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June 2025

‘When the Judges Ruled, There Was Famine’: Bible by Alan M. Dershowitz

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.

Back to Videos Trump: Nobody Knows What I’m Going To Do, Iran Is “Totally Defenseless”Posted By Tim Hains

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/06/18/trump_nobody_knows_what_im_going_to_do.html

President Trump answered several questions about Iran on Wednesday morning:

REPORTER: Can you answer whether you are moving closer to striking Iranian nuclear facilities?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can’t say that. You don’t think I will answer that?

“Will you strike the Iranian nuclear component, and when exactly, sir? Would you please inform us so we can be there and watch?”

You don’t know that I’m going to even do it. I may do it—may not. Nobody knows what I am going to do. I can tell you this: Iran has a lot of trouble. They want to negotiate. And I said, ‘Why didn’t you negotiate with me before all this death and destruction? Why didn’t you negotiate with me two weeks ago? You could have done fine. You would have had a country.’ It’s very sad to watch this. I’ve never seen anything like it. Everyone thought it would be the reverse. I didn’t think so. I was telling them you have to do something. You have to negotiate. At the last minute, they said, ‘We aren’t going to do that.’

And they got hit. Remember 60 days? 61 will become a very famous number. One hell of a first hit. One hell of a hit. Not sustainable, to be honest—it ended on the first night.

FDR’s Massive Federal Overreach And how it prolonged the Great Depression. by Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/fdrs-massive-federal-overreach/

In his first inaugural address, on March 4, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It sounded great, and is still presented as inspiring, but actually the statement made little sense, and wasn’t even true at a time when so many Americans were facing imminent financial ruin. Still, it gave the impression that the new president was a wise man who had matters well in hand during a time of crisis, and that reassured people.

The Roosevelt administration compounded the impression that it was working hard at reversing the nation’s massive economic downturn when it charged out of the gate in its first hundred days with a large number of initiatives designed to end the Great Depression. The Emergency Banking Act was the first federal bailout of the nation’s banks, and gave the federal government massive new power to regulate the banking system. Much more was to come.

On April 5, 1933, Roosevelt signed an executive order forbidding the hoarding of gold. This was a time of economic panic, with people withdrawing gold from the banks at a phenomenal rate. By ending the massive run on gold, Roosevelt saved the banks, and the American economic system (which was still on the gold standard), from wholesale collapse. He also established a number of new federal agencies designed to provide relief for the poor, get the unemployed working, enable American businesses to get on their feet, and more.

These included the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the Public Works Administration (PWA), the National Recovery Administration (NRA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). More of these new agencies and initiatives followed. The Social Security Act of 1935 established a plan to tax Americans to provide pensions for the aged.

All this and other New Deal initiatives made Roosevelt more popular than ever: it gave the impression that the administration was tackling the Depression with tremendous energy and would soon have America back on its feet. Yet the Depression continued through Roosevelt’s first two terms, only to be ended when the U.S. entered World War II after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

As it turned out, the cure just prolonged the disease. Many found the proliferation of New Deal agencies, all known by their three initials, bewildering, and ridiculed them as “alphabet agencies.” Al Smith, Roosevelt’s old rival in the Democratic Party, said that the government during the Roosevelt administration was “submerged in a bowl of alphabet soup.” Smith was making light of a situation that was actually quite serious: the New Deal was the impetus for a massive expansion of government regulation and federal bureaucracy.

Israel’s clash with Iran is nothing like the Iraq War Both the right and the left are exploiting the disaster of Iraq to try to criminalise the Jewish State. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/18/israels-clash-with-iran-is-nothing-like-the-iraq-war/

Remember when Saddam Hussein sponsored an army of fascists that invaded the United States and raped and murdered thousands of Americans? And when he funded a gang of religious fanatics to fire thousands of rockets at people in Leeds and Manchester here in the UK? And when he himself pressed the button on ballistic missiles that landed on New York City and London? No, me neither. Which makes it perplexing that Israel’s push against Iran is being compared to the Iraq War of 2003 – for Iran has done all of that to the Jewish nation, and it dreams of doing more.

The debate about Israel / Iran is at risk of being derailed by disinformation. Gaslighting swirls all around it. This is a crazed stab at ‘regime change’, cry Israel’s critics, and we all know what hellish things spring from ‘regime change’. It is an ‘illegal war’ and a ‘war of aggression’, insists the left. And the trump card: it’s Iraq all over again. Both the digital right and digital left are ‘invoking the spectre of Iraq’, in the words of the New York Times. ‘Welcome to Iraq 2.0’, says the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Only worse – Israel’s ‘unprovoked attack’ on Iran has the potential to be ‘far, far more catastrophic’, apparently.

The moral evasion on display here is off the charts. To compare Israel’s fight against its fanatical tormentors in Tehran with America and Britain’s vain and ruinous war on Iraq is to be wilfully blind to both historical truth and moral principle. First, there’s the fact that Saddam’s regime did not attack us. This was a shattered nation, broken by the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the West’s sanctions and bombing raids of the 1990s. In 2003, Iraq barely posed a threat to its neighbours, far less to mighty America or Britain. Washington and London’s depiction of this shell of a regime as a threat to the world was the blackest of black propaganda. It was the lie that unleashed untold horrors.

The Israel-Iran clash is wholly the reverse of this. Iran has attacked Israel ceaselessly and ferociously. Its neo-fascist proxies in Hamas sent a 6,000-strong army into Israel in October 2023 where they raped and murdered hundreds. Its most important proxy – Hezbollah – followed up this pogrom with barrages of missiles into northern Israel. Between Hamas’s pogrom and June of last year, Hezbollah fired 5,000 rockets and other projectiles at Israel. This caused the evacuation of 60,000 people and the deaths of scores of civilians, including 12 Druze kids. Iran itself has directly fired missiles at Israel: 120 ballistic missiles in April 2024; 200 in October 2024.

Pro-Hamas Group Invests $100K in Muslim Mayoral Candidate Jhad in the City. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/pro-hamas-group-invests-100k-in-muslim-mayoral-candidate/

Forget the Ground Zero mosque, New York City may end up with a ‘Ground Zero’ mayor, a Muslim socialist who hates America and Israel.

And you’ll never guess who’s backing him.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the anti-Israel group whose leader said he was “happy” about Oct. 7, is quietly funding socialist Zohran Mamdani’s bid for New York City mayor.

The Unity & Justice Fund, which CAIR formed last year to expand its political influence, has contributed $100,000 to New Yorkers for Lower Costs, the largest PAC supporting Mamdani, according to campaign records. The money was split between a $25,000 gift on May 30 and a $75,000 donation on June 16.

Unity and Justice, by the way, is a fairly typical Muslim Brotherhood name. The Egyptian Brotherhood Party was the Freedom and Justice Party. It’s the Justice and Development Party in Morocco and the Justice and Construction Party in Libya.

The common theme here is ‘Justice’ which within the Islamic framework means the supremacy of Islamic law.

And CAIR has Muslim Brotherhood roots.

The brand outside may be “lower costs” but the brand inside is ‘justice’ or Sharia law.

Army Brat: World War II by Laura Gutman

The lives of Army brats have always been a core component of the US military. Scarcely described until now, Army Brat: World War II is an essential account that fills a major gap in history.

Author Laura Thurston Gutman lived deeply embedded within the US Armed Forces from before the United States’ earliest entry into World War II through the Vietnam era. Chronicling pivotal events during those years, this historical autobiography describes a life inextricably intertwined with the military. From her birth at West Point’s hospital, to her cobbled-together education, and witnessing her father’s many military honors, Laura’s childhood was one of intense awareness of the danger her father faced and the courage her mother displayed. As she grew older, she lurked in the background during long evenings of intense discussions of policy. Through the constant upheaval and disruption so familiar to military families, Laura developed a radical independence, a determination to gain control over her life, and a fearless approach to her own education.

Chronicling the experiences of a strong military family as they witness and participate in the unfolding of history in a dangerous and challenging world, Army Brat identifies consequential insights into the critical importance of a strong religious foundation; an educational system dedicated to core concepts of nation and loyalty; and leadership that prioritizes sovereignty, national defense, and military support.

On Death Cults and Decadence Israeli lessons for disdainful Americans. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/on-death-cults-and-decadence/

If you haven’t read Douglas Murray’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, you’ve very likely read about it. Released in April, it’s still near the top of the bestseller list, and it deserves to be.

In part, it’s a piece of first-rate reportage – truly historic, world-class reportage of the kind that the legacy media used to publish at their best. Immediately after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, Murray flew to Israel and has spent much of his time there ever since, experiencing things to which neither you nor I would gladly expose ourselves except in the service of truth. Which is to say that Murray takes the title of journalist very seriously: to him, plainly, it is a calling, a trust, a profession in the best and noblest sense of the word.

Of course, to speak of journalism in such terms is to be reminded just how grotesque it is for most of the big legacy-media names – the ones who pull down the million-dollar salaries for staring into cameras, perfectly clad and coiffed, while reading scripts written by other people – to claim the same label for themselves. The day before I am writing this, I turned on CNN, with the usual dread, in hopes of hearing the latest news about the riots in Los Angeles. [Note: This piece was written before Israel and Iran began firing on each other.] I happened to catch the opening moments of Christiane Amanpour’s program. She began with what was meant to be a summing-up of the situation in L.A. She must have spoken eight or ten sentences before I switched the TV off. Why did I switch it off? Because every single sentence that came out of her mouth was a bald-faced lie.

This is the legacy-media landscape of our time: a landscape of lies. More and more of us can see through it, but millions of Americans are still being blue-pilled by Christiane, Wolf, Anderson, Jake, Rachel, and the rest of the whole crooked, compromised crew. For years these millions of Americans have been fed, and have swallowed, lies about Trump – the Russia hoax, the “fine people” hoax, the bleach-drinking hoax, and so forth. But even the lies about Trump aren’t as deeply twisted as the ones surrounding the events that Murray recounts with extraordinary precision and passion in On Democracies and Death Cults.

At times during this post-October 7 era, it has seemed almost as if the legacy media’s lies about the situation in Israel have rewired the minds of half the American population. Perhaps it just seems that way to me because I have so many friends (or “friends”) on social media whose age, sex, color, educational background, and job description render them most likely, for whatever reason, to fall for those lies. In other words, they’re college-educated white women in late middle age who belong to what you might call the creative class – poets, playwrights, composers, musicians, artists, actors, etc. – and who live, most of them, in New York or Los Angeles. More correctly, they live in a bubble of culture – an echo chamber of opening nights and poetry readings and vernissages. You might call it decadence.

GOOD AND EVIL: SYDNEY WILLIAMS

“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.”

Prohibited Access: A Cache of FBI Corruption? A secret FBI document cache—“Prohibited Access”—may hold explosive evidence of political cover-ups, misconduct, and a decade of justice corrupted from within. By John D. O’Connor

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.

Can the Left Ever Stop Its Craziness? The more the left rages, the more Trump rises—while Democrats trade policy for tantrums and canonize chaos in place of compromise. By Victor Davis Hanson

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.