RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/reflections-on-jimmy-carter/

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.
– Matthew 6:5

When word came that Jimmy Carter, age 98, was entering hospice care, the predictable plaudits began to pour in. Calling Carter “an inspiration,” Maria Shriver gushed that he “moves humanity forward every single day.” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) described Carter as having always “walked with God.” Rocker Nils Lofgren called him “[a]s fine a man and soul as I’ve ever seen.” And Steve Martin tweeted: “We’ve seen few humans this devoted and humble….Quietly continuing his mission,which was to do good. If you must leave us go gently . Leave your heart and bravery so we might learn.”

All of which is testimony to the power of hype.

I was nineteen years old during most of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign. You might have expected me to support him. Three years earlier, after all, I’d been every bit as addicted to the Watergate hearings on afternoon TV as my mother was to As the World Turns. I was besotted by the movie All the President’s Men, released a few months before the 1976 election. At the time of the election, I was a student on a college campus dominated by lefties who, purportedly jaded and alienated by politics in those post-Watergate days, embraced Carter as a breath of fresh air, a magnanimous soul uniquely equipped to make America, once again, a City on a Hill, noble in its character and great in its deeds. As Carter put it himself, “I can give you a government that’s honest and that’s filled with love, competence, and compassion.”

I didn’t trust the son of a bitch as far as I could throw him.

Yes, Nixon, aside from being a brilliant statesman, had been a wily character. The Watergate tapes had revealed his salty side. He was no saint, but then again he didn’t sell himself as a saint. What politician is a saint? What mattered was that Nixon was brilliant. He was a terrific president. He knew his stuff cold. He loved America. He hated Communism. Yes, he was often characterized as being awkward in his own body and very uncomfortable about interacting with voters on the campaign trail – which to me meant that, well, at least he wasn’t slick.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/30/why-both-sides-are-right-in-the-h-1b-visas-row/

The current clashes over high-skilled immigration between Donald Trump’s right-wing base and his ‘first buddy’, Elon Musk, reveal a fundamental divide within the US president’s odd coalition. On one side are the populists concerned with jobs being prioritised for American workers. On the other, libertarians fret about how businesses can compete on a global scale.

The row was sparked last week by a tweet by Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chair of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, in which he blamed American culture for celebrating ‘mediocrity over excellence’, causing firms to seek skilled workers from abroad rather than hire home-grown talent. Musk has since chimed in to tell opponents of high-skilled immigration to ‘take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face’. ‘I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend’, he wrote on X.

Never one to sweat the details, Trump’s views on this issue are often ill-defined and seem ideal for sparking just such an internal conflict between his base and his Silicon Valley backers.

As the populists point out, H-1B visas – temporary work permits for skilled workers, first introduced in 1990 – have a record of abuse. Most notably, in 2014, Disney was accused of exploiting the H-1B programme to replace American programmers en masse with cheaper Indian ones. In an era of depressed growth in tech jobs, in part due to AI, the oligarchs’ claim that we face a profound shortage of such workers may be increasingly strained.

The populists also have it right in that H-1B visas have accelerated class divides, particularly in places like Silicon Valley. Valley types used to hire from local schools, like San José State University, rather than from places like the Indian Institutes of Technology. Today, roughly three-quarters of the Valley’s jobs go to non-citizens. Tech oligarchs may like this arrangement, but taking jobs from people who vote can have severe political ramifications, something those galaxy-brained techies seem not to comprehend.

What’s more, the widening social divides in the Bay Area have already created a progressive monoculture, while the GOP has all but ceased to exist there. Back in the 1970s, when the Valley was a place of upward mobility, its politics were decidedly centrist.

On the other hand, the oligarchs are also correct, as Ramaswamy has pointed out, about the stark weaknesses of the US educational system. Only five per cent of American college students major in engineering, compared with 33 per cent in China. In 2016, Chinese universities graduated 4.7million students in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), versus 568,000 in the United States. China also produces six times as many students with engineering and computer-science bachelor’s degrees as the US does.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/30/devin-nunes-reemerges/

2024 proved to be the year of the reemergence of many once and unfairly pilloried public figures.

Elon Musk weathered nonstop attacks on his X social media platform. Furor escalated over his newfound 2024 Trump advocacy—even as he ended 2024 with his iconic Tesla brand still the best-selling car in six states and the most popular electric vehicle in the entire nation.

Tesla’s rising stock prices ensured by year’s end that Musk was by far the richest man in the world with a net worth of well over $400 billion. His recyclable SpaceX Super Heavy starship rocket booster mesmerized the nation as it returned to the launch pad to be caught by a huge mechanical arm.

After January 6, 2021, the media swore that Donald Trump was supposedly washed up. He left office with a 34 percent approval rating. Over nearly the next four years, Trump would face 91 felony indictments and be liable for over $400 million in assorted fines.

Now he is a reelected president. Former oppositional world leaders traipse to Mar-a-Lago to seek his approval even before his tenure begins. His erstwhile critics at home are scurrying about in disarray.

The Trump-hating media who swore Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” and “fit as a fiddle” are mostly discredited and are, for now, still bleeding audiences. And Trump’s chief political adversaries, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Obamas are increasingly either unpopular or irrelevant—or both.

Yet one unremarked-upon return is that of former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who, after 20 years of representing Central California in Congress, retired on January 1, 2022, from the House to become CEO of the newly formed Trump Media & Technology Group, tasked to oversee its social media platform, TruthSocial.

Nunes has regained public attention over the last two weeks after Trump appointed him to become chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which oversees the conduct and performance of America’s intelligence agencies.

And once more he too is the target of tired residual left-wing venom, as a “pugnacious Trump loyalist” in the words of the New York Times.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/21-house-dems-demand-biden-aid-black-klansman/

18 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with Rep. Rashida Tlaib and two other non-black members, signed a letter asking Biden to exonerate America’s first black Klansman.

The letter does not mention that Marcus Garvey had allied with the KKK, admired Hitler, told his followers to read Mein Kampf and declared, “what the Negro needs is a Hitler.”

It also does not mention that Garvey had himself in mind for the job, that the self-proclaimed “Provisional President of Africa” wore imaginary military uniforms and sent his thugs to beat up black civil rights leaders before being expelled in disgrace after defrauding his followers.

Or that the charges of mail fraud that 21 House Democrats want to exonerate Garvey from were brought at the urging of black civil rights leaders of the day who demanded federal intervention.

House Democrats are not the first to argue that Garvey was railroaded.

After the trial, Garvey claimed that he had been convicted because of his allegiance to the KKK. In buffoonery worthy of Candace Owens, he argued that the judge (who was actually a Christian, but who Garvey falsely claimed was Jewish) believed that “I hated and was opposed to the Jews, because of my alleged membership in or connection with the Klu Klux Klan.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-biden-parting-outrage/

Just recently, the White House announced that President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners, all murderers and some multiple murderers, on federal death row. (Yes, while most death penalty cases are handled by the states, the federal government has a death row for violators of federal crimes.) Biden commuted the federal prisoners’ sentences from death to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In a statement, Biden claimed to be acting out of principle and conscience. He plainly said he did not want the federal government to execute anyone, and he specifically did not want the next president of the United States to allow the federal government to execute anyone. He never mentioned who that president might be, but he was referring, of course, to President-elect Donald Trump.

“I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” Biden said. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

It is hard to believe, but even in such grave matters of law and conscience, Biden’s decision was all about Trump.

Biden is planning his last trip as president next month. It will be to Italy, where he will meet Pope Francis at the Vatican. The pope recently prayed that the sentences of death row prisoners in the United States “be commuted or changed.” Vatican News also reported, “Anti-death penalty activists and associations have been imploring President Biden to use his clemency powers before he leaves office to spare the lives of about 40 federal death row inmates who are at peril of imminent execution when the next president takes office.”

The pope, of course, speaks from a religious perspective. His position is consistent; he wants all death penalty prisoners to be spared. But Biden was not so consistent, because while he commuted the sentences of 37 prisoners, he left death sentences in place for three: Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015; Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who killed three and injured more than 200 in 2013.

Biden decided that Kaboni Savage, convicted of murdering 12 people, including a family of six in a firebombing, deserved mercy, while Roof, Bowers and Tsarnaev did not. Biden decided that Ricardo Sanchez and Daniel Troya, convicted of murdering a young mother, father and their 4- and 3-year-old boys, deserved mercy, but Roof, Bowers and Tsarnaev did not. Biden decided that Jorge Avila-Torrez, convicted or raping and murdering two girls, age 8 and 9, and later murdering a 20-year-old woman, deserved mercy, but Roof, Bowers and Tsarnaev did not.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/jimmy-carter-was-a-terrible-president-and-an-even-worse-former-president/

The truth is that historians have not been harsh enough.

A popular narrative surrounding the legacy of Jimmy Carter is that as president he was a victim of unlucky timing that impeded him politically but that he excelled during his long post-presidential career. The reality is that he was a terrible president but an even worse former president.

Carter’s true legacy is one of economic misery at home and embarrassment on the world stage. He left the country in its weakest position of the post–World War II era. After being booted out of office in landslide fashion, the self-described “citizen of the world” spent the rest of his life meddling in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United States and its allies in a manner that could fairly be described as treasonous. His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him.

A former governor of Georgia who had little charisma and national name recognition when he began campaigning for president, Carter ended up in the White House as a fluke. He presented an image as an honest, moderate, and humble southern Evangelical Christian outsider — an antidote to the corruption of the Watergate era. He also benefited from the vulnerabilities of the sitting president, Gerald Ford.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/the-shamelessness-of-ta-nehisi-coates/

Recognition of what Coates is really up to — in The Message and elsewhere — should chasten those who have long treated him as the moral conscience of the West.

None of the many criticisms leveled at Ta-Nehisi Coates seem to land. Coates has made a fool of himself in his new book, The Message, and the tour promoting it, with TV and podcast appearances (including one in which he suggested that he, too, would have been tempted to raid Israel, rape women, and burn children alive if he grew up in Gaza) that would spell the end of nearly anyone else’s time in the limelight. Who can take seriously a man whose career was built on profound musings about race now observing that black Israeli soldiers — many of whom are Ethiopian Jews who have sought refuge in Israel — “would, in America, have been seen as ‘white’”? Is that what we have landed on? “White” just means the guy with the gun? The bad guy?

That’s where Coates has settled, which ought to make anyone who previously treated his musings on American racism as gospel question their own judgment. Yet, his TV appearances and media profiles keep coming, and his reputation seems likely to remain intact. He hardly seems moved to consider that perhaps he may have bitten off more than he can chew in pronouncing his judgment on one of the world’s most vexing conflicts after a short junket to Israel and the Palestinian territories, all of which he calls “Palestine.”

More onTa-Nehisi Coates

Black Critics Shake Their Heads at Ta-Nehisi Coates

The man is like the Dunning-Kruger effect incarnate — yet he acts as though he really has an irreproachable sense of moral discernment. After CBS host Tony Dokoupil was accused of racism and put through the sensitivity-training ringer for civilly pointing out that Coates’s book was extreme and thoroughly misleading, Coates kept mum. Perhaps it would be too much to ask Coates to stick up for Dokoupil by publicly admitting that Coates had pretended to analyze the Israeli/Palestinian conflict by amplifying conspiracy theories about the Jewish state. But a certain kind of public intellectual, committed to honest grappling with the world’s complexity, might have been tempted to tell Dokoupil’s tormentors to back off because the whole exchange was within the bounds of normal argument. He didn’t do that either. Honest grappling is not Coates’s commitment, attested to most of all by The Message, the publication of which affirms that for Coates, shamelessness remains the name of the game.

Shamelessness is one thread running through Coates’s short but eventful stint as the darling oracle of race-obsessed Americans. It did not begin with The Message. There’s a shamelessness to insisting with a straight face that white Americans are engaged in an ongoing race war against black Americans when the most basic facts that might prove such a claim actually point the other direction. (There is no race war, which you could have figured out by the amount of time Coates spends mind-reading in Between the World and Me, for which he won several awards.) There’s a similar shamelessness to hearing Dokoupil point out that Coates’s book about a region has completely ignored the eliminationism animating one side of a conflict and responding, yeah, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

Most of what you need to know about The Message is that it’s a whole lot more of that: warning readers against the “elevation of complexity over justice” — as if that isn’t the consummate false choice, as if justice is self-evident and straightforward — and assuming that readers will pretend this is profound and not an incredible insult to their intelligence.

But merely calling Coates a shameless grifter misses the point. More important questions situate Coates in the context of a movement whose adherents allow him to get away with — indeed, get famous for — unserious drivel. Why are Coates and his writings impervious to criticism? How has he avoided consignment to laughingstock status?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/the_best_or_the_worst_of_times.html

Now that Christmas Day has passed, I have put down my beloved copy of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and picked up his masterpiece, A Tale of Two Cities.  As I have argued before, that novel’s opening sentence perfectly captures the contradictions of our time:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

And you thought that I struggled to locate a terminal period for some of my longest sentences!  In Dickens’s defense, it is one hell of a sentence!  It is also a sophisticated description of the tumultuous events that accompany transformative eras such as our own — what many have come to regard as a “Fourth Turning,” when crisis and social upheaval dominate life for a generation.  

Will we be able to “Make America Great Again”?  Will this be the beginning of a new American “Golden Age,” as President Trump suggests?  Or will we soon endure economic collapse and war the likes of which none of us has ever seen?  As 2024 comes to an end, it is fair to say that uncertainty is only accelerating and that the prospects for peace and prosperity are running neck and neck with their opposites.  

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21251/trumpmaganomics

The new economic policies of President-elect Donald J. Trump promise to include his campaign pledge to “Make America Great Again.” Just a few months ago, commentators were assessing that the Biden administration’s greatest ambition was “managing America’s decline.” What a difference a day makes: November 5, 2024. Trump, a businessman, appears to have a good grasp of most domestic and foreign policy issues that greet him at the stable door. He has already been overflowing with ideas — such as refusing to allow a hostile Communist China to control the Panama Canal, as it presently does; and aligning more closely with Greenland and Canada to provide the northern hemisphere a stronger foothold to safeguard its security and prosperity and that of the Free World.

In securing America’s financial future, Trump’s maganomic policies appear to turn on three points:

Making American not just energy independent again, but energy dominant. Making use of the “liquid gold” America has under the ground would not only enable Americans to buy just about everything at a lower cost than, as now, unnecessarily relying on expensive imported oil for manufacturing and for transporting goods and oneself. Using American energy could at the same time undercut the price of oil exported by America’s adversaries, such as Russia, Venezuela and Iran, and make them less able to conduct wars and other mischief.
Offering generous tax and other incentives, and removing obsolete regulations, to ignite the economy’s “animal spirits” so that more companies would relocate to America. Once again, “Made in America” would become the hallmark of excellence, affordability and abundance. What other country protects its businesses, workers and investments more comprehensively than the United States? The country is not just a haven for jobs and productivity, but also ensures that America will no longer naively misplace its trust in countries that intend to replace the current world order and, at whim, potentially deprive Americans of medicine, computer chips, and other necessities.
Lowering taxes for everyone while trimming excess fat from unwarranted expenses. This plan does not of course mean depriving the less fortunate of their safety net or demolishing social security. What the plan does mean is that Americans will be able to keep more of their hard-earned money to decide themselves how they would prefer to spend it. At least US citizens would know that the taxes thy are compelled to pay would fund projects they actually want or need, instead of vaporizing for “shrimp on treadmills,” “hamster fights” or more than $1trillion each year – greater than the entire proposed US defense budget of $849.8 billion — just to pay interest on the more than $36 trillion national debt. The US government, according to CNBC, each year wastes more than $247 billion, adding that “The problems mainly stem from the way our government tries to solve an issue, according to critics,” and quoting Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste: