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Ruth King

Did Big Government Pull Us Out of the Great Depression? A core element of the Democrats’ world-view is wholly false. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/did-big-government-pull-us-out-of-the-great-depression/

The conventional wisdom is that the Great Depression that began in October 1929 was the fault of Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Republicans in general. Big business was out of control, and big government should have reined it in with regulations that would have prevented the crash from happening in the first place. Herbert Hoover’s disastrous presidency (1929-1933) is generally presented as evidence of this: most establishment historians echo the charge that Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats began making in 1932, that Hoover’s inaction and trust in the power of the economy to right itself only deepened the crisis and lengthened the Depression. Then Roosevelt’s New Deal smorgasbord of government programs put Americans back to work and finally provided the economy the stimulus it needed to recover.

Virtually every aspect of that conventional wisdom is false. As Rating America’s Presidents shows, if Coolidge had been president in October 1929, he would have without any doubt followed the precedent established by Van Buren, Grant, Cleveland, and Theodore Roosevelt that Hoover explicitly rejected in his memoirs: do nothing, recognizing that economic relief was not the federal government’s responsibility, and let market forces heal the economy. What Hoover doesn’t mention is that in all four of those earlier cases, the president’s policy worked, and the economy eventually righted itself, although in some cases it took longer to do so than some would have liked.

In contrast, Hoover and then Roosevelt oversaw the massive expansion of the federal government in response to the Great Depression, and it became the longest-lasting economic crisis in American history, not definitively ending until 1941. Government intervention didn’t end the Depression; it prolonged it. Hoover’s programs only added to the burden ordinary Americans had to carry, especially when he increased taxes in 1932. The tax increases were unavoidable, however: contrary to the assumptions of many Americans today, big government programs don’t magically pay for themselves.

How Hamas Plans To Foil Trump’s Gaza Plan by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21377/hamas-plans-trump-gaza-plan

Hamas is basically saying that if the Trump administration dares to implement the relocation and reconstruction plan, the terrorist organization will unleash a wave of terrorism against Americans and Palestinians.

Hamas does not want any US intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The terrorist group, together with Iran’s terror proxies, fear that this would disrupt their Jihad (holy war) against Israel.

For the Trump plan to succeed, the US must insist on the removal of Hamas from power and the disarming of all the terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

It will take several years to rebuild the Gaza Strip and make it habitable once again. The Trump administration will be gone by then. The biggest fear is that a future US administration will fail to block the return of terrorists to the rebuilt Gaza Strip.

If that happens, it will be a matter of time before the Gaza Strip once again becomes a large base for jihadists not only from Hamas, but other Islamist terror groups for whom Israel and the US are the Number 1 target.

The Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has responded to US President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip by threatening to resort to violence against Americans.

In a statement, Hamas said that the Palestinians will “confront the plan with resistance and necessary force.”

This threat is directed not only against the US, but also against Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, many of whom would be happy to move to another place where they could live in security and peace. Hamas is basically saying that if the Trump administration dares to implement the relocation and reconstruction plan, the terrorist organization will unleash a wave of terrorism against Americans and Palestinians.

Radicals Have Burned California Before In the Golden State, good intentions have often paved the way to disaster.By Eli Lake

https://www.thefp.com/p/eli-lake-breaking-history-radicals-have-burned-california-before-karen-bass-gavin-newsom?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When I think about the recent tragedy of the California fires—and the questions we all have about what went wrong—there is one story I keep coming back to.

A few years ago, an amateur botanist was hiking above the Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles when he noticed several shrubs had been flattened by construction work. What he had stumbled across was an effort by the LA Department of Water and Power to replace the wooden poles of power lines with steel ones. The old ones, you see, were a fire hazard.

But the hiker was more worried about those flattened shrubs, which turned out to be a rare plant called a milk vetch. And so he rallied environmental groups—which ensured that the fire safety project got put on pause.

To me, this episode captures something fundamental about California: Its path to ruin is paved with the noblest intentions.

The Golden State was once the place where industry and imagination locked arms and showed us how great the American experiment could be. It secured our democracy by manufacturing and engineering the weapons that won the Second World War. It built the dream factory of Hollywood and the workshops of the future that we call Silicon Valley. Without California, The American Century would never have begun.

But in our current century, and 50 years of Democrat rule, California has fallen apart—largely thanks to progressive policies attempting to make the world a better place. Tent cities have popped up under bridges and beside freeways; in just the past 10 years, homelessness has risen by over 50 percent. Downtown San Francisco has also become the site of multiple open-air drug markets. Opioid overdose deaths reached an all-time high in the city in 2023. Violent crime has risen, too: As of 2022, rates were 31 percent higher in California than in the U.S. as a whole. Last month’s fires were only the latest reminder that the state is burning up.

To understand how the state unraveled, we need to go back to a decade of despair and decadence: the 1970s. The dark turn began—where else—in the petri dish of progressivism that is San Francisco, which around this time gave birth to the hippie movement. If you want to understand how the radical left can burrow deeply into a state’s bureaucracy, courts, and political machines, look no further than the San Fran ’70s.

California has been a battleground before, and it all began with the summer of love. The year was 1967; the setting, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, a magnet for the dreamers, Vietnam vets, and fans of the new psychedelic rock. It was a wild time. Marijuana plants were everywhere. Communes cooked dinner for anyone who wanted it. A group called The Diggers opened a store where everything was free. The hippies were remodeling their little corner of society. They wanted to spread peace.

Trump’s ‘Revolution Of Common Sense’ Brings Out The Worst In Democrats

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/06/trumps-revolution-of-common-sense-brings-out-the-worst-in-democrats/

When asked by a reporter about how many of the 3,500 illegal immigrants arrested since President Donald Trump took office were criminals, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “All of them.” The reporter was flabbergasted, but Leavitt was right. Those who entered the country illegally by definition are guilty of committing a crime.

This is what Trump meant when he said in his inaugural address that “we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense. It’s all about common sense.” The Democrats’ response has been anything but common-sensical.

The first weeks of the Trump administration have been a whirlwind of these sorts of common-sense orders and pronouncements that, as our I&I/TIPP survey showed (see “Trump’s Executive Orders Have Solid Voter Backing: I&I/TIPP Poll”), are popular with everyone except out-of-touch Democrats.

Sending troops to secure the southern border is a common-sense solution to a national crisis. So is letting border patrol officials do their jobs. So is deporting the millions here illegally, starting with hardened criminals.
Requiring federal workers to return to their offices full time is perfectly reasonable.
Declaring that there are two genders – something humankind has known since Adam – and banning the use of taxpayers’ money for federal “gender identity” programs might rankle the far left, but it makes perfect sense to everyone else.
Blocking access to abundant domestic energy supplies while China builds a coal plant every day makes no sense. Boosting oil and gas production does.
Ending racist, divisive, and mostly likely illegal “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs and instead focusing on skills and merit when making federal government hiring decisions counts as common sense to everyone except left-wing extremists.
How about freezing federal grants until someone has a chance to review them? Trump had to backpedal on this, but only because the order was poorly worded. Even so, it immediately exposed some truly ridiculous things that the federal government supports with your hard-earned cash.
Requiring regulators to eliminate 10 regulations for every new one they impose is the definition of common sense when you consider that the Code of Federal Regulations is more than 100,000 pages long.
Our favorite common-sense move was to offer federal workers a buyout option. Companies struggling to make ends meet do this all the time. The federal government is running trillion-dollar deficits and can ill afford to have workers on the payroll who don’t want to be there, as well as the many who shouldn’t.

Terrorists released by Israel leave prison as millionaires By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/terrorists-released-by-israel-leave-prison-as-millionaires/

Many terrorists released by Israel are millionaires, flush with cash from years of receiving monthly Palestinian Authority “pay for slay” stipends, an analysis by a Jerusalem-based watchdog group revealed on Wednesday.

Palestinian Media Watch posted a list of all 734 terrorists scheduled for release from Israeli prisons in the first phase of the hostages-for-ceasefire agreement with Hamas, together with their “salaries”—the dollar amounts each terrorist had received from the Palestinian Authority’s so-called Martyrs’ Fund while incarcerated.

In total, the terrorists received $141,837,087, or more than half a billion shekels. Of those, 316, or nearly half, received more than a million shekels. (Palestinian Media Watch created a program to crunch the numbers, inputting all the relevant P.A. criteria—crime, marital status, number of children, etc., to determine the size of their stipends.)

“It’s a tremendous force driving terror,” Itamar Marcus, Palestinian Media Watch’s founder and director, told JNS.

First, it signals to Palestinians that these terrorists weren’t working in a vacuum, but were acting in the name of the P.A.

Second, the wealth places the terrorists in an honored position in Palestinian society, in fact, “Palestinian terrorists are the most honored people in Palestinian society,” he said.

“When they’re introduced, and in interviews, even years after they were released from jail, they’re called Asra [“Prisoner”]. That’s their title. It’s like an ambassador. It’s actually similar to POW [prisoner of war]. They have a different word for criminal prisoners. For the P.A., they’re legitimate fighters, even if they killed women and children,” Marcus said.

Trump’s call to resettle Gazans could end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all Alex Traiman

https://www.jns.org/trumps-call-to-resettle-gazans-could-end-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/

Migrating nearly 2 million people out of the Gaza Strip will permanently alter the demographic reality between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.

U.S. President Donald Trump, sitting alongside Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a geopolitical earthquake on Tuesday, doubling down on calls to resettle “1.7 or 1.8 million” Palestinians outside of the Gaza Strip.

The calls go beyond any concept of “total victory” that Netanyahu has verbalized and possibly even considered at any point during the current war with Hamas in Gaza. A little more than a week ago, the questions on the table were whether Israel could ever return all of its hostages and who would rule Palestinians living in Gaza on the “day after” the war.

Trump—in the way only he could do—has stated what should have been patently obvious to a normal observer but unspeakable for any world leader: Gaza is completely uninhabitable, and its residents will need to be resettled elsewhere.

If Trump’s suggestions come to pass, it will not only represent a “total victory” beyond even Netanyahu’s wildest imagination but represent the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Migrating nearly 2 million people out of the Gaza Strip will permanently alter the demographic reality between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, removing any parity of numbers between Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

If successful, calls for Israel to permanently cede land for the creation of a Palestinian state within the Jewish biblical homeland will end, and Israel will finally win the conflict. Jews would then be the overwhelming majority and Palestinians a smaller ethnic minority, removing once and for all the phony claims that Israel is an apartheid state.

Trump even hinted that America may support full Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria (commonly known in the international community as the “West Bank”). “We’re discussing that … and people do like the idea. We haven’t taken a position on it yet, but we’ll be making one probably on that very specific topic over the next four weeks.”

If America recognizes Israeli sovereignty in the provinces of Judea and Samaria, then it will permanently slam the door on the failed Oslo Accords and the two-state paradigm that the Palestinians never wanted in the first place.

The president, who worked extremely well with Israel’s prime minister during the 45th administration, has previously succeeded in breaking paradigms in the region with the brokering of the historic Abraham Accords agreements in the fall of 2020.

In his remarks in the Oval Office, Trump stated tersely that he will “never win a Nobel Prize” for his groundbreaking role in brokering the unthinkable agreements.

He is now bringing his unconventional thinking back to the region just days into a new term and looking for an end to the conflict that began when Hamas penetrated Israel’s border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering 1,200 men, women and children in the south, and kidnapping to Gaza more than 250 others in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Trump acknowledged that many “want to deny that Oct. 7 took place, just as many want to deny the Holocaust took place.”

‘Israel fought back bravely’

In the press briefing after the meeting between the two leaders, Trump called the Oct. 7 assault “an all-out attack on the very existence of a Jewish state in the Jewish homeland.” Then he went on to praise Israel’s response to Oct. 7.

What Is Really Destroying Europe? The EU. by Drieu Godefridi

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21373/destroying-europe-the-eu

The truth is that the reduction in CO2 emissions in Europe is almost exclusively due to industry leaving Europe. That is the dirty little secret of the Green Deal: Europe is reducing its CO2 emissions to the extent and in proportion to the destruction of its industry.

The EU elite has lost control of the narrative. Europeans are turning away from the lies and myths of the Green Deal en masse.

Given the absence of precise definitions, the censors do whatever they want…. In practice, these censors massively quash so-called “right-wing” content, while leaving the abundant anti-Semitic, Islamist and Marxist literature untouched.

[T]he EU is, in reality, a Potemkin democracy. It looks like a democracy, but is in fact an authoritarian bureaucracy. There is no election by the citizens of a parliament worthy of the name, no transparency, no recourses and, it seems, no way of eliminating the organization or any part of it. European citizens can vote as they please, but it is a self-appointed elite within the European institutions who decide the future of Europe. These “elites” will do anything to keep themselves and their ideology in power.

In addition, Qatar has massively infiltrated the European Parliament, buying parliamentarians to promote its interests and its Islamist vision of the world.

Can one measure the sense of alienation that must be felt by Europeans, forced to finance a corrupt bureaucracy working against their interests?

When it comes to migration, the economy, free speech and democracy, the EU is not the solution to any problem. The EU is the problem.

The founding idea of the European Union was to build, through shared prosperity, solidarity and a sense of shared destiny among the nations of Europe. That was why three communities were formed: the economy, coal and steel, and nuclear energy. Until around 2000, in terms of growth and innovation, the European economy, year in, year out, was on par with the American one.

Of that initial — and fairly brilliant — gesture of “peace through prosperity,” literally nothing remains. None of the EU’s current leaders cares about the financial well-being of Europeans. Coal is regarded as the devil’s fuel, and nuclear energy is abhorred by Europe’s elites, who say they prefer the inefficient and erratic wind turbines. Since 2000, the European economy has been mired in stagnation, which has worsened since 2008 and threatens to reach its height in the coming years — ending in the destruction of Europe.

The National Assessment of Educational Regress American children scored poorly, yet again, on the latest nationwide test; school choice is a way to right our sinking ship. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/05/the-national-assessment-of-educational-regress/

The headlines last week told the sad story. The New York Times’ title read, “American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows,” while The 74 proclaimed, The New NAEP Scores Are Alarming. Hope Is Not a Strategy for Fixing Them.” The Wall Street Journal announced, “American Kids Are Getting Even Worse at Reading, Test Scores Show.

The stories shared lowlights from the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given periodically to the nation’s students. The results from the 2024 reading and math test, given to 4th and 8th graders, were announced last week and showed that 4th graders continued to lose ground, with reading scores slightly lower, on average, than in 2022 and much lower than in 2019.

In 2019, 35% of 4th graders scored at or above the test’s reading proficiency standard, but that figure dropped to 33% in 2022 and, further, to 31% in 2024. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40%. Some 33% of 8th graders scored below “basic” on the exam—a record low.

The news was especially bleak for our lowest-performing students, who are “reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”

Worsening reading skills have wide-ranging consequences. Poor test scores have been linked to the economic success of both the nation and individuals. Students with limited reading skills are less likely to graduate from high school, and as adults, they are more likely to be incarcerated.

Mindy Sjoblom of On Your Mark Education, a group dedicated to using the science of reading to promote literacy, asserts, “When students are not reading on grade level by third grade, their life-long choices are severely limited. One long-term study found that students who fail to meet this bar are 4 times more likely to drop out of school. In fact, 88% of these dropouts were struggling readers in third grade.”

It is worth noting that we’ve seen the same pattern recently on other tests—TIMSS, PIAAC, i-Ready, MAP, and state assessment results—explains Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Hillary Clinton’s Hypersonic Hypocrisy: The Missile Tech Scandal She Hopes You Ignore By Charlton Allen

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/hillary_clinton_s_hypersonic_hypocrisy_the_missile_tech_scandal_she_hopes_you_ignore.html

The next time Hillary Clinton or her media allies wag a finger about “Russian interference,” remember this: Hillary Clinton’s State Department helped arm Russia with hypersonic missile technology.

Yes, the same Hillary Clinton who branded Tulsi Gabbard a “Russian asset”. The same Hillary Clinton who pushed the Trump-Russia collusion hoax for years. The same Hillary Clinton who expects America to believe that Moscow is an existential threat. Her tenure at the State Department actively facilitated, promoted, and encouraged the transfer of dual-use technology that helped build Russia’s next-generation hypersonic missile systems.

U.S. officials later sounded the alarm about Skolkovo’s military applications, but the damage was done by then. As Clinton’s State Department actively promoted the initiative, there was little visible scrutiny of how the technology could be weaponized—despite Skolkovo’s deep ties to Russian intelligence and defense interests. As U.S. concerns grew in subsequent years, Clinton and her allies never showed any sign of regret or reassessment—even as Clinton Foundation donors stood to benefit. You can’t make this up.

Selling Out National Security

By 2012, U.S. intelligence had reversed its view on the Skolkovo Project, a high-profile technology initiative to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in Russia. However, it was recognized—too late—that it had become a massive technology transfer operation benefiting Moscow’s military.

The U.S. Army warned that Skolkovo was being used to acquire highly sensitive information on space, satellite, nuclear, and missile technology, and in 2011, U.S. military intelligence assessed that Skolkovo had approved the development of a hypersonic cruise missile engine.

By 2014, the FBI was waving red flags, with the assistant special agent in charge of its Boston Field Office taking the extraordinary step of publicly warning that American technology had been sold to Skolkovo.

Cold Winters Mean Global Warming? In What World? By Brian C. Joondeph

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/cold_winters_mean_global_warming_in_what_world.html

Baby, It’s Cold Outside is a popular Christmas song from another era, long before the MeToo virus infected society. The virus turned harmless flirting into a crime against humanity, disqualifying perpetrators from employment, government service, or polite society.

Today, we sing, ma’am, sir, they, or ze, it’s cold outside.

How cold? “With an average temperature running 3.6 degrees below normal, this is currently the coldest January nationally (lower 48) since 1994”, says Kevin Williams, meteorologist and President of Weather-Track, Inc.

Another meteorologist, Joe Bastardi, agrees. “The nation for Jan is now the coldest max temps since 1988 at – 4.2.”

Logic suggests that cold winters, especially record-setting ones, mean that the planet may not be warming, as global warming alarmists insist.

In response, these Chicken Littles merely changed the name from “global warming” to “climate change” to mask the obvious contradiction of a warming planet causing colder winters.

This is similar to how illegal aliens became illegal migrants, then undocumented individuals, and finally just immigrants or visitors, making no distinction between law-abiding and border-crashing “visitors” to America.