RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/20/its-morning-in-america-again/

When Donald Trump takes the oath of office today, he will do something no president has managed in modern times. He’s getting a second chance to make a first impression.

Normally, when a president enters his second term, the country is already tired of him. He’s a lame duck. He struggles with whether to keep certain people on or find fresh blood, which usually results in the B-team taking over. Everyone immediately starts talking about the next presidential race. Scandals tend to surface.

Today, Trump is like a breath of fresh air after a long, dark, and dreary winter. The team he’s assembled is completely new, bursting with top talent eager to kick reforms into high gear. Where incumbents usually take their second terms leisurely, riding on their successes, Trump’s second-term agenda is more aggressive and wide-ranging than his first.

If Trump had won reelection in 2020, the press and his political opposition (we know, we repeat ourselves), would have simply continued to act out the same script – Trump is a dangerous, corrupt, fascist monster who must be stopped. The effort to kick him out of office would have been relentless. Never Trumpers would still be a force in the Republican Party.

Instead, Trump is like the new kid on the block. The terrible Biden years – with the endless string of failures, embarrassments, incompetence, and lies – are finally over. There’s hope in the air again. Hope that food prices will come down. That the government will stop wasting trillions of dollars. That the economy will kick into high gear and optimism will return. Hope that the cancel culture will be canceled and that the people around the president will at least be competent. Trump himself has more energy and enthusiasm – and far more experience – than he had eight years ago.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/will-the-left-disrupt-the-inauguration

Left-wing radicals have been mobilizing near the nation’s capital ahead of the January 20 inauguration, which has been moved indoors. Since summer, we have tracked D.C.’s radical networks—their movements, methods, and potential for violence. After George Floyd’s death in 2020, these groups learned that street protests could yield political gains. Now, with Donald Trump returning to the White House, they’re weighing their options.

This network is decentralized, adaptable, and steeped in organizing social unrest. Black Lives Matter messaging is fading, replaced by anti-Israel rhetoric. As Inauguration Day approaches, Communist militants and members of Antifa-aligned hubs have suggested storming the Capitol, bringing “direct action” to the streets, and obstructing law enforcement. If these demonstrations unfold, they will have been carefully planned and ideologically incited by professionals, some visible, others hidden.

The network spans college professors, nonprofit leaders, and masked and often troubled militants willing to engage in violence. Those less directly involved play a sophisticated inside-outside game, relying on prestigious NGOs to provide financing and logistics while maintaining arm’s length control over the more radical elements, which do the dirty work.

Key components of this infrastructure include legal organizations, violent demonstrators, street medics, propaganda specialists, and safehouses, indoctrination centers, and publications. Though some Antifa-aligned groups from prior riots have gone underground or merged, a core network of the most committed activists—veterans and new recruits alike—remains active and prepared.

This is their unmasking.

The militant Left organizes in the light and in the shadows. In the light, the Left has built a significant above-ground infrastructure that preaches abstract ideals—liberation, justice, equality—but operates with a sharper edge behind the scenes.

This upper level includes organizations such as the Open Society Foundations, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the National Lawyers Guild. These groups support a well-funded network that includes dozens of interlocking organizations, providing a level of legitimate infrastructure and cover for smaller nonprofits and other groups, which sometimes fraternize with street-level activists. (We reached out for comment to most of the groups named in this piece; unless otherwise indicated, they did not respond.)

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/trump-russia-advocacy/2025/01/14/id/1195050/

Former U.S. Senator Gordon Humphrey served on the Foreign Relations and the Armed Services Committees. He publishes a Russian-language YouTube channel, Nashi Emigranti, that tells America’s story to the Russian people.

The Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy document hit the nail on the head. “U.S. efforts to counter the exploitation of information by rivals have been tepid and fragmented.” Ironically, the Russian Academy of Sciences concurs, reporting in 2021 that the U.S. information war structure looks like “a dusty relic of a bygone era.” Both statements are factual and explain why the nation that invented the internet continues to lose the information war to despotic regimes. It should be no surprise that freedom has been retreating around the world for nearly two decades, imperiling our national security.

Nothing has changed significantly since the first Trump administration sounded the alarm. In his second term, with a Republican majority in each House, President-elect Trump has an opportunity to create a 21st century strategic messaging structure that can persuasively tell America’s story to the world while undermining despots by stoking the coals of discontent among those they misruled and abused. Think Putin, Xi, Khamenei, and Kim. The president should seize this new opportunity to put us on the offense in the battle of ideologies, a battle we must win or, in all likelihood, perish as a free and prosperous nation.

Broadly, our adversaries are on the attack, employing every means of hybrid warfare, from outright invasion, as in Ukraine, to sabotage, as in the severing of vital cables in the Baltic; to terrorism, as in the attempt, believed to be Russian, to hide incendiary devices in cargo meant for air shipment to the U.S.; to assassination plots, witness the November federal court indictment of three persons accused of plotting to kill Trump on behalf of Iran. In between increasingly frequent acts of attempted or actual violence, there is the daily poisoning of human minds by disinformation meant to confuse and demoralize. We’ve never faced anything like today’s hybrid war. But we’d better get used to it because it’s here to stay as long as there are evil regimes in the world.

To survive and triumph, we must bring to bear every instrument of national power. Trump has vowed to rebuild our armed forces, restore self-sufficiency in our defense industrial base, and protect essential infrastructure from cyberattacks. Those big programs reflect one of the president’s well-known business principles: Think big. But they will take years to accomplish.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/17/will-trump-finally-kick-men-out-of-womens-sports/

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.

Before US president-elect Donald Trump has even taken office, the Republicans are coming down hard on gender ideology. Trans athletes’ chances of beating women to scholarships, to medals and to a bloody pulp suffered a significant setback this week, when the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Bill was passed in the House of Representatives.

This bill is the first step in ensuring that schools receiving federal funding bar males from female sporting competitions. The legislation still needs to make it through the Senate to become law, but, interestingly, it did gain support from two Democrats. It seems that at least some left-leaning politicians are beginning to return to reality.

Of course, rather than being reported as a measure to ensure safety, privacy and fairness, ‘progressive’ media outlets from CNN to the Guardian described the proposed act as a ‘ban’ on transgender athletes. But what the bill ultimately aims to do is to amend Title IX – the federal law banning sex discrimination in schools – to define sex as ‘reproductive biology and genetics at birth’ rather than being based on magic gender words.

Transgender Delaware representative Sarah McBride (a white male politician whose election was widely heralded as ‘making history’ because he has long hair and wears a dress in public) claimed to be ‘mystified that this is a priority’. In fairness to the fella, it does seem strange that, when it comes to the trans vs women debate, the focus has been sport rather than, say, ensuring women in prison are no longer locked up with rapists.