Some actors use publicists to oversee their social media feeds.

Others, like Christopher Lloyd of “Back to the Future” fame, acknowledge family members help flesh out their accounts.

Not William Shatner.

The “Star Trek” legend seems fully in charge of his X musings. You can feel his personality in every post.

This week, Shatner took aim at a cultural scourge many of his peers ignored for far too long. The 94-year-old targeted the erasure of history during the post-George Floyd era, a time when progressives attempted to throw the past into the dustbin.

Classic TV episodes got memory-holed for sharing inappropriate jokes. Statues got vandalized and torn down. Beloved authors like J.K. Rowling got attacked for sharing the “wrong” opinions.

Even if said opinions are held by the majority.

That effort has faltered in recent years The election of President Donald Trump partly reflected that. We’re also seeing the return of ribald comedy, much to the media’s chagrin.

Shatner hasn’t forgotten about what he dubbed the “wokies.” And he has a personal stake in the matter.

It’s called Presentism and it was used wreak havoc on history several years ago when statues were torn down, books were banned and things renamed to prove how progressive the world had become. Just listen to my opening monologue on Star Trek TOS on Paramount+. They intentionally… https://t.co/HJhG8PrqFM

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) April 9, 2025

He’s right and most Hollywood stars stood down rather than take a stand against it. Heck, Stephen Colbert laughed when several Dr. Seuss books got memory holed in 2021.

Woke is no laughing matter, and Shatner knows that better than anyone. He’s not taking a political stand, per se. His X account even reads, “NOT POLITICAL” in all caps. It’s common sense, and he flexes just that on social media.

RELATED: WALTER KOENIG EXPLAINS THE SHATNER HATE

Shatner also cited a library removing Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name due to “problematic” elements in her classic yarns.

Obviously you were not around when the wokies (not to be confused with Wookiees ) coerced the Library Association to change the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Literary Award to a generic name because of presentism & their objections on how Native Americans were depicted in… https://t.co/gChoasPFAv

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) April 9, 2025

Naturally, a few of his followers pushed back against his commentary, but he didn’t buckle.

Others noted that Paramount+, in its current incarnation, doesn’t “garble” his iconic line from the “Star Trek” opening sequence – “to boldly go where no man [emphasis added] has gone before.”

Later “Trek” iterations tweaked the line to say “where no one has gone before,” starting with “Star Trek: The Next Generation” in the 1980s.

X users told Shatner his immortal phrasing remains intact.

The post William Shatner Shreds Woke Mob Erasing History appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

Chance Miller, writing at 9to5Mac:

Ahead of that, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said today that Trump firmly believes that Apple can move iPhone manufacturing to the United States. In response to a question from Maggie Haberman of The New York Times about the types of jobs Trump hopes to create in the U.S. with these tariffs, Leavitt said:

“The president wants to increase manufacturing jobs here in the United States of America, but he’s also looking at advanced technologies. He’s also looking at AI and emerging fields that are growing around the world that the United States needs to be a leader in as well. There’s an array of diverse jobs. More traditional manufacturing jobs, and also jobs in advanced technologies. The president is looking at all of those. He wants them to come back home.”

Haberman followed up with a question about iPhone manufacturing specifically, asking whether Trump thinks this is “the kind of technology” that could move to the United States. Leavitt responded:

“[Trump] believes we have the labor, we have the workforce, we have the resources to do it. As you know, Apple has invested $500 billion here in the United States. So, if Apple didn’t think the United States could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change.”

Leavitt is referencing Apple’s announcement from February, when it said it would “spend more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years.” Apple’s commitment, however, made zero reference to iPhone assembly in the United States. The press release focused on R&D in the U.S., chip production in Arizona, AI server manufacturing in Houston, Apple TV+ production, and an academy in Michigan.

Also worth reading today is this story from 404 Media, which outlines exactly why an iPhone made in the U.S. is “pure fantasy.”

Another way to think about it is that the iPhone — the iPhone as we know it — can’t really be made anywhere else but China. Apple doesn’t publicly state how many iPhones are made in which countries — shocker that they’d be secretive about that — but estimates peg annual production as being 85–90 percent in China, 10 percent in India, and the remainder in Brazil and Vietnam. Wages aren’t even close to the biggest reason for this. Ultimately the biggest unique factor to the Chinese supply chain is scale. Foxconn’s iPhone factories in China aren’t mere buildings and aren’t really even campuses — they’re more like entire cities unto themselves.

We can joke about US-made iPhones costing $9,000 but the jokes miss the point. If the world were such that all iPhones sold to Americans were made in America, there’s no plausible scenario where iPhone ownership would be commonplace. Let’s estimate that Apple sells 50 million iPhones per year in the US. Apple couldn’t manufacture 50 million iPhones per year in the US at any cost. No amount of money could be thrown at the problem and make it happen that 50 million new iPhones are made in the US in the near future. Apple could make some iPhones here, but not many. And however many they might make would be built using components (displays, chips) that would have to be imported anyway.

Even if Apple were to dramatically raise the price of an iPhone, and even if, somehow, demand for iPhones didn’t drop in the face of dramatically higher prices, Apple simply couldn’t make tens of millions of iPhones here in the US. But of course demand would drop precipitously in the face of higher prices. And a gray market would instantly rise. Because even if Apple, magically, were able to build tens of millions of iPhones in the US, they’d still be building hundreds of millions of them in China — and those Chinese-assembled ones would cost less. I’m imagining an entire cottage industry of bootleggers running Chinese-made iPhones from Canada into the US, and instead of buying iPhones from an Apple Store, people will buy them from the backs of U-Haul trucks. (Gray market bootlegging is inevitable with these tariffs, for every sort of product. If something is cheaper in Canada than it is in the US, someone’s going to smuggle it across the border.)

There simply is no scenario where 50 million Americans per year buy an iPhone for prices they’d be willing to pay without most of them being manufactured by the Chinese supply chain Apple has built.

Someone asked recently what would change as a result of the world being plunged into a trade war by the Rose Garden tariffs. I quipped that either Adam Smith would be proved wrong or we’d all get poorer. (This is also true of the scaled-back tariffs, which still leave American tariffs higher than they’ve been in a century.)

In response, as sometimes happens, they brought up Adam Smith’s arguments for tariffs. These arguments come from Book 4, Chapter 2 of Wealth of Nations. They’re a red herring, as we’ll see. But let’s look at how they apply.

There are two instances in which Smith says you can always justify managing trade, and two cases in which managing trade can’t be automatically condemned. Restrictions on imports can always be justified (1) in shipping because it’s tied to military defence, and (2) by taxing imports at the same rate that domestic goods are taxed to create a level playing field. Trade restrictions shouldn’t be automatically condemned when (A) they are retaliatory tariffs, or (B) free trade is being phased in.

So what’s the big deal? Retaliatory tariffs are right there in the list. Why would the Rose Garden tariffs vex Adam Smith?

Smith is very specific about when retaliatory tariffs are appropriate. “There may be good policy in retaliations of this kind, when there is a probability that they will procure the repeal of the high duties or prohibitions complained of.” (IV.ii.39) In other words, retaliatory tariffs are good if they secure freer trade. Israel’s elimination of tariffs against the United States did not spare them. When Vietnam and the European Union offered to eliminate all tariffs, the administration rejected these offers as insufficient. If these were meant to be retaliatory tariffs, they’ve failed.

But the Rose Garden tariffs were never retaliatory. They were not based on how much other countries tariff the United States. They are not even based on estimates of non-tariff barriers. The White House confirmed that the method used to calculate the tariffs was the trade deficit divided by U.S. imports from that country, then divided again by 2 (Unless a country does not run a trade deficit with the United States, in which case the tariff was set to 10%).

So it’s not about retaliation, but—at best—a negative trade balance. And we all know what Adam Smith said about the balance of trade, right?

But anyway, Adam Smith’s arguments about tariffs are a red herring if we want to know what Adam Smith would think of these tariffs.

The effect of the tariff announcement in the Rose Garden was not simply to raise the price of international trade. As Thomas Sowell observed, the tariff announcement also introduced uncertainty that makes foreign investment and globally integrated supply chains more vulnerable—more risky—at the same time as the tariffs themselves make international trade more expensive. The overall effect of these policies is the effect of all trade restrictions: they effectively shrink the global market. Exchanges that would otherwise make sense become more expensive and they don’t happen.

Adam Smith’s core economic insight, the one from which all other arguments in the Wealth of Nations follows, is that the wealth of nations is a product of the division of labour (Book 1, Chapter 1), of cooperation facilitated by our natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange (Book 1, Chapter 2). The division of labour is limited by how many people we can divide labour between, what Smith calls the “extent of the market” (Book 1, Chapter 3).

If we will not be poorer because the tariff announcement in the Rose Garden shrunk the number of potential trades, and with them the extent of the market, then the division of labour is not the source of the wealth of nations. If the Rose Garden tariffs won’t make us all poorer, then Adam Smith was wrong about everything.

If Smith was wrong about everything, who cares when he says tariffs are good?

Related content:

CEE Entries: Protectionism, Mercantilism
WealthofTweets: Book 4, Chapter 2
WealthOfTweets: Book 4 Chapter 3
Jon Murphy, The Political Problem of Tariffs

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