The antidote to war is not peace.

The antidote to war is commerce.

This concept of cultivating peace by fostering commerce traces its roots back to Montesquieu and the Enlightenment.

The thought is that increasing commerce leads to shared interests, recognition of the rule of law, and growing prosperity, all of which preclude armed conflict.

At the end of WWII, the U.S. realized that only America, with about fifty percent of the global GDP, could reignite the fires of international trade, production, and competition.

In league with its wartime allies, agreements like Bretton Woods were executed and multilateral regulatory and monitoring organizations like the WTO were established.

With its enormous financial, military, and market clout, America was able to get the flywheel of global commerce moving again.

It worked, of course.

In 1945, global GDP was approximately $1T, while today it is about $117T.

Even better, the percent of the world’s population living in extreme poverty shrank from fifty-five percent to less than ten percent today.

These epic improvements are all due to the expansion of global commerce and free markets, driven by the U.S. sharing its markets, finances, and enforcement power.

But we still have war….it’s obvious to the casual observer that the outstanding component of the Trump Administration’s foreign policy is increasing commerce…

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Make no mistake about it: The Democratic Party is facing an existential crisis that even their media allies can't spin anymore.

The New York Times, the crown jewel of the liberal media establishment, just published a devastating analysis showing how the Democrats' supposed stronghold on American politics has crumbled under the MAGA movement.

While Democrats continue their tired routine of Trump-bashing and pretending to care about working Americans, the numbers tell a completely different story.

The Times' analysis reveals a political earthquake that's reshaping the electoral landscape, and it's not in the Democrats' favor.

“All told, Mr. Trump has increased the Republican Party's share of the presidential vote in each election he's been on the ballot in close to half the counties in America — 1,433 in all. It is a staggering political achievement, especially considering that Mr. Trump was defeated in the second of those three races, in 2020. By contrast, Democrats have steadily expanded their vote share in those three elections in only 57 of the nation’s 3,100-plus counties.”

In the 2024 election, six times as many counties shifted toward the GOP as toward the Democrats. While 435 counties trended more Democratic compared to 2012, 2,678 moved more Republican—by an even larger average margin of 13.3 points versus 8.8 for Democrats.

That's not just a loss; that's a political bloodbath.

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This week, the Supreme Court continued to deliberate over what to do with the growing number of national or universal injunctions issued by federal district courts against the Trump Administration.

The court has long failed to address the problem, and what I call “chronic injunctivitis” is now raging across the court system.

Justices have only worsened the condition with conflicting and at times incomprehensible opinions.

Both Democratic and Republican presidents have long argued that federal judges are out of control in issuing national injunctions that freeze the entire executive branch for years on a given policy.

For presidents, you have to effectively sweep the district courts 677-to-0 if you want to be able to carry out controversial measures.

Any one judge can halt the entire government.

Under President Barack Obama, Justice Elena Kagan expressed outrage over the injunctions in public comments at Northwestern University School of Law.

Kagan lashed out at the obvious “forum shopping” by then conservative advocates to get before favorable courts, insisting “It just cannot be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years it takes to go through the normal [appellate] process.”

In his first term, Trump faced a more than 450 percent increase in the number of such injunctions over the number issued under Obama — a rise from 12 to 64.

The number then went down to just 14 under former President Joe Biden.

With Trump back in office, district courts have now outstripped that record and may surpass the total from the first term in the first year.

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China is the original riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. A country striving for modernity but feudal in its treatment of its citizens, Beijing's economic identity is a combination of Communist orthodoxy and crony capitalism.

As you might expect, the two don't work well together.

On the outside of the riddle, China is booming, the people are subservient and happy, and the government is looking to the future with confidence. This is the picture the Chinese Communists paint for the world to see. The reality is much different.

China is being crushed by debt, has become dependent on high levels of debt, and has created a humongous bubble in several sectors, like housing and household goods.

One noted Chinese economist says, “Basically, China’s economy is all built on speculation and everything is over-leveraged.”  Yet it's not just the debt that's pulling China down. It’s much worse than that.

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Former FBI boss James Comey posted an image of seashells forming “86 47” but quickly claimed, “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.” The Secret Service has good reason to take it as a threat.

“86” is code for “get rid of,” quite possibly in a permanent way. Comey knew exactly what he was doing, Trump said, that the “dirty cop” was calling for the assassination of the president. Comey was aware that Trump had survived two assassination attempts and was lobbying for another. As the people should know, the FBI is also in the “86” business.

In August of 2023, an FBI SWAT team shot and killed Craig Robertson, a 75-year-old woodworker for threats against Joe Biden he allegedly made on the internet. Threats to the president are normally handled by the Secret Service, but this was an FBI operation all the way.

James Comey made no statement or post on the killing that anybody can find. As he had to know, deadly force is a longstanding FBI practice.

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Current FBI Director Kash Patel is closing down the agency’s Washington, DC, mothership office and moving at least 1,500 employees out of the DC area to regional offices.  The decision was not just Patel’s.

During the Biden Administration, it was determined that the 50-year-old Hoover building headquarters was structurally decrepit. More germanely, no prior FBI director had ever explained why nearly a third of the FBI workforce was centered in offices in Washington, far from where most of the serious crime in America occurs.

The news is welcome for reasons well beyond the safety of agents in an apparently unsafe headquarters.

It is no exaggeration to state that most of the FBI scandals of the last decade were born in the Hoover building headquarters, suggesting that the agency had long become top-heavy, politically weaponized, and deeply embedded in and compromised by the Washington apparat. Here is a summary of the last ten years of FBI corruption.

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In what must be the week's best fun news story, we learn that the new pope, Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Robert Prevost, is a fitness fanatic.

His personal trainer and the founder of his gym had details for the Italian press about how then-Cardinal Prevost worked out at their local gym in Rome, running on the cardio machines and bench pressing like anyone else in his plain gym clothes, putting in those hours to keep himself fit, sound mind, sound spirit, sound body, in a piece since picked up by Catholic News Agency:

“The then-Cardinal Prevost — who, as is well known, is also a tennis player — spent his free time on the cardio machines, his favorite exercise. He sometimes also used the stationary bikes and treadmills designed to improve cardiovascular endurance and burn calories.

Omega Gym founder Alessandro Tamburlani related, ‘He was a person like so many other members. He dressed like everyone else, in simple gym clothes’.”

So in other words, he was just a dude, going to the gym to keep fit, same as millions of others do.  Pope Leo is MAHA – RFKII should have been with Rubio and Vance when they met him in the Vatican last Sunday.

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putin is afraid to fly to Istanbul – the SBU knows exactly why. pic.twitter.com/lYDkaCit9f

— Jürgen Nauditt ???? (@jurgen_nauditt) May 15, 2025

Russian despot Vladimir Putin is a “dead man walking” who rarely steps foot outside the Kremlin, British military experts have claimed.   Little wonder Putin A No-Show At Ukraine War Talks In Turkey Today (5/15).

The health of Putin, 72, has long been suspected to be deteriorating with his increasing age, and now experts have said that his brutal invasion of Ukraine has sapped much of his remaining energy.

Former commander of the UK’s  Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment, Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, told the Mirror:

“There are analysts, people who know better than I, who believe Putin is now a dead man walking, a spent force whose war in Ukraine will cause his end.”

 

Bruce Jones, one of the UK’s  leading analysts of Russia, added:

“Things never end democratically in Russia and the situation is bad for Putin. He has had people killed for years and some in his military have already been dealt with in such a way - he knows the way this goes for a leader in Moscow who is not making good decisions. So he is probably right to be paranoid.”

 

And Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of UK forces in Afghanistan, added:

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The days of rogue district court judges hijacking executive authority may finally be numbered.

On Thursday (5/15), the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in a consolidated case, Trump v. CASA, which challenges lower court rulings that blocked President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants.

Despite the constitutional authority granted to the executive branch on immigration matters, three district judges issued sweeping nationwide injunctions halting the order. Now, the highest court may have the chance to rein in judicial overreach and restore balance between the branches of government.

Even Newsweek seems to believe that the court will side with the Trump administration. Further, in recent years, some justices have expressed criticism of universal injunctions.

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Somewhere between 10 million and 12 million illegal aliens were invited into the United States by the Biden administration.

As far as logistics go, former President Joe Biden could not flee Afghanistan without getting 13 Marines killed and abandoning to the terrorist Taliban $50 billion in munitions, a billion-dollar embassy and a $300 million retrofitted huge airbase.

But Biden and his handlers proved far more logistically capable when their target was fellow Americans.

After all, they somehow managed to stop the congressionally approved continuance of the border wall, subvert federal immigration law, emasculate the border patrol and ensure that millions of people around the world could simply walk into the US illegally, unaudited and with impunity.

Why did Biden or his puppeteers do something so anarchic, so injurious to their fellow Americans?

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Will Americans soon witness President Trump’s issuance of an executive order suspending habeas corpus for criminal aliens and American enemies who have participated in an invasion against the United States, and who have chosen to remain in our country against the rule of law?

The writ of habeas corpus goes back to 500 B.C. and is a legal action which allows a prisoner to challenge the authority of the jailer to continue holding him. The legal term habeas corpus literally means “you should have the body” in Latin.

This legal privilege allows incarcerated citizens to seek relief from unlawful confinement as outlined in the Suspension Clause of the U.S. Constitution: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

The privilege of the writ of Habeas Corpus has been suspended four times: in areas that were in rebellion during the American Civil War; in eleven South Carolina counties that were under threat by the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction; in two provinces of the Philippines during an insurrection in 1905 when the Philippines were a U.S. territory; and in Hawaii subsequent to the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Empire of Japan.

In suspending the writ, Trump would be following in the footsteps of Abe Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus as a war power to protect the Union when the public safety required it.

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Revolutions rarely spring into action without notice.  The American Revolution was many years in the making.  The Boston Massacre occurred in 1773, not 1776.  Many of the longstanding oppressive measures that drove the colonists to revolt in 1776 are catalogued in the Declaration of Independence.  As onerous as they were, yet only when the oppression was no longer “sufferable” were the people driven to their last recourse: revolution.

President Trump has been besieged by federal, state, and local judges, even during his campaign.  New York State issued what amounts to a bill of attainder against him, not only crafting a special application of law, in which there were no victims, and designed to prosecute only him, but also assigning to a judge the role of real estate assessor, with the threat of imprisonment in a notorious state penitentiary.  This case, among others, was widely seen as clearly intended only to prevent the re-election of Donald Trump.

A different sort of revolution has been building up in the United States, against a different kind of tyranny: the tyranny of radical leftist judges.  It was only a matter of time before there was outright defiance of those judges.  In one case, federal judge Boasberg complained that his order to turn around deportation airplanes already in flight was ignored.

Now there has been an escalation in that buildup.

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[Stephen Miller is the founder of America First Legal and is currently Chief of Staff of the Trump White House.]

Stephen Miller’s America First Legal (AFL) has filed a bombshell lawsuit against Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in his capacity as Presiding Officer of the Judicial Conference of the United States, and Robert J. Conrad, Director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

The lawsuit accuses the powerful duo of running what AFL describes as an “unconstitutional shadow agency” and violating federal transparency laws.

The lawsuit, filed on April 22, slams the Judicial Conference of the United States and its administrative arm—both overseen by Chief Justice Roberts—as rogue “executive agencies” that have collaborated with far-left lawmakers to wage lawfare against conservative Supreme Court justices.

According to the lawsuit viewed by The Gateway Pundit:

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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!

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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“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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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[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.”

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