RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-long-shadow-of-hillary-clinton/

While one cannot blame all of the world’s problems on the former first lady and senator, much of the trouble in Ukraine is related to her actions.

Volodymyr Zelensky was once a comedian. One of the hallmarks of great comedians is their ability to read the room. When my high school had a very ugly and contentious merger with its sister school (New Trier East and West), a traveling group from Second City came to perform. One of the comedians was asked about the merger, which had made its way into the local papers. He whipped out his Kipling and, without losing a beat, stated, “East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet!” He was met with wild applause by the crowd.

The president of Ukraine did not know how to read the Oval Office on Friday. Zelensky supposedly was coached by Obama retreads Susan Rice, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken and others. If the story is true and they told Ukraine’s president to be tough with Trump, he got some bad advice. One of the strangest features of American governance is the potential for whiplash changes in policy. In dictatorships or even European-style coalition rule, things either remain unchanged or change at a glacial pace. The winner of Germany’s recent elections promised to deal with the problems of large-scale immigration. Once he saw that he could form a coalition without AfD, he said the status quo wasn’t so bad. But not in America. When you change parties, policies can spin around 180 degrees in a second. Somehow, the Obama brain trust tried to convince Zelensky that it was just like the days of Biden, though it was not.

If one wanted to trace a useful starting point for the destruction of Russian and Ukrainian armies, I would suggest the day after the 2016 election. Without evidence, Hilary Clinton and John Podesta claimed that Donald Trump was a Putin stooge and that through Russian interference in the US election, he was elected president. If you could get the ex-secretary of state away from her glass of Chardonnay for a few minutes, she would no doubt repeat the same: the election was stolen from her, and Vladimir Putin was the culprit. These claims had profoundly negative repercussions in the world. The first was the “Russian Collusion” investigation that wasted two and a half years of the Trump administration. Nothing was found, and the millions spent on Robert Mueller’s dream team were wasted, other than it hamstrung the president and supercharged the support, often bipartisan, for Ukraine, a country known for widespread corruption.

https://tomklingenstein.com/elite-holdouts-will-keep-wokeness-alive/

While we’ve since learned that Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s legendary quip about the outcome of the French Revolution being “too soon to tell” was the result of a mistranslation rather than a zen-like sweep of history, there’s something wise about taking the long view.

The defeat of some of the most obvious excesses of “wokeness” — both in policy, through a flurry of Trump executive orders, and among the public, as seen in recent polling — is certainly cause for celebration (and, for those of us who’ve been on the battlefield in large or small capacities, a sense of accomplishment). Perhaps the greatest sign of its waning power in the public consciousness is that it has, finally, become ridiculous; its association has traversed the distance from earnest righteousness to a source of mockery.

The Right should be cautious, though, as political and social battles are rarely (if ever) won for all time. “Liberalism” and “Progressivism” are two labels that required multiple rebrands across several generations due to failing fortunes with the public — and yet maintained enough elite support to return, just as powerfully as before.

Those of us on the Right understand that what’s now known as “wokeness” isn’t new or a heretical deviation; rather, it is the necessary outgrowth of the Left’s assumptions and assertions about the world, inseparable from its conception of “progress.” Most ordinary Americans, though, are busy with their lives and haven’t traced the Left’s radicalism as it lurched from college campuses in the 1970s into the mainstream of elite consensus.

The Right’s smarter activists understand that, since its inception, the Left fails when its excesses are made flesh. For example, women’s sports and childhood medical transitions were crucial battlegrounds in the war against “wokeness,” as they exposed the radicalism of gender ideology in ways that didn’t require lengthy philosophical explanations. Even in defeat, Americans need to be shown the horrors of childhood medical transitions just as the victorious Allies needed to remind the world of the Nazi death camps: the fight was a righteous one, and the enemies deserved destruction for what they’d done.

Given enough time and distance, however, a period of revisionism always arrives, and the battle must be taken up anew.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5180888-democrats-missteps-trump-hate

Democrats did not just lose an election in 2024 — apparently, they lost their minds, too.  

Consider, for instance, how they kicked off Women’s History Month — by voting against protecting women and girls in sports, against guaranteeing them a fair playing field.   

That’s right: Every single Democrat voted down the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would prohibit federally funded schools from allowing male transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports. 

It would prevent girls and women from being injured by bigger, stronger biological males. And, just as importantly, it would prevent girls who have worked like crazy to excel in sports from being humiliated by a men dressed like women. 

Take, for example, the basketball game that took place a year ago between two Massachusetts teams — the Collegiate Charter School of Lowell and KIPP Academy in Lynn. A transgender player for KIPP, at six feet tall and sporting facial hair, injured multiple opposing female players, eventually forcing Collegiate to forfeit the game.  

Or consider the gruesome injury sustained by Payton McNabb in a 2022 volleyball match, when a transgender opponent spiked the ball into her head and nearly killed her. Some 79 percent of Americans, including 67 percent of Democrats, favor keeping men out of women’s sports and locker rooms, according to New York Times-Ipsos polling.  

So why fall on your sword by defeating a bill that so clearly aligns with the preferences of voters?

This is not the only recent foolish move by Democrats. In anticipation of President Trump’s speech to Congress on Tuesday, 22 senators in the Democratic caucus broadcast videos of themselves all reading the exact same script, which starts with the words, “S— that ain’t true,” mocking Trump’s campaign pledge to bring down prices on Day 1. Conservatives on social media quickly roasted the copycat stunt, and rightly so. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/03/the_enduring_battle_over_merit.html

The push for group-based preferences that began with affirmative action in the 1960s and evolved into today’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) movement is now in decline. Merit, not skin color, sex or sexual peccadilloes, may soon decide everything from hiring to college admissions. Hopefully, America’s half century of failed social engineering will be replaced with what Thomas Jefferson called a “Natural Aristocracy.”

Nevertheless, the battle over merit is far from over. The sad reality is that the anti-merit impulse runs deep in human history. Yes, merit has promoted civilization, but anti-merit identity politics is hardly a historical abnormality. Nepotism and ethnocentrism, both of which are antithetical to merit, are probably hardwired into our DNA; the desire for meritocracy is not.

To appreciate this aversion to ability, consider what occurred in Nazi Germany. On April 7, 1933, just two months after assuming political power, Adolf Hitler issued his infamous Law for the Restoration of Professional Civil Service ordering the immediate dismissal of any government official who had at least one Jewish grandparent or opposed the Nazi regime. Since all German academics were state employees, this edict applied to every professor along with judges, police officers, and countless bureaucrats.

A mass exodus of researchers and professors ensued, some of whom while not themselves Jewish had Jewish spouses. Others who were Jewish or had Jewish ancestry were not Germans, but as residents of nearby countries, they saw the handwriting on the wall and fled.

German physics was devastated. Among those escaping were Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Max Born, Albert Einstein, James Franck, Otto Frisch, Fritz London, Lise Meitner, Erwin Schrödinger, Otto Stern, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, and Eugene Wigner. Three—Einstein, Franck, and Schrödinger—were Nobel Prizes winners and five others would eventually receive that prize. Several, notably Bethe and Teller, played major roles in the Manhattan Project or contributed to the physics underlying the atomic bomb. The exodus was a windfall for countries accepting the refugees—some 2500 of these scientists and academics fled to the United Kingdom. U.S. patents increased by 31 percent after 1933 in fields common among German refugees. When the eminent German scientist Max Planck personally pleaded with Hitler not to fire Jewish physicists, Hitler said that the Reich did not need them.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/southern-los-angeles-cities-paramount-governance-local

Like many older industrial towns, Paramount, a mostly Latino city of 50,000 located 18 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, has been through hard times. In 1981, the Rand Corporation described it as “an urban disaster area.” In 2015, it was named among the worst cities in America, based on 22 measures of affordability, economics, education, health, and quality of life. In 2019, Business Insider ranked it near the bottom along with several other nearby cities. Founded as a largely agricultural community in 1948, the city eventually transformed itself into a manufacturing hub but was then devastated in the 1980s as aerospace and car companies exited.

Yet today, walking along Paramount Boulevard, one sees not broken-down storefronts but a thriving downtown, full of attractive restaurants and shops. The city has adopted a “broken windows” approach to policing. While crime rates remain above average for the state, they have been trending down. Homicides, down two-thirds from 1990s levels, are well below the L.A. city average and almost half of those in nearby South L.A. neighborhoods. Paramount has also gotten its city finances on a more solid footing than those of its peers. Whereas L.A. was flirting with huge deficits even before the wildfires, Paramount maintained budget surpluses over the past decade.

Perhaps even more remarkable, one sees no signs of the homelessness, graffiti, and urban disorder that’s so common throughout Southern California—a remarkable shift from conditions just a decade or two ago. “In places like Paramount people get things done because that’s where they live,” says former Paramount city manager Pat West. “In L.A., they have meetings.”

Much of Paramount’s relative success comes from paying attention to little things. The city has focused on parks, urban space, and landscaping, helping local neighborhoods improve their look by subsidizing flower beds and white picket fences to improve the curb appeal of homes.

Under its elected leadership, Paramount has seen job growth in the hospital, education, small industrial, and retail sectors. The city’s income levels are significantly higher, and unemployment lower, than the L.A. County average. Unlike the dysfunctional L.A. school system, Paramount’s independent school district has improved its graduation rate from 71 percent to over 90 percent in recent years, according to city manager John Moreno.

https://thespectator.com/topic/donald-trump-calls-renewal-american-patriotism/

Donald Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night was the most powerful, rousing and pointed of any presidential address in decades. “America is back… and we are just getting started,” it began, capturing the theme of the night. The address ended with a peroration that his administration would “take up the righteous cause of American liberty” and “fight, fight, fight for a country our citizens’ believe in and deserve.” Our country’s “Golden Age,” he said, ”has just begun.”

Dozens and dozens of applause lines were planted throughout the speech as Trump laid out his ambitious agenda and his accomplishments so far. It was not the dull laundry list of programs most presidents present to Congress.

There was an upbeat coherence to the address. It included plenty of specific proposals, but they were not the focus of the speech. The emphasis was on a renewal of American patriotism — a new “Golden Age” — illustrated by his achievements so far. The leitmotif was his recognition of citizens in the gallery who underscored those themes. They embodied both our country’s virtues and its tragedies, the result of policies gone horribly wrong. He pinned those tragedies on Joe Biden and the Democrats.

The result was a bravura performance for the president, a pep rally for congressional Republicans and a train wreck for the Democrats, who sat glumly in their seats, holding signs up attacking the president and booing his applause lines.

The Democrats’ self-inflicted humiliation began as soon as Trump started. Congressman Al Green, who introduced a bill to impeach President Trump shortly after he took office, rose with a cane in hand and started yelling at the president, refusing to be silent or sit (when asked by House Speaker Mike Johnson) and ultimately had to be removed from the chamber.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/05/social-security-administration-identifies-800m-in-savings-for-fiscal-year-2025/

The Social Security Administration (SSA) has managed to identify at least $800 million in cost savings for the agency for the fiscal year 2025.

As the Washington Examiner reports, many of the savings have come from the reevaluation of contracts and grants, as well as payroll, information technology, changes to travel policy, consolidating office space, and switching from printed paper to electronic forms.

“For too long, SSA has operated on autopilot,” said Acting SSA Commissioner Lee Dudek in a statement. “We have spent billions annually doing the same things the same way, leading to bureaucratic stagnation, inefficiency, and a lack of meaningful service improvements. It is time to change just that.”

The main source of savings was a hiring freeze on SSA Disability Determination Services and a reduction in overtime pay, which accounted for $550 million. Another $150 million was saved by cancelling non-essential contracts in the agency’s Information Technology (IT) systems. The agency saved $15 million in canceled contracts and another $15 million in canceled grants.

https://www.thefp.com/p/victor-davis-hanson-can-trump-reset

 https://newcriterion.com/article/maga-agonistes/\

The Trumpian agenda to “Make America Great Again” emerged during the 2015–16 campaign and ensured Donald Trump’s nomination and eventual victory over Hillary Clinton. This counterrevolutionary movement reflected the public’s displeasure with both the Obama administration’s hard swing to the left and the doctrinaire, anemic Republican reaction to it.

Although only partially implemented during Trump’s first term, MAGA policies nevertheless marked a break from many past Republican orthodoxies, especially in their signature skepticism concerning the goal of nation-building abroad and the so-called endless wars, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, that tended to follow. But like all counterrevolutions, there were intrinsic challenges in the transition from simply opposing the status quo to actually ending it.

There was a promising start during Trump’s first administration. Corporate interest in a porous border to ensure inexpensive labor was ignored; immigration was deterred or restricted to legal channels, and the border was largely secured. Deregulation and tax cuts, rather than deficit reduction, were prioritized. Selective tariffs were no longer deemed apostasies from the free market, but acceptable and indeed useful levers to enforce reciprocity in foreign trade. Costly middle-class entitlements were pronounced sacrosanct. Social Security and Medicare were declared immune from cost-cutting and privatization.

This “action plan to Make America Great Again” went hand in hand with an effort to transform the Republican Party. What had once been routinely caricatured as a wealthy club of elites was reinvented by Trump as a working-class populist movement. Racial chauvinism and tribalism were rejected. Race was to be seen as incidental to shared class concerns—notably, reining in the excesses of a progressive, identity politics–obsessed bicoastal elite. Athletes who in 2020 had bent a knee to express outrage at “systemic” racism were in 2024 celebrating their scores by emulating Trump’s signature dance moves.

Despite intense resistance from the media, the Democratic Party, and the cultural left, the first Trump term enjoyed success in implementing many of these agendas. After losing the 2020 election—in which nearly 70 percent of voters in key swing states voted by mail-in ballot—Trump left office without a major war on his watch. He had overseen a period with 1.9 percent annualized inflation, low interest rates, steady economic growth and, finally, after constant battles and controversy, a secure border with little illegal immigration.

Yet during the succeeding four-year Biden interregnum, the world became far more chaotic and dangerous, both at home and abroad. Biden’s general agenda was to reverse by executive order almost every policy that Trump had implemented. And while Trump was successfully reelected in 2024 after reminding voters that they had been far better off under the MAGA agenda than during Biden’s subsequent shambolic tenure, the changed conditions in 2024 will also make implementing that agenda even more difficult than after Trump’s first victory.

Trump has now inherited an almost bankrupt country. The ratio of debt to annual GDP has reached a record high of nearly 125 percent—exceeding the worst years of World War II. The nation remains sharply divided over the southern border. Trump’s own base demands that he address an estimated 12 million additional unvetted illegal aliens; diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and racial quotas; and an array of enemies abroad who are no longer deterred by or content with the global status quo. The eight-year Obama revolution, in retrospect, did not change American institutions and policies nearly as much as the more radical four-year Biden tenure. And so often, when drastic remedies are proposed, their implementation may appear to the inured public—at least initially—as a cure worse than the disease.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/understanding_president_trump_s_joint_session_address.html

On President Trump’s last occasion of speaking in the House for a State of the Union speech, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tore up the speech while seated behind the President. Last night signaled important political changes since that time. Speaker Michael Johnson and Vice President J.D. Vance were seated behind President Trump. The speech was an important indication of the rapid pace of accomplishments for the president.

The tradition of speaking before Congress is relatively unique in American history. Speaking to Congress in this direct manner was a tradition that began just over 100 years ago when Woodrow Wilson sought to build various political foundations for a more powerful executive branch. The State of the Union message as specified by the Constitution as an annual report to Congress was delivered as a written letter until Wilson changed this tradition in the early 20th century. Wilson, FDR, Obama, and Biden have all made important efforts to expand the practical power of the presidency beyond its constitutional limits. Biden repeatedly ignored Supreme Court rulings against his executive actions, such as forgiving student loan debt. Democrat presidents played an important role in expanding executive power throughout the 20th century.

The Democrat congressional membership employed exceptional resistance tactics including the use of handbills and a speech by Texas representative Al Green seeking to interrupt the President’s speech. Speaker Mike Johnson ordered the removal of Green from the chamber. Green was the first House member to file impeachment charges against Trump in the current presidential term. One of the most consistent messages of the handbills was the word “False” presumably asserting that the President’s statements were false.

The important accomplishments President Trump pointed to included: 1) government waste discoveries made by DOGE, 2) reductions in illegal immigration, 3) the renewal of tax cuts and new tax cuts, 4) a new policy of tariffs on many foreign nations, 5) the introduction of new cabinet members. He ended the speech with an intensive peroration that reconnected with the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania. Calling for the nation to fight, fight, fight for the coming “golden age” of American formed a passionate ending to the speech.

The Democratic Party plan for resistance to the President did not appear to form a meaningful coherence. No singular complaint or message appeared to unify the opposition to the president. Nonetheless, the Democrat congressional members appeared exceptionally unwilling to applaud or provide meaningful evidence of support.