RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/05/hed/

Americans have been largely pleased with President Donald Trump’s deluge of executive orders. But not all of them. Public support is weak for his order to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate treaty. This is curious. One is clearly a political organization, the other a useless and wasteful effort. The failure by a significant swath of our countrymen to recognize this is worrisome.

This is actually the second time Trump pulled the U.S. from the WHO. The first departure was in 2020. It pleased us then that no longer would this country “take part in its kleptocratic incompetence and its cozying up to dictators and tyrants, including its biggest influencer, China.” The WHO’s reckoning, we said at the time, “is long overdue.” 

Of course Joe Biden put the country back under the WHO’s thumb on his first day in office in 2021, even though it was clear that leaving had hurt no none. Despite this, our I&I/TIPP poll found that only 38% of Americans agree, either strongly (22%) or somewhat (16%) with quitting the WHO.

Critics point out that at one time, when it followed its original mission, the WHO had value.

“Unfortunately, the WHO has expanded its mission over the years to areas that only tangentially relate to public health, such as issuing alcohol consumption and dietary guidelines,” says Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey A. Singer. “Such issues are more aptly defined as private health, i.e., matters that don’t cause harm to others.”

https://www.jns.org/you-cant-make-america-great-again-by-making-it-retreat-again/

In a recent interview on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” the eponymous host asked typically leading questions of his interviewee—in this case, Curt Mills. The purpose of the one-on-one between the two conservative pundits and supporters of newly instated President Donald Trump was to reiterate their shared aversion to the Republican Party’s “war-mongering neocons.”

Carlson highlighted what he sees as the persistence of neoconservative figures in shaping foreign policy, expressing surprise that “over 20 years after the Iraq War, its architects and supporters are still not fully in control of America’s foreign policy, but certainly influential in it.”

David Wurmser, a renowned Middle East policy expert and former senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, is not mentioned by name in the above exchange. But he has been a target of false accusations regarding his ostensibly pernicious undue sway over U.S. foreign policy. In the following Q&A with JNS, Wurmser sets the record straight.

Q: Before addressing the internecine clash between what I’ll call the “Tucker” camp of the Republican Party/MAGA movement and other conservatives, can you define the term “neocon” and what it has come to mean?

A: Neoconservatives were a group of American liberal intellectuals who began in the 1970s to see a fundamental problem with left-leaning positions. Mining classic philosophy, they essentially had a discovery of civilizational values and foundational ideas that define what made the West—not only in the previous 20 years, but in the previous 2,000—and realized that defending Western civilization was on the table. As a result, they drifted into the camp that was defending it. These figures included Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Nathan Glazer. For me, the epic neoconservative, who emerged during what came to be called the “[Ronald] Reagan revolution,” was Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Originally on the left, affiliated with the Young Socialists—even giving the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention—she ended up becoming the symbol of Reaganism.

What defined her and the entire age of Reaganism was a revival of the faith in America’s being a good and proud nation that needed to issue no apologies. It was a reaction to the defensiveness of the post-Vietnam War era, which had descended into constant self-excoriation during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, always explaining the global hatred of the United States through “blame America first.”

In any case, I don’t believe there’s such a thing anymore as a neoconservative, and I never was one. Because how could I have been a “new” conservative when I reached the age of political awareness after the movement rightward had already happened? I was born and raised on conservative principles. My mother had been a Czech dissident who fled Czechoslovakia in 1948 with the KGB on her tail. She wound up in Germany in a DP camp, then went to Switzerland and finally arrived in America, where most Czech dissidents headed. Later, I found out that she’d been the leader of the Moravian underground against Stalin.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/democrats-still-in-denial/

Like the Japanese soldiers found hiding in the jungle after World War II, unaware that their Emperor had surrendered, the Democrats don’t seem to grasp that their side was nuked and decisively defeated last November.

Witness the recent pathetic spectacle of the Democratic National Committee’s annual winter meeting last week, carried live on MSNBC and held at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley told Fox News Digital, “It’s an important opportunity for us to not only refocus the party and what we present to voters, but also an opportunity for us to look at how we internally govern ourselves.”

But even The New York Times admitted about the DNC meeting that the “Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided” and “have no shared understanding of why they lost the election, never mind how they can win in the future.” “We have no coherent message,” complained Rep. Jasmine Crockett to The Times.

And that’s at the heart of the Democrats’ problem: they believe that ineffective messaging and not the substance of their vision is the reason they lost to Trump. A few Dem leaders, like Amy Klobuchar, at least suspect (correctly) that Biden administration economy-wrecking played a role in voter dissatisfaction, but for the most part, the Party is still in denial about, and clinging to, a vision that the American people roundly rejected last fall.

The forum focused, for example, heavily and unsurprisingly on race and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs – exactly the sort of divisive, social justice madness that Americans brought Trump in to dismantle.

The DNC meeting included a debate among eight candidates for a new DNC chair: former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, DNC Vice Chair Ken Martin, Wisconsin Democrat party Chair Ben Wikler, former Bernie Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir, failed candidate for Arkansas state Representative Quintessa Hathaway, former DHS official Nate Snyder, and Newton, Massachusetts Democratic City Committee executive member Jason Paul. As Fox News Digital put it,

With no clear leader in the party, the next DNC chair is in a position to become the de facto face of Democrats from coast to coast and will make major decisions on messaging, strategy, infrastructure and where to spend millions in political contributions.