RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/08/20/say-whatever-happened-to-all-those-devastating-spending-cuts-we-were-warned-about/

“U.S. deficit grows to $291 billion in July despite tariff revenue surge.” – CNBC

That and other headlines greeted the release of the latest monthly Treasury Department report last week, which showed that the July deficit was $47 billion higher than the year before – even though revenues came in $8 billion higher.

Turns out that, despite all the protests, the screaming, and purple-hair-pulling and nose-ring-wiping about President Donald Trump’s “devastating cuts,” spending in July was $55.5 billion higher than it was a year ago.   

What’s more, there were jumps for outlays for agencies such as Veterans Affairs (up $3 billion year-over-year), Medicaid (up $15 billion), the EPA (up $195 million), the National Science Foundation (up $14 million) – all of which were supposedly being slashed and burned.

In fact, just five of the 15 Cabinet-level agencies spent less this July than they did last year.

As we’ve pointed out many, many times in this space, when it comes to spending cuts, both sides exaggerate what’s going on. Democrats do so because they want never-ending spending increases, and Republicans do so because they want to look like fiscal hawks.

The truth is that spending keeps growing, and growing, and growing. That is nowhere more true than when it comes to Medicaid, which as we exposed here (see “One Chart To Kill The Medicaid Lies For Good”), continues to climb at an unsustainable pace under the One Big Beautiful Bill.

But, don’t despair, because things are getting better under Trump.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/08/18/poll-trump-approval-surges-to-54-after-meeting-with-putin/

President Donald Trump’s voter approval rating surged to 54 percent following his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday.

An InsiderAdvantage survey conducted over the weekend found that Trump “now has an advantage among every age group other than the most senior of voters,” and improved his numbers among black (23.7) and Hispanic voters (47.2). White voters are at a near-record high approval with 64 percent.

Over half of independents (50.4) are approving of Trump, while the vast majority of Republicans (92) and 17.9 percent of Democrats said the same. 

The poll found that 44 percent of voters disapprove of Trump, giving him a net +10 percent approval rating.

The publication’s last poll conducted in July found Trump to have 50 percent approval, with 48 percent disapproving, for a net +2 percent rating.

“Only the nation’s oldest voters disapprove of his job performance, which is consistent with our prior surveys,” pollster Matt Towery said Monday. “Overall, his approval numbers are surging upwards post-summit.”

Trump said his meeting with Putin resulted in “great progress,” and the Russian leader said his war with Ukraine would have never begun if Trump was president in 2022 instead of Joe Biden. 

Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/who-is-responsible-for-the-worsening-of-americas-racial-divisions/

By the early years of the twenty-first century, it looked as if America’s traumatic racial divisions really were receding into the past. It seemed as if genuine equality of opportunity had finally been achieved, and that Americans of whatever background had a level playing field upon which they could make as much of their talents as they wished, depending on how hard they were willing to work.

But then came the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama, who is, of course, the child of a black father and a white mother, seemed to herald the dawning of the new post-racial America. He couldn’t have been elected, of course, without the votes of millions of white Americans, and his victory in itself showed that the nation was not racist. Many white Americans voted for him in order to show that they were not racist, but others voted for him because they were not racist and simply favored his policies. Still others voted for him because they were thrilled at the prospect of showing the world that the United States really was the land of opportunity, in which a member of a once-despised and discriminated against racial minority could become president. And so when he became president, Obama embodied the hopes of many Americans — and promptly dashed them.

Throughout his disastrous eight years as president, Obama did not work to heal what remained of American’s racial divisions. Instead, he stoked racial tensions repeatedly. When he took office, the Justice Department was pursuing a case against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation in Philadelphia. Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, abruptly dropped the case in May 2009 and refused to cooperate with further investigations, giving the impression that the Black Panthers were getting away with voter intimidation because of their race.

Obama’s response to several widely publicized incidents exacerbated racial tensions even more. On July 16, 2009, black intellectual Henry Louis Gates found himself locked out of his Massachusetts home and began trying to force his way in. An officer, who was white, arrived to investigate a possible break-in; Gates began berating him and was arrested for disorderly conduct. Obama claimed that the police “acted stupidly” and noted the “long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by police disproportionately,” although there was no indication of racial bias in this case.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-did-child-rearing-get-so-gentle/

Complaining about the younger generations has been a common habit for many millennia. The Greek poet Hesiod in the 8th Century B.C. groused about the young, “I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint.”

But the antiquity of such clichés doesn’t mean that in our time there hasn’t been a decline in child-rearing and education that has created flawed characters, dangerous ideologies, and bad habits among our young. For many traditional moms and dads, “gentle” parenting coddles and spoils children not just at home, but in grade schools, universities, and jobs, and accounts for many of the problems and dysfunctions of our young people.

Hence the trend of FAFO––the “f–ck around and find out” method of child-rearing. The New York Post reports one pioneer mother, Janelle who explains this novel child-rearing in her video.  “I practice authoritative parenting but within what I would consider a subgenre that I would call ‘f*ck around and find out’ parenting… [kids] get their natural consequences and get to figure out the way through them.”

Just saying “authoritarian” will shock and anger school teachers and “gentle childrearing parents.” But for multiple decades, American primary schools and parents alike have failed dismally at educating and rearing many of our children––a national disgrace for the freest, richest country in the world. Part of the problem is the idea that learning should be “fun” and “affirming” students’ self-esteem, rather than requiring a work ethic to achieve proficiency and knowledge by meeting the challenges of rigorous standards.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/08/19/the-backlash-presidency/

For those who can’t understand why Donald Trump was twice elected president, including the Republicans and conservatives who continue to impugn him, we have the answer: Trump is the response to three (yes, three) terms of Barack Obama.

This country has never had a president like Trump. He doesn’t hold back, he can sometimes be crude, he sees no benefit in playing nice with people who want to destroy him (who also happen to overlap with Americans who want to take down their own country a notch or two because, in their perverted thinking, America was never great to begin with).

Love him, like him or hate him, Trump is a transformative president – he was called on to halt the road the Obama-fueled ruling class was taking the country down, to break the walls its members had built to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions, to prosper financially at others’ expense.

Here is his record so far:

The open border. Joe Biden invited millions of unvetted migrants into this country to swing the electorate to the Democrats, establish a permanent majority, satisfy some perverted obsession with multiculturalism, and antagonize native-born Americans and new citizens who migrated the proper way. A majority of Americans had had enough and turned over border security to Trump.

The administrative state. More than half of Americans had become tired of their votes not counting. The real power and authority in Washington were the unelected bureaucrats who were carrying out the Democratic Party’s agenda. Trump has shown not just a willingness but an appetite for reining in this unaccountable, inflexible force that Democratic administrations built.

DEI. The diversity, equity, and inclusion nags are nothing more than quota peddlers. Americans who have been punished by DEI tenets and offended by its divisiveness elected a man who has made it a point to eliminate this blight on our society that has been nurtured by the left.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/13/russiagate-was-worse-than-watergate/

Russiagate is back. US attorney-general Pam Bondi has ordered a grand-jury investigation into an alleged conspiracy by the Obama administration and the national-security services to tie Donald Trump to Russia. Bondi’s move follows a criminal referral from director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. It also comes after a slew of new information releases since early July. These include Gabbard’s declassification of intelligence on the Obama administration’s conclusion that Russia sought to help Trump in the 2016 election; CIA director John Ratcliffe’s review of the intelligence-community assessment (ICA), ordered by then president Obama in December 2016; and a newly declassified annex to the Russiagate report, produced by special counsel John Durham in 2023.

While the Department of Justice has not yet brought indictments, the alleged crimes could be serious – including offences punishable by imprisonment. Last month, Gabbard accused Barack Obama – along with former director of national intelligence James Clapper, former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI head James Comey – of leading a ‘treasonous conspiracy’. This was, she said, ‘essentially a years-long coup against the duly elected president of the United States, subverting the will of the American people and attempting to delegitimise Donald Trump’s presidency’. On his Truth Social account, Trump posted a joke video depicting FBI agents handcuffing Obama in the Oval Office, to the tune of ‘YMCA’.

Unsurprisingly, the key figures targeted by Gabbard have rejected her allegations. A spokesperson for Obama called them ‘bizarre’ and ‘a weak attempt at distraction’. Brennan and Clapper wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling the allegations ‘patently false’. They even claimed they never relied on the now-debunked Steele dossier to establish their assessment of Trump’s ties to Russia – a claim that is itself ‘patently false’, and which suggests their dishonesty continues to this day.

Likewise, the mainstream media have essentially concluded that there is nothing to see here. They have either ignored the latest Russiagate disclosures or sought to discredit them as just the latest in a long line of Trumpist ‘conspiracy theories’. Trump is rehashing the past, they say. He is seeking retribution for grievances he cannot let go of. It’s all just a diversion from the Jeffrey Epstein story. Tulsi is trying to get back in Trump’s good graces. And so on.

It is convenient for the New York Times and the Washington Post to wave away the latest revelations as ‘Russian disinformation’, as it means they do not have to engage directly with the facts. After all, their own reporters were complicit in perpetuating the Russiagate hoax, gleefully spreading the falsehoods the Obama team and the security services fed them. These two newspapers even won Pulitzer prizes for their coverage. Coverage which we now know was false.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/14/who-has-been-busy-destroying-democracy/

“Destroying democracy”—the latest theme of the left—can be defined in many different ways.

How about attempting to destroy constitutional, ancient, and hallowed institutions simply to suit short-term political gains?

So, who in 2020, and now once again, has boasted about packing the 156-year-old, nine-justice Supreme Court?

Who talks frequently about destroying the 187-year-old Senate filibuster—though only when they hold a Senate majority?

Who wants to bring in an insolvent left-wing Puerto Rico and redefine the 235-year-old District of Columbia—by altering the Constitution—as two new states solely to obtain four additional liberal senators?

Who is trying to destroy the constitutionally mandated 288-year Electoral College by circumventing it with the surrogate “The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact?”

Does destroying democracy also entail weaponizing federal bureaucracies, turning them into rogue partisan arms of a president?

So who ordered the CIA to concoct bogus charges of “collusion” to sabotage Trump’s 2016 campaign, the 2016-2017 transition, and the first 22 months of Trump’s first term?

Who prompted a cabal of “51 former intelligence officials” to lie to the American people on the eve of the last debate of the 2020 election that the FBI-authenticated Hunter Biden laptop was instead the work of a “Russian intelligence operation?”

Who ordered the FBI to connive and partner with social media conglomerates to censor accurate news deemed unhelpful to the 2020 Biden campaign?

Who pulled off the greatest presidential coup in history by using surrogates in the shadows to run the cognitively debilitated Biden presidency, then by fiat canceled his reelection effort, and finally anointed as his replacement the new nominee Kamala Harris, who had never won a single primary delegate?

Who ordered FBI SWAT teams to invade the home of a former president because of a classification dispute over 102 files out of some 13,000 stored there?

https://nypost.com/2025/08/13/opinion/obama-aides-admit-russiagate-was-a-smear-campaign-against-trump/

“That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.”

It’s hard to believe that the Russiagate plotters are so stupid, but the declassified documents tumbling out of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s files show that, while they had a lot of power and managed to hide their nefarious activities for almost a decade — President Barack Obama’s henchmen were none too bright.

The latest tranche of declassified emails has Obama’s DNI, James Clapper, telling then-Director of the National Security Agency Mike Rogers essentially to shut up and put his name to the intelligence community assessment (ICA) that Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan were cooking up, at Obama’s direction, to concoct a narrative that Russia had tilted the 2016 election to help Trump win.

“Understand your concern,” Clapper wrote to Rogers on Dec. 22, 2016, in the waning days of the Obama administration.

“It is essential that we (CIA/NSA/FBI/ODNI) be on the same page and are all supportive of the report — in the highest tradition of ‘that’s OUR story, and we’re sticking’ to it.’ ”

Compromised

Rogers had kicked off the conversation by laying out his concerns that normal tradecraft was being compromised and that his team had not had “sufficient access to the underlying intelligence and sufficient time to review that intelligence.”

“I’m concerned that, given the expedited nature of this activity, my folks aren’t fully comfortable saying that they have had enough time to review all of the intelligence to be absolutely confident in their assessments,” Rogers wrote.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/1000-people-died-while-new-york-attorney-general-chased-trump/

“We have to stop believing or following the rules. Break the rules,” New York Attorney General Letitia James recently told a radical leftist magazine. And she’s been doing exactly that.

Since taking office, the state’s top prosecutor has promoted one politically motivated prosecution after another, targeting, among others, the NRA and the Trump family, even as crime in the state soared to horrifying new heights. An exclusive Freedom Center investigation showed that 1,000 people died while Attorney General Letitia James neglected her duties.

Now James and her media allies are crying because the Justice Department is investigating her.

And no one deserves it more than her.

The New York attorney general’s spokesperson claimed that the federal investigation of the worst attorney general in the country was a “weaponization of the justice system” and “any weaponization of the justice system should disturb every American.”

That is true. It’s why James’ campaign to dissolve the National Rifle Association (NRA) and plunder its assets as part of her promise to eliminate the group for entirely political reasons was so disturbing. It’s why when she ran on promising to “take on President Donald Trump” and fulfilled that promise through politically motivated investigations of his organizations and businesses was equally disturbing. And it’s why the Justice Department has issued subpoenas and is looking into the misconduct of her office in both politically motivated prosecutions.

The so-called ‘fraud’ case against President Trump was illegitimately framed and prosecuted. It should never have existed and would never have existed except for purely political reasons.

Attorney General James now faces her own investigation for mortgage fraud for falsely listing a home for her niece as her ‘primary’ residents. Then there are the documents misstating details in a loan document about a house in New York and James’ father falsely claiming her as his wife on yet another loan document in what looks like a pattern of serial mortgage fraud.