His button is bigger than their button: The Trump administration is days away from nuclear negotiations with Iran, but it isn’t pulling any punches in the meantime.
Trump’s Treasury Department imposed a new round of sanctions on Wednesday targeting “key entities managing and overseeing Iran’s nuclear program,” the Free Beacon‘s Adam Kredo reports, including the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and a subordinate group, the Iran Centrifuge Technology Company, which manufactures the machines powering Tehran’s uranium enrichment program.
“The fresh sanctions are the most biting to date and strike at the heart of Tehran’s nuclear industry, effectively choking off its ability to source the materials required for uranium enrichment and the construction of research facilities,” writes Kredo. “They are certain to get the Iranian leadership’s attention ahead of negotiations with the United States on Saturday.”
READ MORE: ‘Maximum Pressure’: Trump Unleashes Fresh Sanctions on Iranian Nuclear Program
The green revolution that wasn’t: Joe Biden spent years promising Americans that his green energy agenda would create “good-paying union jobs.” Critics spent years warning that the agenda would actually help China, given Beijing’s grip on the green industry.
Who was right? Days before leaving office, our Thomas Catenacci reports, Biden’s EPA quietly waived “Build America, Buy America” rules for its flagship $7 billion solar program. That program was supposed to “strengthen solar manufacturing and protect manufacturers and workers from China’s unfair trade practices.” But the Biden administration determined that its goals of “climate action and energy justice” were more important—and impossible to achieve without Chinese products—so it issued a one-year waiver scrapping the “Buy America” rules.
“The waiver, which remains in effect and has largely gone undetected, ultimately enables Chinese manufacturers to reap the benefits of billions of dollars in American taxpayer funding under the Solar for All program,” writes Catenacci. “Biden’s secretive waiver underscores the tension between Democrats’ green energy objectives and broader goals to boost domestic manufacturing—in addition to solar panels and solar components, electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, and long-duration utility batteries are largely sourced from manufacturers overseas.”
Happy to help: The thousands of administrators at Ivy League schools like Yale have recognized the plummeting public trust in higher education but struggled to understand what brought it. They’re so flummoxed, in fact, that they’ve taken the extraordinary step of enlisting the Free Beacon to help explain it to them.
Our Aaron Sibarium will appear on Yale’s New Haven campus next week for a panel discussion titled “Bridging the Divide: Trust in Higher Education and Media Through Conservative Lenses.” He has a unique perspective on the subject, graduating magna cum laude from Yale in 2018—and having spent years exposing the absurdities of the Ivies, from Claudine Gay’s plagiarism to Yale Law School’s targeting of a Native American student over his lighthearted use of the term “trap house.”
“Yale student Jack McCordick denounced Sibarium’s reporting on the ‘trap house’ scandal in a column for the Yale Daily News, where the editorial standards have declined substantially since Sibarium left his post as opinion editor,” writes the Free Beacon‘s Andrew Stiles. “He dismissed the Free Beacon as a ‘conservative website whose penchant for beating the anti-woke drum is only matched by its hyper-nationalist saber-rattling.'”
“McCordick, who graduated in 2022 (but not magna cum laude), currently works for the New York Times as an assistant to columnists Ezra Klein and Tressie McMillan Cottom, the UNC-Chapel Hill professor who accused government officials of having ‘deputized all white people’ to murder black people during the George Floyd riots of 2020.”
READ MORE: Happy to Help: Yale Invites Free Beacon Reporter to Explain Conservative Distrust of Higher Ed
Away from the Beacon:
- Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, widely considered to have 2028 presidential aspirations, descended upon D.C. to deliver a speech aimed at the working class. Lobbed a softball question on how she’d handle tariffs differently than Trump, Whitmer responded, “I haven’t really thought about that.”
- Speaking of tariffs, Beltway news outlet the Hill centered its Wednesday newsletter on the “US, China trade war.” Just below that subject line was a message from Shein, the Chinese fast fashion giant suspected of using forced labor in Xinjiang.
- Gavin Newsom made national headlines—and generated left-wing outrage—when he said it’s “deeply unfair” for boys to compete in girls’ sports. Doing something about it is another story. “We were trying to figure this out, and couldn’t figure it out,” Newsom recently said of the issue. “And that’s my point of view—that I just couldn’t figure out how to, quote, unquote, make this fair.”
