RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/06/ted-kept-his-cool-while-tucker-was-a-sucker/

The war between Israel and Iran lasted twelve days.

Instead of a broad coalition of Arab states trying to push the Jewish state into the sea, one Islamic Republic (read: dictatorship) faced Israel, isolated from all other Muslim nations. Syria wouldn’t help, and Iranian proxies Hezbollah and the Houthis couldn’t since Israel wiped them out already.

Following targeted bombing campaigns, the nuclear Iran that pundits feared is no longer. The Iranian people are rising in the streets, bolder than ever before. Some even celebrated Israeli (and American) strikes on the Ayatollah’s nuclear facilities, watching the explosions from their homes.

However, one self-important commentator was fretting about the United States being dragged into another Middle Eastern conflict if Trump acted against Iran:

Tucker Carlson.

His doom and gloom bordered on hysterical.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/05/homes-for-hipsters/

More than his good looks, charm and great social-media game, the biggest reason that Zohran Mamdani may become New York’s next mayor grows from his focus on the city’s affordability crisis, most of which is tied to high housing prices.

Mamdani’s ‘cost of living’ campaign – offering rent control, free buses, childcare and city-owned supermarkets – seems to some leftist pundits a potential road back to power, under the guise of the burgeoning YIMBY (‘yes in my backyard’) movement that seeks to lower rental prices through massive housing construction.

Although Mamdani claims his focus on affordability appeals to working-class voters who shifted to Donald Trump, his core constituency lies elsewhere – with relatively affluent, young, single and childless professionals. For them, rent control is a true blessing, although they may not need free buses or want city-financed grocery stores, unless they resemble Whole Foods.

Housing, of course, is not just a New York issue. It also has a particular resonance for younger Americans. A Harvard poll of 18- to 29-year-olds this year ranked housing as the third-most-important issue overall, after inflation and healthcare. The educated hipster class – Mamdani’s base – understandably worries about the fact that in New York, you need a $135,000-a-year salary to afford a decent place, without it eating up most of your paycheque.

On a national basis, Mamdani’s win could prove a critical boost to the YIMBYs. From their origins in California, they have always been an odd agglomeration, originally financed by Bay Area tech and real-estate elites, while also embraced by more predictable leftist advocates of rent control, heavy subsidies and public housing. As YIMBY policies – like rezoning and densification – have either failed to solve the problem, or failed to gain traction with the public, more draconian socialist approaches seem to be gaining currency.

The YIMBYs are at least right about one thing: the lack of new housing is a profound national failure. Homebuilders constructed a million fewer homes – including units – in 2024 than in 1972, when there were 130million fewer Americans. One estimate puts the US housing market short by an estimated 4.5 million homes.

But if YIMBYs have diagnosed a key problem, their solutions – wherever imposed – have tended to make things worse. High-density development, often seen as the alternative to urban sprawl, does not solve the problem of higher urban land costs and higher construction fees.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28689/pedophilia-and-politics

 goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

In an important recap of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) revelations, journalist Margaret Flavin reports on an audit of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as discussed in a recent interview with Vice President JD Vance. Flavin’s article, “Vice President Vance Underscores Reports of Massive Waste and Corruption in Foreign Aid (Video),” posted on Gateway Pundit, June 29, 2025. The results of the audit reveal that only 12% of the money allocated to USAID for aid arrives at its destination! How is this possible?

Vance explains the corruption:

“So, we send $100,000 to this group to buy food for poor kids in Africa, okay.”

“And what actually happens is it’s not $100,000 that go to the food for the poor kids in Africa. The NGO, the non-government organization that gets that money, contracts it out to somebody else, and then they subcontract it. So, there’s like three or four middlemen.”

“Marco Rubio, who’s the Secretary of State, he’s a very good friend. What he told me is that his best estimate, after he had his team look at it, is that 88 cents of every dollar was actually being collected by middlemen.”

“So, every dollar we were spending, humanitarian assistance, 12 cents, was actually making it to people who needed it.

In fiscal year 2023, USAID distributed $7 billion of American taxpayer monies worldwide, and less than $1 billion was actually distributed to the needy. This confirms the waste, fraud, and abuse that Elon Musk’s DOGE team discovered. Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded with his March 10, 2025, announcement that 83% of USAID programs, a whopping 5200 contracts, many were cancelled saving tens of billions of American taxpayer dollars. The 1,000 remaining programs will be managed under the State Department.

Marco Rubio’s March 10, 2025 tweet:

After a 6-week review, we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID.

The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States.

In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18% of programs we are keeping (approximately 1,000) to now be administered more effectively under the State Department.

Thank you to DOGE and our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform.

So, who are the big losers in the crackdown on USAID, and what programs and policies that harmed or did not serve the national interest were they funding?

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/05/what-happened-to-loving-america/

Just in time for Independence Day, Gallup released polling results showing that a remarkable number of Americans are losing faith in their country and what it represents. Unsurprisingly—given who controls the levers of power in the federal government—Republicans are more proud to be Americans this year than last, while Democrats are significantly less so. What’s troubling, however, is that pride in the nation has fallen considerably among political independents and has fallen, over time, among all age groups of respondents. Most disturbingly, only 58% of American Millennials and a scant 41% of Generation Z-ers are proud of their country. “Notably,” as Gallup puts it, “more Gen Z Democrats say they have little or no pride in being an American (32%) than say they are extremely or very proud.”

Some observers, including some who are very smart and very well plugged in, have suggested that a big part of the problem here is that American kids simply aren’t taught today what makes this country so great. Instead, kids are taught more about the nation’s weaknesses than its strengths, more about its failures than its far more numerous successes. These observers ponder the question asked by President Reagan in his farewell address—“Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?”—and they answer, “Clearly, we are not.”

There’s not much to dispute here. This conclusion is almost inarguably correct. The American education system, at all levels, is woefully derelict in its teaching of history, American history in particular. What young children are taught about this nation’s past focuses largely on the negative, while overlooking most of the positive aspects.

Unfortunately, there’s much more to it than just that. The lack of education about America’s rich and amazing history is a small part of a much larger problem. It is more a symptom than the illness itself.

Pride in one’s country—or “patriotism”—is more than just a “feeling.” It is more than a mere emotional response to the power a nation wields or the victories it accumulates. Rather, patriotism is a virtue, which is to say that it is a good and productive reflex, a positive behavior, but it is something that itself must be taught, must be teased out of “the little human animal.” It is not enough merely to teach history. We must also teach the appropriate way to respond to that history. Among other things, patriotism is the means by which we come to know what is important and valuable, and moral in our community. And it must begin, therefore, with a common understanding of what is important and valuable and moral in our community.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/making-july-4th-great-again/

In the postwar period, the rise of the New Left and its “long march” through the institutions accelerated the erosion of patriotism, particularly among those who spent time in universities. Love of one’s country joined faith as a malign superstition, while sexual restraint and virtue became cultural shorthand for repression, ignorance, unsophisticated gullibility, and fascism. The United States was transformed by the left from the “shining city on a hill” to a cesspool of tyranny, racism, oppression, philistinism, and heartless greed.

But this year Donald Trump’s spectacular successes at home and abroad, the fruits of his Make America Great Again movement, has restored Constitutional order, common sense, and tradition to our government.  Now the “vibe,” as the kiddies of all ages say, is triumphantly patriotic, and the celebration of our nation’s birth, of freedom, and of political equality, is once again exuberant. And our exceptionalism is obvious to all except the enemies of freedom.

Earlier, there were moments of renewal. Ronald Reagan’s presidency marked a powerful pushback against the left’s collectivist trends and policies, and reform of our foreign policy of cringing accommodation of our enemies and rivals. With wit and passionate resolve, Reagan challenged the self-loathing clichés of the cognitive and cultural elites, slaughtering whole herds of their foreign policy, economic, and culture war sacred cows. Most important, he shocked the world and befuddled the foreign policy clerks by engineering the collapse of Soviet communism, freeing millions from tyranny.

But the rot of self-loathing had spread too wide and deep in our culture. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 should have swept away the juvenile leftist conceits and ideologies, and the policies which continued to fail at home and abroad. But the left-leaning Democrats, many of whom blamed the racism and oppression of America for 9/11, attacked and undermined the policies of the Bush administration, which initially aimed at preventing another heinous attack.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/californias-perfect-dictatorship/

Mario Vargas Llosa, who passed away in April at the age of 89, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010. Ten years earlier, the Peruvian novelist (The Time of the Hero, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War of the End of the World ) gained global attention for speaking the truth to power. In a 1990 conference organized by Octavio Paz, Vargas Llosa proclaimed that “la dictadura perfecta” was not communism, the USSR or Fidel Castro. The “perfect dictatorship” was Mexico.

As the Peruvian understood, a dictatorship is not a nation where there are no elections. A dictatorship is a country where one party never loses, and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) dominated Mexico since the 1920s. In a practice known as el dedazo, PRI presidents picked their successors, following up their choice with fake elections. In the US state of California, Democrats have established a perfect dictatorship of their own.

Democrats have been in power in Sacramento since 2011 and now hold all major elected offices: Governor (Gavin Newsom), Lt. Gov (Eleni Kounalakis), Secretary of State (Shirley Weber), Attorney General (Rob Bonta), State Treasurer (Fiona Ma) State Controller (Malia Cohen), Insurance Commissioner (Ricardo Lara), and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. Like all state Democrats, these officials enjoy the support of an imported electorate.

For years, Pew Research pegged the number of illegals in the United States at 11 million. A recent study by scholars at MIT and Yale – conducted before the massive influx under Biden – estimated more than 22 million. So the 11 million figure likely underestimates the number in California alone. In 2019, when state attorney Xavier Becerra announced a lawsuit against the Trump administration, he displayed a sign citing “over ten million immigrants” in California – “immigrants” being code for false-documented persons illegally present in the USA. With illegals, California’s approach has been two steps forward, no steps back.

Under California’s “motor voter” scheme, the DMV automatically registers illegals to vote when they get their driver’s license.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/07/03/who-is-proud-to-be-an-american/

The headlines this week have blared about how pride in America has plunged under President Donald Trump. But the Gallup Poll driving all these stories paints a very different picture from the headlines.

What the data actually show is that, not only did pride among Democrats plunge this year, it has been falling for them over the past 23 years – even when the sainted Barack Obama was in the White House.  

In Obama’s first year in office, 78% of Democrats said they were “extremely or very proud” to be an American. But by his last year in office, that share had dropped to 68%.

Not surprisingly, given their hatred of Donald Trump, Democrats’ pride then plunged during Trump’s first term. But even under Joe Biden, only 62% of Democrats could bring themselves to say they were proud to be an American.The Democrats’ growing disdain for their country aligns perfectly with their increasing radicalization – a trend we have been noting here at I&I for years (see, for example, “Don’t Be Surprised By Democrats’ Radical Turn – Fanaticism Is In Their DNA“) and before that at Investor’s Business Daily.

And the fact that only 36% of them say they are proud to be an American today says less about Donald Trump than it does about just how pusillanimous their pride in this country has become.