Soros-linked group shuts down Miami’s conservative Radio Mambí after three years of ownership

 Miami’s longtime conservative, Spanish-language talk radio station will shutter on Friday, only three years after a controversial takeover by a George Soros-linked group.

Radio Mambí, long connected to Miami’s Cuban exile community and known for its anti-communist programming, was purchased — along with other Spanish-language stations — by the Soros-linked group in 2022. At the time, many conservatives, especially right-leaning Hispanics, called it an effort by the left to control the information reaching Spanish-speaking voters. The station is now signing off for good, citing “financial challenges.”

“For four decades, Radio Mambí has been a gathering place for South Florida and those devoted to the ideal of a free Cuba. Often the market leader in Spanish-language talk, our microphones welcomed presidents, governors, mayors, dissidents and political prisoners, cultural icons, and community voices. We stood with Miami through hurricanes and history. Much like our beautiful city, Radio Mambi, its audience, and the media industry are rapidly evolving, presenting financial challenges for many in the marketplace,” Radio Mambí General Manager Mike Sena told Fox News Digital. 

“Sadly, as of 11:59 p.m. on December 12, we will close our live news/talk chapter and will forge on to new frontiers,” he continued. “We are proud of this legacy and deeply grateful to the colleagues, listeners and advertisers who made it possible.”

Radio Mambí will play music and archived programming, remaining the home of the Miami Heat and the Miami Marlins in Spanish-language radio for the “foreseeable future.”

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Former host Lourdes Ubieta and analyst Jorge Bonilla claim the shutdown was a plan to silence conservative voices.Instagram/Lourdes Ubieta

All live programming staff at Radio Mambí will depart. A minimal team, including one sales representative and a board operator, will remain to honor commitments to current advertisers and the station’s sports broadcast partners. 

Conservative host Lourdes Ubieta quit ahead of the 2022 sale, saying she would never accept a paycheck from anyone connected to Soros. She believes the station suddenly shuttering its talk radio operations is evidence she made the right decision. 

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The closure, citing “financial challenges,” follows a 2022 takeover by a Soros-linked group.

“It took them less than three years to destroy these stations,” Ubieta told Fox News Digital. 

“This was always the plan,” she continued. “To silence conservative voices and ultimately eliminate Mambí — an enduring symbol of anti-communist radio in Florida and around the world.”

The Soros-backed group in 2022 created Latino Media Network, a new network made up of multiple Hispanic radio stations, including Radio Mambí, and partially financed by Lakestar Finance, an investment group affiliated with Soros Fund Management. 

Stephanie Valencia, a former Obama White House staffer, serves as the group’s executive chair. Other board members include Al Cárdenas, who is married to “The View” co-host Ana Navarro, actress Eva Longoria and Jess Morales Rocketto, who worked on presidential campaigns for Democratic nominees Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton. 

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Miami’s longtime conservative Radio Mambí will end its live news/talk operations Friday.The Washington Post via Getty Images

“These women ran the stations into the ground, and now they are shutting them down for good,” Ubieta said. 

Radio Mambí had a streak of 40 years of uninterrupted transmission after being founded in 1985. When asked if politics played a role in the decision, a Latino Media Network spokesperson pointed Fox News Digital to a “rapidly evolving media and demographic landscape.” 

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The station will play Spanish music and archived programming for the “foreseeable future.”TNS

NewsBusters analyst Jorge Bonilla, who hosts a conservative talk show on Radio Libre, a competitor to Radio Mambí, has long predicted the demise of the iconic Miami-based station.

“The death of Radio Mambí was always going to be the endgame once the anti-communist bastion fell into the hands of the Soros-backed Latino Media Network. This is one of those times where I hate being right,” Bonilla told Fox News Digital. 

“But the battle continues,” he continued. “Notwithstanding the loss of Mambí, the left has forever lost monopoly power over the dissemination of Spanish-language news and information in the United States.”

https://nypost.com/2025/12/12/media/soros-linked-group-shuts-down-miamis-conservative-radio-mambi-after-three-years-of-ownership/

Florida moves forward to roll back certain vaccine mandates for schoolchildren

 Florida officials are plowing ahead with a proposal to roll back certain vaccine mandates for the state’s schoolchildren, after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis called for the state to become the first in the nation to eliminate all school vaccination requirements.

Pediatricians, infectious disease physicians and teachers have decried the push to undermine vaccines, which for generations have been a cornerstone of public health policy for keeping children and adults safe from potentially deadly — but preventable — diseases.

Experts have warned that doing away with the mandates could allow for a dangerous resurgence of preventable childhood diseases and deaths, amounting to a reversal of one of the greatest advancements in public health history.

Dozens of parents, physicians, educators and advocates crowded into a hotel conference room in Panama City Beach on Friday to testify on a rule change proposed by the Florida Department of Health that would eliminate requirements that Florida children receive the hepatitis B, varicella and Haemophilus influenzae type b or Hib vaccines in order to attend public or private K-12 schools.

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Florida officials have moved forward with the proposal made to roll back certain vaccines required for schoolchildren across the state.REUTERS

The proposal also does away with a requirement for the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine for children attending child care facilities.

Other state mandates related to vaccines for polio, mumps, tetanus and other diseases are enshrined in Florida law and would require legislative action to be rolled back.

Pediatrician Eehab Kenawy, who practices in Panama City, detailed two unvaccinated children his hospital has cared for in the past six months, both of whom contracted Hib, which can cause severe infections and brain swelling.

“One child unfortunately succumbed at four months of age. No vaccines,” Kenawy said.

The mother of another Hib patient, a two-and-a-half-year-old, begged to have her child vaccinated after the child developed a grave brain infection, Kenawy said.

“Quote unquote, mother’s words: ‘please give my child every vaccine you can,’ ” he said.

“This is what we’re seeing.”

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who has long clashed with the medical establishment, has cast current requirements in schools and elsewhere as “immoral” intrusions on people’s rights that hamper parents’ ability to make health decisions for their children.

All U.S. states and territories require that children attending child care centers and schools be vaccinated against a number of diseases, including, measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, whooping cough and chickenpox.

All states allow exemptions for children with medical conditions that prevent them from receiving certain vaccines.

Most also permit exemptions for religious or other nonmedical reasons.

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The move comes after Gov. Ron DeSantis called for the state to be the first one across the nation to eliminate vaccination requirements for all schools.AP

Emotional public hearing

Friday’s public hearing grew emotional at times, as parents and activists opposed to the mandates heralded the importance of personal freedom, while longtime physicians recalled hospital wards full of gravely sick children in the years before the widespread availability of vaccines.

When pediatrician Paul Robinson trained at Vanderbilt University in the 1980s, he cared for countless children “suffering from diseases we now prevent,” including Hib.

“It didn’t cause mild illness. It caused children to die,” Robinson said, recalling the survivors who were left with “deafness, paralysis or lifelong neurologic injury.”

The policy being pushed by the state’s surgeon general is “dangerous,” he added.

Jamie Schanbaum’s legs and fingers were amputated after she contracted meningitis as a 20-year-old college student in Texas.

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Teachers and medical professionals have decried the push to undermine vaccines.AP

She traveled from Brooklyn, New York, to testify in support of vaccines, recounting her seven-month hospital stay as she battled the vaccine-preventable disease and the challenges of living without her limbs.

“No one should go through this experience,” Schanbaum said.

“How about the relearning to use my hands? Feed myself? Wipe myself? This is the reality of what it’s like to survive something like this,” she added.

Rise of vaccine skepticism

Vaccination efforts across the country and around the world have stalled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw an explosion in vaccine skepticism.

Florida’s proposal comes as U.S. Department of Health Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has worked to reshape the nation’s vaccine policies to match his long-standing suspicions about the safety and effectiveness of well-established shots.

Mary Helms, a mother and grandmother from Apalachicola, Florida, referenced Kennedy as she voiced her “full support” for rolling back the mandates.

“Medical choice and medical freedom in all ways is a God-given and sovereign human right,” Helms said.

Susan Sweetin’s voiced filled with emotion as she described her then-newborn son being rushed off for a hepatitis B shot that she said “injured” him. Sweetin is a marketing executive for the National Vaccine Information Center, a group connected to Kennedy.

“This is not informed consent. That is coercion. Vaccines should never be tied to a child’s education,” Sweetin said.

Asked if the state consulted national medical experts such as the American Academy of Pediatrics on the rule development, a department representative declined to answer directly, stating: “the rule language is grounded in policy based on considerations that favor parental rights and medical freedom.”

Measles outbreak in South Carolina

Florida’s push comes as a monthslong measles outbreak continues in South Carolina, almost entirely among school-age children.

State health officials there have said 116 of the 126 cases have been in children under 18, with two-thirds of them in children from age 5 to 17.

The outbreak has been centered in Spartanburg County, where just 90% of students have all the vaccinees required to be in school — one of the lowest rates in South Carolina.

The state has a religious exemption for vaccines, and almost all of the unvaccinated students use it.

https://nypost.com/2025/12/12/us-news/florida-moves-forward-to-roll-back-certain-vaccine-mandates-for-schoolchildren/

Tariffs are working to weaken China’s unfair trade — don’t stop now

 Ever since the November truce in the U.S.-China trade war, chaos has receded and a sense of equilibrium has begun to take hold in American trade policy.

Business leaders have revised their tariff fears, GDP growth is forecast at a robust 3.5%, tariffs are on track to raise a remarkable $256 billion of additional annual revenue, predictions of runaway inflation and spiraling retaliation have been disproven, and green shoots of increased manufacturing activity are sprouting after a season of uncertainty.

But an increasingly conciliatory attitude toward China has created a feeling that the administration’s trade strategy is muddled.

The terms of the November truce suspended high reciprocal tariffs in exchange for China permitting rare earth exports to flow, essentially resetting the U.S.-China relationship back to the status quo immediately prior to Liberation Day.

The White House has even placed national security matters, such as semiconductor export controls and cyber-espionage sanctions, on the negotiating table to preserve the detente.

This has frustrated those who thought the overriding aim of Liberation Day was to decisively squeeze China and provoke decoupling. China has been able to grow its global exports despite U.S. tariffs.

Commentators note that we have been treating allied countries and important fence-sitters like India more harshly than our chief adversary, “punishing our friends while courting Beijing.”

There is plenty of room to criticize the administration’s current approach on pure national security grounds.

But as a trade matter, it’s a different story.

The recent pessimism ignores a fundamental reality: tariffs on China are significantly higher than tariffs on the rest of the world, and as long as that remains the case, it will drive a structural realignment in the global trading system that disadvantages China.

In order to keep exports growing in the face of U.S. tariffs, China must increase sales to new markets. But those new markets tend to be exporters themselves, and don’t have the ability to painlessly replace U.S. demand.

China can only access these markets by aggressively underpricing its exports — weakening the balance sheets of its manufacturers and subjecting its trading partners to China Shock dynamics of bankruptcy, unemployment, and deindustrialization.

In essence, the measures China must take to fuel its export machine end up undermining it.

The administration should hasten this realignment by doing more diplomatically to create a united anti-China trade bloc, conditioning preferential tariffs on blocking Chinese exports and levying high tariffs on countries that remain open to them.

Ultimately, one number is truly determinative for the future of the global trading system: the gap between the U.S.’s effective tariff rate on China and its effective tariff rate on the rest of the world.

That gap represents the extra cost that an American purchaser would pay to source from China versus alternative countries or domestic suppliers.

The Peterson Institute estimates that, as of Nov. 10, 2025, the effective U.S. tariff on Chinese exports was 47.5%, while the equivalent rate for the rest of the world was 18.5% — a substantial gap of 29%.

Although the November truce suspended reciprocal tariffs, the combination of Trump’s other tariffs under Section 301, Section 232, and pre-Liberation Day fentanyl tariffs are enough to render China’s goods more expensive than others. China therefore risks losing access to the U.S. market in any product market where its cost advantage over the next-cheapest supplier is within 29%.

China’s exports to the U.S. have cratered by 29% year-over-year as of November. The Chinese share of U.S. imports has now dropped below where it stood just prior to China’s entry to the World Trade Organization in 2001.

This forces Chinese firms to survive by cutting prices, creating extreme balance sheet problems and putting net profits in freefall.

Western observers often have the impression that Chinese firms aren’t subject to profit-and-loss pressure due to government subsidies. That impression is false — subsidies cause overcapacity at the sector level, but Chinese firms are subject to “cut-throat price wars at home” that “only sharpen their hunger to capture overseas markets.”

With the loss of U.S. orders, this problem is now entering an acute phase characterized by producer price deflation, firm bankruptcies, and declining fixed-asset investment, endangering the future growth of the industrial sector. Chinese factories accept unprofitable orders just to retain their workforces and clear inventories.

Starved for margin and deprived of their main export market, Chinese producers are exporting at aggressively low prices into new markets that can’t accommodate them. Chinese exports to Europe are up by 14% compared to 2024 and the EU’s trade deficit with China has nearly doubled from 2017 levels.

To avoid deindustrialization and mass unemployment from the loss of a manufacturing sector that makes up over 20% of the European economy, the EU — and other regions facing the flood of diverted Chinese exports — will find they have no choice but to limit Chinese access to their markets. This realization is now dawning on governments around the world, which are rolling out anti-China trade and investment measures at a record pace.

Just this week, Mexico announced tariffs of up to 50% on Chinese imports, drawing outrage from Beijing. Even French President Emmanuel Macron, famously dovish on China, is now threatening what he calls “protective measures” to address “unbearable imbalances.”

All countries that wish to retain their industrial capacity are converging on the same set of policies, without any central coordination or political agreement. When that convergence occurs, China will have no option to export itself out of trouble. There won’t be any large markets left to divert to.

The administration has at least three important tasks ahead of it. First, it must monitor the effective tariff gap closely to ensure that it remains large enough to trigger trade diversion away from China.

If the gap shrinks too much — or if the administration drops the ball on anti-circumvention enforcement — the realignment will halt.

Second, it should avoid doing and saying things that unnecessarily slow the trend. Realignment is coming, but bullying rhetoric will create political pressure for countries to distance from the U.S. and explore their options with China. This will leave them weaker when they later conclude that those options are unworkable, which is deadweight loss that the administration can avoid by front-loading diplomacy to create a united anti-China front.

Working with allied countries to scale up a rare earths mining and processing supply chain that excludes China is an ideal venue.

Finally, the administration should do everything in its power to address the major causes of unaffordability in American life: the spiraling costs of housing, health care, child care, and higher education. These are major political challenges, but without action, pressure to scapegoat tariffs as the affordability culprit will grow, and the coalition holding them in place may break.

That would close what may be a brief window to resist deindustrialization and prove the viability of a different vision of the future — one in which America masters the innovative industries of the future, builds reciprocal relationships with its trade partners, and ends its dependence on its chief adversary.

Nicholas Phillips is an international trade lawyer writing about how trade law and policy can reindustrialize America. From Commonplace.org

https://nypost.com/2025/12/12/opinion/tariffs-are-working-to-weaken-chinas-unfair-trade-dont-stop-now/