The flurry of rulings from the Supreme Court has everyone’s head spinning. The most significant among them, even if it doesn’t capture all the headlines, is West Virginia v EPA. The majority opinion is impressive, but the part I found truly wonderful is the concurring opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

This is where we see things headed, toward a major and much-welcome curbing of the power of the administrative state.

Just to review what this thing is, it’s an unelected bureaucracy that rules the country without oversight from voters or legislatures. It writes its own laws, polices its own laws, and has its own courts to punish you if you disobey its own laws.  Gorsuch thinks the whole thing is unconstitutional and he’s right.

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Michael Lopez worked for a huge subdivision of an even bigger multinational entertainment corporation, the place that most of us imagine as a hotbed of woke virtue-signaling.  Certainly, Lopez thought he was taking a snowflake's stand about the Dobbs decision, only to find his employer slapping him down like a mosquito on the wall.

It's just one person, but it's another small sign that the corporate world's love affair with its bullying woke employees is finally ending.

For when his exquisite woke sensitivities made it impossible for him to work after the Dobbs decision, his employer was not at all sympathetic but, instead, fired him.  How glorious.

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Carl von Clausewitz observed in his classic On War that “the maximum use of force is by no means incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect.” That means, in part, acting thoughtfully but with the utmost effort, understanding that war is more bar fight than chess game.

Or, to put it in the simpler words of Jim Malone, Eliot Ness’s counselor in The Untouchables, “You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!”

Al Capone is an apt analogy for what the West confronts in Vladimir Putin: a particularly noxious mix of Mafia mentality, hypernationalist ideology, and totalitarian technique. Elegance is not the Putin/Russian way, and it cannot be our way.

This is the light in which one should measure the accomplishments of NATO’s Madrid Summit last week (6/28-30).

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On the Donbas battlefields, Russian troops still strive to advance, but in the global arena of confrontation with the collective West, Russia keeps losing ground.

A sequence of heavy blows breached Russian defensive geopolitical positions last week, and Moscow’s attempts at counterstrikes only aggravated the sustained damage.

All attempts of Putin to exacerbate the economic difficulties that are supposed to erode Western unity are now inevitably backfiring for Russia, cutting down its petro-revenues and further squeezing crucially needed imports.

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A festering rot of racial animosity exists in our society that we willfully ignore socially and politically. It is a rot that eats away at the flesh of our civil society and spoils the greatness of our multicultural nation.

Progressives continually tell us we have blinders on when it comes to racism in American society. They’ve shoved their ideological solution of anti-racism to force us to “deconstruct” what they believe is an inherently deep-seated racist nation.

I, as a black American, am supposed to rejoice in the presence of our self-appointed saviors, but I peeked behind the veil and saw who they really are.

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The post-Soviet transformation took Russia from a fledgling democracy to a corrupt autocracy.

But, since the start of the war against Ukraine, the Kremlin has taken a new turn, which amounts to a resolute top-down effort at reversing what progress has been achieved in modernizing the state system, economy and society.

The paradox of resorting to the old Soviet way of war based on the massive application of force, while having neither the human resources nor the industrial base necessary to carry it out, undercuts whatever small gains Russian forces are able to make in Donbas (Svoboda.org, June 24).

With every delivery of Western weapon systems, the Armed Forces of Ukraine take a step forward in modernization, while the Russian military falls back to unsustainable World War II patterns (Republic.ru, June 24).

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America, as the world’s only successful multiracial democratic republic, was always fragile. As Ronald Reagan famously warned in 1964, it was and is always one generation away from disappearing—should any cohort become so foolish as to mock its past, dismantle its institutions, revert to tribalism, redistribute rather than create wealth, and consume rather than invest.

We are that generation. And we have an accounting with nature’s limitations, given there is always a corrective, not a nice one, but remediation nonetheless for every excess.

There is an antidote. But it seems well beyond this generation’s capacity.

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