RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/doge-in-the-1830s/

The war against big government has been going on much longer than President Trump has been in office. One of the first arenas in which it played out was the struggle over the Bank of the United States. Such a bank, a private corporation, had been established during the

Washington administration in 1791, but its charter expired in 1811 when a vote to renew it was narrowly defeated: the Senate vote was a tie, and President James Madison’s vice president, George Clinton, voted against the bank. Nevertheless, the idea of a central bank for federal funds did not die.

The Bank’s advocates contended that it was necessary to put the nation’s finances in order; its foes, including Madison, argued that it was an unconstitutional power grab on the part of the federal government. It was also dangerous, then as now, to turn power over the public funds to an oligarchy of private financiers; the possibility for corruption, and for a de facto second government developed by buying favors until large enough to challenge the government of the United States, was immense. Nonetheless, it was the Bank’s great foe, Madison, whose signature brought the Bank of the United States back to life in 1816.

Opposition to the Bank was one of the issues that later propelled Andrew Jackson into the White House in 1829. President Jackson called the Bank of the United States a “monster,” and denounced its “power and corruption.” He charged it with interfering in the political process and bribing elected officials and journalists with “loans” so that they would do its bidding. There was ample evidence for this. The New York Courier and Enquirer, which up until the 1832 election had opposed the Bank, received a substantial loan from it and suddenly became a vocal supporter of rechartering the Bank.

The pro-Jackson Washington Globe accused pro-Bank senators George Poindexter of Mississippi and Josiah Johnston of Louisiana of accepting enormous bribes in return for their support of the Bank, and indeed, Poindexter had received from the Bank a $10,000 loan ($300,000 today) and Johnston one of $36,000 (over $1 million today). These were by no means the only loans the Bank gave to politicians.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/27/yes-lets-give-an-america-without-a-meaningful-government-a-try/

Quite a few in this country are madly in love with government. They cannot conceive of life in which we are free agents, liberated from the chains of reckless lawmaking, imperious regulating and stifling bureaucracy. It’s a distorted world view.

And it’s one held by a couple of university academics, who claim “the U.S. government is attempting to dismantle itself,” with the Trump administration setting out “to create an America its people have never experienced – one without a meaningful government.”

Sidney Shapiro, Wake Forest University, and Joseph P. Tomain, University of Cincinnati, who last year wrote the book “How Government Built America,” summarize their thoughts in The Conversation. They write like apologists for statism, a nasty ideology that relies on coercion and interventionism and is the factory setting for those who wish to rule rather than govern within constitutional limits. It’s founded on the belief that says “government knows better than you, in regards to important matters,” and is poisonous to civil society.

The pair complain that President Donald Trump’s “aim to eliminate government could result in” a country “in which free-market economic forces operate without any accountability to the public.” Do they have any idea how far off they are?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mahmoud-khalil-and-the-red-green-assault-on-american-sovereignty/

The stock market of late has been on a veritable roller coaster, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency continues to ruffle feathers, Iran marches ever harrowingly closer to a nuclear weapon, and Russia and Ukraine get tantalizingly close to a ceasefire. But the national political conversation this week has curiously tended to focus not on any of that but instead on the uncertain fate of a lone noncitizen and former Columbia University graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil.

Talk about a misplacement of priorities. Most American media consumers care a great deal about their pocketbooks and retirement accounts. They likely also care about stability on the world stage — a subdued China, a relatively calm Middle East and a long-overdue peace deal to end the bloodshed in Eastern Europe.

By contrast, here is one thing media consumers probably don’t care a lot about: whether a Syrian national and Algerian citizen who was the face of last year’s violent pro-Hamas Columbia University campus riots gets deported. You would never know that, of course, from the media’s incessant focus on the Khalil saga. Is it any wonder that only 31% of Americans told Gallup last fall they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media?

In any event, Khalil is, by any metric, a wildly unsympathetic figure. The New York Times described him as the “public face of protest against Israel” at Columbia. He was the spokesman of a pro-Hamas student group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest. CUAD has referred to the Oct. 7 slaughter of Israelis as a “moral, military, and political victory” and asserted that it is fighting for nothing less than the “total eradication of Western civilization.” Khalil personally distributed propaganda pamphlets titled “Our Narrative — Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” borrowing Hamas’s code name for Oct. 7.