RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/21/the-trump-counterrevolution-is-a-return-to-sa

We are witnessing a historic counterrevolution after Trump’s victory, far different from his first election in 2016.

The orthodox and the supposed scripted future are now suspect. And they are likely to be dethroned—from the trivial to the existential.

Critics claim Trump has no mandate to stage such a counterrevolution. They argue that he did not win 51 percent of the popular vote or achieve a Reaganesque landslide in the Electoral College.

Yet all the initiatives he advanced and won on polled landslide public approval.

Despite being the target of Democrat lawfare for years, a defiant Trump promised to end an open border, massive illegal immigration, rising crime, and soaring prices. He pledged to slash government and its administrative state, terminate racial and gender identity politics, and restore deterrence abroad.

The people overwhelmingly wanted those messages but were waiting for an unorthodox messenger who would actually deliver them.

The Trump messenger reassured weary citizens that they were not crazy.

Instead, they had good cause to be sick of being talked down to by a media, academic, bureaucratic, and political elite that never earned nor deserved such self-appointed status.

The FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ, not the massive crowds at rallies, were the ones truly out of control.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/21/unburdened-by-what-has-been-trump-is-poised-to-deliver-bigly/

In what must be the millionth time never-Trumpers have predicted this, New York Times columnist David French claimed this week, pointing to appointments he doesn’t like, “Donald Trump is already starting to fail.”

But what really worries people like French and those on the left isn’t that Trump will fail. It’s that he’s off to an outstanding start and has the wind as his back to succeed.

And by that, we don’t mean he will live up to the left’s gross mischaracterization of Trump as a fascist, but that he will actually do what he’s promised: gut the administrative state, restore order to the southern border, and get the economy moving again.

Think about what Trump was up against and what he accomplished in his first term.

After winning in 2016, Trump struggled to appoint his team. On inauguration day, he’d named only 29 of his 660 executive department slots, and ended up with several Obama holdovers.

His support from the public – and even his own party – was weak. He didn’t win the popular vote. Protests erupted all over the country in response to his victory. In the first two years, Republicans sidelined his effort to start building the wall and killed his plan to repeal Obamacare. Embedded bureaucrats thwarted his agenda wherever they could.

And, of course, Trump was immediately dogged by the Russia hoax, which would drag on for his entire first term.

Even with all those handicaps, look at what Trump managed to achieve: a massive pro-growth tax cut that drove unemployment to 60-year lows, an unprecedented peace deal in the Mideast, significant cuts to regulations, the elimination of the hated Obamacare individual mandate, a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, ISIS defeated in short order (after Obama dawdled and said it would take years to accomplish), energy independence for the first time in decades, record low unemployment and low inflation.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dei-cash-cow

There is an old saw that, in America, every great cause begins as a movement and eventually degenerates into a racket. This is certainly true of the past decade’s most fashionable cause: “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” What might have begun as a social movement has now become a business—and not just in the United States. According to McKinsey & Company, spending on “DEI-related efforts” across the globe totaled $7.5 billion in 2020. If trends continue, that figure will exceed $15 billion by 2026.

And, in another American tradition, government contractors have turned a profit on this fad. While it’s hard to determine the precise amount of money that Washington spends on DEI, a search for contracts, grants, and other outlays that reference “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and similar terms suggests that DEI principles were attached to more than $1 billion in federal contracts last year.

This represents a rapid change. In 2019, according to our search, the federal government awarded only $27 million in contracts with language related to “diversity and inclusion.” But after the death of George Floyd in 2020, the federal government and private contractors went all-in on DEI, seeking to implement the Biden administration’s “whole-of-government” equity agenda.

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-uk-is-a-window-to-our-dystopian-future/

Take a walk down my street. There aren’t enough warehouse venues and gang-related killings to warrant the label of “edgy,” and there are far too many two-parents-kids-and-a-dog residences for the “up and coming” label to make any sense. It’s suburban London — those “invincible suburbs” — and predictably predictable.

But look closer. How could there be four solicitors’ offices on a single road? Clearly, they aren’t wanting for customers. Queues of men (only men) spill out onto the pavement. You can see them at all times of day, smoking and shuffling and checking their cracked phone screens incessantly. The buildings they loiter outside all seem to have the same branding. The services advertised are certainly the same: “Immigration law, visa services, overstayers, failed asylum.” You’ll notice that “Rashid & Rashid Solicitors,” the office with the distinctively garish green lettering, has been shuttered. A note on the door tells you it has been closed on orders of the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Googling it takes you to a news article, suggesting it was part of a “visa scam.” A brick has been thrown through the glass window. 

Travel further. Visit Oxford, the seat of English advanced education — and site of a notoriously prolific child grooming ring. Go north to Bradford, which has its own university. Like so many others, it has fallen on hard times. School graduates feel that the fees just aren’t worth it anymore, turned off by a depressed job market and post-Covid learning “modernizations” that somehow manage to make a bachelor’s degree an even bigger waste of time. The one year master’s course is still popular, though. It’s relatively cheap, but the university has still set up two recruitment offices in South Asia. It brings students, some of whom don’t seem to ever turn up to class. But they pay. If the university closes, the town will lose a quarter of its jobs.