RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/01/a-trump-inaugural-speech-for-a-trump-presidency/

Donald Trump’s inaugural address was functionally indistinguishable from one of his rally speeches. It wasn’t as long or discursive but was just as plain-spoken and pointed, and made exactly the same promises.

The address was another sign that Trump intends to govern the way he ran.

His critique of the status quo was stinging and harsh, while a pained Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had to sit within feet of him and endure it.

The flip side of Trump’s often-decried gloomy portrait of the present is his vaulting optimism about the future he intends to bring about. So it was with this address. As usual, he didn’t stint on his bigger-and-better superlatives. It’s going to be a new Golden Age, as “we stand on the verge of the four greatest years in American history.”

Trump described himself as an exemplar of common sense, and, indeed, on some key issues he captured the center last November. His pledges in his address to shut down the border, deport criminals, make it government policy that there are only two genders, and judge people on their merits rather than their race and gender are firmly in the middle of the American consensus, and not too long ago would have been utterly uncontroversial.

His assurances that he will build up the military, push back on electric vehicle mandates, exploit our fossil fuel resources to the maximum extent possible, and end all government pressure for censorship were welcome, as well.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-pardons-dr-fauci/

On Monday, Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons for the January 6 committee, Gen. Mark Milley, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, explaining that “issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.” As the Delaware Democrat contends:

“For more than half a century, Dr. Fauci served our country. He saved countless lives by managing the government’s response to pressing health crises, including HIV/AIDS, as well as the Ebola and Zika viruses. During his tenure as my Chief Medical Advisor, he helped the country tackle a once-in-a-century pandemic. The United States is safer and healthier because of him.”

It isn’t, and Dr. Fauci got his start by declining to serve his country.

Anthony Fauci earned his medical degree in 1966 but to avoid treating wounded American soldiers, in 1968 he took a cushy “Yellow Beret” post with the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Fauci’s bio showed no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry but in 1984 the NIH made him head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).  Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, was on record that Dr. Fauci “doesn’t understand electronic microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.” That reality would quickly become evident.

Fauci’s drug of choice to treat AIDS was AZT (azithodomidyne, also known as Zidovudine), rejected for cancer treatment because of excessive toxicity. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. showed in The Real Anthony Fauci, the NIAID boss forced AZT and other toxic drugs on black foster children in New York City, with deadly results. Fauci was never held accountable and remained in his post.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/burning-down-the-house/

Inauguration Day 2025 was a great day for America, the beginning of our nation’s comeback to greatness, and the end of an era most Americans consider a steep descent into progressive madness and self-destruction. But even as Donald J. Trump reclaimed the White House on Monday and began launching a series of orders to restore sanity and put America First, evicted tenant Joe Biden – arguably the worst President in our country’s history – raced in his final hours to set as many fires as possible on his way out the door.

Literally within the last 15 minutes of his term, for example, the doddering puppet pardoned five members of the Biden crime family – brother James Biden and wife Sara; sister Valerie and her husband John Owens; and brother Francis – to protect them from the incoming administration holding them accountable, possibly for treasonous corruption.

Wait, haven’t the Democrats been self-righteously declaring for eight years that no one is above the law, not even a President?

Biden, predictably, issued a statement, reeking of shameless hypocrisy, claiming he is merely protecting those family members from Trump’s vengeful political retaliation. “My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me — the worst kind of partisan politics,” stated the bitter, angry hypocrite.

The irony here is that it is the Democrats who have spent the last eight years targeting their political enemies – most notably their hated arch-enemy Trump – with merciless and relentless partisan lawfare. Biden’s statement accuses Trump of precisely the strategy to which his own Party has resorted:

Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage their reputations and finances.

Yes, that is precisely why the Democrats engage in it with such fervor: it suits their politics of personal destruction. It is exactly the kind of vicious persecution the cruel J6 Committee brought to bear against the Capitol “insurrectionists,” many of whom Trump rightfully plans to pardon (when Biden pardons someone, it is to protect political cronies; when Trump pardons someone, it is because he or she has been unjustly targeted politically).

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/21/inauguration-day-tale-of-two-agendas/

Donald Trump, now the 45th and 47th president of the United States, promised his “top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous and free,” during his second inaugural speech Monday. At the same time roughly half way around the globe, a group met with the intention of dividing the world into two parts – an inner circle of masters and the rest of the 8 billion on Earth who would be ruled by them.

Trump is far from being the fascist that his most rabid opponents claim he is. Chapman University professor Joel Kotkin captures well the baseless smears aimed at Trump in a recent post in Sp!ked:

To listen to much of the media, progressive politicians and many academics, Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday will usher in a politics we have not seen since the days of Mussolini, Franco and, worst of all, Hitler. In her presidential campaign, vice-president Kamala Harris openly called Trump ‘a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.’

The article’s subhead: “There is nothing Nazi-like about Donald Trump or his programme for America.”

During his speech Monday, Trump failed to reference any of history’s fascists. He didn’t endorse their train schedules. He didn’t propose economic or industrial policy in which the government centrally plans private-sector activities and pursuits. He never summarized his agenda as “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” as Mussolini did.

Instead, he talked about restoring freedom, including free speech. About the rule of law. About America’s exceptionalism. About letting people buy whatever car they — not government masters — choose.

“Our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free,” he said.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21326/manhattan-project-nuclear-fusion

Among the first, most urgent, orders of business for President Donald J. Trump should be to create a Maganomics “Manhattan Project” to develop a nuclear fusion reactor superior to China’s tokamak.

Communist China, which has a head-start, has just helped place a tokamak in Thailand.

This century’s great clean-energy revolution is science’s newest frontier: producing inexpensive, unlimited energy through nuclear fusion. It is done in containers, called tokamaks, giant nuclear reactors to make and store it. Smaller reactors “barely 3 feet across” are already being developed in the US, including one in Idaho and two in northern Nevada.

Nuclear fusion consists of heating two electrons at 27 million degrees Fahrenheit, forcing them to fuse, producing clean energy similar to the Sun’s:

“When the nuclei of small atoms fuse, the resulting nucleus is slightly lighter than the components that went into making it. The lost mass is released as energy. By the famous equation E=mc2, a very small amount of mass becomes a great deal of energy. When four hydrogen atoms (or two deuterium atoms) fuse to become one helium atom, the mass loss is so tiny, the energy released is still small. However, if you can manage to fuse a steady supply of atoms, the energy released becomes immense.”

Communist China’s leader Xi Jinping has already stolen virtually all of America’s intellectual property and technology — for which one can blame hapless former US administrations — and used it to build his extended military, including cyber and space capabilities. Xi lied in assuring the US that he would not militarize the artificial islands he was constructing, then straight away militarized them. When the US declined to build hypersonic weapons out of concern that other countries might then feel compelled to build them too, Xi set about completing hypersonic missiles.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Today, as we celebrate Martin Luther King, we will also inaugurate our 47th President. Mr. Trump is only the second president to serve two non-consecutive terms. As Professor Guelzo indicated in the interview quoted above, this election might represent a tectonic shift in the alignment of the two parties. Personally, I suspect that shift is already upon us. A month ago I wrote an essay entitled “Political Parties are Dynamic.” That essay argued that Democrats failure in 2024 was due to their having ignored middle-class, working Americans, while adopting a bar-bell approach to the electorate – coastal, monied elites offset by those dependent on government. On December 2, 2024 I wrote an essay titled “End of Identity Politics?’, which argued that economic class had mattered more, in the November election, than ethnicity, race, or gender. In speeches, ads and literature, Democrats claim to represent working, middle-class America, but they have abandoned them. Consider education and the poor testing results of students in our public schools, and look at the rising cost of food, electricity and housing – all up more than 23% over the past four years. According to Monster’s 2025 Work Watch Report, 95% of workers say paychecks failed to have kept up with the cost of living.  Is it any wonder that working-class Americans opted for change?

Professor Guelzo did not say that 2024 was a “tectonic” election, only that it might prove to have been. He cited three past elections as tectonic: 1800, when John Adams’ loss to Thomas Jefferson spelled the end of the Federalist Party; 1860, when Lincoln’s victory established the Republican party as a major party; and 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt’s win created the modern Democratic party.

Even before the election, people had grown weary of sanctimonious virtue signalers: politicians who use the Justice Department to investigate political opponents, government bureaucrats who call out policy disagreements as either dis-or-misinformation; news organizations who use “fact checkers” to muzzle free speech; university professors who censored opinions that did not adhere to a proscribed orthodoxy; high school administrators who permit boys into girls’ bathrooms; “influencers” who are blind to counter-arguments; open borders that let in migrant criminals; citizens being told they will have to give up their gas stoves; and big businesses that claim merit is less important than diversity.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/20/bidens-so-called-oligarchs/

In his last address, Joe Biden offered a Parthian shot at “oligarchs” and the dangers these “billionaires” pose to the republic. At the same time, left-wing senators hammered Trump cabinet nominees on the grounds that they would be too complacent in the face of a supposed takeover of the country by Trump’s “billionaires” and their “oligarchy.”

Many things could be said about Biden’s farewell address, but I will limit them to three.

First, Biden was attempting to copycat the warnings of outgoing president and iconic war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Some 64 years earlier—on January 17, 1961, the near day of Biden’s “farewell address,” a departing Eisenhower warned of a new “military-industrial complex” threat to the republic that had grown out of World War II and was cresting during the ongoing Cold War of the 1950s.

The fear, as Ike outlined it, was that a new small tech-corporate elite would sell the country on all sorts of expensive weapons and programs to ensure a near-permanent condition of hyper-military readiness and national insolvency.

This resulting “garrison state” would make the arms merchants and technocrats rich but also exhaust the U.S. treasury in the process. What would follow for the American people was a government octopus that demanded ever higher taxes while spending money in ways increasingly unknown or irrelevant to the public interest.

Eisenhower worried the grandees of the military-industrial complex—ex-generals revolving into defense contractor lobbyists and board members—would redefine the ancient laws of war and peace in terms of mumbo-jumbo techno-jargon. The resulting esoterica was designed to justify budget-busting defense expenditures, without enough care that the federal government would expand while the now overtaxed and overregulated citizen would be at their mercy.

Apparently, a departing Biden sought to graft his own “oligarchy” speech onto Eisenhower’s earlier blueprint.

But Ike was speaking as a successful two-term president. And he was an iconic war hero, as the architect of the successful American role in defeating Hitler—from the beaches of Normandy to the occupation of the defeated German homeland.

The postwar president Eisenhower was worried about a new world in which new nuclear-tipped missiles threatened to turn any conventional war between superpowers into nuclear Armageddon. In other words, Americans listened to Eisenhower, given his probity, gravitas, and experience—and the dangers of the new corporate-government fusion. But they have no reason to listen to Biden.