RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hegseth-hearings-show-dems-still-dont-have-a-plan/

The hearings for Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth were disastrous… for Democrats.

The game plan was to ‘genderify’ the hearings by focusing on the infidelity allegations and the question of women in combat, and to let female Dem Senate members take the lead. The outcome was Sen. Elizabeth Warren and a few others scolding a calm Hegseth. The optics of it were bad again… for Democrats.

Usually it’s not too difficult for senators to make a nominee sweat. But that requires doing research and asking probing, damning questions, while remaining in control. Since much of what members of Congress do is hold hearings, this should be a basic skill, and yet somehow they blew it. It’s never a good situation when the interrogators are more flustered than the subject. And Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a former lawyer (and horribly unpleasant human being) usually maintains better self-control and message discipline, came off as bitterly deranged.

Few people would have been watching the hearings anyway, but the Senate Dems knew they needed just a few moments to go viral and then get picked up late night shows who would spin them up again to make them go viral. It’s telling that those moments didn’t occur. At least not any that are useful to them.

The larger takeaway is that the Dems still haven’t recovered from the election and don’t have a plan. The things they care about, like women in combat, are of very little interest to most Americans. Dems are struggling to bridge a gap on social issues that is no longer pointing in their direction.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-regulatory-tyranny/

Nearly 190 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America presciently described the “soft despotism” he feared the young United States could devolve into––one that would control and direct its citizens not by force, but by a centralized power “more extensive and more mild [that] would degrade men without tormenting them” physically.

Thanks to over a century of progressive technocratic expansion through the metastasizing of federal agencies, their imperious regulatory regime has spread ever more widely, one that as Tocqueville prophesized “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and most energetic characters can penetrate.” The purpose is “to keep them [citizens] in perpetual childhood.”

Understanding this malign dynamic of big government and diminishing freedom, Donald Trump has charged Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with creating and managing a Department of Government Efficiency to begin cleaning out our regulatory Augean Stables. A good place for anyone to start grasping just how enormous, intrusive, and expensive this problem is, should start with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s recent book Overruled.

Regulatory hypertrophy began with the multiplication of laws. Progressivism, believing that credentialed “experts” are better at governing people than the people themselves, started increasing federal laws to fix “problems” or “crises” that states, counties, and cities––closer to their people’s circumstance, mores, and problems––were better placed to deal with. Yet firm believers in not letting “a good crises go to waste,” progressives began manufacturing crises, then passing laws and creating agencies tasked with managing those problems.

What followed is what Gorsuch calls a “paper blizzard.” In a span of about 100 years, the federal laws comprising the U.S. Code grew from fitting in one volume, to needing 54 in 2018. Laws also got longer and denser: the legislation dealing with inter alia Covid 19 relief, clocked in at more than 5000 words. The 1964 Civil Rights Act took a mere 28 pages.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/14/the-la-fires-are-the-horrifying-consequence-of-democratic-misrule/

Los Angeles authorities’ poor preparation for and lamentable response to the wildfires now devastating the city capture a broader problem – namely, the failure of governance across America’s Democrat-controlled regions. This pattern of incompetence has accelerated the shift of American economic and political power to regions outside the long dominant north-east and West Coast.

The reason for this shift lies in the clear failure of Democrats, writ large in the inferno now consuming large swathes of LA. In states like California, Democratic politicians no longer prioritise such things as public safety and key infrastructure, including roads, ports and, most importantly at the moment, water systems. Indeed, today’s ‘progressives’ generally shy away from things like building dams or maintaining water pressure in the name of protecting the environment. They are far more focussed on climate change and ‘social justice’.

Of course, California progressives will justify this by blaming the fires on climate change, even though a leading fire expert at the US Geological Survey suggests this claim is unsupported. Fires have been a regular feature of life in southern California for at least 20million years. Moreover, given the recent extremely dry weather conditions, LA should have been prepared for a conflagration. It was not. A councilperson representing the Palisades has noted the ‘chronic underinvestment in our critical infrastructure’.

Indeed, the devastating impact of the fires is largely a result of environmental policies that discouraged such safety practices as controlled burns. California governor Gavin Newsom has cut funding for fighting wildfires by over $100million this past year, while demanding subsidies for electric cars. At the same time, California’s roads are among the worst in the US, and a planned high-speed railway continues to gobble up tens of billions of dollars.

There’s one word for this: failure. Unsurprisingly, conservative activists, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have all denounced Los Angeles authorities’ bizarrely slow and ineffective response to the fires, and with some justification. Some claims were off-base, such as the suggestion that California’s DEI policies are directly to blame. But the progressive complaint that the right is ‘politicising’ the tragedy also makes little sense. The reasons for the devastating impact of the fires are indeed rooted in conscious decisions taken by Democratic politicians.

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.