RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/liberal-hypocrites/

A handful of years after they cheered a president flanked by armed soldiers declaring half the countries to be enemies of the state, liberals are denouncing President Trump as a dangerous authoritarian. The misinformation censors of yesteryear have suddenly discovered that they love free speech and the men who filled D.C. with federal troops worry about the right to protest.

This born-again liberalism fools absolutely no one except the fools virtue signaling it.

The majority of liberals cast aside liberal values, they learned to deplore meritocracy, fair play, freedom of speech and all differences of opinion that did not serve their radical cause. They became leftists who play the cynical game of viewing dissent as either a ‘threat to democracy’ or the ‘highest form of patriotism’ depending on whether they’re the ones in power or dissenting.

That’s not liberalism. It’s a leftist wolf who puts on sheep’s clothing when he’s being hunted.

Liberalism means fundamentally distinguishing between speech and violence. It does not mean, as leftists have come to do, declaring that their violence is speech and that everyone else’s speech is violence. Branding the BLM race riots as the “speech of the unheard”, while also arguing as the New York Times did that, “Free Speech Is Killing Us”, is illiberal totalitarianism.

Free speech isn’t defending the speech you agree with, but the speech you disagree with, and the last time the born-again liberal hypocrites did that was at least a generation ago. The same people who told us that cancel culture was really ‘consequence culture’ are outraged when consequences come for their activists after they spent over a year calling for Death to America.

The cries about the sanctity of academic freedom ring hollow from the establishment that watched conservatives and then even actual liberals and non-conforming leftists being purged from academia until it became a political monoculture. The same liberals now defending campus Hamas riots were fine with campus bans on everything from sombreros to copies of the Constitution. Scrawl a Hamas red triangle and the civil libertarians will jump to your defense who ignored when a campus chalk message in support of Trump was treated like a hate crime.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21570/nuclear-fusion-energy-race

A visionary, an entrepreneur, a futurist, and perhaps one of the most creative of his generation, one still needs to spend considerable time in reading the comments of Elon Musk to determine his current opinion regarding fusion energy.

Prior published interviews suggest he has been a very strong proponent of solar and wind power, energy sources that have brought Europe to its knees economically and that, understandably, are not currently in favor at the White House.

In 2023, Musk told Joe Rogan during a podcast that “You could actually power the entire United States with 100 miles of 100 miles of solar.”

Musk did in fact recognize the power of fusion energy but, in this context, he meant the sun generating electricity through solar panels:

“We have a giant fusion reactor in the sky…. the sun is converting more than four million tons of mass to energy every second and requires no maintenance….If you can generate energy from solar panels and store it with batteries, you can have energy 24 hours a day.”

Yet Musk tacitly recognizes a growing strategic fact. The nation that owns the stunning advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) may well hold the technology that dictates who will dominate the rest of the 21st Century. AI consumes an enormous amount of power, so much so that Microsoft is investing in bringing back online the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant to ensure uninterrupted electricity to power its AI data centers.

No matter the size of their “farms,” solar panels and wind turbines simply cannot produce enough uninterrupted electricity to protect America’s AI leadership. Consider this quote from a report issued by the International Energy Association:

“In the United States, power consumption by data centres is on course to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030. Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/22/a-tale-of-two-presidents-deportation-records/

With their party dragging itself through an existential struggle, Democrats, with of course help from the media, have made the president’s illegal immigrant deportations their raison de etre. They’ve turned to tantrum-laced political theater and seasoned it with a mountain of hypocrisy.

This year’s George Floyd (or Michael Brown) for the Democrats is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the El Salvadoran and alleged MS-13 gang member who was sent back to his home country. His case, says the Associated Press, is for Democrats “about fundamental American ideals — due process, following court orders, preventing government overreach.”

Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was speaking, even if unofficially, for the party and the media that does the party’s dirty work when he said in regard to the administration’s deportation policy, that “due process and separation of powers are matters of principle” and “without due process for all, we are all in danger.”

It’s blatantly obvious that Democrats “desperately want to neuter the Trump administration’s right to remove those who have come here illegally, including those who belong to foreign gangs, or commit serious felonies.”

Where were the Democrats and the media when Barack Obama was deporting more than 5 million (including both formal removals and returns), many – maybe even a majority – of whom didn’t get their “day in court”? They were around, but not much was said, certainly not to the level of screeching we’re hearing today. There was no rancor, no childish grandstanding, no rallies on behalf of the deported.

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.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/21/voters-align-with-trump-on-dei-transgender-bans-ii-tipp-poll/

President Donald Trump’s executive orders forbidding transgender athletes from competing against females and eliminating so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal government have been met with political opposition, outrage, and angry ridicule. But who’s winning the debate? Trump is, as the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

In the most recent national online I&I/TIPP poll, taken from Mar. 26-Mar. 28, 1,452 adults were asked: “Do you support or oppose President Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girls’ sports?”

It wasn’t close. Among those responding, 64% said they either “support strongly” (48%) or “support somewhat” (16%) the move, compared to the 24% who said they either “oppose strongly” (15%) or “oppose somewhat” (9%) Trump’s order.

Only 4% said they were “not familiar” with the order, while 7% answered they were “not sure.” The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.6 percentage points.

Of 36 major demographic groups followed each month by I&I/TIPP Poll, only two showed less than 50% support: Democrats (46% support, 43% oppose) and self-described “liberals” (39% support, 50% oppose).

By comparison, Republicans (88% support, 6% oppose) and independents (61% support, 25% oppose) showed overwhelming backing, as did every other major demographic category.