He’s Right

President Donald Trump (R) is looking to seal off leaks, especially those that center on potentially treasonous leaks to the press.

A leaked report claimed that the U.S. strike only set back Iran’s program by a few months. U.S. officials have said the nuclear sites were destroyed and it would take years for Iran to rebuild them.

Trump suggested compelling the journalists who publicly reported on the leaked intelligence to reveal their source for national security reasons.

Certainly such leakers should be identified, haled into criminal court, and if convicted, locked up for a very long time. This kind of leaker isn’t just violating his oath of office, or the terms of his employment, he’s committing the felonious act of sending classified material—national security-related material—to the press, which our enemies avidly read. Furthermore, the only way this sort of leaker can have passed the classified material along to the press is by having stolen the material first, and the theft itself should be separately punished with a jail term.

There’s more to this than just that, though.

In all other walks of life, receiving stolen goods is itself a crime, magnified by efforts to profit from the receipt. Unlike the legal and medical professions, there is no intrinsic right to confidentiality between news writers—journalists—and their sources. The Frankenstein-esque creation of a “need to protect sources” is right next door to violating the 14th Amendment’s requirement for equal treatment under law.

Journalism would suffer mighty and irreversible damage were journalists required to reveal the source(s) who transmitted to them stolen materials or communicated to them information the sources were revealing in violation of the obligations of their position? This is cynically offered nonsense. In times past, journalists were required by their editors to have at least two on-the-record sources corroborating the anonymously sourced information those journalists published. That requirement has since been abandoned by the journalist guild.

What concrete, publicly accessible, and publicly measurable standard of journalistic integrity do today’s news writers and their editors use?  They refuse to say, which is them saying loudly and clearly that they have no standard.

It’s long past time to bring journalism, which refuses to regulate itself, back within the bounds of a law that the rest of us must obey.

Mamdani Is Not a Communist

He says so, and that settles it, doesn’t it? Yet the Progressive-Democratic Party’s candidate for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has said, much more forcefully, otherwise, and not so long ago, given his youth (he’s only 33).

  • …we need a socialist New York to give these workers their power back….
  • [I]f we want to change the nature of politics in New York State wholesale, it will require bringing in a lot more DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] members
  • [T]here are other issues which we firmly believe…[including] the end goal of seizing the means of production
  • if we want everyone to be full participants in the economy, we need worker ownership of the means of production

And so on.

Mamdani’s denial of his communist status is typical Leftist and Progressive-Democratic Party reliance on their Newspeak dictionary and their parallel rejection of our American English dictionaries.

Ignorance is strength.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

Indeed. Our ignorance. Know Betters’ strength. Our minds torn asunder. Know Betters’ choosing.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party

Progressive-Democratic Party Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has made Party’s attitude toward us average Americans and toward our nation at large utterly explicit.

I don’t think that we should have billionaires, frankly[.]

There it is. None of us should be allowed to reach our full potential, as even that icon of the modern Progressive movement, Theodore Roosevelt, touted:

Our country, this great Republic, means nothing unless it means…in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.

The best that there is in him only counts if that “him” is a government-approved person.

Then there’s the naked racism of Party, shorn of its emperor clothing:

Mamdani doubled down on his plan to jack up property taxes on “richer and whiter neighborhoods” on Sunday….

Because Whitey is doing better than this Progressive-Democrat in socialist guise personally approves. Do nothing to help folks—of any skin color—on the bottom rungs of our economic ladder do better, do nothing to increase their economic mobility. Just punish the successful—not only because he’s rich (see above)—but especially because this Progressive-Democrat “socialist’ doesn’t like his skin color.

This is what awaits New York City next year unless city voters choose better. This is what awaits our nation, if we as a people don’t choose wisely in ’26 and again in ’28. and in the later cycles.

Public Schools and Parent Options

The Supreme Court ruled that parents could, indeed, opt their children out of parts of public school curricula that violated those parents’ religious belief. In Mahmoud, et al. v Taylor, et al., the Court held

the public-school system in Montgomery County, Md, had placed “an unconstitutional burden on the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religion,” according to the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito.
“A government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill[.]”

The three “liberal” Justices demurred:

Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools[.]

The problem isn’t that chaotic, however:

Some parents from several religious backgrounds—Muslim, Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox—objected to [a collection of books with LGBTQ themes and characters]. The school board said in court filings that it initially tried to accommodate opt-out requests, but doing so became “unworkably disruptive” due to “unsustainably high numbers of absent students.”

In other words, the school board was inconvenienced by not being able to dictate to parents how the school board would treat those parents’ children. Never mind that the objections were so widespread that the school board was unable to impose its will on all but a relative few. That clear cut a separation is hardly chaotic.

The chaos about which those three Justices bleated was caused by the school board and would be caused by other school boards who object to parents not meekly rolling over and kowtowing to the Know Betters of school boards more interested in their Leftist ideologies than they are in teaching the parents’ children.

These three Justices know this. They claim to worry about Court decisions deprecating respect for our court system, but it’s attitudes like those of these three that lead to that deprecation.

An aside: such chaos as might occur from enforcing parental rights, religious and otherwise, would be virtually eliminated were State and Federal governments to get out of the way of school choice, illustrated by voucher and charter schools, parochial schools, and home schooling. Parents could freely exercise their [religious beliefs] vis-à-vis the parameters of their children’s education if they had unfettered access to such a range.

The Court’s ruling can be read here.

A Noble Man

The University of Virginia’s President James Ryan has resigned his position in response to the DoJ continually pushing him and the university he sits atop to get rid of their racist and sexist DEI infrastructure. The constant push was necessitated by his and his university’s continual refusal to do so. Ryan’s rationalization of his decision:

I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job. To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.

How noble. How humble braggingly self-important.

Never mind that had he decided otherwise, the only ones who would have lost their jobs would have been the incumbents of those DEI facilities. On the other hand, researchers would have lost no funding, and “hundreds of students” would have lost no financial aid, nor would many have had their visas in peril. But Ryan considers that bigotry more important than those other matters.

That’s nobility in the current form of academia.