To Hormuz or Not to Hormuz. The Absolute Certainty of Iran Commentators. Meet the More Gruesome Newsom. What the ‘No Kings’ Placards Tell Us. And More
President Trump has shared the video of a “fiery blast” that occurred after the U.S. dropped a 2,000-pound bunker buster on an Iranian ammo depot. Here’s more on the bunker busters. Meanwhile, today’s question is: To Hormuz or not to Hormuz?
President Trump is telling aides that he’s willing to end the Iran war without reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Time is of the essence:
In recent days, Trump and his aides assessed that a mission to pry open the chokepoint would push the conflict beyond his timeline of four to six weeks. He decided that the U.S. should achieve its main goals of hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks and wind down current hostilities while pressuring Tehran diplomatically to resume the free flow of trade. If that fails, Washington would press allies in Europe and the Gulf to take the lead on reopening the strait, the officials said.
About a fifth of the world’s energy supplies go through the Strait of Hormuz, but considerably less for the United States. President Trump has been blunt to one of our oldest allies:
Donald Trump told the United Kingdom to “get your own oil” as he urged US allies to reopen the Strait of Hormuz themselves….
“Number 1, buy from the US, we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.”
The president has got to be worried that Wall Street is finishing the worst quarter for stocks in four years. Spain is blocking U.S. planes from its airspace. Yikes, Italy has blocked our use of an airbase in Sicily. Who’s winning this thing? Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker comments on the absolute certainty of commentators on both sides. Baker’s headline is “You May Already Have Won the Iran War” but the subhead suggests you may already have lost:
I am not against bold opinion commentary, as you might have noticed, but this level of certainty about a war that is four weeks old and with plainly many more phases to come, is simply unsupportable. As we stand, the outcome isn’t knowable with any level of confidence; it surely rests on events at a tactical and strategic level in coming weeks and months that we can’t know.
USA TODAY’s Nicole Russell does not want to see U.S. ground troops in Iran. “I do not want a country like Iran to have nuclear potential. But the war seems to be escalating and President Trump needs to get control of it,” Russell argues. Hugh Hewitt, on the other hand, writes that President Trump is on the cusp of a historic achievement.
Lebanon expelled the Iranian ambassador, but he refuses to leave. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal says the message is clear: We own you. But Lebanon’s future depends on expelling Iran, the Editorial Board says.
Lebanon’s future depends on the expulsion of Iran’s regime, not merely its ambassador. This war provides the best opportunity in years to do so, and the U.S. and Israel can help. But if Lebanon wants independence, the country will have to seize it.
I’m still thinking about the “No Kings” protests. The Wall Street Journal’s Meghan Gurdon clarified something that vaguely bothered me. Gurdon wrote about the placards (“Fighting Fascism with Arts and Crafts“):
The ignominious truth can be seen not in the abusive placards waved by groups of like-minded people, but in the lonely obedience of their production. A number of Americans, and it’s impossible to know how many, appear to have given themselves over so entirely to political antipathy guided by remote strangers that it has become for them a hobby, like ceramics. Some go to rallies and draw energy from the company of others who share their ire. Others appear more solitary and monomaniacal….
That’s the tragedy and embarrassment of No Kings. The participants are entitled to agitate against a president they didn’t want, even though, for all his defects, this one did win the popular vote. The sad thing is that when they’re making handmade signs and smashing up friendships and family relationships on supposedly moral grounds, they think they’re expressing themselves, when in fact they’ve given over their individuality to become dolls dancing on wires in somebody else’s show.
I am still thinking about Sheridan Gorman, the 18-year-old student at Chicago’s Loyola University, who had her life before her when she was allegedly murdered by an illegal alien. Bill writes today about “The Pols Who Failed Sheridan Gorman.” McGurn quoted the Chicago pols who’ve tried to blame Sheridan’s death on Trump and suggests that our political class has lost the ability to talk about a human tragedy without politicizing it.
Wow. The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has accomplished a neat trick—cloaking the union’s partisanship and ideology in the mantle of free speech. A City Journal piece describes the NEA’s recent confidential webinar, hilariously titled “Advocacy and Free Speech Rights for K-12 Educators.” Wai Wah Chin writes:
The training’s first agenda item is “Understanding current threats to educator voice and academic freedom, as well as the risks of [sic] educators face when speaking out.” Clunky “educatorese” seems to be the NEA’s preferred idiom to promote its partisan agenda, which apparently includes support for Palestine, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, racialism, transgender ideology, and DEI. It also includes opposition to the Department of Education (accused of being “actively committed to violating civil rights”), the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (mentioned in nine slides), “Red State governments,” and the Trump administration.
The slides portray the risks to educator-activists in apocalyptic terms. “Democracy itself is at stake,” they claim, with an “unprecedented push to criminalize speech and political opposition.” Educator-activists allegedly face termination, arrest, harassment, doxxing, and even violence—not just from Washington and red state governments but also from “reactionary online mobs.”
Some parents take their children to the zoo to look at the animals. Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of Gavin, seems to think the red states and normal Americans are the zoo. “Newsom’s Wife Brought Children to Red States to See Racism, Sexism, and Bullying Firsthand” is the headline on a Legal Insurrection item. It refers to a 2023 interview, but it is still telling. Hot Air addresses the same story in a post headlined “Meet the Even More Gruesome Newsom.”
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on birthright citizenship tomorrow. The New York Times endeavors to set the stage with a story on the immigrant backgrounds of several Justices. The story is misleading—none of the stories of the Justices would have been affected, whatever the Supreme Court rules. The Supreme Court case will deal with a Trump Executive Order on birthright citizenship. Daniel McCarthy begins a story headlined “When Birthright Citizenship Goes Wrong” with this acknowledgement:
People born here to at least one citizen parent are automatically citizens, and Trump’s order recognizes the children of lawful permanent residents as birthright citizens, too.
But that’s not enough for those who insist the Constitution’s 14th Amendment establishes a radical definition of birthright citizenship.
As McCarthy goes on to say, the case will deal with children born of what has been dubbed “birth tourism.” It will be a fraught ruling—McCarthy compares it in weightiness to the Dobbs abortion ruling.
Illinois was never a slave state. But why not pay reparations for slavery anyway? Evanston, Ill., is doing just that. Judicial Watch attempted to halt the program, but a judge ruled against the watchdog organization:
The program provides $25,000 direct cash payments to Black residents and descendants of Black residents who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969. Evanston was the first U.S. city to pass a reparations plan, pledging $10 million over a decade to Black residents.
Judicial Watch will appeal. “The Constitution forbids race-based government programs like this,” it argues.
Too Terrible to Contemplate. “Can Man-Made Eggs Be the Future of Fertility?” is a The Free Press headline. “A hedge-fund manager and a Harvard biologist are betting that stem cell–derived eggs will transform how humans reproduce,” is the subhead.
