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The bombings are a powerful deterrent to the 'CRINK' alliance; talk of America’s decline is merely wishful thinking; and leadership matters.The bombings are a powerful deterrent to the 'CRINK' alliance; talk of America’s decline is merely wishful thinking; and leadership matters.How China Is Censoring Scientific Research Across The Globe
The China model has no place in a free society.New pope, old problem: Will Leo XIV resist tyranny?
Catholics have a new pope: Leo XIV. Most of the cardinals who elected him were appointed by Pope Francis, and at first glance, the new pontiff appears to share much with his predecessor. But it’s early yet. Catholics should pray that Leo charts a very different course. The reason is simple: The Catholic Church finds itself locked in a battle against three hostile ideologies — globalism, Islam, and communism. And right now, it’s losing on all fronts.
Pope Francis earned the nickname the "People’s Pope,” a title meant to suggest he championed ordinary Catholics. In truth, he aligned more closely with the globalist left. He openly opposed President Trump’s push to restore American borders and criticized similar efforts by European nations to reclaim their sovereignty. Under Francis, the Church’s advocacy of open borders helped dismantle Western Christendom by encouraging the mass migration of Muslims into Europe. Many of these migrants view their secularized Christian hosts with contempt. European leaders, meanwhile, steeped in guilt and detached from the virtues of their own civilization, capitulated. The result: rape, murder, and a continent sinking into self-loathing. Only a radical reformation can pull Europe back from the brink.
Communism and Christianity cannot coexist. The new pope must say so — clearly, unambiguously, and without fear.
Francis also failed pastorally. Faced with the ongoing sexual abuse crisis that has haunted the Church for decades, he refused to lead with transparency or justice. When he became pope, he had the chance to hold predatory priests accountable for their demonic crimes and restore trust among the faithful. Instead, he did next to nothing. His silence signaled to the hierarchy that abuse could still be covered up, even tolerated. That betrayal deepened the wounds of a Church already in crisis and demoralized millions of believers.
Pope Leo XIV now has a moment to break with the past. He must act swiftly and decisively. The Church cannot afford another papacy of retreat and complicity.
A disgraceful bargain
In December 2017, Pope Francis appeared on Italian television and publicly questioned the traditional wording of the Lord’s Prayer. The closing line — “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13, Luke 11:4) — is a direct teaching from Christ. Francis asked, “What kind of Father would lead his children into temptation?”
That question revealed a deeper confusion. The line reflects not divine cruelty but the profound gift of human freedom. God grants mankind free will — the ability to choose between good and evil, between virtue and temptation. The Lord’s Prayer acknowledges that freedom and asks God to help us navigate it. Pope Francis, it seems, struggled to grasp this. His discomfort with the line suggests a broader discomfort with the idea that freedom comes with moral risk — and that risk, in turn, calls for responsibility, discipline, and faith.
At the same time, Francis sent disgraced pedophile Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to Beijing to negotiate a secret deal with the Chinese Communist Party. That deal handed partial control of the Church in China to the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, a CCP-run front established in 1957 to suppress Christianity and replace it with a state-approved imitation.
Religious freedom in communist China remains a fiction. Teaching the faith to children is effectively banned. The Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association exists not to protect believers but to pacify the Vatican and deceive the West. It offers a false promise of coexistence — as long as Catholicism conforms to state-imposed restrictions. Some call this process the “Sinicization” of the Church. A more accurate term would be its communization.
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The CCP has not simply demanded obedience — it has altered doctrine and replaced sacred symbols. The crucifix — central to the Christian faith as a reminder of Christ’s suffering — has been replaced in churches with portraits of Xi Jinping. That’s not contextualization. That’s desecration.
McCarrick, a despicable character to be sure, traveled to China at least three times to help broker the Vatican’s secret agreement with the CCP. Those negotiations produced disturbing compromises: among them, a shared arrangement where the Vatican and the Communist Party jointly approve bishops. Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong has condemned the deal as a betrayal of faithful Chinese Catholics — many of whom spent their lives resisting communist persecution.
Even Pope Francis acknowledged that the agreement would cause suffering. He was right. Since its implementation, the CCP’s Ministry of State Security has “disappeared” at least 15 bishops who refused to submit to party rule. Their whereabouts remain unknown.
But the suffering extends further — to millions of Chinese parents forbidden from teaching their children about Jesus. Families must wait until their children turn 18 before they can legally attend church, at which point they don’t approach the altar as supplicants to God but as subjects of the Chinese Communist Party. This forced delay in faith formation is not only spiritually damaging — it is deeply humiliating. It turns the act of worship into a form of ideological submission.
No more submission
Some may argue that Chinese Catholics are better off with a compromised, state-approved church than with no church at all. Pope Francis may have reasoned that accepting the replacement of the cross — the profound symbol of Christ’s suffering — with portraits of the Chinese Communist Party’s first secretary was a small price for institutional survival.
But allowing an atheistic regime to oversee Christian worship amounts to cruelty disguised as prudence. It undermines the very purpose of the church. There is something profoundly demoralizing to the entire world to watch the Holy Roman Catholic Church behave in such a craven manner.
Pope Leo XIV must draw a clear line. He must reject every agreement with the Chinese Communist Party that surrenders human freedom in exchange for bureaucratic recognition. The freedom of conscience, the freedom to worship, and the freedom to speak the truth — these stand at the heart of the Christian mission. In China, the underground church continues to bear witness to that mission. Its members worship in secret, often at great personal risk, defying a regime that demands their silence and obedience. Their defiance reveals a faith rooted in courage and dignity.
The CCP’s version of Catholicism, by contrast, fuses materialism, Maoism, and political submission. No Catholic worthy of the name should pretend that such a hybrid represents anything but ideological fraud. Communism and Christianity cannot coexist. The new pope must say so — clearly, unambiguously, and without fear.
What should alarm the faithful most is the Vatican’s submission to totalitarian rule. Instead of forming a bulwark against tyranny, the Catholic Church has, through its secret pact with Beijing, told its flock to put Caesar before God. That message contradicts the very heart of the faith. The Vatican must repeal its secret agreement with the Chinese Communist Party and make public its contents. Only then can the world see clearly the extent of the CCP’s repression — and the Church’s role in enabling it.
The disaster in China offers a painful reminder: While Christ is king and has conquered sin, Satan still rules the world (John 14:30). That truth remains central to Christian belief. It underscores man’s constant dependence on God — and Satan’s persistent effort to pull mankind away. In China’s repression of believers, its sponsorship of Islamic terrorism, its support for Iran’s nuclear program, and its vicious treatment of its own people, Satan’s fingerprints remain obvious and unhidden.
Catholics and all Christians should pray that Pope Leo XIV receives the grace to lead boldly and reject the globalist path of his predecessor. As an American, he might take inspiration from the words of Thomas Jefferson: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” That counsel has never been more urgent. May the new pope heed it.
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Harvard University is making significant academic concessions to align with the Chinese Communist Party, according to a new report.O’Leary calls China tariffs soft, but Mark Levin sees the hidden brilliance
On April 8, Kevin O’Leary, commonly known as Mr. Wonderful, appeared on CNN to give his two cents on President Trump's newly announced 104% tariffs on Chinese imports.
O’Leary was critical but not in the way most pundits are critical. On the contrary, O’Leary argued the tariffs weren’t even close to sufficient.
“104% tariffs in China are not enough. I'm advocating 400%. I do business in China. They don't play by the rules; they've been in the WTO for decades; they have never abided by any of the rules they agreed to when they came in for decades. They cheat; they steal; they steal IP. I can't litigate in their courts; they take product — technology, they steal it; they manufacture it and sell it back here,” he said.
When CNN host Laura Coates pushed back, O’Leary doubled down.
“I want Xi on an airplane to Washington to level the playing field. This is not about tariffs any more,” he said, noting that people can dislike Trump all they want but that standing up to China is simply the right thing to do.
Mark Levin says O’Leary’s “tough talking” is fine but that Trump’s tariff plan is already brilliant.
“What Trump is doing is he's ratcheting, and that's the right way to approach it,” he says, noting that the plan will cause some discomfort for Americans in the short term but ultimately will create fairer trade practices.
However, his tariff plan is much bigger than just trade.
“I think Trump is looking at — if not defeating the communist Chinese, severely damaging their economy and hence militarily, the way Reagan did the Soviet Union through economics,” says Levin.
“The truth is as big as the communist Chinese economy is, it's not as big as ours. It's two-thirds or so the size of the American economy. They cannot beat us economically, at least right now,” he explains.
These tariff plans are aimed at ensuring that it stays that way.
To hear more of Levin’s analysis, watch the clip above.
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Zuckerberg courted China, silenced Trump, and called it ‘neutral’
Mark Zuckerberg appeared on “The Joe Rogan Experience” in January sporting a new hairstyle and a gold chain — an image makeover that began with the billionaire tech mogul sparring with MMA fighters in 2023. He cast himself as a reformed free-speech champion, admitting that under the Biden administration, Meta’s fact-checking regime had become “something out of '1984.'” Something, he said, needed to change.
What he didn’t say: Meta’s censorship playbook has long resembled the Orwellian dystopia he now claims to oppose.
‘Meta lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public.’
Under Zuckerberg’s leadership, Meta has operated with "1984"-style control — censoring content, shaping political narratives, and cozying up to authoritarian regimes, all while pretending to remain neutral. While Zuckerberg criticizes China’s digital authoritarianism, Meta has adopted similar strategies here in the United States: censoring dissent, interfering in elections, and silencing political opponents.
Whose ‘shared values’?
Zuckerberg’s hypocrisy is increasingly obvious. His ties to China and Meta’s repeated attempts to curry favor with the Chinese Communist Party expose a willingness to bend democratic principles in the name of profit. Meta mimics China’s censorship — globally and domestically — even as it publicly condemns the CCP’s control over information.
For years, Meta attacked China’s censorship and human rights abuses. But as China-based tech companies gained ground, Zuckerberg’s rhetoric escalated. He warned about Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek, which were producing superior tools at lower costs. In response, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan assured Americans that the company would build AI based on “our shared values, not China’s.”
Zuckerberg even declared he’d partner with President Trump to resist foreign censorship and defend American tech. But that posturing collapses under scrutiny.
Behind the scenes, Zuckerberg worked hard to ingratiate himself with the Chinese regime. As Steve Sherman reported at RealClearPolicy, Meta pursued “Project Aldrin,” a version of Facebook built to comply with Chinese law. Meta even considered bending its privacy policies to give Beijing access to Hong Kong user data. To ingratiate himself with the CCP, Zuckerberg displayed Xi Jinping’s book on his desk and asked Xi to name his unborn daughter — an offer Xi wisely declined.
These overtures weren’t just about market share. Meta developed a censorship apparatus tailored to China’s demands, including tools to detect and delete politically sensitive content. The company even launched social apps through shell companies in China, and when Chinese regulators pressured Meta to silence dissidents like Guo Wengui, Meta complied.
On April 14, an ex-Facebook employee told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism that Meta executives “lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public.”
Political meddling at scale
After the Trump administration moved to block Chinese tech influence, Meta backed off its China ambitions. But the company didn’t abandon censorship — it just brought it home.
In the United States, Meta began meddling directly in domestic politics. One of the most glaring examples was the two-year ban on President Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram. Framed as a measure against incitement, the decision reeked of political bias. It showed how much power Zuckerberg wields over American discourse.
Then came the 2020 election. Meta, under pressure from the Biden administration, suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story — a move Zuckerberg himself later admitted. Though the story was legitimate, Facebook and Twitter labeled it “misinformation” and throttled its reach. Critics saw this as an obvious attempt to shield Biden from scrutiny weeks before Election Day.
Meta’s interference didn’t stop at content moderation. It also funded election infrastructure. Zuckerberg donated $350 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life and another $50 million to the Center for Election Innovation and Research. These funds were funneled into swing states under the guise of pandemic safety. But critics viewed it as private influence over public elections — a dangerous precedent set by one of the most powerful CEOs in the world.
Meanwhile, Meta executives misled the public about the company’s relationship with China.
Beyond corporate hypocrisy
Zuckerberg’s deference to China wasn’t a phase — it was part of a long-term strategy. In 2014, he wrote the foreword for a book by Xi Jinping. He practiced Mandarin in public appearances. He endorsed Chinese values in private meetings. This wasn’t diplomacy — it was capitulation.
Meta even designed its platform to comply with CCP censorship. When regulators in China asked the company to block dissidents, it did. When Chinese interests threatened Meta’s business model, Zuckerberg yielded.
So when he criticizes China’s authoritarianism now, it rings hollow.
Meta’s behavior isn’t just a story of corporate hypocrisy. It’s a case study in elite manipulation of information, both at home and abroad. Zuckerberg talks about free speech, but Meta suppresses it. He warns of foreign influence, while Meta builds tools that serve foreign powers. He condemns censorship, then practices it with ruthless efficiency.
Americans shouldn’t buy Zuckerberg’s rebrand. He wants to sound like a First Amendment champion on podcasts while continuing to control what you see online.
Meta’s past and present actions are clear: The company interfered in U.S. elections, silenced political speech, and appeased authoritarian regimes — all while pretending to stand for freedom.
Zuckerberg’s censorship isn’t a glitch. It’s the product. And unless Americans demand accountability, it will become the new normal.
Trump's economic blueprint is hiding in plain sight
The Trump tariff plan has rocked the stock market and economists around the world, with the president notoriously labeling the implementation of his tariffs as Liberation Day, while others called his reciprocal moves a “huge mistake.”
Many have argued that Trump did not actually implement reciprocal tariffs at all, though. Look no farther than on X, where even though the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, is one of Trump’s top advisers, a White House post about the tariffs was slapped with a Community Notes label that said the numbers the administration used were not based on actual foreign tariffs at all.
Instead, the correction claimed the numbers were likely based on trade deficits and theoretical tariff amounts combined.
— (@)
Although it is worth noting that Trump did reveal that the numbers consisted of “the combined risk" of all foreign tariffs, “non-monetary barriers,” and “other forms of cheating,” the administration soon changed its tune to focus solely on Chinese trade.
After the White House announced another pause on tariffs for all but China, tariffs for which were raised to 125% (a number that may have changed by the time you read this), Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went so far as to say that this was the president’s plan from the beginning.
“This was the president's strategy all along. You might even say that he goaded China into a bad position,” Bessent told reporters.
Bessent then said China’s 84% retaliatory tariffs had exposed the communist nation as “bad actors.”
While billionaire Bill Ackman called Trump’s latest shift “brilliantly executed,” some have argued that Trump’s economic plan is a case of writing on the wall and is following the work of former Hudson Bay senior strategist Stephen Miran.
Miran, Trump's top financial consultant as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, was appointed by the president-elect in November 2024. Miran was also a Treasury Department adviser during Trump's first term and later worked at investment firm Hudson Bay Capital Management, where he published a guide on global trade in November.
The document, titled “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System,” contains many aspects congruent with Trump’s current plan, especially in relation to tariffs.
While the document first noted that Trump proposed 60% tariffs on China during his campaign (the real number turned out to be 34%), the document did note a 10% base tariff on the rest of the world, which panned out correctly.
More accurately, Miran’s piece said the tariff plan would be deeply “intertwined with national security concerns.”
This indeed happened on Liberation Day, when Trump declared it a national emergency for the United States to “reindustrialize.”
'China's the big the big player in this whole tariff war.'
The initial tariffs and national emergency were all too easy to predict, according to Danny Polishchuk, a stand-up comedian who made his first economic predictions in January based on Miran’s document.
"He's gonna tariff every f**king country on earth," Polishchuk said. "[Trump] is trying to just totally redo the entire global financial system to benefit America, because the way that it's currently designed was to not benefit America.”
— (@)
Polishchuk, who has a degree in economics from the University of Guelph, told Blaze News that while media members have been speculating for months, Trump’s plan has “been in this paper the whole time.”
Before Trump’s move to rescind tariffs on all but the Chinese, Polishchuk also accurately predicted that China would be the focus of the administration moving forward.
“China's the big player in this whole tariff war; they're bigger than anybody else,” he explained.
“I don’t think Xi Jinping wants to seem weak,” Polishchuk continued. “It’s a situation of who is going to blink first.”
The Miran document also floated the idea of using tariffs to force China into a deal, an idea Trump endorsed soon after China retaliated.
“A deal’s going to be made with China,” Trump bluntly said. “I just want fair.”
Purposely tanking?
Like a last-place team looking for better draft picks, the Miran document suggested that currency could be purposely tanked to get a better deal. It further suggested that the United States under Trump could attempt to devalue its own currency to make paying off its debts easier, as well as make the prospect of bringing manufacturing into the United States a cheaper endeavor.
As the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency, the “overvaluation” of the dollar has “weighed heavily on the American manufacturing sector while benefiting financialized sectors of the economy in manners that benefit wealthy Americans,” Miran wrote.
While this was theorized in November, Trump himself shared a post early in April about “purposely crashing the market,” something investor David Bahnsen said is a noted strategy.
Bahnsen is the managing partner and CIO of the Bahnsen Group, a firm overseeing more than $4 billion, per Bloomberg, and he spoke to Blaze News about the reflections of the document in Trump’s policy.
“The reason one wants to weaken a currency is to pay a bill with less money,” Bahnsen said. “It is a tool for politicians to excessively borrow and pay back the borrowed money with money that is worthless. That's why there's an advantage,” he explained.
Bahnsen said the method is advantageous to the country with the trade deficit — in this case, the United States — because that country holds the deficit dollars in its own accounts and currency, which then can be manipulated.
Summarized, currency manipulation, or tanking one’s currency value, is done to “either to pay back bills with depreciated dollars or to pay a foreign country for goods and services with depreciated dollars.”
Bahnsen added, “China doesn't like that.”
The Mar-a-Lago Accord
The general thrust of the paper, as Bahnsen put it, is focused on the “excessively strong” U.S. dollar that is being used as a competitive disadvantage in terms of global trade. This is something that President Trump very likely agrees with, the investor claimed.
However, it is the ethics behind the tactic of “currency manipulation” that Bahnsen did not think that Miran specifically addressed; also that Americans need to come to terms with the fact that their government is sometimes the one that is manipulating currency.
“We're hardly blameless on this front ourselves,” Bahnsen stated.
At the same time, both economic experts explained that Trump is striving for what has been referred to as the “Mar-a-Lago Accord.”
The term has seen extremely limited mainstream usage but is mentioned in the economic document as a potential Trump plan to get trading partners to help strengthen their own currencies while decreasing the value of the U.S. dollar simultaneously.
As alluded to previously, this would theoretically boost U.S. manufacturing by making American exports cheaper and imports more expensive.
This speculative strategy seemingly only works with the positioning power that the United States holds, something even Chinese state media seems to recognize.
At the time of this publication, the South China Morning Post has the most detailed reference to the Miran document of any mainstream outlets and warns that it could turn out poorly for the Chinese.
When referring to the Plaza Accord struck with Japan in the 1980s, the Chinese outlet admitted the new American plans could have heavy implications on the Chinese economy and even cited a source that claims China may surprisingly end up agreeing with the implications of the Mar-a-Lago Accord.
“Beijing will make decisions based on its own interests rather than simply follow a U.S.-led accord,” said Ding Shuang, chief Greater China economist at Standard Chartered.
However, the economist added, “In bilateral trade negotiations, China may out of its own interest — and in line with the spirit of the Mar-a-Lago Accord — keep the yuan relatively strong, but it will not agree to a significant appreciation.”
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