RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/22/why-our-systems-collapse/

America has a lot of built-in safety backups and redundancies.

But every once in a while, when tradition, science, time-tested protocols, and common sense are ignored, a fragile system utterly collapses.

Usually, an iconic event reveals how vulnerable the entire country has become, and predictably occurs when suicidal ideologies and nihilism, in perfect-storm fashion, wreak havoc.

The media, academia, the bureaucracy, and higher education can mask the dangers of their political agendas—at least until their sheer incompetence or toxicity can no longer be hidden or excused, and a predictable disaster ensues.

Take the January 4-5, 2025, Pacific Palisades fire that destroyed an entire historic neighborhood of Los Angeles. The embers had not even cooled when we were lectured that “climate change” was responsible for the historically predictable annual autumn and early winter Santa Ana winds that whip up horrific fires before the first winter rains arrive—a phenomenon documented for over two centuries.

The media, in reporting the conflagration, downplayed human culpability. But over the next few weeks, outraged former homeowners and independent journalists began cataloging the real symptoms of a total system failure that turned the normal end-of-year fire season into a catastrophic inferno.

A lot of things had to go wrong to utterly destroy an ancient, coveted neighborhood. But DEI managed to do all of that with ease.

First, we learned that the incompetent mayor, Karen Bass, had cut the fire budget. Then, despite warnings of dry hillsides, underfunded fire protection, and predicted high winds, Bass was nowhere to be seen during the most dangerous weeks of the year.

Why? She was junketing in Ghana, an African nation rarely considered vital to the running of the third-largest city in the United States.

The now-convicted felon, Deputy Mayor Brian Thompson, was under house arrest for phoning in a bomb threat to the city hall. So a mayoral apparatus did not exist.

Next, the clueless and vastly overpaid Janisse Quiñones, the CEO and Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, was likely hired based on diversity, equity, and inclusion criteria despite a prior uninspiring record in her administrative roles at PG&E. She was utterly unprepared for the fire.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/the-left-contrives-its-own-reality-on-political-violence/

The sanctimonious calls for unity are a little hard to take.

In the days following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, members of the Democratic Party and the press have complained that the right is not doing more to promote unity.

Unity would be nice, sure. You first.

“At moments like this, when tensions are high, then part of the job of the president is to pull people together,” former President Barack Obama told an audience last week.

“Whether we’re Democrats, Republicans, independents, we have to recognize that on both sides, undoubtedly, there are people who are extremists and who say things that are contrary to what I believe are America’s core values,” he said. “But I will say that those extreme views were not in my White House. I wasn’t embracing them. I wasn’t empowering them. I wasn’t putting the weight of the United States government behind extremist views. And that . . . when we have the weight of the United States government behind extremist views, we’ve got a problem.”

Obama then said, “My view was that part of the role of the presidency is to constantly remind us of the ties that bind us together.”

That he may sincerely believe those words would be laughable were it not the modus operandi of the Democratic Party and its media allies to invent alternate realities in which their people are forever the heroic and faultless champions of lofty ideals.

The Obama White House, alas, did not represent bipartisan comity. His administration was hardly respectful toward all viewpoints or mindful of constitutional rights. The Obama White House used the Espionage Act against U.S. reporters who refused to give up their sources, it secretly obtained phone records from the Associated Press, it oversaw a weaponized IRS that targeted conservative groups, and it turned the entire intelligence apparatus against the 2016 GOP presidential nominee.

We’re talking here about President “I want you to argue with them and get in their face” Obama, who, at a memorial service in 2016 for five murdered police officers, chose to scold law enforcement, saying, “With an open heart, police departments will acknowledge that, just like the rest of us, they are not perfect; that insisting we do better to root out racial bias is not an attack on cops, but an effort to live up to our highest ideals.” (Give the man credit: At least he managed something less glib than “acted stupidly.”)

How does one achieve unity with a man who lives in a fantasy land, where his opponents are the only ones responsible for political division? This goes well beyond just one man’s delusions and high self-regard; it’s a party-wide problem.

An especially loathsome example involves the tragic killing of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, State Senator John Hoffman. Many on the left insist they were the victims of right-wing political extremism — except that the man who allegedly murdered the couple appears to be an insane person, not an ideologically motivated assassin.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/president-trumps-resolve-to-never-forget/

America’s promise to never forget Sept. 11 is primarily, but not exclusively, about remembering the 2,977 innocents murdered nearly a quarter century ago on an otherwise perfect September morning. In addition to keeping the victims’ memories alive and honoring the heroism of first responders in Manhattan, at the Pentagon, and aboard United 93, not forgetting also means recalling who attacked and how such an operation was pulled off to avoid the specter of repeating one of the darkest days in America’s history.

In hindsight, there were significant failures across the government that spanned political parties and presidents, stretching back to the waning days of the Cold War, when few, if any, Americans knew the names al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden, and most, instead, were fearing Soviet nukes and mutually assured destruction.

The threat of a radical Islamist attack on the homeland was there, however, and the pieces — namely the fanatics who carried out the hijackings, the funders who enabled the plot, and even the strategy itself — were falling into place decades earlier.

The book “Ghost Wars” by Steve Coll focuses on the U.S. government’s, primarily the CIA’s, actions from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to Sept. 10, 2001, providing an illuminating and jarring account of where many things went wrong. To better understand how the age of terrorism came to be, Jack Carr’s “Targeted: Beirut” is a meticulous and gripping retelling of the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing that, now looking back, marked one of the earliest attacks in what became the War on Terror that dominated the lives of the 9/11 generation.

Reading those books outside the time their stories take place makes it seem obvious where problems arose and contributed to the shock of Sept. 11, 2001. Yet, if they’re so obvious now, why have some of those mistakes-turned-warnings not been consistently heeded?

The damage done during four years of President Autopen was evident in real time — warnings for border agents to stay alert for Islamic terrorists inspired by Hamas barbarians’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, numerous Biden administration officials testifying to Congress about how all the alarms were flashing red — yet course was not changed.