RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/24/california-and-its-collapsing-blue-state-democrat-model/

While the media and the new Democrat Party grow hysterical over the Trump counter-revolution, they are missing some of the most revolutionary and insidious changes in American society of the last century.

Much has been written about the collapse of the old orthodox Democratic Party, along with the growing irrelevance and dysfunction of the legacy media, elite universities, and state and federal agencies. But their growing unattractiveness is all related and was not just the result of top-down development.

Rather, current Democrat Party radicalism, street theater, and violence were merely reflections of its own preexisting cultural antipathy toward the middle class. The party is now a pyramidal coalition of the very wealthy and professional classes comprising the capstone, resting atop a vast, expanding bottom of the subsidized and working poor, strapped pensioners and retirees, angry indebted students, 30s-something urban wannabees, impoverished immigrants—including perhaps 30 million here illegally—and, increasingly, trapped residents of a dystopian big-city America.

The collapse of the blue-state/blue-city model and those who work within and promote it reflects the radical environmentalism of the college-educated, as well as an array of high taxes, high crime, endless government regulations, housing shortages, massive homelessness, illegal immigration, critical-legal-theory prosecutors, ethnic and racial chauvinism, defund-the-police city councils, and, most importantly, chronic budget deficits and vast, unfunded pension liabilities and obligations.

In response to this progressive implosion that accounts for Democrat Party unpopularity, under the radar are historic demographic shifts. They reflect two insidious phenomena.

One, the blue-state, urban/professional/college-educated profile has become antithetical to fertility.

No one knows exactly the contributory relative roles to childlessness played by the progressive embrace of abortion on demand or secularism and atheism. Certainly, the fixations on higher education certification, massive student loan debt, years of student limbo, prohibitive housing prices, and a cultural value system that places status, titles, careers, and degrees over children all further promote a declining birthrate.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/24/trump-chaos-or-the-gales-of-creative-destruction/

During President Donald Trump’s first term and again in his second, we have heard his critics indict him for the “chaos” he’s stirred up in Washington. They see disorder and confusion. But those not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome recognize this as the needed shake-up of a government that had grown out of control and become a threat to those it was intended to protect and serve.

The “chaos” label has not been used as often as “Nazi,” “fascist,” “dictator,” “tyrant” and “authoritarian” to try to vilify Trump. But it’s been part of the campaign to – let’s be frank – dehumanize the man in an effort to cripple his administration, chase him from the public square and rile the unbalanced who would do him harm.

A week into his second term, Senate Democrats wanted the country to know about the “lawlessness and chaos in America” brought by Trump. A day later, an overwrought Charles Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, said Trump “plunged the country into chaos” when he “announced a halt to virtually all federal funds across the country.”

On the same day, San Francisco Democrat and former House speaker – may she never hold that post again – made a similar accusation, wildly claiming that the “administration’s cruel decision to freeze federal funding for critical services across the country has unleashed chaos, confusion and fear for hardworking Americans.”

Sounds as if the pair and their staffs coordinated the attack. But give the Democrats credit. They know how to move in lockstep, even to the point of producing a political puppet show in which they posted “identical talking points to social media” that was widely ridiculed for its asininity. 

Even the Manchester Guardian, which daily cranks out copy scrawled by an assortment of cranks, has added its opinion, with its foreign affairs commentator whining about an “ensuing chaos” that “characterizes what may become the briefest honeymoon in White House history.” Le Monde, which bills itself as France’s “leading” newspaper, is also in the game, insisting that “Trump’s chaos” is the key to “revival” for the “unpopular and lost” Democrats.

https://www.thefp.com/p/inside-the-cult-of-luigi-mangione
A Columbia grad, a cashier from Utah, and a Lockheed Martin engineer have one thing in common: They believe the alleged killer is a progressive American hero.

For the past few months, Nicole Haedo, a 36-year-old logistics coordinator, has been walking around her small town of DeKalb, Illinois, wielding an act of “quiet defiance” at her fingertips: a fresh manicure dedicated to progressive causes.

Ten nails, each a proverbial middle finger. On her left hand, her thumb bears the word TRUMP with a slash through it. On her pinkie: BLM. Her middle digit is an ode to The Handmaid’s Tale—an avatar for abortion rights. And the nail on her pointer finger is painted black with the words FREE LUIGI painted on top in bright green.

“It’s my small way of showing support,” she told me. “This is my way of keeping his story alive.”

She is talking about Luigi Mangione—the 26-year-old man accused of murdering a healthcare CEO in Manhattan in the early hours of December 4, 2024.

Haedo said her mom was shocked when she first saw her tribute to the suspect.

“She was like, ‘But he’s a murderer,’ ” Haedo told me. “I’m like, well, first of all, ‘He’s innocent until proven guilty—and second, whoever the shooter was, if his actions start to change the healthcare system, it saves lives.’ ”

Sure, “nobody wants to see bloodshed,” she admitted to me. But “the shooting of the CEO was just a small tip of the iceberg of what’s to come in America.”

“People are getting fed up,” she said.

“It’s my small way of showing support,” Haedo says of her pro-Mangione manicure. “This is my way of keeping his story alive.” (Lyndon French for The Free Press)

When Americans learned that a man shrouded in black had fired three gunshots into the back of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Midtown sidewalk, the first reaction for most was horror. But within hours, a different emotion began to surface: glee. By the afternoon, when UnitedHealthcare announced the death of its top executive on Facebook, more than 77,000 online commenters found it so funny they responded with a laughter emoji. Meanwhile, Reddit users were discussing how to start a legal defense fund for the gunman.

https://amg-news.com/incredible-judge-fines-pam-bondi-for-wearing-a-cross-then-tries-to-cancel-it-forgetting-she-knows-the-constitution-better-than-he-knows-his-own-job/

A judge tried to fine Pam Bondi for wearing a cross in court. Big mistake. She destroyed him with the Constitution, live in court. Now he’s under investigation — and the nation is watching what happens when tyrants get checked in real time.

Pam Bondi walked into the courtroom like she had thousands of times before. Calm. Prepared. Respected. But on this day, it wasn’t her case files or arguments that sparked tension — it was the cross around her neck.

A simple silver emblem of her faith became, in the eyes of Judge Martin Prescott, an “affront to courtroom neutrality.”

Within minutes, the judge halted proceedings and made an announcement that stunned the room:

“Ms. Bondi, you are in violation of decorum. You will be fined if the cross remains visible.”

A fine. For a symbol of faith. In a U.S. courtroom.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5205602-trump-biden-saudi-arabia-oil

When it comes to energy, President Trump is playing chess, not checkers. Former President Joe Biden wasn’t even playing tic-tac-toe.

Consider: Why are U.S. officials traveling to Saudi Arabia to negotiate peace between Ukraine and Russia? Why not more traditional diplomatic venues like Geneva or Vienna?   

Because Trump knows that Saudi Arabia is critical to lowering oil prices and pressuring Russia to come to the bargaining table. He also knows that Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, craves acceptance as a global leader and that hosting these high-level meetings helps him achieve that end.

Biden had spurned bin Salman, promising in 2019 to make him “a pariah.” Trump won’t be making that mistake.

Gasoline prices are down 11 percent from a year ago, providing welcome relief to Americans worried about inflation and a boost for the Trump White House. Trump campaigned on lowering energy prices; nothing could be more important to the success of this administration. Biden’s approval ratings were clobbered when gasoline prices breached $5 per gallon in 2022; for Trump, the stakes are equally high.  

Gasoline prices are lower because crude oil is hovering around $67 per barrel, down from $84 a year ago. Why the drop? There are numerous factors, but the most important is that OPEC+, for the first time since 2022, has agreed to expand output in April. Between next month and September 2026, OPEC-plus has agreed to reverse its prior 2.2 million barrel per day cuts; unless demand strengthens unexpectedly, or there is a major disruption of production in the Middle East, the bump in output should keep prices steady, and below the $78 level posted on Inauguration Day. 

For that, you can thank Trump and his outreach to bin Salman. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/03/21/john_roberts_is_responsible_for_the_high_courts_self-delegitimization_152535.html

At his 2005 Senate confirmation hearing to be chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts famously invoked America’s national pastime in describing his view of the judicial role in our constitutional order: “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.”

If only!

Unfortunately, Roberts’ actual career on the high court has been one extensive repudiation of his lofty “umpire” proclamation. In exalting above all other concerns his personal conception of the institutional integrity of the Supreme Court, and by extension the entire judiciary, Roberts has ironically done more than anyone else to delegitimize the courts. His recent wildly out-of-line criticism of President Donald Trump’s call for impeachment of a rogue lower-court judge is just the latest example. For the court’s own sake, in these politically tense times, Roberts must change course immediately.

Roberts first showed his hand in the landmark 2012 Obamacare case, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. As was initially reported by CBS News’s Jan Crawford in the immediate aftermath of the decision and subsequently reported in later years by other court watchers such as CNN’s Joan Biskupic, Roberts initially intended to rule against the constitutionality of the health care law’s individual mandate — its most controversial feature.

But at some point during the court’s deliberations, Roberts changed his mind. He decided that he could throw a bone to the court’s conservative bloc by ruling against the mandate on Commerce Clause grounds, which the law’s drafters and the Obama administration alike had cited as its constitutional basis. But Roberts threw an even larger bone to the court’s liberal bloc, unilaterally opting to rewrite the statute so as to construe the mandate as a “tax” — which then-President Barack Obama himself had repeatedly told a skeptical public that it was not. Obama’s signature domestic achievement was thus upheld.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/03/generalists_wanted.html

Of all the pernicious concepts infecting minds today, perhaps none is more harmful than the belief that only “specialists” can tackle complex problems.  Strange as it might seem, “specialization” is a very recent human phenomenon.  Smart and capable people in the past did not limit their studies to particular subjects or avoid novel ideas emerging in unfamiliar fields.  Thinkers acquired and applied knowledge wherever they could.

Mathematician and Catholic cleric Nicolaus Copernicus not only developed the heliocentric model of the universe, but also formulated the “quantity theory of money” linking inflation directly to the amount of money in circulation.  The plays and poetry of William Shakespeare not only establish him as arguably the greatest writer to have ever lived, but also reveal his philosophical sophistication and proficiency in the modern fields of psychology and sociology.  Leonardo da Vinci was not only a master painter, but also an engineer, biologist, physicist, inventor, and military tactician.  We call these geniuses “polymaths” and “Renaissance men” today because they contributed so much to so many different subject areas.  As a critique against the twenty-first century’s obsession with subject-matter “specialists,” perhaps Copernicus, Shakespeare, and da Vinci should also be remembered as accomplished “generalists.”

Can you imagine one of today’s tenured “experts” from the mathematics or economics department of a modern university admonishing Copernicus for having published theoretical ideas well outside his canon law studies in the Catholic Church?  Or a political science or philosophy professor dismissing Shakespeare as a clever rhymer who was nonetheless out of his depth with regard to international relations and theories of the human mind?  Or an engineer or architect spurning da Vinci for being a mere portraitist?  Of course not.  All of these academic “specialties” and every other discipline with a department on a college campus stand on the broad shoulders of the great “generalists” of the past.  

https://thespectator.com/topic/trump-working-overtime-rule-law-judges/

EXCERPT

Restore it from what? Essentially from two things: first, Trump is acting to restore the law from the depredations of lawless, indeed un-constitutional, arrangements whereby the core powers of the presidency and of Congress are undermined by unaccountable bureaucrats. 

Second, he is acting to rescue the executive powers of the presidency from the un-Constitutional interference of district court judges. It is the latter that has focused everyone’s attention these last weeks as various judges have issued orders to say that the President of the United States may not fire people who work for him, that he must spend money controlled by agencies of the executive branch, and that he may not deport certain illegal aliens. Here I remind my readers of the first sentence of Article II of the Constitution: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” 

At least, that’s how it reads in my copy of the Constitution. Some of the nearly 700 District Court judges throughout the fruited plain seem to have a different text. Theirs reads, “The executive Power shall be vested, sort of, in a President of the United States of America along with an indeterminate number of district court judges whenever they disagree with said President’s actions.”  

It’s been a breathtaking performance by these local judges. I think that Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, was right when he remarked that: “The US is facing a judicial coup.” What will be done about it?  “Oh,” you say,  “the Supreme Court will weight in to put a stop to this untoward arrogation of executive power by the judiciary.”  

Will they? Many think so. I hope they will. I think they will.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/tesla-terror/

The Democrats may have been rocked on their heels temporarily by their election loss to Donald Trump, and sent into a tailspin of internal bickering about why they lost American voters, but now they are revving up The Resistance – and it includes waging domestic terrorism against the MAGA movement they falsely equate with Nazi fascism.

The primary target around which the Democrats are uniting in violent protest is Trump appointee and mega-billionaire Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has rooted out a reported $115 billion and counting in federal waste and fraud. Musk is therefore an existential threat to the Big Government Left, which depends on bureaucratic bloat and hidden slush funds to maintain their grip on power and to fuel their agenda of permanent one-party hegemony.

Violent Marxists at heart, the Left has launched a coordinated campaign of terror this month against Musk’s American auto company Tesla and even the owners of Tesla vehicles. Tesla dealerships are being firebombed, both here and abroad (a dozen Teslas were torched at a dealership in France; some in Berlin as well). Democrat terrorists are vandalizing Teslas in parking lots and confronting Tesla drivers with angry profanities and threats.

Several Tesla vehicles were set afire in Las Vegas early Tuesday morning, for example. Police said the attacker used Molotov cocktails, shot rounds into vehicles, and scrawled the word “resist” on the front doors of the Tesla Collision Center. Kansas City, Missouri, police are investigating a similar attack at a local dealership. Other such incidents have taken place in Oregon and Washington state.

Last week, a Tesla dealership in Colorado was targeted by terrorists using Molotov cocktails and spray-painting “Nazi cars” on the building’s facade. In Colorado, a man was arrested for hurling five Molotov cocktails at a Tesla charging station, damaging three EV chargers. He also scrawled anti-Trump and pro-Ukraine messages next to the damaged chargers before confronting a female Tesla driver, who managed to drive away.