping, asymmetrical tariffs, patent, copyright and technology theft, a corrupt Chinese judicial system, and Western laxity—or what might be mildly called “bullying.”

Read more...

Make no mistake—this is our moment. After decades of disastrous trade deals, supply chain sellouts, and bipartisan cowardice in the face of communist China’s aggression, the Trump administration is doing what should have been done long ago: confronting Beijing head-on.

This isn’t just talk—it’s action. And it’s long overdue. If we don’t follow through now, we may never have a chance to do so again.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller didn’t mince words during his appearance on “Sunday Morning Futures” (4/13) with Maria Bartiromo. He made it abundantly clear that the administration understands the stakes. China isn’t just a competitor—it’s a hostile regime engaged in full-spectrum economic warfare against the United States.

Read more...

“I think all the world would gain by setting commerce at perfect liberty.” —Thomas Jefferson (1785)

Do you recall that one of President Donald Trump’s Day One executive orders was “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness”?

This included reinstating the name “Mount McKinley” to the highest peak in North America, Alaska’s Denali.

In 2015, 40 years after the state of Alaska had restored the mountain’s native name, the Department of the Interior did the same. Nobody in Alaska wanted the name restored to McKinley, so why did Trump include this among his first actions?

Short answer: His admiration for McKinley’s Tariff Act of 1890, intended to protect domestic markets and workers by leveraging an average duty increase on imports from 38% to almost 50%.

McKinley would later revise his stance and advocate for more tariff-free international trade, which is not inconsistent with what Trump ultimately seeks — a level playing field.

Thus, as he said he would, Trump ordered tariffs on imported goods from every country that imposes tariffs and/or other trade barriers on U.S. exports — and some that don’t.

The most noticeable impact of those tariffs has been in the equity and bond markets – a barometer for economic outlook.

If you are fortunate enough to have accumulated some investments or retirement assets, the prospect of tariffs has taken a heavy toll on those assets — for the moment anyway.

As of the close yesterday, the Dow was down 11.51% year-to-date, while 10-year Treasury yields were back above 4%.

But that is about to change. Today, and likely for the rest of this week, expect major equity market recoveries because, after firing a loud shot across the bow of those subjected to last night’s global implementation of his tariffs, Trump has proven once again that the strategic “art of the deal” often depends on being unpredictable — the art of “organized chaos.”

Read more...

When Donald Trump announced his intention to “take back” the Panama Canal from China, I had to chuckle. My old friend Linc, who had died in 2005, was having the last laugh after all.

As editor of the Daily Inter Lake newspaper in Kalispell, Montana, for 18 years, I got to meet hundreds of people whom I would never have come across otherwise when they came to visit me at my office. One of the most memorable was an octogenarian named Linc France.

Linc (short for Lincoln) was an American original. For decades he had run Linc’s Automotive in Columbia Falls. His 2005 obituary noted that “He could fix anything. If he didn’t have the tool, he could make one.”

Despite ending his formal education in the 8th grade to help support his family, Linc was knowledgeable about many topics and was also civic minded, having served on the Columbia Falls City Council and volunteered for various charities such as Meals on Wheels.

When Linc came to visit me in his blue jeans and flannels with a trucker cap above his piercing eyes, I would sit back in my chair and prepare to be both amused and challenged.

Generally, he would be dropping off a hand-written letter to the editor, and he would ask me to give it a once-over. Most of the time, the letter was about the Panama Canal.

President Jimmy Carter had signed the canal over to the nation of Panama for the contractual obligation of a single dollar back in 1977, and Panama took full control on Dec. 31, 1999, but by then most Americans weren’t interested.

On Feb. 28, 2003, Linc wrote a letter we titled “Canal could be sign of worse to come.” It was indeed prophetic:

Read more...

Sometimes, the military finds ways to give the American taxpayer a bargain.

Precision, for example, can save a few bucks while still allowing the United States military to un-alive bad guys; just ask anyone who is familiar with the careers of Carlos Hathcock or Chris Kyle.

Instead of pouring machine-gun, rifle, and mortar fire down range, they were adept at knocking off bad guys with one .30 caliber round - and the taxpayers saved some money, in addition to which the bad guys became maladjusted at the realization that if they stuck their heads up, the last thing to go through their minds is likely to be 180 grains of America.

Sometimes, we can do it by using lower tech, too.

This brings us to a recent concern expressed by the acting Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral James Kilby, about how expensive the missiles are that we are using to revoke the birth certificates of Houthi rebels in Yemen.

“New acting Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. James Kilby said he regrets the Navy’s reliance on expensive, high-powered missiles to counter the Houthi threat in the Red Sea and pledged to push for cheaper, more efficient solutions.

 

Speaking to reporters at the Sea Air Space conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Kilby said he was "not concerned" about the Navy’s ability to protect its people – such as the 350 sailors aboard the USS Carney missile destroyer – or its ability to safeguard commercial shipping.

 

He is concerned, however, about "not having better ways to more economically attrit the threat." 

He has a point - and we, as a nation, are nearing $37 trillion in debt. So, how do we square that circle?

Well, here's a notion:

Read more...

“We should replace our piece of crap Constitution.”

Those words from author Elie Mystal, a regular commentator on MSNBC, are hardly surprising from someone who previously called the Constitution “trash” and urged not just the abolition of the U.S. Senate but also of “all voter registration laws.”

But Mystal’s radical rhetoric is becoming mainstream on the left, as shown by his best-selling books and popular media appearances.

There is a counter-constitutional movement building in law schools and across the country.

And although Mystal has not advocated violence, some on the left are turning to political violence and criminal acts. It is part of the “righteous rage” that many of them see as absolving them from the basic demands not only of civility but of legality.

They are part of a rising class of American Jacobins — bourgeois revolutionaries increasingly prepared to trash everything, from cars to the Constitution.

The Jacobins were a radical group in France that propelled that country into the worst excesses of the French Revolution. They were largely affluent citizens, including journalists, professors, lawyers, and others who shredded existing laws and destroyed property.

It would ultimately lead not only to the blood-soaked “Reign of Terror” but also to the demise of the Jacobins themselves as more radical groups turned against them.

Of course, it is not revolution on the minds of most of these individuals. It is rage.

Read more...

For decades, Americans have been led to believe that our legal system is built on principles of justice, fairness, and the rule of law.

But that’s not the truth. The truth is very ugly.

The judicial system we have today has been hijacked—weaponized against the very people it was meant to protect. And at the core of this corruption?

The American Bar Association (ABA) and the entire legal cartel that controls our courts.

The ABA is not a neutral, apolitical institution.

It is a radicalized, ideologically captured organization that wields enormous influence over judicial nominations, legal education, and the entire practice of law.

Republican senators, including Eric Schmitt, Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Josh Hawley, Bernie Moreno, and Mike Lee, have now called for President Trump to remove the ABA from the judicial nomination process entirely.

That’s a step in the right direction—but let’s be honest: removing the ABA from judicial nominations isn’t enough.

The bar itself must be abolished.

The Bar Controls the judiciary—and that’s the problem.

The entire legal profession operates as an exclusive club, one that exists not to protect individual rights, but to maintain power.

Lawyers and judges are trained by the same corrupt institutions, taught the same convoluted statutes, and conditioned to believe they serve “justice” when, in reality, they serve a bloated, bureaucratic system designed to suppress liberty.

It’s not a justice system—it’s a control system.

Read more...

Before Donald Trump arrived at the White House in January 2017, we were noting various manifestations of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Given the benefit (or detriment) of holding several advanced degrees, including one in psychology, I defined TDS in detail as a form of hysteric cognitive dissonance:

“Thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes resulting in dissociative behavioral and emotive expressions, which render the afflicted incapable of free thought or critical evaluation, and subject to fear and blind hatred of all people and things associated with Trump, to the extent they will abandon normative logic and reason, sever familial and fraternal relationships, and exhibit increasingly angry emotionally incontinent verbal and physical outbursts.”

 

I would conclude that the escalating frequency and intensity of hysterics associated with TDS are greatly exacerbated by the consumption of the hateful rhetoric spewed 24/7/365 by Leftmedia talking-heads and scribes, and across social media platforms.

Realizing the potential for an endless income stream, therapists adopted a kinder, gentler name for TDS, rebranding it as “Trump Anxiety Disorder,” a designer diagnosis for snowflakes and social justice warriors who fear a sociopolitical climate that does not comport with their safe-space value system.

The symptoms generally include a sense of helplessness and lack of control, resulting in anxiety, confusion, and insomnia.

 

While that may be a nicer diagnostic tag for a revenue annuity, the word “derangement” is a much more accurate description of the behavior of leftists and their Democrat Party socialist influencers.

To be clear, the election of Donald Trump did not create the epidemic of emotional incontinence and resulting hatred — the outbreak of TDS and cognitive dissonance on the Left.

Rather, the election revealed it.

Read more...

The American president has lost patience with the Russian leader – so have his own people.

The Kremlin is nervous.

On Saturday night, a limousine caught fire north of the headquarters of the Russian security services.

Last week, footage showed servicemen being frisked by special protection officers.

Those same officers were later seen opening up sewer hatches in a hunt for bombs near where the Russian leader was speaking.

To Western intelligence agencies, the situation is becoming clear:  within Russia’s top brass, the knives are out for their leader.

Western analysts are often accused of wishful thinking. Rightly so.

In March 2022, an op-ed in the New York Times described Russia as a “Potemkin superpower,” naively suggesting that just the faintest push would cause the whole regime to suddenly collapse.

Such a projection has not come to pass.

But there is one thing the rising paranoia does certainly reveal:  Putin does think he’s vulnerable.

You can understand why. Let’s first consider the feeling within Russian society at large.

250,000 soldiers have died – grieving mothers are now starting to write to president Putin demanding explanations, with one telling Sky News, “It’s impossible to live like this.”

When Moscow was at war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it was the mothers of soldiers that formed the frontline of the anti-war movement.

Then there’s the key demand made by Putin in negotiations with the US…

Read more...

DC is abuzz with a ton of Trump-hating journalists and politicians all of a sudden learning that national security is a thing about which to be concerned.

The Beltway has been seizing and pouncing on a story that they believe is an opening to attack Donald Trump, or at least slow down his pace of progress in the first couple of months by slinging mud at his cabinet and senior advisors.

The story doesn't interest me in the slightest. It's not hard to see the motivation of those now calling for resignations and firings. They're exploiting a mistake in order to scandal the new administration into a standstill.

What I do find of extraordinary importance is what is taking place on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean that happens to contain a very long 12,000-foot runway.

 

Diego Garcia Air Force Base is a joint U.S. and U.K. base on the largest of the Chagos Islands.

The Brits have controlled much of the region as part of their British Indian Ocean Territories, but in 2024, they negotiated transfer of the island to Mauritania, with the exception of a 99-year lease for the Air Base, which is now operated and used by both the Brits and the Americans.

It also happens to be due south of Iran.

In the last week, a pretty significant buildup of U.S. aerial assets have been arriving on the archipelago, and the amount of open source information thus far is something that very well might be of great consequence to the greater Middle East very soon.

Read more...

We’re three days into what the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the mainstream press are trying to turn into a “scandal” — the accidental inclusion of Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a chat about the Trump administration’s operations against the Houthis on the texting app Signal.

The more we learn, the more we know that the whole affair is a massive nothingburger with everything on it and a big ol’ side of fake news fries.

Key members of the administration’s intelligence apparatus testified that the Signal messaging thread didn’t divulge any classified information.

And for all the commendation of Goldberg for not spilling too many beans, we have a better idea that there weren’t many beans to spill.

It's hard not to speculate on why the left is so desperate to blow this thing out of proportion and make it more than it should be.

Obviously, the left wants nothing more than to slap the scarlet letter S for “scandal” on this administration because it has been so effective and popular with the American people.

But a White House press release from Tuesday reveals the most plausible reason why the left wants to discredit the administration when it comes to action against the Houthis.

“Democrats and their media allies have seemingly forgotten that President Donald J. Trump and his National Security team successfully killed terrorists who have targeted U.S. troops and disrupted one of the most consequential shipping routes in the world. “This is a coordinated effort to distract from the successful actions taken by President Trump and his administration to make America’s enemies pay and keep Americans safe. The Biden Administration sat back as a band of pirates — with precision-guided, Iran-provided weaponry — exacted a toll in one of the most important shipping lanes in the world.”

Read more...

The Brits are having a field day ridiculing and condemning what’s becoming known as Signalgate.  It’s not just the ridiculous security lapse but the childishly ignorant banter primarily between Vance and Hegseth:

Below is the take of former British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, originally published in this morning’s (3/26) London Telegraph.]

Read more...