RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.commentary.org/articles/matthew-continetti/lawless-left-riots-liberal-followers/

You’ve seen the image: A shirtless young man, wearing a mask and gloves, waves a Mexican flag while standing on the roof of a defaced car. He’s ringed by flames from a nearby burning vehicle. The smoke obscures a traffic light hanging in the distance. It’s a desolate, anarchic landscape—more fitting for science fiction than a spring evening in America’s second-largest city.

This was Los Angeles in early June, when street protests over federal immigration raids turned violent. For four days, masked men battled local police. They hurled stones and shot fireworks. They obstructed highways, torched taxis, and looted shops. LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said his officers were “overwhelmed.”

Liberals shrugged.

Mayor Karen Bass, Governor Gavin Newsom, Representative Maxine Waters, and the unemployed Kamala Harris were all preoccupied with someone 3,000 miles away: President Trump. They downplayed the chaos while blaming him for it. They demanded Trump relinquish control of the California National Guard and remove the 700 Marines he deployed to Los Angeles. They called for ICE to leave town.

Above all, they preened. They issued statements oozing with moral superiority. “Demonstrations in defense of our immigrant neighbors have been overwhelmingly peaceful,” wrote Kamala Harris with characteristic vagueness. “The Founding Fathers didn’t live and die to see this kind of moment,” Newsom said in a televised speech.

He’s right, but not in the way he thinks. The Founders didn’t live and die to see anarchists flout the law in defense of illegal immigrants. They wrote a Constitution establishing federal supremacy over the states. They quashed rebellion and were, shall we say, tough on crime. The Founders would have had no problem recognizing anarchy and declaring it impermissible. Why does Newsom?

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/tyrannical-regimes-and-the-westerners-who-love-them/

Iranian actress and activist Nazanin Boniadi has issued a heartfelt plea to the Western protest class that I fear will fall on deaf ears. Just as the Palestinians who have made it out of Gaza and can speak freely tried, in vain, to convince the anti-Zionist demonstrators to not lionize Hamas, so are Iranian democracy activists learning about the Western fascination and identification with tyrannical regimes.

The Iranian regime “unleashes its fury, first and foremost, on its own people,” Boniadi told PBS’s Newshour. The regime has shut down Internet access across Iran and has been arresting dissidents to ensure that those who want freedom cannot organize against the government while it is weak. Therefore “we have to separate the Islamic Republic from Iran because most of the Iranian people believe [the regime] is an occupying force.”

She closed with a plea: “I urge Westerners, please, if you want to stand for Iran and the Iranian people and their sovereignty, please don’t conflate that with the Islamic Republic’s sovereignty, they are two different things. Do not raise the Islamic Republic’s flag in your rallies. That is a slap in the face to every dissident, every Iranian who has risked everything for freedom.”

Yet of course this weekend there were those very Islamic Republic of Iran flags on the streets of New York City. The flags of Hamas and Hezbollah—which are also, by the way, Islamic Republic of Iran flags, technically—were replaced by the logo of a tyrannical regime in Tehran. In London, where Boniadi grew up, Islamic Republic flags intermingled with large signs displaying the face of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the words “choose the right side of history.”

https://pjmedia.com/sarah-anderson/2025/06/23/operation-dragon-eye-60-missing-kids-found-in-florida-during-largest-rescue-in-us-history-n4941103

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier and the United States Marshal for the Central District of Florida William Berger announced at a press conference on Monday that a two-week operation known as Operation Dragon Eye — one of, if not the largest child rescue mission in United States history — was a success. 

The two-week operation saved the lives of at least 60 children and saw eight adults arrested on charges including human trafficking, child endangerment, drug possession, and drug trafficking. Operation Dragon Eye involved over 20 agencies and 100 people. 

Most of the children, who were ages nine to seventeen years old, were found in the Tampa Bay area. Their stories are heartbreaking. 

Berger said the children have been “debriefed and provided with physical and psychological care,” but some of them required additional assistance: maternal care. According to Natasha Nascimento of Redefining Refuge, many of the young girls were pregnant. She says the operation didn’t just recover children; it recovered generations.