RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-stepped-on-his-own-speech/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=first

Trump sounded different than we’ve ever heard him before at the outset of his convention speech, compellingly recounting his near-assassination last week. He spoke softly, he sounded humble, he didn’t seem particularly interested in chants from the floor. It created a powerful mood. If he had ended shortly thereafter after hitting a few key themes, it would have been an incredibly effective, memorable performance. Instead, he rambled at length, and stepped on the effect he created at the top with a bunch of rally-like riffs. I wouldn’t exaggerate how much the speech is going to matter one way or another, and perhaps it matters most that the material at the beginning will be what’s replayed. But the candidate would have been better served trusting and sticking to what his speechwriters produced for him.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/19/the-once-and-future-nationalism/

There is no doubt that the events of Saturday, July 13, 2024, were monumental by virtue of how close we came to the course of our history being altered for the worst. No one understands that better than President Trump himself, who is now determined to shape our destiny for the better and on his terms.

As such, the vice presidential selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance shows that, while President Trump is undoubtedly shaken by a not-too-distant past, he is already looking toward the future.

Another All-American Story

Vance’s meteoric rise, from a small-town kid who grew up in poverty to possibly becoming the next Vice President of the United States, is the American Dream in its purest and most glorious form. As detailed in his captivating memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, the young Vance did not grow up in privilege or luxury. As a child, he witnessed firsthand the rot and decay of the once-vibrant American working class, hollowed out by economic outsourcing and poisoned by the spread of drugs.

But through hard work and raw determination, a number of opportunities arose for him to reach the top of the mountain. After serving in the Marines, he climbed the ranks of society, attending Yale Law School before earning his own wealth as a venture capitalist. It wasn’t an easy life to adjust to, as evidenced by one particularly relatable anecdote when the young Vance knew nothing about the etiquette of a white-tie dinner.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/19/is-this-the-end-of-the-road-for-the-democratic-party/

Now that the Republicans have wrapped up their hugely successful convention and as calls for President Joe Biden to step down are accelerating, the question that must be asked is: Can the Democratic Party survive? Donald Trump made one key decision this week that could seal the party’s fate.

First, some history.

When Ronald Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination in 1980, Democrats were in a similar bind as they are today. The party was in disarray, the nation fed up with clueless leaders, and voters were ready for the bold conservative leadership Reagan promised.

But Reagan made one fatal mistake.

After he’d won the nomination, he still hadn’t decided on a running mate, and a scramble ensued. Reagan had the chance to nominate a smart, talented – and young – conservative who shared his vision and would build on it. Instead, he listened to party insiders who said he needed to “broaden his base” by naming an establishment Republican and he picked George H.W. Bush.

This was the worst possible choice. Bush was an establishment hack, an inside-the-Beltway elitist, and the guy who had handed the left its best attack line – “voodoo economics.”

As soon as Reagan was gone, establishment Republicans regained power, shoved conservatives to the side, and systematically undermined Reagan’s achievements, all while mouthing conservative platitudes they knew could win elections.

They turned the GOP from a landslide-winning party to one that has managed to win the popular vote only once since 1988.

We are at a similar crossroads today.

Despite having won five of the last eight presidential elections, the Democratic Party today is in far worse shape than it was in 1980.

It has been completely overrun by its America-hating, DEI-ESG-CRT-socialist-Marxist-spewing radical fringe, which obsesses over things such as “transgender” rights and a phony climate crisis instead of jobs and opportunity.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/18/can-we-let-the-voters-decide-not-the-fbi-cia-doj-lawyers-prosecutors-and-judges/

When Donald Trump seemed to have a lock on the 2016 Republican primary, the Democratic Party concluded that the people could not be counted on to do the “right thing” of electing the Democratic candidate in waiting Hillary Clinton.

What followed were eight long years of extralegal efforts to neuter candidate, then President, then ex-President, and then candidate again, Donald Trump.

The nonstop efforts were all justified as “saving democracy”—albeit by nearly destroying it.

In 2015-2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign fueled the lie that discredited ex-British spy Christopher Steele had discovered Donald Trump to be a veritable Russian agent.

Hillary did not disclose that she had paid Steele—with checks hidden through three paywalls. The FBI, under Director James Comey, also hired the fraudster.

Yet almost nothing in his “Steele dossier” was true.

The FBI doctored evidence submitted to a FISA court. Comey leaked to the press confidential documents about his private conversations with President Trump.

Comey’s successor, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, lied on numerous occasions to federal investigators.

Both former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper repeatedly lied to the nation, saying that Trump was de facto working with the Russians.

The result? Trump lost the 2016 popular vote but still won the Electoral College.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/18/cackling-while-america-burns/

The campaign by Democrats to force President Joe Biden to drop out waned a bit after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. But it quickly resumed as Biden stumbled and bumbled through the week. Just yesterday, news broke that Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer urged Biden to step aside, as did Calif. Rep. Adam Schiff.

While there’s not a single person on any list of possible replacements who wouldn’t continue the decline of the U.S. under Biden, one stands out as more frightening than the rest: Kamala Harris.

There’s an easy explanation why Harris is one of the most unpopular vice presidents. She is an unserious person and a classic midwit, defined by the Urban Dictionary as:

​​Someone who is around average intelligence but is so opinionated and full of themselves that they think they’re some kind of genius. Midwits have a shallow understanding of things and at first can seem a bit smart, until you dig deeper and realize they’re just posers.

But let us skip any further preambling and go right into the reasons why Harris would be a wreck in the White House.

First off, if she were elected president, there would be at least another four years of the Biden administration, which in reality would be Barack Obama’s fourth term. Little good has come from the combined 11 1/2 years of Obama and Biden. “Fundamentally transforming” this country has not improved it but instead drained it of its identity, independence, cohesiveness, and perpetual optimism.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/portal-donald-trump-elon-musk-david-samuels

EXCERPTS

The photograph of a bloodied former President Trump defiantly pumping his fist in the air beneath the American flag as his Secret Service minders struggle to protect him was immediately among the most indelible political images of the past half-century. As memorable as a hunched Richard Nixon signaling V for victory, or JFK standing tall in West Berlin, these are the kinds of images that are impossible for political operatives to gainsay or counterfeit, because they capture character in action. Once seen, these images are impossible to unsee. This was one of them.

In Trump’s case, the photograph was of a man who took a bullet in front of his supporters and lived, just like he said he would. He got up with blood on his face, in front of 10,000 or more people, and showed both the presence of mind and the unkillable ego strength to stage the political photograph of the century with himself as the star. Worship him or hate his guts, it was the most Trumpian act imaginable.

For the record, I don’t vote. I think it’s wrong for reporters to pick sides. But I found Trump to be a vulgarian whose first term in office was mostly a disaster, culminating in the social catastrophe of mass lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations whose health effects remain to be reckoned with. In his time in office, he was: easily distracted; surrounded himself with a sordid assortment of flunkies and scum; confused words with actions; and displayed the managerial ability to run a shoeshine stand in one of his few remaining Manhattan buildings, which are decorated in taste so gaudy it seems likely to repel even midlevel Azerbaijani millionaires, or whoever the audience for these places was originally supposed to be.

However, as it turns out, I am even less of a fan of the people who have spent the last seven years weaving wild conspiracy theories about a duly elected president in an attempt to drive him from office by zeroing out the store of public trust in every institution in America, and in doing so have turned the American press, academia, and other places that once served entirely useful social functions into a Soviet-style moral, intellectual, and aesthetic wasteland.

https://victorhanson.com/the-biden-titanic/

Joe Biden’s escalating dementia and the long media-political conspiracy to hide his senility from the public are the least of the Democrats’ current problems.

Biden’s track record as president may be more concerning than his cognitive decline. He has literally destroyed the U.S. border, deliberately allowing the entry of more than 10 million illegal aliens. His callous handlers’ agenda was to import abjectly poor constituencies in need of vast government services without regard for the current struggles of a battered American middle class and poor.

The widespread poverty of a vast new cohort of illegal immigrants could serve as indictments of a “racist,” “unequal,” and “unfair” America—as if the residents of East Palestine, Ohio or inner-city Chicago had anything to do with the centuries-long corruption and oppression of Mexico and Latin America that daily drives thousands of their own poorest citizens northwards to a society founded on very different ideas than those of their homelands.

Note that the left, neither in Mexico nor in America, never asks why millions of these impoverished people prefer to break into a supposedly racist America. Much less do they even distinguish those principles and values that once made America prosperous, free, and secure from their antitheses that have sadly made much of Latin America mostly poor, without freedom, and insecure.

Biden inherited near-zero real interest rates and inflation at 1.4 percent. Almost immediately, in nihilistic fashion, Biden did to a sound economy what he had done to a secure border. So, he recklessly printed money at a time of spiraling, quarantine-ending demand and supply chain disruption. Middle-class wages never caught up with Biden’s inflation, as prices for key staples are nearly 30 percent higher than when he took office.

The cost of servicing the ballooning national debt at high interest is now nearly $1 trillion per year. The world abroad is aflame, lit by Biden’s inexplicable withdrawal from Kabul, his mixed signals to Vladimir Putin on the eve of his invasion of Ukraine, his deliberate alienation of Israel, his appeasement of Iran and China, and his cuts in the defense budget, coupled with his woke war on mythical “racists” in the military.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/16/isnt-this-what-the-left-wanted/

Like Robert Redford’s character in “The Candidate” — who unexpectedly won a U.S. Senate race and then bewilderedly asked “What do we do now?” — the Democrats, the media, the Hollywood-celebrity industrial complex, and the leftist-dominated professoriate are in a similar position. They have to wonder what to do next after their wish that someone would take out Donald Trump was attempted and failed.

In the hours after Trump was shot in a botched, but only by millimeters, assassination bid, the media scolds began to insist that we must “take down the temperature.” President Joe Biden followed that with a national address Sunday in which he said “we must stand together” as Americans. Trump is reportedly revising his convention speech to focus on unity, believing that he has now been given “a chance to bring the country together,” rather than Biden’s failings.

While Biden struck the right tone in his Oval Office speech, let’s not pretend that the political left hadn’t been looking for any way possible to “stop Trump,” even if that meant in the minds of some on that side that he had to die. And they almost got what they wanted.

Trump is still alive, though, leaving the Democrats in a thorny “now what?” situation.

We don’t doubt that many of the left who fantasized about Trump taking a fatal bullet, such as John McWhorter, are now feeling some remorse. But for every one of those there are too many who were frustrated that the would-be assassin missed his shot by the smallest of margins.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/16/is-trumps-pick-of-j-d-vance-as-his-running-mate-a-political-masterstroke-the-answer-is-yes/

Former President Donald Trump’s selection of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance might surprise you, but it shouldn’t. The 39-year-old first-term senator is a solid, smart pick who will not only bring youth, energy and vigor to the ticket, but also a wealth of hard life experience, highly unusual for someone so young.

Trump’s announcement gave the bare bones of why he selected Vance over the many others who vied to be his running mate:

After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio. J.D. honorably served our country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was editor of The Yale Law Journal, and president of the Yale Law Veterans Association.

All excellent qualifications.

But there is a lot more to Vance, whose life story would fill a book. Indeed, it already has: His memoir of his hardscrabble, troubled childhood in a single-parent household headed by a drug-addicted mother, “Hillbilly Elegy,” became a surprise best-seller in 2016, the same year Trump first won election.

While much of America didn’t know who Vance was, Trump did. Vance’s book, better than any other, explained why Trump had such a fanatic following in America’s rural and industrially ravaged heartland.

It was that book, and Vance’s own experience, that won him the backing of Trump for a 2022 run for an open U.S. Senate seat in Ohio. Vance won.

Now, with Trump’s announcement, Vance (born during the Reagan administration) becomes the first millennial to have a spot on a major-party presidential ticket. He’s part of a shift from the current political gerontocracy that rules Washington to a new generation of leaders who will inherit America’s most serious problems. Vance is in the vanguard.