RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/31/trump-must-finish-off-the-national-endowment-for-democrac

Writing elsewhere last month, I suggested that Donald Trump end the National Endowment for Democracy once and for all. Like most so-called “non-governmental organizations,” the NED is in fact an all-governmental organization. It depends absolutely on a subsidy from the state department, i.e., from the federal government, i.e., from the taxpayer, i.e., from you.

The NED began life in the Cold War as a way of projecting “soft power” against our Communist adversaries. But as James Piereson noted in February of this year, the NED has undergone a familiar process of mission creep and moral and political entropy. “With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Piereson wrote, “the NED adjusted its mission to support democratic reforms in countries in non-communist countries with authoritarian governments, many of which were never adversaries of the United States in the first place.”

Over the years, the NED adopted a view of democracy that held that nationalist and populist leaders campaigning for office around the world were, in fact, authoritarians and a threat to democracy. Many foreign leaders were tossed into that bucket—not only Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but also Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki, and others. Many of these leaders were popularly elected but were nevertheless branded by the NED as authoritarians. It surprised no one when NED officials deemed Donald Trump, too, an authoritarian, lumping him together with these leaders.

The bottom line is that for some $315 million of taxpayer pelf, the NED has been busy fomenting a foreign policy that was not just separate from that articulated by the duly elected president of the United States but actively opposed to it.

So it was no surprise when Trump and his cost-cutters at the Department of Government Efficiency took aim at the NED. Earlier this summer, NED’s subsidy had been zeroed out in Congress’s proposed budget.

But no NGO goes gentle into that good night. When politicians get together to haggle over budgets, lobbyists tag along. Members from interest group A whisper in Congressman X’s ear about their pet—and usually lucrative—project. Words like “constituents” and “donations” are bandied about. Often as not, that line item that had been zeroed out is fully restored. The lobbyists go home happy. The Congressman feels reassured. Only the taxpayers suffer. And the voters, too, whose feelings in the matter are usually completely ignored.

So it was with the NED. What had been zero was suddenly restored to $315 million, with provision for additional contracts added in for good measure.

In olden days, that generally would have been it. A president confronted with such recalcitrance, not to say connivance, would simply have moved on. As usual, Trump’s response was something more aggressive. On Friday, the White House said, in effect, I’ll see your rescission and raise you two.

Employing a seldom-deployed, controversial maneuver called a “pocket rescission,” the White House promised to eliminate “woke, weaponized, and wasteful spending.”

Now, for the first time in 50 years, the President is using his authority under the Impoundment Control Act to deploy a pocket rescission, cancelling $5 billion in foreign aid and international organization funding that violates the President’s America First priorities.

CNN was joined by other dyspeptic chihuahuas—Senator Chuck Schumer, chief among them—to wail that “Trump bypasses Congress to cancel nearly $5 billion in foreign aid.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/01/the-progressive-pantheon-of-pathetic-heroes/

American left-wing heroes are proving to be a creepy bunch.

So what do some of the most renowned “resistance” left-wing heroes have in common other than shared hatred of conservative America?

They are either criminals, pathological liars, or self-described performance-art victims.

Take Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the current face of progressive resistance to the enforcement of federal immigration law.

No one questions that Garcia had previously received deportation orders before he was re-arrested by ICE.

No one argues that his current wife, Vasquez Sura, had in the past successfully petitioned for at least two protective restraining orders against Abrego Garcia—to stop his violent beatings and his manic destruction of household items.

In the old Democratic Party, the worst allegation possible was to be cast as a beater of women.

No one contests that in 2022, Garcia was pulled over in Tennessee for speeding and recklessly veering out of his lane.

He was then found to have an invalid driver’s license. He was accompanied by eight illegal aliens without IDs. And his vehicle was registered to an imprisoned and likely human trafficker. Garcia had been variously recognized in deportation hearings as a member of the violent and lethal MS-13 gang.

Yet when ICE began to deport him, the left went ballistic and constructed him as some sort of civil rights saint.

Senators tossed drinks with the illegal alien.

A few politicos trekked on a holy hejira to El Salvador to demand from the autonomous El Salvadorian government the release of a Salvadorian citizen held in jail on Salvadorian soil—as if they were 19th-century Yanqui imperialists dictating to an elected Central American government that the United States had more rights of jurisdiction over an illegal alien than did the government of El Salvador over one of their own citizens on their own soil.

Feminists said little about his brutal propensity to strike women. Anti-gang activists went mostly mum about his MS-13 affiliations. Those decrying human trafficking were quiet about his transportation of illegal aliens.

Instead, all that was needed of this useful illegal alien pawn was the Democrat meme that Abrego Garcia was a victimized person of color and a target of Trump’s supposedly racist, restrictionist, and xenophobic border policies. His crimes in comparison were immaterial if not advantageous to the cause. No one bothered to remember the legions of innocent women killed and raped by violent illegal aliens.

Mahmoud Khalil was a different, far smoother sort of leftist icon. The pro-Hamas Algerian “student” came to the US supposedly for the chance at an Ivy League education. He soon stayed on a green card, becoming the poster boy of anti-Israel protests at Columbia.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/28/the-annunciation-shooting-reveals-the-savagery-of-identity-politics/

“What is most striking is the media coverage of the horror in Minneapolis. It seems muted. There’s little focus on the killer’s anti-Semitism, where we all know that if he’d been Islamophobic it would have dominated the coverage. His trans identity is not significant, say observers who would have thought it very significant indeed if the piece of shit had been an ‘incel’. And just imagine if three acts of barbarism had been carried in recent months under the rallying cry of ‘Fuck Palestine’. The left would be in up arms. But ‘Free Palestine’? Screaming about Israel before you end the lives of pensioners or praying children? They’re silent on that. Perhaps they’re mortified. They should be.”

Maybe it’s because the school has the exact same name as the first one I attended in London – the Annunciation Catholic School – that yesterday’s massacre in Minneapolis horrified me so deeply. Our school also had a church right next door, also called the Annunciation Catholic Church, like the one in Minneapolis. And just like those kids who were so savagely attacked as they clasped their tiny hands together in prayer at 8am, we, too, would make the short journey from school to church to give praise to God for our lives, our families, our friends.

It is hard to comprehend the sheer barbarism of the mass shooting of those Annunciation kids. The suspect – Robin Westman – is said to have shot through the church’s windows. He pumped bullets into innocents in their holy sanctuary. Two children, aged eight and 10, were killed. Six others are in a critical condition. More would have perished were it not for the heroism of the teachers and older pupils. As the school principal said: ‘Adults were protecting children. Older children were protecting younger children.’ Unimaginable courage in the face of unimaginable evil.

All mass shootings chill the blood. Especially school shootings. But there is something distinctly heinous about firing into a church full of kids. For Catholics, the church is a holy haven from the trials and vagaries of life. If the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis is anything like the Annunciation Catholic Church in London that I attended, then to those kids it will have been a place of safety, silence, wonder. That a man clad in black violated their sacred zone with blind, mad violence is unconscionable. The scars of this will last.

As with all crazed shootings, it would be folly to try to derive hard ‘lessons’ from this atrocity. Yet it would be negligent – to the victims, to America – to not ask questions. To not ponder, at least, how such a bestial act, such a vicious clawing at the fabric of civilised society, could take place in 21st-century America. To my mind, it is possible we are witnessing the hyper-violent logical endpoint to identity politics. From what we know about the suspect, it seems his savagery was in some ways the armed wing of the apocalyptic narcissism that identity politics so often engenders and unleashes.

Westman’s atrocity is being investigated as an anti-Catholic hate crime. He’s reportedly a former pupil of the Annunciation. So he will have sat in the very pews he mercilessly fired upon. But there’s more. He was ‘trans’: he changed his name from Robert to Robin and posed as a woman. He was seemingly anti-Christian. The words ‘Where is your God?’ were written on one of his guns – a vile taunt of the children he knew he was about to massacre. And he was virulently anti-Semitic, a passionate loather of Israel. Did the hate he so brutishly visited on those kids spring from his descent into the extremities of these identitarian positions?

It would be reckless to overlook that this is not the first time a trans person has carried out a mass shooting. There was also the massacre at a Christian school in Nashville in 2023, in which six were slaughtered. And the shooting at a school in Denver in 2019. And the massacre at a warehouse in Maryland in 2018. We must not ‘villainise’ the trans community in the wake of the Annunciation shooting, says Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey. This isn’t about villainising anyone – it’s about asking whether the self-regard and self-pity so recklessly sown by the identitarian zeitgeist might be helping to nurture catastrophic levels of anti-social animus.

Westman’s ‘manifesto’ would seem to suggest he was consumed by the vanity of the victim mindset. It included the trans Pride flag and the words ‘defend equality’. He appeared to hate Christians, presumably for their trans-scepticism. He grossly imagined himself as the ‘horrible monster standing over those powerless kids’.

We have to grapple with the possibility that a culture that forces the individual ever more inwards, inviting them to obsess over their own fantasy identities and to loathe any ‘phobe’ who refuses to genuflect at their altar of the self, is wrenching people ever further and ever more violently from society itself. Sure, most identitarians merely harbour a latent contempt for the average citizen who refuses to validate their hallucinatory self-image. But perhaps some are pushed a little further. Perhaps it was more dangerous than we thought, or certainly foolhardy, to greenlight this politics of recognition that pits the self-pitying individual against the mass of society.

Then there was Westman’s anti-Semitism. It was by all accounts deep and grotesque. ‘Israel must fall’ was written on one of his guns. ‘Free Palestine’, he said. He wrote about murdering ‘filthy Zionist Jews’. ‘Six million wasn’t enough’, he said. By my calculation this is the third act of lethal violence carried out in the US at least partly under the auspices of ‘anti-Zionism’. First there was the slaughter of two Israeli Embassy workers outside a Jewish museum in Washington, DC. Then the scalding of elderly Jews with a flammable liquid in Colorado. And now the slaying of Catholic kids by a devoted Israel-hater. In all three cases, the killer either wrote or said: ‘Free Palestine.’

We need to talk about this. It speaks, surely, to the anti-civilisational bent to ‘anti-Zionism’. That innocents can be slaughtered under the banner of hating Israel, whether it’s an 82-year-old Jew burnt to death in Colorado or two Catholic kids shot to death in Minneapolis, suggests there is a deep anti-human rot to this supposedly political position.