Being a former teacher of U.S. history and American government, I am not surprised that the percentage of eighth grade students who tested “proficient” in U.S. history and civics continues to decline at an absolutely alarming rate. According to the most recent results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress […]
Socialism in America
246 posts
Under the leadership of President Joe Biden, the White House and the Federal Reserve have started to lay the groundwork for a programmable, trackable, easily manipulated digital currency. It might sound like something from a dystopian science-fiction novel, but it’s all too real, and it could soon change life in […]
Most Americans are familiar with the tale of the Trojan horse, in which Greek warriors hid inside a hollow horse statue left at the gates of Troy in an attempt to fool their enemy and win the decade-long Trojan War. Eventually, the Trojans opened the gates, pulled the horse in, […]
Lamenting the astonishing success of the activist Left’s century-long Gramscian march through America’s major institutions is, at this juncture, old hat. Still, there have been a few recent powerful examples, coming in quick succession, illustrating the extent to which leading liberal institutions of civil society have been captured by far-left […]
On January 1, 2023 it is likely most Americans woke up with a hangover. On January 1, 2023, it is a almost a certainty that no American woke up worried that the gas stove in their kitchen was secretly killing them. Within a week, the hangovers had gone away but […]
In 1967, then-Governor Ronald Reagan signed the legislation that created the California Air Resources Board (CARB.) One of CARB’s primary tasks, as the name implies, was to assist in reducing the terrible smog that plagued Los Angeles and, buoyed by the singing of the Clean Air Act by then-President Richard […]
National conservatives believe that the progressive left is attacking America’s traditions and institutions. Defending American freedom requires, controversially, weaponizing the federal government to do to liberals and liberal organizations what is being done to conservatives. For instance, Rachel Bovard argues, “Wokeism is not a fever that will pass, but a […]
When the Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page lead story that the Department of Energy had concluded the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a leak from China’s Wuhan laboratory, you might have argued it was old news. The FBI had already, it turns out, come to the same conclusion and […]
President Joe Biden’s diplomats are negotiating a treaty with the World Health Organization to promote so-called global health equity. The premise is that in a pandemic or other worldwide disease emergency, Americans should not get better or faster health care than inhabitants of third-world countries. If Biden rams this through, […]
Not too many years ago, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was a political afterthought, a movement that was born of the near-constant internal doctrinal struggle that hard-left ideologies encourage and endure. Now, the DSA has about 100,000 members across the country and more than 160 elected officials from the […]
With the revelation that Roald Dahl’s classic children’s works like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory have undergone posthumous sensitivity butchering, one can only wonder exactly how the scriptorial sodomites will handle other prominent works of art from history. First, as to Dahl, it is true that, like many a writer, […]
Last week, as Presidents Day weekend loomed, the Biden administration dropped a little-noticed executive order. That executive order happened to be one of the broadest, most transformative executive orders in modern American history; it turned the federal government into one giant machine designed for the propagation of woke principles. The […]
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is a prolific author who has made millions of dollars selling books that promote socialism and trash capitalism. In fact, for his latest screed, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, Sanders was paid a cool $170,000 by publishing giant Penguin Random House. Then, Sanders launched […]
How many people believe, really believe, in freedom of speech? Or, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, not just “free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate”? The answer is not as many as I supposed before reading my Washington Examiner colleague […]
This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data showing that our nation’s young girls are in a state of absolute emotional and mental crisis. According to the CDC, 57% of high school girls said they were depressed in 2021, compared with 36% in 2011; 30% said […]
This is one of the greatest federal government scandals of all time. Many hundreds of thousands of federal employees have been getting a full-time paycheck from Uncle Sam (meaning from all of us) without showing up for work for three years now. They don’t call it Club Fed for nothing. […]
With abundance, anything is possible; with scarcity nothing is certain. And what the world is facing right now is an abundance of scarcity. From climate change edicts to purposefully limiting housing supplies to cordoning off the public square from the free exchange of ideas to food shortages and/or diet modifications […]
Unless you can get fired for asking it, a rather common question today is exactly what has happened in the past few years to bring society to the point that, well, you can get fired for asking a question? In other words, how did we from zero to woke in […]
Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness. These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, […]
In early February, the U.S. House of Representatives held a vote on a simple resolution condemning the “horrors of socialism.” Ordinarily, one would assume that a resolution calling out socialist policies, which the resolution notes, have resulted in “famine and mass murders, and the killing of over 100,000,000 people worldwide,” […]
Almost every decision that has been made in Washington and in the states that deals with COVID-19 has been about politics and money, hundreds of billions of dollars, and not about public health. COVID-19 is a deadly virus that has killed over a million Americans — almost all over the […]
Poor Ilhan Omar has been denied a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “I certainly did not or was not aware that the word ‘hypnotized’ was a trope,” the congresswoman told CNN’s Dana Bash this week. “I wasn’t aware of the fact that there are tropes about Jews and […]
The ordinarily fluent and unperturbed Justice Elena Kagan seemed, judging from the transcript, to be sputtering a bit in the oral argument of the Supreme Court’s case challenging the racial quotas and preferences used in admissions by the University of North Carolina. Questioning the counsel for those suing the university, […]
The average American home is almost 2,200 square feet. An average home in the United Kingdom is a minuscule 818 square feet, in Finland 880 square feet and in Germany under 1,200 square feet. Cramped. Americans have bigger houses and a higher material standard of living — more appliances, clothing […]
In the wake of the “Twitter Files,” let’s revisit former President Barack Obama’s warning last April about the spread of misinformation: “You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens […]
Power is a zero-sum game. Base power doesn’t grow or diminish depending upon current conditions or the vagaries of transient situations – it remains a set singularity that can never be multiplied, only divided, meaning that gaining power by definition comes only from the loss of power by another group […]
The United Kingdom’s National Health Service is a public, single-payer health care system that is often referred to as a socialist institution. The NHS’s historical failures and the current mayhem afflicting the UK’s public health system should serve as a stark warning to progressives and socialists in America, who consistently […]
Over the past few years, numerous polls have asked Americans their opinions on socialism with several showing that hypothetically, young Americans increasingly prefer socialism over capitalism. However, rarely has there been a poll that has asked Americans the simple question: Is the United States actually becoming more socialist? This question […]
Is charity still charity when it is performed for uncharitable reasons? Looking beyond the “aw, neat, what a great person” façade of “effective altruism,” (see here, with a grain of salt) one clearly finds a level of narcissistic cynicism and a will to the permanent power that financial immortality affords […]
“The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. . . the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” In the book Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, the character Robert Walton is moved by the idea of power. The […]
The cascading release of the “Twitter Files” by Elon Musk and his cohort of independent journalists clearly illustrates the need to drain the Washington swamp once and for all. Nowhere is this more necessary than in the U.S. intelligence and security apparatus, which—despite ostensibly existing to protect Americans and safeguard […]
Discussion and summarization includes all files released to date, Parts 1-12 (as of 1/10/23). All original information was taken from journalists’ Twitter feeds, as provided by hyperlinks in the main body of text. Introduction Elon Musk, after taking control of Twitter and firing most of its upper-level management (and many […]
From all those lists of best books of 2022, here’s one with the potential to change public policy debate and discourse for the better. It’s “The Myth of American Inequality,” and the three authors are two Ph.D. economists, former Sen. Phil Gramm and his long-ago Texas A&M colleague Robert Ekelund, […]
Bernie Marcus, the 93-year-old co-founder of Home Depot has a big bone to pick with socialism. In Marcus’ view, the rapid spread of socialist ideology within the United States in recent years is the principal reason the once-vaunted American work ethic has become a shell of itself. According to Marcus, […]
One of the biggest promises by Republicans in the 2022 election season was that if they won a majority in the House, they would defund the $80 billion that Biden wants to hire 87,000 new IRS agents. But now they are about to agree to a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending […]
Dealing with high inflation and an increasingly shaky economy, Americans are forced to make tougher spending choices. With public debt at an all-time high, government should do the same. This feat isn’t that hard now that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released a series of budget options showing Congress […]
The story of Elon Musk’s acquisition, transformation and public rehabilitation of Twitter is nothing short of remarkable. Here is that rarest of confluences: A right-leaning (or at least right-sympathetic) mega-billionaire privately acquires a disproportionately influential public company out of genuine public-spiritedness, perhaps even a hint of noblesse oblige, and an […]
Despite the fact that the Democratic Party shafted Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in 2016 and 2020, the self-avowed socialist who caucuses with the Democrats is considering a third run for the presidency in 2024. If anything, Bernie certainly is tenacious in his steadfast belief that the socialist revolution will prevail […]
You’d better watch out—you’d better not pout—you’d better not cry—‘cos I’m telling you why: this Christmas, it’s the Surveillance State that’s making a list and checking it twice, and it won’t matter whether you’ve been bad or good. You’ll be on this list whether you like it or not. Mass surveillance is […]
According to the avalanche of posts by reporters Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, and writer Michael Shellenberger, to whom new Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk provided access to internal communications, Twitter massively “shadow-banned,” restricted and even flat-out blocked access to conservatives and conservative content. So, how does the anti-Donald […]
Despite the fact that the Democratic Party shafted Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in 2016 and 2020, the self-avowed socialist who caucuses with the Democrats is considering a third run for the presidency in 2024. If anything, Bernie certainly is tenacious in his steadfast belief that the socialist revolution will prevail […]
New Twitter owner Elon Musk gave reporter Matt Taibbi of Substack access to internal Twitter documents about the media platform’s decision to spike the Hunter Biden laptop story and about how “the Biden team” had a direct pipeline to Twitter executives. Taibbi tweeted: “By 2020, requests from connected actors to […]
It would be an understatement to say that it has been quite an awful week for socialist darling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). First, AOC was repudiated by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization to which she is a proud card-carrying member, over her vote in favor of a […]
I’ve made the case in previous columns that the climate change movement is mostly a climate change hustle. Let’s be real. None of this is about changing the temperature of the Earth. Even the most naive environmental activist can’t really believe that building windmills and driving Teslas is going to […]
As the dust settles on the midterm elections, and the Republican Party emerges victorious in their bid for control of the House of Representatives, we can take a moment to reflect on the reasons behind the outcome. But, as we move forward, we must not forget the underhanded tactics employed […]
The purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people. Unfortunately, we have gone so far in the opposite direction from the ideals of a good government that it’s hard to see how this trainwreck can be redeemed. It gets worse by […]
Democrats have lost the House of Representatives and, along with it, the chance to pass more of their preferred policies in 2023. This makes the “lame duck” period before the January arrival of the new Congress their last opportunity to fully control Capitol Hill for a while. It’s also a […]
Elon Musk conducted a Twitter poll to ask whether he should reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account. The poll received 15,085,458 votes — and Twitter issued its final results in just one day! Musk should stop wasting his genius on hobbies like Tesla and SpaceX and become the Maricopa County, […]