RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-inauguration-democratic-party-2024-election

On Inauguration Day, January 20, all eyes will be fixed on the once and future president, Donald Trump, and the new faces that will populate his administration. That is proper. Trump has traversed an almost cinematic journey back to the White House, and he is associated with policies and personalities that, once in office, are certain to be fiercely controversial and magnificently entertaining.

The deep question in American politics today, however, concerns the fate of the Democratic Party. For Republicans, the future will look and sound like Trump and his band of young buccaneers, about to take Washington by storm. They may succeed or fail in arriving at their destination, but the direction is set. It is otherwise with the Democrats: the 2024 election shattered the party, and it isn’t clear how—or if—the pieces will come together again.

Democrats’ first step forward must be to acknowledge the scale of their repudiation by the voters. They failed to do this in 2016. Back then, they blamed Trump’s election on Facebook and fake news and the manipulations of that dark wizard, Vladimir Putin. The losers of 2016 absolved themselves from any responsibility for their defeat. Ever since, the Democrats have stumbled inside a house of mirrors, where wish is confused with reality and fatal errors appear as a mere failure to communicate. In that place of illusion, they embrace a mythology that elevates them into wondrous spirits—representatives of science, perpetual guardians of “our democracy,” saviors of a dying earth, adjudicators of perfect justice. By definition, only satanic forces could oppose such a chosen people. To abandon this mythology will be traumatic and identity-crushing. 

For change to be possible, party leaders must exert pressure—yet the Democrats are currently bereft of leaders. Joe Biden was a hollow figurehead, his performance in office hovering between comical and terrifying. Kamala Harris parachuted into that sock-puppet slot, and then spent $1 billion for the privilege of dancing with Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin. Tim Walz proved an embarrassment.

There are no heirs apparent, and the elder statesmen have served their cause badly. One might think that Bill Clinton would have something to say about triangulation and the forging of “New Democrats,” but his voice has grown quiet from disuse. Since 2016, the dominant Clinton has been Hillary—possibly the Platonic ideal of an out-of-touch elite. Nancy Pelosi is a brilliant tactician, but she resembles a spider at the center of its web: she cut the heart out of Biden’s candidacy to reduce the party’s loss by a few percentage points.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/19/this-is-not-the-dawn-of-a-new-fascist-era/

Is the US on the edge of a new fascist epoch? 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 Democrats and their media allies believed these accusations would be the key to electoral success, hoping to scare Americans into voting for Harris. Some even suggested Trump would throw Democrat politicians and commentators in jail once in office. Liz Cheney, the one-time rightist turned anti-Trumper, warned Americans this might be ‘the last real vote you ever get to cast’.

Yet these accusations did not ring true for most Americans. Similar nonsense charges have been hurled at far less worthy targets, like George W Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney. Perhaps this has desensitised Americans to Democrats crying ‘fascism’. In any case, a recent Gallup poll showed that only three per cent of voters described ‘elections / election reform / democracy’ as a key issue in 2024, well behind economic problems or immigration. Notably, voters in swing states said that Harris, not Trump, was a bigger threat to democracy.

MAGA and similar movements, such as the National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany and Reform in the UK, have grown in stature by leading a rebellion against unrestrained immigration, rising crime and the post-nationalist ethos of contemporary capitalism. To be sure, they display some worrying, right-wing tendencies.

Yet in economic terms, at least, Joe Biden, Keir Starmer and other progressives are closer to embracing corporatist ideas, which any fascist might recognise, than Trump or his doppelgangers. Critical here is the central notion of fascism. ‘At its fullest development’, writes Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism, fascism ‘redrew the frontiers between private and public, sharply diminishing what had been untouchably private’.

Under Mussolini, for example, private property remained and powerful corporations thrived. But only, as Il Duce himself suggested, if they pledged, ‘formal adherence to the regime’. Mussolini relied heavily on large landowners and companies to help finance the March on Rome. Once in power, Mussolini, who viewed himself as a ‘revolutionary’ transforming society, saw the state as ‘the moving centre of economic life’. He successfully co-opted Italian industrialists to build new infrastructure, as well as the military, which he used to fight off Italy’s historically militant and socialist-oriented unions.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/19/trumps-second-term-nominees-competence-under-fire-amid-partisan-hearings/

Here we are, more or less midway through the confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s key nominations.  Among those we’ve heard from are Pete Hegseth (nominated to be Secretary of Defense), Pamela Bondi (Attorney General), Marco Rubio (State), Scott Bessent (Treasury), Doug Burgum (Interior), Lee Zeldin (EPA), John Ratcliffe (CIA), and Kristi Noem (Homeland Security). Among the most notable still to come are Kash Patel (FBI), RFK Jr. (Health Human Services), and Tulsi Gabbard (National Intelligence).

I have listened to longish bits of several of the hearings. I think there are two main takeaways from the festivities.

One is the coordinated, ideologically fired attack-dog tactics of the Democrats.

The other is the strength, seriousness, and general competence of Trump’s nominees. The contrast with the dramatis personae for Trump’s first go-around is striking. Even more striking is the contrast with Joe Biden’s consiglieri. Could there be more disparate personalities than Pete Hegseth and Lloyd Austin, Marco Rubio and Antony Blinken, Pamela Bondi and Merrick Garland, and Scott Bessent and Janet Yellen?

As to the first, the behavior of the Democrats makes the term “hearing” totally inappropriate.  These struggle sessions are not hearings but yappings. One and all, the Democrat senators seem to be pursuing two ends. One is to take as much airtime as possible to preen and publicize their own views. The focus is not on eliciting the opinions or gauging the experience or competence of the candidates. Rather, it is to grandstand.

The second end is to cater to the far-left Democrat playbook.  Do you think that the 2020 election was fairly won by Joe Biden?  Are you a mindless Trump loyalist?  Do you have an enemies list?  Will you pursue the enlightened “green energy” policies favored by the Biden administration?

Many of the exchanges—no, “exchanges” is not right, because that suggests a respectful give-and-take.  Make that, “harangues”: many of the harangues demonstrated the Democrats’ mastery of the art of projection: accusing your opponents of the bad behavior that you yourself are guilty of. (One witty commentator offered this pithy formulation: “Shorter: I accuse them of doing what we did and they must be stopped.”)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/inauguration-worries-and-unexpected-events/

One week before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, in his final press briefing, outgoing National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan made a cryptic comment.

“I hope this is my last time at this podium, at least for a while,” Sullivan said. “The only thing that would bring me back is an unexpected event in the next few days, which, as you all know, is totally possible, given everything you’ve seen over the past years.”

Did Sullivan speak generally or did he have specific situations in mind?

Consider an internal memo sent by Derrick Jaastad, the executive director of the Veterans’ Health Association’s Office of Emergency Management. Dated Dec. 10, the memo requested two paramedics, two registered nurses, and either two physicians, nurse practitioners or physicians’ assistants for the period between January 17 and 21. The volunteers needed up-to-date certifications, experience in surgery or emergencies, and clearance from the Secret Service.

Such a request is unprecedented.

Jaastad’s request and Sullivan’s comments reflect the distinct possibility of violent mayhem preceding the inauguration, if not during the ceremony itself. That mayhem could include another attempt to assassinate Trump.

As in recent inaugurations, Washington, D.C. is on lockdown. Almost 25,000 law enforcement officers — including 8,000 troops from the National Guard — will be responsible for security. Contractors installed nearly 30 miles of security fencing in the city.

“A large chunk of downtown Washington — stretching about two miles from the White House to the Capitol — will be closed to vehicular traffic, with entry points blocked with concrete barriers, garbage trucks and other heavy items,” Reuters reported.

The Department of Energy even is flying special helicopters over the city to measure radiation levels in case terrorists plan to plant a small nuclear weapon. The department’s Nuclear Energy Support Team conducted similar flights between Dec. 2 and Dec. 13.