Who Is Lucy Connolly?

You will recall that our erstwhile European allies went into the highest dudgeon when Vice President Vence called them out for  becoming more illiberal, that is, for sacrificing free speech on the altar of Islamophilia. These wondrously free countries were in the process of creating a two-tiered system of justice, where Muslim migrants were allowed to get away with whatever while white Europeans were prosecuted for the least harsh word about Islam.

Case in point, Lucy Connolly, currently incarcerated in once-Great Britain for having said something unnice about Muslims in the aftermath of a crime committed by a member of a Muslim migrant family. 

Matt Goodwin has the story on his Substack:

Who is Lucy Connolly, you might ask? She’s a young mother, she’s the wife of a sick husband, and she is, by all accounts, a respected and well-liked childminder.

But she is also a woman who, after the senseless murder of three little girls by the son of Rwandan migrants in Southport last summer, when emotions were running very high in the country, tweeted something very inflammatory.

As for the text itself, you can judge. She wrote this:

“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f---ing hotels full of the b-----ds for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.”

Is it hard to read? Yes. Offensive? Sure. But does it justify what was then handed out to Lucy Connolly by our country’s justice system —a prison sentence of two years and seven months?

Yes, you read that right. Despite having never physically touched, abused, or hurt a single person, despite having never started a fire or thrown anything at a hotel housing asylum-seekers, Lucy Connolly, because of that tweet, was jailed for nearly three years. She was denied bail. She was urged to plead guilty. And she was sent to jail.

What does it mean? It makes clear what J. D. Vance was saying about the degradation of Europe. This is most especially true in once-Great Britain, ruled by the Labour Party.

This is what the Lucy Connolly case is really about. It’s not just about the absurd and frankly outrageous plight of one poor mother who said the wrong thing at the wrong time before almost instantly trying to take it back; it’s about how this case symbolises a much broader deterioration of free speech and liberty in this country.

A country that was once the home of free speech, free expression, and individual freedom is now rapidly morphing, before our very eyes, into a much more dogmatic, openly biased and controlling regime that is mainstreaming a stifling censorship, an increasingly activist and politicised two-tier justice system, and a society in which rising numbers of citizens, understandably, are concluding they should no longer speak freely and at ease around others. And I don’t know about you but this kind of country, where people feel their freedoms are steadily being stripped away, feels like a very fragile and dangerous place indeed.

Strangely enough, Goodwin does not mention that the Labour Party is in charge of this mess. Nor does he note that said Labour government has just dropped plans to investigate and prosecute grooming gangs of Pakistani men who have been preying on British high school girls.

Wednesday Potpourri

First, in the matter of the rare earth minerals deal we are supposedly going to sign with Ukraine. The word from our Treasury Secretary suggests that the fault lies with Ukraine.

Ian Miles Cheong reports:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent informs Tucker Carlson that Zelensky lied to U.S. officials on three occasions regarding the signing of the minerals agreement. His reasoning? “You know who doesn’t sign that deal. Someone with their hand in the till.” Zelensky is skimming.

Second, trad wives are having a moment. Traditional wives are springing up across the country. Kim Iverson suggests that this represents a return to the big, bad 1950s when women were suffering from what Betty Friedan called a problem that did not have a name.

Iverson wrote this:

I don’t get this Trad wife trend. Why do men want to revert to the 1950’s when women were drugged out on Valium, psychiatric drugs, and diet pills while men ran off and cheated then came home and abused their kids. The result was the “free love” 60s and Boomers. Not exactly the picture perfect “Leave It To Beaver” family.

Wilfred Reilly replies:

She makes 1-2 points here, but - on a very basic data wonk level - the current rate of diagnosed mental illness and SSRI use for young white women today is 56%. That's 5x, maybe 10x, the house-wifey level in the 1950s. Today's girl-bosses may objectively be the most depressed women of all time.

Third, the American left is embracing what is now called assassination culture. Charlie Kirk calls it out:

Assassination culture is spreading on the left. Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump.

In California, activists are naming ballot measures after Luigi Mangione.

The left is being whipped into a violent frenzy. Any setback, whether losing an election or losing a court case, justifies a maximally violent response.

This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end. The cowardice of local prosecutors and school officials have turned the left into a ticking time bomb.

Law professor Jonathan Turley calls them the new Jacobins:

They are part of a rising class of American Jacobins — bourgeois revolutionaries increasingly prepared to trash everything, from cars to the Constitution.

Fourth, remember Stephanie Turner. The world class fencer took a knee last week in a match against a male. She was immediately disqualified.

Happily, if it is a consolation, she has been recognized and rewarded for her stand. The Daily Mail reports:

The increasingly influential XX-XY Athletics, which calls itself 'the only athletic brand that stands up for women's sports,' awarded Turner with the Courage Wins Award and announced she would receive a $5,000 prize as well as admittance into a leadership program.

'By taking a knee, she became more powerful than any male. She stood her ground to fight for women's sports,' XX-XY Athletics founder Jennifer Sey said in a press release. 'She's a hero.'

And now, to top it all off, the state of Texas is investigating USA Fencing to find out whether it is in violation of state law.

Go, Texas:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced an investigation into @USAfencing for violating state law after they EXPELLED a female fencer from a WOMEN'S tournament for refusing to compete against a MALE.

Fifth, a Navy admiral has been relieved of her duties, for failing to show proper respect for the commander-in-chief.

Jack Posobiec reports:

BREAKING: Per report, Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield refused to put up POTUS & SECDEF pictures in NATO HQ. Also held an “all hands” where she said “we will wait them out 4 years” She has been relieved of duty.

Sixth, let’s call her President Clueless. I am referring to Katrina Armstrong, formerly the president of Columbia University. Dare we say that she must have been a diversity hire, because she had no idea what was going on on campus.

The Washington Free Beacon reports on a deposition she gave last week:

Former Columbia University president Katrina Armstrong told the federal government on Tuesday that she could not recall students calling for the destruction of the state of Israel. Nor could she recall hearing of allegations that students spit on their Jewish counterparts. Or that a member of the faculty had, in class, described Jewish donors to Columbia as "wealthy white capitalists" who "laundered" "blood money."

In fact, Armstrong, who sat for a deposition at the Department of Health and Human Services in connection with the Trump administration’s civil rights investigation into the university, didn’t seem to remember much of anything about her seven-month tenure as interim president of the embattled Ivy League school. The Washington Free Beacon obtained a transcript of that deposition.

"Sitting here, I have, you know, no specific memory of hearing that," Armstrong said regarding her recollection of student activists agitating for Israel’s demise, "but I recognize the concern about that and understand that."

Seventh, from the hallowed halls of Princeton University, rampant anti-Semitism. The Free Press reports on the most recent manifestation:

At Princeton University on Monday night, “Jewish students were called ‘inbred swine,’ told to ‘go back to Europe,’ and taunted with gestures of the Hamas triangle by masked protesters,” reports Free Press fellow Danielle Shapiro, who is a senior at the school.

Shapiro was among some 200 students who turned out to see former (and possible future) Israel prime minister Naftali Bennett. The politician was set to speak at Princeton until his speech was derailed by numerous interruptions from protesters.

“Ever since October 7, we have endured so many antisemitic protests on campus, it’s almost become the background noise to our studies,” writes Danielle. “And it shows no signs of stopping, even though the Trump administration has paused $210 million in funding to Princeton for failing to clamp down on Jew hate.”

Finally, I have some open consulting hours in my life coaching practice. If you are interested, email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.

The Big Lie

Some people think that the Democratic Party is dead. Others believe that it is on life support. So, our great political minds are pondering-- how did that party self-destruct? 

One might say that Donald Trump caused Democrats to lose their collective minds, and there is some truth to the observation. Others have remarked that a record of failed policies and embarrassing gaffes caused it to lose all credibility.

If one wanted to be more concise, we should point out that the Biden presidency was, from the onset, built on a lie, on a collective lie. Namely, that Joe Biden was compos mentis, that he had the mental acuity required to do the job of president of these great United States. Or even that he was doing the job.

So, the Biden administration, Congressional Democrats and the mainstream media colluded in a lie. They foisted this lie on the American people-- for what reason, we can only guess. Surely, they understood that if Biden was induced to retire from office the result would have been President Kamala Harris, and no sentient soul wanted that.

Democrats chose Biden in 2020 because they thought he had the best chance of beating Donald Trump. They imagined that a Trump presidency would be the worst thing that could happen to the nation and the world. 

And yet, people can tolerate failure. They can accept bad policy and even executive incompetence. They can accept that a president might not succeed in office. One thing they will not be able to abide is being lied to, systematically by large numbers of people. The Democratic Party became a conspiracy of liars.

As it happened, many people knew about Biden’s senility before his disastrous June, 2024 debate against Donald Trump. And yet,Democrats put him up anyway, on the basis of the idea that anything and anyone would be better than Trump.

It was a bad idea, even a stupid idea. As dumb as the notion that no one would ever notice.

Once Biden was elected the Democratic Party and their satraps in the media went into cover-up mode. They did not much care whether Biden could govern effectively. They only cared that this shadow of a man could make his way through the day without doing something that would expose the dark truth of his mental incapacity.

And yet, considering Biden’s enfeebled state and his inability to follow directions in his public appearances, the fact remains-- foreign leaders and dignitaries must have known that he was not all there.

In truth, Biden was an embarrassment. He embarrassed the country, but only after he embarrassed the Democratic Party leadership and the mainstream media.

If the media, for example, has lost whatever credibility it had left, the reason must lie in the fact that it colluded in lying to the public. Obviously, this does not involve all of the media. Annie Linskey, in the Wall Street Journal, wrote some excellent articles about Biden’s mental incapacity, beginning in June, 2024. For that she was widely denounced by the White House, as a Republican stooge.

But then, was Biden himself aware of his condition? After all, if he believed that he was really the president and was doing the job effectively-- that is, if he believed his press and what others were telling him-- then why would he have stepped aside in favor of another candidate. Perhaps the explanation for the Democrats’ failure to mount an effective candidate lies in the fact that Joe was believing his press.

Making it appear that Joe Biden was having a problem making a decision assumes that Joe Biden was capable of making an executive decision. 

It might be happenstance, but the question of lying arose during the presidential campaign. It is part of our everyday cultural life. We see it in transmania, the notion that a man who thinks he is a woman is really a woman. It is a lie. And it is a lie that we are told that we must accept as a higher truth.

So. Good-bye Democrats. Hoist on their own petard, they are now facing the opportunity to rebuild their reputation, to make the country believe that they are less than a flagrant fraud.

Jews for Hamas

Among the most absurd spectacles taking place is this: groups of Jewish students standing up for the rights of Palestinian agitator Mahmoud Khalil. After all, Khalil defends Hamas. He wants to destroy Western civilization, beginning with Israel but extending to the Christian West. He thrilled to the massacre of innocent women and children on October 7. So, leftist American Jews are organizing to defend him.

Better yet, and just in case you thought it was a one-off, an American Jew, by name of Sam Adler-Bell is up in arms against the Trump administration, for the crime of ridding the nation’s campuses of anti-Semitism.

Adler-Bell writes for New York Magazine. He has nothing to say about Hamas atrocities and does not bother to notice that the Biden administration had a soft on anti-Semitism policy, policy that allowed anti-Semitism to metastasize across many of America’s leading academic institutions.

Of course, it was not about anyone’s right to voice an opinion. Hamas-supporters on American campuses harassed Jewish students, preventing them from going to class, attacking them for the crime of being Jewish.

None of which is covered by the freedom of speech.

Obviously, Adler-Bell is an idiot. He does not show any gratitude toward an administration that has been ridding the country of pro-Hamas agitators. He does not cast any aspersions on the administration that stood idly by while anti-Semitism took over American quads.

Douglas Murray has a new book coming out, a book that addresses the dilemma of what is going on in the minds of leftist Americans. How did this supposedly bright group come to lose its moral bearings, and end up supporting Hamas-- while saving its outrage for Israel.

Here is the problem, via Murray’s New York Post essay:

When a party of young people at a dance rave in the early hours of the morning are attacked by truckloads of armed terrorists you would think it would be an easy one to understand. Should you be on the side of the unarmed, terrified young people being hunted down in the woods and the fields, raped, shot and macheted in front of their friends?

Or should you be on the side of the monsters who committed those acts — the people who roamed among the piles of dead bodies to see who might still be alive, who could be kidnapped and stolen from their families?

So, people took sides. They especially took sides for the cowards who murdered women and children, and who whine limitlessly when they have to face a military force.

It represents an especially cowardly approach to anti-Semitism. When facing anti-Semitism they are saying that the problem is not all Jews, but just some Jews. They believe that embracing the Palestinian cause will exempt them from the next intifada.

Their attitude bespeaks raw fear, translated into cowardice.

Is it hard to decide which side to be on after an atrocity like that? For me it isn’t. For most Americans it isn’t.

But an alarming number of people — especially the youngest and most privileged people in our society — chose the other side. Instead of being on the side of the victims, they sided with the perpetrators.

As it happened, pro-Hamas groups have infiltrated America. They were prepared to defend Hamas and to attack Israel for any retaliation.

We now know that on the day of October 7th pro-terror groups in the US were organizing to attack Israel — to demonize it and to lie about it. As I reported here in The Post at the time, on October 8th some of these terrorist supporters gathered in Times Square —to support the massacres as they were still going on.

None of this moral insanity happened because of Israel’s actions. It happened because we have people in our midst who are on the side of the rapists, murderers, beheaders and kidnappers.

The last is the salient point. They anti-Israeli demonstrations began before the IDF attacked Gaza.

Now, young Jews are supporting Mahmoud Khalil.

Look at the people who are even now shutting down streets and campuses in New York. Now they are protesting about the detention of one of the organizers of the Columbia protests — Mahmoud Khalil. Yesterday students at Columbia chained themselves to a gate in protest at what they call Khalil’s “kidnapping” by the US immigration authorities.

None of them expressed the most minimal outrage in defense of the innocent Israelis who were brutalized by Hamas.

I must have missed the time they chained themselves to the gates to protest the actual kidnapping of Edan Alexander. Or Hersh Goldberg-Polin from California who was kidnapped from the Nova music festival, held captive for a year and then murdered by Hamas.

Who is Mahmoud Khalil?

Khalil served as the spokesman for a group that called itself “Columbia University Apartheid Divest” (CUAD).

This group declares in its own mission statements that it is “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Good to know. It also claims that the attacks of October 7th were “a moral, military, and political victory.”

If you believe that Sharia Law must be imposed on the planet, by force if necessary, you have found your home. If you are suffering the indignity of the Palestinian people, people who have failed markedly at self-governance in Gaza and who are suffering from the shame of having been out-produced by Jews, you have found your people.

The Palestinian cause cannot involve freedom, because the people of Gaza had freedom. They used it to produce terror tunnels and rockets to shoot into Israel. They are incapable of building anything themselves, so they salve their narcissistic wounds by trying to destroy what others have built.

In truth, none of the Muslim countries in the Middle East are liberal democracies. None are free. The slogan about freeing Palestine involves suckering stupid American college students into a cause they do not understand, and a cause that will immediately turn against them if ever it has the power to do so.

Sunday Fundraising

With a warm welcome to new subscribers. And, a special thank-you to paid subscribers.

Being as today is Sunday, we take the day off from opining in order to request donations. They are the fuel that keeps this work going. 

Not to be overly obvious, but it takes time and effort to put up a new post daily. Very few others manage to do so. Thus, it’s a job, one that is worthy of compensation. 

If you would like to donate please make use of the Paypal link on this page. If you prefer, you can mail a check to 310 East 46th St. 24H. New York, NY 10017.

I’m counting on you. 

If you have already donated, please pass the word along to your friends, family, neighbors, associates and colleagues.

Please accept this expression of my gratitude for those who will donate and for those who have done so already. Many thanks!

Saturday Miscellany

First, Hungary has decided to withdraw from the International Criminal Court. As you know, said pseudo-judicial body has indicted the prime minister of Israel. Thus, if Benjamin Netanyahu travels to a jurisdiction within the bounds of the court, he can be arrested and put on trial.

Of course, the United States is not party to this nonsense. As of recently, Hungary isn’t either:

Hungarian minister Balazs Orban explains:

Hungary has decided to withdraw from the International Criminal Court. The Court’s recent actions have undermined peace efforts by intervening in ongoing conflicts. Hungary remains committed to justice but believes international organizations must serve peace, not politics.

As you must know, the liberal elites in Europe are horrified at the existence of the Orban government in Hungary. They consider it authoritarian, and we cannot have that.

The other side, via David Goldman, offers this:

Hungary is the world's most steadfast friend of the Jewish people in the world. Jews flourished in Hungary as nowhere else in Europe before World War II, and the friendship of the Hungarian and Jewish peoples is flourishing again. This brave act of defiance of global elites is profoundly appreciated. God bless Hungary.

Second, three cheers for Stephanie Turner. The fencer forfeited a match because she did not want to fight against a male. She was immediately disqualified.

The New York Post reports:

The female fencer who was disqualified from a tournament for refusing to fight a trans opponent ripped into the culture of the sport that has made her fear similar situations for several years.

Stephanie Turner’s viral protest at the Cherry Blossom Open in Maryland garnered her a platform to showcase the “unfair” situations she faced if she refused to compete against other transgender competitors.

The 31-year-old kneeled on the fencing strip, or piste, before she ever launched an attack against Redmond Sullivan during their bout at the University of Maryland in College Park on March 30.

One awaits the consequences for USA Fencing. Surely, they deserve to be punished.

Third, Joel Kotkin writes in Real Clear Investigations that California is where the American dream goes to die. One party progressive rule has done the state in. Among the worst policies are climate change hysteria:

California progressivism today embraces many causes – undocumented immigrants, transgender kids, reparations for slavery – but nothing has shaped the state’s contemporary politics more in recent years than a commitment to what Newsom described in 2018 as “climate leadership.”

In embracing the catastrophism that defines climate change as an existential threat to life on the planet, Newsom has left behind the old progressive notion of focusing on materially improving people’s lives by embracing inherently uncertain computer models predicting danger.

In California, experts from what Bjorn Lomborg, a leading skeptic of climate catastrophism, calls “the climate industrial complex” provide the justification for staggeringly expensive, socially regressive mandates based on the conjured models; the state mandates GHG reductions but leaves implementation in the hands of state agencies closely aligned with the green lobby.

This allows the legislature to look the other way as state climate policies knowingly increase poor and working family costs and shift billions of dollars to the wealthy in the relentless pursuit of unilaterally modeled carbon emission targets that even advocates admit cannot possibly “fix” the global climate. Indeed, in 2023, the California Air Resources Board belatedly disclosed current state climate policies would disproportionately harm households earning less than $100,000 per year while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

Fourth, among the revelations in the Bret Baier interview with Elon Musk’s DOGE warriors was this. Musk’s team is not at all what we were expecting. They are not pimply faced young geniuses. They are more likely to be seasoned corporate executives.

Miranda Divine explained in The New York Post:

For starters, they look nothing like the image that has taken hold in the public imagination, driven by a story in Wired about a group of pimply teenage nerds with online nicknames like “Big Balls” running riot through government systems.

Instead, we saw seven highly accomplished, respectable adults, all but one in a suit and tie. They are friends of Musk that he has tapped as “tech support” for the federal government, at least for the 130 days he has committed himself to.

Some work in his companies. At least one is a self-made billionaire in his own right. The last thing they need is a federal government job. They don’t speak like partisan activists but like the successful engineers and businesspeople they are. They may well be Democrats, like Musk once was, but you wouldn’t know it, and nor should it matter.

Considering the mindless invective that is being thrown at Musk and his staff, it is good to have a reality check.

Fifth, first there was Riley Gaines; next there was Stephanic Turner. Now we have another woman who has refused to compete against a male. The sport is disc golfing-- and, No, I do not know what that is. The woman was named Abbie Wilson.

Libs of TikTok reports:

Female disc golfer Abbie Wilson walked off the course during the Music City Open in Nashville to protest a MAN who was allowed to compete against her in the WOMEN's division. "Females must be protected in our division, this is unfair, I refuse to play." Good for her! This insanity must end!

Sixth, I am sure that you were not gulled into believing that the Israeli military was committing genocide in Gaza. I am sure that you knew that the casualty numbers provided by Hamas were largely a lie.

Fair enough, the mainstream press took them to be scientific truth. Hordes of masked college students were tricked into supporting anti-Semitism.

Now, Andrea Peyser reports in the New York Post, the truth is coming out:

Since the horrific attacks of October 7, 2023, Hamas and its sympathizers at the United Nations and college campuses have lied to the world.

They have denied the truth that Hamas raped its prisoners, invented atrocities by Israeli forces, and denied Israel has the right to exist.

They also made up how many Gazans died.

We know this because Hamas admits it.

The murderous terror organization’s Ministry of Health has quietly reduced the number of civilian deaths that it has claimed were inflicted by Israeli forces.

In its March 2025 fatality list, 3,400 “victims” simply vanish. Previously listed as people who perished last August and October, it turns out Hamas invented them.

The outrage goes beyond the number Hamas said were killed, Andrew Fox, author of a report for the Henry Jackson Society on Gazan casualties, tells the Telegraph.

“The demographics are the most important thing in all this. We’ve heard the claims that about 70% of the deaths are women and children, and these lists, especially the most recent, show that’s complete nonsense,” he said.

The truth? About 72% of those killed are men, ages 13 to 55. In other words, likely members of Hamas.

The Henry Jackson Society report goes into detail about how the Ministry of Health — a group controlled by Hamas — fudged the numbers.

It seems you can add Palestinians themselves to the many people sick and tired of Hamas.

The only people who aren’t? The protesters who hide their identities behind keffiyeh scarves, chain themselves to fences and march through the streets harassing Jews. They are immune to the truth.

Finally, I have some free consulting hours in my life coaching practice. I consult either in person in my midtown Manhattan office or via Skype. If you are interested, please email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.

Is China the Future?

The situation in the Middle East is greatly improved now that we have an administration that is not reading Thomas Friedman. Since it is difficult to be wrong about everything, we are happy to point out that Friedman’s recent analysis of China’s economy seems clear and cogent.

Yet, if you belong to the chorus of shrieky schoolgirls and the Republican senators who think that China is the root of all evil, Friedman’s observations will not make you happy. 

Anyway, Friedman traveled to China to visit the Huawei corporate headquarters. One recalls that David Goldman, no leftist he, visited the same campus and came away with a similar observation.

I’d never seen anything like this Huawei campus. Built in just over three years, it consists of 104 individually designed buildings, with manicured lawns, connected by a Disney-like monorail, housing labs for up to 35,000 scientists, engineers and other workers, offering 100 cafes, plus fitness centers and other perks designed to attract the best Chinese and foreign technologists.

Friedman thinks that he is seeing the future. At the least, he is seeing our competition. It represents the Chinese response to our efforts to cut it off from our technology:

The Lianqiu Lake R. & D. campus is basically Huawei’s response to the U.S. attempt to choke it to death beginning in 2019 by restricting the export of U.S. technology, including semiconductors, to Huawei amid national security concerns. The ban inflicted massive losses on Huawei, but with the Chinese government’s help, the company sought to innovate its way around us. As South Korea’s Maeil Business Newspaper reported last year, it’s been doing just that: “Huawei surprised the world by introducing the ‘Mate 60’ series, a smartphone equipped with advanced semiconductors, last year despite U.S. sanctions.” 

Huawei followed with the world’s first triple-folding smartphone and unveiled its own mobile operating system, Hongmeng (Harmony), to compete with Apple’s and Google’s.

And, the country has moved ahead smartly in the use of A. I. technology:

The company also went into the business of creating the A.I. technology for everything from electric vehicles, self-driving cars and even autonomous mining equipment that can replace human miners. Huawei officials said in 2024 alone it installed 100,000 fast chargers across China for its electric vehicles; by contrast, in 2021 the U.S. Congress allocated $7.5 billion toward a network of charging stations, but as of November this network had only 214 operational chargers across 12 states.

So, China installed 100,000 chargers for electric vehicles, whereas we have managed some 214. Hmmm.

In the past Friedman had approved of tariffs. He is less optimistic about their use today. Allow him his thought:

For starters, that view completely misses the fact that virtually every complex product today — from cars to iPhones to mRNA vaccines — is manufactured by giant, complex, global manufacturing ecosystems. That is why those products get steadily better and cheaper. Sure, if you are protecting the steel industry, a commodity, our tariffs might quickly help. But if you are protecting the auto industry and you think just putting up a tariff wall will do it, you don’t know anything about how cars are made. It would take years for American car companies to replace the global supply chains they depend on and make everything in America. Even Tesla has to import some parts.

Now, those who hate China believe that it cheated. To some extent this is true. To some extent it is not. When China began modernizing several decades ago it required foreign companies to share technology. It is not exactly the same as stealing.

Accusing China of cheating is also a markedly hostile remark, one that is not likely to foster comity or amity:

But you’re also wrong if you think that China only cheated its way to global manufacturing dominance. It did cheat, copy and force technology transfers. But what makes China’s manufacturing juggernaut so powerful today is not that it just makes things cheaper; it makes them cheaper, faster, better, smarter and increasingly infused with A.I.

One reason China is doing well is simple. It has emphasized STEM education and is producing a vast supply of human capital to advance the country economically and technologically.

China starts with an emphasis on STEM education — science, technology, engineering and math. Each year, the country produces some 3.5 million STEM graduates, about equal the number of graduates from associate, bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. programs in all disciplines in the United States.

As the Times Beijing bureau chief, Keith Bradsher, reported last year: “China has 39 universities with programs to train engineers and researchers for the rare earths industry. Universities in the United States and Europe have mostly offered only occasional courses.”

In the world of high-speed rail travel, China is far ahead of us:

Over 550 Chinese cities are connected by high-speed rail that makes our Amtrak Acela look like the Pony Express.

For our part we consider it sufficient to hate China. Detaching from China means that we are missing out on their technology:

As Han Shen Lin, an American who works as the China country director for the Asia Group, put it to me over breakfast at Shanghai’s Peace Hotel, “DeepSeek should not have been a surprise.” But, he continued, with all the new U.S. “overseas investment restrictions and disincentives to collaborate, we are now blind to China tech developments. China is defining the tech standards of the future without U.S. input. This will put us at a serious competitive disadvantage in the future.”

Finally, we are making sure that China does not gain a foothold in America. But, at what price?

For instance, on March 19, the Texas Senate gave initial passage to a bill that would bar residents of and organizations based in China, Iran, North Korea and Russia from owning property in Texas. Putting China on that list is just stupid: Hey, let’s ban some of the greatest brainpower in the world instead of laying out incentives and conditions for them to invest in Texas.

Needless to say, this is not the prevailing American wisdom. And yet, are we really as competitive as we think we are? And would be gain nothing from detente?