RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/bari-weiss-the-old-world-is-not-coming-back?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

On November 12th, I spoke to the General Assembly in Washington D.C., which is an annual conference of the Jewish Federations—the largest Jewish organization in North America. There was a lot to talk about this year. 

When did you know? 

Looking back, now that we are on the far side, I wonder: When did you realize that things had changed? 

When did you know that the things we had taken for granted were suddenly out of our reach? That the norms that felt as certain as gravity had disappeared? That the institutions that had launched our grandparents had turned hostile to our children? 

When did you notice that what had once been steady was now shaky ground? Did you look down to see if your own knees were trembling?

When did you realize that we were not immune from history, but living inside of it? 

When did you see that our world was actually the world of yesterday—and a new one, one with far fewer certainties, one where everything seems up for grabs, was coming into being? 

Maybe it was September 11, 2001, when Islamist terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans. Maybe you noticed, as my friend Jonathan Rosen did, that “an explosion of Jew hatred seemed to have ridden in on the contrails of the airplanes that jihadists had turned into weapons of mass destruction and aimed at the heart of American civilization.” 

Maybe it was the second intifada, in which everyday places—Mike’s Place and Sbarro and Café Moment and the Dolphinarium—became synonyms for slaughterhouses, even as few of our would-be allies said their names.

Or maybe it was on February 1, 2002, when al-Qaeda beheaded the journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan as he spoke his final words: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”

Or maybe it wasn’t until the Shabbat morning of October 27, 2018, when a neo-Nazi gunned down 11 Jews at Tree of Life while shouting, “All Jews must die!” 

Or maybe it was the shooting, six months later, at the Chabad of Poway. For Hannah Kaye, who witnessed the murder of her mother, Lori Gilbert Kaye, it surely was. Or maybe it was in January of 2022, when a gunman held the congregants of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, hostage. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-chooses-pam-bondi-to-replace-gaetz-as-ag-nominee/

In the hours following Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration, President-elect Donald Trump selected Florida’s Pam Bondi to be his nominee for U.S. attorney general.

“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans – Not anymore,” Trump said in a statement.

“Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again. I have known Pam for many years — She is smart and tough, and is an AMERICA FIRST Fighter, who will do a terrific job as Attorney General!”

Bondi served as one of Trump’s lawyers during his first impeachment trial, when he was accused of conditioning military aid to Ukraine on the Eastern European nation’s commitment to investigating Joe Biden.

The Sunshine State’s first ever female attorney general previously served on a Trump commission tasked with curtailing the opioid crisis and drug addiction more broadly. The former president has commended her work in combating “the trafficking of deadly drugs.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/01/yes-you-do-have-to-hand-it-to-trump/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

If anything, his political skills have been underrated

In a very real way, Donald Trump was running not just for the presidency but for his life.

Many political observers, myself included, spend more time mocking or castigating the losers of an election than crediting the winners. “If it bleeds it leads,” and for someone prone to engage in rhetorical carnage, few better opportunities present themselves than by counting coup on the political sad sacks moping around the Losers’ Table. So, if you’ll permit one last laugh about Kamala Harris’s blessed political demise, let’s marvel that the official line in Washington, D.C., and among Democratic media types is that “Harris ran a perfect campaign.” A “flawless campaign.” She did “everything she needed to do,” you see — why, she even secured Queen Latifah’s endorsement — but, alas, fell just a bit short.

You know who surely did not run a flawless campaign? Donald Trump. His consolation is that he has completed the most impressive act of political resurrection in American history, one that makes Richard Nixon’s 1968 return look trivial, and that he, not Harris, will become the 47th president of the United States. The Trump campaign’s victory this year was a landmark — and not just because Trump managed to win despite his behavior and the events that have surrounded him since the last election. The campaign was remarkable also because of its breadth. It organized a voter coalition very different from those of the Bush years and one much better equipped to compete nationally against Democrats in the longer term. It produced an increasingly multiracial party now reoriented toward working-class economic and cultural concerns, whose constituents are bound together in their skepticism of elites, all by the force of Trump’s success.

Who deserves the credit? Surely everyone involved in the campaign is eager to claim some.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/a_trumpian_rebuke_to_the_world_economic_forum.html

In the background of everything I write is a recurring message: human freedom is invaluable, and we must fight for it daily.  We are not “biological programs” or “redundant machines,” as the techno-fascists at the World Economic Forum would describe us.  We are not “useless eaters” whose mere presence threatens the planet.  We are unique individuals made in the image of God.  We are meant to make choices, learn valuable lessons, struggle through hardship, overcome adversity, and persevere.  We are meant to live, have children, protect our families, and pass what wisdom we gain to the next generation.  

What I describe above is ancient knowledge.  Yet many of today’s “leaders” would deny these essential truths.  They speak of “saving the planet” with great fervor but are silent when it comes to saving human life.  In fact, their message is just the opposite: don’t get married, don’t have kids, celebrate abortion, and embrace euthanasia.  To most leaders in the West, life is a burden.  Or rather, your life is a burden.  While they enjoy the perks and privileges of wealth and power, they see everyone beneath their social stratum as just another mouth to feed.  How lowly and unimportant are we in the minds of those who wish to rule over us?  Men such as Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, Al Gore, and John Kerry tell us bluntly that we should own nothing, obey our “betters,” and subsist on a diet of bugs.  According to their dark worldview, this is the bleak future that we deserve.

No doubt Schwab, Gates, Gore, Kerry, and other WEF enthusiasts see themselves as “visionaries.”  The editorial boards of many influential newspapers and the boardrooms of many influential corporations certainly hail them as such.  Don’t forget that prominent American and European businessmen once hailed Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler as “visionaries,” too.  There is no shortage of opinion pieces from the snappiest writers of the first half of the twentieth century extolling the “virtues” of the very leaders we now almost universally denounce as monstrously “totalitarian.”  When the World Economic Forum repackages the tenets of totalitarianism as a “humanitarian” form of global governance necessary for fighting “climate change,” “disinformation,” or COVID, the ideological descendants of last century’s totalitarians manage to make this century’s totalitarianism sound like philanthropy.  

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/21/the-trump-counterrevolution-is-a-return-to-sa

We are witnessing a historic counterrevolution after Trump’s victory, far different from his first election in 2016.

The orthodox and the supposed scripted future are now suspect. And they are likely to be dethroned—from the trivial to the existential.

Critics claim Trump has no mandate to stage such a counterrevolution. They argue that he did not win 51 percent of the popular vote or achieve a Reaganesque landslide in the Electoral College.

Yet all the initiatives he advanced and won on polled landslide public approval.

Despite being the target of Democrat lawfare for years, a defiant Trump promised to end an open border, massive illegal immigration, rising crime, and soaring prices. He pledged to slash government and its administrative state, terminate racial and gender identity politics, and restore deterrence abroad.

The people overwhelmingly wanted those messages but were waiting for an unorthodox messenger who would actually deliver them.

The Trump messenger reassured weary citizens that they were not crazy.

Instead, they had good cause to be sick of being talked down to by a media, academic, bureaucratic, and political elite that never earned nor deserved such self-appointed status.

The FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ, not the massive crowds at rallies, were the ones truly out of control.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/21/unburdened-by-what-has-been-trump-is-poised-to-deliver-bigly/

In what must be the millionth time never-Trumpers have predicted this, New York Times columnist David French claimed this week, pointing to appointments he doesn’t like, “Donald Trump is already starting to fail.”

But what really worries people like French and those on the left isn’t that Trump will fail. It’s that he’s off to an outstanding start and has the wind as his back to succeed.

And by that, we don’t mean he will live up to the left’s gross mischaracterization of Trump as a fascist, but that he will actually do what he’s promised: gut the administrative state, restore order to the southern border, and get the economy moving again.

Think about what Trump was up against and what he accomplished in his first term.

After winning in 2016, Trump struggled to appoint his team. On inauguration day, he’d named only 29 of his 660 executive department slots, and ended up with several Obama holdovers.

His support from the public – and even his own party – was weak. He didn’t win the popular vote. Protests erupted all over the country in response to his victory. In the first two years, Republicans sidelined his effort to start building the wall and killed his plan to repeal Obamacare. Embedded bureaucrats thwarted his agenda wherever they could.

And, of course, Trump was immediately dogged by the Russia hoax, which would drag on for his entire first term.

Even with all those handicaps, look at what Trump managed to achieve: a massive pro-growth tax cut that drove unemployment to 60-year lows, an unprecedented peace deal in the Mideast, significant cuts to regulations, the elimination of the hated Obamacare individual mandate, a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, ISIS defeated in short order (after Obama dawdled and said it would take years to accomplish), energy independence for the first time in decades, record low unemployment and low inflation.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dei-cash-cow

There is an old saw that, in America, every great cause begins as a movement and eventually degenerates into a racket. This is certainly true of the past decade’s most fashionable cause: “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” What might have begun as a social movement has now become a business—and not just in the United States. According to McKinsey & Company, spending on “DEI-related efforts” across the globe totaled $7.5 billion in 2020. If trends continue, that figure will exceed $15 billion by 2026.

And, in another American tradition, government contractors have turned a profit on this fad. While it’s hard to determine the precise amount of money that Washington spends on DEI, a search for contracts, grants, and other outlays that reference “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and similar terms suggests that DEI principles were attached to more than $1 billion in federal contracts last year.

This represents a rapid change. In 2019, according to our search, the federal government awarded only $27 million in contracts with language related to “diversity and inclusion.” But after the death of George Floyd in 2020, the federal government and private contractors went all-in on DEI, seeking to implement the Biden administration’s “whole-of-government” equity agenda.

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-uk-is-a-window-to-our-dystopian-future/

Take a walk down my street. There aren’t enough warehouse venues and gang-related killings to warrant the label of “edgy,” and there are far too many two-parents-kids-and-a-dog residences for the “up and coming” label to make any sense. It’s suburban London — those “invincible suburbs” — and predictably predictable.

But look closer. How could there be four solicitors’ offices on a single road? Clearly, they aren’t wanting for customers. Queues of men (only men) spill out onto the pavement. You can see them at all times of day, smoking and shuffling and checking their cracked phone screens incessantly. The buildings they loiter outside all seem to have the same branding. The services advertised are certainly the same: “Immigration law, visa services, overstayers, failed asylum.” You’ll notice that “Rashid & Rashid Solicitors,” the office with the distinctively garish green lettering, has been shuttered. A note on the door tells you it has been closed on orders of the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Googling it takes you to a news article, suggesting it was part of a “visa scam.” A brick has been thrown through the glass window. 

Travel further. Visit Oxford, the seat of English advanced education — and site of a notoriously prolific child grooming ring. Go north to Bradford, which has its own university. Like so many others, it has fallen on hard times. School graduates feel that the fees just aren’t worth it anymore, turned off by a depressed job market and post-Covid learning “modernizations” that somehow manage to make a bachelor’s degree an even bigger waste of time. The one year master’s course is still popular, though. It’s relatively cheap, but the university has still set up two recruitment offices in South Asia. It brings students, some of whom don’t seem to ever turn up to class. But they pay. If the university closes, the town will lose a quarter of its jobs. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/11/the-trump-bragg-merchan-chess-game/

Is the president-elect being played?

It is rare to witness such a disconnect between pro-Trump media commentators and the Trump defense team as we’re seeing in today’s news: Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg agrees that Trump’s sentencing must be postponed while other proceedings — in particular, Trump’s posttrial motion to vacate the jury’s guilty verdicts — continue. There is outrage in the commentariat, yet Trump and his lawyers are spinning this development as a great victory.

There is a chess game going on here. Bottom line: I believe Bragg is trying to manipulate Trump into asking that the prosecution be suspended for four years.

Despite the Democrats’ campaign rhetoric, Trump is not a convicted felon now, a jury’s guilty verdict notwithstanding. Only the court’s formal entry of a judgment of conviction after sentencing makes a defendant a convicted felon. Bragg knows Trump does not want to be sentenced and have the judgment of conviction entered on the court’s record (and thus on Trump’s personal record). I wager that the DA is calculating that if the president-elect is given the choice of either a four-year suspension of the case or a sentencing so that Trump can eventually appeal the conviction, Trump will choose the former.

If it is Trump himself who asks for that outcome, all the people complaining about the unfairness and harm to the public interest of having a criminal case hanging over a sitting president’s head for four years will have to mute their outrage. And I think Trump is going to ask for that outcome — which is why his lawyers are already equating postponement with victory.

Let’s try to break it into the three relevant stages: (1) Trump’s posttrial motion to dismiss the guilty verdicts based on the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling (which is now on the table); (2) sentencing and entry of the judgment of conviction (which would happen if Judge Juan Merchan denies the posttrial motion); and (3) appeal, which most close observers experienced in criminal law issues believe Trump has a good chance of winning.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/is_burgum_the_right_choice_for_interior_secretary_and_energy_czar.html

From running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination himself, former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum has proven himself a Trump loyalist who commands the president-elect’s trust. Announcing Burgum’s appointment at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump said, “He’s going to head the Department of Interior, and he’s going to be fantastic.”

However, given Burgum’s background, affiliations, and views on important issues, is he the right choice for Secretary of the Interior? Trump has also made him the nation’s energy czar by appointing him chairman of the newly formed National Energy Council. But is Burgum fit to chair the council and, under that post, take a seat on the National Security Council?

A close look at Burgum’s origins, career, political and policy plays, and most importantly, his association with people and ideologies in line with leftist-globalists is called for. The facts will make it evident that it won’t be unreasonable to ask if he will serve the interests of “We, the people” in the new Trump administration.

Burgum, a native North Dakotan, grew up in the small town of Arthur and earned a BA from North Dakota State University and an MBA from Stanford. His family had a thriving agribusiness started by his grandfather. His father’s death when he was in high school deeply affected him, and, showing initiative, he started a chimney-sweeping business while still an undergraduate. As an adolescent, he ran his own newspaper. These early efforts impressed his professors at Stanford.

After working as an analyst at McKinsey & Company, he adopted a data-driven approach to business and other decisions, which he still adheres to. In 1983, he invested in Great Plains Software, which he built into a billion-dollar business and sold to Microsoft in 2001. His Stanford classmate and friend Steve Ballmer was CEO of Microsoft. He is also friends with Bill Gates, the Black Rock group, and many deep-pocketed energy industry CEOs.

Today, he’s one of the wealthiest and shrewdest politicians in the U.S. During his short-lived run for president, he spent more than $2.9 million on ads, more than any other politician or group. To reach the quota of donors who would take him to the debate stage, he offered $20 gift cards to each person who donated $1.