RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://tomklingenstein.com/trump-and-the-vice-of-false-moderation/

We find ourselves in a protracted struggle, fighting the advocates of a pernicious ideology that aims to radically transform the American way of life. Compromise is essential to free political life, but there can be no compromise with those driven by totalitarian impulses. What is needed more than ever is tough-minded moderation, and not a false sense of complacency.

In the very recent past, why have so many intellectuals and politicians — even professed conservatives —  either bowed to or shown little courage in the face of the disruptive mobs that threaten free speech and discussion, the censorious militants obsessed with imposing critical race theory and gender ideology on the rest of us, the terrorists who maim and kill in the name of liberation and decolonialization, and the activists and semi-educated students who shamelessly applaud their crimes? These are enemies of Western civilization, and we must act accordingly. Civic courage has been in short supply. It very much needs to be renewed and reinvigorated.  

True, we must be prudent, even in the midst of battle. But authentic prudence does not mean meeting assaults half-heartedly. While the free man in principle prefers peace to war and the arts of persuasion to endless conflict, he cannot be afraid to stand up and fight when he must — to the death, if necessary. Edmund Burke put things well at the beginning of his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): In resisting the fanaticism of those who war against ordered liberty, we must embody and defend what he called “a manly, moral, and regulated liberty.”

We need to rally a broad “anti-revolutionary party,” as Jordan J. Ballor has called it, comprising all who refuse to deny common sense and the moral truths reflected in the Decalogue, to sever attachment to what is good and noble in our patrimony, and to deny affection for our country. There can be no compromise with the revolutionary party.

To be sure, as I have mentioned, a healthy civic order values compromise, but such compromise requires what we lack today: a shared commitment to the life of reason and to the decencies and shared values required for a functioning republic. Emphasizing civility at the expense of these fundamentals opens the door wide to the revolutionaries. When this happens, good people become weak and ultimately complicit in the assault on their own way of life — on the premises, institutions, and traditions on which a free society rests. Conservatives need to remember this as we move forward.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/15/bidens-disaster-most-voters-give-him-failing-marks-for-leadership-key-policies-ii-tipp-poll/

The days remaining for the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration are few, but before they go, it’s only fair to ask Americans what kind of job the pair did over the last four tumultuous years. As it turns out, data from the latest I&I/TIPP Poll suggest, voters will not be sad to see this Democratic tenure come to an end.

The national online poll of 1.424 adults, taken Jan. 8-Jan. 10, asked a number of questions to get at how voters feel about the job Biden has done, including questions on how Biden did in particular policy areas. The poll’s margin of error is +/-2.6 percentage points.

Apart from Democrats, Biden finds little support anywhere across the nation.

The first broad question posed involved leadership: “Overall, is your opinion of Joe Biden generally favorable, generally unfavorable, or are you not familiar enough to say one way or the other?”

Biden doesn’t come out well in the reckoning. Of those surveyed, just 38% give him a “favorable” rating, while 51% rated him “unfavorable” and another 7% said they didn’t know enough to render an opinion.

But, when gauged by political party affiliation, Americans were far apart.

Democrats handed Biden high ratings (71% favorable, 17% unfavorable), while Republicans slammed Biden (15% favorable, 81% unfavorable) and independent voters more or less followed suit (26% favorable, 59% unfavorable).

https://www.city-journal.org/article/mark-zuckerberg-meta-abolish-dei-fact-checking

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook, made a stunning announcement. He was abolishing the company’s DEI programs and discontinuing its relationship with fact-checking organizations, which he admitted had become a form of “censorship.” The left-wing media immediately attacked the decision, accused him of embracing the MAGA agenda, and predicted a dangerous rise in so-called disinformation.

Zuckerberg’s move was carefully calculated and impeccably timed. The November elections, he said, felt like “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” DEI initiatives, especially those related to immigration and gender, had become “disconnected from mainstream conversation”—and untenable.

This is no small about-face. Just four years ago, Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding left-wing election programs; his role was widely resented by conservatives. And Meta had been at the forefront of any identity-based or left-wing ideological cause.

Not anymore. As part of the rollout for the announcement, Zuckerberg released a video and appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast, which now functions as a confessional for American elites who no longer believe in left-wing orthodoxies. On the podcast, Zuckerberg sounded less like a California progressive than a right-winger, arguing that the culture needed a better balance of “masculine” and “feminine” energies.

Executives at Meta quickly implemented the new policy, issuing pink slips to DEI employees and moving the company’s content-moderation team from California to Texas, in order, in Zuckerberg’s words, to “help alleviate concerns that biased employees are excessively censoring content.”

Zuckerberg was not the first technology executive to make such an announcement, but he is perhaps the most significant. Facebook is one of the largest firms in Silicon Valley and, with Zuckerberg setting the precedent, many smaller companies will likely follow suit.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/14/la-fires-illustrate-a-nationwide-competency-crisis/

Los Angeles is burning, and the raging fires appear to be some of the worst in recent memory. Entire neighborhoods, fancy and regular alike, have burned to the ground. Harrowing video of people trapped in their homes convey some of the human cost of the fires and foretell the inevitable deaths that will be confirmed in the weeks ahead.

There are a surprising number of obstacles challenging the emergency response, considering that we are supposed to live in a first-world country. Fire hydrants ran dry for reasons not yet fully explained, and there were cuts to statewide firefighting budgets in advance of the fires. It now appears that the ongoing homelessness crisis in Los Angeles was a harbinger of third-world conditions across the board.

The political leadership also leaves a lot to be desired. Governor Gavin Newsom shrugged and pinned empty hydrants on locals. In spite of extreme risk warnings, the Los Angeles mayor was away on an overseas junket and went catatonic when reporters asked her some basic questions about events. She is now back and facing sustained criticism from her erstwhile supporters.

Multiple Failure Points Contributed to Disaster

There are lots of theories about what went wrong, and everyone is reaching for their well-worn hobby horses. Some say it’s affirmative action destroying once-competent institutions. Others blame generic incompetence and mismanagement.

Another factor may be changing patterns of home building. Apparently, building on the hills and in the canyons—which are periodically subject to fires—is inherently risky. The recent dry spell, coupled with heavy winds, only made things worse.

Finally, at least some of the fires appear to be a result of arson, whether by the mentally ill or the malevolent.

My intuition is to blame all of these things in combination. While I do not know enough to have a strong opinion about the relative weight of one cause versus another, I start with the prejudice that most failures in life arise from systemic failures, which themselves result from the accumulation of smaller errors similar to the stacking of tolerances in engineering.

A well-designed system can withstand incompetent executives, some affirmative action appointees, and even a shortfall in funding for one year. But most systems cannot withstand all of these things, year after year, which seems to be the unifying factor in Los Angeles’ current predicament.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/13/you-know-who-will-cheer-the-death-of-dei-the-working-class/

So, is it RIP DEI? The boss class’s favourite ideology certainly seems to be in trouble. Big business everywhere is rethinking its devotion to ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’. As part of his coming out as a pretty standard tech bro who bristles at woke and loves Joe Rogan, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has said DEI might be for the chopping block. He even instructed his minions to take the tampons out of the men’s bathrooms at Meta HQ. Expecting people who menstruate to use the ladies’ loo? Guys, this is big.

The legacy media is noisily lamenting Zuck’s bonfire of the diversity initiatives. Meta is ‘eliminating’ DEI, weeps CNN. It quotes an internal Meta memo that basically says it’s game over for ‘equity and inclusion’. To these people, Zuckerberg is an apostate. To renounce the religion of DEI, the divisive ideology that holds such fierce sway on college campuses and in HR departments, is to make oneself an enemy of the new elite. I reckon we’re days away from a Vox piece calling Zuckerberg a fascist.

And the Rogan-pilled Facebook founder is not alone. Other corporations are likewise beating a retreat from DEI. Capitalist giants including McDonald’s, Walmart, Ford and Amazon have ‘pulled the plug’ on DEI, says a clearly emotional CBS. Cue meltdown among the woke. These once right-on capitalists are capitulating to MAGA, we’re told. They’re initiating a ‘rightward shift’ ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump. We’re witnessing a ‘conservative backlash’ against diversity, cries business bible Forbes, and the repercussions could be dire.

Of course the cultural class will mourn the flailing regime of DEI. After all, they were its architects and enforcers. Both their social sway and personal wealth were boosted by this insidious ideology that empowered them to re-educate the great unwashed in the finer details of racial correct-think. But you know who won’t mourn it? The working class. For them, this poisonous dogma was never anything more than a patrician system of moral instruction that diminished their workplace clout and divided them from their fellow workers.

DEI is always presented as a nice, fair thing. It’s about ‘embracing the differences’ that ‘everyone brings to the table’, said CNN last year. It’s about making workplaces welcoming to all, regardless of their ‘race, age, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation [or] physical ability’. These knackered platitudes mask the grim truth about DEI, which is that it is divisive rather than unifying, and spectacularly intolerant of difference – especially political difference – rather than ‘welcoming to all’.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/13/how-trump-plans-to-take-on-censors-and-they-plan-to-take-on-trump/

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
The incoming Trump administration scored an early but possibly illusory victory last month in its effort to reform government overreach when it successfully pressured Congress to eliminate what it termed “sweetheart provisions for government censors” from a measure to stave off a government shutdown.

Funding for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center – which Republicans had attacked as a tool of domestic censorship – was stripped from the final bill, and the center announced that it was closed for good on Dec. 23. Days later, however, reporting emerged that the State Department had devised plans to shift the center’s 51 employees and millions of dollars of funding to a separate hub purportedly to counter foreign “information manipulation and interference.”

President-elect Donald Trump has not said how he will respond to this maneuver. But in extensive public comments, he has said that targeting what critics have called the Censorship Industrial Complex will be a high priority in his new administration. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge to restore free expression on his platforms and join the Trump administration in its efforts to push back on global censorship, two weeks before inauguration day, indicates speech-policing forces like his may be disarming accordingly.

As the State Department’s move suggests, however, this push will likely face stiff resistance. “There will be a visceral reaction from the bureaucratic state in permanent Washington,” Sen. Eric Schmitt told RealClearInvestigations. As attorney general of Missouri, Schmitt launched the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit against federal government collusion with social media companies and nonprofits to target disfavored speech.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/13/woke-dei-green-nihilism-dresden-in-california/

Firebombing on the Pacific

Over 25,000 acres are ablaze in Los Angeles in the Pacific Palisades fire, a veritable living hell.

Some 12,000-plus structures were incinerated. More than 250,000 souls have been evacuated and are in need of shelter.

No one has really taken charge yet. And now even the woke culprits for the catastrophe are blame-gaming each other to determine who was the more incompetent, which in this case translates to the most woke.

No one knows how many have died; all know the number will escalate in the next few days.

The eventual price tag of the ruin will exceed $200-300 billion and outstrip the billions of dollars given to Ukraine.

And there are still some fires that are completely uncontained.

The Los Angeles apocalypse was a multisystem, green-woke collapse—and a disastrous reminder that when Soviet-style, anti-meritocratic ideology permeates all aspects of modern life in California, disaster is inevitable.

First, note that the culprit of the catastrophe is not climate change; it is not Donald Trump. Those are excuses for arrogant incompetency and disdain for the public. And it is not racism or homophobia to fault those who paraded and virtue signaled their tribal identities so extraneous to their actual responsibilities for public safety.

Note that all California statewide officeholders are left-wing. The California left holds supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Only 17 percent of California’s huge congressional delegation of 52 seats is Republican. California’s judiciary is the most left-wing in the country. There is not a single Republican on the 15-member Los Angeles City Council.

Add it all up, and the woke socialist state has been eagerly deindustrializing, decivilizing, and retribalizing its way into what is now a veritable peacetime Dresden on the Pacific.

Again, there is no one else to blame, because California is one of those rare states in which Republicans have de facto zero political power. All the state media, the legacy newspapers, the Silicon Valley daily online news sites, the Bay Area-based Apple, Google, and Facebook monopolies, and the local news outlets are parrots of the woke-green mindset.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/when-the-democrats-went-mad/

Nowadays it is taken for granted that if you’re a “progressive,” you’re in favor of extensive federal control over the economy, under the guise of concern for common people. The idea that moving toward statism and ever more government control constitutes “progress” is a Marxist notion that is rooted in the idea that history is moving inevitably and inevitably toward the Communist state. In America, one of the public figures who was primarily responsible for the popularization of this idea was a charismatic and yet thrice-failed Democrat presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan.

In 1896, the Democrats were going through a revolution. The Republican platform committed the party to the gold standard, which prevented the production of so much currency as to lead to inflation. A minority of Republicans and a significant majority of Democrats, however, supported the free coinage of silver, which would lead to inflation and thereby make it easier for farmers to pay off their debts. That rapidly rising prices were rendering the life savings of Americans essentially worthless did not trouble the silver advocates, who cloaked their case in the language of support for the plight of the common man.

President Grover Cleveland supported the gold standard, but toward the end of his second term, he was deeply unpopular, and the silver forces among the Democrats were restive. At the Democratic National Convention, Bryan, a handsome and vigorous thirty-six-year-old congressman from Nebraska, electrified the delegates with a speech in favor of the free coinage of silver that is one of the most celebrated pieces of oratory in American history. “You come to us,” Bryan declared, “and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

Bryan sounded notes of class warfare that would become ever more common in American politics: “We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest; we are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!” In conclusion, he thundered: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-is-going-to-destroy-as-much-as-possible-on-his-way-out-the-door/

Ever see a drunk asked to leave a nice restaurant? It doesn’t have to have been in person, you’ve likely seen it in a movie or a TV show; something where the person is asked nicely, but forcefully, to leave and they cause a huge scene as they walk to the door – knocking over drinks, bumping into people, being very loud, etc. That guy is Joe Biden. The current President of the United States and his administration are going to go out like a destructive drunk and it should lead not only to the destruction of his legacy, but a dramatic change of the transition period in the future.

Remember when the Obama administration was ending and there were a whole bunch of political appointees – people whose jobs should have ended on January 20, 2017 – who moved to non-political jobs so they could stay in various departments and undermine the incoming Trump administration?

The Biden administration appears to be trying to do that with ideas, bad ideas. “The State Department has crafted plans to distribute staffers from a shuttered office accused of censoring conservatives to a new internal ‘hub’ that will coordinate its activities,” reports the Washington Examiner. “The Global Engagement Center, the office that Republicans accused of working with groups aiming to demonetize right-leaning media outlets in the United States, shut down in late 2024 upon lawmakers agreeing to no longer fund it. However, in a non-public letter to members of Congress on Dec. 6, the State Department outlined its plans to “realign” more than 50 GEC officials and tens of millions of dollars in funding to a hub purporting to counter foreign interference, documents show.”

There was an agreement to shut this censorship machine down and the people the deal was struck with simply started moving it around and calling it something else.

Maybe Biden doesn’t understand or know that this is happening, but he is still responsible for it.