RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/eli-lake-breaking-history-radicals-have-burned-california-before-karen-bass-gavin-newsom?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When I think about the recent tragedy of the California fires—and the questions we all have about what went wrong—there is one story I keep coming back to.

A few years ago, an amateur botanist was hiking above the Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles when he noticed several shrubs had been flattened by construction work. What he had stumbled across was an effort by the LA Department of Water and Power to replace the wooden poles of power lines with steel ones. The old ones, you see, were a fire hazard.

But the hiker was more worried about those flattened shrubs, which turned out to be a rare plant called a milk vetch. And so he rallied environmental groups—which ensured that the fire safety project got put on pause.

To me, this episode captures something fundamental about California: Its path to ruin is paved with the noblest intentions.

The Golden State was once the place where industry and imagination locked arms and showed us how great the American experiment could be. It secured our democracy by manufacturing and engineering the weapons that won the Second World War. It built the dream factory of Hollywood and the workshops of the future that we call Silicon Valley. Without California, The American Century would never have begun.

But in our current century, and 50 years of Democrat rule, California has fallen apart—largely thanks to progressive policies attempting to make the world a better place. Tent cities have popped up under bridges and beside freeways; in just the past 10 years, homelessness has risen by over 50 percent. Downtown San Francisco has also become the site of multiple open-air drug markets. Opioid overdose deaths reached an all-time high in the city in 2023. Violent crime has risen, too: As of 2022, rates were 31 percent higher in California than in the U.S. as a whole. Last month’s fires were only the latest reminder that the state is burning up.

To understand how the state unraveled, we need to go back to a decade of despair and decadence: the 1970s. The dark turn began—where else—in the petri dish of progressivism that is San Francisco, which around this time gave birth to the hippie movement. If you want to understand how the radical left can burrow deeply into a state’s bureaucracy, courts, and political machines, look no further than the San Fran ’70s.

California has been a battleground before, and it all began with the summer of love. The year was 1967; the setting, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, a magnet for the dreamers, Vietnam vets, and fans of the new psychedelic rock. It was a wild time. Marijuana plants were everywhere. Communes cooked dinner for anyone who wanted it. A group called The Diggers opened a store where everything was free. The hippies were remodeling their little corner of society. They wanted to spread peace.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/06/trumps-revolution-of-common-sense-brings-out-the-worst-in-democrats/

When asked by a reporter about how many of the 3,500 illegal immigrants arrested since President Donald Trump took office were criminals, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “All of them.” The reporter was flabbergasted, but Leavitt was right. Those who entered the country illegally by definition are guilty of committing a crime.

This is what Trump meant when he said in his inaugural address that “we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense. It’s all about common sense.” The Democrats’ response has been anything but common-sensical.

The first weeks of the Trump administration have been a whirlwind of these sorts of common-sense orders and pronouncements that, as our I&I/TIPP survey showed (see “Trump’s Executive Orders Have Solid Voter Backing: I&I/TIPP Poll”), are popular with everyone except out-of-touch Democrats.

Sending troops to secure the southern border is a common-sense solution to a national crisis. So is letting border patrol officials do their jobs. So is deporting the millions here illegally, starting with hardened criminals.
Requiring federal workers to return to their offices full time is perfectly reasonable.
Declaring that there are two genders – something humankind has known since Adam – and banning the use of taxpayers’ money for federal “gender identity” programs might rankle the far left, but it makes perfect sense to everyone else.
Blocking access to abundant domestic energy supplies while China builds a coal plant every day makes no sense. Boosting oil and gas production does.
Ending racist, divisive, and mostly likely illegal “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs and instead focusing on skills and merit when making federal government hiring decisions counts as common sense to everyone except left-wing extremists.
How about freezing federal grants until someone has a chance to review them? Trump had to backpedal on this, but only because the order was poorly worded. Even so, it immediately exposed some truly ridiculous things that the federal government supports with your hard-earned cash.
Requiring regulators to eliminate 10 regulations for every new one they impose is the definition of common sense when you consider that the Code of Federal Regulations is more than 100,000 pages long.
Our favorite common-sense move was to offer federal workers a buyout option. Companies struggling to make ends meet do this all the time. The federal government is running trillion-dollar deficits and can ill afford to have workers on the payroll who don’t want to be there, as well as the many who shouldn’t.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/hillary_clinton_s_hypersonic_hypocrisy_the_missile_tech_scandal_she_hopes_you_ignore.html

The next time Hillary Clinton or her media allies wag a finger about “Russian interference,” remember this: Hillary Clinton’s State Department helped arm Russia with hypersonic missile technology.

Yes, the same Hillary Clinton who branded Tulsi Gabbard a “Russian asset”. The same Hillary Clinton who pushed the Trump-Russia collusion hoax for years. The same Hillary Clinton who expects America to believe that Moscow is an existential threat. Her tenure at the State Department actively facilitated, promoted, and encouraged the transfer of dual-use technology that helped build Russia’s next-generation hypersonic missile systems.

U.S. officials later sounded the alarm about Skolkovo’s military applications, but the damage was done by then. As Clinton’s State Department actively promoted the initiative, there was little visible scrutiny of how the technology could be weaponized—despite Skolkovo’s deep ties to Russian intelligence and defense interests. As U.S. concerns grew in subsequent years, Clinton and her allies never showed any sign of regret or reassessment—even as Clinton Foundation donors stood to benefit. You can’t make this up.

Selling Out National Security

By 2012, U.S. intelligence had reversed its view on the Skolkovo Project, a high-profile technology initiative to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in Russia. However, it was recognized—too late—that it had become a massive technology transfer operation benefiting Moscow’s military.

The U.S. Army warned that Skolkovo was being used to acquire highly sensitive information on space, satellite, nuclear, and missile technology, and in 2011, U.S. military intelligence assessed that Skolkovo had approved the development of a hypersonic cruise missile engine.

By 2014, the FBI was waving red flags, with the assistant special agent in charge of its Boston Field Office taking the extraordinary step of publicly warning that American technology had been sold to Skolkovo.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usaids-long-track-record-of-wasteful-left-wing-spending-made-it-an-obvious-first-target-for-musk/

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has come under scrutiny after tech billionaire Elon Musk chose the agency as the first target in his campaign to reduce ballooning government costs and root out progressive ideology from within the executive branch.

Musk’s decision to first declare war on USAID in his role as head of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency should come as no surprise, given the agency’s long history of wasteful, ideologically driven spending.

Established in 1961 under the Kennedy administration, USAID is meant to oversee humanitarian, development, and security programs, doing so in over 100 foreign countries. As originally conceived, the agency was meant to distribute aid in a way that advances U.S. interests, ideally without antagonizing the local population.

But, for decades now, the agency has apparently strayed from that mission.

In 1994, whistleblower Paul Neifert revealed that the agency was distributing U.S. aid based on race in violation of federal law.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/reagan-national-airport-crash-faa-air-traffic-control

We still don’t know how many mistakes led to the collision of a helicopter with an American Airlines passenger jet making its descent at Reagan National Airport last week. But one thing has been clear for decades: America’s air-traffic control system, once the world’s most advanced, has become an international disgrace.

Long before the Obama and Biden administrations’ quest to diversify staff in control towers, the system was already one of the worst in the developed world. The recent rash of near-collisions is the result of chronic mismanagement that has left the system with too few controllers using absurdly antiquated technology.

The problems were obvious 20 years ago, when I visited control towers in both Canada and the United States. The Canadians sat in front of sleek computer screens that instantly handled tasks like transferring the oversight of a plane from one controller to another. The Americans were still using pieces of paper called flight strips. After a plane took off, the controller in charge of the local airspace had to carry that plane’s flight strip over to the desk of the controller overseeing the regional airspace. It felt like going back in time from a modern newsroom into a scene from The Front Page.

It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in 2005. But they’re still using those paper flight strips in American towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032. The rest of the system is similarly archaic. The U.S. is way behind Europe in using satellites to guide and monitor planes, forcing pilots and controllers to rely on much less precise readings from radio beacons and ground-based radar.

Overseas controllers use high-resolution cameras and infrared sensors to monitor planes on runways, but many American controllers still have to look out the window—which is why a FedEx cargo plane almost landed on top of another plane two years ago in Austin, Texas. It was a foggy morning, and the controller couldn’t see that a Southwest airliner was on the same runway waiting to take off. At the last minute, the FedEx pilot aborted the landing, missing the other plane by less than 100 feet.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/05/hed/

Americans have been largely pleased with President Donald Trump’s deluge of executive orders. But not all of them. Public support is weak for his order to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate treaty. This is curious. One is clearly a political organization, the other a useless and wasteful effort. The failure by a significant swath of our countrymen to recognize this is worrisome.

This is actually the second time Trump pulled the U.S. from the WHO. The first departure was in 2020. It pleased us then that no longer would this country “take part in its kleptocratic incompetence and its cozying up to dictators and tyrants, including its biggest influencer, China.” The WHO’s reckoning, we said at the time, “is long overdue.” 

Of course Joe Biden put the country back under the WHO’s thumb on his first day in office in 2021, even though it was clear that leaving had hurt no none. Despite this, our I&I/TIPP poll found that only 38% of Americans agree, either strongly (22%) or somewhat (16%) with quitting the WHO.

Critics point out that at one time, when it followed its original mission, the WHO had value.

“Unfortunately, the WHO has expanded its mission over the years to areas that only tangentially relate to public health, such as issuing alcohol consumption and dietary guidelines,” says Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey A. Singer. “Such issues are more aptly defined as private health, i.e., matters that don’t cause harm to others.”

https://www.jns.org/you-cant-make-america-great-again-by-making-it-retreat-again/

In a recent interview on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” the eponymous host asked typically leading questions of his interviewee—in this case, Curt Mills. The purpose of the one-on-one between the two conservative pundits and supporters of newly instated President Donald Trump was to reiterate their shared aversion to the Republican Party’s “war-mongering neocons.”

Carlson highlighted what he sees as the persistence of neoconservative figures in shaping foreign policy, expressing surprise that “over 20 years after the Iraq War, its architects and supporters are still not fully in control of America’s foreign policy, but certainly influential in it.”

David Wurmser, a renowned Middle East policy expert and former senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, is not mentioned by name in the above exchange. But he has been a target of false accusations regarding his ostensibly pernicious undue sway over U.S. foreign policy. In the following Q&A with JNS, Wurmser sets the record straight.

Q: Before addressing the internecine clash between what I’ll call the “Tucker” camp of the Republican Party/MAGA movement and other conservatives, can you define the term “neocon” and what it has come to mean?

A: Neoconservatives were a group of American liberal intellectuals who began in the 1970s to see a fundamental problem with left-leaning positions. Mining classic philosophy, they essentially had a discovery of civilizational values and foundational ideas that define what made the West—not only in the previous 20 years, but in the previous 2,000—and realized that defending Western civilization was on the table. As a result, they drifted into the camp that was defending it. These figures included Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Nathan Glazer. For me, the epic neoconservative, who emerged during what came to be called the “[Ronald] Reagan revolution,” was Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Originally on the left, affiliated with the Young Socialists—even giving the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention—she ended up becoming the symbol of Reaganism.

What defined her and the entire age of Reaganism was a revival of the faith in America’s being a good and proud nation that needed to issue no apologies. It was a reaction to the defensiveness of the post-Vietnam War era, which had descended into constant self-excoriation during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, always explaining the global hatred of the United States through “blame America first.”

In any case, I don’t believe there’s such a thing anymore as a neoconservative, and I never was one. Because how could I have been a “new” conservative when I reached the age of political awareness after the movement rightward had already happened? I was born and raised on conservative principles. My mother had been a Czech dissident who fled Czechoslovakia in 1948 with the KGB on her tail. She wound up in Germany in a DP camp, then went to Switzerland and finally arrived in America, where most Czech dissidents headed. Later, I found out that she’d been the leader of the Moravian underground against Stalin.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/democrats-still-in-denial/

Like the Japanese soldiers found hiding in the jungle after World War II, unaware that their Emperor had surrendered, the Democrats don’t seem to grasp that their side was nuked and decisively defeated last November.

Witness the recent pathetic spectacle of the Democratic National Committee’s annual winter meeting last week, carried live on MSNBC and held at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley told Fox News Digital, “It’s an important opportunity for us to not only refocus the party and what we present to voters, but also an opportunity for us to look at how we internally govern ourselves.”

But even The New York Times admitted about the DNC meeting that the “Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided” and “have no shared understanding of why they lost the election, never mind how they can win in the future.” “We have no coherent message,” complained Rep. Jasmine Crockett to The Times.

And that’s at the heart of the Democrats’ problem: they believe that ineffective messaging and not the substance of their vision is the reason they lost to Trump. A few Dem leaders, like Amy Klobuchar, at least suspect (correctly) that Biden administration economy-wrecking played a role in voter dissatisfaction, but for the most part, the Party is still in denial about, and clinging to, a vision that the American people roundly rejected last fall.

The forum focused, for example, heavily and unsurprisingly on race and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs – exactly the sort of divisive, social justice madness that Americans brought Trump in to dismantle.

The DNC meeting included a debate among eight candidates for a new DNC chair: former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, DNC Vice Chair Ken Martin, Wisconsin Democrat party Chair Ben Wikler, former Bernie Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir, failed candidate for Arkansas state Representative Quintessa Hathaway, former DHS official Nate Snyder, and Newton, Massachusetts Democratic City Committee executive member Jason Paul. As Fox News Digital put it,

With no clear leader in the party, the next DNC chair is in a position to become the de facto face of Democrats from coast to coast and will make major decisions on messaging, strategy, infrastructure and where to spend millions in political contributions.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/04/trump-should-unleash-musk-to-fix-our-dangerously-decrepit-air-traffic-control-system/

Do What Canada Did 20 Years Ago

After the mid-air collision at Reagan National Airport, President Donald Trump cast blame on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” hiring practices at the Federal Aviation Administration. But the problem goes much, much deeper than that.

Decades of gross mismanagement and chronic waste have left the FAA’s air traffic control (ATC) system dangerously ill-prepared to safely do its job. And the only fix is a complete overhaul – something Canada and most other industrial nations did years ago.

“I put safety first. Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first,” Trump said, suggesting they hired people based on membership in “protected classes” rather than merit.

Naturally, the press sprang into action to attack that claim. But it’s possible that DEI contributed to the calamity, if indirectly.

In 2012, for example, the FAA temporarily halted new hires “so it could replace race-blind hiring rules with a ‘Biographical Assessment’ stratagem designed to hire more minorities,” according to the Washington Times. Congress forced the FAA to drop this “assessment” in 2018, but the FAA now faces a class action lawsuit from more than 2,000 qualified air traffic control applicants who say they were sidelined to make room for “diversity” candidates.

In June 2023, the Transportation Department’s inspector general reported that the “FAA continues to face staffing challenges and lacks a plan to address them,” prompting lawmakers to attack then-Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for being “focused on advancing racist and divisive DEI agenda” instead of filling this alarming gap.

https://nypost.com/2025/02/02/opinion/trumps-win-was-a-call-for-law-and-order-after-the-dems-constant-demonization-of-the-police/

“Maybe this will end in another week,” sighed the cashier at a CVS store on the Upper East Side, seven days after President Trump’s inauguration. A young male, clutching a black plastic garbage bag, had just darted out the door.”Maybe this will end in another week,” sighed the cashier at a CVS store on the Upper East Side, seven days after President Trump’s inauguration. A young male, clutching a black plastic garbage bag, had just darted out the door.

The thief had wandered the premises unchallenged, despite being a member of the predominant shoplifting demographic and openly carrying a receptacle for his heist. After his rushed escape, no one called the police. The employees knew the precinct’s officers weren’t likely to come — and nothing would happen if they did.

I, meanwhile, had had to summon a clerk to gain access to the store’s calcium pills, locked behind plexiglass shields.

So much for the invidious racial profiling that former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden routinely accused the country of engaging in.

The cashier nodded wearily toward a rack of batteries in the front of the store — a target of this latest heist — oddly not behind lock and key.

The clerk’s long gray corkscrew curls, beard and heavy Puerto Rican accent did not mark him as a stereotypical Donald Trump voter. Yet here he was, assuming that his reference to “another week” was clear and that I would share his hope for a political sea change.