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Military beat: Trump’s New ‘Arsenal of Freedom’
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently warned that America faces a “1939 moment” — a “moment of mounting urgency,” cheers The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which hopes this “translates into fixing how the US military fields equipment.”
“Hegseth says the Administration is aiming to ‘rebuild the arsenal of freedom,’ ” adjusting “buying strategies” as new tech evolves, boosting competition and awarding longer contracts to assure companies that expanding production will pay off.
Alas, “the Administration isn’t proposing a defense budget that shows investors the Pentagon is serious”; defense spending is just 3% of the economy, down from 6% in the 1980s.
Yet if President Trump can launch “a revolution in military contracting affairs, it would be one of the biggest achievements in his second term.”
Conservative: ‘Socialism of Fools’ Reborn
“Western leftists” have “celebrated” Zohran Mamdani’s “storming to power” as a triumph of “millennial socialism” just as fervently as they hailed the “mass murder of socialists on a kibbutz in Israel,” fumes Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill.
Israeli kibbutzim, long recognized as “living, breathing exercises in ‘radical democracy’” and one of the only “successful models of socialism,” reveal an “unpalatable truth” about “what passes for ‘socialism’ in bourgeois circles today.”
The “ridiculous” appearance of “Fisher-Price revolutionaries of the Ivy League” cheering on the “slaughter of peace activists and ageing leftists” speaks to the “ugly rebirth of the socialism of fools.”
Israelphobia “holds the Jewish nation responsible for the ills of the entire world,” and “is a story of our moral decline, not Israel’s.”
Libertarian: Beware Lina Khan’s Power Grab
Under former Federal Trade Commission chief Lina Khan’s “influence, we can expect the future Mamdani mayoral administration to get creative — and, perhaps, unconstitutional — in its application of existing laws and authorities,” warns Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown.
“Khan is ‘exploring ways to maximize . . . Mamdani’s executive authority through little-used laws already in place,’ as Bloomberg put it,” which has “a particularly chilling ring when applied to Mandami, a Democratic Socialist” and Khan, who as FTC chair “attempted to do through an executive agency things that should have been left to Congress.”
Khan recently spoke “about how her time at the FTC taught her there were ‘unused and underused’ powers that she could wield, and she wanted to find out the full extent of authority that would be possible for Mandami as mayor.”
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Democrat: The Last Days of Chuck Schumer
Democrats “seem unable to agree on much” except for ensuring that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s “leadership position is increasingly untenable as he comes under fire from both moderates and his left flank,” grumbles Douglas E. Schoen at The Hill.
“After eight Democrats broke with their party to reopen the government,” both factions insist: “He must resign.”
Progressives fault Schumer for failing “to rein in the ‘defectors’”; moderates grumble “that he engineered the longest shutdown ever for nothing.”
Polling shows Schumer would “suffer a historic defeat in a primary against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”
By trying to please “both wings of the Democratic Party,” he “often ended up with nobody happy and everybody angry.”
Instead, Schumer should’ve “been more focused on delivering Democratic priorities.”
Eye on Europe: EU Censorship Clampdown
The European Commission’s new Democracy Shield “is just the latest vision in unfreedom: suppressing dissent and policing speech under the pretext of defending democracy from foreign interference and fake news,” thunders Thomas Fazi at Unherd.
It’s part of a bid “to control the narrative at a time when Europe’s political elites are facing unprecedented levels of public distrust, by centralizing control over the flow of information and imposing a single ‘truth’ defined by Brussels.
In short, the European Commission is building a continent-wide censorship machine.”
EC President Ursula von der Leyen “is, in effect, buying consensus — and using citizens’ own money to do it — collapsing the boundaries between the European superstate, media, civil society and academia.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
English (US)