RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/01/a-trump-inaugural-speech-for-a-trump-presidency/

Donald Trump’s inaugural address was functionally indistinguishable from one of his rally speeches. It wasn’t as long or discursive but was just as plain-spoken and pointed, and made exactly the same promises.

The address was another sign that Trump intends to govern the way he ran.

His critique of the status quo was stinging and harsh, while a pained Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had to sit within feet of him and endure it.

The flip side of Trump’s often-decried gloomy portrait of the present is his vaulting optimism about the future he intends to bring about. So it was with this address. As usual, he didn’t stint on his bigger-and-better superlatives. It’s going to be a new Golden Age, as “we stand on the verge of the four greatest years in American history.”

Trump described himself as an exemplar of common sense, and, indeed, on some key issues he captured the center last November. His pledges in his address to shut down the border, deport criminals, make it government policy that there are only two genders, and judge people on their merits rather than their race and gender are firmly in the middle of the American consensus, and not too long ago would have been utterly uncontroversial.

His assurances that he will build up the military, push back on electric vehicle mandates, exploit our fossil fuel resources to the maximum extent possible, and end all government pressure for censorship were welcome, as well.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-pardons-dr-fauci/

On Monday, Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons for the January 6 committee, Gen. Mark Milley, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, explaining that “issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.” As the Delaware Democrat contends:

“For more than half a century, Dr. Fauci served our country. He saved countless lives by managing the government’s response to pressing health crises, including HIV/AIDS, as well as the Ebola and Zika viruses. During his tenure as my Chief Medical Advisor, he helped the country tackle a once-in-a-century pandemic. The United States is safer and healthier because of him.”

It isn’t, and Dr. Fauci got his start by declining to serve his country.

Anthony Fauci earned his medical degree in 1966 but to avoid treating wounded American soldiers, in 1968 he took a cushy “Yellow Beret” post with the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Fauci’s bio showed no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry but in 1984 the NIH made him head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).  Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, was on record that Dr. Fauci “doesn’t understand electronic microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.” That reality would quickly become evident.

Fauci’s drug of choice to treat AIDS was AZT (azithodomidyne, also known as Zidovudine), rejected for cancer treatment because of excessive toxicity. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. showed in The Real Anthony Fauci, the NIAID boss forced AZT and other toxic drugs on black foster children in New York City, with deadly results. Fauci was never held accountable and remained in his post.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/burning-down-the-house/

Inauguration Day 2025 was a great day for America, the beginning of our nation’s comeback to greatness, and the end of an era most Americans consider a steep descent into progressive madness and self-destruction. But even as Donald J. Trump reclaimed the White House on Monday and began launching a series of orders to restore sanity and put America First, evicted tenant Joe Biden – arguably the worst President in our country’s history – raced in his final hours to set as many fires as possible on his way out the door.

Literally within the last 15 minutes of his term, for example, the doddering puppet pardoned five members of the Biden crime family – brother James Biden and wife Sara; sister Valerie and her husband John Owens; and brother Francis – to protect them from the incoming administration holding them accountable, possibly for treasonous corruption.

Wait, haven’t the Democrats been self-righteously declaring for eight years that no one is above the law, not even a President?

Biden, predictably, issued a statement, reeking of shameless hypocrisy, claiming he is merely protecting those family members from Trump’s vengeful political retaliation. “My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me — the worst kind of partisan politics,” stated the bitter, angry hypocrite.

The irony here is that it is the Democrats who have spent the last eight years targeting their political enemies – most notably their hated arch-enemy Trump – with merciless and relentless partisan lawfare. Biden’s statement accuses Trump of precisely the strategy to which his own Party has resorted:

Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage their reputations and finances.

Yes, that is precisely why the Democrats engage in it with such fervor: it suits their politics of personal destruction. It is exactly the kind of vicious persecution the cruel J6 Committee brought to bear against the Capitol “insurrectionists,” many of whom Trump rightfully plans to pardon (when Biden pardons someone, it is to protect political cronies; when Trump pardons someone, it is because he or she has been unjustly targeted politically).

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/21/inauguration-day-tale-of-two-agendas/

Donald Trump, now the 45th and 47th president of the United States, promised his “top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous and free,” during his second inaugural speech Monday. At the same time roughly half way around the globe, a group met with the intention of dividing the world into two parts – an inner circle of masters and the rest of the 8 billion on Earth who would be ruled by them.

Trump is far from being the fascist that his most rabid opponents claim he is. Chapman University professor Joel Kotkin captures well the baseless smears aimed at Trump in a recent post in Sp!ked:

To listen to much of the media, progressive politicians and many academics, Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday will usher in a politics we have not seen since the days of Mussolini, Franco and, worst of all, Hitler. In her presidential campaign, vice-president Kamala Harris openly called Trump ‘a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.’

The article’s subhead: “There is nothing Nazi-like about Donald Trump or his programme for America.”

During his speech Monday, Trump failed to reference any of history’s fascists. He didn’t endorse their train schedules. He didn’t propose economic or industrial policy in which the government centrally plans private-sector activities and pursuits. He never summarized his agenda as “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” as Mussolini did.

Instead, he talked about restoring freedom, including free speech. About the rule of law. About America’s exceptionalism. About letting people buy whatever car they — not government masters — choose.

“Our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free,” he said.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21326/manhattan-project-nuclear-fusion

Among the first, most urgent, orders of business for President Donald J. Trump should be to create a Maganomics “Manhattan Project” to develop a nuclear fusion reactor superior to China’s tokamak.

Communist China, which has a head-start, has just helped place a tokamak in Thailand.

This century’s great clean-energy revolution is science’s newest frontier: producing inexpensive, unlimited energy through nuclear fusion. It is done in containers, called tokamaks, giant nuclear reactors to make and store it. Smaller reactors “barely 3 feet across” are already being developed in the US, including one in Idaho and two in northern Nevada.

Nuclear fusion consists of heating two electrons at 27 million degrees Fahrenheit, forcing them to fuse, producing clean energy similar to the Sun’s:

“When the nuclei of small atoms fuse, the resulting nucleus is slightly lighter than the components that went into making it. The lost mass is released as energy. By the famous equation E=mc2, a very small amount of mass becomes a great deal of energy. When four hydrogen atoms (or two deuterium atoms) fuse to become one helium atom, the mass loss is so tiny, the energy released is still small. However, if you can manage to fuse a steady supply of atoms, the energy released becomes immense.”

Communist China’s leader Xi Jinping has already stolen virtually all of America’s intellectual property and technology — for which one can blame hapless former US administrations — and used it to build his extended military, including cyber and space capabilities. Xi lied in assuring the US that he would not militarize the artificial islands he was constructing, then straight away militarized them. When the US declined to build hypersonic weapons out of concern that other countries might then feel compelled to build them too, Xi set about completing hypersonic missiles.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Today, as we celebrate Martin Luther King, we will also inaugurate our 47th President. Mr. Trump is only the second president to serve two non-consecutive terms. As Professor Guelzo indicated in the interview quoted above, this election might represent a tectonic shift in the alignment of the two parties. Personally, I suspect that shift is already upon us. A month ago I wrote an essay entitled “Political Parties are Dynamic.” That essay argued that Democrats failure in 2024 was due to their having ignored middle-class, working Americans, while adopting a bar-bell approach to the electorate – coastal, monied elites offset by those dependent on government. On December 2, 2024 I wrote an essay titled “End of Identity Politics?’, which argued that economic class had mattered more, in the November election, than ethnicity, race, or gender. In speeches, ads and literature, Democrats claim to represent working, middle-class America, but they have abandoned them. Consider education and the poor testing results of students in our public schools, and look at the rising cost of food, electricity and housing – all up more than 23% over the past four years. According to Monster’s 2025 Work Watch Report, 95% of workers say paychecks failed to have kept up with the cost of living.  Is it any wonder that working-class Americans opted for change?

Professor Guelzo did not say that 2024 was a “tectonic” election, only that it might prove to have been. He cited three past elections as tectonic: 1800, when John Adams’ loss to Thomas Jefferson spelled the end of the Federalist Party; 1860, when Lincoln’s victory established the Republican party as a major party; and 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt’s win created the modern Democratic party.

Even before the election, people had grown weary of sanctimonious virtue signalers: politicians who use the Justice Department to investigate political opponents, government bureaucrats who call out policy disagreements as either dis-or-misinformation; news organizations who use “fact checkers” to muzzle free speech; university professors who censored opinions that did not adhere to a proscribed orthodoxy; high school administrators who permit boys into girls’ bathrooms; “influencers” who are blind to counter-arguments; open borders that let in migrant criminals; citizens being told they will have to give up their gas stoves; and big businesses that claim merit is less important than diversity.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/20/bidens-so-called-oligarchs/

In his last address, Joe Biden offered a Parthian shot at “oligarchs” and the dangers these “billionaires” pose to the republic. At the same time, left-wing senators hammered Trump cabinet nominees on the grounds that they would be too complacent in the face of a supposed takeover of the country by Trump’s “billionaires” and their “oligarchy.”

Many things could be said about Biden’s farewell address, but I will limit them to three.

First, Biden was attempting to copycat the warnings of outgoing president and iconic war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Some 64 years earlier—on January 17, 1961, the near day of Biden’s “farewell address,” a departing Eisenhower warned of a new “military-industrial complex” threat to the republic that had grown out of World War II and was cresting during the ongoing Cold War of the 1950s.

The fear, as Ike outlined it, was that a new small tech-corporate elite would sell the country on all sorts of expensive weapons and programs to ensure a near-permanent condition of hyper-military readiness and national insolvency.

This resulting “garrison state” would make the arms merchants and technocrats rich but also exhaust the U.S. treasury in the process. What would follow for the American people was a government octopus that demanded ever higher taxes while spending money in ways increasingly unknown or irrelevant to the public interest.

Eisenhower worried the grandees of the military-industrial complex—ex-generals revolving into defense contractor lobbyists and board members—would redefine the ancient laws of war and peace in terms of mumbo-jumbo techno-jargon. The resulting esoterica was designed to justify budget-busting defense expenditures, without enough care that the federal government would expand while the now overtaxed and overregulated citizen would be at their mercy.

Apparently, a departing Biden sought to graft his own “oligarchy” speech onto Eisenhower’s earlier blueprint.

But Ike was speaking as a successful two-term president. And he was an iconic war hero, as the architect of the successful American role in defeating Hitler—from the beaches of Normandy to the occupation of the defeated German homeland.

The postwar president Eisenhower was worried about a new world in which new nuclear-tipped missiles threatened to turn any conventional war between superpowers into nuclear Armageddon. In other words, Americans listened to Eisenhower, given his probity, gravitas, and experience—and the dangers of the new corporate-government fusion. But they have no reason to listen to Biden.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-inauguration-democratic-party-2024-election

On Inauguration Day, January 20, all eyes will be fixed on the once and future president, Donald Trump, and the new faces that will populate his administration. That is proper. Trump has traversed an almost cinematic journey back to the White House, and he is associated with policies and personalities that, once in office, are certain to be fiercely controversial and magnificently entertaining.

The deep question in American politics today, however, concerns the fate of the Democratic Party. For Republicans, the future will look and sound like Trump and his band of young buccaneers, about to take Washington by storm. They may succeed or fail in arriving at their destination, but the direction is set. It is otherwise with the Democrats: the 2024 election shattered the party, and it isn’t clear how—or if—the pieces will come together again.

Democrats’ first step forward must be to acknowledge the scale of their repudiation by the voters. They failed to do this in 2016. Back then, they blamed Trump’s election on Facebook and fake news and the manipulations of that dark wizard, Vladimir Putin. The losers of 2016 absolved themselves from any responsibility for their defeat. Ever since, the Democrats have stumbled inside a house of mirrors, where wish is confused with reality and fatal errors appear as a mere failure to communicate. In that place of illusion, they embrace a mythology that elevates them into wondrous spirits—representatives of science, perpetual guardians of “our democracy,” saviors of a dying earth, adjudicators of perfect justice. By definition, only satanic forces could oppose such a chosen people. To abandon this mythology will be traumatic and identity-crushing. 

For change to be possible, party leaders must exert pressure—yet the Democrats are currently bereft of leaders. Joe Biden was a hollow figurehead, his performance in office hovering between comical and terrifying. Kamala Harris parachuted into that sock-puppet slot, and then spent $1 billion for the privilege of dancing with Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin. Tim Walz proved an embarrassment.

There are no heirs apparent, and the elder statesmen have served their cause badly. One might think that Bill Clinton would have something to say about triangulation and the forging of “New Democrats,” but his voice has grown quiet from disuse. Since 2016, the dominant Clinton has been Hillary—possibly the Platonic ideal of an out-of-touch elite. Nancy Pelosi is a brilliant tactician, but she resembles a spider at the center of its web: she cut the heart out of Biden’s candidacy to reduce the party’s loss by a few percentage points.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/19/this-is-not-the-dawn-of-a-new-fascist-era/

Is the US on the edge of a new fascist epoch? To listen to much of the media, progressive politicians and many academics, Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday will usher in a politics we have not seen since the days of Mussolini, Franco and, worst of all, Hitler. In her presidential campaign, vice-president Kamala Harris openly called Trump ‘a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist’.

The Democrats and their media allies believed these accusations would be the key to electoral success, hoping to scare Americans into voting for Harris. Some even suggested Trump would throw Democrat politicians and commentators in jail once in office. Liz Cheney, the one-time rightist turned anti-Trumper, warned Americans this might be ‘the last real vote you ever get to cast’.

Yet these accusations did not ring true for most Americans. Similar nonsense charges have been hurled at far less worthy targets, like George W Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney. Perhaps this has desensitised Americans to Democrats crying ‘fascism’. In any case, a recent Gallup poll showed that only three per cent of voters described ‘elections / election reform / democracy’ as a key issue in 2024, well behind economic problems or immigration. Notably, voters in swing states said that Harris, not Trump, was a bigger threat to democracy.

MAGA and similar movements, such as the National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany and Reform in the UK, have grown in stature by leading a rebellion against unrestrained immigration, rising crime and the post-nationalist ethos of contemporary capitalism. To be sure, they display some worrying, right-wing tendencies.

Yet in economic terms, at least, Joe Biden, Keir Starmer and other progressives are closer to embracing corporatist ideas, which any fascist might recognise, than Trump or his doppelgangers. Critical here is the central notion of fascism. ‘At its fullest development’, writes Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism, fascism ‘redrew the frontiers between private and public, sharply diminishing what had been untouchably private’.

Under Mussolini, for example, private property remained and powerful corporations thrived. But only, as Il Duce himself suggested, if they pledged, ‘formal adherence to the regime’. Mussolini relied heavily on large landowners and companies to help finance the March on Rome. Once in power, Mussolini, who viewed himself as a ‘revolutionary’ transforming society, saw the state as ‘the moving centre of economic life’. He successfully co-opted Italian industrialists to build new infrastructure, as well as the military, which he used to fight off Italy’s historically militant and socialist-oriented unions.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/19/trumps-second-term-nominees-competence-under-fire-amid-partisan-hearings/

Here we are, more or less midway through the confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s key nominations.  Among those we’ve heard from are Pete Hegseth (nominated to be Secretary of Defense), Pamela Bondi (Attorney General), Marco Rubio (State), Scott Bessent (Treasury), Doug Burgum (Interior), Lee Zeldin (EPA), John Ratcliffe (CIA), and Kristi Noem (Homeland Security). Among the most notable still to come are Kash Patel (FBI), RFK Jr. (Health Human Services), and Tulsi Gabbard (National Intelligence).

I have listened to longish bits of several of the hearings. I think there are two main takeaways from the festivities.

One is the coordinated, ideologically fired attack-dog tactics of the Democrats.

The other is the strength, seriousness, and general competence of Trump’s nominees. The contrast with the dramatis personae for Trump’s first go-around is striking. Even more striking is the contrast with Joe Biden’s consiglieri. Could there be more disparate personalities than Pete Hegseth and Lloyd Austin, Marco Rubio and Antony Blinken, Pamela Bondi and Merrick Garland, and Scott Bessent and Janet Yellen?

As to the first, the behavior of the Democrats makes the term “hearing” totally inappropriate.  These struggle sessions are not hearings but yappings. One and all, the Democrat senators seem to be pursuing two ends. One is to take as much airtime as possible to preen and publicize their own views. The focus is not on eliciting the opinions or gauging the experience or competence of the candidates. Rather, it is to grandstand.

The second end is to cater to the far-left Democrat playbook.  Do you think that the 2020 election was fairly won by Joe Biden?  Are you a mindless Trump loyalist?  Do you have an enemies list?  Will you pursue the enlightened “green energy” policies favored by the Biden administration?

Many of the exchanges—no, “exchanges” is not right, because that suggests a respectful give-and-take.  Make that, “harangues”: many of the harangues demonstrated the Democrats’ mastery of the art of projection: accusing your opponents of the bad behavior that you yourself are guilty of. (One witty commentator offered this pithy formulation: “Shorter: I accuse them of doing what we did and they must be stopped.”)