Conservatives’ Circular Firing Squad
Conservatives’ Circular Firing Squad
Good morning!
Another sign of conservative fracturing in America: More than a dozen Heritage Foundation employees have quit or been fired after its president, Kevin Roberts, defended Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes from attacks he called “venomous.”
The Heritage Foundation think tank is widely regarded as a cornerstone of the modern conservative movement and influences Republican policy.
One of the men who left, law professor Josh Blackman, published an open letter to Roberts, saying, “You aligned the Heritage Foundation with the rising tide of antisemitism on the right.”
Donald Trump Jr. responded, “Personally, I think it’s great news for Heritage that a bunch of Trump-hating rinos are leaving.”
To whatever degree this represents the Trump administration’s view, it is concerning. Opposition to Holocaust denial is dismissed as mere politics. If you hold any principles whatever, you have no home in the maga movement.
This dust-up portends rougher brawls to come.
There’s a profound lesson in the infighting among conservatives. Politics is a world of compromise, maneuvering, ignoring differences to pursue larger ambitions, building coalitions through trade-offs and sellouts. “Politics have no relation to morals,” Machiavelli famously said. You must be a hard-nosed pragmatist if you want power.
The search for effective government, wrestling with its failings and faults, has puzzled man for our entire history. It makes studying the Bible’s description of the one form of government that truly works all the more inspiring.
WSJ: ‘In Germany, everyone is a defense manufacturer now’: Germany’s young entrepreneurs of the year are the founders of the defense start-up Helsing. That’s according to former Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, writing for Germany’s Handelsblatt on December 18. This is part of a massive shift by German manufacturers back to an industry in which they have historically excelled: making weapons.
As of mid-2025, Helsing was valued at $14 billion. It is telling that Germany’s most successful start-up is a weapons producer.
“In Germany, Everyone Is a Defense Manufacturer Now,” the Wall Street Journal wrote on December 19. “Across Germany, railcar factories are being retooled to build military vehicles, auto suppliers are joining with defense contractors, and former soldiers are suddenly hot commodities in the jobs market.”
The shift is encouraged by the government, which plans to nearly triple its annual military spending to $180 billion by 2029.
Everywhere German Economics Minister Katherina Reiche travels, “[o]ne theme follows her: the question of defense capabilities,” Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote on December 16 after her trip to Israel. Welt wrote in July that she is acting “as armaments minister.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that the number of firms in the German defense sector’s main trade association has nearly doubled in the past year, and that growth in this sector is offsetting losses in the vehicles and chemicals sectors.
“Defense spending is so big that it would really be a major game changer in terms of basic and military-applied research,” said Guntram Wolff, professor of economics at Université Libre de Bruxelles.
The Journal wrote:
The growth of the defense industry is a return to Germany’s past. Starting in the early 19th century, German industrialization was closely intertwined with the country’s weapons industry. Steelmaker Krupp, founded in 1811, was the largest industrial company in Europe for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It became synonymous with German military power, producing the Big Bertha gun during World War i and later building tanks and U-boat components for the Nazis.
“The shift isn’t as controversial as it once was in a country with a strong post-World War ii tradition of pacifism,” the Journal commented. “… Germany’s defense industry was completely dismantled after World War ii, and military production was banned. But starting in the 1950s, Germany began to slowly rebuild its military and defense industry with U.S. support, acting as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.”
The revival of Germany’s military industry was well organized and planned. The question is not whether Germany will remain pacifist after rebuilding a powerful military, but rather who will be its target. Learn more in Germany’s Conquest of the Balkans.
Assad’s dungeons are back in business: Syrian dictator Bashar Assad was so brutal that Freedom House ranked his country dead last among independent states in 2024, shortly before Syria’s bloody civil war finally resulted in his fleeing the country. The infrastructure of that brutality was an extensive system of dungeons, as exposed in a recent report. Those dungeons are back in the news because the new regime, which pledged to close them, is still operating them.
Yesterday, Reuters reported that former al Qaeda affiliate and current Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa has reopened Assad’s prisons and filled them with opponents of the new regime. These include members of the Alawite and Druze minorities, who faced ethnic cleansing by Sharaa’s forces this past year, among others. Reuters wrote:
Throughout, there were other detentions from all denominations in the name of security: large numbers of people, many from Syria’s Sunni majority, accused of vague links to Assad; human-rights activists; Christians who say they have been shaken down for information or money; Shiites picked up at checkpoints and accused of ties with Iran or Hezbollah.
The number of those incarcerated seems much lower than under the Assad regime but far higher than what it would be if Sharaa were keeping his pledge from a year ago to close the dungeons completely.
The Trump administration claims that Syria’s change in government makes it a legitimate political and business partner. The use of old dungeons for newly labeled dissidents exposes the error in this belief.
IN OTHER NEWS
The Chinese Communist Party expects to be able to seize Taiwan by force by the end of 2027, according to a Pentagon draft report analyzed by Reuters today. The Chinese now have more than 100 intercontinental ballistic missiles operational across three new silo fields, the report notes, which could factor into tactics that could complicate any American response and “could seriously challenge and disrupt U.S. presence in or around a conflict in the Asia-Pacific region.” China has been threatening to take over its small island neighbor for decades, but Taiwan has maintained its independence and freedom thanks to military equipment and a promise of protection from its main partner: the United States. But this new report follows an admission by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last year that in simulations pitting the U.S. against China, “We lose every time.” In 2026, expect more signs that the authoritarian regime in China is actively planning to conquer this democratic nation.
Is a German strongwoman imminent? Forty-nine percent of Germans expect the nation’s ruling coalition to fall apart before its term ends in 2029, according to a YouGov poll of 2,116 Germans published yesterday. Only 34 percent believe it will go the full term; the rest are unsure. Meanwhile, a separate poll for Bild shows Alternative für Deutschland leader Alice Weidel is the favorite to succeed Chancellor Friedrich Merz, with 26 percent saying they’d like her as chancellor. Only 20 percent chose Merz; 12 percent chose the left-wing vice chancellor, Lars Klingbeil. Beating all of them, with 31 percent of the vote, was “none of the above.” It’s one of the “nones” that the Trumpet expects to become Germany’s next strongman, not Weidel. But the strong support for a fringe figure and the “none of the above” frustration highlight Germans’ rejection of the nation’s current crop of politicians. To learn what the Bible says about a coming German strongman, read A Strong German Leader Is Imminent.
‘Gen Z should just get married and have kids’: One of the “big three” newspapers in Britain just published a pro-marriage editorial. Marriage rates in Britain have fallen to historic lows after the percentage of married adults in England and Wales dropped below half in 2021. Kara Kennedy writes in the Telegraph that “a generation trained to optimize every decision has lost some faith in action itself. We plan so carefully for the future that we forget the future is mostly made of things you couldn’t have planned for anyway: illness, babies, death, joy. A surprise tax bill or two.” The late Herbert W. Armstrong warned about the destruction of this foundational institution decades ago in his booklet Why Marriage—Soon Obsolete? Gen Z and our nations in general desperately need to preserve, defend, understand and, most importantly, live the marriage relationship as its Creator designed.
King David defeats another giant: SpongeBob SquarePants: A new animated musical from an upstart studio was the second-highest-grossing movie in theaters this weekend. It fell behind Avatar: Fire and Ash, one of the costliest films ever made, but out-earned The SpongeBob Movie, an absurd film that is part of a multibillion-dollar franchise. The David movie’s success exposes the bias and degeneracy of Hollywood executives. They could have made a lot of money putting Bible stories on the big screen, but they intentionally chose to focus on perverted propaganda. Many hail the success of David as another sign of an American religious revival, but as Trumpet executive editor Stephen Flurry discussed on yesterday’s Trumpet Daily, it will take far more than popular movies or musicians to turn America to God.
