RUTHFULLY YOURS

ttps://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/our_self_important_self_deluding_self_unaware_elites.html

Our self-appointed “ruling class” is insufferable.  Two-plus weeks into the restored Trump administration, and the Democrat/media outrage template has become utterly banal:

(1) Trump delivers on a campaign promise.

(2) Democrats collapse onto fainting couches and wail, “He can’t do that!,” and then

(3) those same sobbing sad sacks get back up, clutch their pearls, and collapse in anguish yet again.

It would be amusing if their funerary pantomime were not so exhausting.  

Unindicted “Russia collusion” co-conspirator and former acting director of the FBI Andrew McCabe ran to the Communist News Network to complain that all his old friends at the Bureau are terrified of being fired.  He reported to fellow Democrat traveler Anderson Cooper that FBI officials are worried about how they’re going to pay their bills and take care of their families.  “If you get fired,” McCabe explained energetically, like one toddler telling another toddler about the world, “you’re done.  That’s the end of your reputation, your ability to get any job.  You lose your pay, you lose your chance at a pension, you lose your health insurance.”  Baby Cooper agreed with Baby McCabe that those consequences sound scary.  

Yet neither had the requisite self-awareness to ponder, “Is this what J6 protesters felt like when the Gestapo FBI hunted down alleged trespassers as if they were America’s ‘Most Wanted’ criminals?”  Watching the two Democrat babies cry about FBI agents losing their jobs and reputations after we have seen the Bureau do the exact same thing to law-abiding Americans for years is absolutely surreal!  

https://www.newsweek.com/trumps-tariff-proposals-are-already-working-opinion-2026576

Newly reinstalled U.S. President Donald J. Trump looked askance at an Oval Office press conference on Monday when a reporter asked him about the presence of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who was sitting awkwardly just outside of camera view. The previous Friday, Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal had vociferously criticized Trump’s plan to impose 25 percent tariffs on most Mexican and Canadian goods, as well as a 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports.

Trump intended the tariffs, which were scheduled to take effect on Tuesday, to equalize the U.S. trade balance with its neighbors and its largest competitor, and to punish Mexico and Canada for weak border enforcement, which has allowed large-scale crossings by illegal aliens and lax interdiction of shipments of fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid largely manufactured in China that claims tens of thousands of American lives every year.

Despite Trump’s well-documented position, the Journal declared the expected trade war “the dumbest” in history and predicted that the new administration’s economic protectionism would backfire. It was wrong. Just before the Monday press conference, where Trump declared his “great respect” for the 93-year old Murdoch while also saying his paper’s editorialists “didn’t have any idea what they were talking about,” the world learned that Trump’s protectionist inclinations were not so dumb after all.

Despite a lot of noisy grandstanding over the weekend, during which Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum and lingering Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau promised to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs on a “dollar-for-dollar” basis, on Monday morning Sheinbaum signaled in a phone call with Trump that she would back down. She offered 10,000 Mexican National Guard troops to patrol Mexico’s side of the border in exchange for a 30-day pause on the tariffs. During that period, Trump announced that he would lead high-level trade negotiations between the two countries, alongside his secretaries of state, treasury, and commerce.

By late Monday afternoon, Trudeau caved in his own call with Trump, also pledging 10,000 “frontline personnel” to ramp up border security while implementing a $1.3 billion border security plan that will include technological upgrades, helicopter deployments, and cooperative measures with American law enforcement specifically directed at preventing fentanyl from crossing the U.S.’ northern border. Canada, too, will have a 30-day pause of tariffs while negotiations take place.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/usaid-sent-over-18-billion-to-islamic-terror-states/

“It is really, really a sad day in America,” Rep. Ilhan Omar declared at a rally by Democrats outside USAID headquarters protesting President Trump’s reconstruction of the aid agency.

It wasn’t a sad day for America, but it was so for Somalia.

Over the last two years, USAID had funneled $2.3 billion in “humanitarian assistance” to Omar’s native Somalia. Last year it reported a request for $1.6 billion in aid and even with the Biden administration on the way out the door, it sent an additional $29 million in December 2024.

USAID support for Somalia had doubled under the Biden administration and with $3.3 billion from USAID allocated in the last 5 years, the end of the USAID gravy train for the Islamic terrorist state of Somalia must have been a painful blow for Omar, who is very close to the Somali regime. Former Somali Prime Minister Hassan Khaire had reportedly celebrated that “the interest of Ilhan are not Ilhan’s, it’s not the interest of Minnesota, nor is it the interest of the American people, the interest of Ilhan is that of the Somalian people and Somalia.”

It’s unknown if any of Omar’s Majerteen clan members benefited from the billions in American money, but considering the prominence of the clan in Somali politics, it’s likely to be the case.

Somalia, along with other Islamic terrorist entities, including the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, were among the top beneficiaries of USAID cash.

USAID boasted of having sent $2.1 billion to Gaza and the West Bank since the Hamas attacks of Oct 7. In 2024 alone, $917 million was programmed for the terrorist areas occupying Israel.

USAID provided over $3.7 billion to Afghanistan since the Taliban took over with $832 million in the previous fiscal year alone. The money was so unaccountable that USAID refused to cooperate with the U.S. Government’s Afghan War watchdog tracking money going to terrorists.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/07/wait-you-mean-theres-corruption-in-washington/

How many Americans had even heard of the U.S. Agency for International Development just a month ago? Now in the third week of the second Trump administration, the country is learning that USAID apparently has been running a racket that has propped up the Democratic political machine, which includes the usual big-media players, with tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars.

As political scandals go, this one could be the grubbiest of all.

Democrats are already reeling. Polls show they have become as popular as a pineapple on a pizza. This country would be well served if the party collapsed and the remaining reasonable and sane voters Democratic formed a new group.

The Democratic Party of the 21st century has revealed itself through its radical, nonsensical positions to be a party that no longer can be stomached by most of America. A recent Quinnipiac University survey found that 57% of voters have an unfavorable opinion of Democrats, “the highest percentage of voters having an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party since the Quinnipiac University Poll began asking this question.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times’ own polling shows that Americans feel that Democrats are out of touch, and don’t see the party “as an appealing alternative.”

Hastening the downfall might be the scandal that is roiling the waters of the Potomac right now. A nest of corruption, it seems, has been rooted out. And those who have relied on its success are squealing the loudest and longest.

Ostensibly an agency that shuttles financial and other resources for humanitarian reasons, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, looks and acts more like a political slush fund that has kept the political left rich with taxpayers’ dollars than a global development agency.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usaids-long-track-record-of-wasteful-left-wing-spending-made-it-an-obvious-first-target-for-musk/

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has come under scrutiny after tech billionaire Elon Musk chose the agency as the first target in his campaign to reduce ballooning government costs and root out progressive ideology from within the executive branch.

Musk’s decision to first declare war on USAID in his role as head of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency should come as no surprise, given the agency’s long history of wasteful, ideologically driven spending.

Established in 1961 under the Kennedy administration, USAID is meant to oversee humanitarian, development, and security programs, doing so in over 100 foreign countries. As originally conceived, the agency was meant to distribute aid in a way that advances U.S. interests, ideally without antagonizing the local population.

But, for decades now, the agency has apparently strayed from that mission.

In 1994, whistleblower Paul Neifert revealed that the agency was distributing U.S. aid based on race in violation of federal law.

“As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Musk is quite correct in calling USAID a criminal organization,” Neifert told National Review. “Their misconduct goes back years in my case and is not surprising to those familiar with USAID methods. This apple is indeed rotten.”

Stationed in South Africa three decades ago, Neifert accused senior USAID officials of violating procurement laws and the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act that authorized U.S. assistance to the country following the end of apartheid in 1990. On top of being illegal, it was also a self-defeating policy, Neifert explained.

“In bizarre fashion, it was in conflict with the non-racial ideals of pre- and post-Mandela South Africa, which held that abolishment of the raced-based system of apartheid was for the benefit of all members of its ‘rainbow’ coalition,” he said.

“USAID instituted its twisted version of a race-based, spoils system, which required its staff to circumvent U.S. procurement laws by providing USAID funding on a racialized basis to USAID’s favored recipients both in the U.S. and South Africa.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/06/are-trumps-tariffs-really-tariffs/

Hysteria has erupted here and abroad over President Trump’s threats to level trade tariffs against particular countries.

Both American and foreign critics blasted them variously as either counterproductive and suicidal or unfair, imperialistic, and xenophobic.

Certainly, tariffs are widely hated by doctrinaire economists. They complain that tariffs burden consumers with higher prices to protect weak domestic industries that, shielded from competition, will have no incentive to improve efficiency.

Their ideal is “free” trade. Supposedly a free global market alone should adjudicate which particular industry in any country can produce the greatest good for the world’s consumers, whether defined by lower prices or better quality, or both.

Even when “free trade” becomes “unfair trade”—such as China’s massive mercantile surpluses—many neoliberal economists still insist that even subsidized foreign imports are beneficial.

Cheap imports, Americans were told, supposedly still lowered prices for consumers, still forced domestic producers to economize to remain competitive, and still brought “creative destruction,” as inefficient domestic industries properly gave way to more efficient, market-driven ones.

But many exporters to the U.S. are propped up by their own governments.

They may seem more competitive only because their governments want to dump products at a loss to capture market share, subsidize their businesses’ overhead to protect domestic employment or seek to create a monopoly over a strategic industry.

Yet when Trump threatened to level tariffs against Mexico, Canada, Colombia, Venezuela, China, or the European Union, they were not primarily aimed at propping up particular inefficient U.S. industries at all.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/did-big-government-pull-us-out-of-the-great-depression/

The conventional wisdom is that the Great Depression that began in October 1929 was the fault of Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Republicans in general. Big business was out of control, and big government should have reined it in with regulations that would have prevented the crash from happening in the first place. Herbert Hoover’s disastrous presidency (1929-1933) is generally presented as evidence of this: most establishment historians echo the charge that Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats began making in 1932, that Hoover’s inaction and trust in the power of the economy to right itself only deepened the crisis and lengthened the Depression. Then Roosevelt’s New Deal smorgasbord of government programs put Americans back to work and finally provided the economy the stimulus it needed to recover.

Virtually every aspect of that conventional wisdom is false. As Rating America’s Presidents shows, if Coolidge had been president in October 1929, he would have without any doubt followed the precedent established by Van Buren, Grant, Cleveland, and Theodore Roosevelt that Hoover explicitly rejected in his memoirs: do nothing, recognizing that economic relief was not the federal government’s responsibility, and let market forces heal the economy. What Hoover doesn’t mention is that in all four of those earlier cases, the president’s policy worked, and the economy eventually righted itself, although in some cases it took longer to do so than some would have liked.

In contrast, Hoover and then Roosevelt oversaw the massive expansion of the federal government in response to the Great Depression, and it became the longest-lasting economic crisis in American history, not definitively ending until 1941. Government intervention didn’t end the Depression; it prolonged it. Hoover’s programs only added to the burden ordinary Americans had to carry, especially when he increased taxes in 1932. The tax increases were unavoidable, however: contrary to the assumptions of many Americans today, big government programs don’t magically pay for themselves.

https://www.thefp.com/p/eli-lake-breaking-history-radicals-have-burned-california-before-karen-bass-gavin-newsom?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When I think about the recent tragedy of the California fires—and the questions we all have about what went wrong—there is one story I keep coming back to.

A few years ago, an amateur botanist was hiking above the Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles when he noticed several shrubs had been flattened by construction work. What he had stumbled across was an effort by the LA Department of Water and Power to replace the wooden poles of power lines with steel ones. The old ones, you see, were a fire hazard.

But the hiker was more worried about those flattened shrubs, which turned out to be a rare plant called a milk vetch. And so he rallied environmental groups—which ensured that the fire safety project got put on pause.

To me, this episode captures something fundamental about California: Its path to ruin is paved with the noblest intentions.

The Golden State was once the place where industry and imagination locked arms and showed us how great the American experiment could be. It secured our democracy by manufacturing and engineering the weapons that won the Second World War. It built the dream factory of Hollywood and the workshops of the future that we call Silicon Valley. Without California, The American Century would never have begun.

But in our current century, and 50 years of Democrat rule, California has fallen apart—largely thanks to progressive policies attempting to make the world a better place. Tent cities have popped up under bridges and beside freeways; in just the past 10 years, homelessness has risen by over 50 percent. Downtown San Francisco has also become the site of multiple open-air drug markets. Opioid overdose deaths reached an all-time high in the city in 2023. Violent crime has risen, too: As of 2022, rates were 31 percent higher in California than in the U.S. as a whole. Last month’s fires were only the latest reminder that the state is burning up.

To understand how the state unraveled, we need to go back to a decade of despair and decadence: the 1970s. The dark turn began—where else—in the petri dish of progressivism that is San Francisco, which around this time gave birth to the hippie movement. If you want to understand how the radical left can burrow deeply into a state’s bureaucracy, courts, and political machines, look no further than the San Fran ’70s.

California has been a battleground before, and it all began with the summer of love. The year was 1967; the setting, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, a magnet for the dreamers, Vietnam vets, and fans of the new psychedelic rock. It was a wild time. Marijuana plants were everywhere. Communes cooked dinner for anyone who wanted it. A group called The Diggers opened a store where everything was free. The hippies were remodeling their little corner of society. They wanted to spread peace.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/06/trumps-revolution-of-common-sense-brings-out-the-worst-in-democrats/

When asked by a reporter about how many of the 3,500 illegal immigrants arrested since President Donald Trump took office were criminals, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “All of them.” The reporter was flabbergasted, but Leavitt was right. Those who entered the country illegally by definition are guilty of committing a crime.

This is what Trump meant when he said in his inaugural address that “we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense. It’s all about common sense.” The Democrats’ response has been anything but common-sensical.

The first weeks of the Trump administration have been a whirlwind of these sorts of common-sense orders and pronouncements that, as our I&I/TIPP survey showed (see “Trump’s Executive Orders Have Solid Voter Backing: I&I/TIPP Poll”), are popular with everyone except out-of-touch Democrats.

Sending troops to secure the southern border is a common-sense solution to a national crisis. So is letting border patrol officials do their jobs. So is deporting the millions here illegally, starting with hardened criminals.
Requiring federal workers to return to their offices full time is perfectly reasonable.
Declaring that there are two genders – something humankind has known since Adam – and banning the use of taxpayers’ money for federal “gender identity” programs might rankle the far left, but it makes perfect sense to everyone else.
Blocking access to abundant domestic energy supplies while China builds a coal plant every day makes no sense. Boosting oil and gas production does.
Ending racist, divisive, and mostly likely illegal “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs and instead focusing on skills and merit when making federal government hiring decisions counts as common sense to everyone except left-wing extremists.
How about freezing federal grants until someone has a chance to review them? Trump had to backpedal on this, but only because the order was poorly worded. Even so, it immediately exposed some truly ridiculous things that the federal government supports with your hard-earned cash.
Requiring regulators to eliminate 10 regulations for every new one they impose is the definition of common sense when you consider that the Code of Federal Regulations is more than 100,000 pages long.
Our favorite common-sense move was to offer federal workers a buyout option. Companies struggling to make ends meet do this all the time. The federal government is running trillion-dollar deficits and can ill afford to have workers on the payroll who don’t want to be there, as well as the many who shouldn’t.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/hillary_clinton_s_hypersonic_hypocrisy_the_missile_tech_scandal_she_hopes_you_ignore.html

The next time Hillary Clinton or her media allies wag a finger about “Russian interference,” remember this: Hillary Clinton’s State Department helped arm Russia with hypersonic missile technology.

Yes, the same Hillary Clinton who branded Tulsi Gabbard a “Russian asset”. The same Hillary Clinton who pushed the Trump-Russia collusion hoax for years. The same Hillary Clinton who expects America to believe that Moscow is an existential threat. Her tenure at the State Department actively facilitated, promoted, and encouraged the transfer of dual-use technology that helped build Russia’s next-generation hypersonic missile systems.

U.S. officials later sounded the alarm about Skolkovo’s military applications, but the damage was done by then. As Clinton’s State Department actively promoted the initiative, there was little visible scrutiny of how the technology could be weaponized—despite Skolkovo’s deep ties to Russian intelligence and defense interests. As U.S. concerns grew in subsequent years, Clinton and her allies never showed any sign of regret or reassessment—even as Clinton Foundation donors stood to benefit. You can’t make this up.

Selling Out National Security

By 2012, U.S. intelligence had reversed its view on the Skolkovo Project, a high-profile technology initiative to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in Russia. However, it was recognized—too late—that it had become a massive technology transfer operation benefiting Moscow’s military.

The U.S. Army warned that Skolkovo was being used to acquire highly sensitive information on space, satellite, nuclear, and missile technology, and in 2011, U.S. military intelligence assessed that Skolkovo had approved the development of a hypersonic cruise missile engine.

By 2014, the FBI was waving red flags, with the assistant special agent in charge of its Boston Field Office taking the extraordinary step of publicly warning that American technology had been sold to Skolkovo.