RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/honoring-our-founders/

Trent Staggs’s Heirs of the Revolution is a smart, snappy, and supremely timely jeremiad about the legacy of America’s founders, about the ways in which that legacy has been betrayed over the course of American history, and about our duty as Americans to (as the subtitle puts it) “restore our Republic.” It’s a short book, comparable to the pamphlets – most famously, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense – that, in the days of the founders, played a significant role in shaping the political ideas of the British colonists who would soon become citizens of the United States of America. And, like the best of those pamphlets, it packs a punch.

Staggs, a businessman who serves as mayor of the Utah town of Riverton (pop. 45,000) and who lost last November’s Senate election despite enthusiastic endorsements by the likes Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and Kash Patel, has boiled his message down to six points, each of which is given its own chapter. First, we need to restore citizenship, which, Staggs argues, “was once seen as a privilege and an honor” but “has been eroded by apathy, ignorance, and disengagement.” One aspect of serious American citizenship, he proposes, is a belief in American exceptionalism, which, he points out, can be traced back to John Winthrop, who in his 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” envisioned the New World as “a city upon a hill” that, in Staggs’s words, “had a divinely ordained responsibility to serve as an example of moral leadership and governance for the rest of the world.”

Staggs places a great deal of emphasis on dual citizenship, which he considers anathema because it “presents a direct challenge to the concept of undivided national loyalty.” I would agree that holding a US passport along with one from Iran or Qatar or North Korea is problematic, but I would contend that being (as I am) a national of two longstanding NATO allies is a somewhat different thing. Granted, the political and media establishments in Norway, where I live, can be nothing short of appalling – but then so can their counterparts in the U.S. But most of the Norwegian people are very America-friendly.

Two cases in point. The other day, when the USS Gerald Ford, the world’s largest warship, docked in Oslo harbor, crowds gathered excitedly to welcome it. A few days earlier, there was an airshow in the town where I live, and people came from all over to watch F-16s, Spitfires, and older planes do their thing. (The roar of the F-16s shook our apartment windows and scared the cats.) All that being said, I most certainly appreciate Staggs’s point about divided loyalties, which is a problem that I’ve been writing about for years, mostly in connection with the influx into the West of so-called “refugees” who retain the passports from their homelands (and often have second homes – and second wives – there) and return regularly to the places from which they supposedly fled.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ed-latimore-memoir-hard-lessons-boxing

Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life, by Ed Latimore (Portfolio, 304 pp., $30)

“The book is also an illustration of what art is for. True art transforms pain into something meaningful, even beautiful. Much of what makes it into a writer’s work arrives below the level of full consciousness, and that is as it should be. Latimore allows the material to speak, and the result is a story at once raw and redemptive. The book’s final chapters, in which Latimore, from the perspective of a mature and improbably successful man, reflects on the lessons he has learned, are among the most satisfying.”

Occasionally, an author who has learned deep and durable lessons emerges to share them with the rest of us. That’s what Ed Latimore has done with his remarkable new book, Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life.

I first encountered Latimore in 2019 through his posts on Twitter (now X), where he had carved out a niche as an astute observer of struggle, discipline, and self-mastery. His writing was unusually sharp, and when I learned about his background—an impoverished childhood in Pittsburgh’s public housing projects, battles with addiction, a professional boxing career, service in the Army National Guard, and eventual graduation from college—his insights clicked into place.

My own life bears some resemblance to his: I grew up in foster homes, joined the military at 17, struggled with alcohol, didn’t begin college until my mid-twenties, and also wrote a memoir at a relatively young age. Meeting Latimore and finding another person who had made it out gave me a kind of reassurance that is hard to articulate. This personal connection is one reason I find his book so compelling, though readers with different biographies will still find plenty to admire.

Latimore’s memoir begins in the Pittsburgh projects, where he was raised by a single mother and had only sporadic contact with his father. The early chapters are raw and sometimes brutal. In one of the book’s most harrowing passages, he describes witnessing the aftermath of his mother’s boyfriend beating his two-and-a-half-year-old sister with a metal coat hanger. These scenes are not presented for shock value. They are meant to show the environment that shaped him.

The book also offers glimpses into the kinds of moments that rarely appear in mainstream accounts of life in the inner city. In one unforgettable episode from eighth grade, Latimore brings a bag of sugar to school and pretends to sell cocaine. This provokes a fight with a school bully, leads to the author’s arrest for simulating the sale of a controlled substance, and ends with an officer uncuffing him and warning, “If you pulled that shit on the street, someone woulda shot you.”

Latimore credits the officer for using the incident to teach him a lesson. It’s a reminder that police officers are not merely law enforcers but also, at their best, moral instructors. The discretion of a good cop can save a young person’s future—a lesson worth remembering in an era when policing is often portrayed in the most negative light. Instead of funneling him into the juvenile justice system, these officers chose to deliver a hard warning that might have changed the trajectory of his life. Latimore’s story is a counterweight to the prevailing narrative that police presence is inherently harmful. Sometimes, the intervention of an authority figure is precisely what a troubled kid needs.

Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business sometimes moves too quickly past moments where readers might want to linger. This briskness is part of Latimore’s style. He lands his punches and moves on, leaving readers to absorb the impact.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/09/a-republic-overrun-by-lawfare/

Democrats are not only the party of enmity but also the enemies of liberty and justice for all. Enmity consumes the Democrat Party, based not on hostility to certain ideas but hatred of certain individuals, chief among them President Trump and his friends and advisers. Among the latter is Peter Navarro, the president’s trade adviser, whose new book, I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To, details Democrats’ efforts to criminalize politics. Navarro writes from experience and about his experiences as a political prisoner, enjoining us to defend the Constitution. The book is also a reminder of the precariousness of personal liberty and of the vigilance necessary to sustain it, lest we be the targets of malicious prosecution. As Navarro shows, malice begets injustice and threatens to destroy our system of self-government.

At stake is the doctrine of separation of powers as outlined in the Constitution. Upon this doctrine rest the respective rights of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government. Because of this doctrine, executive privilege is a reality; without this doctrine, testimonial immunity—the right of a presidential adviser to refuse to abet a congressional witch hunt—is meaningless, which is why Navarro went to prison.

“If I lose, future presidential advisers of either party could face jail for honoring executive privilege and defending the Constitution’s separation of powers,” Navarro said in a statement. In this scenario, the investigative state grows stronger while the presidency becomes weaker. The result is an unlawful transfer of power from the White House to Congress.

Abuse of power is also inevitable, what with bureaucrats and hacks in charge of the prison system. The summary raids, the truncated religious services, the food mixups, the commissary markups, the interminable counts, the brokenness of the facilities themselves—the indignities are manifold. Despiriting though things are, Navarro does not waver; his spirit, like his faith in the Constitution, is total. He shows his faith by his works, inspiring us to do likewise.

Navarro’s book is itself a work of courage, free of score-settling or recrimination. The emphasis is on fairness, on the balance necessary to establish justice and secure the blessings of liberty. The words summon us to end lawfare, so executive privilege can endure and testimonial immunity can survive. The words give new meaning to the principle of limited government.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/07/freedom-revealed-should-be-required-reading-for-dc-swamp-creatures/

Every now and then, a book comes along that doesn’t just add to the pile of political commentary—it slices through the noise like a clean, sharp blade. Freedom Revealed by Don Wilkie is one of those books. For readers tired of politicians who speak in platitudes about “our freedoms” while voting for another bloated spending bill, this work reads like a slap of cold water across the face.

The book is built around a bold thesis: freedom isn’t some warm-and-fuzzy abstraction; it’s a system. Like a machine, it has parts that either work together or jam. And here’s the kicker—once you see freedom this way, you realize how fragile it is and how reckless our political class has been in tinkering with the gears.

Most Americans think of freedom in sentimental terms—flags, fireworks, maybe a soaring anthem at a ballgame. But this book demolishes that shallow view. Freedom is mechanical: limited government, open markets, and individual responsibility. Remove or weaken one, and the machine sputters. The point isn’t poetic; it’s brutally practical. The book walks the reader through Franklin’s insights and shows that the republic’s design was never accidental. It was an engineering marvel, and we’ve been stripping it for parts.

One of the most engaging sections is the comparison between the marketplace and government. The marketplace, competitive and dynamic, drives down waste and breeds prosperity. Government, by its nature, is non-competitive and therefore breeds waste. Simple? Yes. Devastating? Absolutely. The book lays it out with examples anyone can grasp: competition improves service, lowers costs, and fuels prosperity; government expands rules, bloats budgets, and smothers initiative.

You finish these chapters shaking your head at the obviousness of it all—and wondering why lawmakers in D.C. can’t seem to grasp it. Or maybe they can, and that’s what makes the book sting.

Freedom Revealed argues that prosperity and the rise of the middle class didn’t happen because of government policy; they happened because government was limited enough to let the marketplace breathe. This is the kind of point that would make Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin nod in agreement. The middle class isn’t the product of subsidies and entitlements—it’s the natural reward of citizens allowed to compete and innovate without bureaucrats choking them out.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-man-who-invented-conservatism/

Ask the random conservative to name a modern architect of his political philosophy and names like Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley are likely to come to mind. Maybe George Will or Irving Kristol, Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan. It would take a perceptive student of conservatism to come up with the name of Frank S. Meyer.

Daniel J. Flynn’s brand new book The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer is a riveting, meticulously researched biography that breathes life into the extraordinary journey of Meyer, a man whose intellectual odyssey from fervent Communist to architect of modern American conservatism is as improbable as it is inspiring.

FrontPage Mag contributor Daniel Flynn is a senior editor of The American Spectator and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of seven books including A Conservative History of the American Left; Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (I interviewed him about that one for FrontPage Mag here); and Why the Left Hates America, which I’ve also read and recommend.

Flynn’s new biography is a compelling contribution to the historiography of American political thought.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28805/mimi-strategies-coping-skills-for-kids

 goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

On August 29, 2025, education reformer and Executive Director of FreedomProject Academy, Dr. Duke Pesta, invited me to talk with him about my illustrated children’s book series, Mimi’s Strategy. You can access the program by using this link: Mimi’s Strategies: Coping Skills for Kids. I am delighted to share the discussion with you and hope you enjoy the show!

Most sincerely,

Linda

https://www.frontpagemag.com/107-days-will-cover-up-kamalas-campaign-catastrophe/

In case you missed the exciting announcement back on July 31, failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris revealed in an Instagram post that Simon & Schuster will publish her behind-the-scenes account of her 2024 campaign debacle. The memoir, titled 107 Days in reference to the mercifully shortest presidential campaign in modern history, will be released on Sept. 23, so mark your calendars.

For those keeping score, she had previously published two books under her name: 2009’s Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer and 2019’s The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. The former book faced accusations of plagiarism of a degree that sank Harvard’s Claudine Gay’s career, but which were shrugged off by the Left-dominated media as a “conservatives pounce” non-controversy. The latter book was panned even by NPR as full of campaign platitudes and awkward prose (Kamala’s prose is awkward? Imagine that).

Mainstream media announcements about her forthcoming book have been muted in tone, reflecting the Democrat Party’s general lack of enthusiasm about the catastrophic choice for presidential candidate who shows every sign of intending a comeback run at the White House. Everyone knows that Harris will never win a presidential election; if she couldn’t beat Trump the first time around, she certainly won’t beat JD Vance in 2028; Vance will wipe the floor with her in debates, and he will be riding a wave of four years of epic Trump successes. It’s hard to imagine a conservative opponent that she could beat. She won’t even win her own Party’s nomination over a white male, Gavin Newsom, whose lust for the Oval Office is white-hot. Kamala is out of her league at the level of national politics, and unlikeable.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/animal-farm-turns-80/

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

The 80th anniversary of the publication of Animal Farm passed almost without notice on college campuses where Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is the most assigned political work and in a culture where ‘Equity’ took the book’s sardonic corruption of equality from satire to reality.

Orwell, a fierce opponent of the Soviet Union, had his journalism relentlessly censored by British Communists and their fellow travelers, forcing him to resort to fiction, first Animal Farm and then 1984. The direct inspiration for Animal Farm had come from ‘The Adventures of the Little Pig’ a pre-war children’s book published by the ‘Left Book Club’ to indoctrinate children into anti-capitalism as the little pig grapples with various threats embodying rapacious capitalism.

The Left Book Club had been created “to provide machinery by which books of urgent political importance could be issued at a very low price” and while ‘The Adventures of the Little Pig’ was successful at the time, its political indoctrination is so mild by the standards of contemporary children’s literature, in which Antiracist Baby and the Little Engine That Could Pays a Visit to the Pride Parade are normative, that it’s borderline undetectable, and is mostly forgotten today.

But 8 years later, Orwell used a story about some pigs and other barnyard animals to distill a capsule history of the Bolshevik revolution through its various phases from the promise of liberation to the descent into an even bleaker tyranny than anything that had come before.

Despite the animal fable, Orwell found it nearly impossible to find a publisher. Unlike The Adventures of the Little Pig there was nothing childish about Animal Farm and the book was clearly not meant for children. Anyone familiar with the history of the USSR knew exactly what Orwell was on about which meant that British Communists rushed to suppress it, warning that it was a threat to national security, the war effort and would ruin relations with Moscow.

Orwell’s old enemy, the Ministry of Information, infested with Communists and leftists, did everything possible to make certain Animal Farm would never see the light of day. Orwell would make the ‘Ministry’ the focus of 1984 where it would be known as the Ministry of Truth and in the business of lies, doublespeak and industrial level societal brainwashing. Even Soviet spies took an interest in Animal Farm and worked to suppress the biting critique of the USSR.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/08/was_the_fbi_behind_the_oklahoma_bombing.html

It has always been hard to believe that the truck-bombing of the A.P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, which killed 168 people, including 19 children at a daycare center, was planned by just one or two perpetrators acting alone. However, the official story states that the mastermind was Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh, and that the two others sentenced with him only helped him in various ways.

Right from the start, warning signs indicated that the investigation was being misled. The FBI developed a story claiming that a group called the Patriots Movement, which included anti-government extremists and white supremacists, was responsible for the attack. However, the agency also appeared to be trying hard to hide something. Consider these facts:

Twenty-four eyewitnesses saw a man with McVeigh just before the bombing. The FBI referred to him as John Doe 2 but later dismissed the idea that such a person existed. None of the witnesses who saw John Doe 2 were called to testify.

At least eight people connected to the investigation — including a brave police officer who was a first responder — died under mysterious circumstances, five of them reportedly by suicide.

Local reporters who looked beyond the storyline mainstream newspapers presented that the FBI had received a warning call about a bomb attack.

The sheriff’s bomb squad had even been patrolling the city before the explosion. An official of the Bureau from Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) said agents had been asked not to come in to work on the day of the attack.

In a new book called Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing, Margaret Roberts, former news director of America’s Most Wanted, presents shocking evidence suggesting that FBI agents might have been involved, acting as agent provocateurs in an operation gone wrong.