RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/01/what_an_interesting_time_to_be_alive.html

A lot of people are anxious these days.  They are worried about nuclear war, mass government surveillance, artificial intelligence, lab-created disease, central bank digital currencies — you name it!  I’m worried about those issues, too.  However, there is a part of me that relishes the opportunities we have to shape the future.  This is an interesting time to be alive.

This is not the age of tranquility.  There have been epochs for which that description might be apt — when people were born and died without experiencing much change during the course of their lives.  The technologies that existed never advanced.  The universe of human knowledge never expanded.  Time stood more or less still, as if humanity were stuck in amber.  

We’re not stuck in anything.  The technological revolutions from the late nineteenth century forward have remade the world time and again.  We’ve gone from telegraphs to telephones to cellular phones to smartphones.  Mass communication has evolved from printed newspapers to radio broadcasts to television news to internet chatrooms, email, and social media.  In the last twenty years, individuals have seized control over the instruments of mass communication — becoming self-created news reporters, entertainers, influencers, and celebrities.  In the last ten years, governments and their corporate allies have tried desperately to claw back control over the mass media monopoly they once had.

Global wars have jumbled history’s trajectory and shifted the balance of power more than once.  In some ways, World War II never truly concluded.  An Iron Curtain demarcated the world for another half-century, and even thirty years after the Cold War, its battles rage on.  Russia’s tense relationship with former Warsaw Pact members, China’s belligerent insistence on swallowing Taiwan, Israel’s generational defense of its sovereign borders, post-colonial Africa’s cauldron of bloody civil wars, and the continuing state of war between North and South Korea are but five of the most prominent examples of conflicts that have continued, in one form or another, for eighty years.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/where-did-all-the-fascism-talk-go/

On Monday, journalist Glenn Greenwald asked on X, “Is there a single person in DC or media acting as if Literal Adolf Hitler is about to assume power in 2 weeks in order to end American democracy, install fascism, and create a white supremacist dictatorship? Is it possible those who said this for years never believed it?”

You can answer that for yourself. But the fact is, the Donald Trump transition is turning out to be quite … normal. The president-elect is busy hammering out policy proposals and staffing his administration. Democrats are, of course, criticizing Trump and promising to give some of his nominees a hard time in confirmation hearings. But that is the sort of thing one always sees in transitions from one party to the other. What is absent is the kind of ugly, fevered, frenzied, over-the-top rhetoric about Trump that characterized the campaign.

Remember? Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist. The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called Trump a fascist. Media talkers such as Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski called Trump a fascist. Journalists and academics called Trump a fascist. (Sample headlines from The New Yorker: “What Does It Mean that Donald Trump Is a Fascist?” and The Atlantic: “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.”) For a while, it seemed like everyone on the left with a podcast, TV show or X account called Trump a fascist.

Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden became the focus of nearly nonstop discussion about fascism and Nazism. In the runup to the event, it was entirely commonplace for media commentators to compare the rally to the infamous Nazi rally held at the Garden in 1939. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate Trump defeated in 2016, told CNN that Trump would be “actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/17/the-deep-state-outs-itself-in-shocking-poll/

Remember back at the start of President Donald Trump’s first term in office, when the pundit class was telling us that the Deep State was all a figment of his paranoid imagination? The subsequent eight years of the Russia hoax, bogus impeachments, and lawfare should have been proof enough that it is real.

Now, as Trump is about to begin his second term, a new poll shows just how deeply embedded the Deep State is, and why it has to be dismantled.

In 2017, headlines like the following were everywhere:

“There Is No Deep State” – New York Magazine
“What Happens When You Fight A ‘Deep State’ That Doesn’t Exist” – The New York Times
“Trump Embraces Deep State Conspiracy Theory” – CNN
“The Deep State Is A Figment Of Steve Bannon’s Imagination” – Politico
“Deep State: Inside Donald Trump’s Paranoid Conspiracy Theory” – Rolling Stone
“How Trump’s Paranoid White House Sees ‘Deep State’ Enemies On All Sides” – The Guardian

Never-Trumpers such as Kevin Williamson dismissed it as well, writing in National Review that “Giving the figments of your imagination a name and an involved back-story doesn’t make them real. It just makes you nuts.”

What’s nuts is denying the obvious – that Washington is overflowing with people who want to thwart conservative reforms either to cling to power, preserve their status quo perks, or are just ideologically opposed to a limited government.

https://victorhanson.com/joe-bidens-bizarro-world-of-foreign-policy-achievements/

Departing President Joe Biden offered a farewell brag this week to his State Department about how his tenure had improved America’s stature abroad. In his now accustomed weird mix of whispering and fiery shouting, Biden apparently felt he had to lie or mislead about almost every one of his “achievements.”

Yet to the extent that anything improved abroad on his watch—the weakening of Iran or the near destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah—it was due despite, not because of, Biden.

Biden, bowing to election year political pressure, did all he could to restrain and block Israeli retaliations to the October 7 massacres. Only after he was repeatedly proven wrong does he now shamelessly take credit for what Israel ironically achieved by ignoring his own threats directed at Israel.

Biden is correct only that Iran is “weaker than it’s been in decades.” But Tehran was aided, not hurt, by Biden’s nonstop efforts to lift sanctions, to allow Iran to make billions in oil revenues, to pay the theocracy billions of dollars in hostage ransom, and to beg the mullahs to reenter the ill-starred Iran deal. Everything Biden did makes it much harder for Israel to survive.

So, Iran is now weakened only because Israel ignored Biden’s nonstop ankle-biting and finger-shaking not to retaliate to Iranian aggression. Instead, the Netanyahu government systematically destroyed Iranian air defenses after killing most of Iran’s foreign terrorist operatives.

Biden referenced the end of the Assad regime in Syria, but it imploded not due to any effort by Biden. It was overwhelmed instead only after the Israeli decimation of Hezbollah and humiliation of Iran—coupled with the election victory of Donald Trump—that encouraged Assad’s enemies to attack a now isolated and weakened regime.

Biden is also taking credit for rumors that Hamas might release its hostages, who have been held in a subterranean labyrinth since October 7.

But why, with less than a week left in his tenure, did Biden believe Hamas might begin releasing the hostages when even his own Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has criticized the administration for spending 16 months pressuring Israel, which only emboldened Hamas’s stonewalling?

Much more likely, the election of Donald Trump and his threat to unleash terrible retribution on Hamas (and implicitly on Iran) had prompted the terrorists’ tardy willingness to negotiate a release.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-biden-era-wheezes-its-way-to-a-fittingly-deluded-end/

Joe Biden just finished addressing the American people from the Oval Office, for the final time in his presidency. And at the end of it all, with this humiliatingly garbled ramble that read like the sort of delusional self-exculpatory fantasy his caretaker wife might whisper consolingly into his ear, Biden concluded his career much as he began it over half a century ago: as a venal, petty-souled fool in denial about his own limitations and failures. (We learned nothing tonight that we didn’t already know. Nothing was revealed.)

In a thick, slack-toned voice, stumbling over his words from beginning to end as he squinted at a teleprompter with vacant eyes, Biden slurred through the single most incoherent speech of his life. He began by taking complete credit for the breaking Israeli hostage deal with Hamas — which was to be expected — and then launched into a sleepy lecture awkwardly framed around the Statue of Liberty and how it was built to sway in the wind, much like America was built to be flexible enough to withstand his presidency. One marble-mouthed cliché after another poured from his half-opened maw, smooth featureless pabulum with all the texture and flavor of Gerber baby food. (Shall America “lead by the example of power or the power of our example?” An imponderable for the ages.)

He then turned to what was doubtless intended as the high-minded legacy section of his farewell speech: a warning against the new “oligarchy [that is] taking shape” before our very eyes, the “tech-industrial complex.” This limp attempt to invoke Eisenhower’s farewell address was followed by an equally tired rehash of every complaint the mainstream media and the Democrats have been rehearsing against Silicon Valley since they lost hammerlock control over it. (Both “disinformation” and “misinformation” were cited.)  Robber-barons and trust-busting were invoked as appropriate images to compare with the dangers posed by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

His delivery collapsed into utter incoherence near the end of the speech, as he rambled on about climate change and artificial intelligence and giving America a “fair shot,” before returning clumsily to his opening Statue of Liberty metaphor. Americans will remember nothing about it a day from now. Thus ends the Biden presidency.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/pro-palestinian-protestors-intifadah-anti-american

Anyone who happened to amble by the downtown Manhattan courthouse in early December, just after a jury acquitted Daniel Penny—the former Marine who put Jordan Neely, a deranged and threatening fellow subway passenger, in a chokehold that led to his death—would have noticed something peculiar.

It wasn’t that the sidewalk was filled with protesters, or that they were chanting slogans that ignored the facts of the situation, presenting Neely—a mentally ill man with 42 previous convictions, including for violent assaults on the subway—as an innocent lynched by a malicious white vigilante for no reason other than his being black. It was, instead, that many of the protesters were wearing keffiyehs, the traditional Arab headwear popular with the pro-Palestine crowd, as well as pins or t-shirts featuring the Palestinian flag.

Approximately 5,674 miles separate southern Manhattan from northern Gaza, and neither Penny nor Neely had anything to do with Israel or the Palestinian cause. Why, then, would the activists who rushed to condemn Penny’s actions as racist adorn themselves with Palestinian paraphernalia?

The answer is stark: because “Palestine,” an entity that has never existed, has always been a codeword for chaos. For many activists, being “pro-Palestine” is not to support the creation of a national homeland for some Arabs side-by-side with the State of Israel; the Palestinians themselves, as former president Bill Clinton recently reminded us, have repeatedly rejected every U.S.-brokered attempt at independence. These radicals are pro-Palestine because they are anti-America, and because they champion violent, sectarian conduct that is anathema to our core values.

If that seems like an unfair characterization, consider Fatima Mohammed, one of the leaders of Within Our Lifetime, a cornerstone of New York’s “pro-Palestine” vanguard. “I pray upon the death of the USA on a public platform,” she tweeted on May 9, 2021, “but yolo [you only live once] I guess.” A year later, Mohammed gave a speech in midtown Manhattan, praying to Allah to grant victory to the jihadis. For her tireless advocacy of violence—against America, Israel, and the Jews—she was elected by her classmates to give the commencement address at the City University of New York’s law school graduation. She dedicated her talk to calling for a “revolution” against the “fascist” NYPD and the American armed forces, both of which, she argued, were merely tools of “white supremacy.”

Her views, alas, aren’t rare among the pro-Palestine crowd. Nerdeen Kiswani, another prominent activist, explained in a speech at a 2021 rally that she and her colleagues have a simple aim: “We don’t need tens of thousands of people to shut down and disrupt this city,” she said. “We have to up the stakes.”