RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-harvard-funding-freeze-anti-semitism-race-dei

“The administration is growing ever bolder in its crusade against the institutions responsible for left-wing ideology—whether elite law firms or universities. That crusade is unquestionably justified. Its targets deserve little sympathy. But a question arises: Is the administration more interested in maximal disruption or in achieving its long-term goals? The two aims may not be compatible.”

The Trump administration’s war on higher education has entered its hottest phase yet. On April 14, the administration froze $2.26 billion in federal funding for Harvard University, in response to Harvard’s rejection of administration demands for reform. News of the university’s defiance ricocheted around the globe. The fate of the White House’s academic reform efforts depends heavily on how the coming showdown concludes.

The present conflict began in on April 11, when representatives of the Trump administration’s Joint Anti-Semitism Task Force sent a demand letter to the Harvard president and the head of the Harvard Corporation (the university’s equivalent of a board of trustees). The April 11 mandate is much more sweeping and detailed than the task force’s March 13 demand letter to Columbia University.

https://www.jns.org/arson-attack-suspect-cited-what-jewish-gov-wants-to-do-to-palestinian-people/?utm_campaign=

Cody Balmer told police that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro must know that he “will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,” per a warrant.

Cody A. Balmer, 38, of Harrisburg, Pa., who called authorities on Sunday at 2:50 a.m. and admitted to firebombing the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion less than an hour prior, told 911 operators that he wanted Gov. Josh Shapiro to know that he “will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,” per a search warrant obtained by Penn Live.

The suspect also told 911 operators that he had to “stop having my friends killed” and “our people have been put through too much by that monster,” per the warrant. Penn Live noted that the document suggests that “Balmer’s intonation and cadence sounded like he was possibly reading from a script.”

“You all know where to find me. I’m not hiding, and I will confess to everything that I had done,” the suspect said, per the warrant.

“Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo, who is prosecuting the case, said he has not decided yet whether he will charge Balmer with ‘ethnic intimidation’—Pennsylvania’s hate crime statute—but said he will argue Balmer’s motives should make his sentencing more severe if he is convicted,” Penn Live reported.

https://spectator.org/shapiro-v-clooney-two-democrat-parties/

EXCERPT

The current occupant is Governor Josh Shapiro. The governor, a Democrat, is, like a couple of his predecessors, also Jewish. 

Did that last fact launch the 2:00 in the morning attack on the governor this past Sunday? In which attacker Cody Balmer, 38, managed to squeeze through the black iron fence surrounding the Mansion, break a window, and toss two Molotov cocktails inside, setting the building on fire while the governor and family were sound asleep inside. A fire that did serious damage to a section of the history-laden building. (RELATED: The Left Loves Political Violence)

At this moment, Balmer’s motives beyond an expressed dislike for Shapiro are not known. There is, without doubt, a belief by many — the governor included (and I’m one as well) — that this attack was indeed motivated by antisemitism.

The governor was awakened by state police guards pounding on his door who quickly evacuated the governor and his family, which included four children, two dogs, and a visiting family member.

On Monday, Shapiro faced the TV cameras and read a statement that said, in part:

This type of violence is not okay. I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another, one particular person or another, it is not okay, and it has to stop. We have to be better than this.

Well, amen to that. The governor has it exactly right.

Now. Let’s contrast this statement to a new Broadway play from another Democrat altogether — left-wing movie star George Clooney.

https://spectator.org/inflation-cools-off-media-hardest-hit/

The general consensus among informed political analysts is that the Republicans emerged from last November’s election in control of the White House and Congress due to the border crisis and persistent inflation. The Trump administration curtailed the influx of illegal immigrants with remarkable speed and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for March suggests that inflation is also returning to the modest levels that prevailed throughout President Trump’s first term. The CPI declined by .01 percent last month, a year-over-year rate of 2.4 percent, while core inflation sank to a four-year low.

The cure for inflation required no legislative crackdown on price-gouging. All we really needed was a new president.

Moreover, wholesale prices also decreased in March. According to the Producer Price Index (PPI) report, an important indicator of future inflation pressure, “Prices for final demand goods moved down 0.9 percent in March, the largest decrease since falling 1.4 percent in October 2023.” These PPI statistics, combined with the CPI numbers, clearly portend a brighter future for long suffering consumers and the nation’s economy in general. But the legacy media are loathe to report good news if it reflects well on the new Trump administration. Instead, they search for some black cloud to tarnish every silver lining, and subject the electorate to the kind of fear mongering that pervades the following passage from a story published by the Washington Post:

As consumers and businesses face widespread uncertainty around the Trump administration’s whipsawing trade policies, a widely followed survey from the University of Michigan found that consumers’ expectations for the next year’s inflation jumped to 6.7 percent, the highest reading since 1981. It’s the fourth consecutive month that consumer sentiment has worsened, as people across demographics say they believe unemployment and inflation will get substantially worse.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/15/can-trump-fix-his-fubar-tariff-rollout/

So far, President Donald Trump has been piloting his second term like Maverick from “Top Gun.” With one exception. The tariff rollout has been FUBAR, which is troubling since it’s Trump’s signature economic policy issue.

There have been glaring missteps along the way, repeated pauses, confused and conflicting messaging, turf wars. It’s draining public support and causing real economic problems as businesses can’t make plans while all this is in flux.

We aren’t privy to insider gossip to speculate why this is. But we can say that Trump needs to get his tariff act together, and fast.

Consider what has transpired in just the past two weeks:

Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement turned out to be a disaster. Not just because an island inhabited only by penguins was listed as a trade abuser, but because it quickly became apparent that the math used to set tariff rates made no sense.

While Trump called the tariffs reciprocal, they weren’t. They were instead based on trade imbalances with other nations, which even Trump supporters pointed out is a flawed metric.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/the_fbi_knew_all_along.html

You do not have to wade far into the recently declassified Crossfire Hurricane documents to be shocked.  I had only read three pages of the FBI’s December 19, 2016 interview with the DoJ’s Bruce Ohr before learning just how early in the game the FBI brass knew that the Steele dossier was worthless.

In the way of background, on July 31, 2016, the FBI launched its counterintelligence operation into the Trump campaign, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”  FBI agent Peter Strzok was assigned to head it up.

If the goal was to cripple Trump regardless of the evidence, Strzok was the man for the job.  “Damn this feels momentous,” he texted his lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, upon getting the assignment.  Two weeks later he explained to Page his motives.  “There’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” he texted her.  “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

Ohr played a curious role in the whole affair.  He served as unofficial DoJ contact with the notorious Christopher Steele, the author of the eponymous Steele dossier.  According to Ohr, the two met for breakfast on the same day the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane.  Steele wanted to discuss some “serious stuff” involving low-level Trump adviser Carter Page.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/14/if-u-s-gets-hit-by-recession-will-voters-blame-trump-or-biden-ii-tipp-poll/

Both online and print media are full of talk about an economic recession, one that’s either already here or ready to hit. How much of the recession angst is driven by the media? Are Americans worried about a recession now, and if so, who will get the blame? The I&I/TIPP Poll sought answers to these questions in its April survey.

The national online poll, taken by 1,452 adults from March 26 to March 28, first asked this:

“A recession is traditionally defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. In 2022, this happened — but many in the media denied it was a recession under President Biden. Was the media justified or not?”

Among those taking the poll, 31% responded “Yes, other factors meant it wasn’t truly a recession,” while 34% selected “No, they covered for Biden despite meeting the definition.” A significant number — 23% — answered “I didn’t follow it closely,” while 10% said the were “Not sure.”

But, as usual, political affiliation (a key determinant in past surveys of how people feel about media bias overall) shows significant differences.

Among Democrats, 43% said the Biden downturn wasn’t a recession, while just 28% of Republicans and 22% of independents agreed. Meanwhile, only 18% of Democrats felt the media “covered” for Biden, versus 51% of Republicans and 35% of independents.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/democrats_trade_morality_for_madness.html

New York City has a mayoral election later this year, and the two leading candidates right now are former governor Andrew Cuomo and a state assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani.  The latter has gained traction in the polls by promising to build city-run grocery stores that “will operate without profit motive” in order to combat “the outrageous price of groceries.”  Leave it to the residents of Gotham to pin their hopes on either the guy who turned nursing homes into COVID death traps or a proud communist who is blithely unaware of the Soviet Union’s history with breadlines.  

In response to Mamdani’s plan for government-run grocery stores, John Catsimatidis — the über-successful owner of New York’s Gristedes and D’Agostino food chains — has offered the mayoral candidate one of his supermarkets to test his ideas in practice.  The offer comes with one stipulation: The city must eat all shoplifting costs.  

Mamdani does not appear eager to accept Catsimatidis’s proposal.  After all, New York City is in the middle of a shoplifting crisis today, and mayoral-wannabe Mamdani wants to replace traditional policing with a “Department of Community Safety” that empowers “dedicated outreach workers” to handle “the failures of our social safety net.” 

Something tells me that Mamdani’s vision for New York will turn grocery shopping into even more of a nightmare.  His city-run stores will become magnets for mass theft, and responding community “outreach workers” will be more concerned with criminals’ “preferred pronouns” than stopping armed robberies.  Shelves will be empty.  Food prices will go up.  New York City’s budget problems will get exponentially worse.  It’s all entirely predictable, but plenty of Democrats will vote for this government-engineered catastrophe anyway.

Chalk this up to Democrats’ persistent unwillingness to live within the outer perimeters of reality.  When they see grocery prices rise, they blame “greedy” business owners.  When those business owners explain that out-of-control shoplifting is a major cost responsible for price increases, Democrats insist that insurance covers such losses.  When business owners explain that insurance rates have spiked as a result, Democrats blame “greedy” insurance companies.  For a political party obsessed with diagnosing the “root causes” of every societal problem, the Democrat party sure is incapable of connecting the dots between runaway crime and business closures.