RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21691/rule-by-judges

Under Article 3 of the United States Constitution, judges are supposed to play a critical role in checking and balancing the excesses of the other branches. Their central responsibility is to enforce the procedural safeguards of the Bill of Rights, most particularly those assuring due process, equal protection and the right of dissent. They have no legitimate business interfering with the substantive policies of the executive or legislative branches.

Judges look harder to find procedural objections to policies and actions of which they disapprove.

[Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis] consistently voted to uphold laws and practices with which he had strong substantive disagreements, so long as they did not clearly violate express provisions of the Constitution. That is the proper role of unelected judges in a democracy.

The people — not the judges — should rule the land.

The Book of Ruth begins with an ominous warning: “In the days when the judges ruled, there was famine in the land.”

History shows that judges make poor leaders. Thomas Jefferson understood this when he tried to limit the influence of the “midnight judges” appointed by John Adams. Andrew Jackson refused to implement a Supreme Court decision that he believed undercut his policy toward Native American tribes. Abraham Lincoln responded to what he regarded as the overreaching of judges by suspending the writ of habeas corpus. Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court when the justices tried to dismantle his congressionally-enacted New Deal.

Now, many district court judges are determined to thwart the policies of President Donald Trump. Judicial efforts to thwart executive and legislative actions have occurred frequently in our history, as have executive and legislative responses to such judicial activism.

Under Article 3 of the United States Constitution, judges are supposed to play a critical role in checking and balancing the excesses of the other branches. Their central responsibility is to enforce the procedural safeguards of the Bill of Rights, most particularly those assuring due process, equal protection and the right of dissent. They have no legitimate business interfering with the substantive policies of the executive or legislative branches.

“In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our hands lies the power to choose – what we want to be, we are.”

                                                                                                                Robert Lewis Stevenson (1850-1894)

                                                                                                                The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, 1886

Just like good, evil lurks in all of us. It is our responsibility – to the extent possible – to contain it, to smother it, to let goodness overwhelm it. “Wisdom,” wrote John Cheever in his Journals, “is the knowledge of good and evil…” In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us…But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart.” This is a subject that has been on my mind, with Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and as I have been reading Jonathan Horn’s new book, The Fate of the Generals. It is difficult to reconcile the vile treatment of American and Filipino prisoners by the Japanese, with the Japanese I knew in business and socially. Two generations ago, German Nazis were gassing Jews. Today, they are an ally of Israel. In his 1860 novel The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins wrote: “The best men are not consistent in good – why should the worst men be consistent in evil?”

Today, evil is manifested in the anti-Semitism that has infested much of the West. Do college students, born sixty years after the genocide of Jews in Europe and who now accuse Israel of practicing genocide on Palestinians, have any knowledge of history? Battles between forces of good and evil, are as old as mankind. The Bible tells us that Jesus, as the son of God, is inherently good, while man is flawed, so must avoid temptations. Most of my generation have read Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story, The Devil and Daniel Webster, of Webster’s defense of Jabez Stone who sold his soul to the devil in return for seven years of good luck. The message: In moments of weakness, good people can make bad decisions.

This battle between good and evil is not limited to people. On March 8, 1983, President Reagan correctly referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Evil manifests itself in nation’s where authoritarian leaders control their populations. In the past century, one can think of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Today Ali Hosseini Khamenei Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un serve that role, as their governments deny citizens their natural rights – “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/19/prohibited-access-a-cache-of-fbi-corruption/

We recently learned of a previously concealed tranche of documents likely to shed new light on the past decade of American political controversies. This potentially earth-shaking information is known as “Prohibited Access.”

It was only recently discovered that the FBI’s information system, called Sentinel, had a level of access previously unknown to anyone outside the Bureau and known only to a select few inside. In essence, this was a concealed cache used to hide documents the FBI wanted hidden from discovery.

There is one part of the Sentinel system that is devoted to classified and confidential information, termed “Restricted Access.”

It turns out there is a higher, more secretive level called “Prohibited Access.” To any outside observer or investigator, it would appear that there was no record of Prohibited Access information, even though the existence of Restricted Access documents would be shown.

Accordingly, when prosecutors like John Durham or investigators such as Congressman James Comer were investigating various potential misdeeds, they would not have learned of the existence of documents relevant to their investigation that were kept in Prohibited Access.

Although it remains unclear, there is reasonable suspicion that even FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz was not aware of this document cache. Alternatively, Horowitz may have known about it but also may have agreed to keep its existence secret, a dismaying possibility for one charged with enlightening Congress and the public.

Logic tells us that, broadly, there could be only two related purposes for this concealed tranche because it prevents those investigating the FBI or its favored parties from even knowing about the existence of the documents; such suggests concealment of information inculpatory to the senior levels of the FBI and/or its favored politicians, as well as exculpatory information about the targets of its biased investigations.

If, by way of a wild hypothetical example, James Comey and Andrew McCabe broke laws to make an innocent Donald Trump appear guilty of “Russian Collusion,” they would not wish a trail of their ugly misconduct to see the light of day, nor reveal proof of Trump’s innocence.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/19/can-the-left-ever-stop-its-craziness/

California Senator Alex Padilla recently crashed a press conference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. He deliberately wore no identification. He gave no advance warning that he would disrupt her briefing.

Instead, Padilla barged forward to the podium, shouting about the deportation of illegal aliens.

Immediately, Padilla got his media moment wish—once Secret Service agents, who had no idea who Padilla was, forcibly removed him.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) recently attempted a pseudo-filibuster, speaking nonstop for 25 hours straight—not to delay legislation, but to fixate on Donald Trump.

South Carolina Democratic state Representative Julie von Haefen just posted on social media an image of a bloody guillotine. It bore the title “In these difficult times, some cuts may be necessary” and was juxtaposed with an image of a hanging, beheaded Trump, who, a year ago, was the target of two failed assassination attempts.

The more Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom scream at Trump for nationalizing the California Guard to stop LA’s nightly violent anti-ICE protests, the more the two appear on the side of those who riot, destroy property, and attack police.

Yet who really wants to side with illegal aliens who spit on and burn American flags while waving Mexican flags?

Recently, some Democrats and leftists have romanticized Kilmar Abrego Garcia—an illegal alien, accused domestic abuser, gang member, and alleged human trafficker.

They also canonized illegal alien Mahmoud Khalil. But that pro-Hamas “student” helped organize and defend sometimes violent and antisemitic demonstrations at Columbia.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/06/19/memo-to-tucker-this-is-not-iraq-war-ii/

Tucker Carlson, the TV personality who currently enjoys an enormous gap between the size of his audience and his intellectual abilities, has decided to declare war on the Trump administration for the sin of taking Iran’s nuclear ambitions seriously.

President Donald Trump hit back with a post on Truth Social saying “Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that, ‘IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!”

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene jumped in with Carlson saying, “Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA.”

The mainstream media is loving all this because they delight in anything that undermines Trump. But from our perspective, Carlson hasn’t come close to making his case.

Carlson seems to think, without much evidence, that this is a repeat of the Iraq fiasco, wherein the U.S. justified war based on a false belief that Saddam Hussein had a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

At the time, there was good reason to believe Hussein did, if only because he was so defiant about allowing international inspectors, per the ceasefire agreement he signed at the end of the Gulf War, to verify that he wasn’t building or storing WMDs.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-kings-protest-anti-trump

I spent Father’s Day weekend in Hood River, Oregon, and stumbled upon the local “No Kings” anti-Trump protest. The crowd was populated mostly by Baby Boomers, who appeared to be living out a political fantasy, in which they could “stop fascism” by reenacting the protest movements of their youth. One sign, typical of the genre, derided Trump as a “felon, rapist, con man”; another riffed on Mary Poppins, reading “super callous, fragile, racist, sexist, Nazi POTUS.”

The underlying theory of this protest, which reportedly drew upward of 5 million demonstrators nationwide, is that Donald Trump is an authoritarian leader on the cusp of becoming king. The only way to stop him is to flood the streets and persuade the American people that Trump is a rotten character with despotic ambitions.

The theory, of course, is nonsense. Trump is a duly elected president. He is working with Congress on the budget. His deportation policy, which lent momentum to the weekend’s demonstrations, is predicated on enforcing existing law. Though President Trump contested the results of his first reelection campaign, he ultimately relented and peacefully transferred power to President Joe Biden—hardly the behavior of a tyrant.

Yet the protests are not without utility for the Left. They are not intended to grapple with the reality of the Trump presidency but to submerge reality in fantasy. The first step in entrenching the Left’s fictions in the public mind is to cultivate a sense of hysteria. In the president’s first term, crowds wore vagina-shaped hats and marched in the bitter cold. The tone of the “No Kings” protest was no less absurd, with women in Handmaid’s Tale costumes warning that Trump would reduce them to sex slaves.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/tim-walz-only-china-has-the-moral-authority-to-pursue-peace-in-the-middle-east/

Oh, come on. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz lived down to the worst caricature of him in his remarks at the Center for American Progress today, weighing in on the Israeli airstrikes against Iran, and concluding that only the People’s Republic of China has the “moral authority” to negotiate an agreement in the Middle East.

Here we are, with the Middle East back on fire in a way that has now expanded. With, I don’t — Iran has to retaliate, in their mind, I’m sure. And now, who is the voice in the world that can negotiate some type of agreement in this? Who holds the moral authority? Who holds the ability to do that? Because we are not seen as a neutral actor. And we maybe never were, I don’t want to tell anybody that. I think there’s a lot of people who would say ‘you always lean one way in this.’ But I think there was at least an attempt to be somewhat of the arbitrator in this. We saw President Carter do it with Begin and Sadat. We’ve had certain wins along the way that were actually mutually beneficial both ways. Now I ask, who that is. And consistently, over and over again, we’re going to have to face the reality of it might be the Chinese. And, and, that goes against everything they say they’re trying to do in terms of the balance of powers. I would just have to say, my heart goes out for this. Ukraine continues to go on. Gaza continues to be a humanitarian disaster, and now it’s expanded even further.

Lest you doubt that I am accurately transcribing Walz’s remarks, he begins this portion of his comments at 30:50 in the video below.

Now, a lot of people will look back to Walz’s extensive and longstanding ties to China — at least 30 visits, one funded by the Chinese government, status as a visiting fellow at the Macao Polytechnic University, a Chinese state-run institution of higher education, etc. — and conclude that he’s a “Manchurian candidate,” somehow brainwashed by the Chinese government to repeat their talking points and propaganda to American citizens I think that accusation is nonsense; if the Chinese government had brainwashed him, surely they would have programmed to not look like a deer in headlights during a vice-presidential debate. (Note that Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s new book, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, reveals that in the weeks leading up to the debate, Walz was so nervous that he couldn’t sleep at night and his aides had to remind him to eat.)

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/06/17/l-a-riots-just-one-more-symptom-of-far-left-californias-sad-decline/

In recent years, blue states have blundered repeatedly, taxing and regulating too much, pushing woke education on their failing schools, and driving productive citizens out with their reckless policies, as our exclusive report recently pointed out. California, led by its largest and wealthiest city, Los Angeles, is perhaps the prime example. But while some blue states are at least trying to correct course, no turnaround is in sight for the Golden State.

With recent disasters revealing the incompetence, greed and extreme politicization of its so-called leaders, California careens from crisis to calamity. The Los Angeles riots, entering a second week, are only the latest manifestation of the state’s steady decline, a symptom, not a cause.

We’re not new to this story. We’ve been writing about California’s decline since the early 2000s. But it’s growing worse, as two incisive critics of California’s political class and its insane “progressive” policies, Joel Kotkin and Victor Davis Hanson, separately have written. California is on the road to ruin, if not already there.

“Rather than a model for the future, Los Angeles today offers a masterclass in urban dysfunction,” Kotkin wrote last week in “Los Angeles has fallen.” “Drive through the streets of the South Side or along Central Avenue – historically black L.A.’s main thoroughfare, now predominantly Hispanic – and the ambience increasingly resembles that of Mexico City or Mumbai: cracked pavements, dilapidated buildings, outdoor swap-meet markets and food stalls serving customers, much as one would see in the developing world.”

Remember: This is the city slated to host both the World Cup (2026) and the Olympic Games (2028) over the next few years. What will visitors see?