RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-tariffs-did-not-raise-prices-slowed-inflation/

The tariff doomer hype promised utter catastrophe.

Trump tariffs: When consumers should expect inflation, price hikes to hit wallets – CNBCNearly 90% of Americans expect tariffs to raise prices, Gallup poll finds – CBS News

I wonder who told them to expect that?

Trump’s Tariffs Would Boost Inflation, Shrink the Economy, Trump’s tariff plan amounts to a $3 trillion tax hike – Senate Committee on the Budget

Tariffs May Push Up Inflation Just As It Was Getting Better – Investopedia

Trump’s Tariff Would Cost the Typical American Household Roughly $1,500 Each Year – Center for American Progress

Trump’s tariffs could cost American households $5,200 annually – Center for American Progress

Which one was it? $5,200 or $1,500?

Well the numbers are in and the hype is dead.

Trump tariffs have little impact on prices so far, defying grim forecasts – Politico

Inflation eased after Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, defying fears – ABC News

The experts win again.

Fed Governor Adriana Kugler said Monday that the administration’s new taxes on imports are still “pretty high” and that she expects inflation to rise and growth to slow soon.

Any day now, says a former fellow with the Center for American Progress nominated by Biden.

They want America to fail. If it succeeds, it’ll raise questions about them, won’t it?

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/15/one-of-trumps-most-important-executive-orders-went-entirely-unnoticed/

Not long after Michelino Sunseri, a professional mountain runner, finished a race across Grand Teton last fall, he found himself on the receiving end of a Justice Department criminal charge. His offense? Running on a closed trail, for which he could end up serving six months in jail.

We are not making this up.

Last Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to prevent such gross abuses. It is one of the most important – and underappreciated – actions he’s taken.

The “crime” Sunseri committed wasn’t a federal law passed by Congress. It was a crime invented by the National Park Service – one of some 300,000 federal crimes (although nobody knows exactly how many there are) that unelected bureaucrats have conjured up when writing regulations.

What’s more, many of these regulatory crimes are “strict liability” offenses, which means that you don’t need to have criminal intent to be charged with a crime.

“This status quo is absurd and unjust,” Trump says in his executive order. “It allows the executive branch to write the law, in addition to executing it. That situation can lend itself to abuse and weaponization by providing government officials tools to target unwitting individuals.”

All true. And deeply disturbing to anyone who cares about civil liberties.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/14/donald-trump-has-scrambled-the-old-class-allegiances/

US president Donald Trump has disrupted the nature of class politics. In a reversal of long-standing allegiances, working-class Americans – including many minorities – have shifted towards the MAGA right. Meanwhile, the well-educated, the corporate elites and the government-dependent have generally veered leftwards.

Rather than the relatively simple Marxist notion of a proletarian conflict with the bourgeoisie, we are seeing a more splintered and nuanced class politics across the West. These divisions are not simply driven by income, race or education, but increasingly also by how people earn their living, and how tariffs, policies and regulations impact their daily lives. These new class tensions threaten to push politics towards the fringes, both left and right. As society frays, the era of consensus politics is firmly at an end.

Until last year, the oligarchy that dominates much of the world economy (and that of the US) reliably allied with the political establishment, whether in Davos, Washington, London, Ottawa or Brussels. They embraced many of the woke positions on gender, race and especially climate, while largely disdaining MAGA as well as more traditional Republicans.

As a result, in the US, the main beneficiaries of the much-discussed oligarchic ‘dark money’ have been, contrary to the general media perception, the Democrats. Big-spending oligarchs like Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and Marc Benioff helped Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris raise well over $1.5 billion – the highest figure in history – for her losing campaign.

Now that some oligarchs, like X owner Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have come out for Trump, the woke left has started to finally push back against their power over US politics. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have launched a ‘fighting oligarchy tour’ to wild applause in the largely oligarch-owned mainstream media. In the same vein, the Atlantic, owned by Steve Jobs’s widow, has denounced Musk’s oligarchic embrace of ‘strongman politics’. Progressives were far less concerned when Google camped out at the Obama White House (visiting 427 times during his administration) or when Harris scooped up big cash from oligarchs.

Perhaps the biggest political divide between the oligarchs comes from how they make their money. Many of those rallying to Trump actually build things and compete directly with China. Most obviously, this includes Elon Musk, who sources from China but also competes with its industrial machine at both Tesla and SpaceX.

Another important component of the right-wing oligarchical shift is the ‘defence bros’, like Palantir co-founders Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey. These are mostly habitués of the defence and space centres in Texas, Florida and southern California. In these places, they are building what could be a MAGA-friendly tech base. Military tech and space projects, which for security reasons must be built in the US, require factory space, skilled workers, reasonable housing costs and, as one executive told me, ‘good places to blow things up’. For this, he added, the wide open spaces of Texas are a unique blessing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/from-critical-consciousness-to-oikophobia/

The widespread campus protests against Israel that followed the savage attacks by Hamas on our ally and fellow liberal democracy, were unprecedented in their solidarity with terrorist organizations representing a religion fundamentally opposed to modern Western civilization and its Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian roots.

Sadly and shamefully, demonizing Israel is unexceptional and expected from Western progressives and Leftists––purveyors of a “history” that traffics in unhistorical, ideologically mendacious assertions about imperialism and colonialism. These critics have adopted those lies and made them, along with specious charges of “racism” and “genocide,” the original sin of Israel’s creation and continued existence. The UN also has adopted those malign tropes, and made Israel the “Jew of nations,” the global villain par excellence, while also supporting and funding Hamas’ jihadist violence.

A Western civilizational innovation––critical consciousness, the self-examination and criticism of one’s own political community, practice, and values––has now gone rancid and led to a self-loathing oikophobia, the irrational fear, loathing, and hatred of one’s own culture and fellow citizens that encourages our enemies and rivals.

Domestic anti-Americanism, for example, has invaded our culture and schools, and has become a spurious token of intellectual sophistication, “citizen of the world” cosmopolitanism, and the hallmark of critical consciousness. In reality it is slow-motion suicide dressed up as high fashion.

Contemporary Anti-Americanism began with Marxist sympathizers and fellow-travelers, and spread during the Cold War as a weapon for the Left. It flourished in Europe, which had influential communist parties. The European Left, as French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote, “has a grudge against America mainly because the latter has succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code.