RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-maga-elon-musk-tech-industry

With Donald Trump set to take office later this month, it’s worth considering how his coalition has changed.

The source of the president-elect’s power—his voting base—is populist in nature. This was evident from the beginning. Trump rallied a new political cross-section and has, over the past decade, transformed the GOP into a multiracial, working-class party. He managed to draw tens of thousands of people to stadiums and arenas and to command a fervent social media following that propagates his message.

Trump’s populist appeal came with a downside: his voters and his vision lacked elite champions who could capably administer the White House and advance the MAGA agenda. There was Trump the president and Trump’s voters, but nothing in between. He lacked the necessary middle layer to control the bureaucracy and negotiate with outside power brokers.

Now Trump has a second chance, and his coalition has seen a major shift: a growing segment of the technology industry has committed itself to the MAGA agenda. The most notable representative of this development is the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk. Hundreds of other tech leaders have followed suit, donating to Trump and backing his 2024 presidential campaign.

Some of this is doubtless self-serving. Technologists fear taxes, regulation, antitrust, and other restrictions that would likely have been part of Kamala Harris’s agenda. But part of it is ideological. Many figures on the right, including Musk, have a genuine distaste, even disgust, for “woke” politics and would like to see an innovative, free, and growth-oriented American economy. Some tech leaders were early adopters in supporting Trump, while others have emerged more recently, after it became safe. But the overall message is clear: the tech industry gambled on Trump and, with his election victory, looks to benefit not only financially but ideologically.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/still-suicidal-and-surreal/

Since the Democrats’ shellacking at the polls on November 5, the party has been undergoing a fractious discussion about what went wrong. A whole roster of the usual suspects has been mooted, including neglect of the working class. But that accurate assessment still doesn’t get that the problem is leftism per se, not bad candidates, polling, tactics, or whatever, no more than New Coke failed for those reasons. It was just a bad product.

Take Vermont Socialist, er, Independent Bernie Sanders’s scolding of his party: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. . . .  And they’re right.”

We know what Sanders means: “changing” to a full socialist planned economy managed by the state, rather than the over-regulated hybrid we now have. But those features of our dirigiste economy have created conditions, dysfunctions, and moral hazards––the tax, spend, print, borrow, hyper-regulate, and redistribute money that during the Biden-Harris administration unleashed inflation and wage stagnation that drove voters, including traditional Democrat constituencies, to vote for Trump.

Nor is the problem that “real” socialism has “never been tried.” History is littered with attempts to create a successful socialist or communist economy, and every one we know of has failed––not because it wasn’t properly managed or had a bad “messaging strategy,” but because unlike free-market capitalism, it has been predicated on unreal assumptions about human nature and motivation, as well as ignoring the power of freedom and choice.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/01/trump_s_arctic_policy_is_no_folly.html

On Sunday, December 22, President-elect Donald Trump reiterated his desire for America to take control of Greenland, saying it is an “absolute necessity.” The very next day, Greenland’s prime minister, Mute Egede, said the autonomous island, part of the Danish kingdom, was not for sale. But Trump’s plan—like that of William H. Seward, who, as secretary of state, oversaw the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867—is not without tremendous geopolitical advantage to America.

It’s all about gaining greater American control over the Arctic, where Russia and China are cooperating to build a strong presence. Fears that such cooperation will extend to include North Korea and Iran are not unfounded. Many pundits believe that Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran have aligned themselves into a new Axis of Evil. According to Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation, they are in “expansionist mode,” seeking “much more land and power” and “coordinating their efforts to benefit each country’s goals.”

However, the immediate worries for America are from the Sino-Russian efforts, which have significantly expanded over the past decade. China’s northernmost point is 13 degrees of latitude from the Arctic Circle—that’s 1,443 km or roughly 900 miles. Yet, in 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping audaciously proclaimed China a “near-Arctic state,” launched an “Arctic strategy,” and resolved to make his country a “polar power.”

Cut to 2024. In July, four Chinese and Russian strategic bombers, all taking off for the first time from an airbase in northeast Russia, flew over the Chukchi and Bering Seas. In October, Chinese and Russian coast guard fleets conducted their first joint patrol of the Arctic. These forays followed joint naval exercises in the Bering Strait in 2022 and 2023. The two countries also signed a memorandum of understanding on maritime law enforcement in 2023.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/08/fear-of-a-name-why-are-the-media-and-law-enforcement-afraid-to-call-terror-what-it-is/

Shamsud-Din Jabbar posted videos declaring his support for ISIS and drove a pickup truck with an ISIS flag into a crowd in New Orleans. By so clearly associating his murderous rampage with a recognized terrorist group, Jabbar could not have intended more clearly for the incident to be a terrorist attack. In response, FBI assistant special agent in charge Althea Duncan said at a press conference, “This is not a terrorist event… simply improvised explosive devices.”

The Washington Post’s headline was, “Truck rams New Orleans crowd,” and only mentioned ISIS ties in the second subheading. NPR, NBC, and ABC all ran articles about the attack without using the words “terror,” “Islamic,” or “Islamism,” opting not to specify exactly what sort of “attack” it was.

Evidently, law enforcement, in addition to the press, is fearful of naming the problem. The FBI did later state in a press release that it was investigating the incident as a “terrorist attack,” but they should never have hesitated to call it such. Fear of calling terrorism what it is is extremely problematic in and of itself and draws a strong parallel to the Harry Potter series.

For most of the Harry Potter series, very few characters aside from Harry can bring themselves to even say the name of the most dangerous wizard of all time—Voldemort—not unlike the small number of politicians and law enforcement spokespeople who call radical Islam and terrorism what they are. Even Harry’s professors who teach defense and employees of the Ministry of Magic, the governing body in Harry’s world, generally can’t bring themselves to say Voldemort’s name, at least above a whisper. But as Harry’s friend Hermione so wisely puts it, “Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself.”