RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://ericlevine3.substack.com/p/zohrans-morons

Lenin referred to them as “useful idiots” – the Western Europeans and Americans who supported Communism and the Soviets without fully understanding the consequences of their actions.

We are witnessing a similar phenomenon today in New York City. New Yorkers, including elected officials, Jews, members of the LGBTQ+ community, parents of school age children, crime victims, small business owners, and landlords who support Zohran Mamdani for Mayor, are all basking in the glow of their self-proclaimed enlightenment, self-importance, and virtue.

They should be dubbed Zohran’s Morons (ZMs).

Perhaps the most famous of ZMs is New York Governor Kathy Hochul. By issuing her recent full-throated endorsement of Mamdani, she has not only proven that she is intellectually limited, incompetent, and weak-willed, but she has also demonstrated that she is morally bankrupt.

She truly is America’s worst governor.

Her endorsement is vapid, incoherent, drivel. To explain why she is endorsing him she states:

“In the past few months, I’ve had frank conversations with him. We’ve had our disagreements. But in our conversations, I heard a leader who shares my commitment to a New York where children can grow up safe in their neighborhoods and where opportunity is within reach for every family. I heard a leader who is focused on making New York City affordable — a goal I enthusiastically support.”

Apparently, what they discussed remains a secret. We still do not know on what issues they disagree.

She mentions safe neighborhoods. Mamdani has made clear that he believes the NYPD is “wicked” and “evil” and that it must be defunded. Exactly how Mamdani will make New York’s neighborhoods safe remains a mystery. Of course, less affluent minority communities of color will be the most adversely impacted by the spike in crime that Mamdani’s war on cops will cause.

Hochul’s rejoinder to that is:

“I urged him to ensure that there is strong leadership at the helm of the N.Y.P.D. — and he agreed.”

I have no doubt he will appoint a strong police commissioner for the NYPD. But where will that strong commissioner lead New York’s Finest other than to early retirement? The commissioner will undoubtedly share Mamdani’s view that the NYPD is wicked and evil and needs to be restrained and defunded. Mamdani’s commissioner will undoubtedly share his pro-criminal agenda. With Mayor Mamdani, the best New York can hope for is weak incompetent leadership at the NYPD.

https://pjmedia.com/maureen-steele/2025/09/19/obama-built-the-censorship-machine-and-now-its-backfiring-n4943910

It would almost be funny if it weren’t so destructive. Barack Obama — even now, after what many believe was his continued influence in the former Biden White House — has decided to posture himself as a defender of free speech. He recently warned that “the current administration has taken cancel culture to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.” Spare us the lecture.

We’ve seen the emails from Hillary Clinton’s office where editors were told to toe the line. We’ve watched Mark Zuckerberg testify in Senate hearings, admitting that government officials “told him” what he could and couldn’t allow on Facebook. We’ve lived through the banning, the suspensions, the “fact-check” censorship of anyone daring to challenge the regime’s version of the truth. And every time, we were told it was for our safety — because “misinformation kills.” Funny thing: those so-called conspiracy theories have turned out true again and again, while the establishment’s “facts” collapse under the weight of evidence.

Obama and his surrogates have no moral authority here. They censored to tilt elections, silenced political opponents, and strangled debate. They built an entire censorship-industrial complex that they’re now desperate to deny exists. Section 230 wasn’t meant to create government-run truth ministries, but that’s what the left turned it into. They can’t unring that bell.

And then there’s Jimmy Kimmel, the court jester of the liberal elite, who just discovered what happens when the corporate mob turns on its own. Kimmel’s comments were nasty, cruel, and not remotely funny — but he had a right to say them. 

The point isn’t whether we agree with him, or whether his brand of snide “comedy” is stale. The point is that ABC didn’t fire Kimmel because of principle. It fired him because of money. The lawsuits are stacking up, the backlash is real, and “go woke, go broke” has gone from warning to reality. Corporations don’t care about free speech or decency — they care about liability and the bottom line.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/20/jimmy-kimmel-as-tom-paine-absolutely/

he other day, after Disney/ABC decided to suspend late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, rather than allow him to do his show and further attack President Trump and his supporters, Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin appeared on MSNBC and compared Kimmel and other talk show hosts to one of this nation’s best-known revolutionary figures. “They’re like modern Tom Paines,” the congressman intoned.

While some on the Right were upset by the comment, believing that Raskin had plied Kimmel and his ilk with undue praise, the comparison is, in many ways, quite apt. While it is true that none of the late-night hosts is smart enough or brave enough to inspire a nation to war with his writing—as Paine is said to have done with “Common Sense”—they are very much like him in other ways. You see, in addition to being an inspiring pamphlet writer, Thomas Paine was…how do I put this in a family-friendly publication? …an enormous jackass.

It’s important to note that Paine emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774, which is to say after the Boston Tea Party and after the proverbial die had already been cast and a conflict of some sort seemed inevitable. In other words, unlike most of the Founders, Paine came to America to be a part of the revolution. He didn’t live here and experience colonial rule, eventually concluding that his rights as an Englishman were being violated. He came specifically to agitate, to be revolutionary. His fundamental loyalty was not to the new American polity but to himself and his belief in the need to sweep away the old and start the world anew.

After the American Revolution, Paine eschewed the duties of a statesman to build the new nation and craft its new government, instead moving on, almost immediately, to his next adventure. In the subsequent years, Paine became an ardent supporter of the French Revolution, managed to win election as a representative to the French Revolutionary National Convention, was imprisoned for two years by Maximillien Robespierre, refused to learn that ironic lesson, plotted with Napoleon to invade Britain, returned to the United States only to be denied citizenship and the franchise by Gouverneur Morris (who actually wrote the Preamble to the Constitution), was refused burial by the local Quaker cemetery, and had his bones dug up by a fan who died with them in his house, from whence they were lost to posterity. Paine lived ignominiously and deservedly died ignominiously. Of all the American revolutionaries, he is the least deserving of the title “Founding Father” and the most deserving of being compared to a hack like Jimmy Kimmel.

Unfortunately, this is not what Congressman Raskin meant to do when he made the comparison. He meant to lionize Kimmel and convince people that the former host of “The Man Show” is a noble creature and a venerable patriot. In so doing, Raskin inadvertently revealed something annoying and potentially troubling about himself and those in his social circle (including his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin, a highly respected law professor at Duke University and a former member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors): they don’t know a damn thing about this nation, its founding, or the purpose of the government its Founders established. If your go-to compliment for someone you respect and admire is to compare them to Thomas Paine, then that’s only because you don’t know anything about Thomas Paine. And that, in turn, suggests that you don’t know much at all about the founding of this great nation.