Parental Rights vs California Lunacy

 

Cleverly masked...

California Told Us to Deceive Parents, but We Said No

Teachers shouldn’t be forced to lie to parents about their child’s asserted gender identity.

Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, National Review

etween us, we spent more than five decades teaching in California public schools. We both won Teacher of the Year awards. We coached teams, mentored struggling students, and built the kind of trust with families that only comes from showing up year after year. We didn’t enter education to become plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit. We entered it because we believed in children and in the partnership between schools and parents.

Then California told us to start lying to those parents.

Under policies enforced by Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta, California schools were required to conceal a child’s asserted gender identity from parents, even when a student was living as a different gender at school with a new name and pronouns. These policies apply to children as young as two. We were told to participate or face consequences. As educators, and as women of faith, we couldn’t comply.

So we sued. In December 2025, Judge Roger Benitez of the Southern District of California ruled that the state’s parental exclusion policies are unconstitutional. He found that schools cannot hide a child’s social gender transition from that child’s own parents and that teachers who want to share such information cannot be prohibited from doing so.

Consider what those policies did to real families. One family in our case discovered that their daughter’s school had been secretly transitioning her and treating her as a boy since the start of seventh grade. For 13 months, her mental health deteriorated while her parents knew nothing. She attempted suicide. Her parents learned the truth not from any teacher or counselor, but from doctors at a hospital. Even after this tragedy, school administrators continued to withhold information about their daughter’s gender identification, citing California law.

The daughter in another family was secretly transitioned beginning in fifth grade. Her parents found out only because another mother let the secret slip. When they confronted the principal, they were told that state law prohibited sharing information about a child’s gender identity without the child’s consent.

California defended its approach by claiming that it protects students. But after more than two years of litigation and full discovery, the state could not produce a single piece of admissible evidence that parental involvement causes harm. Its own expert witnesses did not meaningfully disagree that parental notice and involvement is best for the child.

Our refusal cost us personally. Someone broke into one of our classrooms to put up malicious posters. Students harassed us, encouraged by school employees who circulated protest videos. One of us was placed on involuntary leave after retaliatory complaints from colleagues. The other went on leave, fearing for her safety. Even after winning a preliminary injunction, we had to fight for months before being reinstated. The years-long legal battle took a heavy toll.

What began as two teachers refusing to comply grew into something much larger. Other educators joined our case, some under pseudonyms for fear of retaliation. Then parents came forward, including the families of children whose stories are now cited in a Supreme Court opinion. What started as a stand on conscience became a certified class action on behalf of teachers and parents across California, the largest of its kind in the country.

On Monday night, the Supreme Court vindicated those families. In a 6–3 decision, the Court vacated the Ninth Circuit’s stay and restored Judge Benitez’s injunction for parents across California. The per curiam opinion held that the state’s secrecy policies likely violate parents’ rights under both the free exercise clause and the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. The policies, the Court said, “cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.”

The Court’s order formally applies to parents, not teachers. But the logic of the decision protects us, too. If parents have a constitutional right to know about their child’s gender transition at school, then California cannot punish a teacher for providing that information. You cannot have a right to receive the truth if the person who would tell it can be fired for speaking. The state was ordering us to violate parents’ constitutional rights every single day. The Supreme Court has now said those rights are real.

The debate over parental rights in public schools continues to rage across the country, and the Court has signaled that further issues in this arena will probably come before it. But the Supreme Court has spoken with unmistakable clarity: California’s secrecy policies likely violate parents’ constitutional rights, the harm those policies inflict is real and irreparable, and the state’s interest in concealment cannot justify it.

We refused to lie to the parents who trusted us with their children. California punished us for it. The Supreme Court has now told California it was wrong.

Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West are the lead plaintiffs in Mirabelli v. Bonta, represented by the Thomas More Society, a national nonprofit public-interest law firm.

The Trump Doctrine Is Here

 

The Trump Doctrine Is Here. It Ends Forever Wars.

Marc A. Thiessen, The Washington Post

Critics say President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iran is a violation of his promise not to engage in “forever wars.” In fact, the opposite is true. Trump is not starting a forever war in Iran; he’s ending one.

For 47 years, the Iranian regime has been waging war against the United States. That war began in 1979, when Iran seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 50 Americans hostage for 444 days. The war continued as Iran orchestrated the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 258 Americans, followed by the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 Americans. It continued in 1998, when Iran provided “direct assistance” to al-Qaeda for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, training its “operatives about how to blow up buildings,” according to a ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

After the 9/11 attacks, Iran provided sanctuary to senior leaders of al-Qaeda fleeing U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and allowed the group to use Iranian territory as a pipeline to move money, facilitators and operatives from across the Middle East. (It still harbors Saif al-Adel, successor to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri as leader of al-Qaeda, in Tehran). Iran also provided training and bomb-making equipment to insurgents in Iraq, including “explosively formed penetrators” that killed and maimed thousands of American troops.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Iran’s proxy Hamas slaughtered more than 1,200 innocent people – including 46 Americans – and took 12 Americans hostage. The Iranian regime has also attempted terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, including a 2011 plot to set off a bomb in Cafe Milano in Washington to kill the Saudi ambassador, a plot to kill former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and other senior U.S. officials, and a plot to assassinate Trump himself. And the regime that did all this was pursuing nuclear weapons and refused Trump’s repeated demands to peacefully disarm.

Now, Trump is taking decisive action to bring this reign of terror to an end. If he succeeds, the impact will be profound, opening up the possibility of enduring peace in the Middle East and beyond.

The Iranian threat is a primary reason the U.S. has to spend billions on large deployments in the Middle East. If that danger is eliminated, and a new government — one whose mantra no longer is “Death to America” — takes power in Tehran, the United States can finally draw down those forces, execute the long-promised “pivot” to the Indo-Pacific and focus on defending American interests in our own hemisphere.

As important as what Trump is doing is how he’s doing it. With Operation Epic Fury, we are witnessing the birth of a new doctrine to guide U.S. global leadership in the 21st century: the Trump Doctrine.

When Trump came to office, he faced a situation similar to the one Ronald Reagan inherited in 1981. In the wake of the Vietnam War, Americans had no appetite for sending U.S. troops to fight in distant lands. Reagan had to find a new way to lead on the world stage. So, he forged the “Reagan Doctrine,” supporting anti-communist freedom fighters across the globe to roll back the tide of Soviet Communism. That strategy helped win the Cold War.

Today, after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is similarly no popular appetite for U.S. boots in foreign hot spots. So, Trump, too, is pioneering a new way to lead. From Caracas to Tehran, he is using sanctions, tariffs, diplomacy and other tools to impose America’s will on its adversaries. If those adversaries don’t yield, then he is employing military force to decapitate regimes that threaten the American people. And he is controlling events on the ground through his willingness to strike those regimes again and again until leaders emerge who will work with America.

At this moment, the U.S. is striking Iran from the air — eliminating the regime’s leadership, its retaliatory capabilities, its nuclear program and its infrastructure of repression. Expect this campaign to last for weeks, not days. After that, what happens will be up to the Iranian people. As Trump proclaimed on Saturday: “To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. … When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

In other words, there is no need for a U.S. invasion force. The Iranian people are the boots on the ground, and the fate of the country is in their hands. And if things do not turn out as we hope, and a government emerges that resumes its hostile posture toward America and its pursuit of nuclear weapons, Trump can eliminate it as well.

This much is certain: Donald Trump is making history. There have been just 45 presidents since the founding of our republic. Of those, only a handful truly transformed the world. In the modern era, Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Nazi fascism and Ronald Reagan defeated Soviet communism. If he succeeds in defeating Islamic radicalism in Iran, Trump will take his place alongside them as one the most consequential presidents in U.S. history.

 

Fall of the Mullahs

 

Operation Epic Fury and the Fall of the Mullahs

Forty-seven years after the mullahs seized power, the countdown ended in fire, and Trump wagered that decisive force—not talk—would finally clear the path to Iran’s liberation.

Roger Kimball, American Greatness

On January 25, just over a month ago, I wrote here that “The Countdown to Iran’s Liberation Has Begun.” Yes, there were peace talks. Donald Trump’s negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, jetted off to talk to Iran’s agents. Had Iran acceded to Trump’s key demands—above all, the abandonment of its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons—war might have been averted.  As Churchill almost put it, it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war. But the ticking sound that was clicking throughout Iran this last month or so was not diplomacy.  It was, I speculated, “a death-rattle, as a murderous regime nears judgment and a brutalized people pray that liberation, at last, is real.”

The countdown reached zero—liftoff!—yesterday, February 28, at about 8:15 a.m. Tehran time.  That is when the first wave of the assault to destroy the hideous, 47-year-old Islamicist regime commenced.  Code-named Operation Epic Fury (“Roaring Lion” in Israel), the initial assault targeted sites across the country in Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, Tabriz, and elsewhere. According to some reports, a meeting in Tehran with the Supreme Leader Khamenei and several top aides was a primary target.  Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, head of the judiciary in Iran, was killed in the strike. He had hundreds of Iranian citizens executed, so good riddance. Ditto for Mohammad Pakpour.  He was, as one wag put it, “the new head of IRGC that replaced the previous new head of IRGC who was eliminated after he replaced the previous head of IRGC who was eliminated.” The same fate embraced Amir Hatami, the defense minister. It was he who directed the massacre of tens of thousands of Iranian protestors in January. When I sat down to write this, the fate of the 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei was unknown. I had to come back to this sentence with the good news that he, too, has gone to meet his 72 virgins. He had been oppressing Iranians and exporting terrorism since 1989, so good riddance to him, too.

Meanwhile, Iran responded to the attacks by launching missiles at Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and possibly Saudi Arabia. So far, one civilian casualty has been confirmed in Abu Dhabi from falling debris. Apparently, all the other missiles were intercepted.  As one commentator observed, “Iran just converted every neutral and semi-neutral state in the Gulf into a potential co-belligerent. Every nation whose airspace was violated, whose civilians were killed, whose sovereignty was breached now has legal and political justification to join whatever coalition forms next.”

Early yesterday, both President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu delivered statements to announce the military action. Trump delivered his on Truth Social. “For 47 years,” he noted,

. . .the Iranian regime has chanted ‘Death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops, and the innocent people in many, many countries.

Among the regime’s very first acts was to back a violent takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding dozens of American hostages for 444 days.

In 1983, Iran’s proxies carried out the marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel.

In 2000, they knew and were probably involved with the attack on the USS Cole. Many died. Iranian forces killed and maimed hundreds of American service members in Iraq.

The regime’s proxies have continued to launch countless attacks against American forces stationed in the Middle East in recent years, as well as U.S. naval and commercial vessels and international shipping lanes.

It’s been mass terror, and we’re not going to put up with it any longer. From Lebanon to Yemen and Syria to Iraq, the regime has armed, trained, and funded terrorist militias that have soaked the earth with blood and guts.

And it was Iran’s proxy Hamas that launched the monstrous October 7th attacks on Israel, slaughtering more than 1,000 innocent people, including 46 Americans, while taking 12 of our citizens hostage. It was brutal, something like the world has never seen before.

Iran is the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, and just recently killed tens of thousands of its own citizens on the street as they protested.

Trump went on to iterate his number one demand: that Iran never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. He concluded with an appeal to the Iranian people. The “massive and ongoing operation” that had just started would clear the way for the Iranian people to finally assert themselves and form their own government. “We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground,” Trump promised. “We are going to annihilate their Navy. We’re going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world. . . . When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.”

For his part, Prime Minister Netanyahu echoed many of President Trump’s points.  He also went out of his way to thank the president for his “historic” leadership and courage. Trump has been, he noted, “Israel’s greatest friend in the White House of all time.”

Here at home, The New York Times instantly got its anti-Trump chorus on stage. “Trump’s case for striking Iran rests on questionable claims,” sniffed one headline, while an official editorial demanded to know “Why Have You Started This War, Mr. President?” Naturally, Kamala Harris was there with her incontinent anti-Trump bloviating, as were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York’s rich Muslim Socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani.  Right on cue, clumps of unhappy white females, real and honorary, congregated outside the White House with their “Hands Off Iran” signs and other memos of mental madness.  Pathetic. But Democratic Sen. John Fetterman once again broke ranks by coming out in support of the strike. “President Trump,” he wrote, “has been willing to do what’s right and necessary to produce real peace in the region.” Good for him.

Iranians across the globe agreed.  In Tehran, there are many scenes of Iranians playing music and dancing in the streets. “Everyone waited for this day,” wrote one Iranian activist. Young students are cheering Trump, women are celebrating, Iranian exiles are cheering (and here and here), and one clever, technically inclined memer posted a video of Trump dancing to Iranian music (I don’t suppose there are many YMCAs in Iran).

What happened yesterday is not the end of the story.  The fury unleashed by Israel and America is just in its opening phase. It is unclear how many casualties lie ahead. But so far, Trump’s actions in this crisis confirm something I have been saying for some time: that Trump is a great man of history. I am pleased that the red-pilled activist Bill Ackman agrees.  “President Donald Trump,” he wrote on X, “will go down in history as one of the greatest and most consequential presidents we have ever had.” Does that sound odd? Donald Trump? The real-estate mogul and reality TV host?  It may sound odd.  It doubtless bothers the well-coiffed in Harvard Yard, CNN, and the Bulwark.  But it is the truth. The New York Times will not like it, but Trump will occupy a spot alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and Ronald Reagan as one of our greatest presidents.

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).

Profane Race to the Bottom

Profane Race to the Bottom

Newsom and foul-mouthed spokesman lead Democrats’ race to the bottom

Jonathan Turley, California Post

“Respectfully, f–k off.” Those words by California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s spokesperson, Izzy Gardon, summed up the current race to the bottom of American politics.

Democrats appear in a competition of the profane where voters are now subject to a virtual carpet-bombing of f-bombs and other indecent language. 

Gardon’s response was to a standard media inquiry after Newsom’s controversial statement to a black interviewer.

In an Atlanta event, Newsom declared: “I’m like you … I’m no better than you. I’m a 960 SAT guy … literally a 960 SAT guy. You’ve never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech.” It was widely denounced as racist, but Newsom insisted that he was only talking about his struggle with dyslexia. 

The spin quickly fell apart after his statement, “I’m like you … I’m no better than you,” which suggested he thought the audience in Atlanta had low scores. 

Reporters followed up to ask for proof about his disability, including his claim that “I cannot read.” The response was an f-bomb from Gardon.

Newsom, too, unleashed a profane attack on Sean Hannity of Fox News — who gave the California governor a chance to respond to his critics.

When Hannity criticized Newsom’s comments in Atlanta, the governor posted several four-letter words on X, concluding with: “Spare me your fake f—ing outrage.”

There was a time when political leaders maintained basic standards of civility and avoided profanity in public. Presidents like Lyndon Johnson could be quite salty in private, but drew a line in public.

Notably, one of Richard Nixon’s objections to his tapes being made public was the inclusion of foul language used in the Oval Office. He noted in his book In the Arena that “since neither I nor most other presidents had ever used profanity in public, millions were shocked.” 

It was not long ago that Trump’s then-new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci shocked many with a profane diatribe. He defended it as “an Italian thing.”

At the time, I wrote that, as someone who was raised in an Italian family, we clearly had a different upbringing. I noted that if I used that language in public, my Sicilian grandmother would have ended the diatribe with a backhand.

Profanity sometimes added to the mystique of military leaders who sought to convey that they were unconcerned with social norms as warriors.

Gen. George Patton was known to drop some doozies. In one scene in the famous eponymous movie, Patton is asked about the Bible next to his bed and whether he really prayed. Patton responds, “I sure do … Every godd–n day…”

Politics was different. The public once looked to political leaders as role models who exemplified social norms.

It now appears that profanity is viewed as an essential element of political speech on the left.

Katie Porter this week thrilled a crowd by waving around a sign reading “F–k Trump.” Porter was previously criticized for using such language to abuse staffers to “get out of my f–cking shot” in an interview.

At the State of the Union, Rep. Rashida Tlaib wore a button on the House floor reading “F–k Ice.” 

Such behavior is not just limited to Democrats. President Trump has used profanity on occasion.

However, the Democrats appear to have made profanity a signature element in their campaigns.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Texas, seems a perpetual profanity machine, regularly telling figures like Elon Musk to “f–k off” and dropping the f-bomb at a higher rate than prepositions. 

Some are virtually giggly over swearing in public. Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) declared, “I don’t swear in public very well, but we have to f–k Trump. Please don’t tell my children that I just did that.” The crowd roared with approval that Dexter was feigning being naughty with dirty words.

There is a belief that profanity is a way to connect to younger voters who trash-talk and seem to like what was once called “potty mouths.”

However, there is also a clear use of profanity as a way to establish your bona fides with the mob.

Trashing conventions in favor of civility and decency is a way to convey that you are part of a radical chic. 

Figures like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have tried cringeworthy efforts to connect with voters by dancing or cooking burgers. Schumer then joined his colleagues in dropping the f-bomb to show that he is very, very angry.

The use of profanity has risen alongside the rise in rage rhetoric.

Democratic politicians now regularly call Trump, Republicans, and law enforcement “Nazis” and “Gestapo.” Many are promising to carry out a crackdown on Trump supporters once they are returned to power, including through criminal prosecutions. 

The devolution of American politics is occurring as politicians and pundits call for radical changes to our constitutional system. Showing that you do not respect social conventions adds to your cache as a radical leader.

In my book Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution, I explore comparisons with our current politics and the conditions that led to the French Revolution.

There is a value to dehumanizing one’s opponents to justify radical, even violent, action. Profanity conveys your self-authenticating anger to the mob. You may be an establishment politician, but you are one of them.

It rarely lasts. Revolutions tend to devour their own.

Swearing up a storm will not satisfy the mob very long. Democrats hope to ride the rage wave back into power and assume that, once they have that power, the mob will simply disappear in gratitude. 

It is likely that politicians of both parties will continue this trend toward potty-mouth politics. If you are speaking with civility, you are not mad enough.

These politicians are feeding a rage addiction in this country by showing that they do not respect any limits of decency or decorum in seeking radical changes.

Mark Twain said that “under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.” The difference today is that the profanity itself is a prayer by politicians seeking power.

There is a belief that, if you want to be sworn in as the new governor of California or senator from Texas, you’d better start swearing now.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the author of the New York Times bestselling “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.” 

Two Republican Candidates lead CA governor polls

 

Dems quake as two Republican Candidates lead polls

Bianco says ‘Democrat policy is indefensible’ as GOP candidates top California governor polling

https://biancoforgovernor.com/

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and former Fox News host Steve Hilton top early polling in state's jungle primary system

Foxnews 

California Democrats are reportedly panicking over the possibility that the state’s jungle primary system could send two Republicans to the November ballot, a scenario Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco told Fox News Digital is the result of "decades of complete Democrat failure."

The New York Post reported that Democratic lawmakers are privately warning a crowded and "uninspiring" field of candidates could split the vote in California’s top-two primary system, allowing Republicans to advance to the two-person runoff in a state long dominated by Democrats.

One Democratic state legislator described the situation as a "sh**show," while another criticized party leadership for doing little to consolidate the field, according to the Post. Under California’s system, only the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to the general election.

Polling cited by the Post shows former Fox News host Steve Hilton leading with 17% support, followed by Bianco at 14%. Rep Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., also polled at 14%, with former Rep. Katie Porter at 12% and billionaire Tom Steyer at 9%.

The concern comes as Democrats gather this weekend in San Francisco for their state party convention, where candidates are expected to make their case to party activists ahead of the June primary.

Nancy Pelosi took to the stage as well as gubernatorial hopefuls Swalwell and Porter at Moscone Center.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa dismissed the possibility of two Republicans advancing.

"At the end of the day, everybody has a right to run," Villaraigosa told the Post. "The notion that two Republicans can win [the primary] is poppycock."

Bianco disputed that assessment.

"Yeah, so yes, I think it's a little bit odd that they're panicking about that, and they don't recognize that it's because of decades of complete Democrat failure," Bianco told Fox News Digital.

"It's not because of a lack of a Democrat candidate, it's the lack of a Democrat policy that they can show has helped California. The Democrat policy is indefensible in California."

Responding to Villaraigosa’s dismissal, Bianco pointed to polling trends.

"Obviously, polling contradicts that statement," he said. "Two Republicans have been ahead in the polls for the last six months."

Bianco said he believes voter sentiment is shifting more broadly.

"California is looking for change. They are looking for honesty, integrity, transparency, and leadership," he said. "And that is why they're looking at me to be their next governor."

The California Democratic Party did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

It is still unclear which of the eight Democrat gubernatorial candidates will receive the party's official nomination leaving the convention this weekend.

The New York Post reported that Democrats fear vote-splitting among multiple candidates could allow Republicans to capture both top spots, a scenario that could put a Republican in the governor’s office for the first time since Arnold Schwarzenegger left in 2011.

Jasmine Baehr is a Breaking News Writer for Fox News Digital, where she covers politics, the military, faith and culture.

Marco Rubio: More Than Just the Good Cop

Marco Rubio: More Than Just the Good Cop

Michael Barone, Jewish World Review

My first reaction to Secretary of State Marco Rubio's speech, delivered on Valentine's Day, at the Munich Security Conference, was, "Last year, President Donald Trump sent the bad cop, Vice President JD Vance. This year, he sent the good cop, Rubio. Progress." In February 2025, the audience at Munich took Vance's comments as insults. In February 2026, the audience, as evidenced by its standing ovation, took Rubio's as compliments.

Yet, as even journalists writing on deadline quickly discerned, Rubio's words were no less critical than Vance's of what have been European elites' cherished policies.

"Mass migration," Rubio said, is "a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West." He decried a "climate cult" and "energy policies" that "impoverished our people." He condemned policies that "outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions" and invested in massive welfare states."

Red meat substance, suitable for delivery at any of the three Trump Republican National Conventions — more than have nominated any one person, the president might remind you, except for President Richard Nixon. But leavened, as the above quotations suggest, with frequent employment of the first-person pronouns and adjectives — "we" (69 times in the text, by my count), "us" (11), "our" (65).

"What comforted worried attendees," wrote Michael Froman, head of the Council on Foreign Relations and Obama trade negotiator, "was the undertone of the secretary's remarks."

But it wasn't just the undertone that had many Republicans and others start thinking of Rubio as a possible future presidential candidate, despite his recent avowals of support for Vance for the Republican nomination in 2028.

And as a national leader with an intellectually serious grasp of history. Rubio began by summoning memories of the first Munich conference, in 1963, when the Iron Curtain ran through a divided Germany and the Berlin Wall was just two years old.

Halfway through the speech, he went further back, to the postwar years when "our predecessors," faced with a "Europe in ruins" and expanding Communism, "recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make." An interesting way to frame the decisions that produced the Truman Doctrine and the NATO treaty.

Against that, he described the post-Cold War euphoria that "the rules-based global order" would replace national interest. "A foolish idea," he said unemolliently, that "has cost us dearly." A Trumpian take, followed by an implicit denunciation of opening up trade relations with China.

Rather than dwell on that critique, however, he segued back to "centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry," all parts of "the common civilization to which we have fallen heir."

This might have rankled, and perhaps was intended to rankle, the European Union leaders who, out of secular conviction or for fear of angering Muslim immigrants, successfully blocked mention of Europe's "Christian roots" in the EU charter.

As he neared his peroration, Rubio celebrated Christopher Columbus and the English, Scots-Irish, French, German, Spanish and Dutch roots of Americans from Davy Crockett to "the cowboy archetype ... born in Spain." Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), in Munich for her first security conference, ridiculed that last claim, apparently unaware that the Americas had no horses until Hernan Cortes brought some to Mexico in 1519.

More importantly, Rubio's emphasis on America's European heritage is a rebuke of the Franz Fanon-inspired theory, fostered on campuses for decades and sweeping the streets in post-Oct. 7, 2023, "anti-Zionist" demonstrations, that colonialism was the greatest evil in history, and that Europeans and Americans should do penance for their complicity.

Europeans are or should be aware, from the totalitarian tides of the 20th century, that there are worse evils than colonialism — and that to exclude difficult-to-assimilate immigrants is to commit another Holocaust.

But rather than belabor that last point, Rubio instead made the point earlier that "it was here, in Europe, where the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty that changed the world were born." Including "the rule of law, the universities and the scientific revolution," plus Mozart and Beethoven, Dante and Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Leonardo, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Europe should be "proud," a word he repeated half a dozen times, "of its heritage and its history." Proud of a "spirit of creation and liberty that sent ships out into uncharted seas and birthed our civilization," with a Europe that has the means to defend itself and the will to survive."

Among American and European elites, open expression of pride is something, well, just not done. They prefer to denounce the "systemic racism" of their fellow citizens or the "oppressive colonialism" of their forebears, to disparage the motives of "settlers" and idealize the virtues of the "indigenous."

But pride in one's nation and one's civilization, properly understood, is not a warrant for self-satisfaction but a summons to duty, a reminder that for us to whom much has been given, much is asked. In Munich, Rubio was not just Trump's good cop but a mature American leader towering above the crowd.

Mamdani’s heist

 

Mamdani’s heist

Mamdani’s heist on Hochul and New York’s middle class

Post Editorial Board, California Post

Mayor Zohran Mamdani declared war on the city’s middle class Tuesday, insisting that Gov. Kathy Hochul’s refusal to raise personal taxes on the rich and boost corporate taxes leaves him “no choice” except to hike city property taxes nearly 10%.

We told you so, gov — that Mamdani would stab you in the back at the first chance, and he did.

She’s given him his child-care program, and $1.5 billion for the city budget gap; he repays her with blatant political extortion

Plus: So much for his promise to reform property taxes.

And so what if the hike would also lead to big rent increases, the reverse of his campaign promises?

He’d also draw down the city “rainy day” reserve, which is supposed to be for emergencies, when then only “crisis” is a lack of cash to chase his socialist dreams.

“We do not want to have to turn to such drastic measures to balance our budget,” the mayor announced as he released his preliminary budget, “but, faced with no other choice, we will be forced to.”

“Forced to” because he wants to boost city outlays by 10%, $11 billion, to $127 billion total. He’s not being forced. He’s being greedy and irresponsible.

Of course, the other way to balance the budget doesn’t involve raising anybody’s taxes: It’s the same solution every household faces when not enough money’s coming in to pay for everything it would like to buy — namely, to spend less.

Mamdani keeps blaming the “budget crisis” on Mayor Eric Adams’ supposed “underbudgeting,” yet Mamdani’s fellow lefties always slammed Adams for not spending enough.

The new mayor demands these tax hikes to fund his own “free stuff” agenda.

E.g., he wants to add over $1 billion in new “cash assistance” benefits “related to caseload increases” over the next two years, and $2.3 billion in “re-estimated” rental-assistance funding for the same period; why not keep cash giveaways at today’s level of $700 million and deduct the savings from the “gap” that Mamdani insists he can only close by raising taxes?

The Department Education already eats 40% of city outlays, yet he’s budgeting more than half-a-billion bucks to cap class sizes, a gift to the teachers union — without any demand or plan for improved student outcomes.

And other new spending is downright toxic: The mayor means to hire hundreds of new lawyers — signaling a clear intent to bleed local businesses in the name of “consumer protection” — and to add 50 Department of Finance auditors to squeeze city taxpayers

There’s all kinds of ways to save money that the left refuses to see.

Retired city employees pay nothing toward their lifetime health insurance, for example; the city’s legally on the hook for pension obligations, but health-insurance costs are negotiable, and could mean big savings.

Mamdani also aims to eliminate the “2-out, 1-in” rule for new hires, which keeps employee headcount under control. Getting rid of this standard will accelerate agency headcount, which means added payroll costs for decades.

Don’t fall for Mamdani’s insistence that the city is deep in a budgetary crisis. The left always claims that not having more of your money to spend is a dire emergency.