RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dont-wait-for-iran-to-get-nukes/

Donald Trump has twice issued ultimatums to Hamas: If the hostages held by Hamas are not returned by his Inauguration, “there’ll be hell to pay.”

It may not take that long, since last week a deal was announced for a cease-fire and 33 of the Israeli hostages returned in exchange for nearly 1000 Palestinian Arab prisoners in Israeli custody.  Once again, Trump’s foreign policy realism shames the Biden administration’s prissy foreign policy crew and its “rules-based international order” naïve idealism that for decades has ended in dangerous appeasement and shameful retreat.

But this deal is very questionable, fraught as it is with the same moral hazards that have always accompanied decades of such agreements: the Palestinian Arabs’ habit of not keeping their word, and serially violating the terms of every deal; the disproportionate number of prisoners to be released; Israel’s withdrawal from territories that Hamas has used for launching attacks; and the strong possibility that those released prisoners will help Hamas regroup and resume the war.

A much more strategically important goal should be destroying Iran’s theocratic regime, given that it’s mere months from having the wherewithal to make several nuclear weapons. More negotiations, “parchment barriers,” or “deals” piled on top of those that have been going on for ten years, are not viable, and have only provided time and billions of dollars for the mullahs’ nefarious purposes. What we need, as First Lord of the Admiralty Duff Cooper said during the doomed Munich talks, is not “the language of sweet reasonableness” but the “language of the mailed fist.” And we need it stat.

Moreover, it’s not just about the nukes. The bipartisan appeasement of the Islamic Republic of Iran for nearly half a century has been one of the most destructive assaults on our power of deterrence and national prestige, ranking with our retreats from Saigon and, for al Qaeda and other terrorists, from Mogadishu in 1993, and especially Beirut ten years earlier, when 241 American servicemen, mostly Marines, were bombed by an Iranian proxy gang of jihadists that became Hezbollah. Nor did the Reagan administration punish Iran, not even bombing its training camps in the Bekaa Valley, as France (sic!) and Israel did.

The wages of appeasing Iran include proving to the mullahs that Americans––for all their wealth and power––are corrupt infidels enslaved to pleasure and comfort. This perception has not weakened, despite the current setbacks inflicted on Iran by Israel. After all, during the Trump administration Tehran faced challenges like “maximum pressure” on its economy, further infuriating the regime’s already angry citizens. But given the mullahs’ passionate belief in their divine mission, and the continuing civilizational failure of nerve in Western nations, the Iranian theocrats still believe they will achieve the aims enjoined on them by their faith.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/19/the-last-question-is-the-most-important-question/

This past week, the U.S. Senator from Montana, Senator Tim Sheehy, asked the very last, but the single most important question of the day during Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing: “How are you going to lead the reinvigoration of our national shipbuilding industry and restore our Navy?” While much of the rest of the hearing was a spectacle of hysterical accusations and a cavalcade of calumnies, Senator Sheehy’s last question of the day brought up the most important issue facing America’s national defense. Pete Hegseth was well prepared for this question and responded by quoting President Trump, who has said that “shipbuilding will be one of his absolute top priorities” and that Mr. Hegseth, once confirmed, will be pulling this issue up into the Office of the Secretary of Defense so that “the bureaucracy does not strangle important initiatives that need to happen.” Mr. Hegseth went on to say that America “needed to reinvigorate our capacity” by making “rapid investment, rapid fielding,” and then “to incentivize outside entities to fill the gap” as we make historic investment into our defense industrial base.

This may seem like a new challenge for most Americans who are tired of endless wars in the Middle East, so it is worth setting the stage as to why such an effort is urgently needed. It is for three major reasons.

First, the focus of the Pentagon for the last 35 years has been land wars in the Middle East and support of the land war in Ukraine; however, the fight that is brewing from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will not be a land war. It will be a contest of war at sea across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. This struggle will be one where the U.S. will face the great challenge, not seen since WWII, of taking the fight to the PRC and sustaining the sea lines of communication to allies and partners in the region. The Pentagon is in a difficult process of rethinking and recapitalizing its forces as it confronts the intense security threat from the PRC. This burden falls on the totality of the U.S. military, but the U.S. Navy has pride of place in the current cold war with the PRC.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/17/how-president-trump-can-make-american-intelligence-great-again/

Eight years ago, after Donald Trump’s historic 2016 presidential election victory, I published an article with the same title above, listing urgent recommendations for President Trump to reform America’s then-17 intelligence agencies so they could revert to the great agencies they once were that helped our nation win the Cold War. I believed at the time that the growing politicization of U.S. intelligence, especially concerning the Russia collusion hoax during the 2016 campaign, and bloated intelligence bureaucracies had damaged the reputation of our intelligence agencies and undermined their ability to provide crucial intelligence support to the president.

After the extreme weaponization of U.S. intelligence against the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns and his administration, as well as woke mismanagement of intelligence agencies by the Biden administration, intelligence reform is far more urgent today than when Mr. Trump assumed the Oval Office in January 2017.

This is because President Trump has lost confidence in America’s intelligence agencies. As a result, unless there are massive intelligence reforms, the $95 billion-plus that the U.S. is scheduled to spend on intelligence programs in 2025 will be a huge waste of tax dollars.

I have developed five critical steps the Trump administration should take to fix U.S. intelligence. These steps are based on my 25 years working in and with the Intelligence Community and are also drawn from Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton’s extraordinary opening remarks at this week’s confirmation hearing for CIA Director-nominee John Ratcliffe.

Return U.S. intelligence agencies to their original purpose: providing the best possible intelligence support to the president to help him make national security policy decisions to keep our nation safe. This support includes intelligence collection, analysis, and covert action.

Today’s American intelligence agencies have lost sight of their primary mandate to serve the president and operate so independently and arrogantly that they have been accused of being an unelected layer of government. Our intelligence agencies have been called an “administrative state,” a “deep state,” and a “security state.” Many intelligence officials and their supporters actually believe U.S. intelligence agencies should oversee and adjudicate the President’s national security policies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/yes-greenland-is-strategic/

I love it when Donald Trump makes the media talking heads explode.

If you believed their hyperventilating reaction to this week’s masterful press conference at Mar-a-Lago, the United States Navy was getting warships out of mothballs in preparation for legitimate threats to American security in Greenland and the Panama Canal.

And it wasn’t only in the U.S.

French foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, puffed up like a peacock and beat his tiny chest on hearing the news. “There is no question of the EU letting other nations in the world, whoever they may be, attack its sovereign borders,” the little Frenchman sniffed. “We are a strong continent.”

Outgoing German chancellor Olof Scholz backed up his French bud with words of his own, with talk of “the principle of the inviolability of borders.” Those would be Denmark’s borders, not Germany’s.

The Danish foreign minister, while telling reporters that Greenland “has its own ambitions” and could become independent in the future, was more level-headed in acknowledging America’s very real national security concerns.

“We are open to dialogue with the Americans on how we can possibly cooperate even more closely than we do to ensure that the American ambitions are fulfilled,” he said.

Guess what? Greenland is indeed strategic. FDR realized that at the onset of World War II when he ordered the U.S. Army to establish an air base in the south-east of the country once Denmark had been invaded by the Nazis in 1940. My Dad commanded the coastal artillery unit at the base, known as Bluie-West One – later renamed Narsarsuaq Air Base – as a 29-year old US Army Major.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/senator-tom-cotton-targets-chinas-police-presence-in-the-u-s/

Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) is pushing a crackdown on illegal Chinese government-run police outposts that operate in the United States, one of his first moves since assuming the chairmanship of the Senate’s intelligence panel last week, National Review has exclusively learned.

Cotton’s Expel Illegal Chinese Police Act, introduced earlier today, targets the Chinese regime bureaucracy aimed at conducting subversive repression activities on U.S. soil.

The bill, a copy of which was obtained by NR, would kick off a sweeping assault on Chinese political influence activities in America linked both to the police station network and to broader activities overseen by the United Front Work Department.

It would revoke the visas of Chinese government and CCP personnel operating police stations and other illicit outfits in the U.S.

The bill would also impose full blocking sanctions on Chinese law enforcement agencies involved in setting up illegal outposts in the United States, and it would make their employees ineligible for visas to enter the United States.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/30/report-china-orders-largest-military-build-up-since-1930s-germany/

According to a report by a national security expert, the People’s Republic of China has ordered the largest military build-up of any nation in the world since Germany in the 1930s, raising concerns about the military threat presented by China.

As Fox News reports, the claims were made in an article in The Federalist written by Chuck DeVore, the chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. DeVore points out that while the American military has spent over $5.4 trillion on wasted wars such as the “War on Terror” and subsequent attempts at “nation-building,” China has been strengthening its military.

“China is engaging in an unprecedented military build-up that the world frankly hasn’t seen since Adolf Hitler in the 1930s,” said DeVore in an interview following the publication of his article.

“They’re massively building up their nuclear arsenal. We expect it to expand to at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, only five years from now. Probably going to be bigger than that,” DeVore explained. “The Chinese Navy, not by tonnage, but by numbers is now larger than the U.S. Navy. China has something like 250 times the ship building capacity that America does.”

Among other expansions, China has increased the arsenal of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) by 50 new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), bringing the new total to around 400. The Department of Defense (DOD) also reports that 300 more medium-range ballistic missiles and 100 long-range cruise missiles have also been added. China currently has over 600 operational nuclear warheads, and is expected to increase that total to over 1,000 by the year 2030.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/12/our_woke_military.html

Harris/Biden military officials have denied their addiction to DEI, CRT and wokeness in general has had anything to do with the alarming decline in enlistments. Only the Marine Corps has been largely immune to a dearth of enlistees. It seems they’ve done their best to avoid the worst aspects of woke lunacy, or perhaps their historic focus on destroying American’s enemies has helped convince prospective Marines they might have to put up with some woke nonsense, but it won’t keep them from being Marines.

Our service academies, as one would expect of educational institutions, have apparently gone gladly woke, the Air Force Academy in particular:

Graphic: X Screenshot

Judicial Watch announced today that it received 478 pages of records from the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), a component of the United States Department of Defense, which includes instructional materials and emails that address topics such as Critical Race Theory, “white privilege,” and Black Lives Matter.

The Academy’s descent into woke insanity is fully as bad as one might expect:

The presentation includes a set of tables with the headline “White Americans’ Support for Democratic Candidates for President as a Function of Old-Fashioned Racism.” Another slide depicts tables which purport to show “Correlations between Republican Party Identification and Old-Fashioned Racism among White Americans.”

That theme persists:

A “CRT Talking Points” document prepared at the direction of the Air Force Academy Superintendent includes the question “Does CRT teach cadets to hate our country?” The scripted “academic answer” to the question asserts, “much of what is ‘divisive’ [about CRT] is that it’s hard for people to hear the words ‘white supremacy’ without feeling defensive, even though that is the academically correct way to talk about most of American history.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/jihad-never-sleeps/

The age of modern jihadism began in 1928 with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, itself a reaction to the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924. Eighty years later Osama bin Laden called that event a “catastrophe” and a “humiliation and disgrace,” for it marked the culmination of the infidel West’s domination of Islam, the religion of some of the greatest warriors in history.

The purpose of the Muslim Brotherhood was to restore Islam to the global power and dominance of Christendom it had wielded for a millennium; and to return Islam to its divine destiny, which founder Hasan al-Bana wrote is “to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its laws [Sharia] on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Most Westerners didn’t notice or think about the loss of the Caliphate and the epochal shift in the geopolitical order, especially since their secularist culture had relentlessly been diminishing the role of Christianity in our culture and civilization. By the Thirties, Hilaire Belloc could write, “Millions of modern people . . . have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them.”

Despite the gruesome bloody reminders on 9/11 that jihadism and Islam were still a threat, many of our credentialed cognitive elites dismissed criticism of Islam’s doctrines, especially jihad, as Islamophobic slanders and bigotry. Moreover, although the outcome of Hamas’ butchery on Oct. 7 last year seems to be a failure, it is itself an object lesson in the continuing danger of jihadist violence. The collapse of Bashar al Assad’s regime in Syria, mostly at the hands of jihadist forces, should be a warning that jihad never sleeps, and we should not blind ourselves to its nature as documented in Islam’s doctrines and historical practice.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/drones-shut-down-strategic-wright-patterson-air-force-base/

“Unknown drone activity forced one of the U.S.’s most critical military installations to shut down for several hours late Friday evening and Saturday morning,” Newsweek reported on Monday. The incident, confirmed by base officials, “prompted heightened security measures and temporarily halted operations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.” Home to the 88th Air Base Wing, Wright-Patterson is “one of the largest and most strategically important bases in the U.S., tasked with advanced research, intelligence, and operations.”

The shut-down follows sightings of unidentified “SUV-sized” drones in New Jersey but the Biden White House, Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security claim there’s no threat to national security. Locals and politicians alike want the government to shoot down the drones, but Biden DHS boss Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters that’s not possible.

The drones pose “no threat or nefarious activity,” but they can’t be shot down because “our authorities are limited by the United States Coast Guard in the maritime environment, the United States Secret Service in its protection of our national leaders, US Customs and Border Protection with respect to the border.” And civilians attempting to shoot down a drone “would be dangerous.”

Embattled Americans might compare that response to the massive surveillance balloon China sent across the country in early 2023, which the Biden-Harris administration allowed to enter U.S. air space unannounced. China’s craft was first spotted by photographers while overflying Montana. The Billings Gazette published the photos, quickly picked up by national media. Only then did American officials respond.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21229/countdown-to-chaos-inauguration

While much national attention is on the first 100 days of the Trump 2.0 presidency, there is growing reason to be concerned about the final days of Joe Biden’s term.

Among those with a powerful interest in disrupting the peaceful transfer of power to a new Trump administration are: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), world government globalists, Sharia-supremacists, deep state bureaucrats and assorted homegrown and foreign-enabled terrorists, jihadists, and other revolutionaries.

These hostile forces’ ability to create chaos in the United States – especially collectively – cannot safely be ignored.

While much national attention is on the first 100 days of the Trump 2.0 presidency, there is growing reason to be concerned about the final days of Joe Biden’s term.

Among those with a powerful interest in disrupting the peaceful transfer of power to a new Trump administration are: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), world government globalists, Sharia-supremacists, deep state bureaucrats and assorted homegrown and foreign-enabled terrorists, jihadists, and other revolutionaries.

These hostile forces’ ability to create chaos in the United States – especially collectively – cannot safely be ignored.