RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/philly-funds-sharia/

Local and state outlets reported it—and even quietly celebrated it. But no one asked the hard questions. No one challenged the ideology, the curriculum, or the dangerous precedent. That didn’t happen until Liberty Sentinel and journalist Alex Newman blew the lid off what this really was: a taxpayer-funded expansion of Sharia under the banner of “diversity.”

In March 2025, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania awarded $5 million in taxpayer money to Al-Aqsa Islamic Academy—a Philadelphia-based Islamic school currently serving about 300 students. With this grant, the school now plans to expand to 3,000. It is the largest Muslim-specific education grant in Pennsylvania’s history—and likely one of the largest in the United States.

Governor Josh Shapiro made the announcement during a Ramadan iftar dinner, cloaking the moment in the usual buzzwords: “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “fighting hate.” He called it bridge-building. But what he built was a bridge to ideological conquest—not cultural unity.

Governor Shapiro didn’t just make the announcement. He used it to signal virtue with a now-familiar script:

“We are building bridges… promoting inclusion… and standing up to hate.”
— Gov. Josh Shapiro, Ramadan 2025

No, Governor. You’re funding religious indoctrination—an ideology rooted in supremacism and submission, not pluralism.

The $5 million came from Pennsylvania’s Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (RACP)—a fund that’s supposed to support infrastructure, economic growth, and public benefit projects. Roads. Housing. Public safety.

Instead, it’s being used to triple the size of a religious school with a documented ideological agenda.

This isn’t economic development. It’s state-funded ideological expansion.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/18/trump-in-riyadh-a-rejection-of-the-globalist-gospel/

I want to begin this column by paying homage to the two most extraordinary passages in Donald Trump’s extraordinary speech in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, last week.

Here’s the first:

In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins . . . I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment—my job [is] to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.

And here’s the second: Speaking of the “great transformation” that has come to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries in recent decades, Trump noted that

This great transformation has not come from Western interventionists . . . giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called “nation-builders,” “neo-cons,” or “liberal non-profits,” like those who spent trillions failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought about by the people of the region themselves . . . developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies . . . In the end, the so-called “nation-builders” wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.

Both points are coruscatingly true. They were clearly pleasing to Trump’s audience. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was overcome with admiration for Trump’s words. He kept smiling, putting his hand on his heart in benediction, and later personally escorted Trump around the city and then to the airport to say farewell.

The globalist neo-cons of whom Trump spoke still form a powerful lobby in Washington, in those NGOs he mentioned, and in academia. Indeed, they might be said to represent the default or consensus Weltanschauung of the foreign policy establishment.

Donald Trump represents the antithesis of that establishment. It would take a very long post, or, indeed, a book, to detail all the ways that Trump is the antithesis of the Washington consensus on . . . well, on just about everything. I have long been a supporter of Donald Trump, though not always. When he first ran, in 2016, I thought the idea of a Trump presidency was a sort of joke and said so.

Two things changed my mind. First, when it became clear that his opponent would be Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most corrupt serious contender for the presidency in U.S. history (granted, she may have been outdone by Joe Biden), I decided to cast my lot in with Donald Trump faute de mieux.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/17/uniformity-inequity-and-exclusion/

In 1933, a young fellow who detested school, but who was now working as a janitor while paying his way for instruction at the Chouinard Art Institute, got a call from a friend, offering him a job as a cel washer at the Ub Iwerks cartoon studio. He took the job and worked his way up from one feature of the rather complicated process of cartoon making to the next, till in a couple of years he joined the team of the great Fred “Tex” Avery, the comic genius who played with the cartoon medium itself, defying the laws of physics and biology and social etiquette and everything else. The chief animators were all male, and camaraderie bound them together in painstaking, exhausting, and poorly remunerated work.

People who love cartoons will know their names: the storyman Mike Maltese, the composer and adapter of classical music Carl Stalling, the man of a thousand voices Mel Blanc, and the animators Avery, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, Robert McKimson, and the greatest of them all, the man whose madcap genius elevated Bugs Bunny to international renown and who invented Marvin the Martian, the amorous Pepe Le Pew, the songster Michigan J. Frog, and many others—Chuck Jones.

That was the lad who, at age 20, got the job by a phone call.

It seems unlikely that a Chuck Jones could catch such a break now. People at that time did not take schooling so seriously. Everyone understood that you might be highly literate, as Jones was, and well-versed in the arts, as Jones also was, without having the credentialed initials after your name and without any paper evidence of such from your high school. Nor was there any federal or state agency overseeing your employer when he chose whom to hire. I understand that America is still paying the price of racism, and part of me says that the nation deserves no better than what it has gotten. But our current employment laws have rendered freedom of association nugatory, and they exact a high cost to liberty, to genuine diversity among workplaces, and to the unconventional or exceptional employee. I am not the first to notice, for example, that the best-rewarded beneficiaries of anti-discrimination laws are white women with college credentials. These do not often come from working-class families or Appalachia, or from tight economic circumstances, as Jones did. Where then is the real diversity?

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5302937-doge-musk-spending-reforms-fail/

Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, told Fox News’s Martha McCallum recently that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is “not going away” and that “this incredible initiative is moving forward.”

Hopefully that is true, despite DOGE chief Elon Musk heading out the doorto save Tesla, now under attack by left-wing loons. On X Wednesday, DOGE claimed, “Current year non-defense federal obligations are down 20.5% as compared to 2024. Cash outlays will follow as obligations come due. Persistent government wide contract reviews … are bearing fruit.” An indicated $16 billion saving is encouraging.

But Republicans have published their version of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and there’s no evidence of the spending cuts that the DOGE team promised. Instead, GOP legislators in the House are relying on controversial Medicaid reforms to make their tax cuts possible. What went wrong?

The truth is that Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who volunteered to head the DOGE effort, undoubtedly overpromised. But he was also undermined by the political establishment.

At one point Musk projected his team could cut spending by up to $2 trillion. With a federal budget of $7.3 trillion, that was clearly a reach. He slimmed down his projections several times, announcing a new goal of $150 billion at an April Cabinet meeting. Musk is doubtless disappointed, as should be anyone who cares about our country’s fiscal prospects.

The DOGE chief has been thwarted at every turn by judges, claiming he was violating peoples’ privacy as his team sought to review data on Social Security, the Department of Education, the Treasury and the Office of Personnel Management. The White House’s attempts to fire federal employees were also blocked recently in court.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/17/if-woke-is-dead-what-comes-next/

The other day, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham in England, proclaiming the death of woke and the end of the Progressive Era. This is more than a “vibe-shift,” Kaufmann writes; it’s “the end of the 60-year rise of left-liberalism in American culture.” He continues, arguing that the backlash against the left’s aggressive embrace of identity politics and its imposition of that politics on every aspect of our lives is far more profound and widespread than the 1990s reaction to “political correctness” and has even seeped into the left’s own organs of cultural transmission, including the mainstream media. This, in turn, has created a crisis of confidence among cultural liberals, leaving them disorganized, despondent, and marking the end of “the age of progressive confidence.”

On the one hand, I think Kaufmann is unequivocally right about all of this. I have written about the death of woke and the end of this current era of leftism myself, and I believe that Kaufmann has identified the causes and indications of the cultural left’s collapse quite nicely and succinctly.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that the death of woke will necessarily be the panacea some might hope. As even Professor Kaufmann concedes, “What replaces progressivism as our cultural lodestar will become evident only in the fullness of time.” Unfortunately, if past is prologue, “progressivism’s” replacement may well be even worse.

If one looks at the totality of the history of the left—from its bloody birth in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to the present—then neither the death of woke nor my apprehension about the future should come as much of a surprise. Since the beginning, the left has progressed through a series of conceptual epochs, each lasting a handful of decades, following similar patterns: intellectual inception followed by slow but sure growth, resulting, eventually, in cultural domination, and then a swift demise related to its inability to deliver upon the millenarian promises it made.