Trump’s tariffs take a flamethrower to the free trade lie



The globalist fairy tale is finally unraveling — and not a moment too soon.

For decades, Americans were sold the shiny promise of globalization: open markets, booming trade, cheaper goods, and peace through economic integration. But behind the glittering sales pitch was a brutal reality — the slow, deliberate hollowing out of the American middle class.

Trump’s tariffs are not just about trade. They’re about rebuilding what our elites sold off piece by piece.

Enough of this.

President Donald Trump’s recent announcement on tariffs sent the elites — those who profited most from this decades-long experiment — into full panic mode, and for good reason. Their gravy train may finally be running out of track.

This isn’t about economic theory. This is about the lives, livelihoods, and dignity of the American people — especially those in towns and cities that once hummed with the sound of industry.

How it started

The North American Free Trade Agreement was the appetizer in a global feast that served American manufacturing to foreign competitors on a silver platter. Even President Bill Clinton, at the NAFTA signing ceremony in 1993, seemed eager to get past the domestic details and embrace the coming wave of globalization.

By the early 2000s, the United States was importing at unprecedented rates. Today, the trade deficit with the European Union alone is $235 billion. That’s not trade — that’s surrender. Our deficit with Europe hasn’t fallen below $100 billion since 2011.

None of this happened by accident.

It began with a handshake in 1972, when President Richard Nixon traveled to Mao Zedong’s China. At the time, China was riding bicycles and rationing rice. No one imagined that opening the door to trade would lead to the economic superpower we face today.

But by 2001, that door had been blasted open. China joined the World Trade Organization, committing to lower tariffs and removing trade barriers. American markets were flooded with cheap Chinese goods — and American workers were left holding an empty lunch pail.

The result was a trade deficit with China that ballooned to $295 billion last year. That’s the largest deficit we have with any country. Our total trade deficit in 2024 was a record $1.2 trillion — the fourth consecutive year topping $1 trillion.

The human toll

The fallout from this one-sided relationship with China is staggering. A 2016 MIT study found that, in the decade following China’s World Trade Organization entry, the U.S. lost 2.4 million jobs — nearly a million in manufacturing alone. The researchers concluded that international trade makes low-skilled workers in America “worse off — not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis.”

You’d think a quote like that would be plastered across every office in Congress. But no. The political class — especially on the left — chose to ignore it.

Instead, they wring their hands in confusion when working-class Americans turn to a leader like Donald Trump. “Why are they so angry?” they ask, while standing atop the wreckage of towns they helped dismantle.

About that wreckage

In Galesburg, Illinois, Maytag once employed 5,000 workers. The last refrigerator rolled off the line in 2004. The site is now rubble and weeds.

Youngstown, Ohio — once a titan of American steel — has lost 60% of its population since the 1970s. Gary, Indiana, once home to U.S. Steel’s largest mill, has over 10,000 abandoned buildings. In Flint, Michigan, over 80,000 GM jobs vanished. By 2016, over half of men ages 25 to 54 in Flint were unemployed. Buick City, once a symbol of industrial might, was demolished in 2002.

Detroit, once richer than Boston, is now 40% poorer. The U.S. auto parts industry lost 419,000 jobs in the decade after China joined the WTO.

Even NPR admitted that “the China Shock created what looked like miniature Great Depressions” in these areas.

From dream to despair

Between 2000 and 2014, America lost 5 million manufacturing jobs — the steepest decline in American history.

Meanwhile, in the same time period, corporate profits soared 600%. CEO pay has ballooned to 290 times that of the average worker. In 1965, it was 21 times. Since 1978, CEO compensation has grown by over 1,000%. Regular worker pay? Just 24%.

They told us the rising tide would lift all boats. Turns out, it mostly lifted yachts. And the rest of the boats? Capsized.

This economic assault came with a steep psychological toll.

A 2017 Princeton study found a link between rising deaths of despair — suicide, alcoholism, drug overdoses — and job losses in trade-exposed areas.

Since 1999, overdose deaths in America have increased sixfold. In Ohio, they rose 1,000% between 2001 and 2017. The hardest-hit areas? Deindustrialized, working-class communities.

The American middle class is vanishing. In 1971, 61% of households were middle class. By 2023, it was just 51%. In 1950, manufacturing jobs made up 30% of total U.S. employment. Today, they make up just 8%.

RELATED: Why tariffs are the key to America’s industrial comeback

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There are fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than there were in 1941 — before we entered World War II — despite our population more than doubling.

This collapse hit black workers especially hard. Between 1998 and 2020, more than 646,000 manufacturing jobs held by black Americans disappeared — a 30% loss in that sector.

A reckoning long overdue

Trump’s tariff push is a long-overdue confrontation with the failed consensus of globalization. For 25 years, the arrangement has been spectacular — for China and for U.S. corporations chasing cheap labor. But for America’s workers and towns, it has been catastrophic.

Yes, the corporate press is scoffing. CBS News recently “fact-checked” Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s claim that America has lost 90,000 factories since NAFTA. The correct number, they said, was actually 70,500.

Oh? Only 70,500? As if that’s supposed to be reassuring.

These aren’t merely statistics. These are livelihoods — entire communities turned into ghost towns. Every shuttered factory was once a promise of stability, dignity, and upward mobility. And with each closure, that promise was betrayed.

We’ve allowed globalization to crush the backbone of this country — the working men and women who don’t show up on CNBC but who built the very foundation we all stand on.

Trump’s tariffs are not just about trade. They’re about sovereignty. They’re about self-respect. They’re about rebuilding what our elites sold off piece by piece.

This is not a perfect plan. But it’s the first real attempt in decades to confront the human cost of globalization. It’s a wager that America can still choose dignity over dependence, self-sufficiency over servitude.

Let’s hope we’re not too late.

China is winning the Cold War 2.0 ... and we’re letting it happen



The threat to the United States from the People’s Republic of China is multifaceted, long-term, and aggressive. Whether it’s from military modernization to economic coercion, cyber warfare to space competition, China’s national security challenge is global, and it targets U.S. interests, values, security, and standing in the world.

While much of the focus of U.S. policymakers has been on the military threat from China, the communist country has also implemented a multipronged approach to weaken the United States economically, politically, culturally, and diplomatically. It is enlisting a whole-of-government strategy, blending civil and military approaches with tactics short of war to expand its influence and improve its geopolitical position.

The US is involved in a cold war with China and urgently needs to do more to stop its aggressive actions.

China's determined plan uses economics, media, education, politics, culture, diplomacy, and information — among many other approaches — in a highly integrated and orchestrated fashion. Its actions take place within the U.S. domestically. It seeks to undermine the U.S. regionally and globally, while sowing doubt in the minds of U.S. allies.

In short, in many respects, the U.S. is involved in a cold war with China and urgently needs to do more to stop its aggressive actions.

Reshaping public opinion

A central component of the cold war with China is the effort of its government to influence American public opinion and culture. The Chinese government has a veritable army of anonymous social media accounts, which it uses to not only present its views but to foment division among our people while silencing critics of its regime. It also distributes government-funded newspapers within the U.S., little more than propaganda broadsheets, and invests in key media infrastructure — not only to support its views but also to mute criticisms of its policies.

Additionally, through massive state support, it also seeks to shape American culture through supporting select movies, such as the 2019 movie "Midway," to create division between the alliance of the United States and Japan as well as prompting the temporary removal of the flag of Taiwan from the jacket of the actor Tom Cruise in the 2022 movie “Top Gun: Maverick.”

Much like the Soviet Union during the Cold War, China uses all of its resources to challenge, coerce, silence, and divide opinions about its policies and actions. It uses cultural influence as much as any other capability at its disposal.

No better example of China’s cold war tactics is what the regime has done to expand its capabilities in space. Through robust state-funded support, economic espionage, theft, and coercion, China has aggressively grown its constellation of satellites and other capabilities, giving its military and intelligence services, as well as its state-run industries, significant advantages. To this end, it has even tried to replicate Elon Musk’s reusable rocket concept, the Starship, as well as its Mechazilla Catching Tower.

These are just the latest examples of Chinese economic espionage, which has been going on for decades and done great harm to our commercial space companies. Even as it has advocated for peaceful uses of space, China has also aggressively militarized space, creating advantages that could be used in a future conflict. The U.S. needs to do a better job at confronting this sustained threat.

Attacking global institutions

The Chinese government has also sought to systematically expand its power and take over international institutions affiliated with the United Nations and other global and regional organizations. These efforts are made not only to expand its control but also to mute international criticism of China’s actions and to create diplomatic and other complications for the U.S. and its allies.

Consider China’s involvement with United Nations environmental organizations — how it has been able to silence criticism and prevent investigations of the activities of its maritime militia.

RELATED: America’s faith in ‘free trade’ empowered China’s apartheid machine

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China pillages fish stocks around the globe and often destroys reefs and harasses other national fishing fleets. It has also done much to downplay the country’s significant contributions to air pollution and how its development projects worldwide, as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, destroy the environment. Finally, it consistently seeks to reduce Taiwan’s role on the world’s stage and delegitimize its political system and exclude it from international forums.

While China’s leaders publicly call for peaceful relations with the United States, they are relentlessly pursuing a campaign to challenge the United States in virtually every economic, political, diplomatic, and military sphere of activity. China consistently seeks advantages using a sustained, long-term campaign of relentlessly expanding its influence using all of the resources of its government.

In many respects, our country is involved in a new cold war with China, requiring a similarly enduring approach that enlists not just the resources of the United States government but also of our own civil society, allies and partners, and freedom-loving people across the world. We must do a better job of making America first and China last.

Editor’s note: This article was published originally by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.

Trump’s trade crackdown may be US Steel’s last shot



Cleveland-Cliffs, America’s fourth-largest steel producer, stunned West Virginia earlier this month by shelving plans to reopen a shuttered steel mill as an electrical transformer plant.

The project would have restored 600 of the 1,000 jobs lost when the company idled the mill in February. Instead, the cancellation marked just one of several disappointing announcements since March, all driven by the company’s ongoing financial problems. In total, Cleveland-Cliffs plans to idle six facilities across Pennsylvania and the Midwest.

If the choice is between watching Cleveland-Cliffs and US Steel collapse or breathing new life into one through foreign direct investment, Trump won’t hesitate.

And who suffers most? Steelworkers and their families — the people left out of the headlines.

I’ve tracked the steel industry’s decline for decades, first as the lone free-market conservative senior adviser at the Alliance for American Manufacturing, and later through various economic roles in Washington, D.C. Cleveland-Cliffs’ troubles are just the latest symptoms of a chronically ailing American steel sector, burdened by nearly a dozen deeply rooted problems that won’t be solved quickly.

Steelmakers now face skyrocketing costs for raw materials, energy, and labor. At the same time, they compete against a global glut of cheap steel, particularly from Chinese companies that flood markets and drive down prices. Geopolitical tensions, supply shortages, and transportation choke points only add to the chaos. The result: an industry pushed to the brink — and workers left behind.

Some steel companies are taking creative steps to survive. In December 2023, U.S. Steel announced a proposed sale to Japanese rival Nippon Steel. CEO David Burritt had warned just three months earlier that without a strong buyer, he would likely shut down the Mon Valley Works plant near Pittsburgh — an iconic facility employing more than 3,000 workers — and move company headquarters from the “Steel City” to Arkansas.

Nippon Steel emerged as the most financially viable bidder, outpacing Cleveland-Cliffs, which remains weighed down by persistent losses. Despite this, the Biden administration blocked the deal. President Trump initially opposed the sale but has since indicated a willingness to approve it.

For years, I’ve advocated better trade policies — especially deregulation and aggressive action against China. As a former commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, I pushed to crack down on China’s intellectual property theft and ongoing geo-economic abuses. Trump’s trade agenda gives the United States its best shot in decades to protect jobs from Chinese exploitation and reopen long-shuttered paths to profitable domestic manufacturing.

RELATED: Can Trump revive American steel?

Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

On the home front, Trump’s 10-to-1 deregulation initiative — eliminating 10 old rules for every new one — could transform the business landscape. He’s already eyeing 44 regulations that manufacturers want repealed. What critics call a “tariff war” with China is really just Washington’s overdue reckoning with decades of failure to hold Beijing accountable.

These policy reforms won’t take effect overnight. And manufacturers like U.S. Steel can’t afford to wait while neglect and decay continue. Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion bid offers a direct infusion of capital that could revive this historic company and inject new life into a battered industry.

Look at what Nippon’s latest offer — now exceeding $20 billion — includes:

  • A $1.3 billion commitment to upgrade and modernize two U.S. Steel plants.
  • Guarantees to retain the full U.S. Steel workforce and honor existing union contracts.
  • A $5,000 bonus for every U.S. Steel employee once the deal closes.

President Trump understands business and negotiation. His priority — rightly — focuses on revitalizing American industry and creating jobs that put affordable groceries, including now-cheaper eggs, back on the tables of steelworkers.

If the choice is between watching Cleveland-Cliffs and U.S. Steel collapse or breathing new life into one through foreign direct investment, Trump won’t hesitate. He’ll choose growth — and he’ll be right to do so.

America’s faith in ‘free trade’ empowered China’s apartheid machine



Like the “Free Tibet” campaign of the late 1990s, concern for China’s Uyghur population has faded into the background. In the mid-2010s, Beijing faced a short-lived wave of international criticism after General Secretary Xi Jinping created a vast network of internment camps. Nearly three million Uyghurs have been detained and subjected to brutal conditions.

Republicans looking to push back against anti-tariff Democrats should take note. This humanitarian catastrophe continues today, yet receives little sustained attention. It ranks among the most severe human-rights abuses on the planet — and American free-trade policies may have helped enable it. For decades, U.S. leaders embraced open commerce with China while ignoring the costs. That strategic blindness now carries a moral price.

Has our refusal to implement strong tariffs created a monster?

Beijing has long portrayed Xinjiang separatists as Islamic terrorists. This year marks a decade since their last major act of violence — a brutal knife attack at a coal mine that left 50 people dead, mostly Han Chinese workers and police. Horrific as it was, critics argue the assault, like previous incidents, reflected a desperate backlash against the Chinese state’s colonial-style repression.

Since Xi Jinping’s crackdown, no similar attacks have occurred. But the sheer scale of the regime’s response pushes China into apartheid territory — arguably beyond.

Reports estimate that up to three million of China’s 10-million-strong Uyghur population are now detained in so-called re-education camps. These camps aim to strip the Sunni Muslim minority of its identity and recast them as loyal subjects of the Chinese Communist Party.

Other reports indicate that many Uyghurs held in China’s re-education camps are forced to work in factories under conditions tantamount to slavery. Even more disturbing, some evidence suggests that, after “re-education,” Uyghurs are sold online in batches to employers across the country. Xinjiang produces one-fifth of the world’s cotton, and estimates say half a million Uyghurs are forced to pick it. That “free labor” gives Chinese manufacturers a competitive edge — one reportedly tied to the bankruptcy of major U.S. retailer Forever 21.

Democrats may oppose forced labor in theory, but where is the push to penalize what amounts to a 21st-century plantation economy? Would they stay silent if Russia did the same?

One of the most chilling aspects of Beijing’s ethnic campaign is its attempt to re-engineer Xinjiang’s population. This isn’t new. Seventy years ago, Mao Zedong launched a mass migration project to dilute the region’s Uyghur majority. The “Great Leap West,” introduced in 2000, revived the strategy — this time using financial incentives to bring Han Chinese into Xinjiang and offering jobs reserved for Han applicants outside the region. The policy remains in effect, along with forced out-migration of Uyghurs to other parts of China.

Even Western media outlets — usually quick to denounce any effort to reduce immigration — have expressed alarm over Beijing’s demographic engineering in Xinjiang. Many now acknowledge the regime’s mass Han migration into the region as a deliberate attempt to dilute the Uyghur population and strip the minority of any political influence.

More disturbing still are reports of mass sterilization campaigns. Chinese authorities have allegedly targeted Uyghur women to suppress birth rates. In 1990, hundreds of Uyghur men stormed a government building to protest forced abortions — a clash that ended with nearly 20 people dead.

The demographic consequences are staggering. In 1955, Uyghurs made up 90% of Xinjiang’s population. Today, they account for less than half.

Pro-Trump conservatives should grasp the strategic value of highlighting China’s use of migration as a political weapon. Doing so forces the left to confront a reality it usually denies: replacement-level immigration exists, and it carries consequences. Group identity rights don’t just apply to favored minorities — they apply to everyone, including the West.

Consider the demographic parallels. America’s historic, European-descended majority has dropped from 90% after World War II to 57% today. The left has openly — and at times grotesquely — celebrated that decline.

Like Beijing, the Democratic Party understands that demography is destiny. China aims to dominate its non-Han regions. Democrats aim to secure permanent political dominance over what they call “our democracy.”

By exposing the left’s selective outrage — condemning China’s demographic manipulation while applauding similar trends in the West — conservatives can force a reckoning. If it’s wrong in Xinjiang, it’s wrong here, too. And no amount of rhetorical gymnastics can cover up the left’s inconsistency, arbitrariness, and odious bigotry.

China’s mass enslavement of millions should spark outrage at least equal to what the West once directed at apartheid South Africa. That regime was boycotted into submission. Why shouldn’t the same standard apply to Beijing?

As President Trump has rightly asked: Why did we admit China into the World Trade Organization in 2001? What made anyone believe it would ever play by WTO rules — rules it had already vowed to ignore behind closed doors? Was George W. Bush’s administration, along with the now-defunct neoconservative GOP, truly naïve enough to think trade would transform China into a democracy?

More to the point, have we — not just our leaders, but the American people — enabled this? By enriching China through free trade, have we given it the means to carry out apartheid-level abuses against its Turkic Muslim minority?

And has our refusal to implement strong tariffs created a monster?

The anti-Trump, anti-tariff chorus must answer these questions. Its blind faith in globalization didn’t just cost us factories and jobs. It helped fund a regime that builds camps, crushes dissent, and rewrites humanity in its own image.

Can America survive its ‘Jezebelification’?



We, the human race, currently reside in a post-monarchy and increasingly post-nation-state world.

One could say that all those living in the West, and soon enough the rest of the world, in the year of our Lord 2024 are essentially transnational nomads — physically, digitally, and spiritually.

Everything that makes the world economy run — oil pipelines, shipping lanes, computer networks, trade agreements — exists to serve the Jezebel spirit with ruthless efficiency.

We are all splintered off into our own little worlds. No one keeps the same job, the same house, the same friends, the same spouse, or even the same kids for too long. Everything and everyone is temporal, transient, commodified.

Now why is that? Short answer: globalization

Defining the terms

OK, so what's globalization?

The Oxford Dictionary defines globalization as “the increasing integration of economies around the world, particularly through the movement of goods, services, and capital across borders. The term sometimes also refers to the movement of people (labor) and knowledge (technology) across international borders.”

But you know, technical terms and their definitions don't really give the average Joe any real understanding about the world around us.

What is globalization, really? What is its essence? What drives men to build systems that move money, resources, and (don't forget) migrants to different parts of the world?

Well, I have a mental model for you to internalize.

Babylon and Jezebel

In order to understand "globalization," you need to understand two prerequisite, biblically based terms. We need to start referring to globalization by two other sub-categories: Babylonification and Jezebelification. Let's break it down.

Babylonification specifically refers to the mass deracination and migration of large groups of people into big melting-pot societies, much like the major cities of the U.S. and the rest of the West today and much like the original Tower of Babel described in the Bible (Genesis 11:1-9).

The lens that the Babylonification model provides us allows us to see Western culture for what it truly is: a concrete jungle of a cesspit that merely maintains the façade and appearance of a civilized and functioning society.

Babylon (aka the establishment regime) functions to procure peoples and cultures from different locations all over the world and stick them into a centralized metropolitan district in order to perform low-wage labor, live in shoebox housing, eat soy slop, and turn a once ethnically homogenous neighborhood into a multicultural bazaar.

All the decision-making on policy comes from a centralized bureaucratic authority rather than the local community.

The Babylon system does not care for the cultures, histories, and subsequent cultural and historical differences of the peoples it procures and the natives it governs. It only cares for maximal economic output.

Therefore, Babylonification aims to strip all cultures, languages, and histories and distill them into one culture, one language, and one history in order to breed a compliant laborer population. The commodification of the labor class and the dissolution of the nations exist only to serve the desires of the ruling class.

Now, why does Babylonification exist? This leads us into a discussion about Jezebelification.

‘The great prostitute’

Jezebelification can be described as the engine of Babylonification, the underlying motive of the agents who run Babylon. Whereas Babylonification is the corporeal shell, Jezebelification is the heart that pumps its blood.

It is the reason why the world has become more and more globalized. As we see in Revelation 17:1-2:

“Come, I will show you the judgment of the great prostitute who is seated on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality, and with the wine of whose sexual immorality the dwellers on earth have become drunk.”

And again in Revelation 18:11-13:

"And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore, cargo of gold, silver, jewels, pearls, fine linen, purple cloth, silk, scarlet cloth, all kinds of scented wood, all kinds of articles of ivory, all kinds of articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour, wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves, that is, human souls."

The kings and merchants are a reference to the leaders of business and government of the world, who are motivated solely by power, greed, and sexual satisfaction. They seek only to satisfy their carnal desire, which is an appetite that can never be quenched.

They want to serve the Jezebel spirit that inhabits them.

So what do they do?

Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll

They get rich by making products and services that satisfy their unquenchable erotic Jezebel spirit. They create makeup, lingerie, fast food, social media, and (of course) sex trafficking networks — anything and everything that instantly gratifies the whims of the Jezebel.

And as globalization grows and becomes more integrated, so does the power of Babylonification, as the unquenching lust of the Jezebel spirit craves ever more immediate gratification.

Everything that makes the world economy run — oil pipelines, shipping lanes, computer networks, trade agreements — exists to serve the Jezebel spirit with ruthless efficiency.

Having the entire world’s infrastructure dependent upon the desires of the Jezebel spirit also means that any enterprise not dedicated to serving that spirit will fail.

In a highly globalized world, no company can be self-sufficient, as all the pieces in the network depend on each other like links in a chain.

Any company refusing to accept its role as cog in the greater Babylonian machine will soon find itself cut off from the services it needs to sustain itself. Social media and payment processing are but two prominent examples.

Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll? Now that these commodities drive our entire market economy, we can see the old Boomer rallying cry for what it really was: a sales pitch. And in this post-Jezebelification world, it’s an offer we can’t refuse.

The Ruling Class Screwed Over Manufacturing Towns Like East Palestine Long Before A Train Derailed

Even with all the attention it has recently received, East Palestine is easy to miss.

Check out Obama’s multimillion-dollar mansion – then read what he says about 'obscene inequality' in America



Barack Obama is one skilled man when it comes to rhetoric.

“It all sounds right, and he looks good, and the suit fits,” Dave Rubin says in response to a recent lecture the former president gave on CNN.

But upon closer examination, there’s some incongruity.

“Our democracy is not going to be healthy,” Obama says, “with the levels of inequality that we’ve seen … obscene inequality.”

“It’s very hard to sustain a democracy when you have such massive concentrations of wealth,” he continues.

“On first glance, it all sort of makes sense,” Rubin says. But “of course … you just have to peel that thin veneer, and you can see the nonsense.”

Firstly, it’s important to note that Barack Obama “was a community organizer before he was a senator and then president and somehow is now worth, like, hundreds of millions of dollars,” Rubin explains.

Add to that the fact that he owns a 30-acre estate in Martha’s Vineyard that costs $11.75 million.

Obscene inequality indeed.

See for yourself — watch the clip here.


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Pushing ‘College For All’ Makes Americans Poorer. Here’s What We Need Instead

Our good jobs went to China, and better jobs never emerged here. China's workers made out while ours suffered.