RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-tariffs-did-not-raise-prices-slowed-inflation/

The tariff doomer hype promised utter catastrophe.

Trump tariffs: When consumers should expect inflation, price hikes to hit wallets – CNBCNearly 90% of Americans expect tariffs to raise prices, Gallup poll finds – CBS News

I wonder who told them to expect that?

Trump’s Tariffs Would Boost Inflation, Shrink the Economy, Trump’s tariff plan amounts to a $3 trillion tax hike – Senate Committee on the Budget

Tariffs May Push Up Inflation Just As It Was Getting Better – Investopedia

Trump’s Tariff Would Cost the Typical American Household Roughly $1,500 Each Year – Center for American Progress

Trump’s tariffs could cost American households $5,200 annually – Center for American Progress

Which one was it? $5,200 or $1,500?

Well the numbers are in and the hype is dead.

Trump tariffs have little impact on prices so far, defying grim forecasts – Politico

Inflation eased after Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, defying fears – ABC News

The experts win again.

Fed Governor Adriana Kugler said Monday that the administration’s new taxes on imports are still “pretty high” and that she expects inflation to rise and growth to slow soon.

Any day now, says a former fellow with the Center for American Progress nominated by Biden.

They want America to fail. If it succeeds, it’ll raise questions about them, won’t it?

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/15/one-of-trumps-most-important-executive-orders-went-entirely-unnoticed/

Not long after Michelino Sunseri, a professional mountain runner, finished a race across Grand Teton last fall, he found himself on the receiving end of a Justice Department criminal charge. His offense? Running on a closed trail, for which he could end up serving six months in jail.

We are not making this up.

Last Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to prevent such gross abuses. It is one of the most important – and underappreciated – actions he’s taken.

The “crime” Sunseri committed wasn’t a federal law passed by Congress. It was a crime invented by the National Park Service – one of some 300,000 federal crimes (although nobody knows exactly how many there are) that unelected bureaucrats have conjured up when writing regulations.

What’s more, many of these regulatory crimes are “strict liability” offenses, which means that you don’t need to have criminal intent to be charged with a crime.

“This status quo is absurd and unjust,” Trump says in his executive order. “It allows the executive branch to write the law, in addition to executing it. That situation can lend itself to abuse and weaponization by providing government officials tools to target unwitting individuals.”

All true. And deeply disturbing to anyone who cares about civil liberties.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/14/donald-trump-has-scrambled-the-old-class-allegiances/

US president Donald Trump has disrupted the nature of class politics. In a reversal of long-standing allegiances, working-class Americans – including many minorities – have shifted towards the MAGA right. Meanwhile, the well-educated, the corporate elites and the government-dependent have generally veered leftwards.

Rather than the relatively simple Marxist notion of a proletarian conflict with the bourgeoisie, we are seeing a more splintered and nuanced class politics across the West. These divisions are not simply driven by income, race or education, but increasingly also by how people earn their living, and how tariffs, policies and regulations impact their daily lives. These new class tensions threaten to push politics towards the fringes, both left and right. As society frays, the era of consensus politics is firmly at an end.

Until last year, the oligarchy that dominates much of the world economy (and that of the US) reliably allied with the political establishment, whether in Davos, Washington, London, Ottawa or Brussels. They embraced many of the woke positions on gender, race and especially climate, while largely disdaining MAGA as well as more traditional Republicans.

As a result, in the US, the main beneficiaries of the much-discussed oligarchic ‘dark money’ have been, contrary to the general media perception, the Democrats. Big-spending oligarchs like Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and Marc Benioff helped Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris raise well over $1.5 billion – the highest figure in history – for her losing campaign.

Now that some oligarchs, like X owner Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have come out for Trump, the woke left has started to finally push back against their power over US politics. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have launched a ‘fighting oligarchy tour’ to wild applause in the largely oligarch-owned mainstream media. In the same vein, the Atlantic, owned by Steve Jobs’s widow, has denounced Musk’s oligarchic embrace of ‘strongman politics’. Progressives were far less concerned when Google camped out at the Obama White House (visiting 427 times during his administration) or when Harris scooped up big cash from oligarchs.

Perhaps the biggest political divide between the oligarchs comes from how they make their money. Many of those rallying to Trump actually build things and compete directly with China. Most obviously, this includes Elon Musk, who sources from China but also competes with its industrial machine at both Tesla and SpaceX.

Another important component of the right-wing oligarchical shift is the ‘defence bros’, like Palantir co-founders Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey. These are mostly habitués of the defence and space centres in Texas, Florida and southern California. In these places, they are building what could be a MAGA-friendly tech base. Military tech and space projects, which for security reasons must be built in the US, require factory space, skilled workers, reasonable housing costs and, as one executive told me, ‘good places to blow things up’. For this, he added, the wide open spaces of Texas are a unique blessing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/from-critical-consciousness-to-oikophobia/

The widespread campus protests against Israel that followed the savage attacks by Hamas on our ally and fellow liberal democracy, were unprecedented in their solidarity with terrorist organizations representing a religion fundamentally opposed to modern Western civilization and its Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian roots.

Sadly and shamefully, demonizing Israel is unexceptional and expected from Western progressives and Leftists––purveyors of a “history” that traffics in unhistorical, ideologically mendacious assertions about imperialism and colonialism. These critics have adopted those lies and made them, along with specious charges of “racism” and “genocide,” the original sin of Israel’s creation and continued existence. The UN also has adopted those malign tropes, and made Israel the “Jew of nations,” the global villain par excellence, while also supporting and funding Hamas’ jihadist violence.

A Western civilizational innovation––critical consciousness, the self-examination and criticism of one’s own political community, practice, and values––has now gone rancid and led to a self-loathing oikophobia, the irrational fear, loathing, and hatred of one’s own culture and fellow citizens that encourages our enemies and rivals.

Domestic anti-Americanism, for example, has invaded our culture and schools, and has become a spurious token of intellectual sophistication, “citizen of the world” cosmopolitanism, and the hallmark of critical consciousness. In reality it is slow-motion suicide dressed up as high fashion.

Contemporary Anti-Americanism began with Marxist sympathizers and fellow-travelers, and spread during the Cold War as a weapon for the Left. It flourished in Europe, which had influential communist parties. The European Left, as French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote, “has a grudge against America mainly because the latter has succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/elon-musk-department-of-government-efficiency-tesla-washington

It seems that the postmodern world is a conspiracy against great men. Bureaucracy now favors the firm over the founder, and the culture views those who accumulate too much power with suspicion. The twentieth century taught us to fear such men rather than admire them.

Elon Musk—who has revolutionized payments, automobiles, robotics, rockets, communications, and artificial intelligence—may be the closest thing we have to a “great man” today. He is the nearest analogue to the robber barons of the last century or the space barons of science fiction. Yet even our most accomplished entrepreneur appears no match for the managerial bureaucracy of the American state.

Musk will step down from his position leading the Department of Government Efficiency at the end of May. At the outset, the tech tycoon was ebullient, promising that DOGE would reduce the budget deficit by $2 trillion, modernize Washington, and curb waste, fraud, and abuse. His marketing plan consisted of memes and social media posts. Indeed, the DOGE brand itself was an ironic blend of memes, Bitcoin, and Internet humor.

Three months later, however, Musk is chastened. Though DOGE succeeded in dismantling USAID, modernizing the federal retirement system, and improving the Treasury Department’s payment security, the initiative as a whole has fallen short. Savings, even by DOGE’s fallible math, will be closer to $100 billion than $2 trillion. Washington is marginally more efficient today than it was before DOGE began, but the department failed to overcome the general tendency of governmental inertia.

Musk’s marketing strategy ran into difficulties, too. His Internet-inflected language was too strange for the average citizen. And the Left, as it always does, countered proposed cuts with sob stories and personal narratives, paired with a coordinated character-assassination attempt portraying Musk as a greedy billionaire eager to eliminate essential services and children’s cancer research.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/14/on-key-issues-behind-tariffs-trump-holds-an-edge-barely-ii-tipp-poll/

President Donald Trump has expended a lot of effort negotiating new tariffs with America’s trade partners. But will tariffs lead to lower income taxes and more factories at work in the U.S., as suggested? A plurality, though not a majority, of Americans say they will, and support them for that reason, according to the latest I&I/TIPP Poll.

With hot debate over tariffs ongoing and current talks with trade partners, tariffs have been in the media spotlight this year.

Seeking to find out how Americans see tariffs, the I&I/TIPP Poll posed the following statement to respondents: “President Trump recently stated that tariffs could lower or even eliminate income taxes for people earning under $200,000 a year.”

They were then asked: “Does this make you: More likely to support tariffs; Less likely to support tariffs; Neither more nor less likely to support tariffs; Not sure.”

The tally showed that a plurality of 32% answered “more likely,” while 25% said “less likely.” Another 30% said “neither more nor less,” but 13% said they weren’t sure.

Once again, demographic differences show there’s not really much overall common agreement.

Start with political affiliation. Only 16% of Democrats say they’re likely to support tariffs if they cut income taxes, while 54% of Republicans and 25% of independents do. Of the “less likely” responses, 37% are Democratic, only 15% Republican and 23% independent. As for the “neither” responses, 34% are Dem, 22% are GOP, and 36% come from indie voters.

https://gatesofvienna.net/2025/05/tarnishing-the-haloes-of-the-saints/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

NB: This following essay by Baron Boddisey first appeared at the Gates of Vienna website. It recounts events that began one dozen years ago, but whose repercussions only continue to intensify in the communist endgame.

The death of David Horowitz last month stirred up all the old traumas from the fall of 2013 prompted by the controversy over Diana West’s book American Betrayal.

Mr. Horowitz was canonized immediately after his passing, but I couldn’t bear to read all the encomia to the saint — which were legion — that appeared on almost every conservative website.

At the risk of speaking ill of the dead, I feel obliged to note that Saint David behaved in a less than saintly fashion towards my friend Diana West, beginning in the late summer of 2013. He led an unseemly charge against her, one that descended into the gutter from the git-go. He and his fellow polemicists mounted ad-hominem attacks, calling her vile names and disparaging her alleged mental state. On those rare occasions when they attempted to engage the content of her writing, they invariably set up straw men to knock down, in an attempt to refute arguments that she never made.

Diana was blacklisted that fall by all the mainstream outlets of Conservatism Inc., with only the smaller blogs and forums coming to her defense and allowing her a voice. Gates of Vienna was the largest platform among those that supported her, which — given the diminutive stature of this blog — indicates how far into the Outer Darkness she had been cast.

So what was all the fuss about?

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Creative destruction is a school in economics, popularized by Joseph Schumpeter[2], that explains the process by which innovation obsoletes older processes, equipment and products. While disruptive in the short term, it is the driving force for long term economic growth and progress. In Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction (1973), Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “It is only through disruption and confusion that we grow, jarred by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own.” On November 5, 2011 in an op-ed in London’s The Guardian, Naomi Wolf noted: “Democracy is disruptive…there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption.”

Disruption is the antidote to complacency, the enemy of innovation, and it is challenging to those of the status quo – those whom we call the “establishment.” However, disruption is not always good. We can think of dozens of instances – a child throwing food at the table; protestors shutting down university classes; strikers blocking the entrance to a grocery store. But throughout history, progress has thrived on disruption. We see the beginnings of such positive disruption in Washington today: addressing the border crisis, eliminating fraud and waste embedded in federal bureaucracies and confronting anti-Semitism on college campuses. On the other hand, we are also witness to negative disruption: the, seemingly random, use of tariffs by President Trump and belittling comments about allies by Vice President Vance.

That President Trump is a disruptive force is a fact universally accepted. The question we and the world face: Is President Trump a disruptive force for good or bad? “There are times,” Karl Zinsmeister, White House chief domestic policy director 2006-2009, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, “when some messy political demolition and noisy rebuilding are necessary.” Is this such a time? I believe it is.

https://www.city-journal.org/multimedia/us-china-tariff-agreement-will-it-stick

Charles Fain Lehman, Ilya Shapiro, Daniel Di Martino, and Tal Fortgang discuss the deal between the U.S. and China to temporarily lower tariffs, Trump’s executive order on prescription drug prices, and Chicago-isms Pope Leo XIV should bring to the Vatican.

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. Joining me on the panel today, Ilya Shapiro, constitutional law guy at the Manhattan Institute, Daniel Di Martino, Argentinian policy expert, politics expert at the Manhattan Institute apparently, and Tal Fortgang, legal policy guy at the Manhattan Institute. Tal works for Ilya, so Tal, don’t mess this up. Otherwise, it’ll come back in your review.

Ilya Shapiro: But by works for me, that means he writes a bunch of stuff. I read a third of it and enjoy it. That’s our professional relationship.

Charles Fain Lehman: It’s a good review. Tal, quote that. We have this on record. I want to take us into the big news of the day. Earlier this morning, I think, I was asleep, but China and United States announced a 90-day temporary reduction in the mutual tariffs. So they’re down on the US side from 145 percent to 30 percent. It’s a major de-escalation as we’re recording this, the markets are up like a thousand points, although God knows what will be happening by the time it comes out. So don’t get mad at me listeners if it’s changed. Daniel, where are we on this front? You’re the econ guy on the panel. Is this a good development? Is this a bad development? What do you think?

Daniel Di Martino:  I think the Chinese negotiation team probably knows more about what the U.S. wants than we do. At this point, I don’t know what’s the goal of U.S. policy with the tariffs on China. If the goal was decoupling from China, then you should have wanted to keep the tariffs, not lift them. And if the goal was to get them to lower the tariffs, well, now we have a higher tariffs than we did before. So it seems like, at least by those two very different goals that are exclusionary from each other, we aren’t achieving anything.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/murder-ballads/

It didn’t start with Che Guevara, but Che, surely, is one of the major milestones along the way. By all accounts, he was a psychopath, delighting in the summary executions of purported ideological enemies, including children. But that one famous photograph of him wiped all the blood away. A picture cannot only speak a thousand words; it can erase a million crimes. For young people all over the West in the 1960s and thereafter, Che was a hero, period. In 2008, the top Hollywood director Stephen Soderbergh made a hagiographic movie about Che that ran just under four and a half hours (it was ultimately released in two parts); the title role was played by Benicio Del Toro, whose research for the part included a trip to Cuba, where, he later said, he met “tons of people who loved this man.” To be sure, it’s one thing to encounter Che fans in Castro’s Cuba, where the people have been propagandized to a fare-thee-well and where dissenting views are punished severely; it’s another thing to see free people strolling down the streets of Western cities in Che t-shirts – presumably ignorant of the true heroes who won them their freedom but enthralled by a man who fought to destroy it.

Six years after Che’s death, an infant was born in a manger – no, not really – in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He later lived in Houston, where he served nine jail terms for crimes involving drugs, trespass, theft, and aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. Still later he moved to Minneapolis, where he was detained for drug possession and suffered a drug overdose. On May 25, 2020, he was stopped by police on suspicion of passing counterfeit money at a grocery store, and died while resisting arrest by a police officer named Derek Chauvin. News of the death of George Floyd spread around the world like wildfire. Mass protests were held everywhere. Countless Floyd murals were created. Riots caused billions of dollars in damage. Leftists used Floyd’s death to spread the lie that hundreds if not thousands of innocent blacks die each year  at the hands of white American cops (the real number is in the double digits). As a result of this lie, the movement to defund the police won widespread support, and in many cities the police actually were defunded. The fact that Floyd had died not because of Chauvin’s actions but because of the drugs in his system didn’t matter to Chauvin’s judge, prosecutor, and jury, who knew that if they didn’t throw the book at Chauvin – who ended up being sentenced to twenty-two and a half years in prison – they’d be torn to bits by the mob. By the end of the summer, like Che, his fellow perpetrator of violence, Floyd had been canonized by the left, venerated as a martyr. Last May it was announced that, inevitably, Floyd would be the subject of a movie. Daddy Changed the World was being developed by Radar Pictures, with Floyd’s daughter as executive producer. I can’t wait.