RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/donald-trump-force-conservatism-doge-deportations-higher-education

Conservatism has two modes: peacetime and wartime. When the social order is stable and healthy, conservatives seek to cultivate and maintain institutions. In times of chaos, a different kind of conservatism emerges, focused not on preservation but reform.

Donald Trump is a wartime conservative. Since his first presidential campaign, he has argued that America is in decline and requires drastic measures to restore its national greatness. In the opening stretch of his second term, he has focused on three policies—mass deportations, cost-cutting through DOGE, and higher education reform—that are aggressive and have caused distress across the political spectrum. Some center-right critics have fretted about the president’s potential “overreach,” while the usual voices on the left have accused him of “fascism” and “authoritarianism.”

Neither analysis is correct, but both gesture at the same thing: Trump is using force. American culture has changed to such a degree that these measures, none of them unprecedented, now appear radical. Elites have become so habituated to highly regulated, feminized environments that any hint of force causes apprehension.

Educated Americans have trouble imagining the use of force, largely because they have isolated themselves from it. Ivy League faculty members cannot fathom, say, putting their hands on an MS-13 gang member and physically ejecting him from the country. The educated classes have become so inured to the physical world that many perceive a pink slip or reduced research funding as an act of genuine violence.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/when-sharia-gets-a-tax-break/

In America, tax-exempt status isn’t a loophole. It’s a privilege—one meant to serve the public good, not undermine it.

Under 26 U.S. Code § 501(c)(3), that privilege is reserved for institutions that are religious, charitable, educational, or scientific in nature. But the law is explicit: these organizations may not promote criminal conduct, engage in substantial political lobbying, or advocate ideologies that undermine the U.S. Constitution.

Yet that’s exactly what many Islamic nonprofits are doing—with the IRS’s blessing, and in some cases, with taxpayer funding.

These groups hide behind “religious freedom.”

What they’re really advancing is Sharia—a totalitarian legal system that stands in direct opposition to American law and values.

They preach that man-made laws are illegitimate.

That Islam’s legal code is supreme.

And American citizens are subsidizing it.

Take Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California. Marketed as America’s first Islamic liberal arts college, it presents itself as an academic institution committed to interfaith dialogue and scholarship.

But behind the polished branding lies a very different reality.

Zaytuna’s curriculum includes Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller)—a classical Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that is explicitly anti-Western in its rulings.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/liz-peek-biden-cancer-announcement-has-my-sympathy-my-skepticism

Former President Joe Biden announced over the weekend that he had just recently been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer. A statement from the former president’s office identified the cancer as “aggressive” but also “hormone sensitive,” indicating the possibility of “effective management.”

The news generated an outpouring of sympathy from friends and foes alike. President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social, “Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis. We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.” We share that concern and optimism; we hope the former president beats the disease.

But, like much of the public, our initial sympathy has turned skeptical. Doctors say that it is highly unlikely anyone could be “suddenly” diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. Especially one which, according to Biden’s statement, had metastasized into his bone.

Nearly every man over 50 gets checked regularly for prostate cancer. Certainly, a U.S. president, and especially one under close surveillance for age-related illnesses, would have been examined rigorously for a disease that strikes one in seven men during their lifetime.

Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, an oncologist and Democrat policy-maker, told Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, that Biden had certainly had the disease for “more than several years.” “He did not develop it in the last 100, 200 days. He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021. I don’t think there’s any disagreement about that.”

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/05/19/the-real-criminal-behind-joe-bidens-health-cover-up-n4939953

For four years, Americans watched Joe Biden stumble—literally and figuratively—through his presidency, while his inner circle and media allies insisted everything was just fine. Any attempt to question his physical or mental decline was met with accusations of “ageism” or dismissed as wild conspiracy talk. This, from the same Democrats who once obsessed over Donald Trump’s mental fitness, but spent most of Biden’s term parroting absurd claims that he was “sharp as a tack,” “a beast,” or “running circles around his staff.” Videos of Biden looking lost on stage or mumbling were dismissed as “cheap fakes” by the Biden White House, and the media enthusiastically echoed that talking point.

It took a humiliating debate meltdown to finally make it clear they could no longer cover up the obvious. Only then did Democrats admit what everyone else had known for years: Joe Biden was neither physically capable nor mentally fit to serve as president. The charade is over—but the damage is done.

But, now, in light of the revelation of Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis, Congress needs to subpoena Joe Biden’s White House physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, to answer questions.

In 2023, shortly before Biden announced his reelection campaign, O’Connor called Biden a “healthy, vigorous 80-year-old male” fit for the presidency. Everyone knew it was laughable. Biden was visibly deteriorating—stumbling through speeches, forgetting names, and needing direction just to exit a stage. The signs were there for anyone willing to look, and even then, some insiders were quietly admitting behind the scenes that there were serious concerns. Yet, a year later, O’Connor doubled down. In February 2024, he wrote, “The President feels well and this year’s physical identified no new concerns.” 

These claims were lies. Biden’s mental and physical struggles were evident daily, and insiders were already leaking concerns. O’Connor’s medical authority made his deception worse than political spin. 

His health reports gave everyone cover. Without him, the deception couldn’t have happened.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/leon-county-florida-school-board-gender-identity-littlejohn-case

The social contagion of gender confusion among American teenagers has been worsened considerably by educators. In many cases, school officials, most notably at public schools, have socially transitioned children, while deliberately concealing this information from parents.

One such case arose in Leon County, Florida (Tallahassee), where the school board established a comprehensive Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Gender Nonconforming and Questioning Support Guide. That guide specifically instructed educators that they should not tell parents when a child announces a transgender identity, and that children have a legally protected right to keep from their parents information regarding their gender identity and any steps the district takes to affirm that identity.

Operating on this guidance, administrators met secretly with January and Jeffrey Littlejohn’s 13-year-old daughter in the fall of 2020 to develop a “gender support plan” that allowed the child unilaterally to decide which name and pronouns to use, which restroom to visit, and with which sex she would lodge on overnight trips. The document also indicated that school staff would use a new name and “they/them” when referring to the child at school but would use the child’s given name and “she/her” when talking to her parents.

The Littlejohns sued in federal court, alleging violations of familial privacy and of their constitutional rights to direct the upbringing of their children and to make medical and mental-health decisions for them. The district court granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim upon which relief could be granted, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed in a 2-1 split decision.

The appellate panel held that even if the Littlejohns alleged that defendants intentionally violated their constitutional rights, they had to allege further that the defendants’ conduct “shocked the conscience.” That “shock-the-conscience” requirement, per the majority, doesn’t apply to challenges of legislative actions, but it does apply to all claims that executive actions—like those of school officials—violate fundamental rights.

The decision was admittedly in tension with at least three other circuit precedents, each of which says that plaintiffs may win by showing either that the executive officials’ conduct violated their constitutional rights or that it shocked the conscience, but not necessarily both. Though he joined the majority because he felt bound to do so, Judge Kevin Newsom called the outcome “totally bizarre.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/19/the-fbi-washington-headquarters-wont-be-missed/

Current FBI Director Kash Patel is closing down the agency’s Washington, DC, mothership office and moving at least 1,500 employees out of the DC area to regional offices.

The decision was not just Patel’s.

During the Biden Administration, it was determined that the 50-year-old Hoover building headquarters was structurally decrepit. More germanely, no prior FBI director had ever explained why nearly a third of the FBI workforce was centered in offices in Washington, far from where most of the serious crime in America occurs.

The news is welcome for reasons well beyond the safety of agents in an apparently unsafe headquarters.

It is no exaggeration to state that most of the FBI scandals of the last decade were born in the Hoover building headquarters, suggesting that the agency had long become top-heavy, politically weaponized, and deeply embedded in and compromised by the Washington apparat.

Former FBI Director, later appointed as special counsel, Robert Mueller ran a media-driven, 20-month, 40-million-dollar legal circus chasing the unicorn of “Russian collusion.” His left-wing legal team—replete with political conflicts of interest and scrubbed cell phones—was dubbed by the obsequious, giddy left-wing media as the “army,” “untouchables,” “all-stars,” “dream team,” and “hunter-killer teams.”

When called to testify about his investigation that had found no Russian-Trump collusion, Mueller implausibly denied any knowledge of the Steele dossier or FusionGPS. Yet they were arguably the very catalysts for his own special counsel appointment.

Two of his Washington FBI investigators were fired—the amorous Peter Strzok and Lisa Page—who had co-texted a deep personal antipathy toward Trump, the object of their investigations, and a desire to see him not become president, referred to as an “insurance policy.” Note that either the FBI or Mueller’s team also mysteriously lost the requested recorded texts and calls on the duo’s phones.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/philly-funds-sharia/

Local and state outlets reported it—and even quietly celebrated it. But no one asked the hard questions. No one challenged the ideology, the curriculum, or the dangerous precedent. That didn’t happen until Liberty Sentinel and journalist Alex Newman blew the lid off what this really was: a taxpayer-funded expansion of Sharia under the banner of “diversity.”

In March 2025, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania awarded $5 million in taxpayer money to Al-Aqsa Islamic Academy—a Philadelphia-based Islamic school currently serving about 300 students. With this grant, the school now plans to expand to 3,000. It is the largest Muslim-specific education grant in Pennsylvania’s history—and likely one of the largest in the United States.

Governor Josh Shapiro made the announcement during a Ramadan iftar dinner, cloaking the moment in the usual buzzwords: “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “fighting hate.” He called it bridge-building. But what he built was a bridge to ideological conquest—not cultural unity.

Governor Shapiro didn’t just make the announcement. He used it to signal virtue with a now-familiar script:

“We are building bridges… promoting inclusion… and standing up to hate.”
— Gov. Josh Shapiro, Ramadan 2025

No, Governor. You’re funding religious indoctrination—an ideology rooted in supremacism and submission, not pluralism.

The $5 million came from Pennsylvania’s Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (RACP)—a fund that’s supposed to support infrastructure, economic growth, and public benefit projects. Roads. Housing. Public safety.

Instead, it’s being used to triple the size of a religious school with a documented ideological agenda.

This isn’t economic development. It’s state-funded ideological expansion.

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?

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5302937-doge-musk-spending-reforms-fail/

Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, told Fox News’s Martha McCallum recently that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is “not going away” and that “this incredible initiative is moving forward.”

Hopefully that is true, despite DOGE chief Elon Musk heading out the doorto save Tesla, now under attack by left-wing loons. On X Wednesday, DOGE claimed, “Current year non-defense federal obligations are down 20.5% as compared to 2024. Cash outlays will follow as obligations come due. Persistent government wide contract reviews … are bearing fruit.” An indicated $16 billion saving is encouraging.

But Republicans have published their version of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and there’s no evidence of the spending cuts that the DOGE team promised. Instead, GOP legislators in the House are relying on controversial Medicaid reforms to make their tax cuts possible. What went wrong?

The truth is that Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who volunteered to head the DOGE effort, undoubtedly overpromised. But he was also undermined by the political establishment.

At one point Musk projected his team could cut spending by up to $2 trillion. With a federal budget of $7.3 trillion, that was clearly a reach. He slimmed down his projections several times, announcing a new goal of $150 billion at an April Cabinet meeting. Musk is doubtless disappointed, as should be anyone who cares about our country’s fiscal prospects.

The DOGE chief has been thwarted at every turn by judges, claiming he was violating peoples’ privacy as his team sought to review data on Social Security, the Department of Education, the Treasury and the Office of Personnel Management. The White House’s attempts to fire federal employees were also blocked recently in court.