RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-national-science-foundation-education-grant-funding

Throughout 2025, the science establishment has warned that the Trump administration poses a lethal threat to “American science expertise as we know it.” The alarums have been overwrought and misleading—until now. The administration’s 2026 budget request for the National Science Foundation does raise legitimate concerns about funding cuts. Yet in other respects, the reforms decried by Big Science have not gone far enough.

Congress created the National Science Foundation in 1950 to “promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; [and] to secure the national defense.” The foundation disburses up to $9 billion annually to support university researchers in physics, engineering, computing, biology, and chemistry. It boasts an unmatched record of seeding Nobel Prize–winning science.

Before the 2026 budget release, the foundation had already terminated more than 1,700 grants, totaling $1.4 billion. It had capped the amount of overhead that it will henceforth pay universities at 15 percent of a research grant, though it was immediately blocked by the usual federal court injunction. (See “Racist—But Underfunded?,” Spring 2025.) The foundation had embraced a reorganization plan that consolidates divisions and demotes high-level bureaucrats to nonexecutive positions.

Trump opponents cried foul. “The American people deserve a scientific enterprise free from political interference,” California Democrat Zoe Lofgren, ranking member of the House Committee on Science, said in a press release. The termination of grants will lead to the “complete gutting of America’s scientific enterprise,” Sarah Spreitzer, vice president of government relations at the American Council on Education, told Inside Higher Ed. A Columbia University psychologist and NSF grant recipient asserted to the New York Times that the cuts will cede “American leadership in science and technology to China and to other countries.” Science wrote that the reorganization plan plunged an “already battered” NSF into “deeper turmoil.” The restructuring would leave the agency vulnerable to White House pressure to “fund research that suits its ideological bent,” unnamed sources told the magazine.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/06/reactionary-neo-confederate-portland/

In blue cities across America—Portland, Oregon, especially—often violent protesters now seek to surround ICE facilities to stop federal officers from fulfilling their assigned and legal duties of arresting illegal aliens.

Some 10 million or more illegal aliens were allowed to enter the U.S. during the Biden years—illegally and thus without criminal or health checks.

Neither Antifa nor liberal urban America objected to such a flagrant disregard for the law. But both are now as intent on obstructing the legal enforcement of the law as they were earlier in favor of its illegal non-enforcement.

Much less did they care about the consequences of sending millions of foreign nationals into cities and counties where they swamped social services, spiked crime, and flooded emergency rooms and schools.

ICE has repeatedly presented data that show in its first rounds of deportations, it is concentrating on removing either criminal illegal aliens or those who have already been processed with deportation orders, somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of all current apprehensions.

No matter.

Left-wing protesters are swarming ICE headquarters in Portland to violently oppose all deportations, even those of known criminals and those who have already exhausted efforts to remain here illegally.

Why? The Democratic Party apparat knows that the public wants both secure borders and deportations of illegal aliens. Indeed, in part, it lost an election by its open-borders advocacy.

But Democrat officials feel that if street thugs like Antifa can surround and besiege ICE facilities in Portland, Oregon, then deportations will stop. Then, a de facto amnesty will follow for millions who entered the U.S. illegally—and will soon become Democratic constituents.

As a result, they do not fully enforce the law when thugs attack federal law enforcement. Antifa and its spin-off groups favor the night, when they try to block all entries and exits of ICE vehicles and personnel, and can commit their violence with greater anonymity.

The masked rioters assault anyone in their way. They count on exemption from punishment for committing violence against federal officers through the goodwill or indifference of kindred local and state officials who hate the Trump administration more than they respect the law. An Orwellian scenario follows in which federal officers are attacked by Antifa, which in turn counts on the non-intervention of local police.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/10/06/trumps-energetic-leadership-style-continues-to-find-solid-voter-backing-in-october-ii-tipp-poll/

Despite nonstop media controversies swirling about his administration and continued criticism from his political foes, President Donald Trump’s favorability remained rock solid in early October, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

September’s news-filled month — which included the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, renewed efforts to end the Israel-Hamas conflict, and U.S. attacks on South American cartels’ drug boats — failed to diminish Trump’s overall poll readings.

Every month, I&I/TIPP asks Americans the following question: “Overall, is your opinion of Donald Trump generally favorable, generally unfavorable, or are you not familiar enough to say one way or the other?”

Among those participating in this month’s national online poll of 1,459 adults, taken from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2, 43% of Americans held a favorable opinion of Trump’s leadership, while 46% described their opinions as unfavorable. Meanwhile, 11% were either “not familiar enough to say” (7%) or not sure (4%). The poll has a margin of error of +/- 2.7 percentage points.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-city-mayoral-election-zohran-mamdani-tax-spending-proposals

Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist running for New York City mayor, is coasting toward city hall. He has won over younger voters with promises to freeze rents, provide free child care for infants and toddlers, and open city-run grocery stores to cut living costs. His appeal also rests on being young, photogenic, and relentlessly easygoing. He benefits as well from a fractured opposition: instead of a single challenger in the November 4 election, he faces two—former governor Andrew Cuomo and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa—who are likely to split the anti-Mamdani vote.

Mamdani’s rise is striking for another reason: crime, one of the electorate’s top concerns, hasn’t derailed him, despite his past hostility to the NYPD and far-left statements on law enforcement. Just four years ago, worries about crime carried current mayor Eric Adams, a former cop and Mamdani’s ideological opposite, into office. Yet by early September, Mamdani led Cuomo, his closest rival, by more than 22 points and Adams by 37; Adams soon dropped out.

The turning point came in the June primary, when Mamdani shattered New York’s fragile political balance and left the city’s centrist forces unable to regroup. Adams’s narrow 2021 primary win, notes progressive journalist Ross Barkan, had reflected the lingering strength of the old coalition—machine politics, unions, business interests, and outer-borough voters concerned about crime—that governed the city for decades. That result, Barkan says, “tricked people” into thinking that the coalition could hold for Cuomo this year. But Cuomo’s effort to rebrand as a crime- and tax-conscious centrist, along with his union backing, could not overcome his liabilities—most glaringly, his 2021 resignation over sexual-harassment allegations.

As Barkan observes, a different kind of voter asserted itself in June—“not just the gentrifier, professional-class voter,” the stereotype of a Mamdani supporter, “but younger people of color, younger immigrant groups.” Mamdani’s victory reflects this demographic shift, as outer-borough voters of all races who remember the high-crime 1970s and 1980s steadily disappear from the rolls.