Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic.
George Orwell wrote those words nearly 80 years ago.
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As we celebrate our independence on the Fourth of July, Americans would do well to reflect upon what’s necessary for a nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, to long endure.
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Millions of Americans have woken up to the fact that their education system is rotten to the core. As elite universities are engulfed by antisemitic riots, their veil of prestige has been torn to shreds. It is by now clear to many that, in the words of Christopher Rufo, the radical left has conquered everything.
What, then, is to be done? Many, Rufo included, are doing their best to stem the tide of revolutionary ideology through direct political engagement. Their hard work is paying off. In recent months, universities are beginning to move away from mandatory diversity statements. This is just the beginning.
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In “Burke on Our Crisis of Character,” which appeared in the December 2023 issue of Chronicles, Bruce Frohnen notes, “The American Way was real, rooted in families whose rights trumped the demands of the state because families were more natural and fundamental than the state.” The following month in the same magazine, Stephen Baskerville reviews a collection of essays, Up from Conservatism, in which he briefly addresses the pernicious effects of government welfare on family life and fatherhood.
As is the case in nearly everything that the federal government touches, be it education, health care, or anything else, its policies in the last 50 years have severely damaged the American family. Given the additional harms done by government in the first quarter of the 21st century—trillions of dollars in wasted expenses, woefully ignorant public school graduates, divisions along the lines of race, politics, and gender, a diminished pride in our past, the attacks on our liberties—some people I know despair about the future. Others of us want to restore the good that has been lost but feel frustrated and even defeated by the immensity of the task. We vote, we grouse (as I am doing here), yet each day brings some new assault on the culture, some new governmental dictate or intrusion, and we just want to hunker down in the trenches hoping that this bombardment will end of its own accord.
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Some social media blue checks had a bit of a temper tantrum this week following the release of a New York Times poll that showed overwhelming support for Republicans among Gen X voters.
The poll broke down the results by the respondents’ ages, and while the category encompassing Gen X also technically included some younger Baby Boomers, it captured most of the so-called slacker generation. According to the survey, Gen Xers, those born between 1965 and 1980, now prefer a Republican candidate to a Democratic candidate 59 percent to 38 percent, a huge gap unmatched by the other age groups. (Boomers, the next closest group, split at 48 percent for each.)
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In the wake of recent mass shootings in New York, Texas, and Oklahoma, Democrats are once again sending Americans up a blind alley. Their “solution” is to punish millions of law-abiding gun owners for the crimes of a few evil maniacs. Undeniably, there is a certain appeal to this response. Gun control is a facile “fix” to a complex problem.
Americans have owned guns since the founding, but it wasn’t until comparatively recently that mass shootings became a concern. Guns are not the problem. Our culture is. Broken cultures produce broken human beings. For every school shooter, there are thousands of other weak, confused, mentally disturbed men who are drifting away from society. They aren’t dating, aren’t working, and they spend most of their time in their bedrooms playing video games, smoking weed, watching pornography, and stewing in social media echo chambers.
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Survivors of communism are concerned about America’s future as they see Marxism spreading in academia and Americans being too cowardly to speak out and stand up against the ideology.
Human Events and the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley recently hosted “Paying The Price: Victims of Communism Panel,” in which five survivors of communist regimes shared their stories and warned about where America appears headed.
Tatiana Menaker, a refusenik who escaped from the Soviet Union after not being allowed to emigrate, said that when she attended San Francisco State University, she “found such brainwashing machine of Marxism, which I even didn’t have in Russia, in the Soviet Union. American professors are all in delirium of Marxism.”
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Maryland state House Democrats proposed a constitutional amendment Monday enshrining abortion rights within the state, the Associated Press reported.
The proposal was introduced by state House Speaker Adrienne Jones, who said the Supreme Court “has allowed some of the most restricting abortion legislation we’ve seen in a generation,” according to the AP.
Jones appeared to refer to the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the Texas Heartbeat Act, which bans most abortions after six weeks, to stay in effect while the court considers whether the law is constitutional.
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The final decision, after years of debate, was made on Oct. 8 to remove from the New York City Council chambers the statue of the man we all know to have been a dreaded slaveholder—to the tune of 600 over his lifetime—Thomas Jefferson.
Despite that, writing at Bari Weiss’s Substack, political science professor Samuel Goldman, with whom I concur, is less than happy.
“The removal is disgraceful. Unlike monuments to Confederate leaders that display them in full military glory, Jefferson is depicted as a writer. Holding a quill pen in one hand and the Declaration of Independence in the other, he is clearly being honored for composing an immortal argument for liberty and equality.”
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Things stopped working in this country about 50 years ago. But it wasn’t really noticeable until a few decades later. I like to date the beginning of the decay to the summer of 1969, though it’s impossible to put a precise date on it. Still, the summer of 1969 was an inflection point much more important than 1967’s “Summer of Love.”
Consider: On July 20, 1969, Apollo XI landed on the moon and 39 minutes later, on July 21, Neil Armstrong became the first man to stand on its surface. A few weeks later, on the night of August 8, the Manson family broke into Roman Polanski’s Hollywood Hills home and murdered his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, their unborn baby, and three friends who were at the house. The following Friday, August 15, the Woodstock music festival began in upstate New York. A good argument could be made that Woodstock was the culmination of the ’60s, but in reality, the ’60s had ended a week earlier. Woodstock wasn’t the final flowering, it was an aftershock.
This isn’t the time for a full exploration of the summer of ’69 (look out for that in the future), but it’s worth noting that a lot changed after that. Things had already peaked. For example, the two fastest ever commercial aircraft had both flown for the first time earlier in 1969; the 747 in February and the Concorde in March. In fact, the average speed of commercial air travel has been declining ever since. (Though that may be changing for the better.) Then, in the early 1970s, the median real wages of American workers entered a period of extended stagnation characterized by exceptionally low growth which made it impossible for the average person (who, by the way, is not an entrepreneur) to get ahead. It’s still true today, which is why so many families require two incomes if they want to remain in the middle class.
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Imagine, 75 years ago, some British officer lining up a group of young Indian children against a wall in Bombay, handing some bullets to Mahatma Gandhi, and ordering him to load soldiers’ rifles so that they could execute the youngsters.
Would you expect Gandhi to go along with that? Why would an officer even give such an order – except to humiliate Gandhi and mock what he stood for?
Perhaps that gives you some idea of how it feels for the people of my congregation, Cedar Park Church, to be ordered by Washington state officials to provide an insurance plan that covers abortions. Directly paying for abortion coverage is as unimaginable to us as putting bullets in a gun we know would be used to end a child’s life. It is antithetical to everything we preach, teach, and believe. That’s why we had to file a lawsuit through our Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys that is now on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which will hear arguments today.
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My first brush with cancel culture was in the ninth grade in 1975. Corporate daycare operators teamed with the state to cancel my mom’s in-home daycare referral business, which competed with corporate daycare. The “corporate connected” successfully pushed for new regulations to effectively shut down in-home daycare to control and enhance their market.
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The greatest threat America faces isn’t “white supremacy” or any foreign power, but America’s own ruling class. China understands very well that Americans have less to fear from Chinese armies than they do from their own Stasi-like informants with “In This House, We Believe . . . ” signs on their front lawns.
The Chinese have a word for this demographic: baizuo, which literally means “white left.” It’s a political pejorative referring to narcissistic white American liberals.
In a time of vaccine passports, “disinformation,” and make-believe insurrections, the anti-social, authoritarian tendencies of this lot have never been a clearer menace to America and its tradition of civil liberty.
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Last week, the Centers for Disease Control did an about-face, announcing that the fully vaccinated among us may resume normal activities. The news came more than a year after California initiated the first lockdown on March 19, 2020.
The CDC’s new posture comes with some narrow exceptions. If you’re traveling on a plane or find yourself in a homeless shelter or in a medical or correctional facility, you still need to wear a mask; and the CDC made sure to clarify, apparently out of great deference for federalism and Hayekian spontaneous order, that its guidance does not predominate over the requirements of federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance.
Before the CDC updated its pandemic guidance, this was exactly the position espoused by libertarian law professor Ilya Somin of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law. Writing from his regular perch at the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy, Somin’s argument is summarized nicely in the subheading of his piece, “Free the Vaccinated from COVID Restrictions”: “Doing so will protect constitutional rights, reduce vaccine hesitancy, and increase liberty—all at once.”
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No President in our lifetimes has been tougher on China than President Donald Trump. The Trump administration has courageously and steadfastly taken on China’s many trade abuses, threats to national security and human rights abuses. His Art of the Deal got China to agree to a phase one trade agreement even though it left tariffs of 25 percent on $250 billion of goods and another 7.5 percent on the remaining $300 billion of goods. The administration have made it clear to Beijing that its continued actions that threaten Hong Kong and Taiwan will not go unchecked. And the Defense Department has named 31 companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges that are either owned or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and military.
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Recently, I read with great interest James Lindsay’s essay called “The Woke Breaking Point.” There, he invites his readers to ask friends and acquaintances “What would it take for you to say that the Woke movement has gone too far?” This, he suggests, is a way to help people keep themselves honest: if you consider in advance what state of affairs, specifically, would be “too far,” then you will be able to recognize better the excesses of the totalitarian Left and more ready to resist them at the point when it becomes absolutely necessary.
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As the debate between those who want an unlimited lockdown and those who want to reopen America as quickly as possible becomes more clangorous every day, months of intensive study and sad experience with the coronavirus enable us to determine the best course and resolve the argument.
The shutdown must end in all but severely afflicted areas. Its original purpose was to “flatten the curve.” In the early stages, the number of coronavirus reported cases and deaths in the United States was doubling every few days. Horrifying projections based on the scanty evidence available and hyped by the anti-Trump media to put as much pressure and blame on the president as possible for his initially somewhat casual treatment of the subject, stirred fears of millions of deaths and of a universal vulnerability to an almost untreatable fatal illness.
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Across the country governors, county commissioners and executives, and city and town officials have announced “lockdowns” or stay-at-home orders of dubious constitutional validity. The result of these orders is the bizarre situation in which jails are being emptied of criminals while individuals engaged in their ordinary business at appropriate social distance have been arrested for the crime of being outside their home.
One of the most high-profile examples of this inverted constitutional order happened in California, where a paddle boarder was arrested near the Malibu Pier for ignoring orders from lifeguards to get out of the water. CBS News Los Angeles reports the unidentified man spent 30 to 40 minutes paddling in the ocean waters off Malibu Beach after refusing to heed orders from L.A. County lifeguards to go ashore. LASD Harbor Patrol brought in a boat, at which point the paddleboarder voluntarily swam in and was taken into custody.
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If you’re searching for an organizing principle that unites the Left, density ideology should be at or near the top of your list. Far from being a sideshow, density ideology is behind the leftist drive to cram America’s rising population into the footprint of existing cities.
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Attorney General William Barr gave an extraordinary speech at Notre Dame Law School last week, providing one of the most robust defenses of religious freedom in a generation.
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by Edward J. Erler James Madison is justly celebrated for his frequently stated opinion that “all power in just and free Government is derived from compact.” But Madison’s view is not endorsed by all purported champions of the founders. A recent article, “Our Unwritten Constitution: Orestes Brownson and the Foundation…
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by Lawrence W. Reed Except for a fishing trip to northern Canada in the 1960s, my first visit to a foreign country was to the old Soviet Union in March 1985. It was the month in which Soviet leadership passed from the aging old guard of communist hardliners into…
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by Vera Kichanova As Moscow celebrated its 870th anniversary, a futuristic $245 million Zaryadye Park was inaugurated in the heart of the capital — a generous present from Mayor Sergei Sobyanin to his citizens. The 32-acre park includes a ‘floating bridge,’ a piece of tundra, and even an ice cave. The miracle…
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by Jeffery Rendall Wake up any particular morning and glance out the window. Do you notice anything different from the day before? Changes in weather or the seasons don’t count. Chances are you’ll see things appear pretty much the same – and if you’ve lived in one place long…
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by Cuatro Jones When discussing the history of the West and exploring the ideas and philosophies that led up to the creation of the Magna Carta and the U.S constitution, eventually the religion of Christianity must be brought forward in the discussion. Why? Well, despite the many sins of Christians (and there are many),…
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by John Miltimore Sam Haselby says this “should be the end times” for American patriotism. Yet the opposite seems to be happening, and he can’t understand why. America has no national education system, he notes. No conscription. No government agency that enforces the red-white-and-blue rituals performed at schools and…
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