RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/lyndon-johnson-jfk-thanksgiving?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

We are fast approaching Thanksgiving, and many Americans, no doubt, are wondering what they have to be thankful for. 

There’s the skyrocketing cost of pretty much everything. Rising crime. Endless wars. And perhaps worst of all, this fear that we’re falling apart—that Democrats and Republicans can’t work together, that in the middle of the turkey and stuffing a brawl might break out between the “communists” and “fascists.” (There were no communists or fascists on the ballot this year, the partisan smears notwithstanding.)

Over the past year, there has been much talk about America being more divided than ever. It’s easy to forget, in the midst of all the emotion and politicking, that this is an exaggeration—to say the very least. There was the Civil War. And, of course, the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s.

In the 1960s, political violence—including assassination—became an unavoidable fact of life in America. The first devastating and consequential assassination of the decade took place on November 22, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. 

That single act of violence has spawned countless conspiracy theories; fueled suspicion of the “military-industrial complex” (a suspicion that has morphed into antipathy toward the “deep state”); and driven what seems, at times, a permanent wedge between the government and the governed.

But, as always, events throw up remarkable people. And sometimes even people who do not seem all that remarkable become remarkable when history throws them into the fiercest fire.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was such a man. 

The Kennedy clan—aristocratic, with their Harvard pedigree and penchant for playing football at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts—despised him. Johnson—born into a poor family in Texas Hill Country—despised them right back. JFK had tapped Johnson to be his running mate in 1960, because he needed a Protestant and a good old boy to hold the Democratic coalition together. Johnson, a masterful politician first elected to Congress in 1937, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, was mostly cut out of the very insular Kennedy inner circle. The relationship between the two men was purely transactional. 

On the day of the assassination, Johnson was with Kennedy in Dallas—riding two cars behind the president alongside his wife, Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/24/inside-trumps-second-term-mission-to-dismantle-the-administrative-state/

For many years, and in many places, I have been railing against the rise of what people like me have called “the administrative state,” “the deep state,” “the Syndicate.” In an essay called “The Imperative of Freedom” for the June 2017 issue of The New Criterion, I drew upon the work of the political philosopher James Burnham to point out that at least since the 1940s, real legislative power had been increasingly concentrated in what Burnham called “administrative bureaus,” not parliaments or Congress.

“‘Laws’ today in the United States,” Burnham wrote in The Managerial Revolution (1941), “are not being made any longer by Congress, but by the NLRB, SEC, ICC, AAA, TVA, FTC, FCC, the Office of Production Management (what a revealing title!), and the other leading ‘executive agencies.’”

And note that Burnham wrote decades before the advent of the EPA, HUD, CFPB, FSOC, the Department of Education, and the rest of the administrative alphabet soup that governs us in the United States today. As the economist Charles Calomiris pointed out in his short but important book Reforming Financial Regulation After Dodd-Frank (2017), we are increasingly governed not by laws but by ad hoc dictats emanating from semi-autonomous and largely unaccountable quasi-governmental bureaucracies, many of which meet in secret but whose proclamations have the force of law.

Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress, just as Article III vests all judicial authority in the Court. The administrative state is a mechanism for circumventing both. In The Administrative Threat, the legal scholar Philip Hamburger describes this shadowy Leviathan as “a state within a state,” a sort of parallel legal and political structure populated by unelected bureaucrats. Binding citizens not through Congressionally enacted statutes but through the edicts of the managerial bureaucracy, the administrative state, said Hamburger, is “all about the evasion of governance through law, including an evasion of constitutional processes and procedural rights.” Accordingly, he concludes, the encroaching activity of the administrative state represents “the nation’s preeminent threat to civil liberties.”

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/taxpayer-funded-censorship-how-government?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=775254&post_

Campaign season brought with it a steady stream of accusations that various parties and platforms were spreading misinformation and disinformation.

Most recently, the scandals at FEMA over avoiding homes with Trump signs was quickly slapped with a “misinformation” label…until FEMA itself admitted it had happened. MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki suggested “laws have to change” to combat the scourge.

With the misinformation category being weaponized across the political spectrum, we took a look at how invested government has become in studying and “combatting” it using your tax dollars. That research can provide the intellectual ammunition to censor people online.

Since 2021, the Biden-Harris administration has spent $267 million on research grants with the term “misinformation” in the proposal.

Of course, the Covid pandemic was the driving force behind so much of the misinformation debate. Sure enough, the feds have spent at least $127 million in grants specifically targeted to study the spread of “misinformation” — or to help people “overcome” it, so to speak — by persuading them to go along with Covid-related public health recommendations and mandates.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/25/day-1-pipe-and-drill/

Donald Trump has said that on the first day of his second term, he wants to “frack, frack, frack, and drill, drill, drill.” He needs to keep that promise – as well as reopen construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which the Biden administration blocked, just as the Obama White House did before Trump reversed the policy in 2017.

“Put us to work right now,” a laid-off worker who had been building the pipeline when it was shut down said earlier this year. “And you will see not only the fuel prices go down, but you will see the price of everything else go down with it.”

Showing that everyday Americans are more sensible about energy matters than at least half of our political ruling class, another worker said “we should be able to sustain ourselves and not depend on other nations raising their price and then affect us. That shouldn’t even be in the question.”

Those comments were made in March. November changed their outlook.

“It’s a breath of fresh air. We’re running on cloud nine,” said another former Keystone Pipeline worker.

“It will make a big difference as far as your energy cost, your food cost, your gas that you put in your cars. It is actually going to be the primary start of bringing everything … down for the American people that we have suffered so much in the last administration.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/23/the-rise-of-market-originalism/

Republicans have more than ample cause for celebration at the moment. Their victory in this month’s election was sweeping, and the new president and Congress will take office with a true mandate for change.

At the same time, President Trump finds himself in an awkward position, having promised to improve the nation’s economic trajectory while, at the same time, restraining sticky and discomfiting inflation. As I have noted elsewhere, in many ways, the president’s hands are tied. The condition of the nation’s fisc is perilous, and the reinvigorated Bond Vigilantes stand ready to ensure that the situation does not deteriorate further, exacerbated by either increased spending or reduced revenues. President Trump has promised to restore the nation’s economic vitality, but even his party’s largest donors have warned him that the traditional conservative policy to promote economic growth—income tax cuts—is economically risky under current conditions.

Given all of this, President Trump and his economic advisors will have to be resourceful and creative to find ways to nurture economic growth. They will have to think thoroughly about the existing barriers to widespread economic growth and will have to be thoughtful yet aggressive in dismantling those barriers to “make America great again.”

Fittingly, the answers Trump’s economic brain trust should seek are those that focus on the last of the four words in this longstanding catchphrase: again. In short, the formula for economic growth and prosperity can, in part, be found buried in the nation’s past. We, as a nation, can and should focus on making America economically great by employing that formula again.

At the risk of falling prey to “the Golden Age Myth,” I believe it’s important to understand that the nation’s greatest period of economic growth and expansion took place before the economic and political centralization that accompanied (and defined) the “modern era.” One of the keys to restoring the nation’s economic potential, therefore, is recognizing what originally made the American experiment so politically and economically potent.

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5003334-elon-musk-artificial-intelligence

The political left already hates Elon Musk. But its anger toward the disruptive billionaire, Tesla founder and now Donald Trump bestie is only going to get worse.   

Musk’s likely success in artificial intelligence poses a long-term threat to liberals who hope to dominate not only how we look backward — that is, how our history is written — but also the political climate in which we move forward. Just as Musk’s purchase of Twitter crushed liberals’ stranglehold on social media, his growing presence in AI promises to dilute the left’s control of the emerging technology.   

The Democratic establishment, led by the Biden-Harris White House, is not taking Musk’s political realignment lying down.  

The New York Times reports that Musk’s multiple businesses “have been targeted in at least 20 recent investigations or reviews, including over the safety of his Tesla cars and the environmental damage caused by his rockets.” Many of these attacks are idiotic, including the FAA’s delay weeks ago of a rocket test because a similar launch had disturbed birds’ nests nearby. Never mind that the U.S. is in a critical race against China to get men to the moon, and that the rocket in question has been commissioned by the U.S. government to get the job done. 

More craziness against Musk’s firms came from the Justice Department, which claims SpaceX has illegally discriminated “against asylees and refugees in hiring.” In other words, SpaceX, a company engaged in top secret undertakings for our government, is being sued for only hiring U.S. citizens or green card holders. 

You can’t make this up.  

The left is furious that the Tesla founder set out to restore free speech by buying Twitter (now X) and then published the infamous Twitter files, exposing efforts by federal officials to censor conservative voices. Amazingly, they hate him for putting electric vehicles on the map — actually enabling their climate change ambitions — because he used non-union labor to do it.  

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.