RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20243/cause-of-america

Our nation’s founding fathers made the separation of church and state one of the pillars of this republic, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t religious.

On the contrary.

They profoundly believed in God, and through their writings made repeated references to their faith and America’s unique place among nations based on that faith. Among those individuals was Thomas Paine who, in his pamphlet “Common Sense,” wrote, “The cause of America is the cause of all mankind.” He would tell his fellow citizens confronting the imperial rule of England, “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”

America’s first president also embraced his religion. In his farewell address, George Washington reminded his audience, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

This embrace of faith is not unique to our national leaders of the 1700s. Historian Gary Scott Smith wrote that President Ronald Reagan “firmly believed and often declared that God intended America to be a beacon of hope, faith, freedom, and democracy — ‘a city on the hill.'”

As we celebrate this holiday season it is crucial that we reflect on a nation whose motto, “In God we trust” reveals a foundation of morality, ethics and virtue. It does not matter which religion you embrace. These are basic founding principles of a nation that remains humanity’s last best hope and whose citizens are bound together under these shared values. It is easy to lose sight of that fact amidst the political rancor and partisan divides that currently distract us.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/20/a-judicial-insurrection-against-democracy/

We didn’t need further proof that Trump Derangement Syndrome poses a graver threat to American democracy than Donald Trump himself, but we have it. The decision of the Colorado Supreme Court to disqualify Trump from holding office is the anti-Trumpists’ most egregious assault on democracy yet. It shows once again how willing they are to use the tactics of the banana republic, the sly schemes of a tinpot state, to take down a politician they love to loathe. ‘We are defending democracy’, they say, as they beat it to a pulp.

The Colorado justices – every one of whom was appointed by a Democratic governor – ruled four to three that Trump is ‘disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment’. The 14th is a post-Civil War amendment that forbids ‘insurrectionists’ from holding office. It was designed to keep unrepentant Confederates, men who had dragged the republic to war, away from seats of power. Trump’s supposed stirring-up of the boneheads and blowhards who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 was an insurrection too, the justices decreed, and thus his name must be scrubbed from ballot papers across the state of Colorado.

First things first. The idea that the idiots who ran riot at the Capitol on 6 January are in any way comparable to a Confederacy of seven slave states that illegally broke from the American republic is unhinged. It is a testament to the historical illiteracy of the Democratic establishment that it would even hint at a likeness between men who caused a war that killed hundreds of thousands and Trumpists taking selfies in Congress during a conflagration that led to five deaths (three from natural causes). Not content with hysterically referring to 6 January as a domestic 9/11, now they’re implying it was a Civil War-level rupture. And this is leaving to one side the contested idea that Trump incited 6 January.

This is the first time a presidential candidate has been deemed unfit for election under the constitutional ban on insurrectionists. The impact of the ruling will be dire. If it holds – and it very well might not – it means Trump will be absent from presidential primary ballots in Colorado, meaning no one in the state could vote for him to be the GOP’s 2024 candidate. Hard luck Coloradans who want Trump back in the White House – your democratic right to elect him has been stolen from you by judges. Beyond the primaries, the court ruling would ‘probably also affect Trump’s status for the 5 November General Election’, says the Guardian. That is, if the ruling holds, Trump could be blocked from standing in Colorado even if he is freely selected as the Republicans’ presidential candidate in other states.

https://victorhanson.com/humpty-dumpty-america-or-how-did-we-suddenly-fall-apart-part-three-the-symptoms/

Foreign Policy

There have been plenty of foreign policy disasters over the last 60 years since the Vietnam Era. But even in our failures, there was no inherent intent to destroy ourselves and to deliberately harm efforts to improve our security and stature overseas.

Not now.

Why are we experiencing one of the worst military recruitment crises of the last half-century? Why did we drive out over 8,000 of our most experienced soldiers for not being vaxxed, the majority with acquired immunity from prior Covid-19 bouts?

Why was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs proud that he had called his Chinese counterpart to warn him of the supposed volatility of his own American Commander-in-Chief? Why did General Milley and Secretary of Defense Austin promise Congress to chase unicorns of “white rage” and “white privilege,” without any supporting documentation of systemic racial discrimination in the ranks? Were they unhappy that white males died at twice their population proportion in our recent optional wars abroad?

Did they think all their virtue-signaling would increase recruitment, end internal dissension, and improve morale in the ranks?

If someone wished to humiliate and destroy the prestige of the United States, erode our deterrence, and greenlight anti-American aggression, he could not have done any better than the architects of the 2021 Afghanistan flight.

How did the U.S. manage to become so arrogant and impotent all at once?

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/21/judge-orders-removal-of-historic-confederate-monument-in-arlington-cemetery/

On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled in favor of the Biden Administration’s efforts to remove an iconic Confederate monument from Arlington National Cemetery, despite efforts to preserve it.

As reported by ABC News, the removal of the monument was originally ordered by the Biden Administration’s “Naming Commission,” a partisan group dedicated to the renaming or removal of everything related to the Confederacy in the United States. Having previously ordered the renaming of many military bases, including the renowned Fort Bragg, the commission ordered the removal of the Confederate monument in Arlington Cemetery, which is surrounded by the graves of Confederate soldiers, as well as the grave of the monument’s sculptor, Moses Ezekiel.

After efforts by several heritage groups, including Defend Arlington and Save Southern Heritage, the attempted removal of the monument was blocked by U.S. District Judge Rossie Alston on Monday over concerns that the removal would desecrate the surrounding graves. He thus ordered that the government was temporarily prohibited “from taking any acts to deconstruct, tear down, remove, or alter the object of this case — the Confederate Reconciliation Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and the surrounding gravesites — pending further action of this Court.”

However, Alston later determined that “Plaintiffs have not alleged facts that support the premise that Defendants intend to “destroy” rather than “remove” the Memorial.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fetterman-i-didnt-leave-the-left-it-left-me/

An interesting line with a lot of history to it from Sen. Jon Fetterman on dumping the “progressive” label he used to use.

“I don’t feel like I’ve left the label; it’s just more that it’s left me.”

President Reagan would often quip, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” Similar lines have been used by everyone from Bill Maher, “It’s not me who’s changed, it is the left” to Elon Musk.

It’s hard to say exactly what’s going on with Fetterman after his medical issues, but a dividing line seems to have been the Left’s support for Hamas, but he’s also embraced a species of economic populism, fighting against land sales to China, and Japan’s takeover of U.S. Steel.

While Fetterman had never been a foreign policy guy, he did explicitly break with the far left on Israel during his campaign.

“I would also respectfully say that I’m not really a progressive in that sense,” he added. “Our campaign is based on core Democratic values and principles, and always has been, and there is no daylight between myself and these kinds of unwavering commitments to Israel’s security.”

Still, Fetterman said he was “eager to affirm” his positions on the record, lest there be any uncertainty among supporters of Israel who have similar questions. “I want to go out of my way to make sure that it’s absolutely clear,” he told JI, “that the views that I hold in no way go along the lines of some of the more fringe or extreme wings of our party.”

The Left did not take that seriously and assumed he was just pandering. Now they’re finding out that he really meant it.

So this did not come out of nowhere. And it’s not just about Israel.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/12/christmas-in-a-time-of-war

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver. George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

EXCERPT:

Hamas’s barbarism, by contrast, is motivated by religious conviction—warped religious conviction, to be sure; false religious conviction, undoubtedly; but religious conviction, nonetheless. Yes, Hamas has a political program, and its slogan, “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,” is as despicable a euphemism for exterminationist anti-Semitism as was the Nazis’ “Final Solution” to Die Judenfrage (the “Jewish Question”). But what turns people into deranged Hamas murderers and “martyrs,” who by all accounts enjoyed killing 1,400 innocents on 10/7, is the vile belief that what they were doing was the will of God.

It was not; it could not be. Only a fundamentally distorted understanding of “God” could lead to such a wicked conclusion. The God of the Bible cannot command the murder he forbade in the Ten Commandments, because the God of the Bible is a God of reason, and reason cannot contradict itself. The God of the Qur’an, however, is a God of will, who can command whatever he chooses and demand submission to that command as the ticket to salvation. Taken to extremes, that false idea of God as Absolute Willfulness is what makes Hamas, Hezbollah, and their exterminationist anti-Semitism possible, and what gives these hopeless political movements their staying power.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/22/dear-santa-why-is-christmas-so-expensive-this-year/

Jill Biden’s creepy video, featuring a troupe of tap dancers showing off the garish Christmas decorations in the White House, prompted one journalist to comment that they are “really going for the Hunger Games as this year’s Christmas theme.”

While they’re prancing around in the capital, out in the districts everyone else is struggling to pay the sky-high cost of this festive season.

Are you traveling to be with friends and family? Airfares are 18% higher than they were Christmas 2020. And if you try to cut costs by driving, gasoline prices are 45% higher.

Buying food for your guests will cost 20% more than the last Christmas before Bidenflation took hold.

PNC Bank’s annual “Christmas Price Index,” a gimmicky index that measures the cost to buy all the gifts mentioned in “Twelve Days of Christmas,” has gone up more than 13% in the past two years.  

Haven’t bought a Christmas tree yet? It will cost you about 10% more than last year, which is on top of the 10% increase the year before, and 10% the year before that.

Those Christmas lights decorating the house? Your electric bill will be 24% higher. If you’re sending Christmas cards, stationery costs are up 27% under Biden.

At least drowning your sorrows in alcohol is getting less expensive.

https://tomklingenstein.com/video/the-hour-is-getting-late/

America today exists in a state of war, a cold civil war. On one side is the Woke Regime. On the other side, our side, is the American Regime.

The Woke Regime defines justice as group outcome equality. For the American Regime, on the other hand, justice is a reward for individual merit. A regime based on merit will always give rise to group differences. These two regimes are utterly irreconcilable. You can’t admit people to college, flight training, law schools, or anything else according to merit and, at the same time, according to group quotas. It’s one or the other. There is no middle ground; hence, the two sides are implacable enemies. This is what makes it a war. 

The woke left understands this; too often, the American side, especially its political leadership, does not. You don’t win a war if you don’t know you’re in one. The woke side fights. They show us no mercy; we, on the other hand, ring our hands and take a beating. We try to reach across the aisle, but in a war, this is a sucker’s game.

The Woke Regime is comprised of a loose confederation of our most important institutions: media, academia, government, charitable foundations, and corporations, particularly big tech. 

The George Floyd riots show this confederation in action. Woke agitators sparked the flames that lit the riots; the regime’s intellectual leaders justified the riots; its corporate donors gave billions to Black Lives Matter’s network; its media looked the other way; its justice system freed criminals, and its security apparatus and political leaders fanned the flames. No, not all Democrats are Woke Leftists, but virtually all Democrats go along so they might as well be Woke Leftists.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4371449-bidenomics-is-a-flop-and-america-knows-it/

“Wages for workers are up!”  

That was the sunny news delivered by President Biden at a recent campaign stop. Is it true? Not really. Though real wages have finally trended slightly higher, Americans are still underwater since Biden entered the Oval Office.  

The Biden camp may have dropped talking up “Bidenomics,” but the spiel’s half-truths and tone deafness live on.  

The Biden reelection campaign is still trying to sell its economic policies to skeptical voters, even as a recent Wall Street Journal shows that “Only 23% of voters say Biden’s policies have helped them personally, while 53% say they have been hurt by the president’s agenda.” Biden’s pitch hasn’t worked, isn’t working and won’t work. But, they aren’t giving up.   

Joe Biden is unhappy about his poll numbers — as well he should be. They are historically terrible; the only person those low grades could possibly please is Jimmy Carter, who no longer sets the benchmark for most unpopular president ever. According to Real Clear Politics, Biden’s average approval rating across all polls stands at 40.5 percent; that compares with44.5 percent for Donald Trump at the same point in his presidency, 46.5 percent for Barack Obama and 58 percent for George W. Bush.   

Biden apparently laid into his team before Thanksgiving, demanding his aides do something to improve his standing. The upshot is yet another salvo from the White House about the wonders of Bidenomics, including the usual rewriting of history about what a catastrophe Joe Biden faced as he took office in January 2021.  

In a campaign event just recently, Biden claimed, “You know, when we started, the … economy was reeling.” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that myth in a briefing a few days ago, saying the economy “was in a tailspin.” It was not; in the quarter he took office, the recovering economy grew 6 percent, unemployment was dropping sharplyand annualized inflation stood at 1.4 percent.   

The president’s pitch rests largely on dishonest or misleading data, as is the case when Jean-Pierre touts the number of new business start-ups and applications as a sign that Bidenomics is working. As it happens, there was a big surge in new business applications — during Donald Trump’s presidency.   

When Trump took office, in January 2017, monthly new business applications totaled 263,878; in December 2020, his last month, applications — at the height of the COVID panic — amounted to 349,734, an increase of 32.5 percent. So far in Joe Biden’s presidency, applications have actually dropped slightly, from 486,082 recorded in January 2021 to 464,838 last month. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/scholars-say-they-were-plagiarized-by-claudine-gay-ignored-by-harvard-investigation/

Harvard and its president Claudine Gay are doing damage control amid an ongoing plagiarism scandal, with the embattled leader requesting even more corrections to her past work, this time her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation — the foundation of her academic career.

But the total of seven corrections requested so far still leaves dozens of other instances of potential plagiarism unresolved. And scholars who believe their work was plagiarized have told National Review that they were never contacted by Harvard as part of its investigation into Gay’s academic work.

For instance, it does not appear that any of the corrections will address portions of Gay’s doctoral dissertation drawing heavily from the work of Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain, in some cases reproducing her writing word for word without citation.

Swain — who has been outspoken about her feelings on the plagiarism scandal — told National Review that she is concerned by Harvard’s response to the revelations of its president’s academic-integrity issues. She feels that the university should have reached out to her and the other scholars both as a professional courtesy, to inform them their work may have been plagiarized, and as part of their fact-finding effort to determine the extent of Gay’s transgressions, since they’re the foremost experts on their own work.

“I have a problem with the way Harvard has reacted to the entire situation, because it seems like — with the assistance of some of their professors and other elites — they’re trying to redefine what is plagiarism,” Swain said, “and they’re making the argument that there are different levels and, by extension, that some of it is acceptable. That is a problem for higher education in America.”

A number of experts and academics contacted by National Review said that the examples of potential plagiarism that have been flagged are serious, and the large number of instances suggests a pattern.

Lee Jussim, a social psychologist and distinguished professor at Rutgers University, said he’s “never seen anything like” the plagiarism scandal involving Gay.

“I can tell you, I expelled a student from my lab when I first got to Rutgers who I caught doing something not all that different — probably less — than what she has done,” he said.