RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/multimedia/us-china-tariff-agreement-will-it-stick

Charles Fain Lehman, Ilya Shapiro, Daniel Di Martino, and Tal Fortgang discuss the deal between the U.S. and China to temporarily lower tariffs, Trump’s executive order on prescription drug prices, and Chicago-isms Pope Leo XIV should bring to the Vatican.

Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today, Ilya Shapiro, constitutional law guy at the Manhattan Institute, Daniel Di Martino, Argentinian policy expert, politics expert at the Manhattan Institute apparently, and Tal Fortgang, legal policy guy at the Manhattan Institute. Tal works for Ilya, so Tal, don’t mess this up. Otherwise, it’ll come back in your review.

Ilya Shapiro: But by works for me, that means he writes a bunch of stuff. I read a third of it and enjoy it. That’s our professional relationship.

Charles Fain Lehman: It’s a good review. Tal, quote that. We have this on record. I want to take us into the big news of the day. Earlier this morning, I think, I was asleep, but China and United States announced a 90-day temporary reduction in the mutual tariffs. So they’re down on the US side from 145 percent to 30 percent. It’s a major de-escalation as we’re recording this, the markets are up like a thousand points, although God knows what will be happening by the time it comes out. So don’t get mad at me listeners if it’s changed. Daniel, where are we on this front? You’re the econ guy on the panel. Is this a good development? Is this a bad development? What do you think?

Daniel Di Martino:  I think the Chinese negotiation team probably knows more about what the U.S. wants than we do. At this point, I don’t know what’s the goal of U.S. policy with the tariffs on China. If the goal was decoupling from China, then you should have wanted to keep the tariffs, not lift them. And if the goal was to get them to lower the tariffs, well, now we have a higher tariffs than we did before. So it seems like, at least by those two very different goals that are exclusionary from each other, we aren’t achieving anything.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/murder-ballads/

It didn’t start with Che Guevara, but Che, surely, is one of the major milestones along the way. By all accounts, he was a psychopath, delighting in the summary executions of purported ideological enemies, including children. But that one famous photograph of him wiped all the blood away. A picture cannot only speak a thousand words; it can erase a million crimes. For young people all over the West in the 1960s and thereafter, Che was a hero, period. In 2008, the top Hollywood director Stephen Soderbergh made a hagiographic movie about Che that ran just under four and a half hours (it was ultimately released in two parts); the title role was played by Benicio Del Toro, whose research for the part included a trip to Cuba, where, he later said, he met “tons of people who loved this man.” To be sure, it’s one thing to encounter Che fans in Castro’s Cuba, where the people have been propagandized to a fare-thee-well and where dissenting views are punished severely; it’s another thing to see free people strolling down the streets of Western cities in Che t-shirts – presumably ignorant of the true heroes who won them their freedom but enthralled by a man who fought to destroy it.

Six years after Che’s death, an infant was born in a manger – no, not really – in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He later lived in Houston, where he served nine jail terms for crimes involving drugs, trespass, theft, and aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. Still later he moved to Minneapolis, where he was detained for drug possession and suffered a drug overdose. On May 25, 2020, he was stopped by police on suspicion of passing counterfeit money at a grocery store, and died while resisting arrest by a police officer named Derek Chauvin. News of the death of George Floyd spread around the world like wildfire. Mass protests were held everywhere. Countless Floyd murals were created. Riots caused billions of dollars in damage. Leftists used Floyd’s death to spread the lie that hundreds if not thousands of innocent blacks die each year  at the hands of white American cops (the real number is in the double digits). As a result of this lie, the movement to defund the police won widespread support, and in many cities the police actually were defunded. The fact that Floyd had died not because of Chauvin’s actions but because of the drugs in his system didn’t matter to Chauvin’s judge, prosecutor, and jury, who knew that if they didn’t throw the book at Chauvin – who ended up being sentenced to twenty-two and a half years in prison – they’d be torn to bits by the mob. By the end of the summer, like Che, his fellow perpetrator of violence, Floyd had been canonized by the left, venerated as a martyr. Last May it was announced that, inevitably, Floyd would be the subject of a movie. Daddy Changed the World was being developed by Radar Pictures, with Floyd’s daughter as executive producer. I can’t wait.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/13/epic-narrative-fail-irs-revenue-surges-9-despite-predictions-of-decline/

Back in March, unnamed “senior tax officials” told the Washington Post that the “rapid demolition of parts of the IRS” was going to result in a 10% plunge in revenues this spring.  

Actual result: Revenues are up 9% compared with the first four months of last year.

We heard repeated horror stories about DOGE’s devastating spending cuts, too.

Actual result: Spending is up 7% over last year.

Are you noticing a trend here?

According to the Washington Post, “Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.”

That story was published on March 22 and was widely covered by the rest of the corporate media.

So … just how accurate were these “three people with knowledge of tax projections”?

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/12/332875/

Secure borders and stationary populations were considered the mark of emerging civilization by classical historians. In contrast to nomadism and constant strife over disputed territory, peoples who had clearly defined and protected borders ascended to statehood, maintained a distinct culture, and achieved greater prosperity and security.

In contrast, what we suffered from 2021 to 2025 was unprecedented. It was an intentional administration effort to de-civilize the nation by destroying its borders—as if to return to the premodern era, when there were no clearly defined or secure borders, and nomadic peoples migrated as they pleased.

Stranger still, illegal aliens were at times given precedence over citizens—as immigration law was simply discarded.

Without IDs, illegal aliens boarded U.S. flights, while the government ordered citizens to obtain more secure “real” IDs.

Some 8,500 veteran soldiers were drummed out of the military for refusing the experimental mRNA vaccinations. Yet 10 million simply walked across the southern border into America, without a care from the Biden administration whether they were vaccinated, ill, or had criminal records.

Any American citizen pulled over for speeding with an invalid driver’s license, while trafficking eight illegal aliens without identification, would be jailed and charged with felony counts. Not Abrego Garcia—the violent spousal abuser, M-13 gang-member, and previously deported illegal alien. He was neither arrested nor even cited by the officers who pulled him over.

One of the great hallmarks of Roman civilization and subsequent Western civilization was its ability to create large cities by importing clean water, removing waste through sewers, and collecting garbage from the streets. Even in the age before microbiology, ancient and premodern city planners knew the connection between cleanliness and epidemics and how to lessen disease through sanitation.

But in the last two decades, our major cities have been de-civilizing. Citizens are told not to flush non-biodegradable plastics down their toilets, both to preserve the environment and to ensure municipal septic systems work properly. They are reminded to pick up their pets’ excrement on sidewalks and in parks. For purposes of collective health, they are taught not to urinate, spit, or defecate in public areas.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/05/dei-still-lurks-in-local-government/

Progress at the federal level in rolling back DEI will be slow to affect common citizens if we don’t realize what’s still in place locally, in cities like South Bend.

The right believes that it has won the war on DEI. The Trump administration is purging it from the federal government. Several states have followed suit. Corporations are pulling back their long-feigned support of diversity initiatives, and universities are retreating as well — if only out of fear of losing federal dollars. But the cancer of DEI has had a long time to metastasize at the local level before this recent charge against it at the highest echelons of government, the market, and the academy. DEI still needs to be eliminated from local government, where it receives less scrutiny but has an enduring pernicious effect.

Take South Bend, Ind., for example. It’s a small, post-industrial Midwestern city. It’s also one of the smallest cities in the country with a race- and gender-based public spending program.

I worked for South Bend as an engineer for seven months. One of the first tasks I was given was to calculate the race and gender quotas for an electric vehicle charger project. Wanting to conduct the task properly and legally, I decided to research the basis of the city’s race-based spending program. In doing so, however, I discovered that the program has an incredibly weak legal basis and a shrouded origin story.

Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg founded the city government’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion by executive order in 2016. Around that time, he ordered the director of public works to begin applying racial and gender quotas to public works contracts. The city’s legal team rightly indicated to the mayor that such quotas could not be assigned at a whim, and that a series of Supreme Court decisions clearly delineates the strict constitutional requirements for government actions involving suspect classifications such as race and gender.