US, Saudi Arabia said to near deal on chip exports

 The Trump administration and Saudi Arabia are close to finalizing an agreement that would allow United States chipmakers to export semiconductors to the kingdom, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

The chips would power data centers for artificial intelligence (AI) model training, as part of the administration's global tech strategy.

The talks began in May after US President Donald Trump highlighted partnerships between Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/US-Saudi-Arabia-said-to-near-deal-on-chip-exports/64956291

Trump: No one will be forced to leave Gaza

 United States President Donald Trump stressed on Thursday that no one "will be forced to leave" the Gaza Strip.

"It's the opposite. This is a great peace plan. This is a plan that was supported by everybody. As I said, they are dancing in the streets in many many countries right now. It's amazing. I've never seen anything like it," the US head of state commented while addressing reporters at the White House.

He added that the International Stabilization Force, which is set to be deployed to Gaza, is "to be determined." Previously, Hamas officially confirmed that it reached a ceasefire deal with Israel.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Trump:-No-one-will-be-forced-to-leave-Gaza/64956703

Emails: Biden Demanded CIA Coverup of Embarrassing Ukraine Intel

 At the specific request of then-Vice President Joe Biden, the CIA buried an embarrassing intelligence report detailing the poor view the Ukrainian government took of his diplomatic efforts and the business dealings of his own family in that country.

Biden had traveled to Kyiv in December 2015, ostensibly to meet with leaders of that fledgling democracy and to deliver a warning against “the cancer of corruption.” And during an address to the Ukrainian parliament, he did condemn the “pervasive poison of cronyism, corruption, and kleptocracy.”

But behind the scenes, Ukrainian officials expressed “bewilderment and disappointment” that the vice president had crossed the Atlantic “almost exclusively to deliver a generic speech.” Officials close to then-President Petro Poroshenko had hoped for guidance “in support of or against specific officials within the Ukrainian government.” They discovered instead that Biden “had no intention of discussing substantive matters.”

After Biden returned stateside, members of the Poroshenko administration “privately mused” at how American media treated “the alleged ties” of his family “to corrupt business practices in Ukraine.” It was, in their minds, “evidence of a double standard within the United States Government towards matters of corruption and political power.”

Such was the blunt determination of a 2016 report prepared by the CIA and reviewed by RealClearPolitics. It would have been a humiliating assessment for Biden, whom President Obama had entrusted with all things Ukraine. So the vice president and his team killed it.

In an email sent to the CIA on Feb. 10, 2016, an individual in the office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote, “I just spoke with VP/NSA and he would strongly prefer the report not/not [sic] be disseminated,” a reference to Biden and to Colin Kahl, who served as his national security advisor.

“Thanks for understanding,” concluded an individual responsible for delivering the president’s daily brief, a summary of intelligence and analysis presented in the Oval Office each morning.

The buried report and the accompanying correspondence from Biden’s team are only now coming to light. They are the latest tranche of documents declassified by CIA Director John Ratcliffe as the Trump administration continues its review of how intelligence is collected and reported.

The documents themselves are heavily redacted, and according to a senior CIA official, only recently discovered. “We believe that transparency is important,” the official said when RCP asked about the motivation for the release of the documents. The individual stressed also that “whenever possible” the agency “will release information to help serve the public interest in avoiding any future weaponization or politicization of the intelligence community.”

After-action reports are not uncommon, and administrations regularly seek additional information to gauge the effectiveness of their diplomatic efforts. What is striking, however, is that a member of the intelligence community sought to clear a report with Biden and his team before presenting the information to the president. In a reference to the office of the vice president, the subject of the email reads “OVP query regarding draft.”

It is not clear whether the information ultimately made its way to Obama. Analysts at the CIA have since reviewed the draft report and determined, according to the official, that the report would have been beneficial to the U.S. policymakers in their dealings with the Ukrainian government – “this was information of intelligence value.”

Even at that time, the foreign business dealings of the Biden family were no secret. In a writeup of the trip, the New York Times reported that “the credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings.” The Times noted in a Dec. 15, 2015, editorial, “This is not a board he should be sitting on.”

The same message was ricocheting around the West Wing among Obama officials alarmed by the blasé attitude the Biden family was taking to their global business portfolio. Multiple officials raised the alarm in the Obama White House about Hunter Biden’s position with Burisma, including George Kent, U.S. deputy chief of mission to Ukraine. He worried that it created the appearance of impropriety and undermined the American anti-corruption message.

Kent later testified before Congress that he brought his concerns directly to Biden’s team. He was told that the vice president’s eldest son, Beau, was dying of cancer “and there was no further bandwidth to deal with family-related issues.”

It would later become the thrust of President Trump’s attack on Biden during the 2020 campaign, thanks in large part to Biden’s own boasting. Between his exit from office and his bid for the White House, Biden bragged about withholding aid to Ukraine if Poroshenko did not fire Victor Shokin, the country’s prosecutor general.

Republicans alleged that Biden wanted Shokin axed to avoid an investigation into Burisma. Democrats responded that the Ukrainian prosecutor was himself corrupt and slow-walking investigations.

Regardless, Biden implied that he had strong-armed the Ukrainians into that good-government reform during an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2019. The international organization had been pressing Ukraine to remove Shokin from office over corruption allegations. In the former vice president’s telling, he was the one willing to play hard ball.

“‘I’m going to be leaving here in six hours,’” Biden would recall telling Poroshenko. “‘If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”

Shokin was not removed by the Ukrainian parliament until March of 2016. If Biden did pressure Poroshenko to give him the boot during his trip the year before, the CIA did not pick up on chatter that the message had been received. But his overtures to Ukraine continued.

On Feb. 11, 2016, the day after his office spiked the intelligence report, Biden put in a call to Poroshenko. According to a readout released by the White House, the two men agreed “that it is essential for Ukraine to continue to take action to root out corruption and implement reforms.”

Philip Wegmann is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/10/07/emails_biden_demanded_cia_coverup_embarrassing_ukraine_intelligence__153374.html

Ilhan Omar Betrays the Meaning of Citizenship

 

It’s not about bloodlines or imported ideologies.

Loyalty can elevate or enslave. Placed in truth, it anchors. Placed in tribe, it distorts. Though I have known both, I abandoned the latter and embraced the former. That is why when I look at Ilhan Omar and Charlie Kirk, I see two distinct moral universes.

Charlie’s foundation was faith in Christ and country, in family and the free market. His faith was that America embodies true freedom and dignity because our country was founded on biblical principles—principles that demand that power be checked and the weak be protected.

Ilhan Omar’s foundation rests on three pillars: clan, Islamism, and leftism. Each demands loyalty not to principle but to faction. Each reduces life to a struggle for dominance.

I know Omar’s world. It is a place without law, where men with swords and guns decide the fate of neighbors, where girls are cut to mark them as pure, where bribes stand in for justice. These are not random misfortunes, but the dynamics of the system Omar embodies. It incentivizes and rewards absolute and unchecked power—even at the expense of life, limb, and property.

The foundation of Omar’s world is the clan. From birth, children are taught to display unquestioning loyalty to their group, to obey a rigid code of honor and shame without question. Loyalty to kin is praised above all else. The cost of such loyalty, however, is naked, irrational hostility to all outsiders. Distrust, concealment, and perceived persecution feed collective paranoia, and zero-sum thinking rules daily life. Lying and cheating are not sins if they serve the group.

Layered on that is Islamism. The headscarf Omar wears is not a symbol of modesty but a political marker. Her rhetoric on Jews and Israel follows the Muslim Brotherhood script: condemn Israel at every turn, blame Jews for every setback, and treat unbelievers as entirely expendable. There is no depth, only disdain.

And then comes today’s prevailing Leninist leftism. Omar merges the absolutism of clan and the dogmatism of Islamism with the mantras of Marxism: take from the rich and hand to the poor, sanctify grievance, and frame history as an endless struggle between identity groups. But here lies the irony. She now enjoys the wealth of the very system she supposedly despises. She is not the barefoot refugee she once was. She is a multi-millionaire, living in luxury, lecturing Americans about redistribution while securing her own fortune. Her maxims remain Marxist, but her lifestyle is decidedly capitalist.

Charlie Kirk refuted the identity politics of Ilhan Omar and called out Islamism. Instead of fantasizing about socialist utopias, he urged young people to marry, stay faithful, raise children, and build more than they inherited. He believed America’s greatness came not from grievance but from gratitude. He stated his values openly and treated his opponents with respect. For Charlie, faith was not tribal. And he believed wholeheartedly that the universal truths on which America was based were available to all.

This is why Omar’s response to Charlie matters. She lied about him. She smeared and slandered him. When he was killed, she mocked him with grave-dancing remarks. For her, these tactics are permitted. For him, they never would have been. His moral universe did not allow it. Hers encourages it.

Clan, Islamism, leftism: each is a cage. Together they form a prison of mind and soul. Ilhan Omar is the elected, walking, talking example of this blighted mindset.

This is why I reject moral relativism. This moral posture was clearly demonstrated by the journalists who allowed Omar to hurl false accusations at Charlie Kirk. It breeds the racism of low expectations, which is something Kirk also called out. For it is taboo in leftist culture for white girls in the media to ask a black girl with a headscarf to support her statements with some facts. Moral relativism is the false comfort blanket of the liberal West. It pretends all cultures, all creeds, and all systems are equal.

They are not.

Opportunists like Omar exploit this weakness. They demand rights without accepting obligations. They demand protection while scorning the principles that grant it.

The vast differences between Charlie and Omar lead to a larger question: What does citizenship mean? Citizenship was once thought to be a covenant. It meant shifting loyalty away from old allegiances—to foreign leaders, foreign ideologies, foreign gods—and giving it wholly to America. It meant embracing the Constitution and the creed of liberty under law. It was a privilege to be earned, not a welfare card to be handed out.

Omar wants the rights of citizenship but not the responsibilities. She has never spoken with outrage about the atrocities committed against Christians in Somalia or across Africa. She has not condemned the violence of Islamist rule. She has learned instead how to draw from America without giving back. She takes, but she does not adopt. She enriches herself while preaching envy.

This is not about denaturalizing or deporting her. It is about recognizing that she should never have been granted citizenship in the first place. Her life is a warning of what happens when citizenship is treated not as a covenant but as an entitlement.

Charlie Kirk stood for honor, sacrifice, and loyalty to country. Omar stands for deceit, division, and loyalty to faction. He built his message on faith and family. She builds hers on resentment and rupture. He called Americans to unite and find some common ground. She divides and drives her followers toward malice and mistrust.

I fled the warped world Omar actively endorses. I chose the world Charlie defended. And I say with genuine urgency: America must learn the difference.

Citizenship must again be tied to allegiance—not to bloodline or to imported ideologies. To belong here should mean to believe in what America is. Without that, our nation will not endure.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the founder of the AHA Foundation and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. She was born in Somalia before becoming a U.S. citizen.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/from-clan-to-congress-why-ilhan-omar-betrays-the-meaning-of-citizenship/

Why Democrats Won’t Condemn Jay Jones’s Assassination Fantasies

 After it came to light that Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for Virginia’s attorney general, had fantasized about killing a political opponent and his children, some were surprised that other Democrats didn’t condemn him.

No one should have been surprised. Because what Jones said is a widely shared belief among Democrats these days.

According to National Review, which broke the explosive Jones story, he told a colleague that “the only way public policy changes is when policymakers feel pain themselves, like the pain that parents feel when they watch their children die from gun violence.” He was referring to a specific Republican state lawmaker and his family.

The reaction among fellow Democrats? Crickets.

If you think that’s scary, consider this:

Over the weekend, the Skeptic Research Center released results of a poll of 3,000 adults asking whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement: “violence is often necessary to create social change.” (Note the similarity between the question and what Jones said.)

What did the poll find?  Nearly half of young, liberal, well-educated adults – in other words, the mainstream of the Democratic party these days – condone political violence.

Of “very liberal” respondents, for example, 44% agreed that “violence is often necessary to create social change.” Among Gen Z liberals, the number rose to 49%.

And 40% of those with an advanced degree college condoned political violence, compared with 26% of those with a bachelor’s and 23% of high school graduates.

We’re talking millions upon millions of Democrats who’ve been radicalized to believe that burning buildings, terrorizing neighbors, and killing opponents are reasonable acts.

This adds still more evidence to the pile about the violent tendencies of “peace and love” leftists who now control the Democratic party – something we have been tracking at I&I for years. (See, for example, “Will Left’s Violent Tendencies Lead To U.S. Breakup Or Dictatorship?” March 16, 2021, or “Left-Wing Rage: Don’t Pretend It Doesn’t Exist,” Aug. 18, 2023.)

Just a couple of weeks ago, researchers found that in the first six months of this year, left-wing terrorist attacks were already outpacing those from the far right – before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the spate of anti-ICE violence, and other targeted political attacks by leftists.

What’s more, there’s evidence that the left’s attraction to violence isn’t just a result of their fears about Donald Trump or their concern about the future of democracy, but their warped moral compass.

One research paper found that “conservatives have more favorable opinions of liberals than liberals have of conservatives, and thus conservatives extend more empathy to liberals in times of need.”

Translated: leftists have a strong (but wholly misguided) sense of moral superiority over conservatives, which can easily be used to justify violence.

Incredibly, the response from many on the establishment right has been to ignore the frightening rise in violent rhetoric and violent actions coming from the left, while adding fuel to the rhetorical fire with their own apocalyptic language about anything and everything President Trump does.

It’s time for the public (and especially these weak-kneed “conservatives”) to wake up and realize where the real threat to civilized society is coming from. And it’s not from the current occupant of the White House. Because once Trump is gone, leftists will simply direct their hatred and violence to the next prominent conservative.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/10/09/heres-why-democrats-wont-condemn-jay-joness-assassination-fantasies/

MidEast Peace Big Trouble for the Democrat Party

 by Roger Simon

Is it over for the Democratic (aka Democrat) Party?

No, but it’s close.

Being blamed for the pointless government shutdown, as the public is clearly doing, is bad enough, but meanwhile, President Donald J. Trump has been busy saving the Western world by doing the near impossible, bringing peace to Gaza.

(He has been aided in this endeavor by stellar work from Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and the remarkable Secretary of State Marco Rubio.)

It’s going to be amusing watching the Democrats’ lackeys in the legacy media do back flips trying to punch holes in this extraordinary peace deal.

Anyone with an IQ in triple digits, and who is honest (note the two requirements), hardly ever believes their reports anymore, but this is on a different level.

Given what Trump has just achieved, it makes the MSM and Capitol Hill Dems look like clown shows. They, particularly the Democrats’ increasingly bizarre Mamdani/AOC left-wing, have been busy running their party into the ground. Trump’s peacemaking allows them to finish the job by making the Democrats seem so kooky by comparison that even extinction now seems a possibility.

Sound excessive? I don’t think so. Listening to cable news tonight, I may have missed something, but I did not hear one Democrat congratulate President Trump on his achievement.

According to Grok, at this writing, even Sen. Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, a Jew, and supposedly a friend of Israel, has said not a word. Terrified of AOC? You bet.

What is wrong with these people? Well, plenty. They are so overwhelmed with hate, for Trump and evidently for each other, that they can’t see straight or think rationally.

They deserve to go.

They should be replaced by two parties—one that is the Mamdani/AOC wing (which will become extinct within a couple of years, if not months), and the other a renewed centrist party that is no longer living in perpetual fear of replacement by the leftists, as they appear to be now. Life will be better for everyone.

Failing that solution, outside of a handful of states and even in some of them, we will soon have a de facto, if not de jure, one-party system, which is not ultimately a healthy thing.

Much of this may come to a head swiftly if Trump wins the Nobel Peace Prize. He clearly deserves it, but in a way I hope he doesn’t, if only because that prize is so besmirched for having been awarded to Barack Obama for no discernible reason other than the most reactionary and superficial—race. (Obama ended up anything but a peacemaker.)

However, if Trump wins, it will give him the ammunition to continue his efforts in the Middle East and Ukraine, which is obviously a very good thing. It’s hard to think of an American president who was and is such a devoted peacemaker.

And, as we all know, they are blessed.

MORE

Perhaps this will even have a spillover into the New York mayoral race, where many Jewish “liberals” (scare quotes highly deliberate) appear, against all logic, to be backing Mr. Mamdani. But with Hamas on the run, Maudani’s goal to “globalize the Intifada” seems more reactionary (and evil) than ever. Will the Upper West Side crowd pick up on this? I have my doubts, but I’m hoping.

UPDATE

This is a time when I don’t particularly like being prescient. Just a few days ago, I posted “Gaza--Genuine Peace or a Hudna?” A hudna, for those who missed it, is a tactical pause to allow Islamic forces to regroup.

Minutes ago, the following was posted by Amir Tsarfati on Instagram:'

Hamas publishes “God, let the ceasefire be like the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah—followed by conquest, like the conquest of Mecca.”

Tsarfati adds: (Context: The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah was a temporary peace agreement signed by Mohammed with the Quraysh tribe, which he later broke before conquering Mecca. The statement implies that Hamas views the ceasefire as a tactical pause before a future “victory” or takeover.)

https://americanrefugees.substack.com/p/mideast-peace-big-trouble-for-the

Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

 by John Hinderaker

COVID-19 was a godsend for left-wingers around the world. The “pandemic” justified anything and everything. Shut down schools, even though kids were not at risk? Check. Shut down small businesses? Check. Shut down churches? Check. Make people wear idiotic masks? Check.

Shut down liquor stores? Don’t even think about it! Shut down Targets and Walmarts? No way. Shut down left-wing protests and demonstrations? Of course not.

The whole thing was obviously political, and was intended to advance statism. It was Rahm Emanuel who said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Whether covid was a serious crisis is debatable–I don’t think it was–but liberals certainly didn’t let it go to waste. They jumped on it with both feet, asserting previously unknown powers over the rest of us.

To take just one example, on March 25, 2020 Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota issued a long executive order that deprived residents of Minnesota of fundamental rights, starting with this:

Beginning on Friday, March 27, 2020 at 11:59 pm through Friday, April 10, 2020 at 5:00 pm, all persons currently living within the State of Minnesota are ordered to stay at home or in their place of residence except to engage in the Activities and Critical Sector work set forth below in Paragraphs 5 and 6.

It is extraordinary to realize that here, in the USA, a governor literally ordered everyone in his state to remain in his or her house except as permitted by that governor’s orders. And yet, it happened.

In my opinion, covid-era executive orders had little to do with public safety, and a great deal to do with the Left’s insatiable appetite to control the lives of normal citizens. Expanding government power was not a byproduct, it was the point all along. And the growth of government power that leftists brought about during that dark era is still with us.

From the Unleash Prosperity Hotline:

The latest edition of the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Report is out, with data through 2023. Freedom’s march over the past several decades took a huge hit from the Stalinist global COVID lockdowns of 2020-21. Even worse: the blow to human liberty still hasn’t recovered from those evil edicts.

Make no mistake: the restraints on our freedom that various governments imposed, using covid as an excuse, were not a mistake. They were not inadvertent. They were not due to an excess of caution. They were malicious, the expression of a conscious desire to expand government power at the expense of the rest of us.

Government’s covid-era expansion must be thoroughly repudiated, and all remaining vestiges of that expansion should be dismantled. Our freedoms depend on it.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/10/never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste.php