RUTHFULLY YOURS

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?