While the globalist media clutches its pearls and screams that NATO is “hollowed out,” President Donald J. Trump is once again being proven 100% right.
The latest Iran fiasco has ripped the mask off Europe’s so-called “allies.” France, Germany, and the UK just refused to back America in a real crisis, treating NATO like some kind of optional social club instead of the mutual defense pact it’s supposed to be.
French President Macron, UK’s Keir Starmer, and Germany’s Friedrich Merz openly declared the crisis “Not Our War!” They blocked logistics support, refused to let NATO become Washington’s “auxiliary force,” and basically told the American taxpayer: “Thanks for five decades of protecting us, but we’re good.”
This wasn’t some minor diplomatic tiff. This was Europe handing Trump the exact rhetorical hammer he’s been waiting for.
Trump has never been shy about calling NATO what it really is under the current setup: a one-way street. America pays the lion’s share, provides the intelligence, the strategic airlift, the aerial refueling, the missile defense, the C4ISR backbone — basically everything that actually matters in a real fight.
Europe? They finally hit the 2% defense spending target in 2025 after years of freeloading… and they’re still completely dependent on Uncle Sam for the critical stuff they can’t build themselves. Without the American “cardio-vascular system” of NATO, Europe is militarily naked right now. They know it. They just don’t want to admit it publicly.
The real threat of the 21st century
But here’s the part that should make every America First patriot cheer: Trump doesn’t see the world through the old neocon rose-colored glasses. His focus is laser-locked on the real threat of the 21st century — Communist China. He’s not interested in maintaining an expensive, automatic alliance that forces America into simultaneous confrontations with Moscow AND Beijing. He wants deals. Results. America First.
That’s why he’s long viewed NATO as a transactional nightmare — expensive guarantees with no real reciprocity. And the Europeans just proved his point in living color. This isn’t ancient history. This is right now. And the clumsy way the Europeans handled it — grandstanding about “not our war” without immediately reaffirming the alliance — was political malpractice.
They gave Trump the perfect soundbite for the American people: “Why are we still subsidizing these people if they won’t stand with us?
Europe is in a “monstrous” interregnum. They know they need to stand on their own two feet eventually, but they’re nowhere near ready for a sudden break. Trump’s brain is already moving on to the next chess move — prying Russia away from China’s orbit instead of repeating the old Cold War script.
The globalist elite in Brussels and Washington are terrified. They want the old status quo: America pays, Europe lectures, and endless foreign wars continue forever. Trump wants something better: fair deals or no deal.
And after this Iran debacle, more and more Americans are waking up and asking the same question he’s been asking for years: Why exactly are we still carrying these deadbeats?
NATO isn’t dying because Trump hates alliances.
It’s dying because Europe killed it with its own ingratitude, weakness, and shortsightedness.
The ball is now in Europe’s court.
But don’t hold your breath. Trump already knows what time it is. America First.
Attorney General Pam Bondi defiantly refused to apologize to Jeffrey Epstein survivors during explosive congressional testimony, dismissing lawmakers’ demands as “theatrics” while her job security hangs in the balance amid reports President Trump is privately discussing her replacement.
Bondi’s Defiant Refusal Shocks Survivors
Attorney General Pam Bondi faced withering criticism during her April 1 House Judiciary Committee appearance when she flatly refused to apologize to Jeffrey Epstein survivors present at the hearing. When pressed by Democratic lawmakers to acknowledge failures in the DOJ’s handling of Epstein files, Bondi dismissed their concerns entirely, stating she wouldn’t “get in the gutter with these theatrics.” The refusal stunned survivors who attended the hearing seeking accountability, not political posturing. This combative stance marked a turning point in public perception of Bondi’s leadership, with even some Republicans questioning her judgment in dismissing legitimate concerns from victims seeking justice.
Redaction Controversy Exposes DOJ Failures
The controversy centers on the DOJ’s implementation of President Trump’s Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandated release of documents related to the disgraced financier. While the administration released over three million pages, the redaction decisions sparked bipartisan outrage. Representative Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican instrumental in passing the transparency legislation, specifically criticized the DOJ for keeping powerful names obscured while allegedly over-redacting survivors’ information. This selective approach undermines the very purpose of transparency legislation—exposing the truth to Americans who deserve answers about Epstein’s network of enablers and co-conspirators.
Trump’s Mixed Signals Create Cabinet Uncertainty
CNN reported April 2 that President Trump has privately discussed firing Bondi and replacing her with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, citing frustration over negative headlines and insufficient action against political opponents. Yet Trump simultaneously issued a public statement calling Bondi “a wonderful person” doing “a good job,” creating confusion about his actual intentions. This contradiction reflects Trump’s pattern of discussing personnel changes without following through, though sources indicate genuine frustration with the Epstein files backlash from his base. The President defended Bondi as “fantastic” at the hearing while attacking Rep. Massie as a “loser” for criticizing redaction decisions.
Congressional Pressure Mounts Ahead of Next Testimony
Representative Ted Lieu called for Bondi’s resignation, accusing her of lying under oath about the DOJ’s Epstein investigation. Representative Jerry Nadler pressed Bondi on why co-conspirators haven’t faced indictments despite extensive documentation. These confrontations highlight legitimate concerns about whether justice is being served or powerful individuals are being protected through bureaucratic maneuvers. Bondi’s upcoming April 14 testimony before the House Oversight Committee represents a critical inflection point that could determine her fate. Prediction markets currently assess her ouster odds at 45%, reflecting uncertainty about whether Trump will act on his private frustrations or maintain public support.
Justice Delayed for Survivors and Families
The real victims in this political drama are Epstein survivors who continue seeking accountability for those who enabled decades of abuse. The DOJ’s selective redactions and Bondi’s refusal to acknowledge their concerns demonstrate a troubling dismissiveness toward Americans demanding transparency from their government. Conservative principles support limited government precisely to prevent this type of institutional arrogance—unelected bureaucrats deciding which powerful figures deserve protection and which victims deserve exposure. The Trump administration signed transparency legislation to expose truth, not to manage political optics through selective document releases that protect the connected while failing survivors.
Lindsey Buckingham, a guitarist and vocalist who once played with the rock band Fleetwood Mac, was attacked last week in Santa Monica.
The 76-year-old star arrived at a Santa Monica address for an appointment, according to KNBC-TV.
A woman police say is a stalking suspect threw what police said was an unknown substance at Buckingham and ran off.
Police said they know who they are seeking due to past incidents involving Buckingham.
Buckingham was not injured
The Los Angeles Police Department said the suspect is known to them due to previous incidents involving Buckingham, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“The Los Angeles Police Department Threat Management Unit is working with the Santa Monica Police Department to investigate the incident,” LAPD Capt. Mike Bland said.
“To protect the integrity of the open and ongoing investigation, no further comment will be provided at this time,” he said.
In December 2024, Buckingham was granted a restraining order against Michelle Dick.
The order said Dick could not harass or make any contact with Buckingham.
At the time the order was issued, an LAPD detective said that Dick claimed Buckingham was her biological father.
The detective said at the time that she believed Dick was mentally unstable and dangerous.
Buckingham recently said he was upbeat about a Fleetwood Mac documentary in the works and was still making music.
“I am still very, very grounded in my creative life,” he said. “I’ve been working on a new solo album for the last couple of years, which is one song away from being finished.”
Buckingham split with Fleetwood Mac in 2018 and suffered a heart attack in 2019.
Dick spoke with KTLA-TV, according to the station, and admitted she approached Buckingham last week.
“One time, that was last year,” Dick said when asked about allegations that she had gone to Buckingham’s home.
“But I didn’t know I had a restraining order on me. He wasn’t a father to me but he’s my birth father,” she said.
Dick told KTLA on Wednesday that she was living out of her car and had not been arrested.
The state of Oregon passed a law last year that should outrage every American who believes in the First Amendment.
Not because it bans speech outright. Not because it targets a newspaper or a broadcaster. Because it targets a letter. An email. A text message. A conversation telling public employees they have a constitutional right to opt out of their union.
That’s what Oregon made illegal.
The Freedom Foundation has been communicating with public employees for years. We do it because back in 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in Janus v. AFSCME that every government employee has a constitutional right to decline union membership and dues — a right workers will never find out about if they’re waiting for their union to inform them of it.
Someone else, most likely the Freedom Foundation, has to do it for them.
Oregon’s HB 3789, which took effect Jan. 1, was written specifically to shut down our outreach activities in that state — and potentially others. Egged on by their union puppet masters, lawmakers in that state approved legislation threatening heavy financial penalties for what the law describes as impersonating a labor union.
Mind you, backers of the bill couldn’t cite a single example in which Freedom Foundation marketing materials had done so. But actual guilt was never the point.
Because the measure was intentionally written so broadly, a labor-aligned judge could conceivably interpret just about any overture to union members as a violation of the new standard and impose a fine of $6,250 per communication.
Not a single verified incident of fraud. No impersonation. No real victims. Just a law designed to make one organization stop sending workers accurate information about their rights.
We challenged the measure in federal court the moment it took effect, but a District Court judge dismissed the case. It has since been appealed to the Circuit Court.
Meanwhile, no doubt motivated by Oregon’s audacity, New York last month introduced SB 9577.
It is the same bill. Not similar, but identical.
The statutory language is parroted word for word with only one meaningful difference: New York’s penalty is $15,000 per incident, more than double the Oregon fine.
They didn’t copy Oregon’s model. They made it even more unconstitutional.
Not to be outdone, Hawaii’s SB 3055, introduced in late January, has already passed the full Senate, cleared its first House committee, and is scheduled for a final hearing this week.
The Freedom Foundation has been singled out by name as the bill’s target. One union operative told Hawaii legislators our mailers are “deceptive.” Another was more candid than he probably intended to be, testifying that the bill was specifically meant to “get out in front of” the Freedom Foundation’s outreach to union members and citing Oregon as the motivation.
According to the Hawaii AFL-CIO, the bill simply “requires honesty about who is speaking and whether that speech is authorized.”
That’s their defense. We’re not honest about who we are.
In fact, our mailers always state exactly who sent them. Workers know these aren’t the union’s words. The argument isn’t about deception, it’s about the reality that workers are reading the information and exercising their rights.
That’s the crisis unions are trying to address, and passing a law is how they’re doing it.
Three states. Identical legislation. In the span of a few months. Our 9th Circuit appeal in Freedom Foundation v. Rayfield hasn’t even been decided yet, and New York and Hawaii are already advancing the same framework.
The coordination is neither subtle nor coincidental.
If our information was actually misleading, unions would have given examples. They would have produced workers who were confused or deceived.
They didn’t, because they couldn’t. The problem isn’t the content. The problem is that workers are leaving in numbers Big Labor can’t ignore.
When you can’t win the argument, you make the argument illegal. At least in deep-blue states whose elected leaders owe their jobs to huge infusions of union cash.
Oregon proved the strategy works, at least long enough to tie up the opposition in federal court while the dues keep flowing. Now New York and Hawaii are trying to lock in the same model before the courts can stop them.
If they succeed, other states will surely follow. They have to because without an unconstitutional Hail Mary pass, government employee unions are destined for extinction.
Every legislature that takes up one of these bills is answering a simple question: Do workers have a real right to opt out, or just a theoretical one that no one is allowed to tell them about?
Aaron Withe is the CEO of the Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting workers’ rights and advancing employee freedom across America.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.
A shocking video is making the rounds on social media right now which shows Gavin Newsom’s wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom speaking at an event and bragging about the gender nonsense that she is using to fill up the minds of her children.
It’s not exactly clear when the video is from but it appears recent and she is clearly proud of what she is talking about.
It is now widely known that one of Trump’s most effective 2024 ads was the one where he reminded voters that Kamala Harris supports all of this craziness. Now Gavin Newsom’s wife is reminding people that she and her husband support all of this, too.
Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, is drawing attention online for resurfaced remarks about giving her boys dolls to play with and even changing male characters in books to females.
“I’ve given our boys dolls, even if they tear the head off,” Newsom said in an undated interview that resurfaced on X. “I’ve given them dolls to learn that care and caregiving is not just an activity that’s reserved for women, but that it’s also an activity that is a responsibility of men.”
She also said she changes male characters to female when reading books to her sons.
“What I have done with both my daughters and my sons is if I’m reading a book and the protagonist is a male, I just change the he to a she,” Newsom said. “And it just normalizes for my sons, in particular, it’s not even … I don’t even just do it for my girls. I do it for my sons because I want them to see that women can be the center of a story, that women matter, that women are interesting.” …
“At the end of the day, we’re all kind of like in this place in history maybe where we’re recognizing what it is to ultimately deconstruct all these gender roles and ultimately be human, and that’s exciting to me,” Newsom said.
Watch the video below:
Parenting tips from the First Lady of California.
Just think, if Newsom becomes President, maybe the country will get a “boys with dolls” day. pic.twitter.com/Q6EShoImnO
One of the hospices targeted in ‘Operation Never Say Die’ today had a survival rate of nearly 100 percent. It’s amazing that these people got away with this for as long as they did.
People check into hospices to die. It’s extremely rare that someone leaves on their feet. At this place, 97 percent of the patients lived. That is a statistical impossibility.
Just imagine how much more of this there is out there.
Hospice with 97% survival rate accused of defrauding Medicare for $7.45M
The FBI arrested a married couple Thursday accused of fraudulently billing Medicare for $7.45 million while running a hospice with a survival rate reported to be more than 97% after five years. They were the first in a series of arrests planned Thursday, federal officials told CBS News.
A high survival rate at a hospice provider is one of a series of red flags identified by state auditors for fraud because most people enter hospice care in the final stages of a terminal illness. In past cases of fraud, operators were found to be using false or stolen identities to collect federal reimbursements for palliative care.
The targets of the early morning operation were Gladwin and Amelou Gill, a doctor and psychologist who co-own 626 Hospice, which does business as St. Francis Palliative Care, according to the FBI.
The FBI raid took place in the residential neighborhood of San Dimas, California, as FBI SWAT personnel announced over a loud speaker they have an arrest warrant. CBS News was at the Southern California location when the FBI agents executed the first early morning arrests. Also on the scene was Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Trump-appointed official who oversees the federal Medicare system.
The Justice Department later announced that eight people, including the Gills, had been arrested and federally charged in connection with a health care and hospice fraud investigation.
Here’s a video report from FOX News:
UPDATE: More On California Hospice Hoax Bust Fox News: “80% of the people who enter hospice die there most within 3 weeks but in the case of these two hospices according to the records 97% are discharged alive.”
The Kennedy Center will be closed for renovations in July, and all of Washington’s culture vultures are in a tizzy. Thousands of self-styled sophisticates will be deprived of artistic offerings for two years, at least, and there’s no telling what the place will look like once President Donald Trump, whose name has been affixed to the marquee, is done.
Enjoy it while you can—the performances and the venue itself. “The Center for the Performing Arts named for Kennedy, an arts-loving statesman assassinated in 1963, opened in 1971,” Tom Sellar, the editor of Yale’s Theater magazine, wrote earlier this year. He continued,
A white marble building with seven theaters perched along the Potomac River, it possesses sweeping views of the U.S. capital city. With striking crystal chandeliers and a regal red carpet leading visitors into the building, the land held a stateliness and glamor that memorialized the slain president while also honoring the performing arts. The institutional architecture might be dated, but when you walk into the building, you feel a little bit of Jackie Onassis glamour, the dignity of a bygone era.
It’s remarkable how much the place has improved in the past half century, considering that no significant improvements have been made. The Kennedy Center has been expanded, of course. Americans tend to make things bigger but not better, and that’s the case here as everywhere.
We also like to exaggerate the virtues of our heroes—especially ones no one can really remember—which is why JFK these days is regarded as not only as a great statesman, but a wit to rival Oscar Wilde and a connoisseur of the arts.
Mentions of Kennedy’s supposed love of literature, it has long since been revealed, was little more than a campaign ploy. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. urged JFK to position himself as a champion of “artistic and cultural achievement.” Even his “supposed addiction to James Bond,” Schlesinger said, was a “publicity gag.” Kennedy “seemed to enjoy the cool and the sex and the brutality” of Ian Fleming’s spy novels, Ben Bradlee said, but that was about it.
It’s remarkable, too, how the performance space named in JFK’s honor has, since Trump took office for the second time, become a beloved monument to high culture. That was never the case before. For decades, the Kennedy Center has been regarded as hopelessly middlebrow, if not actually embarrassing to the city’s true sophisticates.
It was certainly viewed as such when it opened. “The style of the Kennedy Center is Washington superscale, but just a little bit bigger,” Ada Louise Huxtable reported in the New York Times, when its doors first opened. “Albert Speer would have approved.”
Its 600-foot-long, 60-foot-high foyer—“the length of three New York City blockfronts,” made it “one of the biggest rooms in the world, into which the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles could be cozily nestled.” The Hall of States and Hall of Nations are “disquietingly reminiscent of the overscaled vacuity of Soviet places of culture. They would be great for drag racing.” The building itself “is a superbunker, 100 feet high, 630 feet long and 300 feet wide, on the Potomac. One more like this and the city will sink.”
The whole thing aimed for what its designers called “timelessness” and “produced meaninglessness.” What it has in size, “it lacks in distinction. Its character is aggrandized posh. It is an embarrassment to have it stand as a symbol of American artistic achievement before the nation and the world.”
With its “stupefying size” it’s “a familiar blend of theatrical glamor and showroom Castro Convertible.” It’s a “cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.”
What Trump will do can never be predicted with any kind of confidence and what he has in mind for the Kennedy Center, for his own ballroom and for the rest of the capital—considering the gold leaf he has plastered all around the White House—is not encouraging, of course. Jackie’s tastes were no doubt more refined than Melania’s, though it’s unlikely that our current First Lady will have much say in the plans, whatever that’s worth.
This is the edifice that establishment Washington now defends with such devotion, and echoes something else going on in political circles. This is from the same crowd, after all, that for decades has been telling us that the United States is a corrupt and racist plutocracy operating only for the benefit of rich people. Now they pledge to “save our democracy.” Go figure.
If you think health care is expensive now, just wait till you see what it costs when it’s free.
P.J. O’Rourke
Michael Tomasky of the New Republic wants to terminate the filibuster. Here he agrees with President Donald Trump, but for different reasons, of course. Trump wants to end the filibuster so he can get the SAVE America Act passed. Tomasky hates the SAVE Act but seems to think its passage would be a small price to pay for all the wonderful programs his likeminded liberals could enact once the filibuster was abolished.
The Democrats, “the party of government,” could “do a lot of things.” Good things, at that. They could “do what they came to Washington to do and pass laws that make people’s lives better.” Passing “bill after bill,” they could raise the minimum wage, make “vocational schools and community colleges free,” offer “subsidized childcare to working parents,” build “affordable housing units,” etc., etc., etc.—“done, done, done, done, and done.”
Americans would love it. “For the first time in ages,” Tomasky writes, they’d see their elected representatives, not wasting everyone’s time in “bickering and dysfunction.” Instead, they’d see “one party actually passing laws that make their lives a little better! They could, if they wished to, make FDR’s first 100 days look lackadaisical by comparison.”
But why stop there? The sky’s the limit. The agenda just laid out seems kind of miserly, if not mean-spirited, come to think of it.
C’mon, Michael. Loosen up, buddy! Use your imagination.
A study of the rise of rightwing populism in Europe and elsewhere by academics from universities in Salerno, Paris and Barcelona explores it as, in part, a backlash against globalization. Bankrolled by the National Research Fund of Luxembourg and the Brussels-based National Fund for Scientific Research, the report is generously decorated with the abstruse arithmetic equations now required of any and all serious contributions to political thought.
Left- as well as right-wing populism tends to spike after economic crises, the researchers find, and right-wing populism reached an “all-time high” during the decade ending 2019. Globalization is a factor, but immigration pressures play a role, too, and these can be expected to contribute to populist sentiments. Protectionist policies of trading partners, including the Trump administration’s tariffs, will also be a factor.
How impartial the researchers are might be inferred from how they frame the whole project. “Taken together,” they conclude, “our findings suggest that the blame for the rise of populism cannot be laid to globalization as a whole.”
Blame? Did you catch that?
Pete Hegseth’s firing of Army Chief of Staff Randy George—“the latest in a series of clashes between the Pentagon chief and the service’s leadership,” the Washington Post reports—calls to mind that great line from Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove: “Gentlemen! Gentlemen! You can’t fight here. This is the war room!”
No UK political party has an answer to the crisis.
UK Special Coverage
The British nation is already burdened by crushing energy costs and is bracing for a dramatic increase in that load. To gauge the impact of coming energy price rises in Britain, you must first understand what is sometimes called the “unriching” of the UK. This is a supposedly wealthy country which no longer feels wealthy. Real wages have barely risen in real terms since before the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. Brits have been through the longest pay freeze since the Napoleonic Wars.
So the average family was already feeling pretty miserable even before the latest energy shock caused by the war in Iran. The IMF has forecast that the UK is going to be hit especially hard by Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz. It expects rising prices to create a “large and sudden tax on income”.
But here’s the thing: The UK is already taxed to the hilt, and incomes have been squeezed for years. Britons are already sick to death of cutting back.
UK GDP per capita is around 30 percent lower than that of the U.S.—$65,000 against $90,000—according to IMF purchasing power parity figures. The intergenerational contract whereby the younger generation should be wealthier than their parents’ has been broken. Generation Z Britons are emerging into a world where they can no longer expect to own a house, have a family or enjoy a secure pensioned job.
Burdened with student debt, it is the credentialed classes that feel most cheated. Graduate recruitment has flatlined, leaving many educated Britons doing relatively menial jobs. Schooled by the left-wing academics who dominate UK universities, many of the fragile “precariat”, as they are called, are attracted to the Robin Hood politics of the Green Party leader Zack Polanski. He thinks that by abolishing billionaires Britain will somehow become richer. He also used to say he could enlarge women’s breasts by hypnosis.
Those on the lower income deciles are, to a certain extent, insulated from impoverishment by huge wealth transfers from middle and high earners. Britain spends more on welfare benefits than the total revenue raised by income tax.
But lower middle-income Britons are still the most directly affected by the energy crisis, which has landed with devastating effect, plunging some seven million families into “fuel poverty,” defined as paying more than 10 percent of disposable earnings on energy.
Average energy bills, currently capped at £1,700 a year for a typical household, are already 50 percent higher than before the Ukraine war. They are forecast to leap again to around £2,500 a year. That may not seem vastly greater than bills in America, but British houses are much smaller. The average U.S. household gets a lot more energy per buck. UK domestic electricity costs twice as much as in the U.S.: $0.40 per kWh against $0.18.
For millions of Britons, especially the elderly living on the UK state pension of £12,548 ($16,600) a year, it is often a choice between heating and eating. In 2025, Age UK claims that 41 percent of older people had to cut back on heating their homes last year. Inadequate heating has allegedly been causing thousands of premature deaths every winter, especially in colder regions such as Scotland. So energy is literally a matter of life and death in the UK.
But it is perhaps the less dramatic impact of high energy costs on families that is the most politically salient. Put simply, Britons can’t enjoy life anymore. The press is full of accounts of two-earner families on average incomes being unable to afford family outings, not least because of the cost of gasoline. Zoo trips, beach holidays, or even visits to the movie theater have become luxuries. Half of parents, according to polls, can no longer afford a summer holiday.
Britons already pay more than £100 ($133) to fill up a small family car—that’s if they can afford the cost of insurance and vehicle taxes. UK gasoline costs are nearly double those in the U.S., and they are set to increase rapidly because of the disruption to supplies. In the 1970s, after the last great energy price shock, the UK was saved by North Sea oil and gas revenues. Not this time.
A lifestyle that is taken for granted in the U.S. is no longer available to tens of millions of Britons. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the political parties, Labour and the Conservatives, which presided over the Great Stagnation are being punished at the polls.
Populist parties like Reform UK on the right and the Greens on the left have been on the rise. Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party has been leading opinion polls for the last year. The Green Party won the recent crucial Gorton and Denton by-election. Yet neither of those parties has any really coherent idea of how to make Great Britain great again. Cutting net immigration to zero or abolishing billionaires are not the answer.
But there can be no solution that does not start with energy. Heating is unaffordable, factories are closing and transport is becoming a luxury. The NHS is suffering because of the increased cost of pharmaceuticals. Shortages of fertilizer, dependent on natural gas, are going to push food prices ever higher. Not surprisingly, Britons are voting with their feet and emigrating for a better life in record numbers, according to the Office for National Statistics.
An appeal for calm by the Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is already more unpopular than any of his Tory predecessors, has not eased voter frustration. The UK government is, according to many commentators, asleep at the wheel. Unable to lower energy costs without compromising climate policies, and addicted to public spending, Labour politicians have stopped making sense. Britain used to be a relatively tranquil land, not given to political extremes. That could be about to change.
Washington demands that NATO join a war of aggression.
President Donald Trump this week expressed his “disgust” with NATO in an interview with Reuters. He added that he is “absolutely” considering withdrawing the United States from the alliance.
What has triggered this fury? The refusal of key European NATO allies to join the United States and Israel in their war of choice on Iran. Spain, Italy, and France have all ruled out the use of their territory—their airspace, bases, and ports—for any American or Israeli military action against the Islamic Republic. These are not hostile nations. They are treaty allies, bound to the United States by mutual defense commitments.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who only recently spoke of common civilizational bonds between Europe and America, was slightly more diplomatic than the president, noting that the NATO arrangement, under which the U.S. is committed to Europe’s defense while Europe refuses to reciprocate on Iran, feels “one-sided.”
The message from Washington could not be clearer: The transatlantic alliance is conditional on European willingness to subordinate their own national interests to the demands of Washington, which itself, manywould argue, is acting in the interests of a foreign country—Israel.
Spain is a particularly sore flashpoint. In a move that was entirely within its sovereign rights, the Spanish government—led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez—prohibited the use of its airspace and bases for any military action aimed at Iran.
One might expect Washington to engage in quiet diplomacy with Madrid to resolve the disagreement. Instead, a key Trump ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), demanded sanctions against Spain. That’s a hollow threat: Sanctioning Spain would mean launching a trade war against the whole of the EU, since it functions as a single market, and the military bases on Spanish territory, which Graham claims to be American, are in fact Spanish, with their use by the U.S. regulated by a bilateral defense arrangement. But the fact that an influential U.S. senator would call for sanctioning a fellow NATO ally is indicative of the moment.
What should be particularly alarming from Washington’s point of view is the political cross-section of European dissent. The opposition to the American- and Israeli-led war is not confined to the traditional left. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing party often viewed favorably by certain factions in the MAGA movement, has come out strongly against the war.
Here we have a remarkable convergence: Pedro Sánchez, the socialist leader of Spain, and the AfD, a nationalist-conservative opposition party in Germany, standing on the same ground. Both recognize that being a partner to the United States does not obligate their nations to participate in a war their own publics reject.
Yet, from the perspective of the Trump administration, this nuance is irrelevant. The demand from Washington is absolute loyalty—not to NATO, not to the shared principles and defense of the North Atlantic—the alliance’s primary responsibility—but to a mercurial American president.
To understand where this impulse originates, one need look no further than the neoconservative activists who have found a comfortable home within the Trump coalition. Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a longtime Iran superhawk, recently laid out the emerging worldview in stark terms.
“Five Eyes was built for another era,” Dubowitz declared, referring to the longstanding intelligence-sharing partnership among the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “We get diminishing value from four partners, and ties with Britain are at a low point. Time to rethink the alliance around those actually delivering intelligence value — Israel, Poland, Ukraine, UAE, Japan, ROK and other serious partners.”
In essence, Dubowitz suggests that the Five Eyes and other traditional arrangements be cast aside. In their place, Dubowitz proposes a new constellation of partners, with Israel at the head.
Dubowitz’s vision increasingly aligns with the trajectory of the Trump administration. As The American Conservative’s senior editor Andrew Day recently observed: “Trump is demeaning European allies, urging them to open the Strait of Hormuz, and condemning them for not supporting the US-Israel war of aggression that caused this catastrophe.”
Day’s assessment cuts to the heart of the matter. Trumpism, as practiced today, is not a revival of the old right’s skepticism toward foreign commitments—skepticism that Trump himself appeared to have embraced in the past. On the contrary, it represents a wholesale repudiation of the paleoconservative tradition. Where the great paleoconservatives—figures like Pat Buchanan—were deeply skeptical of both the endless wars in the Middle East and the Israeli lobby’s grip on American foreign policy that has arguably driven those wars, the current iteration of Trumpism is unequivocally pro-Israel and anti-Europe.
There remain influential conservative voices who feel alienated by this turn, as highlighted in Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with The Economist. And the Vice President J.D. Vance offered a striking reflection in April 2025 that directly contradicts the approach now being pursued by the administration he serves.
“I think a lot of European nations were right about our invasion of Iraq,” Vance said. He continued:
Frankly, if the Europeans had been a little more independent, and a little more willing to stand up, then maybe we could have saved the entire world from the strategic disaster that was the American-led invasion of Iraq. I don’t want the Europeans to just do whatever the Americans tell them to do. I don’t think it’s in their interest, and I don’t think it’s in our interests, either.
The administration’s defenders would no doubt object: Hasn’t Europe free-ridden on American security guarantees for decades? Isn’t Iran a genuine threat? And is it unreasonable to expect treaty allies to contribute when the United States acts?
But the issue is not burden-sharing; it is the nature of the burden. The Europeans are being asked to facilitate a war of choice against a nation that has not attacked a NATO member—a war a majority of their citizens oppose and that even most Americans view as reckless. When European allies declined to follow the United States into Iraq in 2003, they were not freeloaders; they were right. A Europe that says no now should be performing the same function.
The irony is that the positions taken by Spain, Italy, and France on Iran are arguably in America’s interest as well. The United States has spent the last two decades mired in disastrous Middle Eastern wars that were opposed by key European allies. When European nations refuse to guarantee airspace for another conflict, they are acting as responsible stewards of peace. Yet in the current climate, prudence is mistaken for betrayal, and independence is met with threats of sanctions and abandonment.
The paleoconservative tradition understood that America’s strength lay in restraint and respect for the sovereignty of others. The neoconservatives offer a different path: Discard Europe, treat Israel as the anchor of a new alliance system, and punish allies who refuse to subordinate their interests to Washington’s demands. The Trump administration, combining neoconservative ambition with Trumpian impatience, has embraced that path. It is time for conservatives to remember that there is a better way.
US Coast Guard rescues 3 federal agents and 2 boaters after vessels capsize near Isla de Cabras in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico
The US Coast Guard said three federal agents and two boaters were rescued after capsizing in rough waters near Isla de Cabras in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico, on Tuesday.
The US Coast Guard and Puerto Rico Police Joint Forces of Rapid Action air crews executed the mission.
Video released by Coast Guard Southeast shows the stranded persons signaling for help as they’re beaten by waves in the ocean before air crews come to their rescue.
Three US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents were thrown into the water after their vessel capsized while attempting to perform the rescue.
WATCH:
Coast Guard was notified by the Puerto Rico Police of the capsized vessel at 9:05 pm on Tuesday before dispatching a 45-foot Coast Guard response boat and Coast Guard MH-60T Jayhawk helicopter, the Coast Guard said in a news release.
“A Customs and Border Protection Caribbean Air and Marine Branch marine unit and a Puerto Rico Police Joint Force of Rapid Action (FURA) also responded,” the Coast Guard said.
A “Good Samaritan” later reported seeing the 22-foot vessel with two people clinging to it. The three CBP agents initially attempted to rescue the boaters, but 10-foot swells sank them, the Coast Guard said.
According to the press release, “All three agents and the two boaters are safe and there are no other people missing.”
Coast Guard Air Station MH-60T Jayhawk helicopter aircraft commander Lt. David Tirado-Tolosa, CBP Air and Marine Operations Southeast executive director Andy Blanco, and Coast Guard Sector San Juan Search and Rescue mission coordinator Commander Zach Geyer issued statements on the case:
“Excellent team effort on this case late Tuesday night, said Lt. David Tirado-Tolosa, Coast Guard Air Station MH-60T Jayhawk helicopter aircraft commander for the case. “The quick actions by FURA and CBP AMO allowed for constant eyes on all five people in the water and their prompt rescue. This mission highlights the high-risk environment our crews, federal, and local partners face every time they respond to a search and rescue. We are very glad everyone made it home safely, as this could have easily had a different outcome. I encourage everyone to check the weather before heading out; the next couple of days will not be safe for small vessels or swimmers on the north shore.”
“I am incredibly grateful for the swift and courageous actions of all the agencies involved in Tuesday’s rescue, especially our partners at the U.S. Coast Guard and Puerto Rico Police,” said Andy Blanco, CBP Air and Marine Operations Southeast executive director. “Their outstanding coordination, expertise, and rapid response were instrumental in ensuring the safe recovery of our agents and the boaters. This successful rescue is a powerful reminder of the risks our crews face every day, and of the strength and importance of our partnerships in safeguarding our maritime communities.”
“This case highlights the dangers facing rescue professionals coming to the aide of mariners peril,” said Cmdr. Zach Geyer, Coast Guard Sector San Juan Search and Rescue mission coordinator for the case. “The responding CBP asset crew exemplified the courageous effort our federal and local responders make in a deliberate and calculated risk decision to save two individuals in immediate danger of death. Through strong coordination across agencies, including CBP, FURA, the Caribbean Air and Marine Operations Center, and the Federal Aviation Administration, responders safely deconflicted a congested airspace and ultimately saved lives. This case reflects the professionalism and teamwork required to save lives at sea. We are extremely glad and fortunate that everyone is safe and back with their families and coworkers.”
