RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Anxious Generation was published one year ago today. Our plan was to promote the book in the spring, take the summer off to recharge, then get to work in September on Jon’s next book, a deeply depressing investigation of technology’s effects on democracy.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the book catalyzed a movement around the world. Most spectacularly, schools, states, and entire countries implemented phone-free school policies, and Australia raised the age for opening social media accounts to 16.

This went well beyond our wildest expectations of what could happen.

The question is why this change is unfolding so quickly—and what this mass movement says about the state of our culture and its prospects for renewal.

Wherever children have smartphones in their pockets and social media on those smartphones, family life turns into an eternal struggle over screen time. That’s been our reality for a while. Then came Covid-19.

For several years, children—deprived of school and every other normal social activity—were confined to their screens. As Covid restrictions faded away, the device addictions they had amplified did not. And that struggle between parents and their kids only intensified.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/burn-vandalize-teslas-domestic-terrorism

Over the past month, anti-Trump agitators have found a new favorite target: Teslas. In response to Elon Musk’s war on bureaucracy, vandals in cities across the country have broken windows, punctured tires, and keyed doors of the popular electric vehicle. Some have even lit the cars on fire.

Various administration officials have labeled the acts “domestic terror.” Musk critics have brushed off these actions as the price of political participation or implied that they are a predictable backlash to his alleged extremism. Indeed, the most ardent defenders see the burning of cars as a proportional response—as one protester’s sign put it, “Burn a Tesla: Save Democracy.”

These efforts to blur the line between protest and terrorism, however, are profoundly undemocratic. The idea that property destruction and violence are legitimate forms of protest has deep roots on the left, but it is inimical to the freedom of expression that makes democratic life possible.

The Tesla bombers are reading from an old playbook. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, American and European anarchists conducted bombing campaigns and other acts of political violence. They were inspired by theorist Peter Kropotkin’s “propaganda of the deed”—the idea that the expressive character of violence could help instigate revolution.

The revolutionary Soviets not only engaged in brutal violence but also actively justified it as a necessary precondition of their revolution. In Terrorism and Communism, for example, Leon Trotsky responds to a liberal critic by insisting that the revolutionary class has an obligation to use violent means to attain its ends.

https://dianawest.substack.com/p/whats-it-all-about-carlson-and-rogan

One of the more interesting things Darryl Cooper revealed while ensconced on the massive Joe Rogan platform last week concerned his appearance on the even more massive Tucker Carlson platform last summer. It was the night before the Carlson interview, Cooper recalled, and he and Carlson were having dinner, talking about the upcoming show. Carlson informed Cooper that he was going to introduce him as America’s greatest living historian. Cooper says that he demurred, having explained to Carlson that he was no historian, did no original research, published nothing; rather, that he was someone who recorded stories about what he had read.

Carlson was having none of that. He was dead set on tagging Cooper with this nonsensically extravagant accolade and told him just to roll with it during the taping the next day. If you go back and watch Tucker’s opening of the Cooper show, you will notice that no blush, no gulp, and barely a muscle move across Cooper’s face as Tucker coats him with this syrupy wash of words — “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” But even that wasn’t enough for Tucker: “I want people to know who you are, and I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States today because —”

Yes, yes … why? Tell us why!

“— because I think that you are.”

If Carlson’s motives remain opaque, we are now at least privvy to the calculation, the Barnum-esque decision, to dress up the podcaster as this “greatest,” this “most important” historical expert in the whole of these United States.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/27/from-profanity-chic-to-terrorist-porn/

The Democratic Party is polling about 27 percent approval—and sinking.

In 2024, it lost the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and both the popular vote and the Electoral College, 312-226.

In 2024, Trump won over 46 percent of the Hispanic vote, including a majority of Hispanic men. Trump also likely captured 26 percent of the black male vote, doubling his 2020 total.

In 2024, Trump increased his 2020 vote total in every single state. And he won 89 percent of all the counties in the United States.

On every issue, Democrats sided with strident leftist movements rather than the majority of Americans.

They supported globalism over nationalism, high-priced green energy over lower gas and electricity prices, and an open border and 12 million unaudited illegal aliens over security and legal-only immigration.

They seem unconcerned with our $36 trillion debt or the deterrence lost abroad that led to two theater-wide existential wars.

Democrats stay mum about unfair trade and budget deficits. They prefer the Black Lives Matter fixation on the color of our skin rather than Martin Luther King’s emphasis on the content of our character.

They support allowing biological men to overpower women in female sports events—in opposition to 80 percent of the electorate.

Democrats faced choices after their catastrophic defeat last year.

One, they could have stopped the hemorrhaging of their base of 18-30-year-olds, black men, Hispanics, and Independents by moving toward the center.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/doge-in-the-1830s/

The war against big government has been going on much longer than President Trump has been in office. One of the first arenas in which it played out was the struggle over the Bank of the United States. Such a bank, a private corporation, had been established during the

Washington administration in 1791, but its charter expired in 1811 when a vote to renew it was narrowly defeated: the Senate vote was a tie, and President James Madison’s vice president, George Clinton, voted against the bank. Nevertheless, the idea of a central bank for federal funds did not die.

The Bank’s advocates contended that it was necessary to put the nation’s finances in order; its foes, including Madison, argued that it was an unconstitutional power grab on the part of the federal government. It was also dangerous, then as now, to turn power over the public funds to an oligarchy of private financiers; the possibility for corruption, and for a de facto second government developed by buying favors until large enough to challenge the government of the United States, was immense. Nonetheless, it was the Bank’s great foe, Madison, whose signature brought the Bank of the United States back to life in 1816.

Opposition to the Bank was one of the issues that later propelled Andrew Jackson into the White House in 1829. President Jackson called the Bank of the United States a “monster,” and denounced its “power and corruption.” He charged it with interfering in the political process and bribing elected officials and journalists with “loans” so that they would do its bidding. There was ample evidence for this. The New York Courier and Enquirer, which up until the 1832 election had opposed the Bank, received a substantial loan from it and suddenly became a vocal supporter of rechartering the Bank.

The pro-Jackson Washington Globe accused pro-Bank senators George Poindexter of Mississippi and Josiah Johnston of Louisiana of accepting enormous bribes in return for their support of the Bank, and indeed, Poindexter had received from the Bank a $10,000 loan ($300,000 today) and Johnston one of $36,000 (over $1 million today). These were by no means the only loans the Bank gave to politicians.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/27/yes-lets-give-an-america-without-a-meaningful-government-a-try/

Quite a few in this country are madly in love with government. They cannot conceive of life in which we are free agents, liberated from the chains of reckless lawmaking, imperious regulating and stifling bureaucracy. It’s a distorted world view.

And it’s one held by a couple of university academics, who claim “the U.S. government is attempting to dismantle itself,” with the Trump administration setting out “to create an America its people have never experienced – one without a meaningful government.”

Sidney Shapiro, Wake Forest University, and Joseph P. Tomain, University of Cincinnati, who last year wrote the book “How Government Built America,” summarize their thoughts in The Conversation. They write like apologists for statism, a nasty ideology that relies on coercion and interventionism and is the factory setting for those who wish to rule rather than govern within constitutional limits. It’s founded on the belief that says “government knows better than you, in regards to important matters,” and is poisonous to civil society.

The pair complain that President Donald Trump’s “aim to eliminate government could result in” a country “in which free-market economic forces operate without any accountability to the public.” Do they have any idea how far off they are?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mahmoud-khalil-and-the-red-green-assault-on-american-sovereignty/

The stock market of late has been on a veritable roller coaster, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency continues to ruffle feathers, Iran marches ever harrowingly closer to a nuclear weapon, and Russia and Ukraine get tantalizingly close to a ceasefire. But the national political conversation this week has curiously tended to focus not on any of that but instead on the uncertain fate of a lone noncitizen and former Columbia University graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil.

Talk about a misplacement of priorities. Most American media consumers care a great deal about their pocketbooks and retirement accounts. They likely also care about stability on the world stage — a subdued China, a relatively calm Middle East and a long-overdue peace deal to end the bloodshed in Eastern Europe.

By contrast, here is one thing media consumers probably don’t care a lot about: whether a Syrian national and Algerian citizen who was the face of last year’s violent pro-Hamas Columbia University campus riots gets deported. You would never know that, of course, from the media’s incessant focus on the Khalil saga. Is it any wonder that only 31% of Americans told Gallup last fall they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media?

In any event, Khalil is, by any metric, a wildly unsympathetic figure. The New York Times described him as the “public face of protest against Israel” at Columbia. He was the spokesman of a pro-Hamas student group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest. CUAD has referred to the Oct. 7 slaughter of Israelis as a “moral, military, and political victory” and asserted that it is fighting for nothing less than the “total eradication of Western civilization.” Khalil personally distributed propaganda pamphlets titled “Our Narrative — Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” borrowing Hamas’s code name for Oct. 7.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/25/medal-of-honor-recipients-family-ties-to-black-patriot-of-the-american-revolution/

In a White House ceremony on January 3rd, the daughter of Corporal Fred B. McGee received his posthumously awarded Medal of Honor for his heroic actions in the Korean War. His was one of several from the Korean and Vietnam Wars during the ceremony. While McGee survived the war, he died in 2020 while his family continued to campaign for his award to be upgraded to the Medal of Honor.

His actions on Hill 528 near Tang-Wan-Ni, Korea, on June 16, 1952, occurred while serving with the 17th Infantry Regiment, one of the few American military units that had been racially integrated at that time. According to his Medal of Honor citation, McGee was a light machine gunner when his platoon assaulted a fortified enemy position. Braving machine gun and mortar fire, he laid down covering fire for the assaulting troops. When his squad leader was wounded, McGee took command and exposed himself in order to lead the squad forward to a position to neutralize an enemy machine gun.

When the machine gunner was mortally wounded, he ordered his squad to withdraw and volunteered to cover their retreat and to help recover the dead and wounded. He aided a wounded man to safety despite being subjected to considerable mortar and artillery fire. He was initially awarded the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts for his action on Hill 528.

https://www.thefp.com/p/mia-love-last-wish-for-america-utah
Mia Love never had it easy. Yet in an age where cynicism about the United States and its founding had become the norm, she never lost sight of the great opportunities America had given her.

In 2022, Love was diagnosed with brain cancer. Two weeks ago, she announced in a moving Deseret News essay that she would soon die, and used this final opportunity to write a love letter to America. We wanted to have her on “Honestly,” but this past weekend, her family announced that she had passed away at age 49.

You can read all about her life in this beautiful obituary published by Deseret News, a Utah publication we admire. We are grateful to them for allowing us to reprint this lightly edited piece and help it find the widest possible audience. — BW

My dear friends, fellow Americans, and Utahns, I am taking up my pen, not to say goodbye but to say thank you and express my living wish for you and the America I know.

My battle with brain cancer is coming to an end. The disease is no longer responding to treatment, and my family and I have shifted our focus from treatments to enjoying every moment and making memories with the time we have.

My life has been extended by exceptional medical care, science, and extraordinary professionals who have become dear friends. My extra season of life has also been the result of the faith and prayers of countless friends, known and unknown. The result of such humble faith and pleading prayers have been felt by me and my family in ways too numerous to count. I have always believed that faith and science are inextricably interconnected.

As a mayor, member of congress, and media commentator, I have seen the worst of petty politics, divisive rhetoric, and disappointing lapses of moral character by some. These same roles also provided me a front-row seat and backstage pass to be blessed and inspired by the courage, vision, and hope of America’s finest daughters, sons, and citizens.