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PixabayBy Fay VoshellWho can doubt that wherever communism has risen, war follows?

Photo Credit:Image: CristianIS via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

CristianISBy J.B. ShurkThere is no shame in armistice when the alternative is Armageddon.

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For decades, the State Police, New York’s second-largest law enforcement agency, has had no formal disciplinary guidelines for misconduct, and action against officers is inconsistent and sometimes lax, according to reporting by Sassy Sussman for The New York Times and New York Focus. With support from the Fund, Sussman reviewed thousands of police disciplinary files. […]
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T7 Global Bhd bukan asing dengan badai kontroversi sepanjang 2025. Pada April tahun lalu, syarikat itu dikaitkan dengan

Adam Kredo, WFB Arc of Justice—the California-based charity established by Code Pink cofounder Medea Benjamin to dole out millions to Code Pink and other far left activist groups—was…

Colorado Democrat Manny Rutinel, the congressional nominee running in the state’s competitive Eighth Congressional District, boasted that he “joined a bipartisan push” to create a $350 million police fund. That fund was actually created through a ballot measure put forward by a right-wing group.
Last month, Rutinel released a document titled “Plan to Keep Our Communities Safe.” It states that Rutinel “joined a bipartisan push backed by Colorado’s County Sheriffs to create a $350 million fund to recruit, train and retain police, and a $1 million fund to better support the families of fallen police officers.”
Rutinel was referencing a 2025 bill in the Colorado House, where he served from 2023 to 2026, known as SB25-310. But that bill merely implemented Proposition 130, a ballot measure that voters passed by a six-point margin in November 2024. It was placed on the ballot and backed by Advance Colorado, a conservative nonprofit that local liberals have painted as a boogeyman for spearheading a wave of right-wing voter initiatives. Advance Colorado executive vice president Kristi Burton Brown said “Manny never once reached out to support the campaign for Prop 130, which was a ballot measure passed by voters, not legislators.”
“He also never endorsed the measure while it was on the ballot,” she told the Washington Free Beacon. “If he supported the bill to implement the funding, that bill was a requirement based on what voters passed, not an idea from legislators.”
Rutinel’s exaggerated public safety claims come as the Democrat attempts to rebrand his image as a left-wing activist in his race against Rep. Gabe Evans (R.), a former police officer, in what is expected to be one of the closest midterm elections in the country. Rutinel recently removed a section of his campaign website saying he was “committed to confronting systemic racism and advocating for policies that promote racial equity in … the criminal justice system,” the Colorado Sun reported Saturday.
During a debate Wednesday night, Rutinel promoted his “Plan to Keep Our Communities Safe,” calling public safety “a top priority for my campaign.”

“I want to fund our police so that they have the resources to protect our communities. I’ve done that in the legislature. I have a public safety plan on my website that has all that laid out,” he said, adding that the document “outlines a series of steps that I want to take when I’m in Congress.”
That “series of steps” is light on specifics, like how Rutinel would subsidize local police departments from the federal level. And the plan’s claim that Rutinel “consistently voted to fund Colorado state and local law enforcement” doesn’t square with his record. The bills it points to as evidence were massive omnibus budget packages with a mix of increases and decreases for various public safety programs. This year’s legislation, for instance, cut $200,000 from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
Rutinel’s plan also vows to “[e]quip law enforcement with the resources” needed to curb drug dealing and violent crime. But as a state lawmaker, Rutinel cosponsored legislation strengthening Colorado’s sanctuary restrictions by further limiting local and state law enforcement’s abilities to cooperate with ICE. That 2025 bill came as a string of violent incidents by illegal immigrants tied to the brutal Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua gripped Aurora, backyard to both the eighth district and Colorado’s capital. The Drug Enforcement Administration, with help from ICE, raided a makeshift nightclub and seized crack, cocaine, and “tusi,” a drug cocktail containing ketamine, MDMA, methamphetamine, and sometimes more dangerous drugs like fentanyl. ICE determined that 41 of the 49 arrested were illegal immigrants. A month earlier, suspected Tren de Aragua members illegally in the country were arrested for kidnapping and torturing two people.
Another section of Rutinel’s safety plan focuses on his efforts to protect “against the sexual exploitation of children,” pointing to his vote for HB26-1257, which he says was meant to “[c]rack down on human trafficking.” But that legislation had no direct ties to kids. It was aimed at helping local governments shutter massage parlors suspected of conducting illegal activity, including human trafficking, but victims at those sorts of establishments are typically adults, according to the Polaris Project, a nonprofit that combats human trafficking and supports survivors. The bill makes no mention of children.
Rutinel also points to SB26-015, which he says “toughen[ed] penalties against child sex offenders.” That bill, however, was a weaker version of legislation Rutinel helped kill in committee two years prior, a move that prompted the Gazette’s editorial board to blast him by name and accused him of rolling “out a welcome mat for perverts.” The version Rutinel supported removed a four-year mandatory minimum sentence for anyone convicted of soliciting for child prostitution, the Free Beacon reported.
That wasn’t the only time Rutinel helped kill human trafficking legislation in committee. He also voted to indefinitely postpone a Republican-led bill that would have allowed nonprofits investigating trafficking or supporting services to sue alleged traffickers, subject to the attorney general’s review.
The safety plan is just the latest instance of Rutinel overstating his record. He has routinely described himself as a “first responder” in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria devastated the island. But he was actually a “logistics specialist” tracking “inventory of large and small generators.”
Rebranding his image has also been a theme across his campaign. He’s called himself a “friend” to ranchers, who are cornerstones to the eighth district’s economy, and said in July that he hasn’t “been a vegan for several years.” Yet he’d been on an anti-meat crusade since college and wrote policy papers urging animal-based farmers to “transition” to plants to fight climate change. Just months before announcing his campaign, he said his “entire” job working for the far-left environmental group Earthjustice was to “take on large meat corporations and sue them for all they’re worth,” the Free Beacon reported.
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As the Iran conflict threatens to intensify and tech CEOs fret openly about their creations’ potential to destroy humanity, now might not seem the time for an extended meditation on America’s civilizational roots. But for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, these traditions are most valuable at times of great peril, like today.
Standing on the Pnyx, the hilltop heart of Athens’s ancient democracy, America’s top diplomat warned Wednesday, “We are at an inflection point … not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization.” In his speech, he argued that the United States and Europe can, through this inheritance, “rediscover the virtues, the courage, and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time.” This legacy is becoming increasingly important for meeting today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.
Rubio drew a line from the ancient Greeks to the present, noting, “the greatest Americans of every generation have carried the unmistakable features of their forefathers—born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty, and then carried across the Atlantic to be reborn on the shores of a new world.” And that’s not all. These “institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks—qualities that can’t be reduced to any particular political system or theory.”
This formulation—that the road to Philadelphia in 1776 runs through Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London—would have seemed like a tired cliché only a few decades ago. The controversy it engenders today is largely due to the failures of the educational establishment, which has expended enormous sums stunting the moral and intellectual growth of generations of Western leaders.
Some critics of Western civilization think the concept is too banal and its champions too bloodthirsty. They can spot in other cultures some of the “essential traits” that Rubio said “would come to define the West,” such as “fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory.” And they have seen the gory consequences of nationalism smeared across Europe’s 19th and 20th centuries. This seems just restrictive enough to provoke strife, but too vague to be otherwise useful.
The highest and greatest expression of Western values assuages those concerns. The Western identity is a fundamentally pluralistic one. Athenian philosophers and Jewish prophets disputed sharply about God and man, and their followers did not greet Roman legionnaires with open arms. There was plenty of conquest and slaughter, but over time, the potent mixture of their ideas produced the conditions for free people to govern themselves. Individuals strive for honor and glory, but as Rubio points out, “glory and fame, those things were won through striving, sacrificing, and achieving greatly for something larger than yourself.”
The United States and its allies prosper when they embrace that heritage. Rubio correctly notes that Western virtues are “the characteristic of a people—expressed in their traditions, their stories, their imagination; in the qualities they demanded of their citizens; in the things they lived and fought and died for.” This peopledom is not determined solely by ancestry. Few Americans today can trace their lineage back to the Athenians of yore, but they have an equal claim to the citizenship pioneered on the Pnyx.
Ironically, although most recent discussions about Western civilization focus on the implications for Europe, a civilizational view is more helpful for understanding other parts of the world. Many other countries, such as China and India, behave more like the heirs of distinct traditions than the kinds of nation-states formalized in the Westphalian system. Literature and liturgies are not magic decoder rings that unlock every secret in a society, but they offer important context.
Technological progress increases the value of ancient wisdom. As AI makes genetic modification easier and other biotechnologies more effective, free societies will have massive public debates about how they can be employed. The specific uses of each technology will be downstream of bigger questions, such as what humans are and how they ought to be treated. A deep grounding in a moral tradition will not automatically produce the answer to these questions, but it will go a long way.
Europe and the United States, which share the same foundational ideas and values, are likely to end up in the same place on these issues. But first, they must rekindle the thumos, “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride” that Rubio observes “is the heart of great civilization.”
“The course we take,” he warns, “will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.” Igniting that thumos is the first step toward a brighter, freer future.
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