RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trumps-smithsonian-restoration/

The Left has been wringing its hands this past week after Trump recently ordered a “comprehensive internal review” of several Smithsonian museums to ensure that the 178-year-old institution, captured by the Left, removes its relentless anti-American propaganda and provides some balance in its exhibitions and materials.

In an Aug. 12 letter from the White House to the Smithsonian’s woke chief, Dr. Lonnie G. Bunch III, the White House stated:

As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Nation’s founding, it is more important than ever that our national museums reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story.

The review is to help the administration “support a broader vision of excellence that highlights historically accurate, uplifting, and inclusive portrayals of America’s heritage.”

The letter cited one of Trump’s executive orders from March, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which bluntly called out the Left’s “revisionist movement… to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light” – especially as manifested at the Smithsonian. That E.O. noted that the museum complex had, “in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” promoting “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”

The ”recent years” under which that influence grew happen to coincide with the tenure of Lonnie G. Bunch III, who took over as the Secretary of the Smithsonian in 2019. Prior to that, he was the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is nearly exclusively focused on the legacy of slavery, with exhibits such as “In Slavery’s Wake,” “Slavery and Freedom,” and “Make Good the Promise.”

You may remember that it was also in 2019 that the Smithsonian collaborated with the New York Times on its historical revisionist 1619 Project, which falsely asserts that the United States’ founding was grounded not in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all, but in racism and enslavement.

And then there was the 2020 controversy over a racist “whiteness” chart displayed in an online portal at Bunch’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, a chart that identified such traits as hard work and rational thought as being “white.” An accompanying graphic stated, in part,

White dominant culture, or whiteness, refers to the ways white people and their traditions, attitudes, and ways of life have been normalized over time and are now considered standard practices in the United States.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/08/22/the-light-shines-on-another-obama-scandal/

Weren’t we assured that Barack Obama went “into and out of office with not a whiff of scandal”? Yes we were. Former Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen told us so, as did many others. But it wasn’t true. There are many, the most recent a claim that Obama, and then Joe Biden, pressured bank executives to deny services to conservatives. It’s a serious charge that, like the Russia hoax, makes Watergate look like a sandbox squabble.

Here’s what we’ve learned: Acccording to Fox Business, major bank executives said “they were under pressure by the Obama and Biden administrations to deny services to individuals and businesses for political reasons.”

One executive said the “pressures were very, very real. When your regulator gives you a suggestion, it’s not a suggestion, it’s an order. The political stuff is very real, those pressures are real.”

This is known as “political debanking” and is “the involuntary termination of banking services to individuals and organizations based on their political or religious views,” says Todd J. Zywicki, a professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, who further “argues that access to financial services is a prerequisite for exercising constitutional rights.”

Zywicki’s March paper “traces the rise of political debanking from the Obama administration’s Operation Choke Point, which targeted disfavored industries under the guise of ‘reputation risk.’” It was expanded under Biden administration, during which “Melania Trump and Michael Flynn faced account closures for their political stances.”

Other “high-profile cases” included “the cancellation of accounts tied to Donald Trump Jr.’s events and the National Committee for Religious Freedom,” and “illustrate a growing weaponization of the financial system to suppress dissent.” 

Operation Choke Point was a creation of the Obama Justice Department. Its mission was “to ‘choke out’ companies the administration considers a ‘high risk’ or otherwise objectionable, despite the fact that they are legal businesses,” says a House Oversight Committee report. “The goal of the initiative is to deny these merchants access to the banking and payments networks that every business needs to survive.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/08/russiagate_dismantling_the_democrats_hoax.html

At the long-anticipated U.S.-Russia summit in Alaska on August 15, President Trump stressed that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin was well aware that his country had not interfered in the 2016 election. This unexpected remark amid talks on Ukraine war settlement referred to a massive legal work conducted by the intelligence community aimed at exposing that “treasonous conspiracy.”

That is, in mid-July this year, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revealed that the so-called Russiagate investigation was politically motivated and inspired by the Democrat party, particularly the outgoing Obama administration in late 2016. The disclosures reinforced suspicions long held but never conclusively substantiated: the Russia-interference claim was not merely flawed but deliberately constructed to undermine Trump’s presidency.

Russiagate in a Nutshell

On January 6, 2017—just days before Donald Trump’s inauguration—the U.S. intelligence community released a new assessment concluding that “Russia interfered in the election to favor Trump.” This statement reversed six months of prior assessments, which indicated there had been no recorded foreign meddling through cyber operations.

The strong claim had a profound and long-lasting impact. It is not just about Trump’s first term being severely obstructed. Many of his top-tier supporters were “canceled,” some of them sent to jail under false “evidence.” Trump himself suffered massive reputational damage that had almost buried his political career. Overall, the meddling accusation campaign resulted in better electoral positions for the Democrat party during the 2018 and 2020 elections.

Besides, Russiagate prompted some anti-interference bills to be passed by Congress. Many of them included sanctions on Russia and other adversaries of the U.S. which led to higher tensions with Moscow, Iran, and China. Some pundits say this plot could have triggered numerous wars, including hostilities in Ukraine.

Moreover, the accusations led to a long-lasting investigation by the FBI and other agencies, which cost American taxpayers a hefty pile of money. The initial FBI investigation, called Crossfire Hurricane, transformed into Special Counsel Mueller’s probe, and it damaged the federal budget for some $35 million. Durham’s subsequent probe cost some $7 million, and other congressional investigations expenses up to $5 million.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/education-and-wealth-trump-all-identity-politics/

One of the strangest and dysfunctional ideas in our society has been “identity politics.” This creation sprang from Cultural Communism’s exploitation of the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society’s federal legislation and agencies’ redistribution of taxpayer money. The purpose was to keep the newly franchised black citizens mired as victims still oppressed by racist whites, and to make blacks political clients of the Democrat left, a project launched in the U.S. by Stalin decades earlier.

The effort was a success if measured by the subsequent predictability of black voters’ loyalty to Democrats. They have remained loyal despite a lack of reciprocation by the Dems. For example, look at black politicians who have ignored the persistent scandal of black-on-black violent crime. The current Democrat assault on the police and efforts to reduce fighting crime is disproportionately dangerous for “black lives,” who don’t “matter” to Dems as much as we’ve been told.

After the Civil Rights Act ended Jim Crow law, savvier American leftists knew that the improvement in black lives starting in the 1920s and increasing in the postwar period, and the growing distaste for racism, would create difficulty for the Democrat left’s plan to capture black votes.

So, they continued to treat blacks as victims, thus creating a reliable constituency. In fact, the black vote has gone Democratic for decades until Trump’s second presidential election achieved the highest number of black voters by any modern Republican candidate.

In addition, either unknown or indifferent to the moral hazards when the Dems started federal redistribution of Great Society funds in the Sixties, the plan actually worsened black lives. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley catalogued the earlier decades of improvement, as well as the decline after the Civil Rights Act, the Great Society programs, and their malign moral hazard of the federal dole that worsened black lives:

Between 1890 and 1940, for example, black marriage rates in the U.S. were higher than white marriage rates. In the 1940s and ’50s, black labor-participation rates exceeded those of whites; black incomes grew much faster than white incomes; and the black poverty rate fell by 40 percentage points. Between 1940 and 1970—that is, during Jim Crow and prior to the era of affirmative action—the number of blacks in middle-class professions quadrupled. In other words, racial gaps were narrowing. Steady progress was being made. Blacks today hear plenty about what they can’t achieve due to the legacy of slavery and not enough about what they did in fact achieve notwithstanding hundreds of years in bondage followed by decades of legal segregation.