RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-venezuelas-opposition-leader-said-about-her-personal-safety-before-maduros-forces-kidnapped-her/

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was kidnapped by her country’s dictatorship today as she left a political rally in the Chacao neighborhood of Caracas. It was the first time she had come out of hiding since Nicolás Maduro stole elections in the country last year.

In a conversation with National Review on January 3 — among Machado’s last media interviews prior to the kidnapping today — she told me that she was in a “safe place.” While other opposition politicians had sought asylum abroad, she stayed in Venezuela, biding her time until she could launch a new wave of demonstrations today.

The article I wrote about our conversation focused on her remarks about the demonstrations she launched today to coincide with the inauguration of Maduro pursuant to last July’s sham election and her relationship with the incoming Trump administration. But other comments she made in our conversation speak to her immense bravery, especially in light of the regime’s attack on her today,

Right off the bat, I had asked Machado about the fact that she had gone into hiding after the election, from which Maduro disqualified her, almost certainly because of her immense popularity (and his unpopularity). I asked if she was safe.

“I’m sure you’re aware of what happened at the end of July and just after the election. The regime unleashed a brutal wave of oppression against ordinary citizens just because they were involved in monitoring the election, but also against everyone else that was involved and had a responsibility in organizing the process,” she said.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/uk-parliament-votes-364-to-111-against-muslim-rape-gang-investigation/

The Labour government had announced that it was responding to the brutal Muslim killing of a little girl in the UK with a crackdown on homeschooling that it had dubbed the ‘Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill’.

While Labour was trying to turn that Islamic crime into an assault on homeschooling parents, Conservatives fought to include a call for an inquiry into the Pakistani Muslim ‘grooming’ rape gangs.

Labour however successfully blocked the inquiry in a 364 to 111 vote.

Not a single Labour MP voted for it. And that’s understandable.

Even assuming that the high numbers for rape victims in the UK are correct, the UK still has 4 million Muslims.

250,000 votes of rape victims vs 4 million bloc votes concentrated in key areas is really no contest.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/argentina-president-javier-milei-economy-inflation

Just over a year ago, Javier Milei, the eccentric, chainsaw-wielding libertarian economist, won the presidency in Argentina against a backdrop of soaring inflation and rising poverty. Since taking office, Milei has aggressively pursued a free-market program of fiscal austerity and deregulation. This approach contrasts strongly with Perónism, the strongly interventionist economic ideology followed by most Argentine presidents since its namesake, Juan Perón, rose to power in 1946.

Milei’s critics, including prominent economists such as Thomas Piketty, warned that his agenda would prove catastrophic. Though Argentina still faces severe economic challenges, Milei has largely proven these doubters wrong and achieved several victories worth celebrating.

Monthly inflation has fallen sharply since Milei took office. Rising prices have been a recurring problem in Argentine history, with the government frequently turning to the central bank to print money to finance its excesses. Unlike many of his predecessors, Milei has reduced federal spending (by 28 percent) and cut the number of federal ministries in half.

This fiscal discipline has been paying off. In October 2024, Argentina achieved its first budget surplus in 12 years. Since last May, monthly inflation has stayed below 5 percent; in November, it was 2.4 percent, the lowest since July 2020.

If we annualize the data since May 2024 (that is, if we express these monthly changes as if they had lasted an entire year), we find annual inflation trending down to about 33 percent. While that is extremely high by American standards, it’s a welcome change for Argentina, which has been reeling from triple-digit inflation on a year-over-year basis since the beginning of 2023.

Austerity has not been painless, as Milei himself cautioned in his inaugural address. Slashing government spending deepened the recession that began in 2023, and poverty and unemployment have both risen. But the recession ended in the third quarter of 2024, as the economy grew at a 3.9 annual rate. Economists now forecast that Argentina’s economy will expand 4.2 percent in 2025.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/justin-trudeaus-legacy-a-weakened-canada

Justin Trudeau, possibly the worst prime minister in the history of Canada, has resigned. Sort of. He has stepped down as leader of the Liberal Party and won’t run in the next election but will remain at his post until a new leader is chosen. Meantime, Parliament will be prorogued—or discontinued without being dissolved—to avoid the possibility of a successful no-confidence motion, which would surely topple the Trudeau government. The next election is scheduled for October of this year, but in all likelihood it will take place earlier, at some point this spring. So, Canadians will still have to endure another few months of Trudeau—a ham-fisted resignation if there ever was one.

Trudeau’s Liberal Party also seems bound for electoral destruction. All the polls are dire, but some suggest that the defeat will be so thorough that the Liberals may not even win enough seats to be a recognized party. This is a spectacular decline. What makes it even more striking is that Trudeau almost singlehandedly revived the old Liberal Party in 2015 after about a decade of successive defeats, turning a seemingly moribund third-place party into a government. Now the restorer has become the euthanizer. How did it happen?

Trudeau came to power after years of ever larger and increasingly stable Conservative governments under Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–2015). Conservatives had been in power before, if rarely, in the twentieth century, but Harper’s party had taken a more ideological and populist turn after an electoral wipe-out in 1993. The renewed Conservative Party was anchored in western Canada, far from the Liberal strongholds of Toronto and Montreal, whose elites had governed Canada for most of the twentieth century. Western Canada’s concerns—agriculture, oil and gas, and other commodities—rose to prominence as never before, and so did a new governing class.

But the old Liberal elite hated them and never saw the new Conservatives as legitimate. The reaction was often hysterical, with some partisans proclaiming that Harper was a more dangerous threat to Canada than ISIS. Trudeau himself captured the Liberal mood when he mused about the possibility of “making Quebec a country” if Canada were genuinely “Stephen Harper’s Canada,” and he insisted on the need to put Quebeckers rather than western Canadians in charge of our “community and socio-democratic agenda,” whatever that meant.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trudeaus-reign-of-terror-will-likely-stop-short-of-canadas-total-destruction/

At long last, on Monday Justin Trudeau has announced his pending resignation, although it will be awhile before he is actually gone. In declaring his intention to resign, Trudeau prorogued parliament until March 4, which means it will not be in session, but will not be dissolved. During this period, the Liberal Party will select a new leader, after which Trudeau says he will finally depart from the scene. Thus the misrule of this curious man is likely to come to a definitive end reasonably soon, and we can only hope that he doesn’t do too much more damage between now and then.

Trudeau is the embodiment of David Horowitz’s indelible dictum that “inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out. He himself has been upfront about this. Back in 2013, before he was prime minister, he was asked what country he admired most. Trudeau answered: “You know, there’s a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green fastest … we need to start investing in solar.’ I mean, there is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about, of having a dictatorship that he can do everything he wanted, that I find quite interesting.”

Then when Fidel Castro died in 2016, Trudeau’s statement gave no hint of the bloodthirstiness and repression of the Communist regime in Cuba. Instead, the vacant and vapid Canadian prime minister was fairly gushing with praise for “Cuba’s longest-serving President.” He declared that “Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.”

Trudeau admitted that Castro was a “controversial figure,” but insisted that “both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people, who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante.’” He said that his family was joining “the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.”

This was not just an ill-considered outpouring of grief for a man Trudeau obviously loved dearly. His praise for China and for Castro have in common an admiration for the authoritarian’s ability to get things done with no regard for the opposition or the give-and-take of the democratic process. China was able to go green and Castro was able to make significant improvements to education and healthcare (in Trudeau’s view, not in real life) because they didn’t have to deal with all the carping and compromise that working with parliaments and voters entails.

https://www.thefp.com/p/muslim-grooming-gangs-cover-up-keir-starmer-elon-musk?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The serial rape of thousands of English girls went on for many years. Few in power cared. Then Elon Musk started tweeting.

LONDON — The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.

British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/germany-populist-afd-party-immigration

Elon Musk calls it the “last spark of hope” for Germany. European elites call it the heir to National Socialism. The debate over Germany’s reviled populist party, the Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD), is worth paying attention to, since it reveals modern Western society’s most fundamental belief structure. That debate is about to heat up further, when Musk holds a live conversation on X with the AfD’s leader. The elites, Musk says, “will lose their minds.”

The Alternative for Germany is a leper in German political life, due to the party’s opposition to Germany’s lax immigration policies. Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a domestic intelligence agency, has granted itself authority to surveil the party, which it deems a threat to democracy.

Germany’s other political parties have pledged not to cooperate with the AfD. The resulting “firewall” shuts the party out of governing coalitions, no matter how much popular support it enjoys. The AfD is denied the committee chairmanships in the national parliament in Berlin that its numbers would otherwise entitle it to. German courts have almost uniformly rejected the party’s efforts to remove these legal and extralegal barriers to normal participation in political life. The media keep AfD officials off the airwaves. While other political leaders, including far leftists, are regularly quoted in the press and interviewed, AfD representatives are spectral presences, rarely heard or seen on broadcasts or given space in publications.

The problems motivating the AfD’s rise are not spectral, however. Immigration into Germany increased significantly in 2015, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel famously announced: “Wir schaffen das! [We can handle this!],” in response to the thousands of Syrians then crossing into the country. Twenty-three percent of the German population in 2021 were first- or second-generation immigrants—and that was before the Ukrainian migration. Over 17 percent of the German population are first-generation immigrants, a higher percentage than in the United States, where less than 14 percent of the population were foreign-born in 2022. The burdens on Germany’s social services, criminal-justice system, and housing stock have been enormous. Fifty-five percent of Syrians with at least eight years of German residency were on welfare in 2023, compared with 5 percent of native Germans. More than 60 percent of the people in Germany who depend on government benefits for income are foreign-born or second-generation migrants, according to the Wall Street Journal. The disruption to social cohesion from an unassimilated alien culture is greater still.

Establishment panic over the AfD reached a boiling point in late summer 2024. On August 23, 2024, an illegal Syrian asylum seeker stabbed to death three people attending a “diversity” festival in the western German town of Solingen. The festival commemorated Solingen’s 650th anniversary; it was a telling marker of modern German ideology that the city honored its medieval roots with a paean to “diversity.” Twenty percent of the Solingen population are now foreign-born. No one in the press observed the irony of a “diverse” Solingen resident trying to kill as many of Solingen’s less diverse inhabitants as possible, on the day celebrating his presence in the city.

Elections for the state parliaments of two eastern German states—Thüringen and Sachsen—were scheduled for September 1. The Solingen knifings threatened to boost the AfD’s vote share. And so, the Nazi comparisons poured out. Bodo Ramelow, the minister president of Thüringen and member of the Left party, told public TV station ZDF that he was fighting the “normalization of fascism.” “That is my battle [das ist mein Kampf],” he said. Election signs in Thüringen read: “Whoever votes for AfD is voting for FASCISM! [Wer AfD wählt, wählt FASCHISMUS!].” A female protesting the AfD on the day of the election told ZDF that she was “demonstrating for democracy.” She didn’t want to live in a “Nazi realm,” she said. A journalist in Berlin wrote that the “specter of Nazism continues to haunt Germany.”