First, the good news. The White House will execute a “sea change” on China policy, according to Politico. They plan to reverse “decades” of trade policy and block technology transfers “to curtail Beijing’s economic and military rise.”

That change is long overdue, but Politico seems to forget recent history. They declare that the policies will “do more to slow” China’s technological development than anything Donald Trump did in office.

Really? Trump touched off a tariff war over the imbalance on trade with China. Trump also blocked China conglomerate and tech snoop Huawei from any involvement in 5G network development, and had to pressure our Western allies to follow suit. That was more than Barack Obama did in eight years.

What did Joe Biden have to say? He criticized Trump’s trade policies and accused Trump of stoking hatred. “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” Biden scolded at the time.

It’s good to see an old dog learn a new trick. It’s silly to pretend the dog invented it.

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I attended Microsoft’s latest Annual Shareholder meeting and asked the company about its intrusion into the abortion issue shortly after the reversal of Roe.

Microsoft spoke out in favor of the alleged right to abortion and even went so far as to announce subsidies for abortion fees and travel. The very next day, Microsoft's president Brad Smith and CEO Satya Nadella posted a discussion where they lamented an economy in which “we are going to have fewer people on which to rely,” and talked about training grandparents to program apps as a way to deal with the worker shortage.

The inability to see the contradiction between those two statements is breathtaking—lamenting worker shortage that would not exist without Roe and the 66 million people aborted in its wake while at the same time subsidizing for abortion fees and travel. Want more workers? Stop reimbursing employees for taking those innocent lives in advance.

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‘Tis the season for Christmas carols, and one of the most beautiful of our carols asks the most important question of all: “What child is this, who, laid to rest, on Mary’s lap is sleeping?” Christmas demands an answer to that question.

Even with all the fanfare and frantic activity of the season, that question remains. Even though commercialism and secularism and political correctness try to push the question aside, the question still stands. In the stillness of a winter’s night, the question rings our loudly and insistently – who is this child?

You know the carol’s answer: “This, this is Christ the king, whom shepherd’s guard and angels sing.” “Joy! Joy! For Christ is born. The babe, the son of Mary!” That is the true answer to the question – the baby is Christ the king. May you know the full joy of Christmas.

Merry Christmas.

 

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Economic anxiety, food supply disruptions, foreign wars, cultural decadence, corruption in the ruling class, populist uprisings…

No, I’m not talking about 2022, I’m talking about 2,022 years ago, or thereabouts, when Christ was born in Bethlehem. Light came into the darkness, but the darkness could not comprehend it. 

The darkness still cannot comprehend it, and will never defeat it. Herod tried, and died. Rome, the alleged eternal city, tried to murder the eternal God. But Christ rose and Rome fell. China is trying to eradicate the faith. It too will fail and then fall, until it repents. 

What happened in Bethlehem two millennia ago was D-day for the Kingdom of God, an invasion of the kingdom of darkness. We spend a lot of time arguing about politics and who should represent us—as we should. This time of year, how about refocusing us on the far more important question: Who our King is. 

Rejoice, Jesus the Messiah is born of the virgin Mary, rejoice!

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The seventh tranche of internal Twitter documents revealed disturbing new facets of the attempts by the FBI to censor public debate. Not only did Twitter executives come under pressure to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, Twitter essentially deputized them by granting security clearances. In fact, they even did a dry run one month earlier in September 2020—by positing a hypothetical disinformation story about Hunter.

That’s one heck of a coincidence.

This tranche also reveals that major American news organizations took part in this supposed disinformation effort. Along with Twitter and Facebook, “top national security reporters” from the New York Times and Washington Post took part in these briefings. Both papers later declared the New York Post report “disinformation,” refusing to acknowledge its legitimacy until earlier this year.

That’s not a coincidence. The cooperation of the newspapers that exposed Watergate in a government censorship combine is a disgrace, however. Congress needs to get to the bottom of this ASAP.

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The red wave may have fallen short of expectations. But come January, Republicans will control the House of Representatives. So why would some Senate republicans be willing to finalize all next year’s spending now?

Our country has serious issues that must be addressed. They include border security and the politicization of the Justice Department and FBI. And the Democratic spending spree over the last two years has resulted in hideous inflation.

Republicans’ only leverage is the power of the purse. Passing an omnibus bill now gives that power away for another full year.

If the GOP limits their support to a short-term, continuing resolution, that would allow a new, Republican-controlled House to shape next year’s appropriations bill and control the purse strings.

Americans are right to wonder: If Republicans don’t use their power, why did we give them any?

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When the Soviet Union fell, the archives were opened—and all the world could see the corruption of the regime well documented by its own bureaucracy. Now, Twitter isn’t exactly the USSR. For example, no nuclear missiles. But the prior regime did fall and now Elon Musk has opened the files for all the world to see. 

Anyone who cares about the truth can see Twitter’s reign of censorship—every bit as bad as its critics thought. We see well-educated people permanently banning a former president, building blacklists and shadow-banning. It’s jaw-dropping. 

The whole thing is an object lesson for us all. This crowd should not be gatekeepers over our national discourse. Whether it’s Twitter, YouTube, Google, Facebook—or the government and elite media who colluded with them—the elite managerial class has shown that it cannot be trusted to decide which speech we should be allowed to hear. 

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The nation awaits the launch of the 118th Congress—with new leadership and some serious work to do.

The top national security priority has to be the House Select Committee on China. Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher is Republican leader Kevin McCarthy’s choice to chair the new committee.

He’s a good fit for this huge job: An active-duty Marine for seven years— including two tours in Iraq—and a serious student of security studies with his PhD from Georgetown University. 

Congressman Gallagher will need to waken Americans to the new Cold War that China has launched over the past 20 years while we dozed complacently. 

The Select Committee should start by asking C-SPAN to cover every hearing gavel to gavel, scheduled in the evening so Americans can easily watch them. 

Michael Pillsbury of the Hudson Institute calls this competition, the New Cold War,  “The Hundred-Year Marathon.” It’s been underway for decades—but we’re just waking up as the race reaches a critical moment.

The stakes could not be higher.

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America needs to wake up. China is moving on the world stage, and it means business. In fact, China has established its own proxy police stations and courts in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

They are part of a world-wide network attacking, harassing and intimidating Chinese critics of the CCP in America. They masquerade as innocuous service centers assisting with drivers licenses renewals. They are actually monitoring dissenters from the Chinese Communist Party line.

That’s not all. Newsweek magazine has found 626 groups linked to CCP influence operations here in the United States.

Speaker-elect McCarthy has created a Selected Committee on China, naming Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin as Chairman. It needs to get to work.

Let the left obsess over their pronouns and the latest sexual fads. The rest of us need to focus on a real and growing threat—that’s not just overseas.

 

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From shock to anger to outrage: That describes my arc of reaction to the latest installment of the “The Twitter Files” coming from Bari Weiss in this case.

Using Twitter’s own internal files, released with the blessing of new owner Elon Musk, Weiss demonstrated that Twitter was indeed censoring conservatives, despite vigorous and repeated denials from company brass over the years.

Now we know: Conservatives were singled out, secretly muffled, as Twitter robbed them of time and of influence.

The most damaging result of this new scandal will be the further erosion of faith in elections in the social media era. The Twitter Files license an endless series of counterfactuals that cannot be proven or disproven. “If Twitter hadn’t tipped the scales, then [you fill in the blank] wouldn’t have happened.”

Once again, conservatives have been told to trust a public square that turns out to be rigged against them. Each time it happens, more damage is done. “Russia, Russia, Russia” well now it’s going to be supplemented by “Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.”

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