RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21625/trump-golden-era-america

The first 115 days of the Trump Administration have been filled more remedial action than we have seen from most presidents in their entire terms.

Invariably, the forecasters focus on the next 12 short months while failing to appreciate the sweep of history that has brought us to this next chapter of American history. The pessimistic “bears” among us have warned that there are systematic threats to our economy, our nation, and the stability of the world. The optimistic “bulls” will tout the enormous advances in reducing the former administration’s inflation and out-of-control illegal border crossings, the brimming new technology, foreign investments in the trillions that will bring many new jobs, Wall Street confidence, and a resilient American economy that continues to set the pace for the rest of the world.

In truth, they are both right, and the reality of America in the first half of 2025 is far more nuanced than any one side would have you believe.

With an appreciation of history, one needs to look at our nation as a democracy that has demonstrated time and time again an enormous resiliency to profound changes that would have fractured any other country — and that has been so literally since our independence.

As president, George Washington had to send troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion when a band of angry citizens of a new United States violently protested a tax on alcohol levied to pay off Revolutionary War debts. Without a strong response, America could have disintegrated at the start.

Economic cycles of boom and bust could have dismantled our democracy. Few Americans recognize how close our nation came to the political edge during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when massive unemployment led to despair among millions.

World War II propelled America into its role of a global superpower, which it continues to hold today. The war’s legacy created a pathway for civil rights, the emergence of the middle class, an interstate highway system that connected us to all points of the compass, and a strong and resilient government that avoided nuclear war through strength, leading to our ultimate victory in the Cold War.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/the_great_simmering_in_the_west.html

So-called ‘elites’ have built a dark and volatile world.

People all over the world are worried about the future.  While regional wars continue to fester, the prospect of global war weighs heavily on many.  However, likely belligerents are not all foreign aggressors.  Nearly a century of globalization has erected a web of clunky international institutions that wield tremendous power while disregarding sovereign borders.  Concomitantly, mass immigration has transformed once-homogenous national populations into stews of many competing cultures and religions.  Battle lines forming inside nations are more serious than those forming among them.

Self-described “futurists” such as Bill Gates and Yuval Harari believe that artificial intelligence will soon replace most humans in the workforce and that a small cadre of global “elites” must centrally manage humanity’s transition to general “uselessness.”  With A.I. entities independently running machines and becoming exponentially smarter and more competent in their tasks, entire industries will transition from human to synthetic labor until all industry surrenders to A.I.  

As emerging robotics programs have demonstrated, no profession will be immune to the next generations of A.I.-equipped machines.  Robots will pick the fields, police the streets, and perform complex medical surgeries.  A.I. can already write legal briefs that pass muster and screenplays that are at least as interesting as anything Hollywood produces these days.  Engineers, architects, and chemists are competing against machines that can process a thousand lifetimes of computations before their human counterparts finish morning coffee.

Men such as Gates and Harari see this future galloping toward us and view its implications as self-evident.  As human producers are replaced, human “value” will dwindle.  No longer sustaining even a fraction of their cost through their own labor, human beings will become extraneous to the creation of wealth and permanent drains on the global State.  

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/15/the-real-first-100-days/

Pundits are confused about what to make of the first 100 days of the second Trump administration.

Supporters talk of “flooding the zone,” believing Trump is making so many changes so quickly that his opposition is reduced to deer-in-the-headlights infancy.

They must be right when the nation suffers daily Democratic pottymouth videos, vandalism of Teslas, infantile meltdowns at congressional witnesses, rioting against federal agents to protect illegal alien felons, protesting on behalf of women beaters, M-13 gangbangers, human traffickers, and assaulters, and visa-holding violent students praising Hamas terrorists.

In contrast, opponents either claim that Trump’s first three months are either directionless chaos or a Hitlerian nightmare or both.

But what is really happening?

One, Trump is finally addressing the problems that proverbially “cannot go on forever, and so they won’t go on.”

When, if ever, would the left have closed the southern border? After 10, 30, 50 million illegal aliens?

How many more criminal illegal entrants was the Biden administration willing to allow into American neighborhoods—500,000? 1 million? 3 million?

How long was the world simply going to ignore the human destruction on the doorstep of Europe?

Would Biden or Harris have sought a ceasefire? Or would it have taken another 1.5, 3, or even 5 million more dead, wounded, and missing Ukrainians and Russians?

Nor did past administrations ever seek a solution to the massive national debt, much less the uncontrollable budget and trade deficits.

All prior presidents passed the day of judgment on to some vague future presidency, assured that their money printing would at least not blow up on their watch.

All moaned that China was piling up huge trade surpluses while denying its own population the usual modern safety net. They knew Beijing’s aim was to use the trillions of dollars in trade surpluses to build a new massive military, a greater arsenal of nuclear bombs, and a new imperial Belt and Road overseas empire.

Yet no administration did anything but greenlight American outsourcing and offshoring while ignoring Chinese trade cheating and technology theft.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-tariffs-did-not-raise-prices-slowed-inflation/

The tariff doomer hype promised utter catastrophe.

Trump tariffs: When consumers should expect inflation, price hikes to hit wallets – CNBCNearly 90% of Americans expect tariffs to raise prices, Gallup poll finds – CBS News

I wonder who told them to expect that?

Trump’s Tariffs Would Boost Inflation, Shrink the Economy, Trump’s tariff plan amounts to a $3 trillion tax hike – Senate Committee on the Budget

Tariffs May Push Up Inflation Just As It Was Getting Better – Investopedia

Trump’s Tariff Would Cost the Typical American Household Roughly $1,500 Each Year – Center for American Progress

Trump’s tariffs could cost American households $5,200 annually – Center for American Progress

Which one was it? $5,200 or $1,500?

Well the numbers are in and the hype is dead.

Trump tariffs have little impact on prices so far, defying grim forecasts – Politico

Inflation eased after Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, defying fears – ABC News

The experts win again.

Fed Governor Adriana Kugler said Monday that the administration’s new taxes on imports are still “pretty high” and that she expects inflation to rise and growth to slow soon.

Any day now, says a former fellow with the Center for American Progress nominated by Biden.

They want America to fail. If it succeeds, it’ll raise questions about them, won’t it?

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/15/one-of-trumps-most-important-executive-orders-went-entirely-unnoticed/

Not long after Michelino Sunseri, a professional mountain runner, finished a race across Grand Teton last fall, he found himself on the receiving end of a Justice Department criminal charge. His offense? Running on a closed trail, for which he could end up serving six months in jail.

We are not making this up.

Last Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to prevent such gross abuses. It is one of the most important – and underappreciated – actions he’s taken.

The “crime” Sunseri committed wasn’t a federal law passed by Congress. It was a crime invented by the National Park Service – one of some 300,000 federal crimes (although nobody knows exactly how many there are) that unelected bureaucrats have conjured up when writing regulations.

What’s more, many of these regulatory crimes are “strict liability” offenses, which means that you don’t need to have criminal intent to be charged with a crime.

“This status quo is absurd and unjust,” Trump says in his executive order. “It allows the executive branch to write the law, in addition to executing it. That situation can lend itself to abuse and weaponization by providing government officials tools to target unwitting individuals.”

All true. And deeply disturbing to anyone who cares about civil liberties.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/14/donald-trump-has-scrambled-the-old-class-allegiances/

US president Donald Trump has disrupted the nature of class politics. In a reversal of long-standing allegiances, working-class Americans – including many minorities – have shifted towards the MAGA right. Meanwhile, the well-educated, the corporate elites and the government-dependent have generally veered leftwards.

Rather than the relatively simple Marxist notion of a proletarian conflict with the bourgeoisie, we are seeing a more splintered and nuanced class politics across the West. These divisions are not simply driven by income, race or education, but increasingly also by how people earn their living, and how tariffs, policies and regulations impact their daily lives. These new class tensions threaten to push politics towards the fringes, both left and right. As society frays, the era of consensus politics is firmly at an end.

Until last year, the oligarchy that dominates much of the world economy (and that of the US) reliably allied with the political establishment, whether in Davos, Washington, London, Ottawa or Brussels. They embraced many of the woke positions on gender, race and especially climate, while largely disdaining MAGA as well as more traditional Republicans.

As a result, in the US, the main beneficiaries of the much-discussed oligarchic ‘dark money’ have been, contrary to the general media perception, the Democrats. Big-spending oligarchs like Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and Marc Benioff helped Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris raise well over $1.5 billion – the highest figure in history – for her losing campaign.

Now that some oligarchs, like X owner Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have come out for Trump, the woke left has started to finally push back against their power over US politics. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have launched a ‘fighting oligarchy tour’ to wild applause in the largely oligarch-owned mainstream media. In the same vein, the Atlantic, owned by Steve Jobs’s widow, has denounced Musk’s oligarchic embrace of ‘strongman politics’. Progressives were far less concerned when Google camped out at the Obama White House (visiting 427 times during his administration) or when Harris scooped up big cash from oligarchs.

Perhaps the biggest political divide between the oligarchs comes from how they make their money. Many of those rallying to Trump actually build things and compete directly with China. Most obviously, this includes Elon Musk, who sources from China but also competes with its industrial machine at both Tesla and SpaceX.

Another important component of the right-wing oligarchical shift is the ‘defence bros’, like Palantir co-founders Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey. These are mostly habitués of the defence and space centres in Texas, Florida and southern California. In these places, they are building what could be a MAGA-friendly tech base. Military tech and space projects, which for security reasons must be built in the US, require factory space, skilled workers, reasonable housing costs and, as one executive told me, ‘good places to blow things up’. For this, he added, the wide open spaces of Texas are a unique blessing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/from-critical-consciousness-to-oikophobia/

The widespread campus protests against Israel that followed the savage attacks by Hamas on our ally and fellow liberal democracy, were unprecedented in their solidarity with terrorist organizations representing a religion fundamentally opposed to modern Western civilization and its Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian roots.

Sadly and shamefully, demonizing Israel is unexceptional and expected from Western progressives and Leftists––purveyors of a “history” that traffics in unhistorical, ideologically mendacious assertions about imperialism and colonialism. These critics have adopted those lies and made them, along with specious charges of “racism” and “genocide,” the original sin of Israel’s creation and continued existence. The UN also has adopted those malign tropes, and made Israel the “Jew of nations,” the global villain par excellence, while also supporting and funding Hamas’ jihadist violence.

A Western civilizational innovation––critical consciousness, the self-examination and criticism of one’s own political community, practice, and values––has now gone rancid and led to a self-loathing oikophobia, the irrational fear, loathing, and hatred of one’s own culture and fellow citizens that encourages our enemies and rivals.

Domestic anti-Americanism, for example, has invaded our culture and schools, and has become a spurious token of intellectual sophistication, “citizen of the world” cosmopolitanism, and the hallmark of critical consciousness. In reality it is slow-motion suicide dressed up as high fashion.

Contemporary Anti-Americanism began with Marxist sympathizers and fellow-travelers, and spread during the Cold War as a weapon for the Left. It flourished in Europe, which had influential communist parties. The European Left, as French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote, “has a grudge against America mainly because the latter has succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/elon-musk-department-of-government-efficiency-tesla-washington

It seems that the postmodern world is a conspiracy against great men. Bureaucracy now favors the firm over the founder, and the culture views those who accumulate too much power with suspicion. The twentieth century taught us to fear such men rather than admire them.

Elon Musk—who has revolutionized payments, automobiles, robotics, rockets, communications, and artificial intelligence—may be the closest thing we have to a “great man” today. He is the nearest analogue to the robber barons of the last century or the space barons of science fiction. Yet even our most accomplished entrepreneur appears no match for the managerial bureaucracy of the American state.

Musk will step down from his position leading the Department of Government Efficiency at the end of May. At the outset, the tech tycoon was ebullient, promising that DOGE would reduce the budget deficit by $2 trillion, modernize Washington, and curb waste, fraud, and abuse. His marketing plan consisted of memes and social media posts. Indeed, the DOGE brand itself was an ironic blend of memes, Bitcoin, and Internet humor.

Three months later, however, Musk is chastened. Though DOGE succeeded in dismantling USAID, modernizing the federal retirement system, and improving the Treasury Department’s payment security, the initiative as a whole has fallen short. Savings, even by DOGE’s fallible math, will be closer to $100 billion than $2 trillion. Washington is marginally more efficient today than it was before DOGE began, but the department failed to overcome the general tendency of governmental inertia.

Musk’s marketing strategy ran into difficulties, too. His Internet-inflected language was too strange for the average citizen. And the Left, as it always does, countered proposed cuts with sob stories and personal narratives, paired with a coordinated character-assassination attempt portraying Musk as a greedy billionaire eager to eliminate essential services and children’s cancer research.