RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/31/democrats-and-men/

Since last November, Democrats and their friends in the media have spent a great deal of time wondering what they can do to win back male voters. Now they’re prepared to spend a great deal of money to help them figure it out. The “gender gap” in American politics was traditionally about Republicans’ inability to win over a majority of women voters, but this imbalance has more than evened out over the last few election cycles. Today, the Democrats’ struggle to win male voters—and young male voters, in particular—is as pronounced—if not more so—than their opponents’ struggle with women. Some of them, at least, would like to know why and would like to spend $20 million of their donors’ money in the process.

The explanations and consequent solutions offered so far range from the seemingly practical to the hopeless to the head-scratching. One might think that $20 million would buy something more insightful than this, but then, this is the same party that triumphantly chose Tim Walz as its vice-presidential nominee, fully expecting him to be the answer to their gender gap problem. Or in other words, don’t hold your breath.

In reality, the odds that the contemporary Democratic party will be able to win back men, now or in the foreseeable future, are vanishingly small. The party, as it is currently constituted, lacks both the will and the ability to make the changes that would be necessary to do so. What I mean by this is that the contemporary Democratic party is built on a handful of foundational notions that are, by and large, incompatible with the goal of appealing to men.

To start, historically, biologically, and evolutionarily, men need a purpose. That may sound trite or even sexist, but it’s nevertheless true. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that men need an externally imposed purpose. Whatever the case, women, by definition, have a purpose, namely to create and nurture new life. While men are necessary to create life as well, their role is, obviously, not as involved or enduring. Once upon a time—which is to say from the dawn of history until about 50 or 60 years ago—man’s purpose, therefore, was to provide for and protect the family, to enable the nurturing of new life as safely and successfully as possible. There is an evolutionary reason that men are, generally, bigger and stronger than women—because they had to be able to hunt and work for food and defend their loved ones from danger.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/01/what-is-american-conservatism/

“To be deceived about the truth of things and so to harbor untruth in the soul is a thing no one would consent to.”
— Plato, The Republic

Let me start with the genus. What is conservatism? The answer? It is cheerful allegiance to the truth. This is especially true of conservatism’s American variant. Conservatism in America has some distinctive features, traceable mostly to two things: the Founders’ vision of limited government supporting individual liberty and the historical accidents of newness, on the one hand, and geographical amplitude and separateness on the other.

Although it may sometimes seem that conservatives are constitutionally averse to cheerfulness, writing works with titles such as Leviathan, The Decline of the West, The Waste Land, and Slouching Towards Gomorrah, by habit and disposition, I submit, conservatives tend, as a species, to be less gloomy than—than what? What shall we call those who occupy a position opposite that of conservatives? Not liberals, surely, since the people and policies that are called “liberal” are so often conspicuously illiberal, i.e., opposed to freedom and all its works.

Indeed, when it comes to the word “liberal,” Russell Kirk came close to the truth when he observed that he was conservative because he was a liberal, that is, a partisan of ordered liberty and the habits and institutions that nurture it. (Is that another definition of conservatism?) In any event, whatever the opposite of conservatives should be called—perhaps John Fonte’s marvelous coinage “transnational progressives” is best, though the old standby “Leftists” will do—they tend to be gloomy, partly, I suspect, because of disappointed utopian ambitions.

Conservatives also tend to enjoy a more active and enabling sense of humor than leftists. Has anyone ever accused Elizabeth Warren of having a sense of humor? How about Rachel Maddow? Or Jamie Raskin?

The nineteenth-century English essayist Walter Bagehot once observed that “the essence of Toryism is enjoyment.” What he meant, I think, was summed up by the author of Genesis when that sage observed that “God made the world and saw that it was good.” Conservatives differ from progressives in many ways, but one important way is in the quantity of cheerfulness and humor they deploy. Not that their assessment of their fellows is more sanguine.

On the contrary, conservatives tend to be cheerful because they do not regard imperfection as a moral affront. Being soberly realistic about mankind’s susceptibility to improvement, they are as suspicious of utopian schemes as they are appreciative of present blessings.

Conservatives, that is to say, are realists. Like Plato, they recoil from the prospect of being fundamentally out of touch with reality.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-executive-orders-work-productivity-infrastructure-covid-masks

Wait around long enough, and a Trump executive order will likely come rolling out of the White House addressing a pet peeve or what would have been a pet peeve, had one known. In the interest of speeding up the Trumpian reform process, however, herewith are two proposed EO’s, based on close analysis of the extant orders. They are not exhaustive. Readers may have other needed EO’s in mind.

EXECUTIVE ORDER ENDING ILLEGAL EMPLOYEE ANTI-HARASSMENT TRAINING AND RESTORING AMERICAN PRODUCTIVITY.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1. Purpose. A bedrock principle of my administration is to make America productive again. Yet every year, America’s hardworking employees are subjected to hours of wasteful anti-harassment and anti-bias training. The only function of this immoral training is to provide employment to the graduates of unlawful women’s and black studies programs. These divisive training sessions presume that Americans are guilty of harassment and bias simply because of their race and sex. No evidence has been presented that America’s managers and workers are denying opportunities to their fellow workers because of prejudice, microaggressions, white privilege, rape culture, heteronormativity, ableism, neurohomogeneity, or the patriarchy. Nevertheless, influential institutions of American society, including the federal government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education require stultifying anti-bias and anti-harassment training. American dynamism is put on hold as employees click hopelessly through PowerPoint slides on bystander intervention, definitions of sex discrimination, and options for filing discrimination complaints.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/29/democrats-and-their-dei-albatrosses/

A few Democrat officeholders, activists, and pundits are finally coming to their senses that their brand is toxic to a majority of the American people.

The Biden administration killed what was left of it in a number of ways.

First, it serially lied to Americans about the cognitive decline and cancerous condition of President Joe Biden, both while in and after office.

Only when caught did the complicit media fess up that the Biden inner circle serially misled the American people about Biden’s inability to fulfill the duties of the presidency.

Second, left-wing politicos used Biden as a waxen effigy. His job was to pose as a “moderate” cover to push through the most radical and unpopular agenda in the last half century.

Only that way could “Old Joe Biden from Scranton” and his backroom handlers ram down the throat of the American people unpopular policies that nearly wrecked the country: hyperinflation and $7 trillion in new debt, weaponization of the government, and partisan lawfare, an open border and 12 million illegal aliens, a racialist DEI commissariat, a crackpot Green New Deal, defunding the police, biological men competing in girls’ sports, and two theater-wide wars abroad.

Third, without either a functional president or viable initiatives, the new hard-left Democrats sought to brand Donald Trump as “Hitler” and half the country who supported him as “fascists.”

For nearly nine years, the Democrats launched one failed hoax after another on the American people: “Russian collusion,” “laptop disinformation,” and the lying so-called “51 intelligence authorities.” They proved quite willing to undermine the rule of law by manipulating the court system in efforts to destroy their bogeyman, Donald Trump.

Never had the American people seen a political party engineer 93 bogus indictments of a rival candidate and ex-president. Two dozen states tried to take Trump off their presidential ballots. And the Biden Department of Justice sicced an FBI SWAT team to barge into Trump’s home.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/30/rogets-thesaurus-wont-save-democrats/

This week, we saw a spate of news stories blaming Democrats’ troubles on their vocabulary. They’re just using too many darn multisyllabic, academic-sounding words and turning off numbskull voters, is the basic message.

Seriously?

The Democrats’ problem isn’t linguistic, it’s ideological. But no one in the party wants to admit that.

A Washington Post story this week – “Democratic troubles revive debate over left-wing buzzwords” – begins by saying:

Maybe it’s using the word ‘oligarchs’ instead of rich people. Or referring to ‘people experiencing food insecurity’ rather than Americans going hungry. Or ‘equity’ in place of ‘equality,’ or ‘justice-involved populations’ instead of prisoners.

As Democrats wrestle with who to be in the era of President Donald Trump, a growing group of party members — especially centrists — is reviving the argument that Democrats need to rethink the words they use to talk with the voters whose trust they need to regain.

The Post goes on to say that “liberal candidates too often use language from elite, highly educated circles,” and quotes Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear saying that: “It makes Democrats or candidates using this speech sounding like they’re not normal.”

Earlier this year, a group of centrist Democrats gathered at a ritzy resort in Loudoun County, Virginia, the richest county in the country, to talk among themselves about how to regain working-class trust.

Among the recommendations: “get out of elite circles and into real communities” and embrace “traditional American imagery.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/we-have-no-moral-obligation-to-forgive-or-forget-the-biden-lies/

What a remarkable coincidence that Joe Biden’s wranglers discovered he had cancer right in the middle of the revelations about how he was totally senile and everyone around him, including his very real doctor wife, covered it up. Yeah, right. His puppet masters knew, even if that human rutabaga didn’t. Stage IV prostate cancer doesn’t sneak up on you. It’s easy to detect. I know my PSA. It’s .07. I got it tested a couple of weeks ago. I get it tested every year. Weird that I have better medical care than the President of the United States, right? But you don’t believe that. And I don’t believe that. The hacks, frauds, and charlatans demanding that you believe that certainly don’t believe that.The Democrat Party: It’s all a lie. It’s all a scam. They hid his likely terminal disease so he could be reelected, disclose it, quit, be hailed as a selfless hero (Hat Tip: Buck Sexton), and hand the country to that drooling half-

wit vice president of his. We all know it. And we need to say it, loudly and often, regardless of how hard the whiners whine.

There are two categories of people who heard the “news” – well, it was only news to the American people – and immediately told us that we need to slow our roll on demanding accountability for the rudderless presidency in solemn deference to this ultra-convenient revelation. The first kind are nice people, too nice. Some are serial Fredocon invertebrates who always counsel weakness, submission, and silence. Some believe Christian charity requires not only prayers for him and his family but a free pass on this massive wrongdoing for everyone involved. Others have an understandable sensitivity to the subject because they had family members who suffered the same terrible illness that Joe Biden has just been revealed to have, even though everybody around him must’ve known he had it for years and simply lied to cover it up.

Well, the sissies can pound sand; they look at history and think the Vichy French were too belligerent. I’m not going to judge the others; you need to follow your conscience. But I’m also not going to listen to them. I’m going to say what I want, all the time, and I’m going to continue to point out that Joe Biden is an evil, senile, corrupt pervert, who was and is surrounded by minions interested only in retaining their prestige, power, and plunder.

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-american-way-of-life-is-under-threat/

Let us begin by listening to the progressive vision of America. 

The late Todd Gitlin, a leading student activist of the 1960s New Left who went on to a career in academia, declares that America is the fulfillment of the Enlightenment. But, Gitlin writes, “the point is not to celebrate some accomplished Enlightenment with its Declaration of Independence…its Federalist Papers and Constitutional debates,” but to see the American project as “an aspiration, an invitation, a commitment to a process that seriously aims to bring about understandings that do not yet exist.”

Michael Walzer, another major left-wing intellectual of Gitlin’s generation, writes that America is “a radically unfinished society.” The late Richard Rorty, one of the most influential public philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, described the American project as the utopian dream of Walt Whitman and John Dewey. Rorty declares that Whitman and Dewey, influenced by Hegel’s concept of progressive evolution, “wanted…utopian America to replace God as the unconditional object of desire. They wanted the struggle for social justice to be the country’s animating principle.” 

This is the shared vision of the progressive  political coalition that includes both the hard Left, with its neo-Marxist oppressor vs. oppressed framework, and the mainstream of the Democratic party.  These forces represent progressive fusionism, its constituent parts working in tandem just as the twentieth-century conservative fusionist coalition worked together politically, despite philosophical differences.

Different elements of the progressive coalition emphasize distinct yet complementary visions of America. All find our nation deeply flawed and in need of transformation. 

The hard left tells us that America is (and always has been) an oppressive society.For example, the Organization of American Historians praises the 1619 Project and declares America is “a nation built on slavery, exploitation, and exclusion. Critical race theory provides a lens through which we can examine and understand systemic racism and its many consequences.”

The narrative of the mainstream Democratic party must be more political.  Their argument runs as follows:

America’s past is deeply problematic. But we have great ideals. The core of those ideals is the continuing expansion of social justice to those previously “oppressed” groups: blacks, women, gays, undocumented immigrants and as President Biden noted “transgender rights are the civil rights issue of our time.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/28/media-covered-up-bidens-health-issues-angry-voters-want-them-to-answer-for-it-ii-tipp-poll/

By 2-to-1, Americans agree that the media covered up former President Joe Biden’s mental infirmities, and an even-larger share believe it’s “important” to hold media outlets accountable for failing to inform the public about the former president’s health problems, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows. The poll was taken before the former president was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer on May 16.

In the national online I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,400 adults taken in late April and early May, Americans were asked: “To what extent do you agree or disagree that the media covered up Joe Biden’s mental decline?”

It wasn’t close, with 56% saying they agreed either “strongly” (33%) or “somewhat” (23%), while just half that — 28% — disagreed either strongly (13%) or somewhat (15%). Another 16% were not sure. The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points.

It is again an issue on which there are sharp divisions among key demographics.

Politically, differences were especially sharp, with majorities of Republicans (79% agree, 15% disagree) and independents (53% agree, 30% disagree) taking the hardest line. Just 38% of Democrats agreed, while 43% disagreed.

Men and women are another big split. Men agree (64%) far more than they disagree (25%) that the media covered up Biden’s mental issues. Women are less inclined to think the media covered up Biden’s issues: 49% agree, 31% disagree.

https://pjmedia.com/david-manney/2025/05/24/mark-steyns-vindication-a-triumph-for-free-speech-and-personal-fortitude-n4940136

In a previous column, I detailed Michael Mann’s unraveling legal crusade, focusing on his courtroom defeat and the staggering financial penalty levied against him. Readers’ responses were passionate, particularly about the absence of commentary on Mark Steyn.

Let me be direct: the omission was intentional. The Mann saga deserved focus, and Steyn’s fight deserves its own chapter.

This is that chapter.

Author, broadcaster, and unflinching cultural critic Mark Steyn did not merely weather a defamation trial. He survived it physically, financially, and morally when most would have buckled under the strain. What began as a battle over words became a battle over the soul of free speech.

The Lawsuit That Should Have Never Been

In 2012, Michael Mann filed a defamation suit against Steyn, the National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and Rand Simberg. Simberg had published a blog post likening Mann’s professional conduct to Penn State’s handling of Jerry Sandusky. Steyn quoted Simberg’s post and added his commentary, calling Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph fraudulent.

Rather than engage in rebuttal, Mann went for the jugular. He sued.

Steyn endured a legal process that lasted over a decade, dragging him through courtrooms, draining his resources, and exposing him to smears. 

While National Review and CEI were eventually dismissed from the case, Steyn fought alone. There were no corporate backers or legal insulation, just Steyn, his pen, and a mountain of principle.