RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/24/joe-biden-the-mainstream-media-and-the-republic-we-couldnt-keep/

I like Megan McArdle, the conservatarian political columnist for The Washington Post. I really do. I think she’s smart and talented and interesting. Best of all, she’s not someone who is bound by ideology or political allegiances. Ideology and allegiance are good in some cases and in some occupations, but not in hers and not at her paper. McCardle is as close to a “truth teller” as exists in the mainstream media today, and I appreciate that.

All of that said, McArdle’s column this week leaves me nearly despondent, mostly because it’s hopelessly naïve and, as a result, exposes the ridiculousness of the current American predicament. McArdle starts her piece by expressing sympathy for former President Joe Biden with his recent cancer diagnosis, but then jumps right in, openly and aggressively criticizing those who hid Biden’s mental incapacity from the nation for the better part of four years. So far, so good. Biden deserves our sympathy, while his enablers deserve our detestation. Unfortunately, it’s downhill from there, as McArdle uses her platform to call for Democrats and even her colleagues in the media to reflect on their treachery and determine how best to fix things going forward:

I’m convinced that deep institutional soul-searching is due in many quarters and that this conversation is too important to delay, even at the risk of adding to the Biden family’s distress. It is impossible to read “Original Sin” … without reaching a horrifying conclusion: The most powerful nation in the world and its nuclear arsenal were left in the hands of a man who could not reliably recognize people he’d known for years, maintain his train of thought, or speak in coherent sentences.

That’s great. I agree that these are reasonable conclusions, but I still have some questions. How is it that some of us reached those same conclusions in 2020? How did some of us already know this would happen before he won the White House? Why do some people—Democrats and the mainstream media—pretend that they need this book to explain to them now what many of us knew all along? More to the point, does anyone actually believe that the people who need to do soul searching will actually do it? Or, if they do, that they will come to the conclusion that they screwed up and put the nation in great jeopardy?

Here are some predictions, although not particularly bold ones: No one, save maybe Megan McArdle, will do any soul-searching. No one will resolve to do anything differently in the future. No one in the media will suffer any negative career repercussions for hiding Biden’s decline and openly lying to the American people. Indeed, some—like the execrable Jake Tapper—will get rich off it. Most notably, no one in the Democratic Party or Joe Biden’s inner circle will suffer any sort of legal, financial, or professional consequences for their overt and inarguable criminality. If anything, they’ll be lauded by their fellow partisans as heroes and saviors, brave men and women who did what had to be done to save “our democracy” ™ from the bad people. In short, nothing good will come of any of this.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/democrats_confederacy_of_dunces.html

Three hundred years ago, the remarkable satirist Jonathan Swift wrote, “When a true Genius appears in the World, you may know him by this infallible Sign; that the Dunces are all in Confederacy against him.”

Now, you might not be President Trump’s biggest fan.  Perhaps you are glad that he has returned to the White House but look forward to one of his capable lieutenants succeeding him in four years.  But I would argue that never has a larger collection of absolute idiots assembled to oppose an American leader, and for that reason alone, Donald J. Trump is probably a genius.  (And a very stable one at that!)

Right now, Democrats are waging a public relations campaign in support of criminal illegal aliens.  They are trying to make military-aged males with gang tattoos look sympathetic.  Sure, many of them have been accused of engaging in human-trafficking, drug-smuggling, identity theft, and fraud, but Democrats say these “new” Americans are just like us.  Sure, foreign nationals are regularly accused of rape and murder across the United States, but Democrats are quick to point out that “old” Americans commit heinous crimes, too.  Sure, illegal aliens are a huge financial burden to the prison system, welfare programs, health care, public schools, and local communities, but Democrats insist that it’s “racist” to tell the truth out loud.  

While President Trump is rounding up violent criminals who have no right to be in the United States, Democrats are crying in front of cameras and promising to bring them back to a neighborhood near you.  In four months, they’ve shown more love for foreigners who broke into our country than they’ve ever shown for American victims of transnational cartels!

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/05/at_least_for_now_trump_s_dhs_blocks_harvard_s_international_student_money_mill.html

According to Grok, roughly 27% of Harvard’s student body—or around 6,800 students—consists of people from overseas. Given that they pay full fare (no federal student loans, grants, or scholarships for them), that works out to around $400 million in tuition revenue annually (6,800 x $57,000). Grok also estimates that, of those 6,800 foreign students, roughly 15% come from China.

You can see, then, how important those foreign students are to Harvard. And that’s why it was such a devastating blow when, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem wrote to Harvard this afternoon informing it that, because it refused to abide by its Civil Rights obligations, despite two warnings, the United States government was revoking its privilege (not its right, but its privilege) to host foreign students and workers:

Here’s the letter’s text, in case you can’t get the attachment to open:

I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked.

As I explained to you in my April letter, it is a privilege to enroll foreign students, and it is also a privilege to employ aliens on campus. All universities must comply with Department of Homeland Security requirements, including reporting requirements under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program regulations, to maintain this privilege. As a result of your refusal to comply with multiple requests to provide the Department of Homeland Security pertinent information while perpetuating an unsafe campus environment that is hostile to Jewish students, promotes pro-Hamas sympathies, and employs racist “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies, you have lost this privilege.

The revocation of your Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification means that Harvard is prohibited from having any aliens on F- or J- nonimmigrant status for the 2025-2026 academic school year. This decertification also means that existing aliens on F- or J- nonimmigrant status must transfer to another university in order to maintain their nonimmigrant status.

This action should not surprise you and is the unfortunate result of Harvard’s failure to comply with simple reporting requirements.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/05/21/joe-biden-cognitive-decline-biggest-scandal-modern-history/

News of former president Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis prompted Americans of all persuasions to offer prayers and sympathy. Human decency like that, transcending political differences, is laudable. Whatever our political differences, Biden and his family deserve our compassion.

What’s unusual is the scepticism – indeed, cynicism – surrounding the announcement, which came just before the release of a major book about Biden’s cognitive decline and its cover-up. There have been questions about whether officials knew about the cancer while he was in office and hid that from the public. Those doubts have been voiced by numerous specialists, including physicians who held high positions in Democratic administrations.

This cynicism is the bitter fruit of four years of the Biden administration’s deceit on countless basic issues, including the former president’s health. Americans were repeatedly told that “the president is mentally sharp and incredibly energetic”. That simply wasn’t true, and everyone knew it.

Still, some Democrats are attempting to downplay everything that happened over the past four years, as if it is old news that can be safely buried now that Donald Trump is in the White House. They won’t get away with it. The scandal surrounding Biden’s cognitive decline is the biggest in modern US political history.

In fact, there are three scandals, each reinforcing the other two. First, and most obviously, there is the blunt fact of the former president’s fading mental capacity. Second, there was the concerted cover-up, both by Democratic politicians and the mainstream media. The third is the still-unanswered question: who was actually making presidential decisions? Who controlled the auto-pen that signed almost every order from the Oval Office? To rephrase Senator Howard Baker’s pointed question during the Nixon-Watergate hearings: “What did the president not know? And when did he not know it?”

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/22/everybody-rejoice-paul-krugman-is-predicting-a-recession/

“We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.” – Paul Krugman, November 2016

“Joe Biden will eventually preside over a soaring, ‘morning in America’-type recovery.” – Paul Krugman, November 2020.

“Slower growth is certain. For 2025, I see little or no GDP growth, rising unemployment, and persistent inflation.” – Paul Krugmann, May 2025

If you want an accurate gauge of future economic conditions, look no further than Paul “Nobel-Prize-Winning-Economist” Krugman. He has a solid record of being exactly wrong, as the above quotations show.

So, the fact that he is now predicting stagflation should give everyone a boost of confidence that we are headed for a second Trump boom.

Krugman’s new prediction comes, in fact, just as signs are looking up.

The stock market is back in positive territory since President Donald Trump took office, and is up 7% compared with a year ago.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/22/are-some-racist-slurs-okay/

One reason why the public turned on DEI was its insistence that roughly 70 percent of the country was stereotyped as victimizers by virtue of their skin color.

In contrast, the other “diverse” 30 percent were de facto considered the victimized.

In such absurd binaries, the left returned to the old “one-drop” rule of the antebellum South, suggesting that anyone with any nonwhite ancestry was a minority victim.

And once that Marxist-inspired dichotomy was institutionalized, a corollary was established that the self-declared racially oppressed cannot themselves be racist oppressors.

But human nature is universal and transcends race.

One lamentable characteristic of our species is that we are all prone to excess and crudity if not deterred, especially once civilizational restraint is lost.

We are now witnessing examples of what follows when anti-white stereotyping and racism are given a pass—as long as the purveyors can claim their victimhood entitles them to bias.

Recently, WNBA basketball stars Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark got into one of their now-characteristic on-court rivalries. But this time around, Reese mocked Clark as a “White gyal [sic] running from the fade.”

Reese assumes that her status as a Black star grants her immunity from backlash—a privilege unlikely to be extended if the roles were reversed.

Or is her crassness a simple reflection that 60 years after the Civil Rights movement, it is deemed cool or deservedly acceptable to use the word “white” derogatorily?

After all, loose-cannon Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), in one of her accustomed racialist rants, recently went after her party’s big Democratic donors, who raised a record amount of money for Kamala Harris’s short-lived campaign.

Crockett played the race card when claiming that Democratic insiders were already backing the next party nominee as the “safest white boy.”

Her racist irritation is puzzling. After all, two out of the last four Democratic presidential nominees have been African-Americans.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/donald-trump-force-conservatism-doge-deportations-higher-education

Conservatism has two modes: peacetime and wartime. When the social order is stable and healthy, conservatives seek to cultivate and maintain institutions. In times of chaos, a different kind of conservatism emerges, focused not on preservation but reform.

Donald Trump is a wartime conservative. Since his first presidential campaign, he has argued that America is in decline and requires drastic measures to restore its national greatness. In the opening stretch of his second term, he has focused on three policies—mass deportations, cost-cutting through DOGE, and higher education reform—that are aggressive and have caused distress across the political spectrum. Some center-right critics have fretted about the president’s potential “overreach,” while the usual voices on the left have accused him of “fascism” and “authoritarianism.”

Neither analysis is correct, but both gesture at the same thing: Trump is using force. American culture has changed to such a degree that these measures, none of them unprecedented, now appear radical. Elites have become so habituated to highly regulated, feminized environments that any hint of force causes apprehension.

Educated Americans have trouble imagining the use of force, largely because they have isolated themselves from it. Ivy League faculty members cannot fathom, say, putting their hands on an MS-13 gang member and physically ejecting him from the country. The educated classes have become so inured to the physical world that many perceive a pink slip or reduced research funding as an act of genuine violence.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/when-sharia-gets-a-tax-break/

In America, tax-exempt status isn’t a loophole. It’s a privilege—one meant to serve the public good, not undermine it.

Under 26 U.S. Code § 501(c)(3), that privilege is reserved for institutions that are religious, charitable, educational, or scientific in nature. But the law is explicit: these organizations may not promote criminal conduct, engage in substantial political lobbying, or advocate ideologies that undermine the U.S. Constitution.

Yet that’s exactly what many Islamic nonprofits are doing—with the IRS’s blessing, and in some cases, with taxpayer funding.

These groups hide behind “religious freedom.”

What they’re really advancing is Sharia—a totalitarian legal system that stands in direct opposition to American law and values.

They preach that man-made laws are illegitimate.

That Islam’s legal code is supreme.

And American citizens are subsidizing it.

Take Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California. Marketed as America’s first Islamic liberal arts college, it presents itself as an academic institution committed to interfaith dialogue and scholarship.

But behind the polished branding lies a very different reality.

Zaytuna’s curriculum includes Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller)—a classical Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that is explicitly anti-Western in its rulings.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/liz-peek-biden-cancer-announcement-has-my-sympathy-my-skepticism

Former President Joe Biden announced over the weekend that he had just recently been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer. A statement from the former president’s office identified the cancer as “aggressive” but also “hormone sensitive,” indicating the possibility of “effective management.”

The news generated an outpouring of sympathy from friends and foes alike. President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social, “Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis. We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.” We share that concern and optimism; we hope the former president beats the disease.

But, like much of the public, our initial sympathy has turned skeptical. Doctors say that it is highly unlikely anyone could be “suddenly” diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. Especially one which, according to Biden’s statement, had metastasized into his bone.

Nearly every man over 50 gets checked regularly for prostate cancer. Certainly, a U.S. president, and especially one under close surveillance for age-related illnesses, would have been examined rigorously for a disease that strikes one in seven men during their lifetime.

Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, an oncologist and Democrat policy-maker, told Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, that Biden had certainly had the disease for “more than several years.” “He did not develop it in the last 100, 200 days. He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021. I don’t think there’s any disagreement about that.”