Commentary Culture Investigations

Why this battle, and why now?

“Never just read one newspaper” is one of my media literacy rules. Sometimes even that fails, as it did on Monday April 13, 2026, when the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both weighed in with suspiciously similar, and sadly unskeptical, stories claiming that the Iran war somehow provided vindication for China’s emphasis on wind and solar energy.
How’d the New York Times (“War Highlights China’s Renewables Lead”) and the Wall Street Journal (“An Iran War Winner: China’s Clean Energy”) wind up with the same bad takes on the same story on the same day? It’s likely that their editors were both reading the Associated Press, a wire service that drives newsroom agendas by providing a tip sheet in advance disclosing what stories the AP is working on. The AP had its own version of the same story, headlined, “Iran war’s global energy crisis sharpens China’s advantage in clean tech.” Datelined Hong Kong, a China-controlled territory where journalists are imprisoned if they publish articles that the Chinese authorities disapprove of, the AP story begins, “China is poised to benefit from the Iran war as global energy disruptions accelerate a shift away from fossil fuels and toward clean technologies and renewable power, industries that China dominates.”
The gist of the story—that the Iran war somehow demonstrates that China is right about wind and solar energy—is a fantasy, not a fact. Even if you rely on China’s own unreliable data, the International Energy Agency lists coal and coal products as 71 percent of China’s energy production, and solar, wind, and other renewables combined at 5.4 percent.
Not everyone agrees that the Iran war is a win for China, energy wise.
President Trump posted to Truth Social over the weekend, “Massive numbers of completely empty oil tankers, some of the largest anywhere in the World, are heading, right now, to the United States to load up with the best and ‘sweetest’ oil (and gas!) anywhere in the World. We have more oil than the next two largest oil economies combined – and higher quality. We are waiting for you. Quick turnaround! President DJT”
Trump also posted a world map of marine traffic depicting tankers headed for the U.S. to fill up. “GREAT!!!,” Trump commented.
“The U.S. is going to make a fortune,” said an Israeli reserve brigadier general, Amir Avivi, the founder and chairman of Israel’s Defense and Security Forum. Avivi said in Monday’s IDSF briefing that American interests for the conflict include moving Iran “from alliance with China to alliance with the United States.” He also said that a successful war outcome for America would likely include Iranian oil being traded in petrodollars as part of the SWIFT system (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) rather than on the black market.
A headline that said “Iran War Winner: U.S. Fracking and Offshore Drilling” would be as accurate, probably more accurate, than the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Associated Press headlines. It’s unlikely to appear so long as the AP is driving the agenda.
The AP used to be funded largely by dues from member newspapers. But as the newspaper industry has collapsed, the AP has become increasingly reliant on grants from nonprofit organizations with ideological agendas.
The AP website also lists a “partnership” with the China News Service. It describes the China News Service as providing “News and insight from daily life in China,” illustrating the partnership with a pair of adorable pandas. “China News Service (CNS) provides in-depth news from China to an international audience, with coverage including feature stories and topics such as current events, art, lifestyle, people and travel,” the AP website says. What AP doesn’t say is that China News Service is controlled by the Chinese government and its governing Communist Party.
The AP article carries a disclaimer stating that “The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content.” The Washington Free Beacon has previously exposed this relationship with articles such as “The AP’s Climate Coverage Is Funded by Left-Wing Groups—And It Shows” and “AP Quietly Reveals Donation From Foreign Group That Trains Journalists as Climate Change ‘Activists.’” I wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal in 2025: “Following the Money, the Associated Press Moves Left.” This latest AP article fits the pattern.
The first quote in the AP article says: “China’s approach to energy sector development and geopolitics has been completely validated by the Iran conflict,” said Sam Reynolds with the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis is funded by the same left-wing foundations that fund the AP. For example, the Hewlett Foundation gave $200,000 to the  Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis in 2025 and $750,000 to the AP’s climate desk in October 2024 for a 24-month grant.
A member of the board of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis is Sarah Brennan, who works at the Rockefeller Family Fund on the Funder Collaborative on Oil & Gas. The Rockefeller Family Fund gave $347,250 to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis in 2024, according to the Rockefeller Family Fund tax return, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis $570,000 in 2025. The AP website lists “The Rockefeller Foundation” as a current funder. There are lots of Rockefellers, and the Brothers Fund, the Foundation and Family Fund are distinct entities, but the heirs of John D. Rockefeller, founder of what is now ExxonMobil, have been outspoken against fossil fuels. “Supporting the AP’s climate desk dovetails with The Rockefeller Foundation’s recognition of climate change as a singular threat to humanity,” the Rockefeller Foundation website says. The Rockefeller Foundation 2024 tax return listed a $250,000 grant to the AP in 2023 “in support of launching a climate coverage initiative.”
Another passage in the AP article: “They are at the very forefront of this, more so than any other countries in the world, certainly more so than the United States,” said Li Shuo, director of the Asia Society Policy Institute’s China Climate Hub. The Rockefeller Foundation gave the Asia Society $200,000 in 2024 for “researching China’s climate goals and implementation strategies,” according to the Rockefeller Foundation tax return.
There’s nothing necessarily problematic about a news organization funded by Rockefellers publishing news articles that also quote sources funded by Rockefellers. The problem is when it leads to readers being misled about reality. The stories are deceptively illustrated with pictures of windmills, solar panels, and batteries instead of coal mines or nuclear power plants.
The executive editor of the New York Times, Joseph Kahn, has been pushing this Chinese triumphalist line: “It’s obvious China has taken the lead … America is relatively stagnant by comparison,” he claimed in December 2025. The reality is that China is heavily dependent on imported oil, notwithstanding all the greenwashing pliantly provided by the AP, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal reporters. The U.S., by contrast, is a net exporter of energy.
The AP’s director of Media Relations & Corporate Communications, Patrick Maks, answered a question about the organization’s partnership with China News Service, providing a statement that said, “AP distributes clearly labeled third-party content from hundreds of unconnected organizations around the world. This content is marked as fully separate from the core AP news report. None of the AP’s business relationships have any connection to, or influence over, the journalism AP produces and provides to its customers and audiences around the world.”
He did not say directly whether the AP is paid for the arrangement, or if so, how much. Whether it’s a paid or voluntary “partnership,” it’s concerning, no matter the labeling. China will have less money to throw around on this sort of thing now that its supply of smuggled petroleum from Iran is getting more scarce and more pricey. Alas the same does not apply to the Rockefeller and Hewlett Foundations, at least if their return is measured in articles produced rather than in readers convinced.
The post The Misleading Media Groupthink On China’s Renewable Energy appeared first on .

The court observed that the president’s complaint ‘comes nowhere close’ to establishing actual malice, which a defamation claim requires.

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) is taking heat after a sexual misconduct scandal forced his good friend, California Democrat Eric Swalwell, to suspend his campaign for governor and resign from Congress. “An important question everyone should be asking: what did Senator Ruben Gallego know and when did he know it?” journalist Yashar Ali wrote on X.
Gallego, who chaired Swalwell’s short-lived presidential campaign in 2020 and served alongside him in Congress for years, endorsed the congressman’s bid for governor on March 26. The Arizona Mirror described Swalwell as “one of Gallego’s closest friends in Congress.” In 2021, they took their spouses to Qatar on a luxury junket, met with terrorist-adjacent charity officials, and posed shirtless while riding camels in the desert.
Before abruptly withdrawing his endorsement last week—amid reports that Swalwell allegedly raped a former staffer and behaved inappropriately toward at least three other women—Gallego initially rode to his buddy’s defense.
“When you are in first place, is when they target you,” Gallego wrote on April 7 in response to reports that Swalwell would “soon” face credible accusations of sexual misconduct. “Eric is a fighter and he will win the Governors race.” Gallego also attacked the credibility of Democratic influencer Arielle Fodor, aka “Mrs. Frazzled,” who (accurately) predicted that the coming allegations would sink Swalwell’s campaign.
In a statement posted on April 10, Gallego claimed he was “shocked and upset” to learn of the accusations against his friend, and said he regretted defending him on social media “prior to knowing all the information.” Since then, many have challenged Gallego’s suggestion that he was completely unaware of Swalwell’s alleged behavior toward women, which has been described as an “open secret” for more than a decade.
“I’ve covered Eric Swalwell since he was a member of the Dublin City Council,” wrote Bay Area writer Steven Tavares. “Shortly after being elected to Congress in 2013, his behavior towards women was known by all levels of our local government and the Alameda County Democratic Party.” Gallego became a congressman in 2015. Nearly three years later, a CNN article on sexual harassment in Congress referenced “more than half a dozen” Capitol Hill sources who “independently named one California congressman for pursuing female staffers.”
Swalwell married Brittany Watts, the mother of his three children, in 2016. The woman who alleged that Swalwell raped her was a former staffer on his presidential campaign—which Gallego chaired—in 2019, and worked in his congressional office until 2021. The woman’s account was detailed in a San Francisco Chronicle report that Gallego cited in the statement withdrawing his endorsement of Swalwell.
Gallego’s bromantic relationship with Swalwell isn’t just raising questions about how much he may have known about his buddy’s atrocious behavior. The scandal has also increased scrutiny of Gallego’s own not-so-wholesome personal life. Gallego divorced his first wife, Phoenix mayor Kate Gallego, less than a year after joining Swalwell in Congress. He filed for forced divorce when she was nine months pregnant and “likely to give birth any day.” He described the marriage as “irretrievably broken”—a claim his wife disputed—and demanded that his wife cover his attorney’s fees. The details only came to light in 2024 after the Washington Free Beacon successfully sued to have the records unsealed.
Gallego claims to have met his second wife, real estate lobbyist Sydney Barron, a little over a year after his divorce was finalized. He was 39 at the time; she was 25. There is reason to doubt Gallego’s account of the timeline. He wrote in his book, They Called Us “Lucky,” that the couple got engaged in February 2019. Records show they were legally married in December that same year. Two months later, Gallego announced on social media that Barron had accepted his proposal. They held a wedding in Puerto Rico in 2021, according to Politico. The ceremony was officiated by Leigh Parker Pross, a defense industry lobbyist who introduced the couple while working as regional finance director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Days before the Swalwell scandal broke, Gallego told NBC News he was seriously considering a presidential run in 2028.
UPDATE: Swalwell resigned from Congress on Monday. He vowed to take responsibility for his “mistakes,” but reiterated that the “serious” allegations against him were “false.” In a statement, Gallego said Swalwell was “no longer fit” to serve and once again claimed to have had “no knowledge” of his former colleague’s scandalous behavior. “I trusted someone who I believed was a friend,” Gallego wrote, “but it is now clear that he is not the person I thought I knew.”

The post Wingman Woes: Gallego Caught in Swalwell Storm appeared first on .

Shocking allegations of sexual assault from women who were previously staffers for Rep. Eric Swalwell have ended his campaign for the California governorship. Despite Swalwell’s trying to shut down these claims as “false allegations,” Democrats are pulling away their support and are doing everything they can to distance themselves from him.
On this episode of The Spectator P.M. Podcast, hosts Ellie Gardey Holmes, Lyrah Margo, and Morgan Weiner discuss the developing controversy with Swalwell and go through the horrific experiences that these women shared. They examine the responses by notable Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and connect Swalwell’s inappropriate encounters to Gavin Newsom’s past with women. (RELATED: The Women Who Will Haunt Gavin Newsom’s Presidential Campaign)
Tune in to hear their discussion!

Read Ellie and Lyrah’s writing here and here.
Listen to the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Spotify.

Watch the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Rumble.

From Just the News:
Colorado election officials have reported a significant increase in the number of inactive voter registrations removed from state rolls following a legal dispute with the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.
The issue stems from a lawsuit filed in 2020, in which Judicial Watchalleged that Colorado had failed to properly maintain its voter registration lists in compliance with the federal National Voter Registration Act.
State officials denied any violation of federal law but ultimately agreed to settle the case in 2023. As part of the agreement, Colorado committed to providing regular data on voter roll maintenance to Judicial Watch for several years.
Read more here…
The post Colorado removes 372,000 inactive voters from rolls after Judicial Watch legal action appeared first on Judicial Watch.

From Newsmax:
Newly declassified documents have raised fresh questions about the whistleblower complaint that triggered President Donald Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.
The records, obtained by RealClear Investigations, show then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson knew the complainant was a registered Democrat with ties to then-former Vice President Joe Biden, yet still determined the complaint was “a matter of urgent concern that appeared credible.”
“Michael Atkinson is a key anti-Trump conspirator who played a central role in transforming the ‘whistleblower’ complaint into the impeachment proceedings,” Judicial Watch investigator Bill Marshall told RCI.
Read more here…
The post Declassified Docs Raise Questions on Trump Whistleblower appeared first on Judicial Watch.

The attempted firebombing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home should be a wake-up call.

A viral video of New York Times Columnist Tom Friedman suggesting he’d rather have the U.S. lose the Iran war than see President Donald Trump succeed is the epitome of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), iconic Fox News Channel Chief Political Analyst Brit Hume says.

“Don’t want Iran to lose if it means Trump wins,” Media Research Center Vice President Brent Baker explained Saturday in a X.com post introducing video of Friedman telling CNN that he’d like the U.S. to prevail – but, not if President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu are responsible for the victory:

“Don’t want Iran to lose if it means Trump wins. @TomFriedman of @NYTimes really wants ‘to see Iran defeated militarily because this regime is a terrible regime for its people and the region’” but on CNN’s @Smerconish he fretted ‘the problem is I really don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are two awful human beings. They are both engaged in anti-democratic projects in their own countries. They’re both alleged crooks. They are terrible, terrible people doing terrible things to America’s standing in the world and Israel’s standing in the world.’”

The video post exposing Friedman’s priorities has garnered more than a million views to-date.

The columnist’s anti-Trump-at-all-costs attitude is “A perfect distillation of TDS,” Hume replied to the video of Friedman’s comments.

“What kind of sick hate must @tomfriedman have that he roots for USA to lose to a terrorist regime who has killed thousands of Americans?” U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee asked, reacting to the video on X.com. “I didn’t vote for Obama but I praised him for taking out Bin Laden,” the former Arkansas governor added.

Friedman’s sentiment “bluntly shines a terrible light” on why the so-called “mainstream” media (MSM) can’t be trusted, former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer wrote.

“Friedman’s thinking infects virtually all reporters in the MSM,” Fleischer’s post warns:

“Tom Friedman of the NYT bluntly shines a terrible light on how much of the liberal MSM covers ALL the news. Their anti-Trump bias taints how they cover the news, to the point where they are torn over the Iran War because they don’t want Trump to win it.

“This is why it’s so hard to trust the accuracy and fairness of the MSM. They don’t exist to play it straight and cover the news. They exist to support their anti-Trump point of view.

“And don’t tell me Friedman is a columnist so he’s different. Friedman’s thinking infects virtually all reporters in the MSM. They are very much cut from the same cloth.”

 

Don’t want Iran to lose if it means Trump wins. @TomFriedman of @NYTimes really wants “to see Iran defeated militarily because this regime is a terrible regime for its people and the region,” but on CNN’s @Smerconish he fretted “the problem is I really don’t want to see Bibi… pic.twitter.com/rgPngGXkGc
— Brent Baker 🇺🇲🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) April 11, 2026
 

Amanpour & Co., airing on PBS and CNN International, bashed President Trump’s color-blind government policies by dishonestly conflating equality and DEI-style “equity” in Friday’s interview with Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson.

The show opener from Trump-loathing host Christiane Amanpour commenced the sleight of hand: “As Trump and company wage war on DEI inside America — elevating those who first fought for equality. Civil rights leader Bryan Stevenson tells me about the legacy of Montgomery in the 1950s.”

But DEI doesn’t stand for equality, as Amanpour implied. It’s an abbreviation for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” a more radical and far-reaching concept. While striving for equality means providing each individual equal opportunities to achieve a desired outcome, an “equity” system allocates more opportunity to certain groups, engineering unequal treatment based on group identity in a doomed attempt to achieve equal outcomes for all.

HOST CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: We turn now to the culture war raging in America. Since taking office, President Trump and his cabinet have had DEIs squarely in their sights, attacking equal rights protections at home and bullying other countries to do the same as the price of doing business with the United States.

As a civil rights lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson has been fighting back. In Montgomery, Alabama in 2018, he opened a national memorial dedicated to victims of lynching. Now, he’s been telling me about his fourth project, focused on Montgomery’s 1955-65 decade, when black residents launched the historic bus boycott and with it a movement to help transform the country….

So, let’s just recap a little bit. President Trump signed an executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History and basically ordering a purge of what he called divisive race-centered ideology from a lot of American public spaces, parks, historic sites and museums. And right in the middle of this, you’re opening a new, I might say, challenge to that ideology and putting the legacy of racism and civil rights right front and center….
BRYAN STEVENSON, FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, EQUAL JUSTICE: Yes. Well, we are deeply committed to pushing our country to recognize and address the harms of our history in a more honest way. We’ve never really created cultural institutions in this country that deal honestly with the harms and legacy of slavery. We haven’t dealt with the challenges created by a hundred years of lynching and terror violence….

Again, the host mischaracterized what DEI really means — it’s more radical than what people mean by “leveling the playing field.”

AMANPOUR: ….I mean, you’ve got prominent white administration people hitting back at decades of trying to level the playing field. You know, Trump, his administration, as I said, their attacks on DEI. You’ve got Hegseth, the current secretary of defense. Basically, he’s like obsessed by it….

Christiane Amanpour on her eponymous show, airing on PBS: …President Trump and his cabinet have had DEIs squarely in their sights, attacking equal rights protections at home and bullying other countries to do the same as the price of doing business with the United States.” pic.twitter.com/rJ06jBA7mG
— Clay Waters (@claywaters44) April 12, 2026
 

Then Amanpour ran a clip of Hegseth promising President Trump a “colorblind and merit-based” military and assuring him he “The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department.” The host reacted to Hegseth’s statement about colorblind standards with accusations of racism.

AMANPOUR: I mean, honestly, you know, for you and me to hear that, you as a black man, me as a woman, you know, to see that he did that, the first firing was the highly decorated General C.Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and then many female officers as well, purging records of a Medal of Honor winner with a Hispanic-sounding surname. I mean, honestly. And that’s now.

Making promotions at least somewhat contingent on race and gender will tempt some to game that ethnic and gender-based spoils system.

STEVENSON: The administration has basically restored a presumption of incompetence, a presumption of unworthiness, a presumption of incompetence, a presumption of incompetence, a presumption and they’ve applied it to black and brown people….

Presuming incompetence…isn’t that what affirmative action-type systems like DEI actually do?

Amanpour, the purported journalist host, concluded the interview with a radicalized hippie moment, quoting the previously referenced civil rights legend, John Lewis.

AMANPOUR: As the great John Lewis said, make “good trouble.”