RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/elon-musk-department-of-government-efficiency-tesla-washington

It seems that the postmodern world is a conspiracy against great men. Bureaucracy now favors the firm over the founder, and the culture views those who accumulate too much power with suspicion. The twentieth century taught us to fear such men rather than admire them.

Elon Musk—who has revolutionized payments, automobiles, robotics, rockets, communications, and artificial intelligence—may be the closest thing we have to a “great man” today. He is the nearest analogue to the robber barons of the last century or the space barons of science fiction. Yet even our most accomplished entrepreneur appears no match for the managerial bureaucracy of the American state.

Musk will step down from his position leading the Department of Government Efficiency at the end of May. At the outset, the tech tycoon was ebullient, promising that DOGE would reduce the budget deficit by $2 trillion, modernize Washington, and curb waste, fraud, and abuse. His marketing plan consisted of memes and social media posts. Indeed, the DOGE brand itself was an ironic blend of memes, Bitcoin, and Internet humor.

Three months later, however, Musk is chastened. Though DOGE succeeded in dismantling USAID, modernizing the federal retirement system, and improving the Treasury Department’s payment security, the initiative as a whole has fallen short. Savings, even by DOGE’s fallible math, will be closer to $100 billion than $2 trillion. Washington is marginally more efficient today than it was before DOGE began, but the department failed to overcome the general tendency of governmental inertia.

Musk’s marketing strategy ran into difficulties, too. His Internet-inflected language was too strange for the average citizen. And the Left, as it always does, countered proposed cuts with sob stories and personal narratives, paired with a coordinated character-assassination attempt portraying Musk as a greedy billionaire eager to eliminate essential services and children’s cancer research.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/14/on-key-issues-behind-tariffs-trump-holds-an-edge-barely-ii-tipp-poll/

President Donald Trump has expended a lot of effort negotiating new tariffs with America’s trade partners. But will tariffs lead to lower income taxes and more factories at work in the U.S., as suggested? A plurality, though not a majority, of Americans say they will, and support them for that reason, according to the latest I&I/TIPP Poll.

With hot debate over tariffs ongoing and current talks with trade partners, tariffs have been in the media spotlight this year.

Seeking to find out how Americans see tariffs, the I&I/TIPP Poll posed the following statement to respondents: “President Trump recently stated that tariffs could lower or even eliminate income taxes for people earning under $200,000 a year.”

They were then asked: “Does this make you: More likely to support tariffs; Less likely to support tariffs; Neither more nor less likely to support tariffs; Not sure.”

The tally showed that a plurality of 32% answered “more likely,” while 25% said “less likely.” Another 30% said “neither more nor less,” but 13% said they weren’t sure.

Once again, demographic differences show there’s not really much overall common agreement.

Start with political affiliation. Only 16% of Democrats say they’re likely to support tariffs if they cut income taxes, while 54% of Republicans and 25% of independents do. Of the “less likely” responses, 37% are Democratic, only 15% Republican and 23% independent. As for the “neither” responses, 34% are Dem, 22% are GOP, and 36% come from indie voters.

https://gatesofvienna.net/2025/05/tarnishing-the-haloes-of-the-saints/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

NB: This following essay by Baron Boddisey first appeared at the Gates of Vienna website. It recounts events that began one dozen years ago, but whose repercussions only continue to intensify in the communist endgame.

The death of David Horowitz last month stirred up all the old traumas from the fall of 2013 prompted by the controversy over Diana West’s book American Betrayal.

Mr. Horowitz was canonized immediately after his passing, but I couldn’t bear to read all the encomia to the saint — which were legion — that appeared on almost every conservative website.

At the risk of speaking ill of the dead, I feel obliged to note that Saint David behaved in a less than saintly fashion towards my friend Diana West, beginning in the late summer of 2013. He led an unseemly charge against her, one that descended into the gutter from the git-go. He and his fellow polemicists mounted ad-hominem attacks, calling her vile names and disparaging her alleged mental state. On those rare occasions when they attempted to engage the content of her writing, they invariably set up straw men to knock down, in an attempt to refute arguments that she never made.

Diana was blacklisted that fall by all the mainstream outlets of Conservatism Inc., with only the smaller blogs and forums coming to her defense and allowing her a voice. Gates of Vienna was the largest platform among those that supported her, which — given the diminutive stature of this blog — indicates how far into the Outer Darkness she had been cast.

So what was all the fuss about?

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Creative destruction is a school in economics, popularized by Joseph Schumpeter[2], that explains the process by which innovation obsoletes older processes, equipment and products. While disruptive in the short term, it is the driving force for long term economic growth and progress. In Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction (1973), Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “It is only through disruption and confusion that we grow, jarred by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own.” On November 5, 2011 in an op-ed in London’s The Guardian, Naomi Wolf noted: “Democracy is disruptive…there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption.”

Disruption is the antidote to complacency, the enemy of innovation, and it is challenging to those of the status quo – those whom we call the “establishment.” However, disruption is not always good. We can think of dozens of instances – a child throwing food at the table; protestors shutting down university classes; strikers blocking the entrance to a grocery store. But throughout history, progress has thrived on disruption. We see the beginnings of such positive disruption in Washington today: addressing the border crisis, eliminating fraud and waste embedded in federal bureaucracies and confronting anti-Semitism on college campuses. On the other hand, we are also witness to negative disruption: the, seemingly random, use of tariffs by President Trump and belittling comments about allies by Vice President Vance.

That President Trump is a disruptive force is a fact universally accepted. The question we and the world face: Is President Trump a disruptive force for good or bad? “There are times,” Karl Zinsmeister, White House chief domestic policy director 2006-2009, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, “when some messy political demolition and noisy rebuilding are necessary.” Is this such a time? I believe it is.