RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-biden-era-wheezes-its-way-to-a-fittingly-deluded-end/

Joe Biden just finished addressing the American people from the Oval Office, for the final time in his presidency. And at the end of it all, with this humiliatingly garbled ramble that read like the sort of delusional self-exculpatory fantasy his caretaker wife might whisper consolingly into his ear, Biden concluded his career much as he began it over half a century ago: as a venal, petty-souled fool in denial about his own limitations and failures. (We learned nothing tonight that we didn’t already know. Nothing was revealed.)

In a thick, slack-toned voice, stumbling over his words from beginning to end as he squinted at a teleprompter with vacant eyes, Biden slurred through the single most incoherent speech of his life. He began by taking complete credit for the breaking Israeli hostage deal with Hamas — which was to be expected — and then launched into a sleepy lecture awkwardly framed around the Statue of Liberty and how it was built to sway in the wind, much like America was built to be flexible enough to withstand his presidency. One marble-mouthed cliché after another poured from his half-opened maw, smooth featureless pabulum with all the texture and flavor of Gerber baby food. (Shall America “lead by the example of power or the power of our example?” An imponderable for the ages.)

He then turned to what was doubtless intended as the high-minded legacy section of his farewell speech: a warning against the new “oligarchy [that is] taking shape” before our very eyes, the “tech-industrial complex.” This limp attempt to invoke Eisenhower’s farewell address was followed by an equally tired rehash of every complaint the mainstream media and the Democrats have been rehearsing against Silicon Valley since they lost hammerlock control over it. (Both “disinformation” and “misinformation” were cited.)  Robber-barons and trust-busting were invoked as appropriate images to compare with the dangers posed by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

His delivery collapsed into utter incoherence near the end of the speech, as he rambled on about climate change and artificial intelligence and giving America a “fair shot,” before returning clumsily to his opening Statue of Liberty metaphor. Americans will remember nothing about it a day from now. Thus ends the Biden presidency.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/pro-palestinian-protestors-intifadah-anti-american

Anyone who happened to amble by the downtown Manhattan courthouse in early December, just after a jury acquitted Daniel Penny—the former Marine who put Jordan Neely, a deranged and threatening fellow subway passenger, in a chokehold that led to his death—would have noticed something peculiar.

It wasn’t that the sidewalk was filled with protesters, or that they were chanting slogans that ignored the facts of the situation, presenting Neely—a mentally ill man with 42 previous convictions, including for violent assaults on the subway—as an innocent lynched by a malicious white vigilante for no reason other than his being black. It was, instead, that many of the protesters were wearing keffiyehs, the traditional Arab headwear popular with the pro-Palestine crowd, as well as pins or t-shirts featuring the Palestinian flag.

Approximately 5,674 miles separate southern Manhattan from northern Gaza, and neither Penny nor Neely had anything to do with Israel or the Palestinian cause. Why, then, would the activists who rushed to condemn Penny’s actions as racist adorn themselves with Palestinian paraphernalia?

The answer is stark: because “Palestine,” an entity that has never existed, has always been a codeword for chaos. For many activists, being “pro-Palestine” is not to support the creation of a national homeland for some Arabs side-by-side with the State of Israel; the Palestinians themselves, as former president Bill Clinton recently reminded us, have repeatedly rejected every U.S.-brokered attempt at independence. These radicals are pro-Palestine because they are anti-America, and because they champion violent, sectarian conduct that is anathema to our core values.

If that seems like an unfair characterization, consider Fatima Mohammed, one of the leaders of Within Our Lifetime, a cornerstone of New York’s “pro-Palestine” vanguard. “I pray upon the death of the USA on a public platform,” she tweeted on May 9, 2021, “but yolo [you only live once] I guess.” A year later, Mohammed gave a speech in midtown Manhattan, praying to Allah to grant victory to the jihadis. For her tireless advocacy of violence—against America, Israel, and the Jews—she was elected by her classmates to give the commencement address at the City University of New York’s law school graduation. She dedicated her talk to calling for a “revolution” against the “fascist” NYPD and the American armed forces, both of which, she argued, were merely tools of “white supremacy.”

Her views, alas, aren’t rare among the pro-Palestine crowd. Nerdeen Kiswani, another prominent activist, explained in a speech at a 2021 rally that she and her colleagues have a simple aim: “We don’t need tens of thousands of people to shut down and disrupt this city,” she said. “We have to up the stakes.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-administration-america-safety-law-enforcement

Upon being nominated in 2021 to head Joe Biden’s Justice Department, Merrick Garland announced that the DOJ’s top priorities would be “ensuring racial equity” and “meeting the evolving threat of violent extremism.”

The U.S. had just lived through race riots, mass looting, and the largest annual homicide increase in the country’s history. Americans were getting robbed at gunpoint while eating in restaurants; thieves were smashing trucks and SUVs into storefronts to make off with merchandise, cash registers, and ATMs.

But when Garland and his boss referred to violent extremism, they were referring to white supremacists. “The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy,” President Joe Biden said at Howard University’s commencement in May 2023, “and I’m not saying this because I’m at a Black HBCU. I say it wherever I go.”

He wasn’t kidding. “Our own intelligence agencies in the United States of America have determined that domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy is the greatest terrorist threat to our Homeland today,” Biden said in September 2022 at a White House Summit on combating hate. The Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies regularly issued alerts about looming outbreaks of white supremacist violence. Those outbreaks never materialized, including those predicted for Election Day 2024.

Fighting largely phantom white supremacy was just one of the Biden administration’s obsessions that diverted it from the core duty of government: maintaining law and order. The Trump administration should reverse all identity-based policies from the Biden era and refocus federal law enforcement agencies on combating crime and illegal immigration. Doing so will guarantee an improvement in public safety.

The Biden administration made race and ethnicity the key factor in crucial criminal justice positions. By March 2022, 48 percent of Biden’s picks for U.S. attorney positions were black, though only 13 percent of the U.S. population is black.

This disparity would be worrisome enough in its own right: turning any irrelevant characteristic into a selection criterion guarantees an inferior pool of candidates. But given the academic skills gap, such a large racial preference means an even larger sacrifice of meritocratic standards. Twenty-two percent of black law graduates never pass the bar exam after five tries, for example, compared with 3 percent of white test takers. State bar associations are lowering pass scores on bar examinations in the hope of qualifying more black attorneys. Black LSAT scores and law school class rankings are at the bottom of distribution curve.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/16/see-for-yourself-newsom-is-all-smiles-as-l-a-burns/

Has there ever been a more reprehensible human being in charge of the once-great state of California.?

As fires were consuming homes and destroying neighborhoods – largely due to the criminal incompetence of Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and the legions of hopeless inept leaders in the one-party state – Newsom seemed to be having the time of his life.

We can’t read his thoughts. But from his expressions, it’s as if this is all great news to Newsom because it gives him more time in the spotlight. He can’t seem to help himself but smile as the news media descend on Los Angeles, follow him around with cameras, let him bloviate, and make him the center of attention. The only time Newsom genuinely expressed anger and frustration was when responding to President-elect Trump’s criticism of his failed leadership during this crisis.

Newsom’s not the only one who seems delighted with his moment in the sun. The Castro-loving Bass, too, can’t seem to stop smiling at the massive devastation her party unleashed on her citizens.

This all should be a wake-up call for California voters to wipe the smiles off the faces of these “progressive” leaders who wasted massive amounts of taxpayer money set aside for fire prevention, left the state unprepared for a disaster they knew was coming, and then pointed fingers of blame everywhere but at themselves.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, below are 23,000 words showing just what smug cretins these people are. All these are screenshots of events as Californians saw their homes, schools, businesses, churches, and livelihoods go up in flames.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hegseth-hearings-show-dems-still-dont-have-a-plan/

The hearings for Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth were disastrous… for Democrats.

The game plan was to ‘genderify’ the hearings by focusing on the infidelity allegations and the question of women in combat, and to let female Dem Senate members take the lead. The outcome was Sen. Elizabeth Warren and a few others scolding a calm Hegseth. The optics of it were bad again… for Democrats.

Usually it’s not too difficult for senators to make a nominee sweat. But that requires doing research and asking probing, damning questions, while remaining in control. Since much of what members of Congress do is hold hearings, this should be a basic skill, and yet somehow they blew it. It’s never a good situation when the interrogators are more flustered than the subject. And Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a former lawyer (and horribly unpleasant human being) usually maintains better self-control and message discipline, came off as bitterly deranged.

Few people would have been watching the hearings anyway, but the Senate Dems knew they needed just a few moments to go viral and then get picked up late night shows who would spin them up again to make them go viral. It’s telling that those moments didn’t occur. At least not any that are useful to them.

The larger takeaway is that the Dems still haven’t recovered from the election and don’t have a plan. The things they care about, like women in combat, are of very little interest to most Americans. Dems are struggling to bridge a gap on social issues that is no longer pointing in their direction.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-regulatory-tyranny/

Nearly 190 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America presciently described the “soft despotism” he feared the young United States could devolve into––one that would control and direct its citizens not by force, but by a centralized power “more extensive and more mild [that] would degrade men without tormenting them” physically.

Thanks to over a century of progressive technocratic expansion through the metastasizing of federal agencies, their imperious regulatory regime has spread ever more widely, one that as Tocqueville prophesized “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and most energetic characters can penetrate.” The purpose is “to keep them [citizens] in perpetual childhood.”

Understanding this malign dynamic of big government and diminishing freedom, Donald Trump has charged Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with creating and managing a Department of Government Efficiency to begin cleaning out our regulatory Augean Stables. A good place for anyone to start grasping just how enormous, intrusive, and expensive this problem is, should start with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s recent book Overruled.

Regulatory hypertrophy began with the multiplication of laws. Progressivism, believing that credentialed “experts” are better at governing people than the people themselves, started increasing federal laws to fix “problems” or “crises” that states, counties, and cities––closer to their people’s circumstance, mores, and problems––were better placed to deal with. Yet firm believers in not letting “a good crises go to waste,” progressives began manufacturing crises, then passing laws and creating agencies tasked with managing those problems.

What followed is what Gorsuch calls a “paper blizzard.” In a span of about 100 years, the federal laws comprising the U.S. Code grew from fitting in one volume, to needing 54 in 2018. Laws also got longer and denser: the legislation dealing with inter alia Covid 19 relief, clocked in at more than 5000 words. The 1964 Civil Rights Act took a mere 28 pages.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/14/the-la-fires-are-the-horrifying-consequence-of-democratic-misrule/

Los Angeles authorities’ poor preparation for and lamentable response to the wildfires now devastating the city capture a broader problem – namely, the failure of governance across America’s Democrat-controlled regions. This pattern of incompetence has accelerated the shift of American economic and political power to regions outside the long dominant north-east and West Coast.

The reason for this shift lies in the clear failure of Democrats, writ large in the inferno now consuming large swathes of LA. In states like California, Democratic politicians no longer prioritise such things as public safety and key infrastructure, including roads, ports and, most importantly at the moment, water systems. Indeed, today’s ‘progressives’ generally shy away from things like building dams or maintaining water pressure in the name of protecting the environment. They are far more focussed on climate change and ‘social justice’.

Of course, California progressives will justify this by blaming the fires on climate change, even though a leading fire expert at the US Geological Survey suggests this claim is unsupported. Fires have been a regular feature of life in southern California for at least 20million years. Moreover, given the recent extremely dry weather conditions, LA should have been prepared for a conflagration. It was not. A councilperson representing the Palisades has noted the ‘chronic underinvestment in our critical infrastructure’.

Indeed, the devastating impact of the fires is largely a result of environmental policies that discouraged such safety practices as controlled burns. California governor Gavin Newsom has cut funding for fighting wildfires by over $100million this past year, while demanding subsidies for electric cars. At the same time, California’s roads are among the worst in the US, and a planned high-speed railway continues to gobble up tens of billions of dollars.

There’s one word for this: failure. Unsurprisingly, conservative activists, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have all denounced Los Angeles authorities’ bizarrely slow and ineffective response to the fires, and with some justification. Some claims were off-base, such as the suggestion that California’s DEI policies are directly to blame. But the progressive complaint that the right is ‘politicising’ the tragedy also makes little sense. The reasons for the devastating impact of the fires are indeed rooted in conscious decisions taken by Democratic politicians.

https://tomklingenstein.com/trump-and-the-vice-of-false-moderation/

We find ourselves in a protracted struggle, fighting the advocates of a pernicious ideology that aims to radically transform the American way of life. Compromise is essential to free political life, but there can be no compromise with those driven by totalitarian impulses. What is needed more than ever is tough-minded moderation, and not a false sense of complacency.

In the very recent past, why have so many intellectuals and politicians — even professed conservatives —  either bowed to or shown little courage in the face of the disruptive mobs that threaten free speech and discussion, the censorious militants obsessed with imposing critical race theory and gender ideology on the rest of us, the terrorists who maim and kill in the name of liberation and decolonialization, and the activists and semi-educated students who shamelessly applaud their crimes? These are enemies of Western civilization, and we must act accordingly. Civic courage has been in short supply. It very much needs to be renewed and reinvigorated.  

True, we must be prudent, even in the midst of battle. But authentic prudence does not mean meeting assaults half-heartedly. While the free man in principle prefers peace to war and the arts of persuasion to endless conflict, he cannot be afraid to stand up and fight when he must — to the death, if necessary. Edmund Burke put things well at the beginning of his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): In resisting the fanaticism of those who war against ordered liberty, we must embody and defend what he called “a manly, moral, and regulated liberty.”

We need to rally a broad “anti-revolutionary party,” as Jordan J. Ballor has called it, comprising all who refuse to deny common sense and the moral truths reflected in the Decalogue, to sever attachment to what is good and noble in our patrimony, and to deny affection for our country. There can be no compromise with the revolutionary party.

To be sure, as I have mentioned, a healthy civic order values compromise, but such compromise requires what we lack today: a shared commitment to the life of reason and to the decencies and shared values required for a functioning republic. Emphasizing civility at the expense of these fundamentals opens the door wide to the revolutionaries. When this happens, good people become weak and ultimately complicit in the assault on their own way of life — on the premises, institutions, and traditions on which a free society rests. Conservatives need to remember this as we move forward.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/15/bidens-disaster-most-voters-give-him-failing-marks-for-leadership-key-policies-ii-tipp-poll/

The days remaining for the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration are few, but before they go, it’s only fair to ask Americans what kind of job the pair did over the last four tumultuous years. As it turns out, data from the latest I&I/TIPP Poll suggest, voters will not be sad to see this Democratic tenure come to an end.

The national online poll of 1.424 adults, taken Jan. 8-Jan. 10, asked a number of questions to get at how voters feel about the job Biden has done, including questions on how Biden did in particular policy areas. The poll’s margin of error is +/-2.6 percentage points.

Apart from Democrats, Biden finds little support anywhere across the nation.

The first broad question posed involved leadership: “Overall, is your opinion of Joe Biden generally favorable, generally unfavorable, or are you not familiar enough to say one way or the other?”

Biden doesn’t come out well in the reckoning. Of those surveyed, just 38% give him a “favorable” rating, while 51% rated him “unfavorable” and another 7% said they didn’t know enough to render an opinion.

But, when gauged by political party affiliation, Americans were far apart.

Democrats handed Biden high ratings (71% favorable, 17% unfavorable), while Republicans slammed Biden (15% favorable, 81% unfavorable) and independent voters more or less followed suit (26% favorable, 59% unfavorable).

https://www.city-journal.org/article/mark-zuckerberg-meta-abolish-dei-fact-checking

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook, made a stunning announcement. He was abolishing the company’s DEI programs and discontinuing its relationship with fact-checking organizations, which he admitted had become a form of “censorship.” The left-wing media immediately attacked the decision, accused him of embracing the MAGA agenda, and predicted a dangerous rise in so-called disinformation.

Zuckerberg’s move was carefully calculated and impeccably timed. The November elections, he said, felt like “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” DEI initiatives, especially those related to immigration and gender, had become “disconnected from mainstream conversation”—and untenable.

This is no small about-face. Just four years ago, Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding left-wing election programs; his role was widely resented by conservatives. And Meta had been at the forefront of any identity-based or left-wing ideological cause.

Not anymore. As part of the rollout for the announcement, Zuckerberg released a video and appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast, which now functions as a confessional for American elites who no longer believe in left-wing orthodoxies. On the podcast, Zuckerberg sounded less like a California progressive than a right-winger, arguing that the culture needed a better balance of “masculine” and “feminine” energies.

Executives at Meta quickly implemented the new policy, issuing pink slips to DEI employees and moving the company’s content-moderation team from California to Texas, in order, in Zuckerberg’s words, to “help alleviate concerns that biased employees are excessively censoring content.”

Zuckerberg was not the first technology executive to make such an announcement, but he is perhaps the most significant. Facebook is one of the largest firms in Silicon Valley and, with Zuckerberg setting the precedent, many smaller companies will likely follow suit.