RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/09/thanks-obama/

Someday, when today’s young Americans look back in anger at what their country has become—and believe me, they will be angry—they will have their pick of culprits to blame for the sad state of affairs. If there is any justice in the universe, however, they will focus their resentment and frustration on one man: Barack Obama. Although the United States (and the West more generally) had been drifting toward collapse for decades, Obama’s efforts to “fundamentally transform” the nation were, in retrospect, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

Now, to be clear, I’m not referring here to something as small and meaningless as policy, foreign or domestic. As Presidents Trump and Biden amply demonstrated, policy can be changed and then changed back again, over and over and over. To be sure, the effects of these changes may be deleterious, and they may create substantively different outcomes than would have occurred otherwise. For the most part, however, the effects of policy changes are limited and, if corrected, temporary. Obama, for example, may have thrown the entire Middle East into flux and threatened the very future of the planet with his policy of appeasing the Mullahs of Iran, but Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, between them, undid most of that damage and returned the region to its pre-Obama status quo.

And nor am I referring to Obama’s inarguable and inarguably troubling role in the scheme to undermine Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign (and, eventually, his presidency) by painting him as an agent of Russian influence. Russia-gate is ugly and treacherous, and a significant number of players—perhaps including Obama—should be held to account for what they did and how they manipulated the nation’s intelligence apparatus to serve partisan political ends. Some of them—perhaps including Obama—deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison. This “scandal” is far more serious and far more perfidious than any other in American history—save, perhaps, the scandal of saddling the American people with an incoherent and incompetent president for a full four years, while others, still to be named, ran the country surreptitiously.

Nevertheless, Obama’s true offense is even more damning still.

As I have argued in these pages and elsewhere, none of the people who deserve to go to jail for the crimes involved in the scandals noted above will ever actually do so.

https://www.city-journal.org/multimedia/douglas-murray-on-political-violence-immigration-and-his-win-in-a-defamation-case

Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. This episode, we’re doing something a little bit different. We thought we’d do an experiment. And so I’m very pleased to be joined by my colleague Douglas Murray. Douglas is senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He’s a journalist and the bestselling author of eight books. Now eight books, right? Yeah, I think that’s the total.

Douglas Murray: Right.

Charles Fain Lehman: Including The War on the West, The Madness of Crowds, and his most recent book On Democracies and Death Cults, which came out earlier this year. And we thought… We had the opportunity to pick Douglas’s brain. And so we thought we’d have a one-on-one conversation, talk about some of the issues that have come up on the show, the sort of core to what MI and CJ are interested in, but also that what you’re interested in. So thank you for taking the time.

Douglas Murray: It’s great to be with you.

Charles Fain Lehman: So I want to start us off by turning our attention to, I think, a story that drives to a number of themes. It’s been a big focus of ours at CJ, and I’m curious for your thoughts on. As you may be aware, last week, New Yorkers were shocked by a mass shooting at 345 Park Ave. It took the lives of four New Yorkers, including an NYPD officer, an off-duty NYPD officer, the perpetrator, guy named Shane Tamura, who killed himself during the act. It seems like based on the reporting that has come out since then, he was trying to target the NFL offices in the building. He believed himself to have a football-related injury and was trying to draw attention to that. At least that’s the theory of the case. New details have emerged since we last talked about this on the show, which indicate that he had a long history of mental illness, including two police visits back in Nevada where he’s from over fears he was armed and suicidal.

But part of what has drawn my attention to this story is the internet sort of in the immediate aftermath lit up in celebration of the murder of Wesley LePatner, one of Tamura’s victims, who’s a Blackstone executive who’s involved in their work on real estate. Social media users posted that she had been, I think the phrase is Luigied, evoking Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson. So there are a bunch of different threads that I want to unpack here with you and get your thoughts on.

I think we can start with the story itself. I think there’s something really evocative. My colleague, sometime panelist Jesse Arm raised this to me the other day, which is like, this is a guy who was walking down the street in the middle of Manhattan carrying an assault rifle. Nobody stopped him. He walked into a building. He had a history of serious mental illness. You’ve written about urban disorder, urban dysfunction. You and I have talked about this before. I’m curious about what you see that incident as symbolizing, how you think about how we get to a point where a guy can basically a crazy guy can unchecked kill four people in the middle of Manhattan and this is in some sense is normal.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/democratic-socialists-of-america-hold-panel-on-abolishing-the-family/

Earlier this week the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) uploaded to YouTube the video of a panel discussion from its annual Socialism Conference, held in Chicago over Independence Day weekend. For those who hear the term democratic socialism and picture happy Scandinavians living their best lives instead of being chewed up in a capitalist rat race, it’s worth noting that the discussion featured open calls for the abolition of the nuclear family in the United States.

No surprise there. The DSA is not a separate political party but aligns with far Left Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (until they determined she wasn’t pro-Hamas enough) and Independents like lifelong communist Bernie Sanders. Like the Democrat Party itself, the DSA has become increasingly radical with younger generations over the last half century. Their anti-family stance aligns with Karl Marx’s imperative to abolish the family, which is essential to the establishment of his collectivist utopia. Why is it essential? Because Marx and the DSA view the nuclear family to be – as the video description on YouTube declares – “an inherently repressive, racist, and hetero-sexist institution that functionally reinforces and reproduces capitalism.” So it must be deconstructed, dismantled, and discarded on the ash heap of history.

The panel, titled “The Left and the Family: A Roundtable,” took place on July 4, while patriotic Americans everywhere were celebrating their freedom from tyranny. Socialist ideologues have no time for such unserious recreation; after all, they have an entire, deeply entrenched system of oppression to tear down. As my friend, author Michael Walsh, is fond of pointing out, “The Left never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.”

The all-female panel featured speakers Emily Janakiram of New York City for Abortion Rights, University of Chicago sociologist Eman Abdelhadi, Katie Gibson of the University of Chicago, and long-time BDS activist and Portland DSA member Olivia Katbi. As an aside: of course she is a BDS activist, because the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement designed to permanently destroy Israel as a Jewish nation-state has in recent years become one of the more prominent intersectional goals of socialism; at the DSA national convention in August 2017, for example, the organization passed a resolution explicitly affirming “solidarity with Palestinian civil society’s nonviolent [!] struggle against apartheid, colonialism, [and] military occupation, and for equality, human rights and self-determination.”

In the video (the comments section of which has been turned off, unsurprisingly, because the Left is totalitarian at heart and doesn’t tolerate opposing opinions), Abdelhadi declared that she and her fellow socialists are in a “reactionary, fascist moment” and must keep their eyes on the prize of a “radical liberatory horizon” in which food, housing, education, and child care are collectivized – just as Marx envisioned. She stated that black women and “indigenous communities” – groups that she claimed are “disposable to capitalism” – have already modeled this and the rest of the world should follow suit, as if this sort of collectivization is such a rousing success. She didn’t mention that a disproportionate number of black women have been forced to model this way of life because there is no husband and father in the home, which has proven disastrous for the black community and society at large.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/08/how-intelligence-community-analysis-rules-were-flagrantly-violated-in-the-fraudulent-russia-collusion-intelligence-assessment/

The 2017 Russia ICA wasn’t intelligence—it was political sabotage, rushed and rigged to smear Trump before he even took office, the House report now reveals.

A bombshell House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) Majority Staff Report recently released by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard explains in detail how the rules for drafting intelligence assessments were deliberately ignored to produce a highly politicized Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in early January 2017, designed to sabotage the first  Trump administration.

Worried about the House report’s clarity and persuasiveness, former Obama officials, former intelligence officials, congressional Democrats, and liberal journalists are desperately trying to discredit this report.

President Obama ordered the ICA, titled “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 Presidential Election,” during a December 9, 2016, meeting with DNI James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and others. The ICA was issued less than a month later, on January 6, 2017.

Because ICAs are high-profile analyses of significant national security issues that are supposed to reflect the views of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, they usually take many months – often over a year – to complete. For this reason, the speed with which this ICA was issued sparked immediate controversy.

The Intelligence Community’s tradecraft standards are guidelines taught to all U.S. intelligence analysts to ensure that their analysis reflects analytic rigor and excellence. The House report explains how these standards were set aside to produce this assessment in less than a month and ensure that it had one preordained conclusion: that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 election and that Russia meddled in the election to help Trump win.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/07/why-dei-was-already-dying/

Donald Trump’s executive orders banning Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI)-related racial and gender preferencing have ostensibly doomed the DEI industry.

But DEI was already on its last legs. Half of all Americans no longer approve of racial, ethnic, or gender preferences.

DEI had enjoyed a surge following the death of George Floyd and the subsequent 120 days of nonstop rioting, arson, assaults, killings, and attacks on law enforcement during the summer of 2020.

In those chaotic years, DEI was seen as the answer to racial tensions.

DEI had insidiously replaced the old notion of affirmative action—a 1960s-era government remedy for historical prejudices against black Americans, from the legacy of slavery to Jim Crow segregation.

But during the Obama era, “diversity” superseded affirmative action by offering preferences to many groups well beyond black Americans.

Quite abruptly, Americans began talking in Marxist binaries.

On one side were the supposed 65–70 percent white majority “oppressors” and “victimizers”—often stereotyped as exuding “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” or even “white rage.”

They were juxtaposed to the 25–30 percent of “diverse” Americans, the so-called “oppressed” and “victimized.”

Yet almost immediately, contradictions and hypocrisies undermined DEI.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-unbearable-lightness-of-the-woke-mind/

Back in the days when the grown-ups ran things, there was a gag about an elderly woman who called the cops on her neighbor for standing naked in his window on the tenth floor across the street. When the officer arrived, he looked out the window and said, “I can’t see any naked man.” The old lady scoffed and said, “Of course not! You’re not using the binoculars!”

Until the peevish, thin-skinned, self-selected cultural hall monitors took over the culture, I never dreamed that such preposterous, invented affronts could be taken seriously enough to be sanctioned as “hate speech” against politically selected “victims,” and subjected to censorship, abuse, and harassment.

What we used to call “political correctness” ––a phrase from the Thirties frequently used to compliment fanatic adherents of totalitarian regimes––as damaging as it was, pales next to the sheer stupidity, toxic hyperbole, and preposterous big lies that have flourished during the Trump decade and the left’s political meltdown. Their complaints and attacks with obsessive ad Hitlerum fallacy are dog-bites-man stories, and usually are just traffic noise for normal grown-ups.

But recently, the “woke” Stasi outdid themselves with their attack on actress and model Sydney Sweeney’s advertisement for American Eagle’s new line of jeans. In one video, Sweeney changed an American Eagle billboard featuring her tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” by crossing out “genes” and replacing it with “jeans.”

Passionate intensity ensued, some haters calling the ad “a dog whistle for eugenics.” Things got worse when Sweeney commented, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color.” This obvious truth really riled up the permanently offended race-hacks, who whipped out their ideological binoculars and took off virtue signaling. They discovered that Sweeney’s comments and visuals were all about eugenics and “white supremacism,” along with a nod to Nazism’s crackpot race theories.

This juvenile tantrum reveals the “woke’s” trademark ignorance of history. Francis Galton (1822-1911), Darwin’s cousin who invented the term eugenics, applied Darwin’s theory of “fitness for survival” to the mind, morals, and character of human beings. Galton, Robert Zubrin points out, saw human nature “almost as plastic as clay under the control of the breeder’s will,” and said the “unfit” must be kept from procreating, for “if these continued,” Galton warned, “to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.”

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28762/the-predators-have-their-pick

goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com

Gen Z, loosely defined as Americans born between 1997 and 2012, is the first generation to grow up with full access to the Internet from pre-school onward. They are America’s digital natives and use the Internet constantly and consistently to interact socially. The seeming anonymity of the Internet has created a medium of over-sharing private information on social media, where young people’s emotional vulnerabilities are exploited by avaricious online sexual predators. The connections between social media, pornography, pedophilia, and societal collapse are positively chilling.

Jaco Booyens, founder of the anti-human trafficking organization, Jaco Booyens Ministries, is committed to protecting American children from predatory exploitation. In his explosive hour-long, July 24, 2025, interview with Epoch Times journalist Jan Jekielek, “How Traffickers Prey on America’s Youth,” Booyens exposes the form and content of America’s child sex trafficking industry. Today I am focusing on his stunning revelations about the cunning and horrifyingly successful mechanisms of child sex trafficking in America, including profiles of buyers, sellers, and victims.

Sexual predators feed on the basic human longing for love and belonging in a $52 billion supply and demand industry. Booyens explains that the average predator in America invests nine months online with a potential victim before he strikes, asking a potential victim to self-expose or physically meet in person.

https://dianebederman.com/9-11-islam-won-operation-enduring-freedom-war/

Following 9/11 and the horror of it all, America, and her allies, went to war against Afghanistan, against Muslim terrorists, despite the fact that the majority of terrorists, the pilots who perpetrated the attack, had come from Saudi Arabia.

To what end?

How many Americans died in that 20 year war? Answer: 7,053 U.S. service members died in the post-9/11 wars: Operation Enduring Freedom. How many soldiers came home with severe, life changing wounds? Answer: Hundreds of thousands of U.S. and allied service members were wounded in combat and have died or been disabled as a result of injuries sustained in the war zones. Post-9/11 war veterans have far higher rates of service-connected disabilities than veterans of previous wars. Then, in 2021, President Biden withdrew from Afghanistan. And more American soldiers died and the Taliban came back in power. In the meantime, Biden had opened the southern border to anyone and everyone, including barbarians. In the past, barbarians had to break down the wall; not this time. They were welcomed into the country. To this day, Democrats are protecting these people.

Now look around America. After almost 25 years of war against Islam, Islam is in America. Firmly rooted. Muslims have infiltrated education, media and government. Much of that made possible by Qatar. Qatar has wormed its way into the West.

And now America, negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza – a war started by Muslim terrorists – is bending the knee to Qatar; holding peace talks with supporters of terror.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”   Sermon: “A Knock at Midnight,” 1958 Martin Luther King 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           “I hate you!” Who has not screamed that invective, or had it directed at them? It is generally short-lived, an intense, emotional response to an accusation, characterized by anger, contempt and/or disgust.

Such words are usually directed toward specific individuals, things, or ideas. In most cases those feelings are ephemeral. But I write about what I call ‘institutional’ (for lack of a better term) hatred, where an individual or group deliberately foments hatred toward a person, race, ethnicity, or nation. Time is a healer, even of ‘institutional’ hatred. Bill Clinton was despised by Republicans during the 1990s, and as Matthew Hennessey wrote in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: “Hate is too mild a word for how Democrats felt about George W. Bush while he was in the Oval Office.” Today, in both cases, hatred has vanished.

But such hatred is not always transient. Blacks were hated by many in this Country for decades, culminating in the white-robed Ku Klux Klan, whose remnants still exist. The consequences were the killings – many by lynchings – of tens of thousands of black Americans. For more than ten years, from the mid 1930s through May 1945, Nazis maintained a nation-wide hatred toward Jews and others they classified as undesirable. The consequence was that between fifteen and twenty million civilians were imprisoned, tortured, mutilated and/or murdered, in a network of over 44,000 Concentration Camps scattered across occupied Europe.

Hatred clouds reason. Hatred of Jews is what the Nazis employed to get ordinary citizens to go along with their despicable extermination policies. Reason, on the other hand, is what permitted the Allies to ultimately defeat Nazism.