RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/06/chicagos-longest-weekend-the-george-floyd-riots-five-years-later/?utm_

The city recovered, but its Democratic politics were wrecked

I want to tell you a story about how my city lost faith in itself. The end of May marks the five-year anniversary of the George Floyd riots. It is a dark memory to summon, nearly as dark as the five-year anniversary of nationwide Covid lockdowns in March, which are the riots’ immediate predicate and context. Many of the nation’s cities burned or experienced looting. Our national politics changed forever, for the worse. And half a decade on, Chicago still reels from the consequences in a way that few other metropolises do; we have arguably never recovered from the loss of confidence and shift in city politics the Floyd riots triggered. Your experience of them may be different — every state in the union witnessed at least some sort of civil unrest, after all — but this is mine.

The story begins elsewhere, of course. On May 25, Minneapolis man George Floyd died after being restrained during arrest by police officer Derek Chauvin. By May 26, viral videos of the arrest taken by onlookers were rocketing around social media, raising public outrage at the tactics used by Chauvin to restrain Floyd. On May 27, the powder keg exploded in Minneapolis: Protests swiftly turned into vandalism once night fell, then riots and fires, and finally unrestrained larceny. And the riots did not end. They continued for days, each time beginning as night fell, their purpose seemingly different from that of the initial spasm of civic rage: with method, intent, and mass looting.

Equally as alarming as the violence on the streets was the reaction of mainstream and social media to it all: Instead of deploring the civic breakdown, a good portion of the nation seemingly excused or even lionized it. We were told over and over again by print media and cable news that the protests were “mostly peaceful,” regardless of how much property destruction, arson, and looting was going on. (The trend reached its legendary apotheosis a few months later, when a CNN reporter did a live hit in Kenosha, Wis., in front of a burning store and declared the protest, with zero sense of irony, “mostly peaceful.”) The unceasingly celebratory din from the left on Twitter was even more appalling, as a nation of self-radicalized twentysomethings, restless from lockdown, convinced themselves that this was their moment for revolutionary racial justice and sloganeered about the need to “defund the police” while cheering for as much destruction as possible. (The snide cries of “Who cares about looting? Target has insurance, after all” still ring in my ears.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/06/injunction-dysfunction-is-a-threat-to-our-system/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

Nationwide rulings by judges in single districts distort American politics

Nationwide injunctions — or perhaps, as Justice Neil Gorsuch has acidly observed, we should call them “universal” or even “cosmic” injunctions — are a distortion of our constitutional order. Alas, they are proliferating because of other, more deeply seated distortions.

A nationwide injunction occurs when a single unelected judge, seated in just one of 94 federal districts throughout the nation — say, the District of Hawaii, home to just 0.4 percent of our population — issues a ruling that binds the entire country, forbidding the government (most often, the president through subordinate executive agencies) from executing a policy, regulation, or statutory interpretation.

A judge’s role in our system is vital but modest. As Chief Justice John Marshall admonished in Marbury v. Madison (1803), establishing the authority of courts to review the constitutionality of congressional statutes: “It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.”

To say what the law is. Not to write or enforce it. The courts are the nonpolitical branch. It is not for them to make policy, the prerogative given to the political branches accountable to the people whose lives are affected. The judge’s burden is to dispose of cases or controversies — justiciable claims of concrete harm brought by a plaintiff allegedly aggrieved by the defendant — by saying what the law is. Because a court merely interprets the law within the four corners of the dispute, it settles the legal rights of the parties and nothing more.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/5253634-yellen-trump-manufacturing-pipedream

Former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the crew at CNBC this week that President Trump’s goal of bringing manufacturing back to the United States was a “pipedream.”  

It was an odd remark, given how her former boss, Joe Biden, ran for president on the prospect that he could revive manufacturing in the U.S. — the central pillar of his promise to rebuild the economy “from the bottom up and middle out.” 

Did Yellen not believe Biden’s campaign pitch? Was she not on board with the CHIPS Act, which threw tens of billions of dollars at semiconductor firms to encourage their shifting production to the U.S.? 

Yellen also claims she does not understand the rationale for Trump’s tariff war, which she calls   a “self-inflicted wound.” When Biden ran for president in 2020, he promised to do away with tariffs President Trump had imposed on China. Not only did he keep those tariffs in place, he added to them in 2024, trying to protect America’s industries by putting a 100 percent tariff on imports of Chinese electric vehicles and slapping solar panels with a 50 percent duty, among other assorted products. Did Yellen protest those taxes on imports from China?  

In short, is Yellen pessimistic about U.S. manufacturing and negative on tariffs because it is Trump at the helm or because she has strongly held convictions that the U.S. cannot compete? If the latter is true, she should have gone public instead of insisting that billions of taxpayer dollars be thrown at an impossible cause. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mahmoud-khalils-letter-from-a-louisiana-jail/

Persecuted by a diabolical regime simply for believing a certain way, deprived of every possible right, including the right to a blankie, by a police state that, if it can suppress the rights of the brave truth-teller Mahmoud Khalil, will soon be setting up concentration camps from sea to shining sea for those who will emulate him, Mahmoud Khalil is — as he repeatedly assures us — a profile in courage. His stirring letter, smuggled out of jail, will no doubt be seen by future historians as a foundational document in the universal march for freedom. It made a deep impression on me. It should do the same for you.

My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices under way against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.

Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.

Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.

On March 8, I was taken by DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-tariffs-trade-consumption-production

Behind all the drama of President Donald Trump’s tariffs lies the hope that they serve some clear purpose for American and global trade. But Trump’s signature inscrutability makes it hard to discern what that purpose is—or whether one even exists.

Either way, his actions threaten to unravel the global trading system that has been in place for the past 80 years. That unraveling would bring economic and financial pain—but also potential upside, given that the current system is ultimately unsustainable.

The current system emerged from a set of relatively narrow foreign policy priorities in the years following World War II. Washington focused on rebuilding Europe and Japan after the war’s devastation. Part of that motivation was humanitarian—but more importantly, it was a strategic effort to use rising prosperity in those regions to counter the spread of Communism.

As part of this effort, the U.S. directed massive aid flows overseas, most famously through the Marshall Plan. To support industrial recovery abroad, Washington also allowed goods from Europe and Japan to enter the U.S. market with minimal restrictions, while permitting those nations to maintain tariffs and other protections for their fragile domestic industries. The dollar’s role as the world’s dominant trading currency—the so-called global reserve—further aided this arrangement by keeping the dollar strong. That, in turn, made foreign goods cheap for American consumers and U.S. exports more expensive abroad.