RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/12/trump-trade-and-the-tragedy-of-the-working-class/

Last month marked the 60th anniversary of the first serious attempt on the part of social scientists to analyze and evaluate the collapse of the traditional family in American society. On March 1, 1965, the U.S. Department of Labor released a report written by then-Assistant Secretary (and future Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D, NY) on the dissolution of black families in America. That report, “The Negro Family:  The Case for National Action,” was both groundbreaking and enormously controversial. Sixty years later, the study remains groundbreaking. However, its conclusions are, sadly, no longer especially controversial, having been corroborated by endless data spanning decades and extending to every race, culture, and creed in the country. At some point, the rescue of the American family will either become a serious and urgent focus of societal action, or it will prove the undoing of the great American experiment.

Among other things, Moynihan noted in his report the existence and the pervasiveness of black poverty and the correlation between that poverty and the breakdown of the black nuclear family. In an attempt to explain why black economic advancement lagged behind both political advancement and the economic fortunes of other ethnic groups, Moynihan examined reams of data and endless studies on black family life. And what he found—a paradox which came to be known as “Moynihan’s Scissors”—was” that welfare and male unemployment in the black community no longer appeared to be nearly perfectly correlated, as they were in the past and in other populations.

As it turned out, male unemployment was diverging from welfare outlays because the family was breaking down. In other words, welfare made it possible for women—black women, in this case—to survive and raise their children without the children’s father present in the home. In turn, the absence of the father from the home became necessary for the collection of welfare. A vicious circle had been created, and it was exacerbating black poverty tremendously.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/11/paying-a-heavy-cost-for-going-after-a-tax-cheat-named-hunter-biden/

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

Joe Ziegler is not a beaten man – not for his antagonists’ lack of trying. Across his seven-year pursuit of Hunter Biden’s unpaid taxes, Ziegler, a special agent in the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigative division, and his colleague Gary Shapley were shunned, threatened, and lied to. Ziegler was doxed. Shapley was told to accept a demotion or resign. Convinced the IRS and Department of Justice were stonewalling their efforts to bring charges against a sitting president’s son, the agents went public as whistleblowers in 2023.

The result, during the hyper-polarized years spanning the Trump-to-Biden-to-Trump administrations, was predictable: The two men were accused of partisanship, lambasted by Democratic members of Congress and the press, and had their reputations impugned by high-powered lawyers paid for by those sympathetic to the Bidens.

The fortunes of these political victims have now turned. In mid-March, incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Ziegler and Shapley would start work as senior advisers, helping to guide tax reform.

Which is all the agents had ever wanted and tried to do. “At the end of the day, this is truly about doing the right thing and standing up for what is right,” Ziegler would testify before the House Ways & Means Committee in December 2023. “I will say this again and again, this is much bigger than the Hunter Biden investigation. This was not a personal attack on Hunter Biden, but a call for change.”

While the reprisals they say they endured for their acts of conscience appear to have ended, Ziegler and Shapely do not want their experience to be memory-holed – especially because other whistleblowers who spoke out during the Biden administration have received less attention for their tribulations. Speaking with RealClearInvestigations recently, the two men gave their first in-depth interviews on the years-long case that upended their lives and careers.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/elon-musk-tesla-takedown-protests-activists

Last month, a wave of more than 200 protests targeting Tesla properties erupted across the United States. The media portrayed this movement, officially branded the “Tesla Takedown,” as a spontaneous grassroots backlash against CEO Elon Musk’s role in dismantling waste and fraud in the U.S. federal bureaucracy. Each of these demonstrations appears to have been sparsely attended, but both the number of protest sites and the timeline of events suggest a coordinated effort.

On February 21, Rolling Stone published an article by activist-filmmaker Alex Winter describing the genesis of the Tesla Takedown protest campaign. Within two weeks of its publication, multiple Tesla properties were attacked with incendiary devices, and three men were arrested for separate attempts to firebomb Tesla locations in Salem, Oregon; Loveland, Colorado; and Charleston, South Carolina.

If the mainstream press accounts—as well as Winter’s own description—are to be believed, the fire-bombings and protests were unrelated. When mentioning the protests at all in the context of the violence, some outlets described them only as “dozens of peaceful protests at Tesla dealerships and factories.” Stories did not touch on how, more often than not, violent and nonviolent tactics reinforce one another and work toward the same ends.

A closer look suggests that Tesla is the latest target of an activist and organizing ecosystem that the Left has built over decades. That infrastructure manufactures, amplifies, and strategically uses protests and “direct actions” to force concessions or policy change. These direct actions range from nonviolent (sit-ins or flash mobs) to violent (arson, harassment, or even assassination), all meant to focus attention through the drama of real-world confrontation. The goal is to bypass the normal channels of democratic decision-making, obtaining desired ends through minoritarian pressure campaigns.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/11/hey-about-that-not-so-surprising-drop-in-inflation/

No doubt you’ve already heard the news that inflation actually declined in March on a month-to-month basis for the first time in almost three years, and fell to 2.4% on a yearly basis. This is horrible news, at least for the Democratic Party, which continues to hope for the worst under President Donald Trump.

Economists had actually expected inflation to rise for the month. Instead, this is the first time since July 2022 that the index declined. “Surprising,” said a number of headlines.

Recall for a moment last year’s bold promise from Trump on inflation: “Prices will come down and come down dramatically and come down fast,” he said.

So far, so good, as Trump himself noted on X.

Despite Trump’s imposition of tariffs on much of the rest of the world, in particular China, which he had promised to do, his moves so far have had zero impact on inflation and are unlikely to for months to come.

Democrats are in a tough spot. Unable to tar Trump with President Joe Biden’s inflation disaster, Democrats earlier found what they believed was a point of inflation vulnerability for Trump: The soaring cost of eggs!

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/10/ten-tariff-questions-never-asked/

1. Trump’s So-Called “Trade War.”

Many call the American effort to obtain either tariff parity or a reduction in the roughly $1 trillion trade deficit and fifty years of consecutive trade deficits “a trade war.” But then what do they call the policies of the past half-century by Europe, Asia, China, and others to ensure asymmetrical tariffs, pseudo-health and security trade restrictions, and large surpluses?

A trade peace? Trade fairness?

2. Do Nations Prefer Surpluses or Deficits?

Why do most nations prefer trade surpluses and protective tariffs?

Are Europe, Asia, China, and others stupid? Are they suicidal in continuing their trade surpluses and protective or asymmetrical tariffs?

Is the United States uniquely brilliant in maintaining a half-century of cumulative trade deficits? Do Americans alone discover the advantages of a $1 trillion annual trade deficit and small or nonexistent tariffs?

Why don’t America’s trading partners prefer deficits like ours—given we supposedly believe they are either advantageous or perhaps irrelevant?

3. Would Our Trade Partners Prefer to Trade Places With Us?

Would our trade partners prefer to have America’s supposed benefits of a $1-trillion trade deficit? Would the United States then “suffer” like they do by running up $200 billion annual surpluses?

4. What if Wages Went Up at the Rate of the Stock Market?

What would now be the reaction of the stock market if over the last decade wages had increased at the rate of stocks—and the stocks at the rate of wages?

5. Is Wall Street’s Panic Based on What Might Happen—Or What Is Happening?

Is Wall Street’s meltdown a fear of what might happen in the future? Or is it reacting to March’s latest jobs report that there were 93,000 more jobs created than predicted? Was the Wall Street panic predicated on reports of much lower oil prices? Did the furor arise over the March inflation report that the annualized inflation rate dipped to 2.6% per year?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/09/trump-is-right-to-take-on-the-free-trade-fundamentalists/

It’s easy to dismiss Donald Trump’s haphazard tariff barrage as silly and self-defeating, especially after so many days of global market turmoil. But critics among liberal Democrats and Republican free traders still need to address the overriding goal behind the seeming madness. The key strategic objective of Trump’s approach is simple: restoring American industrial power. Opponents of the US president ignore this at their peril.

It is true that the American economy continues to outperform those of Europe and the UK, especially in terms of tech, communications and finance. Yet the situation for blue-collar professions and working-class communities has not improved with the pace of globalisation. Between 2004 and 2017, the US share of world manufacturing shrank from 15 to 10 per cent. Since 2000, notes an Economic Policy Institute study, China’s export barrage has cost as many as 3.7million US jobs.

The ‘China shock’ is not just an American but a global phenomenon. Today, China boasts nearly as many factory exports as the US, Japan and Germany combined. Overall, Europe’s industrial sector continues to decline, losing 850,000 manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2024. Germany could lose around half of its 800,000 auto jobs to Chinese competition by 2030.

To be sure, the early stages of globalisation reaped enormous benefits, both for Western consumers and for developing countries. But China’s admission into the World Trade Organisation in 2000 changed the dynamic. Here was a huge country, with enormous human capital, which adopted a highly mercantilist drive to dominate industries, first at the lower end of manufacturing and then, increasingly, in the most sophisticated sectors.

Wall Street bankers and tech oligarchs may be untroubled by the consequences of Beijing’s mercantilism, as they have little contact with America’s working and middle classes. The poorest have increasingly been forced to subsist on expanding welfare benefits which, in turn, subsidise the affluent for whom they work for a pittance as nannies, gardeners and day labourers.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

President Trump bears responsibility for the rout in the world’s equity markets. His tariffs, if used to raise revenues, as he claims, will cause a global recession, or worse. If they are used to negotiate lower tariffs on U.S. exports, which he also claims, they will strengthen the economy and may lead to global free trade. He is right, however, in his complaint that there is much in our politics and culture that has gone wrong over the past several years. We are a country, like much of the West, with a spending problem. Federal debt, as a percent of GDP, is higher than it was in 1945 (121% in 2024 versus 112% in 1945). Both political parties are at fault for excessive spending. As well, there has been a rise in anti-Semitism, fueled, in my opinion, by dislike for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and often masked as anti-Zionism. And, of course, our border was open throughout President Biden’s term in office.

In this age of technology, we must focus on ensuring access to needed raw materials. Over the past several years, we have let defense spending lapse, while permitting China unchallenged access to commodities and markets across Africa and South America. We have allowed unfettered (and illegal) migration into our country, and not just for those seeking political refuge from despotic governments, but for criminals and gang members, some of whom brought in fentanyl, a drug that has killed an estimated quarter of a million Americans since 2018. We have seen the Democratic Party take a sharp turn to the left, as it became increasingly patronizing in tone – do as I say, not as I do. The Party has focused on equity, not equal opportunity. In the name of diversity, it has encouraged racial division and allowed identity policies, rather than ability and diligence, to become the standard for admissions into colleges and businesses; it has let universities become beacons of “social justice,” rather than pinnacles of learning where students debate controversial subjects in a respectful and tolerant manner; it has encouraged sports venues to allow males to compete against females. Just last year, the Party knowingly nominated a man for President who was mentally unfit, and now we have a Supreme Court Justice who is unable to define a woman. In all of this, mainstream media has been complicit.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-legal-trick-being-used-to-trip?utm_campaign=260347&utm_source=cross-post&r=8t06w&utm_medium=email

Judges are issuing orders that block government policies from taking effect anywhere in the country. Jed Rubenfeld explains what to do about them.

It’s been a relatively good week for President Donald Trump when it comes to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled more or less in his favor on three different challenges, including upholding on jurisdictional grounds his deportations of migrants to El Salvador. But the most pressing legal issue for Trump—the “nationwide injunctions” that have hamstrung many administration priorities—remains unresolved.

According to one count, only some 27 “nationwide injunctions”—orders issued by judges that block government policies from taking effect anywhere in the country—were issued throughout the twentieth century. Yet against Trump, counting both administrations, judges have so far handed down at least 79.

Supporters of these injunctions claim that they are a necessary check on unconstitutional actions by the administration, such as Trump’s moves to end birthright citizenship. The White House and its Republican allies on Capitol Hill say that district court judges are subverting the will of the people and want the Supreme Court to limit or halt the issuance of these injunctions.

Who is right? Let’s take it one step at a time. What are nationwide injunctions? Are they really being used against Trump more than other presidents? And are they legal?

The term nationwide injunction—a.k.a. “universal injunction”—has no legal definition, but it generally refers to a judicial order prohibiting the government from enforcing a measure anywhere in the country. That means that the ruling goes beyond the particular plaintiffs who brought the case, effectively allowing district courts to halt a policy from being applied anywhere in the U.S.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/09/the-word-went-out-get-trump/

It’s fair to ask how Donald Trump went from celebrity real estate developer to the man most detested by about half of Western society. We think we know this vilification happened.

Read on.

In 1949, William Randolph Hearst, owner of the largest newspaper chain in the U.S., sent a two-word message to his editors: “Puff Graham.” It made evangelist Billy Graham, in Los Angeles for one of his early crusades, into “an instant celebrity nationwide,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

“The sudden front-page coverage showered on Graham by Hearst newspapers in mid-October (after three weeks of little notice) was quickly matched by other newspapers and news magazines – literally a media circus descending on his rallies under a big tent,” says the Times.

Graham’s fame soared as he later appeared on the covers of the day’s leading magazines, from Time to Newsweek to Life.

The Billy Graham Library calls Hearst’s order “a watershed event,” and Graham himself thanked Hearst in a letter, telling him that “Literally millions of church people across the nation are rejoicing and thanking God for your interest and backing of the recent Los Angeles evangelistic campaign.”

We don’t discount the possibility of divine intervention, but Graham’s popularity is owed in large part to the power and reach of one man (who might have been moved divinely to “puff” the evangelist).

No postings until I return on April 10