In Trade War, Trump Is Finding Tough Adversary in China's Xi Jinping

This is actually good. 

At WSJ, "Xi Is Ratcheting Up China’s Pain Threshold for a Long Fight With Trump":

Censorship and surveillance have helped keep the Communist Party in control and are getting stronger.

As President Trump tries to play hardball in his trade war with Xi Jinping, he faces an adversary who has armed China to play a long and potentially painful game in its contest with the U.S.

In the weeks since the U.S. president first slapped sky-high tariffs on China, Beijing has responded with defiance. A spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry posted on X footage from 1953 of Mao Zedong promising to fight to the end against U.S.-led forces in the Korean War. “We are Chinese,” she wrote. “We don’t back down.”

The Mao post and other messages from Beijing highlight what China sees as one of its core advantages against the U.S.: While Trump and his Republican backers are vulnerable to the whims of American voters, the party that Mao built is deeply entrenched, having maintained power through more than seven decades despite war, famine, political upheaval and financial crises.

Xi isn’t resting on those laurels. Since an earlier trade war during the first Trump administration, he has intensified his grip on the country’s leadership and spent lavishly reinforcing the authoritarian tools that underpin the party’s longevity, including enhancements of the world’s most sophisticated systems for censorship and surveillance. The Chinese leader wants to harden his country specifically for a confrontation with the U.S., urging officials to engage in what he calls “extreme scenario thinking.”

Trump has already struck a more conciliatory tone this week, saying he wants to enter into negotiations with Beijing and is willing to lower the 145% tariffs he has imposed on China in his second term.

The White House hasn’t said what it ultimately hopes to achieve in negotiations with China. Any push to significantly reduce the U.S.’s $295 billion trade deficit would require China to fundamentally change its economic model...

Weimar Republic Is Calling

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC CALLED AND SUGGESTED THAT 2025 DIAL IT BACK A NOTCH OR TWENTY."

Trump to Order Investigation Into Criminal Democrat Operation ActBlue

See AoSHQ, "It's the Democrats' own Holy Land Foundation."

Right Wing Extremist Chats Flourishing on Telegram

 At Der Spiegel, "Good Hunting":

He goes by "Hunter” on the messaging app Telegram. And the young German makes no secret of his political orientation. He’s from a "NatSoc Family,” he claims, writing in English – a family with national-socialist sympathies. Where they live in the German state of Saxony, he writes, there are fewer "non-whites” than in western Germany, and the far right is gaining ground, "especially the militant scene.”

In a chat with a Telegram user claiming to share his views, "Hunter” goes into detail. He writes that he is training a group of teenagers and young men between 13 and 25 and posts photos of them marching in camouflage. Sometimes, they drive to Poland or the Czech Republic, apparently for target practice. He is planning to conduct detonation tests in the woods with a mixture of diesel and manure, he claims. His role model: Timothy McVeigh, the man who blew up a federal building in the U.S. state of Oklahoma in 1995.

The actual name of this Neo-Nazi from Eastern Germany is Jörg S. What he doesn’t know while chatting: His alleged sympathizer is an undercover agent for the FBI, the U.S. domestic intelligence agency. Through their liaison officer in Berlin, the FBI tips off the German intelligence service and the public prosecutor.

After months of investigation, the police arrested Jörg S. in November 2024 together with seven other men. They are purported to have founded the terrorist group called the "Sächsische Separatisten” (Saxon Separatists). Jörg S.’s lawyer declined to comment. In previous statements he disputed any accusations of terrorism, claiming the defendants were a "relatively harmless hiking group.”

The authorities are convinced that Jörg S., 24, and his associates belong to a militant far-right subculture that in recent years has been attracting young men from around the world. Their groups have names like "Atomwaffen Division” (Atomic Weapon Division), "National Socialist Brotherhood,” or "The Base.” They long for the day when the state order will collapse, and they propagate violence against Jews, Blacks and migrants.

The "saints” that they venerate are right-wing terrorists like Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, and Stephan Balliet, who attacked a synagogue in Halle in 2019 and subsequently killed two people in the neighborhood. They occasionally post photos of themselves wearing skull masks. Their digital pamphlets are teeming with swastikas and violent fantasies. Germany must "fully descend into chaos” before "something normal” can reemerge, the Neo-Nazi Jörg S. wrote in a chat. At one point he fantasized about a "white jihad.”

The Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS), a non-profit organization in Berlin, recently ascertained just how large this subculture is. Their findings are alarming: According to the study , which was made available to DER SPIEGEL prior to publication, there are at least 164 active chat groups that can be attributed to the "Terrorgram” network.

CeMAS counted 651 German users in these groups who have sent over 317,000 messages since 2022. According to the experts, 83 of them are "heavy users,” which points to an "increased potential for violence.”

One group in which German users were particularly active was named "Terror Wave.” Their members hid behind pseudonyms like "Gestapo Officer” or "Proud Nationalist.” The mass murderer Breivik "dindu nuttin wrong,” one of them wrote. Middle Easterners should be "killed like pigs,” wrote another. In the chat, the users shared info on how to make explosives. It has since been taken offline...

How the International System Can Survive a Hostile Washington

From Ngaire Woods, at Foreign Affairs, "Order Without America":

In a remarkably short time, the second Trump administration has upended many of the precepts that have guided international order since the end of World War II. President Donald Trump has rapidly redefined the U.S. role in NATO while questioning U.S. defense guarantees to Europe and Japan and even intelligence sharing with its Five Eyes partners: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. At the United Nations, the United States has sided with Russia and other erstwhile adversaries, such as Belarus and North Korea, and against nearly all its traditional democratic allies. European officials, scrambling to react, have begun wondering whether they need to develop their own nuclear deterrents and whether Washington will continue to maintain U.S. troops on the continent.

Yet just as important as these security considerations is the administration’s rejection of the treaties, organizations, and economic institutions that the United States has done so much to shape. On the first day of his second term, Trump issued executive orders to withdraw from the UN Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization and imposed a 90-day pause on all delivery of U.S. foreign aid. In early February, he ordered a sweeping 180-day review of all international organizations to which the United States belongs and “all conventions and treaties to which the United States is a party.” And more aggressive moves may be coming: Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the second Trump administration, which has anticipated many Trump policies, calls for a U.S. exit from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, cornerstones of global development and economic stability that the United States has for decades guided with a firm hand.

From all this it may be easy to conclude that the postwar order is falling apart. By renouncing U.S. leadership, the Trump administration appears to be marking the end of American primacy and benevolent hegemony. As the historian Robert Kagan and others have argued, in the absence of the American superpower, a chaotic jungle may emerge. Of course, it is possible that the Trump administration could use raw power to undermine global stability and enable the United States, China, Russia, and others to carve out their own spheres of influence. In such a world, wars might be more frequent, and previous close allies of the United States, whether in Europe or Asia, could be vulnerable to outright coercion. Yet it is not preordained that this kind of breakdown will occur. The old order may well be disappearing, but whether that leads to chaos and conflict also depends on the many other countries that have until now upheld the institutions on which it has rested.

There are many ways that interstate cooperation can continue to be effective without U.S. leadership and even act as a restraining force on unilateral moves by Washington. But for that to happen, core members of the postwar order, including European countries, Japan, and other partners in Asia and elsewhere, must preemptively join together to reinforce cooperation with one another. They cannot afford to wait and see, with the risk that some might peel away. The Trump administration is moving fast to reset what the United States wants and bypassing long-established multilateral arrangements to get it. Other countries must move just as fast to protect and build on those structures, which they will need now more than ever.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

In standard accounts of international relations, order requires a powerful hegemon that is prepared to use its dominant military and economic power to uphold the rules, norms, and institutions that govern interactions among states. This understanding—known as hegemonic stability theory—is often invoked to explain the breakdown of order in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, when no country was both willing and able to underwrite cooperation: the United Kingdom was willing and the United States was able, but neither was both. By contrast, after World War II, the United States, driven by the global threat of communism, had both the will and the capacity to enforce order. Applied to today’s world, the theory suggests that a U.S. withdrawal from the international treaties and organizations it helped create would cause a collapse of order.

As the political scientist Robert Keohane pointed out in the 1980s, however, hegemonic stability theory looks only at the “supply side”: the willingness of a powerful country to supply the conditions for cooperation. But the demand side matters, too. Many countries, including the vast majority that lack dominant power, support various forms of multilateral cooperation to secure their own interests. That demand exists because in a world rife with competition, uncertainty, and conflicts, most countries recognize that ad hoc deal-by-deal diplomacy is unlikely to succeed. Such deals will tend to favor strong powers and thus lead to the kind of coercive behavior Trump has already used against weaker countries such as Canada and Mexico. As a result, even in the absence of a hegemon, countries may seek collective institutions to pool their power, build a bulwark against instability, and capture the mutual gains that occur when a modicum of cooperation is achieved. This insight suggests new possibilities for order without the United States.

In fact, multilateralism without a hegemon has a long history in Europe. At the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, the European powers convened to create a rudimentary order. What emerged was the Concert of Europe, a group that would come to include Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Although the United Kingdom had great naval and economic strength at the time, it did not have hegemonic power over the continent. Rather, a combination of diplomatic cooperation and a balance of power kept order until the Crimean War and the unifications of Germany and Italy disrupted it. A yet older example of such cooperation is the Hanseatic League, the confederation established by northern European cities in the thirteenth century to protect and promote their trading interests. Highly successful, it flourished for hundreds of years...

More. 

Is Your Favorite Influencer's Opinion Bought and Sold?

From Lee Fang, at the Los Angeles Times:

Your addictive doomscrolling on X, TikTok or Instagram may also be the latest nexus for millions of dollars in secret political corruption.

Over the last month, the problem has come into sharp relief. Newly surfaced documents show that more than 500 social media creators were part of a covert electioneering effort by Democratic donors to shape the presidential election in favor of Kamala Harris. Payments went to party members with online followings but also to non-political influencers — people known for comedy posts, travel vlogs or cooking YouTubes — in exchange for “positive, specific pro-Kamala content” meant to create the appearance of a groundswell of support for the former vice president.

Meanwhile, a similar pay-to-post effort among conservative influencers publicly unraveled. The goal was to publish messages in opposition to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push to remove sugary soda beverages from eligible SNAP food stamp benefits. Influencers were allegedly offered money to denounce soda restrictions as “an overreach that unfairly targets consumer choice” and encouraged to post pictures of President Trump enjoying Coca-Cola products. After right-leaning reporter Nick Sortor pointed out the near-identical messages on several prominent accounts, posts came down and at least one of the influencers apologized: “That was dumb of me. Massive egg on my face. In all seriousness, it won’t happen again.”

In both schemes, on the left and the right, those creating the content made little to no effort to disclose that payments could be involved. For ordinary users stumbling on the posts and videos, what they saw would have seemed entirely organic.

In the influencers’ defense, they didn’t break any rules — because none exist...

Chainsawed Trees Spark Anger Over Downtown L.A.'s Decline

Well, you'd think. (Eye-roll.)

Who chainsaws trees? Aliens? Foreigners? Leftists? Anarchists? Democrats? 

At LAT, "‘Enough is enough’: Chainsawed trees spark anger over downtown L.A.’s decline":

Downtown Los Angeles has seen more than its share of indignity over the last few years.

The pandemic sent office vacancy rates rising as masses of in-person workers stayed home, and, in turn, many restaurants and businesses shuttered. Homelessness soared amid interconnected economic, mental health and drug crises.

And though downtown has since seen some development, a looming sense of disarray and decline lingers. After the 6th Street Viaduct was triumphantly unveiled, its hype quickly gave way to unruly street takeovers and copper thieves wire-stripping its lighting.

Even as the skyline expanded, Angelenos’ attention fell on two skyscrapers that taggers had almost entirely covered in graffiti.

Which is why this weekend’s shocking act of vandalism that took out six of the city’s mature trees felt all the more disheartening.

“This has struck a chord,” said Cassy Horton, a 37-year-old downtown resident. “It just really like flies in the face of everything that we’re trying to do [to revitalize] the community, and for somebody to go around ... and set back what little progress we already have ... was really, really upsetting and hurtful.”

Along with safety, she said, green space has been one of the top concerns of the almost 100,000 people who live downtown, so the attack on some of the area’s few trees particularly angered people...

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How Much Time Should We Spend Online?

It varies. 

For me? Not much nowadays, now that I'm retired. I don't have anything to prove blogging or on social media, and I've made enemies with my support for Donald Trump --- even among supporters of Donald Trump! Especially on Facebook, which is high school, sometimes literally (my old classmates are organizing for the 50th reunion, oh my). 

In any case, Tyler Cowen makes the case to be glued to your screens. 

At The Free Press, "The Case for Living Online":

How much should we be online? Is it crazy to spend the majority of your day in chat groups, answering emails, and scrolling X? Is posing 20 to 30 queries a day to the AIs consistent with having meaningful respect for actual flesh-and-blood human beings?

I say yes.

Perhaps you balk at that answer. Perhaps you think that’s akin to admitting a heroin addiction. So I ask you to challenge yourself: Don’t think about how you should spend your time. Think about how you already choose to. Be honest.

I suspect most people aren’t like me—spending hours a day with ChatGPT, Claude, WhatsApp, and X. But, whether or not those are your particular fancies, the online life attracts a great number of people. Just walk through an airport, where most people have idle time, and watch how many of them are on their phones. You must either think this is (mostly) justifiable, or you have a very low opinion of current humanity. In that case, you must think them incapable of creating meaningful, autonomous lives, centered around some notion of the good. (I am not so pessimistic—at least, not yet.)

I view many of these online time investments as a determined attempt to be in touch with the people we want to be in touch with. To meet the people we truly want to meet. And to befriend and sometimes to marry them.

Those goals are so important that they can justify our massive online presence. I will explain this view further, but first let us consider the strongest and most articulate argument against such an intense online life.

It comes from Ross Douthat, who, in a recent New York Times essay, made the case that the digital revolution—and AI especially—is presenting humanity with an extinction-level event, at least on the cultural front.

“The age of digital revolution—the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence—threatens an especially comprehensive cull,” writes Ross. “It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a ‘bottleneck’—a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs, and peoples with extinction.”

Ross calls for human resistance against these trends, calling upon us to embrace what tech partisans sometimes call a “meatspace” existence. He asks us to “sit with the child, open the book, and read.” We should seek church rather than YouTube, a sit-down restaurant rather than a WhatsApp group, and love and procreation rather than porn.

Surely “the real,” as Ross presents it, has value above and beyond its immediate utility. But it also, he argues, likely makes us happier in the long run, too.

Elsewhere, Jonathan Haidt, in his best-selling book The Anxious Generation, has called for far less online engagement and much more real-world play, most of all for our children. He has spent the year or so since the book’s publication advocating for cell phone bans in schools and age requirements for social media sites—all aimed at getting kids offline.

Ross and Jon do have a point, and indeed I do plenty of reading and also babysitting, including the conjunct of reading to babies. It is easy to see that many individuals spend too much time on their phones, as they might tell you themselves.

And yet Ross’s characterization of online existence does not recognize its true value, which I believe is deeply human.

Why do I spend so much of my time with email, group chats, and also writing for larger audiences such as Free Press readers? I ask myself that earnestly, and I have arrived at a pretty good answer...

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I Used to Hate Trump. Now I'm a MAGA Lefty

From Batya Ungar-Saargon, at The Free Press, "The president is giving the working class its best shot at the American Dream in 60 years. That’s why I support him":

My name is Batya, and I am a MAGA Lefty.

The journey has been a long one. Initially, I had Trump Derangement Syndrome—and I had it bad. In 2016, I stopped going to my favorite local bar in Sheepshead Bay because everyone there had voted for Trump. How could they do that to me?!

Like so many other Democrats, I took Trump’s victory personally. If you had told me that just eight years later, I would happily, proudly endorse Donald Trump to become the 47th president of the United States of America, I never would have believed you.

People often ask me how I deprogrammed my TDS. The journey has been a long one. The cracks came one at a time. My rabbi, the best person I know, told me offhand early in 2016 that he loved Trump, and after that I could no longer sustain the fiction that every Trump voter was a racist. Later that year and the next, I did a lot of reporting in the South for a series of essays on polarization, which further dispelled the myth. Instead of the divisiveness of the elites, I saw Americans across the political aisle and from all races and ethnicities finding unity in their communities and churches.

In 2018, I encountered a Yale study that uncovered a surprising phenomenon: White liberals dumb down their vocabulary when they talk to blacks and Hispanics—but white conservatives don’t. It was a shattering indictment of my entire worldview, which suddenly seemed based in the insulting and frankly racist view that minorities needed the largesse of white elites to thrive or even to feel human.

When a fundamental belief of ours is challenged, we start to question other orthodoxies we hold dear. It took a little while—I voted for Joe Biden in 2020, albeit reluctantly—but I finally came to the realization that I hadn’t just been wrong about Trump supporters; I’d been wrong about Trump himself.

If you get your news from the liberal mainstream media—The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and The Washington Post—you may think, as I once did, that Trump is a far-right extremist. These outlets cast Trump as a racist, a hater, a George Wallace for the 21st century. But, in fact, when viewed dispassionately, Trump is more like a 21st-century FDR: socially moderate, anti-interventionist, and committed to America’s blue-collar workers as the backbone of this country and the locus of our power and democracy.

Think of Trump’s major convictions: He’s anti-war. He promised to veto a national abortion ban. He is respectful of religion but also pro-gay. And most importantly, he represents the working class’s best shot at achieving the American Dream that we’ve seen in 60 years.

These are the views of the hundred or so working-class Americans I interviewed when I traveled the country for my book Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. Regardless of which party they voted for, they were intensely moderate, with a set of views that didn’t map neatly onto either party. They were pro-gay but opposed the trans agenda. They were pro-life but against abortion bans. They wanted much less immigration, and thought tariffs would put money in their pockets. They were deeply tolerant of ideological differences. In fact, they weren’t ideological at all. Many, like me, had been Democrats until they voted for Donald Trump.

Ironically, if you look beyond the bluster, if you simply look at the policies Trump represents, it’s the kind of agenda that was viewed as solidly Democratic for 100 years, because it’s all about protecting labor—and Democrats were always the party of labor. Though it’s hard to remember now, in the 1990s, it was the Democrats who supported strict immigration, on the grounds that a tight labor market protects workers’ wages. Civil rights icon Barbara Jordan in 1996 insisted that there’s “no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labor force.” Mass migration was seen as especially punitive to black Americans, who have borne the lion’s share of the negative impact of importing millions of low-wage laborers. As recently as 2015, Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders called open borders a “Koch Brothers proposal.”

The Democrats also opposed free trade on the grounds that it’s a race to the bottom in terms of wages. They were anti-war, and defended free speech, women’s rights, and gay rights. They believed abortions should be safe, legal, and rare. Meanwhile, the Republicans believed in American exceptionalism and nation building. They were pro-life and anti–gay marriage. They were the party of the country club, of free trade and corporations and big business and Wall Street and trickle-down economics.

By now, it’s no secret that we’ve just witnessed a massive political realignment along class lines, as the Democrats abandoned labor to cater to the over-credentialed college elites and Donald Trump became the candidate for the multiracial working class...

Pope Francis Dies at 88

The Pope is Dead.

Full Obituary, at the New York Times, "Francis, the First Latin American Pope, Dies at 88: After decades of conservative leadership, Francis tried to reset the course of the Roman Catholic Church, emphasizing inclusion and care for the marginalized over doctrinal purity."

Border Crossings Grind to Halt as Trump Policies Take Hold

Good.

At WSJ, "Illegal crossings at southern border are at lowest levels in decades, as a trend that began before the election has continued under new administration."

Dow Tumbles, Dollar Slides as Trump Renews Attack on Fed

Continued market chaos, with apologies in advance to your investment portfolio.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Stock Market Today: Dow and Dollar Drop on Jitters Over Fed and Trade."

The "Sell America" trade picked back up on Monday.

Stocks fell, with the Dow industrials dropping 1,200 points and on pace for their worst April since 1932, and the dollar hit fresh multiyear lows against the euro and other major currencies. Yields on longer-term Treasurys rose and gold surged to a fresh record high.

Markets are on edge about President Trump's tariff war as well as his threats to fire Fed chief Jerome Powell. Trump on Monday demanded lower rates in a post on social media...

Tom Holland, How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

An awesome tome, perfect for Easter.

At Amazon, Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. #AmazonSales #CommissionEarned/p>