RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/01/trump-vance-and-the-new-new-world-order/

This past week, the venerable Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for The Financial Times, used his column to declare the Trump administration and, by extension, the United States “the enemy of the West.” “Today,” Wolf wrote, “autocracies [are] increasingly confident,” and “the United States is moving to their side.” According to the subhead on the column, “Washington has decided to abandon…its postwar role in the world.” Meanwhile, Wolf cites the (in his estimation) august Franklin Roosevelt, as he complains that the United States “has decided instead to become just another great power, indifferent to anything but its short-term interests.”

The ironies here—as well as the historical ignorance—abound.

To start, one would imagine that Wolf, an educated man with two degrees from Oxford, might know that it was his countryman (and two-time Prime Minister), Henry John Temple (i.e. Lord Palmerston), who declared in a speech in the House of Commons that “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Wolf might also be expected to know that this statement was repeated—more famously and more pithily—by Henry Kissinger, perhaps the quintessential American diplomat in the supposedly vaunted postwar order. Kissinger, like Palmerston and Trump (apparently) understood that a nation that pursues anything other than its interests is foolish, faithless, and, in time, doomed.

What bothers Wolf, it would seem, is that American interests are diverging from British and continental European interests. That is unfortunate, but it is also more than likely the case that this divergence is the result of Britain and Europe’s abandonment of the principles, values, and ambitions the allies once shared, rather than the other way around. For example, Wolf criticizes the speech given by J.D. Vance in which the vice president defended the traditional American dedication to free speech and attacked the British and European rejection of that principle. Yet again, Wolf might be expected to know that the American preoccupation with this and all other negative rights is something the nation’s Founders inherited from their British forefathers. If the two nations now differ on the importance of this fundamental right, then that’s hardly Vance’s, Trump’s, or any other American’s fault.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/video-victor-davis-hanson-on-trump-zelensky-dust-up-at-oval-office/

In this new video, historian and pundit Victor Davis Hanson discusses the Trump-Zelensky dust-up on Friday at the White House, reflecting on how, “usually, in international diplomacy, the client doesn’t dictate to the patron.”

Don’t miss it!

https://www.city-journal.org/article/liberal-democracy-trump-populism-conservatives

The Trump administration is hitting its allies with tariffs, pulling out of international agreements, withdrawing U.S. support for Ukraine, pardoning January 6 rioters who attacked police, and going after the Department of Justice. At the precise moment when liberal elites are lamenting their overreach on wokeness and mass immigration, these actions risk discrediting national conservatism across the western world.

Populism, which Trump has embodied, is an important check on what Yascha Mounk has termed undemocratic liberalism. However, national populists must move beyond “tear it all down” partisanship to construct a new, mainstream vision of national unity. The negative impulses of populism need to be reined in: we need a rational populism. Liberal institutions must learn from the populist moment, and populists need a vision for the institutions.

As progressivism has triumphed in the culture, its irrational and illiberal strands have come to the fore. This has pushed classical-liberal rationalists to the right, and convinced traditional conservatives to back free speech and Enlightenment truth.

The Right was not always amenable to the idea of evidence-based policy. James Burnham’s conservatism of the early 1960s, for example, still opposed Enlightenment reason and free speech, preferring tradition to planning and accumulated habit to consistent principle. That has changed, with free speech and science’s “facts don’t care about your feelings” ethos now associated with the right. The new marriage is symbolized by Silicon-Valley tech elites throwing their lot in with national-populist conservatives like J. D. Vance.

Liberals have also been stunned into self-reflection by Trump’s convincing comeback. Whatever they think of Trump or the European populist Right, the lesson is clear: institutions must change if they are to regain the trust they have clearly lost.

https://reason.com/2025/02/26/why-do-many-americans-have-a-positive-view-of-socialism/

Socialism is popular!

A Pew study reports that more than a third of American adults view it positively.

How is this possible?

Little has brought more misery—first in the Soviet Union, then in China, Cuba, Nicaragua, now Venezuela.

One reason young people support socialism is because their social media feeds show videos made by popular but economically illiterate people.

TikTok star Madeline Pendleton has 1.6 million subscribers. My new video shows her telling them: “Socialism is working better than capitalism 93 percent of the time!”

Where does she get 93 percent?

https://thespectator.com/topic/behind-vicious-attacks-elon-musk/

Why are Democrats mounting such a ferocious assault on Elon Musk? Why are mainstream media outlets so eager to go along?

The simplest answers are the best. Musk is the most prominent member of the new administration aside from the president himself. He is Donald Trump’s point man for exposing malfeasance in federal bureaucracies, determining where the money is going and cutting the engorged payroll.

The more Musk and Trump succeed, the worse for Democrats. They created those agencies; their supporters staff them; and those supporters funnel lots of public money to specially favored institutions and projects. When Musk attacks this partisan nexus, he is attacking a major source of Democratic power and influence.

That is what’s really at stake here, beyond cutting the budget. The pickings are easy, and they’re popular. The latest poll shows 60 percent think DoGE is helping and 76 percent support eliminating fraud and waste. (Who, for heaven’s sake, are the 24 percent who don’t support eliminating fraud and waste?)

Why does the mainstream media oppose these popular efforts, marching in lockstep with the Democrats? Because they are Democrats. That’s why 60 Minutes deceptively edited their interview of candidate Kamala Harris to make her appear coherent and intelligent. She was neither, a point she continues to prove whenever she speaks. That’s why CBS refused to release the transcript before the election. Hey, what are friends for?

Of course, attacking Musk has its own attractions. He is the richest man in America and the best-known, aside from the president. Pillaring Musk for his wealth allows Democrats to pose as populists, hoping to regain voters they lost to Trump’s MAGA coalition.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/28/should-federal-workers-be-treated-differently-than-private-sector-employees/

In consuming the news, one could easily conclude that, as we said earlier in the week, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are carpet bombing the federal government. The wails and screeching breakdowns over the injustice of federal workers losing their jobs are ear-piercing. They are, we’re told, under attack.

After all, these are no everyday workers toiling for large corporations and small businesses – they’re federal employees who apparently are so indispensable to life as we know it that if they are no longer employed at taxpayers’ expense, America and maybe even western civilization will collapse.

Why else would there be so much fuss, so many tantrums, over a few of them losing their jobs?

We noted earlier that even if 100,000 federal workers lose their jobs, that’s a tiny 4% haircut off of nearly 2.3 million federal workforce. Yet we hear about an angry mob – our term – “getting fired up for the fight,” the birth of “fresh grassroots energy (that) came after a wave of layoffs hit government workers in recent weeks” and grousing about the administration’s “extreme, illegal, and unconstitutional actions.“

“It really is a witch hunt that is happening regarding our federal workers,” Maryland Democratic Sen. Angela Alsobrooks said.

Federal workers have sued to keep their jobs, there have been obligatory protests, and in a letter to department and agency heads, more than 100 Democrats showed their desperation to save the bureaucracy that works for them and not the American people. They bellyached about “Elon Musk’s public threat to dismiss any employees who” don’t respond to his email asking them to explain what they do at “work”; called his “threat” “reckless, cruel, unlawful, and unenforceable”; and demanded “immediate action.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/02/first-fire-all-the-generals/

The deeper issue with our top generals is that they are the creatures of a system geared toward bureaucratic conformity and a flavorless competence.

President Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, have outraged the Beltway by dismissing top generals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown.

Also ousted were the chief of the Navy and the vice chief of the Air Force, with perhaps others on the chopping block.

This is being called an “unprecedented purge” and a step toward the politicization of the military.

At the very least, though, these moves send a message that change is coming to an ossified Pentagon, and if they are followed up with reforms to how we promote and evaluate our generals, they will be a step toward a more effective and — to use one of Hegseth’s favorite words — lethal military.

Worries about the politicization of the military are rich after years of the civilian leadership pushing DEI on the ranks and insisting that climate change is a national-security threat. Here comes Secretary Hegseth saying that the military needs to be about “its core mission of deterring, fighting and winning wars,” and he’s the dangerous ideologue?

General Brown is an honorable man, but he’s the one who used his position as a political soapbox.

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, Brown released a video that began, “As the commander of Pacific Air Forces, and a senior leader in our Air Force, and an African American, many of you may be wondering what I’m thinking about the current events surrounding the tragic death of George Floyd.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/27/who-caused-the-counter-revolution/

At some point, some president was going to have to stop the unsustainable spending and borrowing.

To have any country left, some president would eventually have had to restore a nonexistent border and stop the influx of 3 million illegal aliens a year.

Some commander-in-chief finally would have to try to stop the theater wars abroad.

But any president who dared to do any of that would be damned for curbing the madness that his predecessors fueled.

And so none did—until now.

Not since Franklin Roosevelt’s rapid and mass implementation of the New Deal administrative state have Americans seen such radical changes so quickly as now in Trump’s first month of governance.

Americans are watching a long-awaited counter-revolution to bring the country out of its madness by restoring the common sense of the recent past.

It is easy to run up massive debts and hard to pay them back. Politicians profit by handing out grants and hiring thousands with someone else’s money or creating new programs by growing the debt.

Yet it is unpopular and considered “mean” to spend only what you have and to create a lean, competent workforce.

1776, not 1619, is the foundational date of America.

Biological men should not manipulate their greater size and strength to undermine the hard-won accomplishment of women athletes.

Affordable fossil fuels, when used wisely, are still essential to modern prosperity.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/tulsi-gabbard-to-fire-100-nsa-staffers-who-took-part-in-hair-raising-online-sex-chats/

What the Trump administration has uncovered in just five weeks about what has been going on in Washington is beyond belief. What has been happening in the National Security Agency, however, is beyond anything that has been found (at least so far) in showing leftist elitists’ self-absorption and contempt for the American taxpayer. It’s not the waste and fraud that DOGE has been uncovering. It’s much worse.

City Journal revealed Monday that although “the ‘intelligence community’ is one of the most powerful parts of the American national security apparatus,” some of those entrusted with the solemn responsibility to keep the nation safe “have another on-the-job priority: sex chats.”

That’s right: we’re paying these people to protect the nation from threats, and they’re spending their time on our dime talking about their various lurid obsessions, delusions, deviances, and perversions. And those words are far too polite for some of what they were doing.

The bacchanalia took place on the NSA’s messaging program, Intelink. That in itself was a violation of regulations, for an NSA staffer explained that “all NSA employees sign agreements stating that publishing non-mission related material on Intelink is a usage violation and will result in disciplinary action.” Yet for at least the last two years, NSA employees have turned Intelink into Smutlink, swamping it with talk of “sex, kink, polyamory, and castration,” and there is no indication that anyone faced any disciplinary action for breaking the rules about how Intelink was supposed to be used.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/26/trump-doge-mass-layoffs-federal-workforce/80500659007/

WASHINGTON – The Trump administration Wednesday ordered heads of federal departments and agencies to prepare to initiate “large-scale reductions in force” by March 13 as President Donald Trump shifts to a more aggressive phase of cutting the federal workforce.

A memo sent by the Personnel Management and Management and Budget offices has also instructed federal departments to eliminate and consolidate duplicative positions, reduce their property footprints and produce reorganization plans for their agencies.

“The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt,” the memo from OMB Director Russ Vought and OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell says. “At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public. Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hardworking American citizens.”

Mass firings of federal workers thus far have focused primarily on eliminating recently hired or promoted probationary workers in making drastic cuts to the federal workforce, an effort guided by billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency. This first round of firings came after buyouts were offered to all federal employees, which more than 75,000 workers accepted.

The newly ordered reductions, however, are expected to target federal employees with full civil service protection, not just probationary workers, according to the memo.

Exemptions include U.S. Postal Service workers, positions deemed necessary for law enforcement, national security and border and immigration obligations, as well as military personnel in the armed forces.