RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/qed/the-devouring-state/

There is a quiet but powerful assumption that underlies much of the modern political left: that people are fixed. You are who you are—because of your upbringing, your environment, your skin colour, your class, your chromosomes—and you are stuck that way. This is not a fringe belief. It is foundational. It determines how the left writes policy, how it talks about people, and ultimately how it justifies its own existence.

This deterministic worldview—where the future is something done to us, not something we build—is no minor quirk. It is the lifeblood of leftist politics. Without it, the left’s policies begin to unravel, its rhetoric loses force, and its claims to moral authority collapse. For if people are truly free—if they possess the capacity for self-betterment, resilience, and growth—then the left’s vast machinery of redistribution, intervention, and protection becomes unnecessary, or worse, infantilising.

To understand this dynamic, the work of Carl Jung provides a useful framework. His archetype of the devouring mother—the figure who smothers her children with care, robbing them of the challenges that build independence—is an apt metaphor for the modern welfare state. The devouring mother does not act out of cruelty but out of a pathological need to protect, to provide, and to be needed. She denies the child the trials that would make him strong—because his weakness justifies her role. This is exactly how many modern governments behave: offering more and more, doing more and more, until the individual no longer knows how to stand.

In psychological and behavioural literature, the case for agency is overwhelming. The belief that one’s actions matter—that personal responsibility and effort shape outcomes—is one of the most robust predictors of success across nearly every domain of life. Children raised to believe in their capacity to overcome hardship fare better academically, emotionally, and economically. Adults who take responsibility for their choices are healthier and more resilient. Communities that foster self-reliance tend to be safer, more cohesive, and more innovative.

But here lies the problem: individuals who believe they can lift themselves up don’t need bureaucrats to do it for them. Citizens who believe in their capacity to act don’t require constant intervention, assistance, or redistribution. And so, from the left’s perspective, this belief in human potential is not just inconvenient—it is dangerous. It threatens the very foundation of their legitimacy.

It is no accident that the Left tends to frame people as helpless victims, be it of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchal oppression, or genetics. These narratives are not just analytical tools; they are political necessities. They serve to delegitimise personal agency while legitimising the expansive role of the state. If individuals are seen as powerless it becomes the state’s sacred duty to rescue them. And just like the devouring mother, the State can feel morally righteous for doing so.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2025/07/13/former-ny-governor-criticized-comrade-mamdani-and-then-this-happened-n4941716

David Paterson was the governor of New York from 2008 to 2010, when he was succeeded by Andrew Cuomo as the Democrats’ one-party rule of the state continued drearily on. Yet although he is another New York Democrat, Paterson is not thrilled with Zohran Mamdani, his fellow Democrat who stands on the brink of becoming the next mayor of New York City. 

Yet when he criticized Mamdani, Paterson found to his dismay that not only was he inundated with angry phone calls from the young Communist’s supporters, but his family was targeted as well. And so once again we see the new feature the left is intent on introducing into American politics: intimidation. 

Paterson said Sunday that after he said that either Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams should drop out of the mayoral race so as to try to block Mamdani from winning, the reaction from those who see Mamdani as the Democrats’ new hope was swift and severe: “I got a whole lot of nasty, negative phone calls — really vitriolic — from Mamdani supporters,” Paterson recounted. The enraged Marxists “called my home. They called my wife. It was really kind of difficult for those 48 hours after the press conference.”

Paterson refuses to bow to intimidation, and restated his position: “If Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams both stay in the mayor’s race, it will be [an] open door for Zohran Mamdani to win the election in November for mayor. My proposal was that there be a way to make a decision [on] which of these two candidates should run against Mamdani.” 

All three of these candidates are Democrats, although Cuomo and Adams are running as independents, as Mamdani is the official Democrat nominee. There is a Republican in the race, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, but he doesn’t stand a chance: New York City is a one-party entity, to the degree that even if Adolf Hitler himself were running on the Democrat ticket and the Archangel Michael on the Republican, New Yorkers would still dutifully reject the GOP candidate and pull the lever for the man with a D behind his name. 

Three Democrats in the race, however, will just split the Democrat vote and likely hand the city to the candidate who is the official party nominee, and that’s Mamdani. Evidence of how deep the rot goes in the Democrat Party is the fact that Paterson’s problem with this Communist is not so much a matter of principle as simply that he is a young upstart who has not fully sketched out the details of how exactly he plans to destroy New York City. 

https://lizpeek.com/news/zohran-mamdanis-enraging-anti-cop-comments-leave-former-dem-advisor-almost-speechless/?utm_source=newsletter.lizpeek.com&utm_

Former Democratic Party advisor Dan Turrentine has strongly criticized New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for his resurfaced comments about law enforcement, calling them “enraging.” According to Fox News, Turrentine expressed concern over the potential impact of Mamdani’s comments on public safety and urged the Democratic Party to “condemn” them.

The controversy centers on remarks Mamdani made during a 2020 appearance on the “Immigrantly” podcast. In the interview, Mamdani argued that the history of the New York Police Department (NYPD) demonstrates a system that “functions in many ways to punish poor Black and Brown people.” He suggested that police often overstep their roles, including in situations involving homelessness and domestic violence. Mamdani suggested that many scenarios—such as handling a homeless person on a train or responding to domestic violence—would be better addressed by professionals other than armed police officers.

These comments have recently gone viral, drawing sharp criticism from both Republicans and Democrats. Turrentine, who previously worked for Hillary Clinton and Colorado Governor Jared Polis, voiced his frustration on “The Morning Meeting” podcast. He described Mamdani’s views as “crazy” and said he hoped the Democratic Party would condemn them. Turrentine emphasized the risks police face in New York City and argued that the NYPD has made significant progress in reducing crime, recalling the city’s transformation from a “hellhole” to a more stable environment in recent years.

“I’m almost speechless. Like, that is so enraging,” Turrentine said. “It’s crazy. I hope it hurts him. Like, when I hear that, and I try to have an open mind, hope that whoever our next mayor is makes this city a great place. I live [here]. We have children here. New York City police officers put themselves in such harm’s way. This city is full of crazy people on subways. I, our children go on it. The number of times that there are homeless people who are, like, out of their mind who come up to kids, who scream at them right near – to say the police are the [problem], I hope our party condemns him.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/14/will-john-brennan-ever-tell-the-truth/

When asked why the current Department of Justice might be investigating him, former CIA Director John Brennan answered, as was his wont, with a complete lie: “I am clueless about what it is exactly that they may be investigating me for.”

Clueless? Hardly. Brennan knows full well that his fingerprints are on some of the greatest scandals of the last decade. These machinations have threatened the very integrity of our institutions and elections.

He has a record of serially lying to Congress, the public, and the media, and doing so emphatically.

In 2011, as the government’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan absurdly insisted that the Obama administration’s drone strikes along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border had not killed a single civilian noncombatant. Yet multiple sources proved the claim was clearly false. In truth, the number of innocents killed was likely somewhere between 50 and 70.

In 2014, as director of the CIA, Brennan lied again, doubling down by denying that CIA operatives were hacking into U.S. Senate staffers’ computers.

“As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. . . . We wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the, you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we do.”

Here, too, he was caught lying and forced to apologize—but never charged with perjury.

But Brennan’s biggest fabrications came in 2017 when, as an ex-CIA director, he testified before a congressional committee that he neither knew who had commissioned the now-infamous bogus Steele dossier nor whether the CIA had relied on it for its intelligence assessments.

But Brennan knew well at the time that then NSA director Michael Rogers and James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, had both gone on record that the dossier did play a major role in the intelligence community’s interagency assessment. Indeed, the concocted dossier was delivered directly to President Obama. And John Brennan was one of its most ardent advocates, seeing in it a way to undermine the Trump campaign.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-assassination-attempt-major-failures-token-punishment/

Sunday marks the first anniversary of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life at his campaign rally in Butler, Pa. To make the occasion, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report on the Secret Service errors and lapses of judgment that led to the shooter, Thomas Crooks, to be able to get Trump in his sights and have a clear, unobstructed, easy shot. If Trump hadn’t turned his head at the very moment of the shot, he would have been killed on that day. And as damning as the new report is, it demonstrates definitively that the corrupt system that made the assassination attempt possible is still very much in place.

Fox News reported Saturday that “ten days before the event, high-level Secret Service officials were briefed on a classified threat to Trump. ‘Once those officials reviewed the intelligence, they could have then requested that personnel within their chain of command be briefed on the specific information.’”

But they didn’t. “Officials failed to share this information, leaving federal and local law enforcement entities planning and staffing the event unaware of the active threat, including members of the Donald Trump Protective Division.”

The big question here is why the Secret Service decided to sit on this threat. What were the political views of the officials responsible for the decision not to brief others within the chain of command? Were they leftists? Did they want Trump dead? Were officials in the Biden White House and the Democrat Party questioned regarding any possible connection to concealing this information? These are the kinds of questions that a really useful report would be answering, although the GAO’s report is damning enough even despite its careful avoidance of such matters.

The people assigned to protect the once and future president, meanwhile, were green and untested: “The Secret Service agent who was responsible for ‘identif[ying] site vulnerabilities,’ was new to her role. The Butler event was ‘her first time planning and securing a large outdoor event as the site agent.’” What an amazing stroke of bad luck, that on her first day in this important role, there is an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate! Or was that day chosen for this shooting precisely because someone knew that Trump would be more vulnerable than he had been previously?