Liberalism, or progressivism, is a wide one-way road that leads to destruction.  Gas prices are high* because liberals are opposed to every practical source of energy,* including offshore oil drilling* and oil production in Alaska.*  Electricity is expensive because liberals are engaged in a war on coal.*  It's nearly impossible to run a business because of all the red tape generated by the EPA, IRS, ADA, EEOC, NLRB, and of course, Obamacare.  New York City has bedbugs because liberals got DDT banned in the 1970's.*  Unemployment is high because the minimum wage is too high,* and because it's easier just to live on food stamps and "disability" checks.*  Millions of children have never met their fathers, because the welfare state rewards illegitimacy.*  Many others have been abandoned* because of the belief that a baby is just a growth or piece of tissue that's part of a woman's body, which she can dispose of as she pleases.*  Over 54 million people have been killed (so far) because of that kind of thinking.*  That's why the Social Security ponzi scheme is falling apart — there are fewer young workers.*  Drunkenness and gluttony are now considered diseases instead of being evidence of bad decisions, because political correctness* has done away with stigma.*  The public schools are mass-producing dimwits who don't speak intelligible English*, can't write a coherent paragraph, don't know American history, don't know the difference between facts and opinions, can't make change without a cash register, and can't multiply or divide without a calculator.*  They are being taught that styrofoam, oil, guns and Christianity are bad,* but animal rights,* car pooling* and Islam* are good.  (Don't bother to bring your lunch to school.*  You can eat out of Big Brother's hand.*)  Billions of dollars are being wasted on solar panels* and windmills,* because of a baseless fear of "global warming"* — even though global warming stopped, all by itself, before the end of the 20th century.*.  The goal of progressivism is the abandonment and destruction of traditions, rules, standards, conventional wisdom, common sense and common knowledge.
This is a copyrighted original compilation, © 2020 by Andrew K. Dart

One glaring example of the Democrats' impact is the over-abundance of homeless bums in big cities, especially on the west coast.

And you would already know all this, except that the so-called news media are now just producing infomercials for big government.*  America is being destroyed from within (much like Detroit or California) by left-wing tax-and-spend socialist Democrats, and here are the results:

Overview articles:

(Scroll down for timely news, or click here.)

The Cruel Progressive Creed Undoing Civilization.  Debt is suffocating us.  Our currency is on its way to being Lebanonized.  Most major American cities are broke, dirty, unsafe, and run by either corrupt incumbents, neo-Marxists, or both.  The law is optional, and applied asymmetrically on the basis of race and ideology.  The past is found guilty by the laws of the present and so it is being undone.  The military budget is on a trajectory to be the smallest in terms of GDP allotment since World War II; its careerist officers, for their own short-term interests, are now demonizing and will soon be driving away the very demographic that has suffered percentage-wise the greatest casualties in recent wars and was once unquestionably the foundation of the military.  There is no U.S. border; it is an abstract construct that millions will illegally cross in the next few years, ostensibly because they will become future soldiers in the progressive wars for America to come.  The idea of merit that built America is a dirty word, replaced by medieval tribalism of hiring and promotion by superficial appearance.  In just five months, Joe Biden created a desert and called it progress.

The collective insanity that's rapidly erasing America.  Many of us older than half a century no longer recognize the country we grew up in.  We have a hard time reconciling that past America with what we see happening today.  America, to our view, was predominantly a place of light, freedom, and joy.  Now, as we witness a massing storm of iniquity, we either don't understand what we're seeing or we choke back the language to describe it because the words all sound too harsh or politically incorrect. [...] This plague on our society has pushed us to many forms of mass hysteria:
  •   We shun those who do not comply with outrageous and unconstitutional mandates.
  •   We blindly believe government officials and their allies in the media, though they have proven time and again that they lie and should not be trusted.
  •   We're emptying our jails of violent offenders while imprisoning law-abiding citizens — sometimes for simply exercising their rights.
  •   We're taking political prisoners like any third-world dictatorship.
  •   We allow our cities to be torched and looted with few repercussions.
  •   We're tearing down our history, our culture, and our traditions in the name of progressivism.
  •   We invite seemingly anyone who wants to enter the country illegally to take our jobs, receive public services, and drag down wages.
  •   Our national debt reaches into the stratosphere while politicians go whistling past the graveyard.
  •   We abort the innocent and defenseless while vigorously defending the guiltiest among us.
  •   We scare our children into radicalism with tales of impending doom due to climate changes that are as old as the earth.
  •   We're wrecking entire industries to "protect the earth" while propping up those same endeavors for our enemies.
  •   We deny biological realities and allow men to use women's facilities and participate in women's activities, provided that they "self-identify" as women.
  •   We subject the military to ideological litmus tests.
  •   We fraudulently change election results while casting those who push for transparency as "conspiracy advocates" and add their names to a list of domestic terrorists.
  •   We allow the government to censor those who oppose the lunacy that passes for public policy.
  •   We teach dependency and hatred at many school districts across the country, and within our colleges and universities.
  •   We accuse, disarm, and punish the law-abiding while acquitting the guilty.
This is the short list of our collective insanity.

The Time Has Come for Reasonable Americans to Stand up and Draw a Line in the Sand.  In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has been under nonstop attack by corporate media because he has insisted on following the science and good sense when it comes to keeping his state safe and open for business.  CBS News deceptively edited video of DeSantis answering a question about vaccine rollouts at Publix stores to make it look as if he were dodging a question he answered immediately, clearly, and honestly.  Hollywood productions and Major League Baseball are calling for boycotts of Georgia over their latest voter laws.  Airline companies and Coca-Cola are registering their condemnation.  These entities and the people who run them constantly bemoan the "division" in this country even as they willingly make half of their customer base into automatic enemies with every new statement of protest they register.  They have made what we eat and drink political.  They have made biology political.  They have made flying political.  They have made our national pastime political.

I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.  Here are some important things that I didn't know five years ago or now.
  •   There actually is a Deep State, and those who constitute it really do not honor the election results or the will of the people.
  •   There really appear to be lawless elements within the upper echelons of the FBI, CIA, and NSA who are not accountable for their crimes and are thus above the law.
  •   The fourth branch of government, the bureaucracy, really is unaccountable to the "unwashed masses."
  •   Many of our top military command, along with many in the military-industrial complex, don't always hate wars.  There's a lot of money and many promotions to be made during a time of war.  The last four years saw no new wars and even troops coming home.  For some, that is bad for business.
  •   Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are no longer works of fiction, but prophecies.
  •   George Orwell was righter than Nostradamus.
  •   The news media centers of New York City and Washington, D.C. are not neutral arbitrators of the truth; rather, they uncomfortably resemble TASS and Pravda from the Soviet Union days.
  •   The old robber barons like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan are starting to look a whole lot better compared to the new robber barons like Dorsey, Zuckerberg, and Bezos.
  •   The United States Supreme Court would actually refuse to hear a legitimate case because it was frightened of violence.
  •   The left insists on conflating and equating evangelical Christians with White supremacists.  This should terrify the Christian community.
  •   Words such as mom, dad, aunt, uncle, brother, and sister are now not words of love and respect, but considered politically incorrect verbiage in Congress.
  •   Censorship, the cancel culture, and becoming a nonperson come from the left, not the right.
  •   The left, not the right, actually is going to try to deny citizens' rights afforded to all in the Bill of Rights.
  •   Violence from the left is regarded as free speech and noble, while violence from the right is classified as sedition and felonious by powerful institutions.
  •   It really is not Republicans vs. Democrats, but globalists vs. nationalists.
  •   The new McCarthyism, blacklists, history re-writers, and re-education camps are coming from the left, not the right.
  •   Fences and barriers are a good thing for our nation's capital but somehow a bad thing for our nation's borders.
  •   Our Founding Fathers of yesteryear would be called "domestic terrorists" by some today.
  •   Presidential elections really can be stolen by corrupting just a handful of precincts in just a handful of states.
  •   Calling into question the validity of the 2016 presidential election is patriotic, while calling into question the validity of the 2020 presidential election is treasonous.

The Time for Talking with the Left is Long, Long Past.  Conservatives must accept this hard reality and avoid the aforementioned instinctive, very human but in this case deadly habit:  projection. [...] Their no-holds-barred attitude is apparent to all with eyes to see.  They have
  •   continually attacked us traditionalists and fomented unrest at our political events while accusing us of authoring violence;
  •   visited career and reputational destruction upon those who dare speak unfashionable truths while accusing those truth-tellers of intolerance;
  •   used government agencies such as the IRS and FBI to persecute us while accusing us of endangering the republic;
  •   played the identity politics card and demonized whites while accusing conservatives of being divisive, racist and bigoted;
  •   conspired with foreign powers to undermine our nation while accusing us of treasonous behavior;
  •   enabled China, an imperialistic foe and a clear and present danger to our country;
  •   endeavored to steal an election after having wrongly accused conservatives of thus doing in 2016;
  •   abetted an invasion of our nation in order to raise an alien electoral army that can help them seize power;
  •   mismanaged a pandemic and caused death while using it as a pretext for stripping our liberties, "locking down" the country and destroying people's livelihoods;
  •   corrupted our children with perversion and scarred their bodies, minds and souls;
  •   facilitated the murder of the unborn while accusing us of indifference to the vulnerable;
  •   prosecuted conservatives on trumped up charges while shielding their co-ideologists from justice;
  •   called truth "hateful" or "misinformation" and censored it via Big Tech while presenting convenient lies as "fact";
  •   encouraged violent mobs to create mayhem and attempted to strip the imperiled of the capacity for self-defense while sometimes being protected themselves by armed details;
  •   attacked our history and heroes and destroyed our cultural heritage while effecting their own "Year Zero," dystopian transformation;
  •   indoctrinated the young in schools to transform them into foot soldiers in the leftist campaign of civilizational rape;
  •   attacked our nation's foundational faith, Christianity, while spreading corruptive moral relativism and destructive theologies; and
  •   degraded society with perverted science while accusing us of scientific obscurantism.

Revolution 2020.  [Scroll down]  The Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v.  Board of Education, which outlawed state-directed segregation, also gave impetus to all manner of efforts to re-form society by legal-administrative force.  The decision itself eliminated any chance that this could be done in a disinterested manner.  It was not based on the plain, unequivocal meaning of the 14th Amendment's "equal protection of the laws."  Back in 1896, Justice John Marshall Harlan had dissented from Plessy, arguing that any state establishment of racial preference whatever, regardless of its character or intention, violates those words.  But Thurgood Marshall based his decision on "science" — that is, on the variable opinions of the credentialed class.  A sociologist by the name of Kenneth Clark claimed he had proven that Negro children could feel and learn normally only in a racially mixed environment.  (The "black is beautiful" movement began countering this immediately.)  Quickly, "scientific" conventional wisdom made "benign" or "remedial discrimination" by race official U.S. government policy.  The Brown decision's reliance on "science" also confused legally established segregation with the segregation that results from personal choices.  This confusion was the basis for Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in "public accommodations" on the basis of race.  Thenceforth, Civil rights law was no longer about removing legal barriers to personal choices.  It had begun forcing personal choices.  The Supreme Court's approval of the law as a mere regulation of interstate commerce was thin pretense.  The Act turned out to be the little law that ate the Constitution and poisoned American society.  It was passed primarily by Republican votes.  Democrats, seeing the empowerment of a historic Republican constituency in the South as potential disaster, scrambled to avert it by out-pandering Republicans, while describing any reticence on their part as racial animosity and ascribing whatever ailed Negroes to the Republicans' racism.  Quickly, the dynamics of politics turned "civil rights" into a ruinous socioeconomic scam.

America needs a New Declaration of Equal Justice under the Law.  What has been allowed to grow in the American cultural and political petri dish over the last two generations is a mixture whose contagious influence is as harmful as it is riddled with absurdities.  A partial list would include: an unequal two-tiered justice system; open borders; preferential treatment of illegal aliens over American citizens; the dominance of political correctness and its de facto censorship of free expression; fake news; rewriting history; the 1619 project; renaming Columbus Day; the abolition of traditions of every size and shape; destruction of American historical monuments; trampling the American flag and other symbols of democracy; the eradication of family values while celebrating and elevating relationships counterproductive to procreation — an imperative for any civilization that wants to survive; election fraud and dismantlement of the electoral process; an attempted coup that would have nullified the Constitution and the peoples' sovereignty; a baseless and wasteful impeachment; the disgraceful character assassination of nominees to the Supreme Court; the pervasive infiltration of education with academics hostile to America; the adoption safe spaces and the prohibition of trigger words on college campuses; union control and influence on public school educational curricula whose net effect dumbs down students and often paints America as the great villain.

Resisting the Totalitarian Power of Politicization.  [Scroll down]  Consider a schoolteacher who will not bow to the ugly utilitarian aims of the Common Core, but who teaches great poetry for its own sake.  The automatism of her fellow teachers and her superiors will move to crush her.  Consider the secretary who declines to post a rainbow flag on the wall beside her.  The machine lurches into action.  Consider the curator of a small museum, who exhibits paintings he believes are beautiful and powerful, without regard to the sex or the race of the painters.  Juggernaut comes a-rolling.  The system is perpetually hungry.  It must be so because lies evacuate the soul.  The more you feed, the emptier and hungrier you become.  To the totalitarian mind, all things must be politicized; no region of life may remain untouched, unabsorbed, undevoured.  Choirs, knitting groups, groceries, elementary schools, day-care centers, libraries, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, congregations, bowling leagues, fast-food joints, department stores, florist shops, delicatessens, marriages, flirtation, love poetry — all must go down the vast assimilating gullet of Jabba the State, who belches up emptiness and rages for more.

Crash and Bernie.  The Democrat list of incompetence, just in the past 12 years, is a long and distinguished one.
  •   Cash for clunkers
  •   Obamacare
  •   The Obama care website
  •   Obama's EPA turning rivers orange in Colorado
  •   Sanctuary cities
  •   Allowing people to defecate on the street
  •   Allowing people to do drugs on the street
  •   Mismanagement of Forests
  •   Mismanagement of water
  •   Transvestites entertaining children in public libraries
  •   Impeachment without a crime

The Democratic Descent into Madness:  Super Tuesday Edition.  The Democratic Party [...] has pushed some of the worst ideas and most destructive policies ever seen, including its defense of slavery and the Confederacy during the Civil War; the creation of the KKK to harass and kill former slaves; the enactment of an intricate web of laws throughout the South to prevent former slaves and their descendants from exercising their full rights as citizens; calling in armed soldiers to prevent black kids from attending state college; using "progressive" policies to destroy great cities across the country (Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, and San Francisco among them); passing off a serial sexual predator as a champion defender of women; attempting to destroy the U.S. healthcare industry while lying through their teeth about it; nominating Hillary Clinton as its candidate for President; using the power of the federal government to spy on the rival party's presidential candidate; and Chuck Schumer. [...] This is a party that needs to be punished.  And the only way to punish a political party is to take away as much of its power as possible.

Crash and Bernie.  Democrats propose solutions to 'problems that don't or rarely exist' and their results are an embarrassment — many times causing problems that never existed in the first place.  The Democrat list of incompetence — just in the past 12 years — is a long and distinguished one.
  •   Cash for clunkers
  •   Obamacare
  •   The Obama care website
  •   Obama's EPA turning rivers orange in Colorado
  •   Sanctuary cities
  •   Allowing people to defecate on the street
  •   Allowing people to do drugs on the street
  •   Mismanagement of Forests
  •   Mismanagement of water
  •   Transvestites entertaining children in public libraries
  •   Impeachment without a crime [...]

Why Are Liberal Cities Such a Mess?  Many major U.S. cities run by liberal Democrats are in rough shape.  They are afflicted by the problems of homelessness, violent crime, gangs, and unemployment to a far greater degree than the country as a whole.  Liberal cities are governed by the guiding tenets of softness, misplaced "compassion," and individual unaccountability.  Examples include:
  •   Hands-off policing style (NYC has long since abandoned the highly successful stop-and-frisk practices of the Giuliani years that led to low street crime).
  •   Sanctuary cities, which give rise to higher incidents of crime, poverty, unemployment, and the wasting of taxpayer-funded public resources because of the undocumented population's draining effect on the community.
  •   The inexplicable decision of cities like Boston to no longer prosecute crimes such as shoplifting and breaking and entering, leading to urban stores not being able to remain open and be profitable (thus denying the community of a valuable resource).
  •   Widespread locally approved abuse of the SNAP/EBT program, allowing its acceptance for alcohol and other nonessential items.
  •   Explicit sanctioning of sleeping on the street or other common public areas and unrestricted public loitering.
Liberal policies have worked almost perfectly to degrade the quality of inner-city life for their residents to the point of abject unacceptability.

In the age of leftism:
  Canada elects a substitute drama teacher for prime minister.
  Calling someone an "illegal alien" (a legal term), carries a fine of up to $250,000.
  Teachers are required to present LGBT content to junior high school kids.
  Illegal aliens can obtain driver's licenses.
  A sharia law Islamist who married her brother to circumvent American laws is now an American congresswoman.
  A woman who fabricated a lie to gain entry to Harvard is at the top of the Democratic presidential candidacy polls.
  A man who endorsed the American Communist Party is running for president of the United States.
  In a time of surging stocks, record employment, record female work participation, and economic prosperity in the most capitalist country in the world, capitalism is scorned.

Thread Reader:  On Why Things Are So Screwed Up.  The Left (manifested by the Democrat Party) have effectively removed God from the public square and created the modern secular state with the following clichéd characteristics:
    a.  Anything goes.
    b.  Everything is relative.
    c.  Diversity over assimilation.
    d.  Rule of men replaces rule of law.
    e. [Ignore] the Constitution.
The results are the symptoms of a sick society that we observe every single day; here a just a few of them:
  •   Arbitrary law enforcement in service of the political class (hello, Jeffrey Epstein!)
  •   Open borders and the attendant crime and disease (thanks, Democrats!)
  •   Legacy media gone bonkers (anti-Trump #FakeNews 24x7)
  •   A thoroughly corrupted political class (two sides of the same coin)
  •   Hollywood producing filth (what does "R" mean anymore?)
  •   Perversion and immorality condoned (flagrant public LGBTQ demonstrations)
  •   Federal agencies weaponized against political enemies (the IRS, FBI, DoJ, EPA, etc.)
  •   Abrogation of oaths of office (the Obama regime's seditious cabal at DoJ, FBI, State Dept, CIA, etc.)
  •   Hyper-politicized public education (John Dewey's dream brought to life by Common Core)
  •   Hyper-politicized sports (think about soccer and the USWNT!)

Future Belongs to Those Who Oppose Drag Queen Story Hours.  A new kind of debate is now raging inside conservativism.  In times past, we discussed the strategic and tactical options by which we might work toward common goals inside the existing political framework.  Today, the framework itself is in question.  What is being discussed is the classical liberal foundation of the American political system.  Indeed, both left and right have worked inside this framework for much of our nation's history.  Rarely have we faced such a challenge to the way America resolves its problems.  However, liberalism is in crisis.  Our society is in shambles and drifting steadily leftward.  The most outlandish behaviors — political correctness, transgenderism and Satanism — are being mainstreamed.

Fruits yet to be harvested:
Do You Understand that Democrats will Destroy America?  The Green New Deal, renewed regulations, Medicare for All, free college, as well as the 70-90% tax rates proposed by Democrats, will tank the stock market and US economic growth, leading to higher unemployment and reduced wage gains.  All these programs require higher taxes and not just the soak the rich fantasy of the 70-90% rates.  Most of the Democratic candidates have pledged to roll back the 2017 Republican tax cuts that fueled the renewal of economic growth in the US.  Open borders will flood the US with poverty stricken immigrants and their competition for jobs will depress wages.  The social welfare needs of the immigrants will skyrocket government expenditures.  So while taxes receipts are falling due to slower economic growth rates, expenditures will be rising, leading to increased government debt and consequently higher interest rates.  If the Federal Reserve tries to keep interest rates low to prevent a deepening recession, then the increase in the money supply and the expanding deficit will eventually destroy the value of the dollar.

Mayor Pete and the Crackup of Christianity.  Consider what has changed already.  In the 19th century, blasphemy was a crime.  In the Roaring '20s the "vices" of booze and gambling were outlawed.  Now they are major sources of state revenue.  Divorce was a rarity.  Now half of all marriages are dissolved.  After the sexual revolution of the '60s, births out of wedlock rocketed to where 40 percent of all children are born without a father in the home, as are half of Hispanics and 70 percent of all black children.  Pornography, which used to bring a prison term, today dominates cable TV. Marijuana, once a social scourge, is the hot new product.  And Sen. Kamala Harris wants prostitution legalized.  In the lifetime of many Americans, homosexuality and abortion were still scandalous crimes.  They are now cherished constitutional rights.  Yet, Mayor Pete's assertion — that God made him gay, and God intended that he live his life this way, and that this life is moral and good — is another milestone on the road to a new America.

Why Do Most People in This Country Work, while Others Never Will?  [Scroll down]  In President Obama's home town, the south and west side neighborhoods of Chicago had long been decimated by the long-term effects of a stream of uninterrupted rule by Democratic mayors.  The people left behind in these neighborhoods long ago gave up hope of a better life and have been inevitably forced to rely on public assistance and making money in the underground economy, including an unlawful drug trade dominated by violent gangs.  The overwhelming loss of high-paying and often unionized manufacturing jobs previously located in these neighborhoods had devastating and permanently detrimental effects and was the main reason behind their rapid decline.  The Democrats focus on addressing the grievances of their coalition of constituent interest groups with the unfortunate effect of further dividing the American people by providing these groups with special privileges and extra attention.

Anarchy is Swallowing Up the Social Order.  [D]espite increased government controls of everyday life in education, policing and citizen surveillance (don't forget those traffic tickets based on surveillance cameras), and dictation of many aspects of everyday living, we do not observe increasing order.  We observe increasing social anarchy.  Let's look at a somewhat truncated list of what we have endured and are enduring as a society.  We have seen horrible onslaughts as follows:  the Fort Hood jihad massacre, the Boston Bombing jihad massacre, the San Bernardino jihad massacre, the Pulse Nightclub massacre, riots in Berkeley, Ferguson, and Baltimore, cop shootings in Dallas and New York City, the Sandy Hook massacre, the Las Vegas massacre, the Texas church massacre, the Florida HS massacre, the Chattanooga recruiting station attack, and the jihad attack in Garland, TX against Pamela Geller.  We see anarchy further revealed by regular and frequent breakdowns of mass transit systems in metropolitan New York City and elsewhere and massive infiltration of our country by illegals (reminiscent of flooding in of Germanic tribes leading to collapse of the Roman Empire).  The anarchy occasioned by mass illegal immigration is encouraged by sanctuary cities with the avowed policy of protecting illegals, even those with multiple illegal border crossings, from apprehension by ICE.  Also, there is a drug use and abuse health crisis of epidemic proportions.  Further, the family in America is also being ripped to shreds as the number of children born outside of the marriage bond was 5% in 1960 and is 40% for the last few years.

What a Socialist Really Wants.  Now we have the remarkable spectacle of Venezuela, one of the richest countries in the world, being reduced to poverty and hunger by a dimwitted socialist junta.  The whole thing is a public spectacle, like botched plastic surgery on a movie star.  The socialists in charge have all the answers.  They know what you need better than you do.  Unfortunately, that turns out to be every tragic, stupid outcome imaginable.  How does any other country dare to discuss socialism?

It is not Mr. Trump who is dividing America.  When Barack Obama commandeered one seventh of the U.S. economy in the name of making health insurance available to a small minority of Americans who did not have it, and he did so through political chicanery, with no support from the Republicans, and against the wishes of the majority of Americans, that was divisive.  When Mr. Obama tried to force schools to allow males who "identified as" females to use women's bathrooms (and vice versa), and he did so with no public debate of the matter and in the complete absence of credible scientific evidence that a biological male can in any psychologically healthy sense claim to identify as a female, that was divisive.  When white students at our best colleges (and even recruits to the U.S. Army) are taught that they have enjoyed undeserved advantages because they happen to have been born white in a nation founded and peopled mostly by whites, that's divisive.  And when our political and economic institutions are vilified as expressions of "white supremacy" because they were developed predominantly by the white majority, that's divisive.

The Pitiful Roots of Anti-Americanism.  The Progressives' failure is not a failure to enact their agenda.  They have dominated America politically for the past century.  FDR gave us really big government, and the federal government has become a scandal of fraud, waste, and abuse — a scandal that even the Big Government Press cannot keep hidden from us.  LBJ declared War on Poverty — and that war was lost.  Instead of eliminating poverty, the War on Poverty has made poverty more pathological, creating an underclass, often now described as "permanent," living on government handouts.  Even the Progressives' anti-Americanism was given free rein with the election of Barack Obama, who shared their obsession with "fundamentally transforming" America.  Yet wave after wave of electoral victory has not made American Progressives happy.  Whenever the voters put the Progressives in charge, the result is governmental metastasis and social catastrophe — by necessity.  The left is simply wrong about how things work.  It is easy to come up with programs that defy common sense.  It is also possible to use governmental power to impose those programs on society.  But the power of government can't make them work.

The Worst-Run States Have This One Thing In Common.  Four of the five worst-run states all have one thing in common — and it's exactly what you think it is.  That's right, states with the worst fiscal condition — according to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University — are almost universally run by Democrats.

Guns Aren't the Problem.  The Collapse of the Morality You Mock is the Problem.  God is not mocked and our society has been mocking him for some time.  From the collapse of the family; to a culture of death that champions abortion on demand; to a growing hostility towards people of faith; to championing deviancy while normalcy is defined a deviant; to attacks on the two parent, heterosexual nuclear household; to porn culture, our society is rotten and these things happen in rotting societies.  This has always been under the surface.  Now it is boiling out because God has handed us over to ourselves. [...] We have determined that mothers and fathers are interchangeable or don't even matter.  We have determined that sexual expression is the height of society.  We have determined that humanity and personhood are severable.  Frankly, even lax European cultures have less of a culture of death than we do.  We stand almost alone in the West in liberal abortion policy.

Minnesota Democrats wage war on God, faith and American history.  The further we've moved away from God in our schools, the more he's been replaced by the extreme indoctrination of our kids with teaching and programs that completely undercut what families teach their children at home.  Nobody seems to care that parents are offended that many schools are no longer interested in partnering with them and instead are undermining them as the primary authority in the lives of their children.  Political correctness has infected schools to the point where priorities are out of whack.  Our schools lack the security they desperately need, teachers are underpaid, and yet politicians ignore these real issues and, instead, pick fights with people of faith.

How Americans Got Hoodwinked.  [Scroll down]  By the 1980s, an entire new generation was disoriented.  School and media had turned young minds toward an ideology at odds with America's founding principles and values.  Americans progressively lost their moral bearings and their identity as Americans.  Marxist activists and other crusaders for a collectivist nation had by now taken positions of leadership in academia, government, and church.  Public schools were beginning to pit students against their parents and filling their heads with ideas calculated to undermine the core values of their country and heritage.  Americans who got all their news from the mainstream press or TV were unaware that a culture war had broken out across the country.  Mainstream media reporters, allegedly on the side of truth, were either ignorant or complicit.

Socialism's Gateway Drug.  There's open talk of a divorce between individualists and collectivists; i.e., a separation of the US into at least two separate countries.  Can chaos be far behind when so many see the corruption from top to bottom, and are giving up belief in The Great Experiment? [...] The corruption in government is not just for enrichment or power.  It's to sow the seeds of WHY BOTHER? among the population. [...] The flood of third-world immigrants is not just for "diversity".  It's to sow the seeds of violent civil unrest as the natives of America and Europe finally resist at the 11th hour. [...] The deficit spending of every Western government is not just to buy votes.  It's second-level intent is to sow the seeds of an inevitable financial collapse, leading to societal chaos. [...] Look around you at what's happening.  Look at everything — every single thing — the Left does, in the context of trying to precipitate chaos.

Has Giving Leftists What They Want Made America Better?  In 1962, the United States Supreme Court gave leftists what they wanted:  the removal of prayer from public schools.  So how has that worked out for us?  Since prayer was removed from schools in 1962, out-of-wedlock births for girls 15-19 years old has tripled.  Violent crimes have increased tenfold.  Single-parent female-headed households have grown from 5 million in 1962 to 12 million and growing.  Sexually transmitted diseases in kids 10-14 years old has skyrocketed, increasing 257% since 1962.  Fifteen-year-olds having sex since 1962 is up 1,000%.  For decades, divorce rates were declining.  Since 1962, divorce rates have increased 117%, making America number one in the world for divorce.

Of Course Children Prefer Liberalism.  Liberals knew well what they were doing as they worked for decades at destroying the family.  As generations of Americans have been raised in broken homes — often by broken people — it makes it easier to make them wards of the state.  After all, if you don't have parents who care much or provide much for you, why not look to Uncle Sam and his trillions?  One of the great lies of modern liberalism — perhaps the great lie — is that the world owes us something, and it's up to us to do whatever it takes to get it.  If one has the "right" to do whatever one wishes in the sexual realm, why take responsibility for an unplanned pregnancy?  And if we don't have to worry about sex leading to children, why get married at all?  And if we want to get married, why can't we define what is marriage?

Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture.  [Scroll down]  This cultural script began to break down in the late 1960s.  A combination of factors — prosperity, the Pill, the expansion of higher education, and the doubts surrounding the Vietnam War — encouraged an antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal — sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll — that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society.  This era saw the beginnings of an identity politics that inverted the color-blind aspirations of civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into an obsession with race, ethnicity, gender, and now sexual preference.  And those adults with influence over the culture, for a variety of reasons, abandoned their role as advocates for respectability, civility, and adult values.  As a consequence, the counterculture made great headway, particularly among the chattering classes — academics, writers, artists, actors, and journalists — who relished liberation from conventional constraints and turned condemning America and reviewing its crimes into a class marker of virtue and sophistication.

Anarchy Is Swallowing Up the Social Order.  [Scroll down]  Thus, despite increased government controls of everyday life in education, policing, and citizen surveillance (don't forget those traffic tickets based on surveillance cameras), we observe increasing social anarchy. [...] We see regular and frequent breakdowns of mass transit systems in metropolitan New York City and elsewhere, massive infiltration of our country by illegals (reminiscent of flooding in of Germanic tribes leading to collapse of the Roman Empire), and the drug use epidemic.  We see thirty-one "gender designations" by the City of New York with male and female demoted to being only two of the thirty-one.  Recently the mayor of Oakland, Calif. notified 1,000 illegal alien felons (yes, felons — not just nice men and women scrambling to make a living) that ICE was coming for them.  These developments suggest that anarchy is rife.  Thus, we see that the scope of government has grown and become more intrusive, but at the same time, anarchy seems to be racing forward at warp speed.  The leftists seem to think the anarchy is growing because government, despite its growth, has not been growing big enough or fast enough.  According to their thinking, growth in government power is the answer to anarchy.

Another Liberal-Created Failure.  According to professor William Gronfein at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, by 1955 there were nearly 560,000 patients housed in state mental institutions across the nation.  By 1977, the population of mental institutions had dropped to about 160,000 patients.  Starting in the 1970s, advocates for closing mental hospitals argued that because of the availability of new psychotropic drugs, people with mental illness could live among the rest of the population in an unrestrained natural setting. [... But] shutting down mental hospitals didn't turn out the way advocates promised.  Several studies summarized by the Treatment Advocacy Center show that untreated mentally ill are responsible for 10 percent of homicides (and a higher percentage of the mass killings).  They are 20 percent of jail and prison inmates and more than 30 percent of the homeless. [...] Many innocent people have been assaulted, robbed and murdered by mentally ill people.  Businesspeople and their customers have had to cope with the nuisance created by the mentally ill.

The Left Is Reaping the Whirlwind of the Culture They Made.  [Scroll down]  It seems clear to me the sheriff was speaking about rap music with its hateful, violent and misogynistic lyrics, and video games like Grand Theft Auto, where you can have sex with a prostitute then strangle her or pull an innocent person out of a car, beat him, then steal his vehicle.  I am a First Amendment purist and don't want to see expression censored in any way.  And I don't argue that there's a straight line between any specific cultural creation and bad acts.  But surely, a culture in which those in authority approve of and argue for things like gangsta rap and GTA — and indeed for the use of violence to silence speech that offends them — well, such a culture becomes a machine for transforming madness into murder.

A Time for War.  Civil War.  It's here.  Now.  Thankfully this is not yet the blood in the streets kind of war, but war it is. [...] Examples of the current battles in the war:
    Racialism, black lives matter, NFL kneeling, and the war on being white.
    The new feminism, and the war on being male.
    The new feminism, and the war on the unborn.
    Turning sex into a cesspool.  Weinstein, Hollywood, preying on children, rampant unfaithfulness, broken families, transgenderism.
    Turning race baiting and sex allegation into weapons of mass destruction.
    Environmental catastrophism.
    Health care control.
    Spending our grandchildren's money.
    Allowing immigration to strangle what's left of our institutions.
    Pretending radical Islam is okay, but Judeo-Christian culture is not.
    Teaching that socialism is just another form of government and not a failure.
    Teaching that our country is inherently evil, and must be changed throughout.
There are many others.  But the important thing to understand is every one of these major battles is going on simultaneously.

No, I Am Not a Moron but Half the Country is Deranged.  Of all the crises plaguing the nation, who would ever consider gender identity and potty access as the most pressing issues yet we now have the unthinkable occurring.  Men allowed to enter ladies bathrooms whenever they like and dogs getting their own bathrooms at JFK airport.  Criminals getting their sex change operations paid for by taxpayers while in prison.  Transgender former males winning female sporting events ('quel surprise') like wrestling or weightlifting.  The language we all learned from day one has become weaponized by the gender militants in our Marxist academia.

The 6 Big Ways Liberals Are Destroying America's Culture.  [#1] The Politicization Of Everything:  Want to watch football?  There are players protesting the flag.  Turn on a Hollywood awards ceremony?  There are actors making political statements.  Want to go to the bathroom in peace?  Well, first, we need to know if you're okay with sharing it with someone who feels like the opposite gender today.  You're just a regular person telling an off-color joke you heard?  Better be careful; that could turn into a front page scandal if the wrong group gets offended.  Want to buy a Halloween costume for your kid?  Well, you better make sure it's someone of the same race or people will be upset.  Want to go on a date?  If you date someone of the same race, you may be racist.  Ready to marry your honey?  Then you better support gay marriage or you're a homophobe.  I can remember a time in America where you could just live your life without paying attention to politics at all if you wanted and that was a good thing.  Remember that old saying?  Never discuss race, religion or politics in polite company?  Well, because of liberals, you don't have a choice anymore.

How the Left Devalues American Citizenship.  In his relentless effort to devalue what it means to be an American, Obama exempted citizenship applicants from a major part of the Oath of Allegiance.  Applicants no longer have to pledge to defend our country. [...] While illegals are not official citizens, outrageously, they receive benefits unavailable to citizens — free attorneys, college tuition, checks, abortions, and more.  Democrats and fake news media are working to guilt-trip Americans into gifting illegals the right to vote (some are already voting).  So, illegals don't desire or need no stinkin' U.S. citizenship.  Obama's illegals have no desire to assimilate.

Dear Democrats:  Does Trump do anything that's not racist?  [Scroll down]  When you don't enforce immigration laws, you will get more illegal immigration.  When you don't hold people to account on sexual abuse like Bill Clinton, you will get more sexual abuse.  When you have a secret slush fund to pay off claims for congressmen and no disclosure, you will get more claims.  When you allow people like Clapper, Brennan, Comey, and Holder to lie to Congress with no repercussions, you will get more liars, and when you have a secretary of state who repeatedly lies and violates securities laws — who enriches her family and foundation with her political position, who repeatedly lies and not only doesn't get penalized, but gets rewarded with a presidential nomination — you will get more political corruption.

Rhode Island, Connecticut and Illinois are the 'worst possible states to live in' (but Louisiana and Mississippi aren't much better).  If you live in Illinois, Connecticut or Rhode Island, the chances are you know someone who is not happy.  Not happy at all.  Around a quarter of the population living in these regions have described them each as the 'worst possible state to live in', according to a Gallup survey.  The map data doesn't explain the nature of the residents' grievances.

Timely news and commentary:

Biden Touts Police Reform While Mobs Run Wild in Portland.  Joe Biden commemorated police officers who had lost their lives in the line of duty in 2019 and 2020 in a speech at the Capitol building on Saturday.  "There's too much pain.  There's too much loss.  There's too much at stake for your safety and the safety of those you serve," Biden said at the National Peace Officers' annual memorial service.  There's also too much interference by politicians for the police to do an effective job.  And there's too little support by Democratic politicians of the police forces that keep their cities from blowing up.  There's a clear disconnect between what Biden was saying about the heroism of police and the fact that he and other politicians have abandoned them.

Portland police don't stop chaos.  A crowd of 100 people wreaked havoc in downtown Portland, Oregon, this week — smashing storefront windows, lighting dumpsters on fire and causing at least $500,000 in damage — but police officers didn't stop them.  Portland Police Bureau officials say that's because of legislation passed by Oregon lawmakers this year, which restricts the tools they can use to confront people vandalizing buildings and causing mayhem.  "The reason that we did not intervene goes back to what we talked about last month with House Bill 2928 and the restrictions placed on us in a crowd control environment," KOIN reports that Portland Police Lt. Jake Jensen said in a neighborhood meeting Thursday.  Residents frustrated by the latest round of destructive demonstrations Tuesday questioned whether that meant anything goes now in Portland.

Food prices will go up 'tremendously': Billionaire supermarket owner.  Americans will see food costs rise "tremendously" in the coming weeks, according to billionaire supermarket owner John Catsimatidis.  Catsimatidis, who is the president of Gristedes and D'Agostino Foods, discussed his concerns about inflation and supply chain issues on FOX Business' "Mornings with Maria," and warned companies like Nabisco, Pepsi and Coke will begin to prioritize products and raise prices in order to get ahead.  "I see food prices going up tremendously," he told Maria Bartiromo.  "[CEOs] want to be ahead of the curve and the way they're doing it is they're dropping all promotions.  They are dropping low-moving items."

Where is the outrage?  Where is our outrage?  A duly elected president has been illegally surveilled, slandered, libeled, and undermined.  False witness has been brought against him, yet the guilty remain free, in power, and unapologetically above the laws to which their constituents are beholden.  Where is our outrage?  A Presidential election has been stolen.  Incontrovertible proof of massive, organized, election fraud has been uncovered and put before legislative bodies, most of which have responded by vilifying the investigators and threatening them with prosecution.  Where is our outrage?  An unremarkable pathogen with a 99.7% survivability rate has been fashioned into a cudgel with which overreaching federal and state governments have beaten down freedom, imprisoned Americans in their homes and forced a demonstrably dangerous drug upon them — a drug that has killed thousands, harmed millions, and earned pharmaceutical companies and their investors billions.

You will never guess what's topping iTune's hip-hop chart.  In just a few months in office, this utterly incompetent man [Joe Biden] has already managed to harm America very badly.  He has opened the southern border to millions of immigrants, instituted "green" policies that have sent the price of gas skyrocketing, and presided over policies boosting inflation is at levels not seen in decades (and promising to rise higher).  Worse even than these practical steps towards damaging America, Biden is in the process of outlawing half the nation over both factual and ideological ideology about vaccines.  He is effectively overseeing America's balkanization.  Then, to top this all off, he has presided over the destruction of the supply chain so that shelves will probably be bare for Christmas.  Moreover, given that the supply chain is an immensely complicated, interconnected entity that stretches around the world and across the length and breadth of America, there's no reason to believe that shelves will be any fuller after Christmas.

Democrats Call Gov. Larry Hogan's Plan To 'Refund' Police 'Divisive Rhetoric' Amid Baltimore Crime Spike.  Democrats criticized Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan's plan for "refunding police" Friday, calling it "misguided" and "divisive rhetoric."  Hogan announced a $150 million plan to provide additional support to Maryland's law enforcement agencies and victims of violent crime across the state at a press conference Friday.  The initiative directs tens of millions of dollars to local police aid, neighborhood safety grants, body camera and other accountability measures for officers and other programs.  "Our $150 million refund the police initiative will provide a desperately needed shot in the arm to our state and local police agencies.  But there is far more work to be done," Hogan said from a news conference in Annapolis.  "Trying to reduce crime by defunding police is dangerous, radical, far-left lunacy.  Thinking that you can improve law enforcement by defunding the police is like saying you want to improve education by defunding the schools."

Gov. Hochul's drug-war surrender will be the death of NY neighborhoods.  Oct. 7, 2021, will go down in history as the day that New York surrendered in the war on drugs.  Not a shot was fired, except for the heroin or meth shot into the vein of a drug addict on the streets of Midtown, the South Bronx or Harlem.  Gov. Hochul last week signed into law a bill pushed by state Sen. Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx) and backed overwhelmingly by the city's Democratic delegation to the Legislature.  It decriminalizes the possession or sale of hypodermic needles and syringes by addicts to inject drugs.  Touted as a move to reduce overdose deaths, it will instead be the death of downtowns and residential neighborhoods across the Empire State.

NYPD orders cops to stand down, allow junkies to shoot up in streets after decriminalization measure passes.  NYPD officials have ordered patrol and beat officers to stop rolling up suspects who are seen shooting drugs on the streets after legislation in the state legislature passed decriminalizing the purchase and sale of hypodermic needles commonly used to inject heroin and other hard drugs.  "Effective immediately, members of the service should not take any enforcement action against any individual who possesses a hypodermic needle, even when it contains residue of a controlled substance," says a directive to New York Police Department commanders issued last Friday and obtained by the New York Post.  The order to NYPD officers referenced Senate Bill 2523 which outlines the decriminalization.

Father is suing woke Loudoun County after his 15-year-old daughter was 'raped' in 'gender-fluid' girls' bathroom.  The furious parents of a 15-year-old high schooler are suing Loudon County in Virginia after their daughter was allegedly raped by a 'skirt-wearing male student' in a 'gender fluid' school bathroom.  Jess and Scott Smith allege that the district attempted to cover up the alleged assault.  They claim that Superintendent Scott Ziegler alleged there was no record of the May 28 incident at Stonebridge High School in Leesburg, Virginia, despite Loudoun County Sheriff's office conducting a two-month long investigation into the allegations.  On June 22, Scott Smith was filmed exploding with anger about the assault at a school board meeting, and was later convicted over the disturbance.  He only revealed the alleged sex attack that had sparked his fury earlier this week.

Virginia Democrats Voted to Allow Schools to Refrain from Reporting Sexual Battery in 2020.  Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly voted for — and Governor Ralph Northam signed — a law allowing schools to refrain from reporting instances of sexual battery, stalking, violation of a protective order, and violent threats occurring on school property in 2020.  § 22.1-279.3:1 of Virginia code had required that these, among a number of other major crimes, be reported to law enforcement if they occurred on campus.  Democrats insisted that misdemeanors be extirpated from reporting requirements in House Bill 257, replacing the word "criminal" with "felony" in the code.

Portland and other 'defund' cities are destroying their own livability.  Portland, Oregon, chose to jump on the politically correct bandwagon in 2020 and defund its police force.  A rash of murders has since swept over the Rose City, which was once a pleasant place to live.  Until recently, Portland only had a quirky reputation reflected in the comedy show Portlandia.  It was amusingly wacky and liberal — a place where the dream of the 1990s was still alive.  Today, Portland is looking a lot more like it did in the late 1980s, at the height of the crack epidemic.  The city is about to set a new annual record for murders, and it's only October.  By the time this editorial is published, it may have already hit its highest annual homicide total since 1987.  Between the violent insurrection that leftist protesters waged against its federal courthouse, which lasted for weeks last summer, and the violence that petty criminals are inflicting on innocent citizens, the Rose City just isn't a nice place to be anymore.

Theft-plagued Walgreens shuts down five more stores in San Francisco:  At least 17 have already closed due to 'legalized shoplifting'.  Walgreens is shuttering another five of its stores in crime-ridden San Francisco because of rampant shoplifting by thieves who waltz past security guards and sell the items outside the drugstore chain's doors.  The national chain has closed 17 of its 70 San Francisco locations in the past two years because of the shelf raiders, who have swiped everything not behind lock and key.  Thefts in the chain's 53 remaining stores are five times the average for their stores elsewhere in the country, according to company officials.

Bidenflation Shock:  Kids Shoe Prices Up 11.9%.  It's not just getting more expensive to feed your family in the U.S.  It's getting more expensive to keep shoes on your children's feet.  The price of boys' and girls' footwear jumped 3.3 percent in September from August, a huge one-month increase.  Compared with a year ago, the prices of kids shoes are up 11.9 percent, the Department of Labor's Consumer Price Index showed Wednesday [10/13/2021].

Vaccine Mandates Aren't Biden's Only Job-Killing Scheme.  Despite $9 trillion in fiscal and monetary stimulus from the federal government, America has an employment problem.  The Labor Department estimates that 10.4 million jobs remained unfilled in August, the most recent month for which figures are available, including 1.5 million in health care and social services.  That same month, a record-high 4.3 million people quit their jobs. [...] The good news is that President Joe Biden has a plan.  The bad news is that his plan could result in the loss of millions of additional workers.  Start with vaccine mandates.  The president announced in August that he planned to impose a vaccine mandate on nursing home staffs.  Nursing homes lost nearly 38,000 staffers in September alone, among the steepest one-month drops since the pandemic began.  The Washington Post reported late last month that vaccine mandates imposed by hospitals have led many unvaccinated workers to leave or be terminated, exacerbating a shortage in skilled nursing and bedside care.  The potential employment effect of vaccine mandates is not confined to the health care sector.  Other professions where vaccine requirements are common also reported job losses.  In August alone, 25,000 state and local education workers quit their jobs.

The average new car price hit a record $45,000 in September.  A new study from Kelly Blue Book found that the average price paid for a vehicle in September it an all-time record of $45,031 as discounts dwindle and buyers in the market gravitate toward high-end models.  "The record-high prices in September are mostly a result of the mix of vehicles sold," Cox Automotive analyst Kayla Reynolds said.  "Midsize SUV sales jumped in September compared to August and full-size pickup share moved up as well.  Sales of lower-priced compact and midsize cars, which had been commanding more share during the summer, faded in September.  As long as new-vehicle inventory remains tight, we believe prices will remain elevated."  It was the sixth-straight record month, according to KBB's data.

Biden White House Spreads Lie that Inflation Is 'High Class Problem'.  White House chief of staff Ron Klain is spreading the lie that inflation and the supply chain snarl are "high class problems," which means we're lucky to have them.  On Wednesday [10/13/2021], some Harvard idiot (excuse me for repeating myself) named Jason Furman tweeted, "Most of the economic problems we're facing (inflation, supply chains, etc.) are high class problems.  We wouldn't have had them if the unemployment rate was still 10 percent."

Thanks to Biden's policies, prepare for a cold, expensive winter.  Upon entering the Oval Office, Biden immediately shut down the Keystone Pipeline and ended new drilling on federal lands.  While Trump had brought America to energy independence and affordable energy, Biden reduced America to a vassal of oil-producing countries.  Thanks to this policy, gasoline prices keep climbing.  In my neighborhood, they've increased by almost 78% in just nine months.  The same is true everywhere.  Like all Biden policies, this is devastating for the middle and working classes, for it doesn't just make commuting more expensive; it increases the price of every single item in America.  Fuel is needed for farming, manufacturing, shipping, wholesaling, and retailing.  Every aspect of life becomes more expensive when fuel prices rise, with the middle and working classes bearing the ultimate burden.  All of this is in the name of fighting alleged climate change.  That is a faith, not a science.  We humans can pollute, and I believe we have a moral obligation to keep our environment clean and healthy, but the whole climate change theory is a joke and a bad one at that.

For Consumers, 'Build Back Better' Is Going to Start Getting Replaced by These Three Words Soon.  Consumers were promised "build back better" under Biden, and all they see is high inflation, gas prices through the roof, and 'out of stock' signs everywhere.  Stop blaming COVID as well.  Grocery stores are open.  Big box retailers have never closed.  We have three vaccines readily available.  As for the labor shortages, I mean, how can you be shocked given Biden's unemployment benefits extravaganza.  Crises are everywhere, and Joe is taking naps.

Inflation up 5.4% from year ago, matching 13-year high, Labor Department.  Consumer prices in September increased U.S. inflation to 5.4% compared to a year ago, according to the Labor Department monthly consumer price index report, released Wednesday [10/13/2021].  The number matches the highest such rate since 2008, amid global supply chain issues.  The Consumer Price Index rose 0.4% in September from August, with the costs of new cars, food, gas, and restaurant meals all increasing.  The annual increase in the consumer price index matched readings in June and July as the highest in 13 years, the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported.  The costs of food and shelter in September together together contributed to more than half of the monthly, seasonally adjusted increase, the bureau also reported.

Gas prices at 7-year high and rising as Biden wages offensive against domestic energy producers.  [Scroll down]  There isn't enough oil and gas supply to meet U.S. demand, due to a combination of factors, including the Biden administration halting new leases on federal land, halting the Keystone Pipeline, increasing regulatory burdens, and other measures that will take years to correct, those in the industry argue.  In one of his first acts in office, President Joe Biden, through executive order, halted the issuance of new oil and gas leases on federal lands, effectively stopping much production for existing operations.  He also eliminated low-cost Canadian crude from being processed by mid-continent and Gulf Coast and U.S. refiners by prohibiting the Keystone pipeline from opening.  If Biden had not severely hampered domestic production, the U.S. would have an ample supply of oil and gas and commensurately lower costs at the pump, industry experts argue.  The $6 billion in additional costs imposed on the industry included in the budget reconciliation bill include new methane fees, inspection fees, severance fees, and bonding requirements, as well as additional requirements for operating on federal lands.

Very likely because of media-induced fear of Covid-19...
BLS Report: 4.3 Million US Workers Voluntarily Quit Their Jobs in August.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the job openings and labor report for August today [10/12/2021].  The data shows that 4.3 million U.S. workers voluntarily quit their jobs in the month of August.  This is a significant jump from prior.

Looks Like Stagflation Is Already Here.  On the same day the International Monetary Fund cut its growth forecast for the U.S. economy, Atlanta Federal Reserve President Raphael Bostic warned that the "transitory" bout of inflation "won't be brief." How do you spell stagflation?  B-i-d-e-n-o-m-i-c-s.  The IMF report, released Tuesday, has the international organization lowering growth globally by a 10th of a percentage point and for the U.S. by a full percentage point.

More Bad Policies and Government Spending Will Worsen Labor Shortage.  The September employment report released on Oct. 8 showed a modest employment gain, with 194,000 new jobs added, and a drop in unemployment from 5.2% in August to 4.8%.  What appears to be good news in the report — a 0.4 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate to 4.8% — is not all positive news.  The decline is due in part to 183,000 people dropping out of the labor force as opposed to unemployed workers finding new jobs.  This is also the second month in a row of lackluster job gains that have fallen about 700,000 below expectations.  Normally, these last two subpar job reports would be bad news for unemployed workers.  But with a record high 10.9 million job openings in the U.S., the poor job gains are perhaps most troubling for employers and consumers.  Without enough willing workers, employers are struggling to get the workers they need to recover from the pandemic and to meet customers' demands.  Americans across the country also continue to experience long waits, shortages of goods and services, and rising prices.

The Green Agenda or How This Energy Crisis is Different from All Others.  The price of energy from all sources conventional is exploding globally.  Far from accidental, it is a well-orchestrated plan to collapse the industrial world economy that has already been weakened dramatically by almost two years of ridiculous covid quarantine and related measures.  What we are seeing is a price explosion in key oil, coal and now especially, natural gas energy.  What makes this different from the energy shocks of the 1970s is that this time, it is developing as the corporate investment world, using the fraudulent ESG green investment model, is dis-investing in future oil, gas and coal while OECD governments embrace horrendously inefficient, unreliable solar and wind that will insure the collapse of industrial society perhaps as early as the next months.  Barring a dramatic rethinking, the EU and other industrial economies are willfully committing economic suicide.

Heating costs in NY expected to spike for many customers this winter.  A new forecast on energy costs for heating in New York state calls for a spike in those expenses this coming winter.  During an annual presentation by the state of the NY State Public Service Commission last week, staffers said that on average, statewide, consumers will be hit with about a 21% increase in heating costs over the entire winter compared to last year.  Rochester Gas and Electric is forecasting about a 33% average increase over the winter for natural gas customers.

The Editor says...
Which political party opposes fracking, pipelines, offshore exploration, internal combustion engines, nuclear power, and the use of coal?  Those are the people to blame when energy prices inflate overnight.

Food Prices Hit Highest Level in a Decade.  Food prices across the world have risen to their highest levels in a decade on the back of tightening supply conditions coupled with robust demand, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).  The FAO's food price index, which measures world food commodity prices, has surged by 32.8 percent in the 12 months through September, coming in at a reading of 130 points, a level not seen since 2011.  On a month-over-month basis, the index rose 1.2 percent.  Accounting for the bulk of the rise in the index were higher prices of most cereals and vegetable oils.  The FAO vegetable oil price index was up 60 percent in September from a year earlier, and 1.7 percent higher than in August.  The cereal price measure was up 27.3 percent over the year last month, and 2 percent from August.

British Airways tells pilots and cabin crew not to refer to passengers as 'ladies and gentlemen' in favour of gender-neutral terms.  British Airways has instructed pilots and cabin crew not to refer to passengers as 'ladies and gentlemen' in an effort to celebrate 'diversity and inclusion'.  Britain's flagship carrier has abandoned the greeting in favour of more gender-neutral terms, reportedly to respect wider social norms and make children feel included.  Other major airlines, including Lufthansa, easyJet and Air Canada, have already adopted gender-neutral language.

The Editor says...
Air Canada did the same thing two years ago.

The Left Got What It Wanted — So Now What?  [Scroll down]  What did all that madness achieve?  Mostly, the first election in U.S. history in which over 100 million ballots were not cast on Election Day.  Strangely, with such an avalanche of ballots, the usual error rate of absentee balloting dived from around 2-4 percent to 0.2-0.4 percent.  You see, when we suddenly must count tens of millions more paper ballots then it becomes easier, not harder, to spot errors.  So, the Left won its Pyrrhic victory.  The nation was done with the demonized Trump and now the Left controlled the presidency, and both houses of Congress. [...] What followed was a concerted effort to destroy the Trump record:  the greatest level of combined annual natural gas and oil production in any nation's history, record low minority unemployment and near record peacetime, general unemployment, a border secure and illegal immigration finally under control, and a New Middle East in which Israel and its Arab enemies concluded neutrality pacts.  China was put on notice for its past mockery of global norms.  Inflation was low, growth was good.  "Stagflation" was still a rarely remembered word from the past.

Life in Seattle is about to get very interesting (and that's not good).  Seattle, more than many American cities, vigorously embraced the "Defund the Police" movement.  Last year, the Seattle City Council began the process of defunding the police and it's been continuing ever since, relentlessly slicing away at the city's police budget.  Crime has risen accordingly and people are making noises about getting the police back.  However, the radicals have a new arrow in their quiver to reduce the number of police in their city.  An October 18 deadline is looming to fire those police who have refused the vaccination and, with only a week to go, roughly 40% of the police force is still unvaccinated.  Since George Floyd's diseased heart gave out thanks to overdosing on meds and fighting the police, Seattle has been one of those cities that has most enthusiastically sought to rid itself of its police force.  Even the fact that the little autonomous zone known as CHAZ instantly turned into warlord hell didn't deter the council from its mission.

Lumber Prices Rose 50 Percent Since August and May Climb Higher.  The price tag on lumber, after declining since its all-time high in May, could climb higher through the early months of the coming year, experts recently told Insider. [...] In addition, global food prices have hit a decade high and grew for the second month in a row in September, according to a report from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).  A reason behind the price growth regarding lumber was a small increase in renovation demand once "price-sensitive" buyers moved forward with home improvement projects since wood prices experienced a substantial correction, according to Justin Jalbert, a senior economist for Fastmarkets.

The Editor says...
I don't often buy lumber, but I do know that the price of Diet Coke (at Wal-Mart) has gone up 60 percent since Biden took over.

"Shortages" Aren't Causing Inflation.  Money Creation Is.  For central bankers and mainstream analysts the recent inflation outburst is only a transitory phenomenon which has nothing or very little to do with the massive monetary and fiscal stimuli unleashed during the pandemic.  Although the Fed has recently conceded that price pressures are persisting longer than expected, the surge of inflation is allegedly due to supply bottlenecks caused by the pandemic.  This superficial diagnosis serves as a convenient excuse for politicians to keep in place damaging growth stimuli and draconian public health measures.  Mainstream economists define inflation as an increase in consumer prices which occurs when the growth of money supply outpaces economic growth.  In other words, too much money is chasing too few goods.  If the recent surge in inflation were driven by a shortage of goods rather than an increase in the money supply, then aggregate output would be shrinking.  But this is not the case, because global economic output is projected by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to grow by 5.7 percent in 2021 after having dropped by 3.4 percent in 2020.

Who is Really Running the Destroy-America Biden Regime?  In less time than a normal human pregnancy, putative president Biden managed to accomplish the following:
  •   Crashed our booming economy,
  •   Destroyed our energy independence,
  •   Opened our southern border to hundreds of thousands of illegals — many of them diseased, drug- and sex-traffickers, career criminals, jihadists, et al,
  •   Accelerated Iran's production of nukes,
  •   Promised the disaster of hyperinflation,
  •   Expressed "great confidence in" the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, after the General [...] conspired with China against President Trump and told military officials not to take orders from him.
  •   Orchestrated the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan — another Milley debacle — leaving behind, to this day, hundreds of stranded Americans and Afghan allies, billions of dollars of U.S. armaments and Black Hawk helicopters and airplanes, massive troves of the rare-earth mineral lithium ("the new oil," as Dave Hodges reports), as well as Taliban-Isis-Al Qaeda terrorists in charge, and 13 heroic but dead U.S. service members.
[...] We also have:
  •   Draconian mandates in cities like New York and other blue states that prevent people from entering restaurants, theaters, gyms, et al, without proof of having had a Covid jab,
  •   Dire threats that all benefits to Marines (and other military, including Navy SEALS, will be revoked if they decline the Covid jabs.
  •   Actual life-threatening shortages of nurses, doctors, and other hospital personnel — as well as first responders — who refuse the experimental vaccine.
  •   Threats to police forces that guarantee a horrific rise in crime.
  •   Mandatory Covid jabs for travelers on all domestic airline flights in the U.S., already enacted by several major U.S. airlines.
  •   And here's the kicker:  NO requirements for illegal immigrants to get tested or receive the vaccine!
  •   Then there are the parents who revile the toxic, far-left, so-called "woke" propaganda being crammed down their children's throats being labeled "domestic terrorists" — the idea of Attorney General Merrick Garland, who forgot to mention that his son-in-law makes millions selling those toxic materials.

Smaller Products, Rising Prices:  Shrinkflation Hitting Grocery Store Shelves.  Shrinking products and rising prices.  From cereal to soap, paper towels to pretzels, you might have noticed you're not getting as much as you used to at the grocery store.  Consumer blogs pointed WCCO to products like oatmeal packets of 10 cut to eight for some varieties, tuna cans from seven to five ounces, and some family size cereals slimming down from 19.3 ounces to 18.8 ounces, all evidence of what's known as shrinkflation.

Real cost of inflation to average American household:  An extra $175 a month.  Over the past couple of months, Allison, a wife and mother of a toddler and teenager in Chicago, says she's been spending about $50 more each week on groceries to feed her family — and that's at a discount supermarket chain, Aldi's.  "I used to spend $70 a week, but all of sudden this summer, I noticed that I couldn't leave the store without spending at least $120," said Allison, who works in education.  Like millions of Americans whose income has not kept pace with inflation — up 5.3 percent in August compared with a year ago — Allison and her family are feeling the pinch of the rising cost of living and giving up some things just to make ends meet.

Trump Is Not the Cause of the Crimes Threatening America.  The Biden Administration is crumbling the more the Bidenization of America advances.  The country is plunging into disillusioned alarm amid rising rates of inflation and violent crime, an oceanic tide of illegal and unskilled immigration, incomprehensible flailing over COVID, and horrifying foreign policy disasters. [...] The Democratic leaders in the Congress today are also reckless and often unethical, and the senior officer corps is politicized, incompetent, and routinely take liberties for which they should be court martialed. [...] As the full horror of Bidenization sinks in — the open southern border, skyrocketing rates of inflation and violent crime, and a foreign policy of cap-in-hand submission to America's enemies becomes clearer — there will be a resurrection of American national self-confidence.

Magnet! Joe Biden's $3.5 trillion bill hands cash to illegals worth more than per capita income of 74 countries.  Imagine you are a Honduran.  If you make the average Honduran per capita income of $2,405.70 a year, and suddenly learn from a relative up in el norte that Joe Biden is handing out $3,600 a year to anyone in the U.S., legally present or not, for nothing more than having kids, what would you do? [...] You'd weigh your options, and decide what your best ones were.  One, you could be breaking your back to earn the $2,405.70 a year back in Tegucigalpa, assuming you were earning the average (and at least half the country earns less).  Or two, you could go to the states illegally, get a federal tax I.D. and the $3,600 would be yours.  And as a bonus, you'd qualify it the minute you broke into the country illegally, and you wouldn't have to lift a finger to work for it.  All you'd have to do is bring the kids.  You'd also be get free health care, free education, other cash benefits for the kids, and this doesn't even include the benefits handed out by states such as California, such as free housing and cash transfers.  You'd also free to earn more if you wanted, legally or illegally, since under Biden, there'd be no possibility of deportation once you break in.  What would you do?

Consumers facing high energy costs as winter quickly approaches.  Homeowners in the United States might be in for a costly winter.  Oil and natural gas prices continue to climb higher as supply struggles to keep up with demand, which will only increase as the temperatures begin to drop across the country and heaters begin to be switched on in houses.  The price of natural gas used to heat homes across the country and produce electricity has skyrocketed over the past year, growing by about 180%.  The oil price has also significantly risen, with the cost of crude more than doubling since this time last year.  As September comes to a close and fall gets into full swing, many consumers will start to feel the pinch.

The Editor says...
Shutting off pipelines to appease the environmentalists is a short-sighted action with real-world consequences.

Defunding Disaster:  Austin Police no longer to responding to 'non-life threatening' 911 calls.  Starting Friday [10/1/2021], Austin's sworn police officers will no longer be responding in person to non-emergency calls because of severe staffing shortages, APD announced.  The announcement comes after the Harris County Sheriff's Deputies Organization in Houston warned residents that if they were "robbed, raped or shot" to "hold their breath and pray" because they might not have the personnel to respond.  The Austin no-response announcement includes vehicle collisions with no injuries and burglaries no longer in progress or where the suspect has fled the scene.  Instead of calling 911, residents are being told to call 311 to file a non-emergency police report.

Key Inflation Measure Soars to 30-Year High.  The Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge, the core personal consumption expenditures price index, which excludes food and energy costs, soared to a 30-year high in August.  The measure increased 0.3 percent for the month and was up 3.6 percent from last year in its steepest climb since May 1991, a trend suggesting that the pandemic's inflationary pressures, catalyzed by massive government spending, supply chain bottlenecks and surging demand, are not correcting as quickly as some economists anticipated.

Austin City Council member sounds alarm on 'disastrous consequences' of defunding police.  The Austin Police Department announced it will no longer respond to calls for "non-emergencies" after a cut to the police budget in 2020 led to staffing shortages.  Mackenzie Kelly, an Austin City Council member, said the decision to defund the police has led to "disastrous consequences" in the city.  The Austin City Council voted in August 2020 to cut up to $150 million — roughly 34% — from the police budget.  By the end of July, Austin reported that the number of homicides in 2021 had already matched the total homicides in all of 2020.  "A lot of what we're seeing happening starting today is coming home to roost from that decision," Kelly said.  "And it's disastrous."

More Evidence That Defunding Police Wasn't a Good Idea.  The surge in violent crime over the past year — murders in particular — has been astounding and historic.  The numbers back this up and paint a grim picture.  Property crime is generally down, but violent crime is way, way up.  The murder rate rose by nearly 30% in 2020, more than any other time in the last half-century.  This is according to recently released statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its annual report on crime.  The report shows that there were 4,901 more murders committed in 2020 than in 2019.  It's the largest single-year increase — by a wide margin — in murder rate since the FBI began compiling these statistics in 1960.

Biden Democrats have declared war on American small businesses.  Thousands of America's small businesses are teetering on the edge of permanent closure, and Democrats in Washington are about to give them one final shove.  The result will be the further fraying of our social fabric and the permanent loss of working-class jobs.  Over the last several months, small businesses persevered the best they could, holding on until "temporary" welfare programs driving people away from work expired.  But if there were any doubt left that Dems' ultimate goal wasn't a temporary boost to Americans most impacted by lockdowns, but rather a calculated step toward government control and socialism, their proposed $4.3 trillion tax-and-spend bill removes it all.  Walk down any main street or city avenue in America today, and you will see sign after sign with help-wanted pleas, hiring incentives or apologies in advance for shortened hours and delayed service due to staff shortages.  There are nearly 11 million job openings nationwide, and our small businesses are trying to get back on their feet after the crushing lockdowns.

Brazen Shoplifters Rob Chicago Department Store In Broad Daylight.  This is the new trend in all progressive cities now.  Cities that have decriminalized most 'soft' crimes such as shoplifting.  Watch as these two shoplifters fill bags with expensive perfumes in broad daylight and leave while people film.  This was at the Ulta in Norridge at 4115 N Harlem near the 16th district in Chicago.  [Video clip]

Shoplifters casually rob California Marshalls as people watch, employees do not report crime.  Multiple shoplifters in California were seen brazenly stealing from a Marshalls location as the crime continues in the state.  "People shopping there were just kind of standing there watching.  The only thing I figured I could do was get their identities and their license plates and give them to somebody who will do something with them," witness Lindsey Rodriguez, a resident of Hemet who recorded the suspects, told NBC4.  Rodriguez said she saw one man stroll out of the store with his arms full of clothing on Saturday evening [9/25/2021] in Hemet, and said one woman used wire cutters to sever security tags on expensive purses.

Liberal Parents Raise Young Child Without A Gender, Make HIM Wear Girl Clothes, Play With Girl Toys.  This is Zoomer.  Zoomer was born a boy.  How do we know?  Because he was born a boy, that's how.  Zoomer was also born with two liberal leeches attached to him.  These liberals were Zoomer's parents and refused to acknowledge Zoomer's born gender identity and instead called HIM they and them.  They also made Zoomer play with both boy and girl toys as well as wear dresses and male clothing, just in case Zoomer was a born drag queen or something.  At age 4, Zoomer figured out he was a boy and this was a big moment for his not-so-bright parents.  [Video clip]

The Editor says...
Luke 17:2

Stolen Elections Have Consequences.  Progressives seem completely committed to the Cloward-Piven strategy, even those who have no idea what it is.  So here we are, stuck in the midst of a government induced labor shortage.  A completely man-made crisis either by design or stupidity or a lethal combination of the two.  Fast food joints can't hire burger flippers and fry droppers even at $16/hour, never mind the truly vital jobs of dock workers and long-haul truckers.  And still, Joey is "losing patience" with you dolts who refuse to get jabbed so he's going to mandate that you do if you want to keep your job.  That should help everything.  The evil geniuses in charge are starting to look less genius and a great deal more evil.  They have no idea how to turn things around much less fix what they broke.

Climate change panic is the next big thing (again).  Biden's woke trail of destruction is difficult to dismiss.  Our nation has strived for energy independence for decades.  We finally accomplished that goal during the Trump years only to watch it all be flushed away in Biden's first month in office, along with tens of thousands of high-paying American jobs.  Biden then moved on to the border where he reversed most Trump-era policies, threw out American laws, and started the open border crisis we're witnessing today.  Hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens have already been relocated to various places around the country. [...] Next, there is COVID, which sees the left whipping the American people into submission for a disease that is highly lethal only to the very elderly with multiple comorbidities.  The rest of the population suffers, to various degrees, on a par with the seasonal flu. [...] They've now initiated a new form of illegal, despicable, and useless discrimination based on vaccination status.  All of it is unconstitutional.

We're coming up on the bad part of the 'cycle of democracy'.  As we witness tens of thousands of illegal aliens bum-rushing our southern border, we should be acutely aware that a quid pro quo is in the making — aliens expect the grab-bag of goodies (largess), and Democrats expect future support for their electoral endeavors.  Leftism is vile.  It is premised on power and control, disguised as compassion.  Leftists' ideas always bring decline and despair.  Their path to utopia is through your dystopia.  We see it with climate change; inflation; immigration; foreign affairs; voting rights; abortion; race, sex, and class division; and ultimately Marxism.  Their ideas range from bad to horrible.

Disturbing photos show rampant drug use in broad daylight among the homeless around Penn Station as crime spikes 41%.  Disturbing photos show homeless people in New York City's storied Garment District near Penn Station shooting up and dealing drugs in broad daylight as the crime in the area has spiked 41 percent since last year.  Homelessness in the area has been a years-long issue but has become more rampant in recent months, with people not even trying to hide their drug use.  Photos taken by DailyMail.com show one man with what appears to be drug paraphernalia in his hand, and another slumped over in a wheelchair.

Every Tragedy Caused by Government Is Done with the Best of Intentions.  President Johnson's "war on poverty" caused more poverty, deepened the dependence upon government welfare of those most economically vulnerable, and initiated a collapse in marriage rates and two-parent families that continues to this day.

What a lovely city.
'City of the Walking Dead:' Junkies shoot up in broad daylight in Midtown.  The outgoing de Blasio administration appears unwilling or unable to address the crisis, as the quality-of-life disaster unfolds just steps from high-profile Midtown landmarks such as Macy's, Madison Square Garden and the sparkling new Moynihan Train Hall.  The block bordered by 35th and 36th streets, and Seventh and Eighth Avenues, is "littered with used needles, broken glass crack pipes, trash, urine, and feces" as junkies shoot up and dealers brazenly sell drugs, lamented one neighbor on social media.  "I've personally seen dozens of deals go down.  I've seen a person OD and nearly die."  During a single walk around the block last week, The Post witnessed three different people injecting needles in their wrists or fingers in the middle of the afternoon.  Each addict sat on the sidewalk or in empty storefronts.  Dozens of other junkies sat or lay nearly comatose, many of the men shirtless, on the same block.

Leftists force mass Third World immigration by deceiving us into feeling guilty.  Instead of a "melting pot" culture based on careful assimilation, we are deliberately creating a "tribal pot" of diverse and warring identity groups.  And to get the majority to go along with such a scheme, those constructing their own reality just invent history out of whole cloth — and teach it to the non-thinking — that creates guilt trips in the majority.  This begins in preschool so that, by the end of the day, the self-loathing is so elevated that the white majority is thankful they have been replaced.

Civilization requires deterrence.  The current crime wave of murder and violent assault in our major cities is the wage of loud efforts to defund the police and contextualize crimes as somehow society's rather than the criminal's fault.  As a result, lawbreakers now believe there is a good chance that robbing people or hurting or killing them might result in monetary gain or at least bloody satisfaction.  They no longer fear a likely sentence of 30 years in prison.  So, they see little risk in hurting people.  And innocents suffer.

National Sabotage by Immigration.  Beneath the surface of Biden's genial Uncle Joe schtick is an executive branch controlled by some of the most dogmatic left-wing apparatchiks ever seen in American politics.  Among their witch's brew of radical ideas, they have seized upon immigration as one of the quickest and most effective ways to transform the country to their vision.  It is becoming increasingly difficult to give this administration the benefit of the doubt on anything.  That became nearly impossible after independent journalist John Solomon broke the news of a letter from recently departed Border Patrol chief Rodney Scott to Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate and its homeland security and governmental affairs committee.  In his letter, Scott described a culture in the current administration where inexperienced political appointees routinely ignore or reject common-sense recommendations from career immigration enforcement professionals.

'Wrong Way' Biden Flies The Nation Into Yet Another Crisis.  If President Joe Biden's navigating skills were any good, the southern border would be calm, inflation under control, every American safely out of Afghanistan, and COVID defeated.  Instead, we are left to wonder how it is that his sense of direction can be so fabulously wrong. [...] In May, he said that the "experts" he talked to "do not see signs of persistent dislocation or long-term inflation."  In July, he said that "our experts believe and the data show that most of the price increases we've seen were expected and are expected to be temporary.  The reality is you can't flip the global economics light back and not expect this to happen."  Look at the chart [at left] and see just how wrong Biden's heading has been.  Inflation has remained unusually high, even as the months stretch on and the alleged transitory effects should have long since passed.

The Looming Economic Bubble.  There has been considerable discussion in the past couple of months about the rate of inflation in the United States, and polls now show that 85 percent of Americans are concerned about inflation.  This is a demonstration once again of the wisdom of the average person.  While the United States, and to a lesser extent the West generally, is being subjected to a variety of threats and disappointments, and there is a natural aversion to highlighting additional negative developments that could be looming, it would be comforting if we heard anything from the secretary of the Treasury or the chairman of the Federal Reserve about the current apparition of a gigantic financial bubble over the United States.  In the past year, the United States has had a money supply increase of 25 percent, an unprecedented event.  What was originally billed as slight and self-correcting inflation increases are now gathering into a continuing and growing storm cloud, only thinly disguised by the unrepresentative composition of the official consumer price index.  Year over year, hourly pay scales have risen by 7.5 percent, new cars cost 10 percent more, used cars and new homes are 20 percent more expensive, and rental accommodations are 12 percent more costly.  These increases all fall short of the money supply increase, and they all appear to be stoking up rather than settling down.

What's Behind Runaway Inflation?  The Federal Reserve and Congress both created this excess aggregate demand situation.  Fed leaders have poured over $4 trillion into the U.S. economy since February 2020.  Congress has been busy shoveling over $5 trillion dollars out the U.S. Treasury door to nearly all households and many businesses since the March 2020 shutdown.  The result is a hot U.S. economy, and the out-of-control Fed continues their QE purchases of $120 billion of securities each month into an already pricey equity market amid widespread inflation pressures.  Apparently "woke" Fed leaders think a faster rate of inflation will draw more lower-skilled people into the labor force.  That nonsensical concept was pushed into the ditch in the 1960s and 1970s.

Biden Administration Warns States Federal Debt Crisis Could Trigger Recession.  The Biden administration has issued a warning that the pending federal debt crisis might trigger an economic recession that would affect economic growth and trigger job losses across the United States.  "Hitting the debt ceiling could cause a recession.  Economic growth would falter, unemployment would rise, and the labor market could lose millions of jobs," the White House said in a letter to state and local governments that was released Sept. 17.  Arguing that Congress needs to raise or suspend the U.S. debt ceiling, the administration said the debt crisis may affect the country's recovery after the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic.  In July, Congress missed its deadline to suspend or raise the debt limit, prompting several recent warnings from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen that her agency will exhaust its cash reserves.

The Left seeks to remove any and all controls on asylum.  One might assume that even the most radical fringes of the American Left would be fairly content about the state of things in this country today, particularly on immigration.  After all, the Biden administration has given them pretty much everything they wanted to erode our borders and the rule of law.  Any such assumption would be incorrect, as anti-borders forces are pushing like never before for even more extremist policies to transform this country into a place most people would not recognize or desire to live.  The most recent example of this is took place in the U.S. District Court of Southern California.  An Obama-appointed judge ruled that the government's "metering" policy of turning back asylum-seekers to points of entry in Mexico to be unconstitutional.  While this may sound like another garden-variety immigration case in federal court, it represents a sharp detour from both policy and the government's approach to immigration.

A pandemic of the incompetent, not the unvaccinated.  First, the CDC and NIH watched the virus ravage China and did nothing.  Next, they told President Trump that it was xenophobic to stop travel from China.  Next, they told us the virus was not transmitting human to human.  Next, they changed, without reasoning, the reporting requirements for potential deaths associated with the virus to guarantee a higher death total in the U.S.  Next, they misrepresented the data for the projected death toll in America with a completely incorrect model.  Next, they told us to shut down the country for two weeks to slow the spread.  Next, they told us a vaccine in less than a year was impossible.  Next, they pushed mask mandates with no science to back them up. [...] Next, they supported crazy items like mandatory masking outdoors, no swimming in public pools, and wearing a mask in your own home.  Next, they continued to keep businesses closed past the two-month mark, and they fail to provide evidence that closing any business helped slow the spread.  Next, they started paying people extra unemployment benefits while removing all incentives to look for work.

The Greatest Existential Threat to America.  Our Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin — a leader who presided over the worst, most incompetent, most [humiliating] military defeat in the history of our nation — is black.  Of course, he's black.  He was appointed by Biden to display the wonderful diversity of the most progressive president in history.  He wasn't chosen because he was a brilliant military leader (obviously).  He was chosen because he was a political hack ready and willing to embrace even the most suicidal left-wing policies.  (Note:  Left-wing policies are by their very nature suicidal because the defining characteristic of the left is that it hates America and wants to "dismantle" it and replace it with the left-wing fantasy of a socially just future.)  In February 2021 — with the deadline for withdrawal in Afghanistan a bare three months away — General Austin was not ordering a military alert to prepare for what was going to be a major humanitarian and military reckoning.  Instead, he was ordering a military "stand down" to indoctrinate all America's troops in Black Lives Matter hate white people and hate America propaganda.

Crime soars in Minneapolis as cops fear being unfairly targeted in woke viral videos.  Proactive policing in Minneapolis plunged dramatically following the murder of George Floyd last year, even as violent crime soared, a new analysis reveals as the city prepares to vote on a ballot initiative to abolish the police department.  In the year following Floyd's death, traffic stops in Minneapolis plunged 74 percent, patrols of known problem areas were down 76 percent, and stops of suspicious people plunged 75 percent, according to a Reuters investigation.  Confidential police sources said that part of the slowdown was due to a staffing shortage amid an exodus from the department, but that much of the reduction in policing was due to a fear of being caught up in an incident that could go viral in a climate of anti-cop sentiment.

American Consumers Believe Inflation Is Here to Stay, NY Fed Survey Finds.  A survey by the New York Federal Reserve released on Monday shows that American households expect the recent spike in inflation won't go away anytime soon, despite the Biden administration's continued insistence that the surge in consumer prices will be fleeting.  The median expectation for the inflation rate over the next year increased to 5.2 percent in August, the New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations found.  That level is the highest median expected inflation rate recorded since surveys began in 2013.  Respondents also said they expected inflation to be up by 4 percent in three years.

Hospital to stop delivering babies as maternity workers resign over vaccine mandate.  Lewis County General Hospital will stop delivering babies after September 24 because too many maternity unit workers have resigned over COVID vaccination mandates.  That's according to Lewis County Health System Chief Executive Officer Gerald Cayer, who held a news conference Friday in Lowville.  He said 6 employees in the maternity unit resigned rather than get a COVID shot and another 7 are undecided.

Grocery prices could rise another 3% before the end of year, Kroger warns.  Grocery prices will rise by another three percent before the end of the year, according to one of America's biggest supermarkets.  Cincinnati-based Kroger generated $132 billion in sales last year, but the company said inflation is running longer than management previously anticipated, altering their expectations for prices.  Bosses now say they predict prices will rise 2 to 3 percent over the second half of this year.

The Years We Wasted.  The war is lost, at home and abroad.  On the domestic front, we doubled the rate of Muslim immigration to the west and began assimilating ourselves with Islam's strictures on freedom of expression and the like. [...] In the broader society, our rulers quickly determined that it was easier to punish us than our enemies.  The post-9/11 security state surely helped soften up western populations for the Chi-Com-19 lockdowns, in which entire nations have been reduced to TSA-administered airports.  As for the war overseas, it ended with a military that can do everything except win handing the keys to Afghanistan back to the guys who pulled off 9/11 — and apologizing for the two-decade inconvenience by gifting the mullahs with some of the most expensive infrastructure on the planet plus an air force, approximately five assault rifles for every Taliban fighter, and express check-in for the forty-seven per cent of the Afghan population that apparently served as US translators.  The position of the United States is far weaker than it was twenty years ago.  Around the planet, the assumption of friends and enemies alike is that the American moment is over and the future belongs elsewhere.

An ENTIRE police department in Missouri just resigned.  The Hill reports the entire police department of Kimberling, Missouri, has resigned "without immediate authority" to replace them.  Police Chief Craig Alexander resigned on Aug. 23.  After that, the floodgates opened.  The rest of the officers started resigning until there were none left.

US producer prices jump an unprecedented 8.3% in August.  Inflation at the wholesale level climbed 8.3% last month from August 2020, the biggest annual gain since the Labor Department started calculating the 12-month number in 2010.  The Labor Department reported Friday that its producer price index — which measures inflationary pressures before they reach consumers — rose 0.7% last month from July after increasing 1% in both June and July.

Producer inflation accelerated in August, as wholesale prices rose record 8.3% from a year ago.  Prices that producers get for final demand goods and services surged in August at their highest annual rate since at least 2010, the Labor Department reported Friday [9/10/2021].  The producer price index rose 0.7% for the month, above the 0.6% Dow Jones estimate, though below the 1% increase in July.  On a year-over-year basis, the gauge rose 8.3%, which is the biggest annual increase since records have been kept going back to November 2010.  That came following a 7.8% move higher in July, which also set a record.  The data comes amid heightened inflation fears fed by supply chain issues, a shortage of various consumer and producer goods and heightened demand related to the Covid-19 pandemic.  Federal Reserve officials expect inflationary pressures to ease through the year, but they have remained stubbornly persistent, with Friday's numbers indicating that the trend likely will continue.

Republicans tear into Biden administration's plans to crack down on beef, poultry and pork to combat rising grocery prices.  Republicans are ripping the Biden administration on Thursday [9/9/2021] over its plan to crack down on big meatpacking companies and for blaming a sharp increase in grocery prices under President Biden's watch on beef, pork and poultry.  It comes after the Biden administration announced plans to take a tougher stance toward meatpacking companies it says are causing sticker shock at grocery stores.  Four companies control much of the US meat processing market, and White House officials blamed those companies for rising food prices.

Joe Biden Is a Total Failure.  The shortfall of 500,000 in the expected net new job figures for August shows that stagflation is upon us: employers are afraid to hire employees as they normally would coming out of the COVID recession because they don't know if they will be able to afford them.  Hourly pay scales are increasing at 7.5 percent, new car prices at 10 percent, rental accommodation at 12 percent, and new homes at 20 percent, all well ahead of the official rate of inflation, contrary to the smug assurances of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and even some Federal Reserve spokespeople, that inflation was a mere bubble.  Historically, the only sustainable way of fighting stagflation has been to counter inflation with increased supply and achieve that goal and the corresponding non-inflationary increase in demand through the encouragement of demand in the tax system.  The present administration is committed to raising taxes and to colossal spending increases, which will exacerbate both stagnation and inflation.

The glaring truth about Biden and his masters.  Joe Biden, the so-called president, is nothing more than a marionette controlled by a gaggle of career bureaucrats and academics, none of whom has ever contributed anything substantial to our once vibrant society.  Indeed, they are nothing more than destroyers, power-mad ideologues who use a demented old grifter as a mouthpiece while they dismantle, piece by piece, our once great Republic.  Globalism is their ultimate goal, and the nightmare we're experiencing brings us ever closer to that frightening reality.  Biden is a figurehead for the Marxist madness that's corrupting our schools, destroying small business, and slowly but surely eliminating our nation's sovereignty.  The current push to force Americans to "register" their firearms under a United Nations gun-grabbing scheme is just one example of the ongoing attack on our cherished freedoms.  Another glaring example is the fascist collaboration between the ruling elites and Big Tech to silence dissent, a clear violation of the First Amendment.  If the Marxist drive continues, it will go on and on until the Bill of Rights is little more than a footnote in a long forgotten history.

Kamala Harris has blood on her hands.  Not in connection with Afghanistan — I doubt that she has had any influence on events there — but as a result of her support for violent crime in Minnesota.  In the wake of the George Floyd riots, Harris contributed to the Minnesota Freedom Fund and encouraged others to do so as well.  She did so on the pretext that the Freedom Fund was bailing out "demonstrators" arrested in Minnesota, but of course no one was arrested for demonstrating.  Those bailed out were arsonists, aggravated assaulters and other serious criminals.  Moreover, the Minnesota Freedom Fund didn't restrict itself to bailing out those arrested in the summer of 2020.  Rather, its efforts to inflict violent crime on Minnesotans have continued to the present day.  Last Sunday, an innocent man was murdered by a criminal who had been charged with domestic assault but was sprung by Kamala Harris's Minnesota Freedom Fund just days earlier.

As US Schools Prioritize Diversity Over Merit, China Is Becoming the World's STEM Leader.  The United States has been dominant in the mathematical sciences since the mass exodus of European scientists in the 1930s.  Because mathematics is the basis of science — as well as virtually all major technological advances, including scientific computing, climate modelling, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and robotics — US leadership in math has supplied our country with an enormous strategic advantage.  But for various reasons, three of which we set out below, the United States is now at risk of losing that dominant position.  First, and most obvious, is the deplorable state of our K-12 math education system.  Far too few American public-school children are prepared for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).  This leaves us increasingly dependent on a constant inflow of foreign talent, especially from mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and India.  In a 2015 survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board, about 55 percent of all participating graduate students in mathematics, computer sciences, and engineering at US schools were found to be foreign nationals.  In 2017, the National Foundation for American Policy estimated that international students accounted for 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical engineering at U.S. universities; and 79 percent of full-time graduate students in computer science.  That report also concluded that many programs in these fields couldn't even be maintained without international students.

The Masked Ball of Cowardice.  [Scroll down]  Likewise, in October 2020, the WHO's peer-reviewed bulletin showed COVID-19's overall IFR across all age groups to be about 0.23%.  John Ioannidis, the world's most-cited physician, believes the IFR (infection fatality rate) to be lower and published his own peer-reviewed study showing the overall IFR to be about 0.15%.  But in a poll conducted by the Menzies Research Centre, by June 2021 Australians on average estimated their chance of dying if they contracted the virus to be 38%, an overestimation of more than 160-fold.  For the public to be so egregiously misinformed about their actual risk from COVID-19 renders democratic accountability for lockdown measures impossible.  Even more so because, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which citizens judge the threat of COVID-19 is their own government's decision to employ drastic lockdown measures.  "We found that people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the government imposed a lockdown — in other words, they thought, 'it must be bad if government's taking such drastic measures.'  We also found that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they supported lockdown."  The policies thus create a feedback loop in which the measures themselves sow the fear that makes citizens to believe their risk of dying from COVID-19 is hundreds of times greater than it really is, which in turn causes them to support more lockdown measures.

The Federal Reserve Is the Monetary Equivalent of the Kabul Airport.  Speaking to the virtual Jackson Hole conference of the Federal Reserve System, Fed Chair Jerome Powell says that inflation will go away soon. [...] The Fed is the monetary equivalent of the Kabul airport.  After dumping $5 trillion of helicopter money into the U.S. economy and overstretching supply chains in almost every industry, the Fed is faced with the worst inflation since the Carter era.  And the worst is yet to come, [...].  The rent on a new lease has jumped 10% year-on-year according to the search site Zillow, but rent inflation according to the government is just 2%.  That's because it takes a year or two for leases to expire and the new, higher rents to kick in.  A huge jump in inflation driven by higher rents is baked into the cake for 2022.  That's the elephant in the parlor, and Powell didn't mention it.

US rent hikes will explode consumer inflation in 2022.  How come the shelter component of the US Consumer Price Index is rising at just 2% a year while all the private-sector gauges of rent inflation show rent hikes of close to 10%?  Shown in the Chart of the Day [left] is a comparison of the Zillow Rent Index with the Consumer Price Index rent component.  Shelter is two-fifths of the total index, so the question of whether inflation is "transitory" or not depends on rents.  This question has a simple answer:  It takes the Bureau of Labor Statistics about a year to catch up with rent inflation.  What the government reported as rent inflation in July reflects the economy of a year ago and more.  That's because renters' leases take a year or two to expire.  The Zillow, Apartmentlist.com and CoreLogic reports reflect the average rent on a new lease, not the rent on leases signed in the past.  As old leases expire and renters have to pay the higher market rate, rent inflation will surge.

Key Inflation Gauge Posts Fastest Annual Price Gain in 30 Years.  The Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge, the so-called core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, vaulted in the 12 months through July to levels not seen in 30 years.  The Commerce Department said in a release Friday that core PCE rose 3.6 percent over the year in July, matching last month's level, which was an increase from 3.5 percent in May and 3.1 percent in April.  The last time the core PCE inflation gauge saw a similar year-over-year vault was in July 1991, while the highest level the measure has hit is 10.2 percent in February 1975, when the economy was gripped in a troubling upwards wage-price spiral fueled by rising inflation expectations on the part of consumers.  The Fed looks to core PCE as a key inflation measure that informs its monetary policy, which has an inflation target of a longer-run average of 2 percent.

America Is Now Actually the Mess Dems Pretended It Was Under Trump.  Long before Donald Trump even had the chance to take office, we were constantly assured by Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media that the United States as we knew it was pretty much toast.  It began on election night 2016.  I stayed up until about six in the morning on the west coast watching both CNN and MSNBC (one on my television and one on my phone) melting down over Trump's victory.  In no uncertain terms, the talking heads at each network repeated the dire warning that a Trump victory meant certain doom for the American stock market.  It was the first of about a million things they got wrong.  Trump's economy was humming along in overdrive until the Wuhan lab let the bat go free.  Objectively, the first three years of the Trump era were [very] good ones for the republic.  Unfortunately, American Democrats all live on a subjective moon that orbits a navel-gazing planet.  Rather than just sit back and enjoy all of the peace and prosperity that President Trump helped bring about, all they could do was rend their garments over the fact that he had dared to defeat the least likable presidential candidate in history fairly and squarely.

The Drossy Touch of Joe Biden.  Almost everything Joe Biden has touched since entering office has turned to dross.  None of his blame-gaming, none of his distortions, none of his fantasies and unreality can mask that truth. [...] In January, Biden inherited a rebounding economy that was fueled by $1 trillion in stimulatory federal red ink.  Given natural pent-up consumer demand, why did Biden need to print yet another $1 trillion, seek to green-light another $2 trillion for "infrastructure," and raise even higher unemployment compensation to the point of discouraging employees from returning to work?  At the same time, he has alarmed employers with braggadocio threats that higher capital gains, income, payroll, and estate taxes are all on the way.  More lockdowns only further eroded small businesses.  The result was price inflation of all the stuff of life — homes, lumber, gas, food, appliances — as well as historic shortages of everything from cars and houses to the work of contractors and electricians.

Everything Is Not All Right.  Currently, the situation at our southern border is a nightmare with record numbers of migrants overwhelming infrastructure and bringing new variants of COVID along with cartels smuggling drugs and human capital across.  The current administration seems to have no response, and what's more, no concern.  The swift deterioration of conditions and withdrawal in Afghanistan has enabled U.S. persons, weapons, and intelligence to fall into the hands of the Taliban, undoing 20 years of stalemate in a month's time.  The push for COVID vaccines and rejection of natural immunity is driving a record silent super-spreader event across the country.  Inflation is running rampant as supply shortages are met with an overabundance of stimulus dollars injected into the bank accounts of American taxpayers.  Just eighteen months ago we touted energy independence, and now the Biden Administration is begging OPEC to make up for artificial shortfalls in supply that are driving exorbitant fuel prices.  Meanwhile, local school boards, government agencies, and corporations continue to double down on racist and divisive social policy designed to drive a wedge down the spine of society.  This is not business as usual.

A Call to Action.  [Scroll down]  Independents and moderates don't like this any more than we do.  They understand that Democrats destabilize our democracy when they flout the law, disregard the Constitution, or defund the police.  They see the hypocrisy in opening the border with no restrictions for COVID, criminality, or skills, yet closing it to Cubans or Afghans escaping real persecution.  They fear being silenced by the Army of the Woke or petty authoritarians using COVID to curtail their freedoms.  They're revolted by demands to end racism with racism and nullify all of education and history, achievement and progress in the name of white supremacy and privilege.  They justifiably recoil when activists co-opt their children's mental health with fanciful notions that something humankind has always taken for granted, is a choice along an ever-changing gender continuum.

We've come a long way baby.  From the Obama-Biden Peter Principle presidential ticket which delivered a commie leader and his feckless sidekick, determined to fundamentally transform America.  That woke enough people up to give us President Trump for 4 years.  But as he was too dangerous to the deep state's agenda he had to go.  So *censor me if you can find me* they rigged the election and fraudulently delivered the election to the selected team of Biden/Harris, arguably the two stupidest American leaders ever "elected." [...] So now come the consequences of the fraudulent election:
  •   Out of control inflation
  •   Out of control spending
  •   Out of control crime
  •   Out of control illegal alien invasion/child trafficking
  •   Crippled American energy independence
  •   Iran is back!
  •   The pandemic is back!
  •   Our foreign policy is a shambles.

Are We in a Revolution and Don't Even Know It?  The collective madness that ensued from the pandemic, the quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd killing and subsequent months of exempted riots, the election year, and the resurgence of variants of the Chinese-engineered coronavirus, all ignited the fuse of formerly inert socialist dynamite.  And the ensuing explosion of revolutionary fervor in just a few months has made America almost unrecognizable. [...] Inflation and the devaluation of the currency are now seemingly a good thing; printing dollars erodes the savings of the thrifty and money spreads to those who allegedly need and deserve it.  Note we owe nearly $30 trillion in national debt.  Yet as the Biden Administration runs a $2 trillion annual deficit, it pushes an "infrastructure" bill that will mean additionally somewhere between $2 to $4 trillion of more printed cash.

The Dystopia Of Progressivism.  Welcome to the new America — the United States of Dystopia:  open borders, massive increases in government, reckless spending, crushing debt, demonized and defunded police, coddled criminals, cancel culture, identity politics, censorship, and socialism.  America is becoming unhinged.  Who should we blame?  One immediate candidate is the progressive wing of the Democrat Party, which now controls the beltway bureaucracy, the White House, most of Congress, and the mayors and councils of our urban ghettos. [...] And now the progressives want to change America by opening borders, defunding police, emptying jails, increasing debt, suppressing speech, and revising history.  Already, too many potential Democrats are crossing the border, irrespective of COVID, trafficking and, the fentanyl accompanying them.  But Cubans, unlike Central Americans, are not welcome since they tend to vote Republican.  Our cities burn and innocent citizens are shot, but the police who serve and protect must be demonized and jails emptied, because disorder is preferable to order whose maintenance is the first duty of sound government.  Suppressing speech is not progress.  Yet Leftists routinely defame their opponents as 'racist,' 'sexist,' 'misogynistic,' 'homophobic,' 'xenophobic,' 'fascist,' or 'deplorable,' using demagoguery reminiscent of Senator Joseph McCarthy to drown out speech with which they disagree.

How Did We Go From Energy Dominance To Energy Begging In Just 8 Months?  [U]nlike Jimmy Carter, who blundered his way into gasoline shortages, Biden is intentionally creating the current situation to pay homage to climate "crisis" environmentalists.  During his presidential campaign, Biden promised to "get rid of fossil fuels."  Since taking office, he's been busy trying to carry out that pledge.  One of the first things he did in office was to call a halt on oil and gas leases on federal lands and off our coastlines, and has yet to resume allowing them even after a federal judge ordered the administration to do so.  He shut down construction of the Keystone Pipeline.  He blocked energy development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  He directed federal agencies to "eliminate fossil fuel subsidies as consistent with applicable law."  He's promised to add some $90 billion to the industry's tax burden by eliminating what he calls tax "subsidies."

Our Military Is A Woke Joke.  Ignore those pictures of the Afghan army that our military senior leader geniuses spent 20 years and zillions of dollars on disintegrating in the face of a pack of glorified mountain banditos from the Seventh Century — the real story is that, finally, America's fighting men and women are fully aware of the urgency of accepting and validating the trans experience.  And it's even better if said trans people are BIPOC.  Plus differently abled. [...] Yes, it is a joke, a sick one.  Fire all the generals.  Invite a few back, maybe a dozen.  Clean out the Pentagon.  Can all the "Diversity Consultants," "Equal Opportunity Officers," "Climate Change Mitigation Specialists," and every other strap-hanging oxygen thief who doesn't contribute to the only thing the military should be focusing on right now — putting Chi Coms in graves.  Yeah, there's been a strategic failure of epic proportions by our civilian establishment.  We need to fix that at the ballot box by tossing out every Democrat and every Liz Cheney-esque combat tourist who delights in sending our young people overseas to get ground up in idiotic wars designed to enrich their cronies.  Hardest hit at the end of Afghanistan:  Haliburton, Raytheon, KBR, and a hundred other contractors you never heard of.

Is there anything less green than the left's beloved cannabis?  Marijuana is one of the least "green," most energy-intensive crops there is.  That is the dirty little secret that no "woke" groups or climate terrorists wish to acknowledge.  The recent surge in its acceptance, legality, and use, is, therefore, making it a rapidly growing source of greenhouse gases.  Since pot is grown mostly indoors and requires special lighting and environmental controls that consume up to 2,000 watts of electricity per square meter, it is responsible for inordinately high levels of energy consumption... like 40 times that needed to produce leafy greens such as lettuce. [...] A research report titled, "Energy Use by the Indoor Cannabis Industry:  Inconvenient Truths for Producers, Consumers, and Policymakers," introduces readers to the fact that the ever-growing pot-growing industry is already responsible for over 1% of all electricity consumption in the United States.  If true, that is a mind-blowing statistic.  Think about it.  Of all the myriad energy uses in existence, from air-conditioning and heating to televisions and refrigerators, to massive sports stadiums and concert halls, to 24-hour-a-day big-box grocery stores and downtown skyscrapers, to the military-industrial complex, etc., etc., growing pot uses one one-hundredth of all the electricity consumption in the U.S.?!!

An American apocalypse — why people of all classes, races are filled with fear.  [Scroll down]  The crime wave likewise is not accidental.  It is the logical result of deliberate nihilistic policies of releasing thousands of criminals from jails and prisons, defunding and defaming the police, and empowering woke mayors and prosecutors to contextualize crime as the fault of society, not of the criminal.  In response, millions of Americans now simply avoid the mayhem and chaos of blue-state big cities.  Race relations have regressed 50 years.  Under the fad of critical race theory, the color of our skins is now deemed essential to who we are.  Most Americans still integrate, assimilate, and intermarry.  But the current woke revolution is an elite, top-down effort to smear a self-critical and always improving nation, as some sort of contemporary racist hellhole.

Inflation keeps growing, but Dems won't stop spending.  President Joe Biden and Democrats keep telling Americans not to worry about inflation, that it's only temporary.  Yet the record price hikes keep getting worse.  On Thursday [8/12/2021], the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yet another jump, a full 1 percent, in the producer price index (which measures prices before they reach consumers) for the month of July.  Wholesale prices are now up 7.8 percent over the past year, the fastest annual surge since such record-keeping began in 2010.  On Wednesday, the BLS reported consumer prices rose 0.5 percent in July, or 5.4 percent over the past year — maintaining June's yearly pace, the largest in 13 years.  Biden actually bragged that it wasn't even higher, yet wages are up only 4 percent from a year ago, so Americans have lost ground.

Dear Media:  You got what you wanted and what you worked for.  Happy now?  Our despicable mainstream media did everything in its vast and coercive power to see Joe Biden elected president. [...] In seven months, Biden has pretty much destroyed America!  The open border has welcomed what will be a million migrants from around the world by the end of the year, many of them sick with a panoply of diseases long ago eradicated in America, and bringing in new variants of COVID.  While Americans are ordered to mask up and be vaxxed, these people arriving at our southern border, welcomed by the Biden regime that has tied the hands of ICE and the Border Patrol, are mask- and vax-free.  Eleven Democrat senators just voted against mandating that they be screened, tested, masked and vaxxed before being allowed in to roam about the country.  How's that for hypocrisy?  Biden is purposefully altering the demographics of the U.S. with the single-minded goal of making the Democrat party the ruling party in perpetuity.  He and his partners in crime care not a bit about the American people.  They care only about cementing their control over the 330 million citizens who call his nation our home.

Storm Clouds For Biden.  For the first time in quite a few years, prices for staple items are rising rapidly, and with the federal government borrowing and spending at a record pace that trend can only accelerate.  People aren't happy about it: this Fox News poll finds that 70 percent of respondents consider grocery and gasoline prices to be a hardship for their families, with 29 percent considering them a serious hardship.  Further, 79% say "the federal government's economic policies" are responsible for rising prices, with 49 percent considering them "very responsible."  To be fair, respondents also blame the coronavirus — not sure how that works — and "the regular ups and downs of the economy."  But as prices continue to rise over the next year, more and more fingers will be pointed at Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Reality Bites Biden's Policies.  The Democrats' idiotic anti-fossil fuel campaign took a hit this week when Biden begged the Saudis to up production after shutting down as much of domestic production as he could.  (Apparently, he believes that oil from the Middle East doesn't affect the climate as much as fossil fuel from Canada and the U.S. Or, if it does affect the climate by warming it, that's now a good thing.) Dane Bjorn Lomborg who, unlike AOC and Greta, knows what he's talking about, explains that more people (166,000 of them) each year die from cold than die from heat.  In like manner to Biden's begging OPEC for more oil, California's loony decarbonization program hit a snag as it is forced to rely on carbon fuels to prevent widespread blackouts.

Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine suggests 'chestfeeding,' 'father's milk' in new guidelines.  The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine has issued guidelines that suggest employing such terms as "chestfeeding," "human milk feeding," and "parent's milk" to promote what it calls "gender-inclusive language."  The ABM position statement on "infant feeding and lactation-related language and gender," co-authored by eight doctors and the academy, said that "the use of de-sexed or gender-inclusive language is appropriate in many settings."  "ABM recognizes that not all people who give birth and lactate identify as female, and that some of these individuals identify as neither female nor male," said the four-page document posted July 29.

The Editor says...
Do you really want to live in a world where there are no facts?

The Four Horsemen of the Biden Apocalypse.  Across America, our cities are on fire as crime is exploding.  An increasing number of innocent Americans are being victimized each day.  Incredibly, liberal politicians have used the opportunity to demand the defunding of police departments.  This has only increased the number of police officers resigning and retiring.  As a result, police departments are understaffed, and recruitment is becoming extremely difficult in urban areas that are viewed as being anti-police.  The answer, according to Biden and the Democrats, is always more gun control and never more criminal control.  Citizens are unsafe on the streets of our cities, and our children are unsafe in our public-school classrooms.

Producer Price Index Records Highest Inflation Rate in History Since Tracking Began.  The "producer price index" is essentially the tracking of wholesale prices at three stages:  Origination (commodity), Intermediate and Final.  The Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) released stunning price data showing a dramatic 7.8% price increase in Final Demand products at the wholesale level.  When you see the wholesale level of prices almost double the increase in consumer level inflation rate, you can predict that consumer prices will likely go even higher.  The future finished goods at a retail level will carry the current wholesale price increase.  Stuff costs a lot now, and stuff is about to cost even more pretty soon.  Food products are fast-turn consumable goods, and the inflation in the food sector is jaw-dropping already.  However, fresh and processed foods turn at different inventory levels.

American Armageddon.  Americans are growing angrier by the day in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or Tea Party furor of over a decade ago.  The rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives.  For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families' safety and the American way of life.  The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past.  It is nonexistent.  Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year — with complete impunity.  There is zero effort to stop them.  Officials daily hector Americans to get vaccinated and tested for COVID.  But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them infected with the virus.  Have we ever had a president who made no pretense about destroying federal immigration law and asking of Americans what he does not of illegal aliens?

Inflation Continues to Crush Middle Class, July Inflation 5.4 Percent, Milk 8 Percent, Energy 23 Percent, Gasoline 43 Percent.  The Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) releases the inflation numbers for July showing massive U.S. inflation continues to crush the working class.  Massive increases in domestic food staples (+10%), energy (+23%) and regular unleaded gasoline (+43%) are hitting the middle-class exceptionally hard.  No middle-class Americans are having their wages increase even close to the scale of price increases for basic purchases.  This outcome results in massive drops in "real wages" (wages minus inflation), and eliminates disposable income entirely.  These outcomes are not due to COVID-19 or any recovery therein.  These outcomes are a direct result of Joe Biden economic and monetary policy.  The White House responds to inflation by saying the Biden administration is attempting to directly subsidize the middle-class inflation they are creating by giving Americans money to pay for higher prices through COVID bailouts.  Yes, the administration admits they are exploding the dependency state.

Inflation remains at 13-year high at 5.4%, despite Biden insisting soaring prices are temporary.  A key measure of inflation remained unchanged in July from its June level, spurring fears that price increases will continue to hit Americans in the wallet.  Federal data released on Wednesday showed that for the 12 months through July, the consumer price index rose 5.4 percent, unchanged from June and at the highest level since the Great Recession in 2008.  On a monthly basis, consumer prices jumped 0.5 percent from June to July, down from the previous monthly increase of 0.9 percent.

For Six Months Biden Has Shut Down U.S. Oil Production, Today Biden Asks OPEC to Pump More Oil.  There's hypocrisy, there's double speak, there's stupid decisions based on politics, and then there's this level of Biden hypocrisy and stupidity that cannot be adequately encapsulated.  President Trump's energy production policy made the U.S.A. energy independent.  We were actually exporting oil and gas to other nations.  However, in the previous six months Joe Biden has:  (1) Shut down oil and energy development in ANWAR which would increase use of the Alaska pipeline[,]  (2) Blocked the Keystone Pipeline from completion[,]  (3) Banned energy development on federal lands[,]  (4) Shut down the sale of energy leases in the Gulf of Mexico[,] and (5) Blocked energy development in Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Alabama.  As a direct and immediate consequence, gas and fuel prices have skyrocketed.  The price of Unleaded Regular Gasoline is now up over 60% from 2020.

Too bad about those worker wage gains, Biden's inflation has already wolfed them down.  Joe Biden, who plays Mr. Everyman on TV, in real life has an amazing history of stiffing the little guy.  He touts a federal $15-an-hour minimum wage and raves about wage gains during his administration: [...] Biden's inflation ate them.  How exactly does that happen?  Simple:  It's government spending, with all the government debt that comes of it.  With Biden's monster $1.2-trillion infrastructure stimulus package in the works, and its even bigger $3.5-trillion "Bernie" budget resolution now in the pipeline, it's set to get even worse.  And Biden has spent [...] a lot already. [...] Where does the money come from?  It's certainly not in some bank account now.  It's coming the Hugo Chávez way, which is to say through the money-printing press.

American Express tells its workers capitalism is racist.  American Express, which made a $2.3 billion profit last quarter, invited the great-grandson of the Nation of Islam's founder to tell its employees that capitalism is evil.  It was part of the credit card giant's critical race theory training program, which asks workers to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then rank themselves on a hierarchy of "privilege."  According to a trove of documents I've reviewed, AmEx executives created an internal "Anti-Racism Initiative" after George Floyd's death last year, subjecting employees to a training program based on the core CRT tenets, including intersectionality, which reduces individuals to a tangle of racial, gender and sexual identities that determine whether he is an "oppressor" or "oppressed" in a given situation.

Impeach Joe Biden.  In just about seven months in office, Biden is surpassing what it took James Buchanan and Jimmy Carter — two of the most wretched presidents in U.S. history — to achieve in four years. [...] Biden is dissolving our southern border.  Isn't that grounds for impeachment?  Isn't it a president's duty to "protect and defend" the nation by preventing hordes of illegals from entering the country?  But dereliction is Biden's lesser offense.  His southern border policy flouts his duty as chief executive.  Biden's defiance isn't the result of misplaced compassion or incompetence.  Very naïve Americans persist in characterizing the border crisis as due to the Biden administration's bungling mismanagement.  That's simply not true.  As Tucker Carlson repeatedly points out, the southern border breakdown is premeditated.  The White House and congressional Democrats know what they're doing and why.

The Rage Orchestrating the Transformation of America.  The unfortunate events of Jan. 6 were immediately pounced upon by the Left and transmogrified into the worst attack on the Capitol ever — conveniently forgetting that the British burned Washington in 1812, Puerto Rican terrorists (later pardoned by Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama) shot up the House in 1954, and the Weather Underground (led in part by Obama buddy Bill Ayers) bombed the Capitol and other federal buildings in the 1970s. [...] The various COVID vaccines, whose readiness was concealed by the drug companies until after the election, are now being used as yet another crowd-control measure, restricting international travel (and, soon enough, domestic travel as well) as well as entry into shops, restaurants, and other public spaces — all in the name of "health" and "safety," of course.  Political disagreement settled peaceably, good will, personal autonomy, bodily integrity — these are now all things of the past.  Meanwhile, our economy is in tatters, welfare is a way of life, our constitutional freedoms have been willingly surrendered, our language has been mangled, and we are all at each other's throats.

Biden's Six Months In Office Have Us On The Road To Communism.  America's southern border is open.  According to the US Customs and Border Patrol, close to 190,000 people crossed into the United States in June alone, and that number has been accelerating in the six months since the Biden administration reversed all the Trump-era policies and refused to enforce existing immigration law.  At this rate, it's not inconceivable that we'll have absorbed another 30 million illegal immigrants, or about 10 percent of the current U.S. population if Joe Biden serves two terms.  That is an invasion.  The US military should be lined up virtually shoulder to shoulder along the entire length of the southern border.  But then who would vote for Democrats?  The only immigrants crossing into this country from the south who would not eventually vote for Democrats in large numbers are Cuban refugees.  They are also, by and large, the only group with legitimate asylum claims — and they are the only group Biden's government is turning away.  Their fate is something you probably don't want to think about, but it serves the purposes of the Biden administration, whose goal is to import as many future Democrat voters as humanly possible.  The Canadian border is now closed due to COVID but illegal immigrants streaming across our southern border with their ten percent covid infection rate are being transported at taxpayer expense into the U.S. interior.  If this doesn't qualify as senseless, pointless, lunacy, I don't know what would.

The Bad Path of Relativizing the Rule of Law.  Progressive leaders have tacitly permitted criminals to run life off the tracks and ruin it by relativizing the rule of law and behaving as if it applies to everyone else but them.  Conceptually, enforcing the law is the solution, but progressives don't see it that way.  America's cities are testaments to the abject failures of these policies because violent crime has escalated, especially murder.  Yet progressive district attorneys adamantly refuse to prosecute them.  Moreover, the movement to eliminate cash bail steadily gained traction as it has in New York, which attenuates accountability.  It is incumbent upon district attorneys to prosecute all those who commit violent crimes.  But district attorneys Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Cyrus Vance, Jr. in New York don't see it that way.  According to Niall McCarthy, a data journalist for Statista, the world's leading statistical database, murder rates have risen 52% and 32%, respectively, in those jurisdictions during the first half of 2020 when compared to the same period in 2019.

A grandiose Rep. Cori Bush says the quiet part out loud.  We've all known about this quiet part:  It's the one that says that high-level leftists, the ones who want to take our cars, air conditioners, heating, health care, travel rights, and money, do not have to abide by their own rules.  Rules are for the little people and, when it comes to Bush's need for personal security guards while she's defunding your police, Bush is happy to explain why she's special. [...] Cori Bush is the first-term congresswoman from Missouri's first congressional district (St. Louis, mostly). She is an RN, a pastor and, most importantly, a hard-left activist who came to political prominence following the Ferguson riots that followed after Michael Brown robbed a store, tried to steal a police officer's weapon, and was killed in the resulting struggle.  The BLM lie was that he had his hands up and said, "Don't shoot."  Bush rode that lie into Congress and has been one of the loudest advocates for defunding police all over America.  Thanks to the effects of this policy, poor and middle-class people have been slaughtered in Democrat-run American cities in unprecedented numbers.  Many parts of cities such as Chicago and New York are like war zones, only scarier.

When Life Imitates A Terrifying Science Fiction Thriller.  [Scroll down]  Our Skynet is called Silicon Valley and it is comrade to the American left.  Unlike Skynet, which gained self-awareness, Silicon Valley is full of people who seem to have no self-awareness at all.  They proffer ideas that normal people recognize as ludicrous — e.g., men can give birth, America is systemically racist, and defunding police leads to safer streets — yet they think they are correct about everything.  Just look at the world they exist in.  The Bay Area is overrun with homelessness, with drug addicts literally sprawled out on the sidewalks; the streets are covered with human feces and hypodermic needles; violence is raging out of control; and so many criminals shoplift with impunity in full view of employees and cameras that national chains and Mom & Pop shops alike are having to close their doors because they're losing so much money.  What's more, their calls for defunding the police persist, despite extraordinary spikes in violence.

If You Can Figure Out What This Crazy Person With Animal Pronouns Is Saying, You May Be Insane As Well.  From the great Liberals Of TikTok on Instagram.  Something went very wrong with this girl's life.  [Video clip]

Large Democrat-Run Cities Lag Nation In Job Recovery.  A new report reveals that large, Democrat-run cities are lagging the nation — including other municipalities — in labor market recovery.  Personal finance company WalletHub combined three statistics — change in unemployment in June 2021 versus June 2019, June 2021 versus January 2020, and June 2021 versus June 2020 — to evaluate the cities with the fastest rebounds from high unemployment rates caused by COVID-19 and the lockdown-induced recession. [...] The ten worst cities for labor market recovery include the three largest metropolitan areas in the United States — New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, led by Democratic mayors Bill de Blasio, Eric Garcetti, and Lori Lightfoot.

You've made your bed, now lie in it.
Portland wants to walk back defunding the police but officers don't want the jobs.  Last June Portland's Mayor Ted Wheeler, who is also the police commissioner, decided to put an end to the Gun Violence Reduction Team (GVRT) as part of an effort to reimagine policing.  The $6 million that would have gone to the team was redirected " toward communities of color."  Even at the time the assistant chief of police warned their could be serious consequences. [...][ Daryl Turner, the head of Portland's Police Union issued a similar warning.  "That is going to cripple us in our ability to be able to stop violence in the streets of the city of Portland," he said.  After the GVRT was cut, the number of shootings and murders in Portland skyrocketed.  Last September there were 110 shootings in Portland, a 243% jump compared to a year earlier.  At the end of the year, Portland had more than 900 shootings, double the previous year.  The spike in violence continued into 2021.

Joe Biden's failing first crisis.  It's difficult to find many Americans who aren't frustrated with Biden.  A solid majority, 55 percent, told pollsters from ABC News they are pessimistic about the direction of the country in the next 12 months, with only 45 percent saying they are optimistic.  The survey represented a dramatic swing of 20 points since May, when two-thirds said they were optimistic.  The findings are stunning given that much of the media, especially the Times, has treated Biden with kid gloves for the first six months of his presidency.  But the protection racket can't hide what people see with their own eyes.  The inflation tax at the checkout line and gas station is inescapable, as is the two-year crime and murder surge around the nation.  On those two bedrock issues and so many others, the White House seems either incompetent or impotent.

Our Nation's Theme Parks Are The Real Dystopian American Vision.  From Disney World and Universal Studios to Cedar Point and Six Flags, America's theme parks may offer charm and exciting thrill rides, but they also offer a stark dystopian vision of how far America is from the great country it once was. [...] As any miserable member of the decaying American middle class knows, everything of real importance in their overcrowded, declining country costs more.  Single-family homes, university degrees, childcare, and health insurance have all surged in price.  Often, as the price has exploded, quality has fallen.  A college degree is essential for most career paths, yet actual colleges teach less than ever, and entire fields like English and anthropology have become embarrassing jokes.  In cities like San Francisco, enormously expensive housing is paired with the need to pay for a private school to avoid a calamitous public system.  For millions of Americans, the struggle to maintain the middle class trappings they grew up with has become a path to financial destruction.

Bacon in California May Soon Be More Hard to Find as Pig Rules Take Effect.  Thanks to a reworked menu and long hours, Jeannie Kim managed to keep her San Francisco restaurant alive during the coronavirus pandemic.  That makes it all the more frustrating that she fears her breakfast-focused diner could be ruined within months by new rules that could make one of her top menu items — bacon — hard to get in California. [...] Animal welfare organizations for years have been pushing for more humane treatment of farm animals but the California rules could be a rare case of consumers clearly paying a price for their beliefs.

Whitlock: Simone Biles and the celebration of quitting are latest signs America has been hacked.  The pace of change in American culture is too rapid.  A contemplative and reflective nation has turned rash and emotional.  Feelings drive the mood and attention span of the citizenry.  Fear fuels our decision-making.  With irrational children punching in the data and interpreting the printouts, America is being forced to operate at the speed and with the precision of a computer.  Silicon Valley social media companies download information into our smartphones, and we instantly spit out conclusions and solutions.  It's unsustainable.  Societies can't process information at warp speed.  Plagued by malware and viruses, we're malfunctioning.  George Floyd is more revered than George Washington.  "Three Men and a Baby" is no longer a Hollywood movie featuring Tom Selleck, Ted Danson, and Steve Guttenberg.  It's the ideal family, according to the BLMLGBTQIA+ Alphabet Mafia.  The same group says "gay is the new black."  Jesus and Christianity are more polarizing than Allah and Islam.  But nothing has changed more rapidly than our position on quitting.  In 48 hours, Olympic gymnast Simone Biles transformed the felonious act of quitting into a deed of breathtaking heroism.

Joe Biden Moves to Bankrupt More Americans and You Can Thank Brett Kavanaugh.  The economic illiteracy of the left never ceases to amaze, and that's certainly true regarding Joe Biden's latest push.  The president is now moving to pressure Congress into extending the so-called "eviction moratorium" that has crippled the housing market and crushed landlords across the country.  This comes after some property owners have not gotten paid rent in over a year while they still have to pay their mortgages.  As you can see, this is really caring and compassionate stuff coming from Joe Biden.  [Tweet]  The absurdity isn't just that this is coming under the guise of an "emergency," but that it's been allowed to happen at all.  On what planet does the CDC or Congress have the constitutional authority to literally steal people's property with no reimbursement?  Yet, that's exactly what's been happening.  In fact, you can find multitudes of left-wing ideologues willing to defend it as a right and just move, citing the supposed evils of landlords.

Do We Have to Watch Their Wretched Movie All Over Again?  The consumer price index for June rose on an annual basis before seasonal adjustment by 5.4%.  That's higher than May, which suggests that inflation is accelerating.  And it's far above the 2% annual rate, which is the professed goal of the Federal Reserve.  Treasury Secretary and former Fed Chair Janet Yellen insisted that the jumps in prices are just temporary adjustments to the COVID-19 economy, although she's extended the period for adjustments.  Current Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said he's not worried and will keep interest rates low.  They've got the bond market on their side.  But those expressing alarm include not only the Wall Street Journal editorial page but also Harvard economist and Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.  He's been arguing for months that President Joe Biden's administration is pumping too much money into the economy.

Biden's 'Accomplishments' So Far:  A Troubling Tale In 8 Charts.  Months after President Joe Biden supposedly "rescued" the country from the COVID-19 pandemic and promised that he'd bring the country together, how is the nation doing?  Well, there are several indicators on the rise.  Unfortunately, they are all indicators of trouble.  The news Thursday [7/29/2021] that the GDP gained 6.5% in the second quarter (the first full quarter since Biden signed his American Rescue Plan) is good.  But it is well below economists' forecasts.  The Blue Chip Consensus forecast was above 9%, and other surveys pegged Q2 growth at 8.5%.  It was also just barely above the gain in Q1 — which was before any of Biden's policies had taken effect.  Still, other things are on the rise under Biden, too, many of them well above expectations.  The misery index is up, for example, so is inflation, pessimism, and financial stress.  Illegal border crossings are up and murders are way up.  Oh, and cases of COVID-19 — the disease Biden said he would slay — are increasing again.  Naturally, while taking credit for the good GDP number, the Biden administration is trying to pin the blame for all these other things on President Donald Trump.  But how convincing can that be, when Biden ostentatiously broke with just about every one of Trump's policies and did so in ways that had an immediate effect?

Irony, Absurdity, and Dishonesty — The Democrat Party's Playbook.  Amid the turmoil and trauma in the aftermath of George Floyd dying in police custody (for which Officer Derrick Chauvin was convicted and sentenced for murder), the outpouring of emotion and outrage became a call to "Defund the Police." [...] Nature abhors a vacuum, and human nature is just the same.  It is a sad fact that we live in a fallen world and when lawful authority exits or is diminished, criminals will enter and increase.  It was entirely predictable and has happened as predicted.  There is a crime wave sweeping the nation in those cities and municipalities run by liberal, "woke" Democrat politicians.  Minorities and the poor have suffered the most.  This has not helped but has added immeasurable suffering, misery, and devastation.  Do these elected Democrats display any sense of accountability or responsibility for such a poorly conceived policy?  NO!  They trot out talking points and try to blame Republicans for the mess they made.

Killer Biden Inflation Is His Main 'Gift' To America.  Excessive taxes, spending, and government regulation have once again gripped America thanks to the policies of Biden, Harris, and the progressives.  The predictable result is higher prices for everything and a repeat of the Carter Misery Index from which President Reagan rescued us beginning in 1981.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and as confirmed by Americans for Tax Reform, since January 2021:
  •   Gasoline prices have increased by 45% and other energy prices by 24.5%
  •   The price of bacon has increased by 8.4% and seafood prices by more than 6%
  •   The price of fresh milk has increased by 7.5% and fresh fruits by 8.4%
  •   Prices for major appliances are up 14% and furniture and bedding have increased 8.5%
  •   Airfares have increased by nearly 25%
The root of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, as our economist friend Milton Friedman frequently observed.  The New York Times warns that inflation also results in long-lasting damage if wages don't keep up.

The closest you can get to mind control is speech control.  Why has the United States been transmogrified in little more than half a century from a Christian nation that joyously displayed Christmas trees and crèches in public spaces into a secular nation that bans prayers at public school graduation ceremonies, allows men who "identify" as women to invade female dressing rooms, and even celebrates a woman's constitutional "right" to snuff out the life in her womb?  These are a few of the transformations in American society that Michael Knowles analyzes in his recent work Speechless:  Controlling Words, Controlling Minds — transformations broadly attributed to "political correctness" and Marxism.

Furious restaurant owners vent at Biden for telling them to raise wages which they say will lead to MORE inflation.  Restaurant owners are lashing out at President Biden for telling them they have to raise wages in order to attract staff, a move they say will drive inflation, put them out of business and shows how little he understands about the country's labor crisis.  There are still more than 12 million people in America claiming some kind of unemployment (5.9 percent) and first-time claims rose to 419,000 last week, the highest in nearly two months.  At the end of 2019, the number of unemployed was 5.8 million (3.5 percent).  The states with the highest unemployment rates (over 7 percent, 2 percent more than the national average), are California, Connecticut, DC, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York, all of which are Democrat states.

Inflation [is] Something to Be Concerned About Now.  Inflation has been accelerating this year, and it isn't hard to see why.  Government spending has been so overwhelming that even former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a Democrat, said recently:  ["]We are printing money.  We are creating government bonds.  We are borrowing on unprecedented scales.  Those are things that surely create more of a risk of a sharp dollar decline than we had before.  And sharp dollar declines are much more likely to translate themselves into inflation than they were historically.["]  Summers foresees the rise in inflation harming the poor the most.  Others at risk include savers and people on fixed incomes.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which keeps track of inflation, reported July 13 that inflation was 5.4% in June, the highest percentage jump since 2008.

'Their Hands Are Tied': San Francisco Locals Demand Change To Stop Brazen Crime.  San Francisco local businesses and employees are calling for change as they describe increasingly brazen shoplifting and car break-ins.  Many residents told Fox News they believe changing California law Proposition 47 is the solution.  "The police are actually wonderful, their hands are tied, that's what's going on out here."  Gianni, a local who works in Fisherman's Wharf, told Fox News.  San Francisco Police Department's Public Information Officer, Robert Rueca explained "There's a threshold of 950 dollars that needs to be met in order for a misdemeanor to turn into a felony when it comes to theft."

License to shoplift:  Two thieves brazenly stroll out of TJ Maxx with armfuls of clothes.  Two men casually walked out of a Los Angeles area TJ Maxx with their arms full of what appears to be stolen goods as brazen shoplifters continue to rampage through California retail stores.  Viral video posted earlier this week shows two men carrying armfuls of jeans, jackets and other apparel as they casually saunter out of a TJ Maxx in the Granada Hills section of the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.  'That looks great,' one man is heard saying in the video as the two men head toward the door with the stolen loot, making no haste as they leave.

Here's Joe Biden's report card after six months in the White House.  The first marking period is over and President Biden's grades are coming in. [...] Government spending to ease the impact of the pandemic, coupled with mass vaccinations, led the country's gross domestic product to surge 6.4 percent during the first quarter of 2021, with some economists saying the growth is likely to continue throughout the year.  But last week's unemployment figures showed 3.2 million workers remained out of work even as new claims for jobless benefits dipped to a new pandemic low.  And a poll last week showed that more than 1.8 million jobless people turned down work during the pandemic due to hefty unemployment benefits.

This Shocking Video Shows Just How Brazen Crime In California Has Become.  California's slide into chaos has not been an accident.  A huge reason for the striking rise in homelessness and both petty and violent crime is Prop 47, a bill deceptively titled the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act.  The actual bill couldn't be further from the title.  It reduces the penalties for felony crimes, allows for early release of violent criminals, changes some violent felonies to misdemeanors, and allows criminals to steal up to $950 dollars per day in property without prosecution.  As a result, police officers are less and less likely to respond to calls reporting petty theft, as there isn't much they can do with a suspect.

Radical Travis County DA Garza Drops Indictment Against Cop, Claims 'New Evidence'.  There may be a movie's worth of drama going on inside the Travis County (Texas) District Attorney's Office.  Jose Garza won that office on a platform of, basically, letting criminals go free and indicting cops.  Voters should pay more attention to what local office-seekers are saying.  Sometimes they actually mean it, and Garza did.  If Austin had a dashboard, all the lights would be blinking red.  Austin, the capital of Texas and the heart and seat of Travis County, has suffered at least 47 homicides in 2021.  Violent crime is spiking.  Police officers are leaving in droves, leaving the streets much less defended from crime than before.  That wasn't Garza's doing, Austin Mayor Steve Adler led the defunding of APD in August 2020 (and has proceeded to gaslight the city that he didn't), but that together with Garza's pro-release priorities are putting convicted felons back on the streets, where they are emboldened, while police officers face hostility from the Austin government, forced critical race theory indoctrination (more on that in due time), and the demoralizing prospect of facing an indictment from Garza, even if their cases have already been adjudicated.

The American Descent into Madness.  [Scroll down]  We used to know what inflation was, its pernicious role in past civilizations, and how to combat it.  The danger of worthless currency is a staple of classical literature from Aristophanes to Procopius.  The scary fact is not just that we are destroying the value of our money — the exploding price of gas, food, appliances, lumber, power, and housing are overwhelming even Joe Biden's entitlement machine — but that we are constructing pseudoeconomics to justify the nihilism.  Right now, we witness a multitrillion-dollar fight over borrowing beyond our $30 trillion debt to build "infrastructure," a word that has been expanded to include mostly anything but roads and bridges.  What exactly is so liberal about the farmworker paying $5 a gallon for gas to commute to the fields, the small contractor doing a remodeling job with plywood at $80 a sheet, or the young couple whose loan qualification is always a month behind the soaring price of a new home? [...] America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive, and frightening place by July 2021.  It went not so much hard-Left, as stark-raving mad.

The American Descent into Madness.  Nations have often gone mad in a matter of months.  The French abandoned their supposedly idealistic revolutionary project and turned it into a monstrous hell for a year between July 1793 and 1794. After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.  Mao's China went from a failed communist state to the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno, when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966.  In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America.  Madness, not politics, defines it.  There are three characteristics of all these upheavals.  One, the events are unsustainable.  They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it.  Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless.  Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.

Democrats and the Tyranny of the Mob.  If Target or Facebook or Coke or Nike or Disney want to beclown themselves by genuflecting at the altar of wokeness that's their business and citizens have the option of shunning their products or services.  With government, however, there is no such freedom.  Government, by its very nature, applies to all citizens equally, or at least that's the theory.  As such, when government bows to the mob and acquiesces to its demands, the rule of law suffers.  The last few years have been a virtual tour de force of government acquiescence to the mob.  One of the early examples of this was Baltimore's mayor and its previous mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody.  As the chaos erupted across the city, the mayor not only acquiesced to the mob, she literally gave them permission to wreak havoc:  "We also gave those wished to destroy space as well."  That is literally the definition of mob rule, and the mayor of a major American city let it happen.  As is usual with Democrat treachery, little thought was given to the rights of innocent citizens whose property was destroyed, whose lives were put in jeopardy, or whose freedoms were quashed as they hunkered down in their homes hoping to survive the chaos and violence.

NYC sex workers rampant in open-air prostitution market amid lax enforcement.  [Scroll down]  When the police ride through — in both marked and unmarked cars — business mostly carries on without interruption.  While cruising down the block one night, a cop flashed the lights of their unmarked car in an apparent attempt at deterrence but took no other action.  Current and former vice cops told The [New York] Post that there's little incentive to make arrests, with the office of Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez moving away from prosecuting prostitution cases, a shift that began in mid-2019.  In January, Gonzalez's office moved to vacate some 262 warrants stemming from prostitution cases dating back to 2012.

Leftists can't connect the dots.  What do they think the end scenario will be from teaching racist CRT doctrine to children from pre-school through high school?  What about the outcome of canceling fossil fuels to rely mainly on renewable energy?  Are they connecting any dots to see the outcome of passing trillion-dollar budgets when the economy is already facing inflation?  Are they following the sequence to see the endgame of allowing seemingly endless numbers of illegal aliens into our country?

The Dreaded Misery Index Is On The Rise Under Biden.  The misery index spiked at the start of the COVID-19 lockdowns, jumping from 5.94 to over 15 in one month with the surge in unemployment.  But then it quickly dissipated, as the economy under Trump rebounded faster than the so-called experts had predicted.  By the time Trump left office, the misery index was back down to 7.7.  A funny thing has happened since.  The misery index has climbed each and every month that Joe Biden has been president.  In February, it ticked up to 7.9, then rose to 8.6 in March.  Last month, the misery index hit 11.3, as the monthly inflation rate climbed to 5.4% while the unemployment rate edged up to 5.9%.

Inflation Nation:  Biden Admin "There Will Be Several More Months Of Rapid Inflation".  The Biden administration announced there will be "several more months of rapid inflation" as inflation levels have repeatedly broken long-held records.  "We will have several more months of rapid inflation," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said.  "So I'm not saying that this is a one-month phenomenon.  But I think over the medium term, we'll see inflation decline back toward normal levels.  But, of course, we have to keep a careful eye on it."  However, many economists are predicting the high levels of inflation will persist for multiple years.  "Americans should brace themselves for several years of higher inflation than they've seen in decades, according to economists who expect the robust post-pandemic economic recovery to fuel brisk price increases for a while," The Wall Street Journal reported.  "The respondents on average now expect a widely followed measure of inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy components, to be up 3.2% in the fourth quarter of 2021 from a year before.  They forecast the annual rise to recede to slightly less than 2.3% a year in 2022 and 2023.  That would mean an average annual increase of 2.58% from 2021 through 2023, putting inflation at levels last seen in 1993."

Media Narrative Wrecked!  Poll Shows 1.8 Million Turned Down Jobs Because of Government Handouts.  A new poll delivers a devastating blow to the latest lie from the mainstream media about unemployment.  According to a poll from Morning Consult, a whopping 1.8 million Americans turned down jobs because the government extended unemployment benefits and it discouraged work.  The outlet stated that 14.1 million Americans who were receiving unemployment insurance for the week ending June 19 that "benefits reduced the number of accepted job offers by an estimated 1.84 million over the course of the pandemic."  The 1.84 million Americans turned down jobs likely because of government handouts.  Morning Consult's survey found that "most workers receiving unemployment insurance know that their benefits are about to expire, signaling that job acceptance and search practices are likely to change even before benefits actually expire."

Bidenflation: Cost of Gas, Used Cars Up 45%, Car Rentals 88%.  Nearly all Americans expect the inflation under Joe Biden's presidency will worsen still, even as the cost of gas and used cars is already up by 45 percent, and bacon up by 8.4 percent, the Washington Examiner reported Thursday [7/15/2021].  "The hashtag #Bidenflation has been trending recently," wrote Washington Secrets columnist Paul Bedard, noting a new survey from Skynova, an online invoicing firm that found 88 percent of people in the United States believe the current inflation is "here to stay and will soar more."

Explosive Inflation Leads To Record Collapse In Home, Car Purchase Plans.  For the past several months we have warned about the pernicious effects soaring prices are having on both corporations ("Buckle Up!  Inflation Is Here!") and consumers ("This Is Not Transitory: Hyperinflation Fears Are Soaring Across America"), prompting even otherwise boring sellside research to get (hyper) exciting, with Deutsche Bank (which warned this week that "Inflation Is About To Explode "Leaving Global Economies Sitting On A Time Bomb") and Bank of America (which "Just Threw Up All Over The Fed's 'Transitory' Argument") now openly claiming that the Fed is wrong, and the US is facing an unprecedented period of far higher, non-transitory inflation, with DB going so far as to warn "policymakers will face the most challenging years since the Volcker/Reagan period in the 1980s."  But none of this has spooked the Fed into conceding — or believing — that inflation is anything more than transitory.  And maybe just this once, the Fed has a point because all else equal, by which we mean lack of rising wages, the best cure to higher prices is, well, higher prices.

The Democrats' Topsy-Turvy Spin Machine.  The oceanic influx of unskilled labor at the southern border cannot fail to aggravate unemployment and depress the incomes for the vulnerable sectors of what, under President Trump, was a fully employed workforce.  The administration has reduced domestic oil production and squandered the country's status as an energy self-sufficient state. [...] This regime has embraced the most hair-raising, unproven, terroristic versions of the climate change issue, and it's only answer to surging increases in violent crime is the tired Democratic mantra about gun control.  The firearms don't discharge themselves and are now mainly used for self-defense and deterrence.  It is legally and politically impossible to reduce significantly the immense number of firearms in the country and the sophistry about what constitutes an "assault weapon" will not achieve anything.

Bidenflation is so bad, even Wolf Blitzer noticed.  Inflation can be curbed.  Under President Donald John Trump, the USA was a net producer of oil and natural gas for the first time in 50 years.  Unemployment fell to 3.5%.  Biden reversed that by opposing the Keystone XL pipeline and blocking drilling.  Unemployment is now 5.9% and inflation 5.4% for a misery index of 11.3.  The Federal Reserve has kept the interest rates at ridiculous lows for decades.  It is time to raise those interest rates to reduce inflation.  Finally, the USA needs to make its own computer chips.  Red China's shortage of these chips has led to a shutdown of the auto industry, which has pushed prices higher as people turn to buying used cars, pushing those prices higher.

Once Beautiful Portland is Now A Progressive Nightmare.  After years of progressive rule, Portland has fallen!  Antifa rules the streets, the homeless rule the parks and criminals rule everything in between.  After more than a year of allowing most homeless camps to remain intact so as not to displace people during the pandemic, cities across the country are now beginning to confront another public health crisis unfolding on their streets.  The number of Americans who are homeless has increased in each of the past five years, according to government data, and for the first time more than half of homeless adults are living not in shelters but in tents or sleeping bags outside.  There has yet to be a nationwide homelessness count since the start of the pandemic, but a quarter of Americans now report being at "imminent risk" of losing their homes, and cities up and down the West Coast say they are overwhelmed by an unprecedented rise in homeless people, hazardous encampments and related trash.  [Video clip]

In Many Cities In America, The Criminals Are Starting To Gain Firm Control Of The Streets.  Every week the horrendous crime wave that is sweeping across America seems to get even worse.  In some of our largest cities, looting, murder and violence are becoming a way of life, and authorities seem powerless to do anything about it.  Is this what we can expect life in the United States to look like moving forward?  All over the globe, people are watching us, and they are stunned by what they have been witnessing.  Criminals are wildly out of control, and many of our largest cities are being transformed into extremely violent war zones.

North Dakota Gov.: Biden Oil and Gas Lease Halt Has Already Cost over $100 Million in Lost Revenue, Could Cost Billions if It Continues.  On Friday's [7/9/2021] broadcast of the Fox Business Network's "Varney & Co.," North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) discussed his state's lawsuit against the Biden administration's halt on oil and gas leases on public lands and said the suspension of the leases has already cost state, county, and local governments over $100 million in lost revenue, and "going forward, the cost could easily run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and if it went on permanently, it could be billions of dollars."

The Nation That Wouldn't Get Out Of Bed And Go To Work.  A country of roughly 330 million has more than 9 million job openings, and 9.5 million unemployed.  This is a disgrace, a clear indication that our American character and work ethic are slipping, a rolling tragedy that's been authored by the Democrats. [...] According to the Labor Department, there was a record high of 9.2 million job openings in May, and 9.5 million jobless in June.  ZipRecruiter reckons as many as 15 million jobs need to be filled.  Either way, millions are ignoring what MarketWatch describes "an insatiable demand for labor as the economy fully reopens and businesses scramble to keep up with soaring sales for their goods and services."  We have arrived at this point in history because the Democrats have made sitting at home collecting a government check a better financial decision than working.  We covered this in May, when we said "as part of Biden's 'American Rescue Plan,' the Democrats included a $300 weekly bonus to those on unemployment that runs until September.  The plan included various other handouts that are letting the jobless live comfortable lives at the moment."  In some cases, taxpayer-funded benefits are higher than the wages recipients would receive in return for their labor.

The 'Minneapolis Effect' Caused Last Year's Spike in Violent Crime.  The spike in violent crime last year was a serious departure from recent crime patterns over the last several decades.  In fact, 2020 was likely the deadliest year for gun-related homicides since 1999.  According to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 19,000 people died of gun violence in 2020.  This spike was particularly acute in major cities across the country.  For example, Minneapolis saw a 95% year-over-year increase in homicides between May and Aug. 1.  In Chicago, homicides more than doubled in July 2020, compared to 2019.  And New York experienced a 50% increase in homicides and a 112% increase in shootings.  Sadly, that is only the tip of the iceberg of cities that experienced this surge.  What caused that sudden spike?  Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former federal judge, persuasively answers that question in a recent law review article.

The Unlivable City.  People are fleeing California in general, and San Francisco in particular, in droves.  As to San Francisco, the fundamental problem is lawlessness.  Which means not just violent crime, which the city has in abundance, but a breakdown in the fundamental norms of civilization that make urban living possible.  The main problem is that San Francisco's far-left city administration has decided not to prosecute theft.  The result, naturally, is an epidemic of theft.  Thus Target, for example, is now closing its San Francisco stores at 6 p.m. [...] How low has San Francisco sunk?  Check out this video of thieves openly stealing handbags and similar products from a Neiman Marcus store:  [Video clip]

Colorado: America's Leftist Laboratory.  In just a few brief years, Colorado has been transformed from a symbol of independence and self-determination into the liberal Left's laboratory for social experimentation.  Its citizens have become caged lab rats made to endure unrelenting torturous socialist/Marxist research procedures that are subsequently exported to and replicated by fellow travelers in other liberal states.  Put simply, Colorado is the nation's leftist-lab for social engineering.  This state is now the political equivalent of the Nevada and Marshall Islands nuclear testing sites of the 1940s.  Colorado is now politically radioactive.

The Genesis of Our American Collective Meltdown.  Within the space of about 6 months in 2021, the costs of the essentials of life have skyrocketed — food, gasoline, housing, appliances, cars and trucks, and building materials.  Non-ending streams of stimulus money, huge deficits, and pent-up demand so far have ensured that Americans would pay such spiking prices.  And soon radical inflation may trigger 1970s stagflation and then recession, as the "why-go-to-work?" checks and consumer zeal finally cease, but the government printing machine keeps going.  What good is free government money if spiraling prices eat away the entitlement?

It's Independence, not In Dependence, Day.  Two hundred and forty-five years ago, the brave Founders of this nation declared their independence from the rule of George III, the monarch of Great Britain.  In so doing they declared — and put at risk — their lives, liberty, and fortunes — to stand for freedom and self-determination.  Looking at the week's news it's easy to see why many of us feel the liberty they fought for and enshrined in the Constitution that followed is slipping away at the hands of vocal minorities who have captured the media, Big Tech, the education establishment, the federal executive branch, and even the military.  By way of example, we learned that in San Diego one unit of the Navy — a military branch in recent years rife with incompetence just as it looks that we will most need it — was forced to take a mandatory diversity hike for Pride Month waving LGBT flags.  This is not the first time members of this unit were forced to support this stuff against their free speech rights.

On A Collision Course With National Disaster.  If I were leading President Joe Biden's central committee and my goal were to destroy America as founded and ensure that it lose its distinction as the world's freest and most powerful nation, I doubt I could concoct a superior strategy than adopting the Biden administration's message and policy agenda.  The administration is creating total societal chaos, fomenting disorder and undermining the rule of law at every turn.  As the first duty of government is to protect and defend its citizens, we might be alarmed to consider that the administration is engaged in a multipronged strategy to do the opposite.  It is shrinking our military, which defends against foreign threats.  It is at war with law enforcement, which ensures domestic tranquility, and it is destroying our southern border.  It is systematically destroying our liberty and prosperity.

Target Will Close San Francisco Stores Early Due To Rising Thefts.  Retail chain Target will be closing its stores in San Francisco, California, early due to increases in shoplifting in the city.  ABC 7 reported that Target acknowledged San Francisco's high retail crime by closing its stores earlier in the day in an attempt to cut down on shoplifting.  "For more than a month, we've been experiencing a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents at our San Francisco stores, similar to reports from other retailers in the area," a Target spokesperson told NBC Bay Area in a statement Friday night.  "Target is engaging local law enforcement, elected officials and community partners to address our concerns.  With the safety of our guests, team members and communities as our top priority, we've temporarily reduced our operating hours in six San Francisco stores."

The Woke Learn What Consequences Are.  After years of unpunished retail theft, Target has decided to close six of its area stores early.  [Tweet]  Of course, the outcry is that this is racist — because these stores are in predominantly poor, minority neighborhoods.  So, while the woke are learning what consequences are, they certainly aren't willing to accept and learn from them.  The reality is that Target, no matter how much money they give to Black Lives Matter or how many rainbow stripes they put on their logo during the month of June, is still a business.  They can act as woke as they want in their advertisements, but if they can't make money doing something, they aren't going to keep doing it.  When local DAs and city councils bless the idea that petty theft is not a crime, allowing people to walk in and steal hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise without even being arrested, this is what you get.

Biden polls horribly on his handling of rising crime.  Americans are giving President Biden dismal ratings on his handling of rising crime, a new poll found.  The ABC News/Washington Post poll released Friday morning revealed that just 38 percent of Americans approve of the 46th commander-in-chief's response to recent crime spikes nationwide.  On the other side, 48 percent said they disapproved.  As crime rates have continued to surge, lawmakers have been quick to point fingers to avoid their party taking blame.  Republicans have largely argued that Democrats' efforts to defund the police, remove qualified immunity for police officers and introduce cashless bail have all contributed to the budding crisis.

The Real Reason They Blame Heat Deaths, Blackouts, and Forest Fires on Climate Change Is Because They're Causing Them.  [Scroll down]  [W]hat determines whether or not there is enough electricity is whether there are sufficient "baseload," reliable power plants and fuels, not marginally higher use of air conditioners.  The people who manage electricity grids knew perfectly well that it could be hot last summer, hot this summer, and that a cold snap like the one that occurred in Texas in February was likely, since worse cold snaps had occurred in the past.  The main reason there aren't enough reliable power plants is because progressive activists, scientists, and journalists successfully persuaded policymakers to shut them down, not build them, or not operate them. [...] Hundreds of people have died in North America over the last few days from lack of air conditioning.  But for years activist analysts, scientists, and journalists have claimed we have too much of it.

Dan Crenshaw:  Troops at Fort Bliss Forced to Wear IDs with Race and Social Class During Diversity Training.  Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) this week revealed several instances where service members were forced to classify themselves by race and socio-economic status during diversity and inclusion training.  In one instance, Crenshaw said soldiers were forced to wear personal identification badges that listed their race, ethnicity, social class, and other things, during at training at Fort Bliss in Texas.  Crenshaw said the badges reduced soldiers to a list of characteristics that have "nothing to do with their service or their training or the content of their character."

This Independence Day, Historic American Nation Facing "State Conquest" — By Anti-America And The Minority Occupation Government.  [Scroll down]  General Robert E. Lee and General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson were once honored by Americans as model Christian leaders, regardless of their Civil War difference.  Today, the Southern Baptist Convention, once the redoubt of Southern Christian conservatism, is trembling before Critical Race Theory.  The desecration of Christian morality and symbols is so common it barely attracts notice.  In contrast, putting skidmarks on a rainbow flag on a road can lead to felony charges.  Let's not kid ourselves that blasphemy charges are only to be found in the Muslim world, or that we don't have a state religion of our own.

There's no point in trying to politely address a crowd any more.
Disney World has removed the 'Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls' greeting from its Magic Kingdom fireworks show.  Disney World has made another change at its Orlando, Florida, theme park as part of the company's initiative to become more inclusive.  Employees were invited to a "cast member" preview of the "Happily Ever After" fireworks show at Magic Kingdom on Wednesday.  The event was the first fireworks showing hosted at Disney World since the nightly shows were halted at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.  While the fireworks show seemingly remains unchanged, the preshow recording is now different.  As heard in videos shared by employees, Disney World has replaced the "Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls" greeting with one that says "Good evening, dreamers of all ages!"

The truly scary China Virus variant.  The symptoms vary but are becoming increasingly recognizable: uncontrollable cackling at questions that aren't funny; sleeping with Chinese spies; incoherently babbling to a national TV audience; identifying boys as girls and girls as boys; silently watching as criminals destroy our cities, while ordering the police to stand down; and, in the name of anti-racism, teaching people to hate an entire race based on the color of their skin.  There are countless more examples, but you get the general idea.  This horrible disease is most evident in career politicians (usually, but not always, Democrats), bureaucrats, newscasters, and Silicon Valley tycoons.  Sadly, the virus has now infected the military, as evidenced by the recent "woke" ramblings of an ignorant tool who sits as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  But the biggest threat to the general public comes from academics, who use the education system to infect youngsters from kindergarten through college.  Students learn to hate their country and respect socialism, the slightly weaker variant of the real virus that threatens our Republic.  The China Virus to which I'm referring is Communism.

And Now Prices Are Really Soaring:  June Rent Jump Is Biggest On Record.  With BofA predicting that the US is facing a period of "transitory hyperinflation", one which could last up to 4 years, as a result of soaring commodity prices in everything from metals to food and beyond, in what increasingly more warn is a stagflationary burst right out of the 1970s playbook.

Cops Quit in Droves as Crime Skyrockets and 'Defund' Movement Grows.  Police retirements and resignations rose significantly over the course of the last year amid widespread riots and coinciding calls to defund the police, according to a survey of about 200 police departments nationwide.  The survey of roughly 200 police departments revealed that retirements were "up 45 percent and resignations rose by 18 percent in the year from April 2020 to April 2021 when compared with the previous 12 months, according to the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington policy institute," as reported by the New York Times.

Election Integrity:  The Firewall That Keeps America Free.  There is no denying that the COVID-19 viral invasion was a catalyst for so much of the disruption of 2020, culminating in election irregularity in November.  By spring 2020, normal activities and businesses were largely shut down nationwide by federal and local governments' response to COVID-19.  Antifa and BLM protests and riots in May and June brought the costliest manmade damage to American property in history.  Then the cancel culture, already ensconced and in control of college and university campuses, came to the streets and parks of America in the tearing down historic monuments — all the while law enforcement was coming under severe attack with numerous police departments facing prospects of defunding.  This lockdown-crisis environment gave Democrats an opportunity to push for change in state election rules to their advantage, such as allowing wholesale distribution of mail-in ballots, extension of deadlines for counting those ballots, and legal challenges to voter ID and signature verification laws.  And we all now know the result:  the November 3rd election was characterized by unprecedented election irregularities and charges of vote fraud in more states than any prior election.

Austin's Homicide Number Passes 40 As Defunding the Police Takes Its Toll.  Austin Mayor Steve Adler and Council Member Greg Casar defunded the city's police in the name of racial justice and equity.  Did they anticipate that their decision would result in a skyrocketing murder rate that disproportionately impacts the city's minorities?  That's what's happening.  Austin suffered 47 homicides in all of 2020, which was the worst year for homicides in a decade. 2021, the year in which defunding the police kicked in, will surely surpass 2020's total.  Two fatal shootings in Givens Park on the city's east side this week push the 2021 homicide total to 41 so far.

Portland Police Limit Traffic Stops, Searches in [Pursuit] of "Racial Equity".  Police in Portland, Oregon's largest city, are being advised to no longer pursue low-level traffic infractions — including expired plates and broken headlights — unless related to an immediate safety threat, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and Police Chief Chuck Lovell announced Tuesday [6/22/2021].  According to the changes to the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) protocols, officers will no longer prioritize making traffic stops for the enforcement of low-level traffic infractions, such as expired tags or minor equipment issues, that aren't immediate public safety threats.  Also, officers will follow new consent search protocols that will "help ensure residents are aware of their Fourth Amendment rights."  If police do stop a driver, they must receive recorded consent before searching the vehicle and clearly inform the person they have the right to refuse.  Police Chief Lovell has instructed his officers to not pull citizens over for "less serious, non-moving violations" and instead focus on those who are making the road unsafe for others, including anyone driving under the influence and reckless drivers.

Are You Living by Lies?  [Rod] Dreher was inspired to write his book by heroic dissidents who refused to bend the knee to communist tyrants and saw a similar tyranny becoming ensconced in the United States.  These moral giants are astonished that the primary beacon of freedom during their years of oppression has become a society where speech and actions disapproved by secular elites are regularly squelched and punished.  Religious freedom, for example, is being reduced to the freedom to gather in congregations where (at least for now) marriage is affirmed by a priest, rabbi, or minister, a freedom that doesn't extend beyond meeting walls to how a baker runs his business. [...] Under this soft totalitarianism, Americans are now compelled "to engage in doublethink every day.  Men have periods.  The woman standing in front of you is to be called 'he.'  Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity.  Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result."  I might add to that short summary the lie that America is a racist country, that law enforcement and our judicial system are institutionally racist, and that America was founded in 1619 upon the bedrock principle of white racism.

What Is to Be Done?  A Blueprint for Taking the Country Back.  As we sit here, six months into the disastrous Biden administration, the question is finally becoming evident to even the most politically disinterested American.  The quality of life in the big blue cities has deteriorated markedly.  The cost of gasoline has seemingly doubled overnight.  The petty restrictions imposed unconstitutionally on the electorate are still insisted upon in many places — proof once more that tyranny is not primarily about rounding up folks and shipping them off to camps, but insisting that they conform to the most picayune and counter-factual ukases, just to illustrate their powerlessness.  The very fact that you still must wear a slave muzzle to enter a federal building is a visible sign of your continuing humiliation and subjugation.  And the manic insistence that everyone in the United States be forced to undergo the largest unsupervised medical experiment in history ought to tell you all you need to know about the "vaccines."  My body, my choice?  Forget about it, comrade.

Our National Delusion Won't Stop with Book-Burning.  [Scroll down]  It's just a little censorship, Google, Facebook, and Twitter say.  So we put you in virtual time-out or purge your voice from the internet for "spreading hate" — what's the harm?  It's just a little citizen designation, Attorney General Garland says.  What could possibly go wrong with legally defining half of the American populace as "domestic violent extremists" because they voted for Donald Trump or as "white supremacists" because they have the wrong color skin?  Conservatives are just too "touchy" these days.  Nothing bad ever happens when a certain class of people are designated as enemies of the State for supporting the "wrong" ideas — nope, nothing to see here.  Except, it never, ever ends with just censorship or labeling.  What starts with burning words — whether on paper or in digital space — always ends with burning people.

US Reliance on Russian Oil Surges to Record High Amid Tensions.  Russian oil imports have set a new record in the United States despite the strained relationship between Washington and Moscow.  Industry experts believe the Biden administration's climate policies will make the country more dependent on foreign oil producers.  The United States imported record levels of crude oil from Russia in March and is expected to continue importing at high levels in coming months, according to the Western Energy Alliance, a trade association that represents 200 independent natural gas and oil producers in the United States.  Imports of crude oil and petroleum products from Russia reached 22.9 million barrels in March, the highest level since August of 2010, according to International Energy Agency (IEA).  Of the total amount, crude oil imports from Russia stood at 6.1 million barrels.  Russia has become the third-largest oil exporter to the United States.

The US Government as a Sleazy Salesman.  [Scroll down]  Two trillion, three trillion, four.  Why stop there?  People are hurting.  You know — COVID.  Everything is "infrastructure," which everyone uses, right?  Even the huge deficits some states ran up over a period of years spending money on heaven knows what are now being underwritten by federal "stimulus."  Government is making it rain.  Its largesse is so great that many employers can't staff daily operations.  Their former employees still need grocery money, but they no longer need to clock in to earn it.  They're finding it elsewhere.  Nice work if you can get it — and many millions can, apparently.  Who can blame them?  Work is hard.  Wake up early, make the commute, and spend eight hours doing something you wouldn't otherwise do.  Most jobs aren't all that rewarding.  Even a relatively small amount of well timed government money is an acceptable substitute, especially when a chunk of it is tax-exempt.  The problem is that direct payments to individuals are hideously expensive when those many millions of citizens, plus an unknown number of illegals, may be eligible.

Tucker Carlson, Buckhead, and Why Our Cities Fail.  The rich know better than to kick up much of a fuss about bad government.  They don't need to.  Most of what they need they pay for out of pocket, like private security in their neighborhoods and private schools for their children. [...] The poor can be bought off cheaply with crumbs from the table.  They don't expect much and are given even less than that.  So the schools are a disaster — because if they aren't, the poor might become middle-class, and that won't do at all.  And the roads are a mess.  And the criminals rule the streets with the tacit approval of the politicians.  After all, a long time ago, urban Democrats realized there are more votes throwing in with the street criminals and the lowest common denominator than the law-abiding in those terrible neighborhoods; the law-abiding, after all, want nothing more than to get out and move up.  They're ruling over a ruin, but they rule.  And the ruin pays well.  Every bit of lost revenue from the disappearance of a city's tax base gets made up with federal grant money, virtually none of which is controlled very tightly by purse strings.  It's eminently stealable, and it's eminently stolen.  The worse things get, the more money is thrown at the problem.

Wholesale prices jump 6.6% in the fastest rise on record as soaring inflation threatens economic recovery.  Wholesale prices in the U.S. increased at their fastest annual rate ever in May, driven by rising food prices, as soaring inflation threatens to derail the post-pandemic economic recovery.  The producer price index, which measures inflation pressure before it reaches consumers, rose 0.8 percent in May for an annual gain of 6.6 percent, the biggest jump since annual data was first compiled in 2010, the Labor Department said Tuesday [6/15/2021].  The annual gain is somewhat skewed by a 'base effect' from last year's data, when prices plunged early in the pandemic, but nevertheless offers another worrying signal to consumers that their dollars won't stretch as far as they used to.

Police retirements have soared 45 Percent since BLM protests erupted.  Police retirements have risen by 45 percent in the past year, with officers opting out of forces across the country amid Black Lives Matter demonstrations that fueled anti-cop rhetoric.  The alarming statistic was revealed by the Police Executive Research Forum on Sunday, with the organization also revealing that resignations rose by 18 percent during the same twelve month period.  'It is an evolving crisis,' Chuck Wexler, the organization's executive director, told The New York Times, adding that police forces are also struggling to attract new recruits.

Kevin McCarthy Sends Letter To Members Outlining America's Declining Condition Under Biden, Democrats.  House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) unloaded on Democrat President Joe Biden in a letter sent to Republican lawmakers on Sunday [6/13/2021], warning that the Democrats' policies were doing significant harm to the country.  McCarthy's letter started off by noting that the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed was paying off big time as communities across the country come back to life following the coronavirus pandemic, which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and devastated the economies of many states.  However, beneath the surface, the policies of the Biden administration and of Democrats in general are causing a variety of problems, McCarthy argues.

[The] Biden Administration [is] Turning [the] Military Into [a] Left-Wing Force.  No institution in America — from government offices to schoolrooms to corporate boardrooms and beyond — is safe today from the poisonous racism of Critical Race Theory and the "1619 Project" which posit that United States history is rooted in slavery and white supremacy, and that "whiteness" is an incurable disease.  The institution whose subversion poses the greatest threat to our national security is the military, now overseen by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a determined advocate of these repulsive anti-American views.  Austin has required both Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project as core elements of the Pentagon's military training programs — concealing their sinister agendas under the innocuous-sounding "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" label.  He has ordered a purging of the military ranks of what he calls "extremists," defined as opponents of these noxious views and supporters of Donald Trump and the Capitol protest of January 6th.

Inflation's Here, Getting Worse, And Could Last Longer Than COVID-19 Pandemic.  Both the out-of-touch Biden administration and our betters at the Federal Reserve Board continue to assert that inflation's no big thing.  They're right.  It's not, unless you work for a living.  Then it's a very big thing indeed.  We were told by all the best "experts" that inflation is ephemeral, a mere blip.  The Fed keeps telling us the recent jump in prices is "transient."  Democrats and many of their media friends continue to insist it's not an issue.  Just keep spending, they say.  Stimulus!  But calling the recent burst in inflation "transient" or any other such euphemism to suggest it's like a brief summer cold is not exactly accurate.  In fact, it's wrong.  The recent surge in inflation isn't likely to go away anytime soon.  Indeed, it's even worse than the numbers now indicate.

Stolen elections have consequences:
Federal Reserve tells employees to avoid 'biased terms' like 'Founding Fathers'.  The Federal Reserve has instructed employees to adopt "bias-free language" and avoid using biased terms like "Founding Fathers," according to an internal webpage obtained by Fox News.  The Federal Reserve's Board of Governors issued the guidance for all employees nationwide on April 29, a former Fed staffer with knowledge of the matter told Fox News.  "Bias-free language recognizes diversity and avoids stereotyping, demeaning, or excluding people on the basis of gender, race, ethnic group, religion, age, ability/disability, or sexual orientation," the guidance states.  "Try to avoid words and phrases that may be considered offensive, pejorative, or prejudiced (whether consciously or unconsciously), as these can distract your audience from the ideas/information you're trying to convey," it continues.

Federal Reserves Instructs Employees To Avoid 'Biased' Terms Like "Founding Fathers".  And the absurdity just keeps coming.  The latest organization to act as the speech police for its employees is the Federal Reserve.  The Fed's employees are reportedly being trained to "avoid bias" in their language, including avoidance of terms like "Founding Fathers" and "grandfathered."

Understanding the Deliberate Agenda of Our Ruling Class.  If you pay attention to recent discussions of social and economic change, much of the rhetoric attempts to normalize what used to be considered unmistakable marks of poverty.  Rather than living in a home with a family, you are supposed to embrace the child-free life and see the benefits of a pod or a tiny home.  Instead of meat, which is now scarce and expensive, you are going to eat the bugs and enjoy them.  Electricity itself may prove scarce, but this is the price of reducing global warming.  Video games and travel — ephemeral things that do not last — are offered as substitutes for the old fruits of a free market economy: a job, a home, and economic independence.  Culture makers and political leaders have moved away from talk about the American Dream and towards preparing us for privation.  Biden's speeches often have this quality.  While he's bragging now about gains in jobs, he also speaks in very dark terms about the need for collective sacrifice and the country's uncertain future.

Bidenomics is proving a total disaster that could send America back to stagnant '70s.  Bidenomics is proving an utter disaster for American workers and consumers, and don't bet on it to end soon.  With the pandemic all but over — more than half of American adults are fully vaccinated, and transmissions have fallen through the floor — the economy wants to roar back to life.  Job openings climbed to 9.3 million in April, the highest number since the Labor Department started collecting the stats in 2000 and a million more than in March, the feds announced last week.  But businesses are having trouble filling those spots: 3.5 million Americans are still on unemployment benefits, the feds also revealed.  It's a big drop from 19.2 million at COVID's height, but still twice the pre-COVID level, even though nearly all the job-killing restrictions are no more.

Biggest Core Inflation Rise in 30 Years as Biden Economy Crushes American Dreams.  The American Dream is moving further and further out of reach under the Biden regime whose disastrous economic policies are crushing the country.  While the Democrats spend as much money as they can, most of it going to political pork for their donors and backers, the cost of living is becoming impossible for millions of Americans who can't afford a house or a car, and as inflation rises, much of anything at all.

The Hangover Arrives:  Explosive Inflation Leads To Record Collapse In Home, Car Purchase Plans.  For the past several months we have warned about the pernicious effects soaring prices are having on both corporations and consumers, prompting even otherwise boring sellside research to get (hyper) exciting, with Deutsche Bank and Bank of America now openly claiming that the Fed is wrong, and the US is facing an unprecedented period of far higher, non-transitory inflation, with DB going so far as to warn "policymakers will face the most challenging years since the Volcker/Reagan period in the 1980s."  But none of this has spooked the Fed into conceding — or believing — that inflation is anything more than transitory.  And maybe just this once, the Fed has a point because all else equal, by which we mean lack of rising wages, the best cure to higher prices is, well... higher prices.  Presenting Exhibit A:  two weeks ago, we observed that anticipating an end to Biden's stimmy bonanza end and that soon they will have to live again within their means, Americans' buying intentions (6 months from today) as measured by the Conference Board, had cratered across the 3 major spending categories:  homes, automobiles and major household appliances.

We're Not Going Back to a 1970s Economy.  It's Worse than That.  We may be returning to the economy of the 1970s, but that poor economic period had its roots in the 1960s.  If we are witnessing what has been compared to the 1970s, what does our future have in store for us?  What roots are we planting now?  The bill proposed at this time by the Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress is for six trillion dollars in spending.  This alone is more than 25% of the amount the Great Society spent in its first fifty years.  While that is unadjusted for inflation, the point remains.  That doesn't include the trillions spent in the previous year due to the COVID pandemic.  Are we witnessing the Great Society on steroids?

Everything was better with President Trump in the White House.  Incredibly, only four months have passed since Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. was installed as president and in that brief time, he has done more damage than anyone could have thought possible.  On day one Biden stopped work on the Keystone pipeline, now truly defunct, which cost thousands of jobs. [...] President Trump made us energy independent.  Now we are again importing oil, even from Iran.  He removed sanctions that prevented Russia from completing their Nordstream pipeline that will enrich that country fabulously.  He has stopped drilling on federal lands including ANWR and put an end to nearly all drilling for our own oil on federal lands.  He is intentionally strangling the US oil industry without regard for the hardships this will bring to all Americans.

Another jump in prices tightens the squeeze on US consumers.  American consumers absorbed another surge in prices in May — a 0.6% increase over April and 5% over the past year, the biggest 12-month inflation spike since 2008.  The May rise in consumer prices that the Labor Department reported Thursday reflected a range of goods and services now in growing demand as people increasingly shop, travel, dine out and attend entertainment events in a rapidly reopening economy.  The increased consumer appetite is bumping up against a shortage of components, from lumber and steel to chemicals and semiconductors, that supply such key products as autos and computer equipment, all of which has forced up prices.  And as consumers increasingly venture away from home, demand has spread from manufactured goods to services — airline fares, for example, along with restaurant meals and hotel prices — raising inflation in those areas, too.

Inflation surges as consumer prices leap 5%, biggest jump since 2008.  Inflation continued to surge in May, with consumer prices accelerating at the fastest pace in more than 12 years as the economy emerges from the pandemic, the feds said Thursday [6/10/2021].  The Labor Department's Consumer Price Index, which measures a basket of goods and services as well as energy and food costs, jumped 5 percent in May from a year earlier.  That's higher than April's 4.2 percent year-over-year rise in prices, and the biggest 12-month rise since August 2008, just before the financial crisis sent the US into the worst recession it had seen since the Great Depression.  Economists surveyed by Dow Jones expected a 4.7 percent spike in May.

This Isn't Your Father's Left-Wing Revolution.  Sixties protestors mainlined divorce, abortion on demand, promiscuity, drug use, and one-parent homes.  But in the end, most veteran cultural revolutionaries by the late 1970s and 1980s had gotten married, were raising families, bought homes, got jobs, and made money.  But this time around, their offspring's left-wing assault is different — and far more ominous.  The woke grandchildren of the former outsiders are now more ruthless, systematic insiders.  The woke and wired new establishment knows how to use their money and power to rebirth America as something the founders and most current Americans never envisioned.  Name one mainline institution that the woke Left does not now control — and warp.  The media?  The campuses?  Silicon Valley?  Professional sports?  The corporate boardroom?  Foundations?  The K-12 educational establishment?  The military hierarchy?  The administrative state?  The FBI top echelon?

The Amazon driver's attack on an older woman is an important warning.  On Friday [6/4/2021], a disturbing video emerged and instantly went viral.  It showed a young Amazon driver viciously punch an older woman who had been unhappy with a slow delivery.  While the video is shocking on its own, it's also a loudly clanging warning about the dangers of Critical Race Theory (CRT), especially when allied with other leftist doctrines commonly taught to the young, including the claim that words are violence.  As CRT expands throughout America, expect more attacks like this one.

Stephen Moore:  Biden's $6T spending plan [is] a danger to [the] economy.  Former economic advisor to President Donald Trump, Stephen Moore, is criticizing Joe Biden's $6 trillion spending plan.  In an interview on Sunday, Moore said the economy is continuing to recover after COVID-19 lockdowns and yet another round of fiscal stimulus is not necessary.  He added the biggest danger to the economy is raising taxes, which Biden claimed is necessary to fund his spending proposals.  Moore also criticized Biden's proposals to extend higher unemployment benefits, saying it prevents Americans from seeking jobs.  He continued on to say it hurts small and medium businesses.

Is Anyone Else Noticing a Pattern With the Increase in 'Random' Attacks on White People?  A 350-pound, large-breasted man pummeled a diminutive woman (actually two women) in Gardena, Calif., over the weekend.  Fortunately, the second beating was caught on video, leading to the suspect's arrest.  The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department released surveillance photos and video showing the shirtless "man" coolly walk up to a woman and brutally pound her.  He then continued to hit her as she was on the ground. [...] Mystery motive?  Random?  No reason?  How's this:  the Democrats and the lefty media demonize white people 24/7.  Biden has black people believing gangs of white supremacists are patrolling in pick-ups looking to lynch their kids.  The left tells black people, "You are a victim.  Systemic racism and oppression are keeping you down and white people are to blame."  What happens when you tell people they are helpless victims?  They lash out.

Republicans tear into Biden's 'lackluster' jobs report they say is fueled by his $300-a-week unemployment benefits.  Top Congressional Republicans took to Twitter Friday to grumble about May's 'lackluster' job numbers, holding Democratic President Joe Biden's policies responsible.  Both House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise pointed a finger at the $300-a-week unemployment benefit that conservatives believe have motivated Americans to stay home.  'Washington needs to stop paying people NOT to work,' McCarthy said, while Scalise's tweet offered, 'This is what happens when you pay people not to work.'

'Woke' medicine is coming to a hospital near you.  According to Katie Herzog, writing at Bari Weiss's Substack blog, Critical Race Theory is aggressively intruding on physicians' ability to treat patients, do research, or train the next generation of doctors.  Katie Herzog's "What Happens When Doctors Can't Tell the Truth?" examines a world in which doctors are silenced for fear that they will be destroyed professionally should they run afoul of the Critical Race Theory infecting medical care across America and in which young doctors, imbued with "anti-racist" zeal have the whip hand. [...] The only way to stand up to what's happening is through collective action.  Woke people, drunk with power and the urge to avenge wrongs that predate their births, quickly form mobs that surround and destroy anyone who offends them.

What Happens When Doctors Can't Tell the Truth?  They meet once a month on Zoom: a dozen doctors from around the country with distinguished careers in different specialities.  They vary in ethnicity, age and sexual orientation.  Some work for the best hospitals in the U.S. or teach at top medical schools.  Others are dedicated to serving the most vulnerable populations in their communities.  The meetings are largely a support group.  The members share their concerns about what's going on in their hospitals and universities, and strategize about what to do.  What is happening, they say, is the rapid spread of a deeply illiberal ideology in the country's most important medical institutions.  This dogma goes by many imperfect names — wokeness, social justice, critical race theory, anti-racism — but whatever it's called, the doctors say this ideology is stifling critical thinking and dissent in the name of progress.

When Police Get Woke, Society Gets Broke.  [Scroll down]  I'm ashamed to admit it took some years to accept that my parents weren't wrong about absolutely everything, and that the "authorities" I had so enthusiastically questioned and rejected had achieved that status for the simple virtue of having been correct.  And I became a cog in the authority machine itself when I joined the Los Angeles Police Department after graduating from college, but even then it was only after a few years of patrolling the streets of L.A. that the scales fell from my eyes and I came to realize the liberalism I had embraced, far from improving the lives of those it purported to help, made them worse.  I spent the greater part of my police career working in South Los Angeles, where I was confronted daily with the grim harvest of liberal policies that, however well intentioned in their origins, resulted in the dissolution of families and sent forth thousands of fatherless young men who, lacking guidance in the home, found it on the streets though membership in gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, both of which originated in Los Angeles and have since spread like cancer across the country.

Building a home now much more difficult due to skyrocketing lumber costs under Biden.  The $6 trillion budget proposal from the Biden administration has to come from somewhere.  Recent reporting suggests that the White House is set to heavily tariff imports on lumber.  According to Reason, the Biden administration's Commerce Department might retroactively hike up "anti-dumping tariffs" for American importers of Canadian lumber from their 8.99% rate in 2018 to a whopping 18.32% for 2019.  Since it's the year 2021, those companies are going to have to pay up back-taxes on lumber.  According to the Cato Institute, the US government can actually do that.

Did Pandemic Signal The Demise Of Modernity?  Daniel Hannan — Lord Hannan of Kingsclere — is today among Britain's wisest and most articulate champions of classical liberalism.  He's also today very pessimistic about the future of liberalism.  This pessimism is on full display in this recent video.  Hannan predicts that the post-Covid-19 world "will be poorer, colder, grayer, more pitched, more authoritarian."  I ardently wish that I found his stated reasons for pessimism to be unpersuasive, but this wish is not granted.  Hannan's pessimism, to me, seems warranted.  [Video clip]

The Great Conservative Migration.  In fact, my wife and I were part of the migration.  We lived for 36 years in American Siberia — otherwise known as Minnesota.  Politics in Minnesota has always been dominated by the Democrats.  However, in recent years it has taken a decidedly radical turn.  When Keith Ellison — former supporter of the Nation of Islam and attorney to cop killers — was elected attorney general, we knew it was time to leave.  This anti-Semite, race baiter, and woman abuser was now the state's top law enforcement official.  What could possibly go wrong?  One year after we left, the George Floyd riots happened.  That's what could go wrong.

Seattle Police expected to lose 300 officers by the end of the month, 'that's a third of the agency'.  In a heartbreaking and revealing interview on The Ari Hoffman Show on [...] KVI, President of the Seattle Police Officer's Guild Mike Solan said regarding police officers leaving the department, "At the end of this month... we will be close to 300 officers (leaving), that's a third of the agency."  Solan told Hoffman that the loss of officers was from last year to date and could range from 288 officers to 300.  Solan described the departing officers as "great human beings that do the job.  They just want to serve."  Some of the officers opted for early retirement, while others took law enforcement jobs in other cities or switched to alternate careers.  Sources told The Post Millennial that morale on the force is at an all-time low.  Last month, a Seattle police officer and trainee were refused service at a local chocolate shop.  The incident revealed a pattern of behavior by employees of the chain at other locations.

Ignorant Liberals Pushing Vaccine Passports Don't Get Who That Would Really Hurt and Discriminate Against.  We saw after BLM/Antifa rioting and demanding to "defund the police," that the cities that moved in that direction saw a big spike in crime, shootings and murders.  Among the people being adversely affected by this, black people.  So the very people BLM claims they're fighting for with all this are some of the people being harmed by the defunding as well as the rioting.

The Democrat party in Congress is a Marxist cult.  Democrats in and out of Congress and every leftist propagandist in the media are now a committed Marxists.  They no longer even pretend to respect or value the Constitution.  They are now pushing Critical Race Theory as if their lives depend on promoting outright racism as the essence of America.  CRT teaches hatred and victimhood; it is the antithesis of our founding principles.  Our Marxist left supports BLM and Antifa as well, anarchist groups to whom they've given free rein to riot, loot and burn down countless cities and businesses.  The Marxist left is on board with the campaign to defund our police.  The cities that have done so are in worse shape than ever, crime and murder rates are soaring.  They support the invasion occurring on the southern border.  Tens of thousands of migrants have been ushered into the US at the rate of about six thousand a day!  The Biden administration then secretly buses or flies these "children," (adult young men) into the interior, preferably red states who then must bear the cost of feeding and housing them and the criminal element among them.

American Division Is Now a Strategic Weakness:  Three Perilous Trends.  Three perilous trends accelerate in the United States as we speak.  They weaken us, and that weakness is now sensed and tested by foreign powers, threatening to plunge the United States into a major foreign conflict in the very years that the consensus for our federal union is at a historically low ebb.  The first perilous trend is that our division is now so prominent it's a thing our enemies can plan to.  When Russia encircled Ukraine in a traditional blockade posture and tested out de facto control of international waters in a notable percentage of the Black Sea, how did we respond?  The U.S. responded with only strongly worded statements and actually cancelled two scheduled naval deployments there.  For all the realism we celebrated over the past decade, on the horizon now is the end of the era where the bipartisan U.S. strategy of generally looking away as rising powers change borders and create new territory is consequence free.

The Dark Democratic Motives Behind The Government-Induced Labor Shortage.  As businesses continue to struggle to find willing employees in the wake of governments continuing to pay them in many cases MORE than they would make working to stay at home, many states are pushing back by preemptively ending the extra federal unemployment cash.  The first two-dozen or so states to opt-out, however, are not surprisingly ALL led by Republican governors.  Which means that Democrats overwhelmingly are behind the ongoing federal and state effort to destroy small and medium-sized businesses by purposefully denying them the labor help they need to get back on their feet and serve their customers.  But why? [...] Do they not understand that any normal, reasonable person, if given the choice, would choose free cash and the ability to either sit on the couch and watch Netflix or earn some extra tax-free money under the table over having to log 40+ hours a week for what they're now getting for free?

The great restaurant price hike.  A New Hampshire restaurateur has apologized to customers for putting prices up after the cost of basic items like oil, meat and gloves rose by as much as 300%.  Alan Natkiel, the owner of Georgia's Northside in Concord, says the price of brisket has gone up 185%, chicken breast is up 70%, and fryer oil costs have doubled in the past three months, while plastic gloves were three times as expensive as pre-pandemic prices.  The price of disposable gloves have [sic] soared by 300%.  Natkiel says the surge in prices has even forced him to stop serving chicken wings as a national shortage has made them so pricey they were no longer commercially viable.  He shared his frustration in a Facebook post at having to put meal prices up, as inflation reaches its highest level since 2008.

Biden's Budget is One More Biden Blunder.  The economy is growing very well, and we are near the level that we were prior to the virus.  There is no problem with growth.  But inflation is a problem.  Despite the administration's position, inflation is right now a serious problem that will get worse the longer we wait to react to it.  Biden's budget proposal will make the inflation problem much worse.  The inflation data is presented in a number of ways to consumers.  Sometimes a monthly price index is given, which compares consumer prices to the prior month.  Sometimes the index is compared to the same month last year.  The critical and most valuable information tells us what is happening now.  From January to April of this year, the monthly Consumer Price Index went from .3% to .4% to .6% to .8%.  That means since January inflation is running at about a 6% annual rate and it is increasing.

Woke in the City that Never Sleeps.  The Big Bagel is getting so bad, even the baddies are demanding the fuzz do something.  As the body count rises, it is obvious that the victims of violence are predominantly poor and minority. [...] One hears and reads about the daily gunplay, and compares the statistics to those of forty years ago.  Robbery is up close to 30%, grand larceny 66%, and shootings 166.1%.  Murder is up 32% from 2019.  One wonders when the useless mayor will declare an emergency as the place is starting to resemble a war zone, and after the Covid crisis more and more New Yorkers believe the city is ungovernable and unlivable.  Still, two of the numerous candidates running for mayor rant in their speeches about defunding the police.  Violent criminals no longer have any fears, according to Pat Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association, and having done away with bail laws, criminals get booked and walk, free to continue shooting and robbing people.  Cuomo and de Blasio, architects of these new laws, shamelessly go about their business, which is appearing on television and patting themselves on the back.

The 'Fourth Turning Crisis' Has Arrived.  Sweeping social transformations occur during times of crisis. [...] What crisis are we in, you ask?  Well, consider the staggering debt and economic collapse that is looming.  Confrontation and possible war with China is looming as well.  The pandemic has and is still wreaking havoc on our way of life.  Big Tech and Big Media are restricting free speech and fixing elections with the compliance of the administrative state in Washington.  The border is being overrun.  Schools no longer teach our history or what it is to be an American.  At the head of it all is Joe Biden and his merry band of race-baiting socialists purposely driving this runaway train off the tracks.  And in the end, societal collapse and a great reset into a Marxist world government await our demise.  So yes, we are in a crisis where the future of our way of life hangs in the balance.

The Rise of 'Blow Off Steam' Policing.  Authorities frequently met last summer's riots with a diffident response.  National Guard troops remained in their barracks, and police often stood by as looting, arson, and property destruction took place in cities ranging from New York and Chicago to Seattle and Minneapolis. [...] Such responses by police and authorities are rooted in the fear that a heavy-handed response will cause more violence.  This might be called the "blow off steam" approach to controlling civil disturbances.  Under this theory, a heavy-handed police response to community violence — with armored vehicles, riot shields, tear gas, and the like — makes matters worse, playing into the larger narrative of police brutality.  This approach is also rooted in the idea that the rioters have legitimate grievances, that ordinary free speech is inadequate for their concerns, and that riots are an expression of understandable anger and emotion.  In other words, if you let protesters cathartically break a few things and burn down a few stores, their passions will burn out and things will return to normal.

Post-pandemic New York City is laid bare as homelessness, mental illness and crime escalate.  'New Yorkers don't feel safe and they don't feel safe because the crime rate is up.  It's not that they are being neurotic or overly sensitive — they are right,' Governor Andrew Cuomo declared on Wednesday [5/26/2021].  'We have a major crime problem in New York City.  Everything we just talked about, with the economy coming back, you know what the first step is?  People have to feel safe.'

Why 260 Cops Have Fled Seattle.  There hasn't been a police department more brutalized in recent memory.  In Seattle, cops have been pummeled by a psycho city council.  It's not shocking.  Seattle is left-wing.  The residents are left-wing.  They're all nuts.  The mayor allowed armed leftists to seize portions of the city.  The 'summer of love' came crashing down when — shocker — people started to get shot and killed inside the autonomous zone.  They have hamstrung the police and spit in their faces.  After a summer of riots and not being allowed to restore order, along with an overall anti-police atmosphere, are we shocked that scores of cops have fled Seattle?  Around 20 percent of the police force has left.

Refund The Police?  Major Cities Are Backtracking On Police Cuts After Explosion Of Violent Crime.  A year after the death of George Floyd, elected officials of major cities are walking back commitments to cut police funding amid spiking crime rates.  Elected leaders in places such a Minneapolis, New York City, and Los Angeles are now pushing to increase funding to police departments after months of budget cuts and low morale have gutted law enforcement ranks.  At the same time, major cities across the U.S. are suffering spikes in violent crime.  "The violence needs to stop, it[']s unacceptable.  People deserve to feel safe in their neighborhood, they deserve to be able to send their kids out to the sidewalk to play and to recreate without bullets flying by.  That's unacceptable.  We should be holding these perpetrators accountable," Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, said at a May 7 news conference addressing a spate of violence that ripped through the city.

Feet-of-Clay Icons.  Americans mostly have given up on familiar institutions for entertainment, guidance, or reassurance.  What now do Hollywood, network news, the media in general, Silicon Valley, the NBA, NFL, MLB, or higher education all have in common?  A propensity to lecture Americans on their moral inferiorities, a general ethical decline in their own disciplines, and a strange obsession to acquire great wealth while living in contrast to what they advocate for others.  Add also incompetence.  Movies are mostly bad now.  The network news is blow-dried groupthink.  There is no "paper of record" anywhere.  Twitter and Facebook no longer even try to hide their politicized contortions of warped rules and twisted protocols.  Professional athletes are now reminders of why no one ever wants to be "enlightened" by multimillionaire quarter-educated narcissists.  The public a half-century ago lost faith in academia.  It wasn't just that most new bad ideas could be traced to the campus or that hothouse professors increasingly seemed both ignorant and arrogant, but rather their product — educating students — was defective.  No one believes anymore a BA is synonymous with knowledge.  More likely, it is a euphemism for incurring $100,000 in debt.

Democrat Policies Have Created a Blue-State Exodus.  Americans can't escape from blue states fast enough.  Even before the COVID pandemic, they were fleeing Democrat-led states for red ones in droves.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 2010 and 2019, California, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Illinois lost a combined four million residents.  Meanwhile, the top five states that saw the greatest influx of new residents were the Republican-led states of Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and Arizona.  It does not hurt that Florida, Texas, and Tennessee also have no income tax.  But the pandemic, in conjunction with disastrous Democrat policies, has only accelerated the blue-state exodus.  It turns out that draconian lockdowns in the form of school, restaurant, and business closures; massive spikes in violent crime; few entertainment options; higher taxes; and scarce job opportunities do not make for a desirable living environment or a suitable place to raise a family.

To Fight Back, Question Everything.  In terms of safety, health, opportunity, and prosperity, there has never been a better time in human history, but hardly anyone living anywhere is celebrating. [...] In a world saturated with information, the "key" to distinguishing between truth and falsehood is one question, one word:  "why?"  Why should schools and companies discriminate based on skin color?  Why should my race say more about me than my brain?  Why is it okay for federal immigration law to be ignored while federal tax laws must be obeyed?  Why are Americans who defend the Constitution treated as domestic terrorists?  Why are Americans who burn down cities treated as heroes?  Why does every "solution" to climate change involve the expansion of government powers and the contraction of personal liberties?  Why must the government police speech in order to keep it free?  Why must government disarm citizens in order to keep them safe?  Why is the government so afraid of the people that it must spy on them at all times?  Why is it no longer "our government," but rather the government?

Two-thirds of Americans say beef, chicken prices have skyrocketed.  The steaks are too high!  About two-thirds of US shoppers say the prices of red meat and chicken have soared since the start of the year, according to a new poll.  Meat lovers have been hit hardest by rising food costs out of the 2,000 grocery shoppers surveyed between May 17 and May 19, Bloomberg reported.  The poll, which was conducted by Morning Consult, found that around 65 percent said that red meat is more expensive now, while about 59 percent said that chicken has become pricier.  Meanwhile, more than half of the shoppers said that fruit, toilet paper, milk and prepared foods also cost more.

'The Wheels Are Coming Off.' Deeper Cuts to Austin Police Are on the Way in Mayor Adler's 'Reimagining'.  The Austin Police Department is in a state of crisis.  More cuts to specialized APD units are coming this year, thanks to the "reimagining" of police led by Mayor Steve Adler and Councilmember Greg Casar.  Travis County, meanwhile, steps up targeting police officers for prosecution.  According to an internal document provided to PJ Media, several units face deep cuts or outright elimination by summer's end.  The Sex Offender Apprehension and Registration (SOAR) unit is losing its officer positions, according to the APD document.  Local Fox 7 TV has previously reported some of the cuts.  PJ Media's source, who wishes to remain off the record, said:  "As more units are cut, work conditions for those who stay will continue to deteriorate, causing more folks to leave, causing more units to be cut, and so on.  It is basically a death spiral."

A young leftist is shocked to find herself on the receiving end of cancel culture.  Emily Wilder graduated from Stanford last year.  At the beginning of May, she landed a job working for Associated Press.  Two weeks later, she found herself fired because conservatives discovered her wildly pro-Palestinian social media activity while in college.  She's figured out that she was "canceled" but cannot grasp that this happened because conservatives have finally adopted leftist tactics.

An aspiring congressional candidate unveils novel campaign slogan: 'Make crime illegal again'.  Washington state congressional candidate Matt Larkin is running on a tough-on-crime platform based on supporting law enforcement in an effort to "make crime illegal again" amid skyrocketing crime and failed liberal leadership in Seattle.  Larkin, a Republican who lost his bid for Washington state attorney general to the incumbent Democrat in 2020, plans to challenge sitting Democratic Rep. Kim Schrier for the seat representing the 8th District of Washington.  In an exclusive interview with Fox News, Larkin said that skyrocketing violent crime, rising homelessness and the growing number of assaults on police officers motivated him to jump into the race.

If it's not enhanced unemployment benefits, why are people turning down jobs?  Employers say they're having difficulty filling jobs.  Jobless Americans say they want to work.  So what's going on?  Businesses reported a record 8.1 million jobs to fill last month, up from 8 million in March, according to data from the Labor Department.  There were 7.5 million open jobs in February.  And yet the unemployment rate ticked up to 6.1% in April from 6% the month before.  Many employers say that enhanced government unemployment benefits have actually given people less reason to take a job.  The Biden administration approved $300 in extra federal benefits each week to unemployed workers last March as part of a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill.

Texas legislators ban homeless 'camping' statewide.  Across the blue cities of America, city officials have turned their public spaces into vast and expanding homeless camps.  That leaves such cities without public spaces, and puts the quality of life at zero.  Portland, San Francisco, Orange County, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York, all spring to mind.  In such places, we have seen whole stretches of places like Venice Beach become a freakish third world tent shantytown, with the camping homeless blocking roads, scaring children, giving cash to drug dealers, getting intoxicated, throwing trash, boosting cars, theatening those who don't want to give them spare change, and doing their bodily functions in public places, if not on private property.  The same is true in Los Angeles, New York, and the rest.  When the homeless take over, the public has no choice but to stay away.

San Fran Legalized Shoplifting.  Now Seniors Have No Pharmacies.  Actions have consequences.  Pro-crime policies work.  And electing leftists who call themselves progressives and promise to protect criminals from being locked up in the name of criminal justice reform while regulating and taxing the businesses they prey on more than ever has inevitable consequences.  [Video clip]

Labor Union's Endorsement for Biden Comes Back to Bite Them.  I have no sympathy.  You voted for this, guys.  This is the country you wanted.  You wanted Joe Biden to overhaul the economic agenda.  No more mean tweets, but now there's rising inflation, anemic jobs growth, a border crisis, and a war brewing in the Middle East.  Russia has become aggressive again, and China is getting more handsy with Taiwan.  But there are no more mean tweets.  For those in the steel industry, they're pleading with Biden to keep the tariffs established under Donald Trump intact.

Walgreens Closes 17 San Francisco Stores Due To "Out Of Control" Shoplifting.  The effects of allowing chaos to prevail in Democrat-controlled cities across America might not be evident to liberals and social justice warriors now, but when businesses close up, it's going to be very transparent then.  According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 17 Walgreens Pharmacy locations have shuttered their doors in San Francisco during the past five years.  At least ten of the stores in the city have closed since 2019. [...]  [Video clip]  The cost of business and shoplifting is staggering for Walgreens.  Despite closing 17 stores, the company still has 53 open in the metro area but could close more by the end of the year.  Thefts at Walgreens' in the city are four times the average for other stores across the country.  The pharmacy chain spends 35 times more on security guards in the city than elsewhere, said Jason Cunningham, regional vice president for pharmacy and retail operations in California and Hawaii.

Biden's 'Inflation Tax' Targets the Poor and Middle Class.  President Biden has repeatedly promised that he won't raise taxes on American families earning less than $400,000 per year.  Yet widespread and growing inflation due to his policies is — at least indirectly — breaking that promise.  Call it the Biden inflation tax.  Consumer prices have increased at an accelerated rate every month this year.  In April, core inflation rose at its fastest month-over-month pace since 1981.  The producer price index grew by the largest amount on record last month.  Commodity prices are skyrocketing, with corn rising by more than 50% this year, lumber elevating to four times its traditional rate, and copper hitting a record high.

Media in Full Spin Mode to Cover for Biden's Failures.  Joe Biden's presidency is spiraling out of control.  By any reasonable metric he has failed as a commander in chief.  He has failed on immigration, he has failed on the economy, he has failed to create jobs, he has failed on foreign policy, he has failed on handling the pandemic, he has failed to unite the country, and he has failed as a leader.  But that's not what the mainstream media would have us believe. [...] [A]lthough there are currently 8.1 million job openings in the U.S., we somehow only managed to add 266,000 jobs in April, or nearly three-quarters of a million less than the one million that Wall Street economists were projecting.  This after the March job numbers were already revised down another 140,000.  Might it have something to do with Biden's insistence that Americans receive a $300 weekly bonus check to stay home?  Even those making $32,000 a year would see a raise by going on unemployment.

States are wise to turn down Biden's poison unemployment money.  At this point, the fact is unavoidable:  The Biden administration's foolish decision to extend increased unemployment benefits through the summer is clearly retarding the job market's recovery.  It made sense to pay out something to workers in exchange for government restrictions on their livelihood.  But the long-term extension of extra-generous benefits has turned all the incentives on their head.  For too many workers, the increased benefit makes it at least as profitable not to work as it is to work.  And how can you blame anyone for not working if it actually costs them money?  Don't blame the workers.  Do blame the White House that chose to frame their choice for them so irrationally.

Portland Has Turned Into Such A Dystopian Hellhole, Homeless Men Chase People Around With Knives.  According to a video by journalist Andy Ngo, a man with knives chased another man on Sunday in downtown Portland, Oregon, near the Justice Center and Central Police Station.  Ngo said the police did not respond to the attempted sting.  The area in the video has homeless tents on the sidewalk.  The victim and the attacker both appear to be white.  The attacker, who seems to come from the tent area, repeatedly used the n-word while chasing the victim.  The victim was able to flee from his attacker without being stabbed as the attacker had to stop to put on his pants.  [Video clip]

Inflation could spike to 20% in the next few years as the US money supply explodes, says Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel.  Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel said inflation could spike to 20% in the next two or three years due to "unprecedented" fiscal and monetary stimulus and an explosion of the US money supply.  "I'm predicting here that over the next two, three years, we could easily have 20% inflation with this increase in the money supply," Siegel said in a recent interview with CNBC.  Siegel went on to criticize Fed chair Jerome Powell for not acting to quell inflation in the near term.  The Wharton professor called Powell the "most dovish chairman" that he's ever seen and said that the Fed chair's stance could "be a problem down the road."  In the meantime, Siegel said he is bullish on stocks because fiscal and monetary support is going to keep flowing in.

The city is paying the price for his bad judgment and lack of foresight.
Minneapolis Mayor Admits Anti-Police Rhetoric has Led to Crime Spike.  The mayor of Minneapolis, who himself has bashed police in order to placate the Black Lives Matter mob, now says that calls to "defund the police" have led to a spike in crime in the city.  "The violence needs to stop, it's unacceptable.  People deserve to feel safe in their neighborhood, they deserve to be able to send their kids out to the sidewalk to play and to recreate without bullets flying by.  That's unacceptable.  We should be holding these perpetrators accountable," Mayor Jacob Frey (D) said.  Star News Education Foundation Journalism ProjectBut that is a strikingly different tune from Frey's message last summer, when Minneapolis was engulfed in riots after the death of George Floyd at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.  At that time, he went on a tirade against police after a Black Lives Matter rally, calling them "racist," among other unfounded accusations.

Biden is the New Jimmy Carter, But He's Even Worse.  Empires rise and fall, leaders come and go, and every now and then a president wins election only to find himself in over his head with the burden of the Oval Office.  It's happened twice now in my lifetime, first with Jimmy Carter and now with Joseph R. Biden.  There has been a lot of discussion recently comparing the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter with the failing presidency of Joe Biden, but I will clue you in on something.  Biden's presidency is worse, and Biden is worse as a man and human being.  We're five months into Biden's presidency, and already he seems determined to outdo all four years of Carter's incompetence by Christmas.  Inflation is rising, the southern border practically doesn't exist, the Middle East is in turmoil, and we recently experienced a gas shortage thanks to hackers easily breaching our digital infrastructure.

Biden [is] beset by crises following reversals of Trump policies.  According to the most recent figures, the Customs and Border Patrol agency encountered more than 178,000 illegal migrants crossing into the United States via the southern border in April.  That figure is up slightly from the already-high 172,000 recorded in March.  Nearly half a million illegal crossers have been shuttled through the immigration system and released into the U.S. since Biden assumed office, and countless thousands more have come in undetected.  Within a few days of arrival most migrants "have legal documents, and are sent on their way to all four corners of the United States," according to Todd Bensman, a fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies who is stationed at the Texas-Mexico border.  On his first day in office, Biden took major steps to reverse Trump border policies, including:
  •   Funding to complete the border wall was halted
  •   The Migrant Protection Protocols — also known as the Remain in Mexico policy — was repealed
  •   The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 was sent to Congress.

Welcome Back, Carter.  Except Add Dementia.  [Scroll down]  Joe Biden, on the other hand, is a puppet with dementia.  It's clear he's not even the president.  He's just the front man doing the bidding of evil people who want to destroy America and capitalism.  The amazing thing is Biden's done it all in just a little over 100 days.  He's practically just set the Guinness World Record for fastest destruction of a great country.  Look around.  America is a dumpster fire.  Let us count the ways Biden has wrecked America from sea to shining sea and across the globe.  The borders are open, and immigrants pour in by the thousands per day.  Many of them bring crime and disease.  They bring bankruptcy and insolvency for America and our formerly great middle class.  So far in fiscal 2021, we've managed to bring in the most tax money ever while still spending an unimaginable 90% more than we collected.  Then there's dreaded inflation.  A massive wave of stagflation is clearly coming because of madman Biden's insane levels of spending.

Bidenomics Looks Like a Ticking Time Bomb for Democrats (and the Economy).  Ever since Joe Biden floated his $1.9 trillion COVID-relief bill, worrywarts like yours truly have been warning about the possibility of inflation.  In case you weren't alive in the 1970s, inflation erodes the value of money.  Simply put, your paycheck is worth less today than it was last week or last month.  This demoralizing and frustrating decline in purchasing power can have the psychological effect of causing consumers to spend money quickly, for fear that prices will rise.  There is also increased pressure on welfare and wages to keep pace with the rising cost of living.  Once this cycle gets going, it's hard to unwind.

Lines at gas stations are a feature, not a bug, of Biden's green future.  Biden ran for president advocating, or at least paying lip service to, long-standing environmentalist plans designed to create gasoline shortages.  They never put it that way, of course, but that has always been their goal in shutting down pipelines and banning new fracking and oil exploration.  The whole point has been to stop fossil fuels from being extracted from the ground and burnt to run our economy, in the naive hope that this will cause global temperature patterns to change.  This plan, however, has just been preempted by a criminal plot to do much the same thing by other means.  The DarkSide hacking group's ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline put gasoline pipelines out of commission all up and down the East Coast.  This has not only sent the price of gasoline skyrocketing but has actually caused gas stations on the Eastern Seaboard to run dry.  This simply never happens under normal circumstances.  And — surprise, surprise — the public does not like it.

Democrats refuse to prioritize Real infrastructure — like Colonial Pipeline.  Child care is infrastructure, according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren.  Health-care aides for seniors are infrastructure, say Democratic activists.  "Anti-racism" is infrastructure, we're told.  But these things aren't infrastructure; they're just things Democrats want funded with taxpayer money.  You know what's actually infrastructure?  Bridges and pipelines.  On that front, we're not doing so well.  The shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline this week demonstrated that our actual infrastructure is vulnerable and that our lives can be disrupted quickly when it fails.  Hackers, undeterred by the FBI and Homeland Security officials who are supposed to be protecting critical infrastructure, managed to lock down the pipeline controls with ransomware.  Fuel deliveries stopped, gas lines formed (shades of the Jimmy Carter era), and prices went up, all within a couple of days.  Fresh from blocking construction of another major pipeline (the Keystone XL), the Biden administration flailed, while a nation that just a year or so ago became a net oil exporter found itself facing fuel shortages.  That's infrastructure.

Psaki calls inflation surge a sign of Biden's 'successful economic strategy'.  The Biden administration seems to be proud of its inflation surge, brought on by low interest rates and monster government spending. [...] They seem to think they can command prices down with all that communication, much as Hugo Chavez used to do, creating shortages to accompany their runaway inflation as their big comforting answer.  Or perhaps more in their style, they're going Brezhnev or Chernenko again, telling us that all the bad things happening aren't happening, never mind the evidence of our own eyes.  Pay no attention to those soaring lumber prices, those high vegetable prices, those now-costly airline tickets, those leaps in price at the pump.  They're all irrelevant because Joe Biden is a ... self-declared success.

Waking Up in the Wrong Movie.  The remarkable thing about the multiple crises facing Joe Biden is how quickly they've multiplied and worsened.  These include, in no particular order:
  [#1]   the Mexican border problem;
  [#2]   the expanding war between Israel, Hamas, and possibly with Iran;
  [#3]   the gasoline supply disruption stemming from the cyberattack on the Colonial fuel pipeline;
  [#4]   economic trouble and warnings of impending inflation.
These sprung up in the first days of his term with an abruptness and progression that has taken pundits by surprise.  The administration must have anticipated eventual problems would arise but not so soon nor from so many directions.

Biden's Blast from the Past — The Return of the Misery Index.  This week has the distinct smell of Democrats in charge.  We have gas lines again, more cars waiting to fill up their gas tanks than ever waiting to hear candidate Joe Biden speak at his sparsely attended campaign car rallies.  War is breaking out in the Middle East with Palestinian militants lobbing missiles at Israel, and Israel appropriately responding to attacks on its homeland.  I wonder if Obama's "pallets of cash" paid for any Hamas missiles?  Or if the planned restoration of $235 million in US aid to the Palestinians has freed up cash for missiles?  Inflation and unemployment are both rising.  It's like traveling back in time to the late 1970s, dancing to the Bee Gees' "Stayin Alive" under a mirror disco ball.  But now it's 2021 and we are dancing to Biden's fiddle.

Consumer Prices Increase 4.2% To The Highest Level Since 2008.  The consumer price index has jumped 4.2% over the last 12 months, the fastest pace of inflation since 2008, according to a Department of Labor report.  The consumer price index (CPI) increased 0.8% between March and April, according to the Labor Department report released Wednesday morning.  Economists projected that the CPI increased by 0.2% last month and 3.6% over the 12-month period ending in April, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Unleaded Regular Gasoline Up 52 Percent, Fresh Fruits and Vegetables Rising Fast.  As expected the high-turn consumable goods are starting to rise in price rapidly.  The Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) has released the consumer price analysis from April (remember there's a big lag).  The trend is rapid inflation continuing with no end in sight.  CORE inflation just jumped the most since 1982.  Overall prices are up 4.2 percent year-over-year, which is three times the rate of inflation under Joe Biden than under President Trump.  Inflation hurts the lower and middle economic class much harder; and the specific inflation sectors show massive increases on the goods and services that blue collar workers use most.  It is specifically the Biden economic policies that are to blame for the scale of these increased prices.  Inflation of this scale is an outcome of policy.

NYPD union boss blames 'feckless' Bill de Blasio and his 'imbecilic' police reform laws for the Times Square shooting.  The weekend shooting of three people in New York City's Times Square tells you all you must know about life in the Big Apple under the stewardship of Mayor Bill de Blasio and the legions of feckless elected officials and enablers dangerously masquerading as leaders. [...] The 31-year-old suspect in the latter shooting has been identified.  He, too, is a career criminal who was walking the streets despite being arrested last year for the random attack of a stranger.  In this incident, he was trying to kill his brother over a personal dispute.  There is little doubt that he will soon be arrested and indicted for the shooting of three innocent people.  Hopefully, he will be held on high bail because his offenses are some of the few crimes that are still eligible for bail in de Blasio's dystopian New York.

Biden Mocks Ancient Wisdom.  The United States has borrowed about $29 trillion in debt — about 130 percent of its annual gross domestic product.  The government will run up a $2.3 trillion annual budget deficit in 2021 — after a $3.1 trillion deficit the year before.  The Biden Administration still wants to borrow more — another $2 trillion in new social programs and "infrastructure."  In the crazy last 100 days, the price of everything from lumber, food, and gas to cars and houses has soared.  Yet many interest rates are still stuck at or below three percent.  Jobs are plentiful; workers are not.  Is that a surprise when government cash handouts discourage the unemployed from taking a pay cut to go back to work?  After being freed from 13 months of quarantine, Americans are splurging.  But meeting their huge pent-up demand is causing shortages.

Here's How Biden's Spending Could Become A Hidden Tax On Everything You Purchase.  As the U.S. climbs out of a once-in-a-century pandemic, rising prices have led to increasing worry that rapid inflation could be just over the horizon.  Americans have already witnessed higher prices in the past few months, with everything from gasoline to lumber to basic home items jumping in cost.  The increases, partially fueled by non-existent interest rates and record government spending, could lead to inflation that the U.S. has not seen in decades, experts say.  "In the short term, consumers can expect to see rising prices across the board," Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a columnist at The Washington Post, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.  "I expect in the next few months people will be getting sticker shocked in virtually all aspects of their life."

The Inflation Numbers Are out and We Are in Trouble.  The government report on inflation has been released, and it's not good.  Inflation hit 4.2% in April, a crushing blow to the poor and middle class especially.  This followed on the heels of stagnating hiring shown by last week's jobs report.  Remember, the consumer price index doesn't even include things like lumber so this number is likely lower than reality despite still showing an out-of-control rise.  That rise is directly timed with Biden passing his COVID "relief" act that printed trillions of largely unnecessary dollars.  That stimmy check was nice and all, but people are about to pay for it over and above what they received via inflation.  Gas prices are up 50%, used vehicle prices are up over 20%, and home energy costs are up over 35%.  Meanwhile, with or without this number, anyone who has been to a grocery store or hardware store lately can see the inflation with their own eyes.

Minneapolis Mayor:  You know, this "defund the police" thing may have increased crime.  It's been another week in Minneapolis that looks more like the wild west than a modern, midwestern city.  On Sunday night, seven people were shot in multiple incidents, with one victim being killed.  Another person was killed on Monday night.  Meanwhile, arrests and prosecutions are lagging far behind these reported incidents.  People have been noticing and they are bringing their complaints directly to Mayor Jacob Frey when he ventures out to address the public.  One pastor named Dale Hume came forward to say that the city's efforts to defund the police haven't worked and "you can obviously see that is not the solution."  Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Mayor Frey came out this week and said that he agrees with the Pastor.

Welcome Back, Carter.  Anyone want to party like it's 1979?  Okay, at least in 1979 we weren't locked down, masked up, and socially distanced.  But, other than that, there wasn't much to celebrate.  The economy was in the tank, inflation was rampant, gas lines were long, daubers were down, and no one in the White House knew what to do about any of it.  A new term had to be coined for something thought impossible/oxymoronic... "stagflation."  Yes, even as the economy was slowing down, inflation was rampant, an unprecedented pairing of economic indicators.  And today?  The economy is in the tank, inflation is rampant, gas lines are getting long in some areas, daubers are down, and no one in the White House knows what to do about any of it.  It may be worse than that.  It may be possible that no one in the White House wants to do anything about any of it because it is part of the plan, the Great Reset, the elite's desire to take the U.S. down a peg while/by reducing greenhouse gases — and increasing intersectionality, multiculturalism, critical race theory, and other noxious forms of political correctness.

Gas Lines Return as Woke Deep State Fails to Stop Cyber Attack.  Welcome to Jimmy Carter 2.0, to an America saddled with a failed president and a failed Deep State whose minions worry about everything except what actually matters.  The [...] FBI and the [...] CIA have one [...] job, and that's to protect our way of life.  Period.  And the fastest way to unravel our way of life — the most effective, deadly, and destructive way — is to interrupt the free flow of oil.  Therefore, outside of physical threats to American persons and property, the FBI and the CIA should be focused almost exclusively on ensuring the energy that keeps our way of life alive is not interrupted.  Well, once again, these feckless Deep Staters have failed.  Instead of being focused on stopping a VERY successful cyber-attack on a crucial oil pipeline, these useless idiots have been focused on using the correct pronouns.

'Things Fall Apart' With No End in Sight.  The American birthrate has now fallen for six years in a row, to a record-low 1.64 babies per woman.  Some blame this on the dreaded COVID, but it would make more sense for births to rise, given that couples have had more than a year of snuggle time while riding out the "pandemic" and collecting government checks.  A more likely reason is the non-stop barrage of propaganda from the anti-human Left, whose refrain has long been "how can you bring a child into this world?" — a world, by the way, they've been doing their best to ruin for more than half a century with abortion, divorce, and latterly, child sex-change operations.

White House Occupant Reads Teleprompter, Desperately Attempting to Spin Horrific Policy Outcomes.  The White House occupant appeared today [5/10/2021] to deliver remarks on some key issues that are catastrophic to the long-term goals of the leftist administration.  First, let's be clear; there's no-way the Chicago control agents would allow the installed occupant to speak on any issue, publicly, that was not a direct and measurable threat to their long-term goals.  The remarks today by Joe Biden are carefully scripted to diffuse political damage that is pending as a direct outcome of the executed policies. [...] The bottom line is simple:  The Democrats can see a political backlash coming that is going to overwhelm them.  No amount of spin or manipulative talking points will change the outcome of the reality people are feeling.  Massive increases in gas prices combined with massive inflation is the exact policy outcome from Jimmy Carter.

Corn Is the Latest Commodity to Soar.  America's biggest cash crop has rarely been more expensive.  Corn prices have risen roughly 50% in 2021 and a bushel costs more than twice what it did a year ago.  Corn has been one of the sharpest risers in the broad rally in raw materials that is prompting companies to boost prices for goods and fueling concern among investors that inflation could hobble the post-pandemic economic recovery.  Lumber prices have shot to more than four times what is typical, pushing up home prices and obliterating renovation budgets.  Copper, a cog of industry found throughout the home and in electronics, hit record prices Friday.  Crude oil hasn't cost so much since 2018 and soybeans are trading at their loftiest level since 2012.

The Fossil Fuels Must Go Through.  There is something surrealistically ironic about Joe Biden's Emergency Order to mobilize tanker trucks — anything — to keep the fossil fuels going.  On the one hand it is a backhanded admission of how vital the products transported by the Colonial Pipeline are.  On the other it is a reminder of how policy errors can progressively cascade through the system, one mistake compounding the others.  Why is there a shortage of tanker truck drivers?  One reason is the Covid-19 lockdown.  "We've been dealing with a driver shortage for a while, but the pandemic took that issue and metastasized it," said Ryan Streblow, the executive vice president of the National Tank Truck Carriers.  "It certainly has grown exponentially."  More fundamentally truck driving has become an unattractive lifestyle choice for young people.

The Editor says...
Any kind of work that requires leaving the apartment (or Mom's basement) is unattractive to lazy millennials.

Jobs disappointment traces back to Joe Biden's stimulus.  "The government," wrote Frederic Bastiat, "is that great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else."  This incisive, tongue-in-cheek definition of the state, beloved by libertarians everywhere, is especially appropriate this week.  Big COVID-era government, the data now demonstrate, has put millions of workers in a position in which their incentive is not to report to work and produce something of value in exchange for a wage, but rather to stay home and collect money from taxpayers for not working.  In short, poor decisions by Democrats have created a larger-than-life version of what Bastiat described, at least for people at lower income levels.  On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released devastating employment numbers, showing dramatic underperformance for job creation in April.  Although the ranks of the employed did increase by 266,000, that number was expected to increase by four times as much.

'Dude, Where's My Workforce?'  It must be a nasty surprise for companies that have slavishly repeated Woke mantras and imposed overtly racist policies on workers and even customers in the name of "racial equality" to now find themselves short of the one thing they need to thrive and grow:  workers.  They can thank Joe Biden and the Woke Democrats for that.  No question, right now companies are sucking for air, finding it impossible to ramp up fast enough as workers stay home in droves rather than return to work.  People are said to be "scratching their heads" over why, after a year of pandemic-forced business closings, workers aren't desperate to work and earn.  After all, just a few months ago the concern was whether they'd have jobs to go back to.

Biden's Woke Military Will Embarrass America.  Something is happening in the halls of the Pentagon, and it bodes ill for America's future military.  Wokeness is crawling out of the shadows to neuter America's fighting power.  This is a dangerous move because of the criteria likely to be used to identify "extremists."  These will not only further divide the military ranks, but also diminish our fighting readiness and make us the laughingstock of modern militaries, prominently including existential enemies in Russia and China.  Evidently, secretary of defense Lloyd Austin's military-wide stand-down wasn't enough for the Biden leftists in the White House and Congress, along with appointees now walking the Pentagon's E-ring.  No, they are trending full-rudder left like other federal agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency.  The aim is to make our bloated federal government more "woke" — a slang term meaning alert to so-called injustice in society and especially racism — regarding so-called "extremists."

Philadelphia's Fall:  A Microcosm of Democrat Devastation.  Large American cities, the vast majority of which are run entirely by Democrats, are deteriorating before our eyes; and the phenomenon is not due to the COVID pandemic.  New York City is in rapid decay, reverting to its pre-Rudolph Giuliani condition as Mayor Bill DeBlasio is more concerned about wokeness and virtue-signaling than he is about effectively running the city's government.  In San Francisco and Los Angeles, homelessness is out of control, their treasuries are effectively broke, and residents have been fleeing in record numbers.  And in Portland, Mayor Ted Wheeler has stood by as riots have been ravaging the city for almost a year now, with empty hotels across the city as tourists stay away in droves.  There are dozens of cities we could examine to illustrate the failure of Democrat policies, but Philadelphia may be the most fascinating to consider. [...] Democratic Philadelphia voters outnumber Republican voters almost 7:1.  The last time the city had a mayor that wasn't a Democrat was in 1952.

Biden and 'elitist environmentalists' lost at least 1,000 steel jobs in Pennsylvania.  Pennsylvania State Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward argued on "Fox & Friends" on Thursday that Scranton native Joe Biden and his administration are "partially responsible" for the cancelation of a $1.5 billion steel project, which would cost "at least 1,000 blue collar jobs" because "of their focus on only green energy."  Late last month, Pittsburgh-based United States Steel Corp. said that it is canceling the project to bring a state-of-the-art improvement to its Mon Valley Works operations in western Pennsylvania, citing the fact that the landscape has changed in the two years since the company announced its intentions.  According to the company, project permits initially stalled by the coronavirus pandemic never materialized, U.S. Steel has added capacity elsewhere and now it must shift its focus to its goal of getting rid of greenhouse gas emissions from its facilities by 2050.  [Video clip]

Red Pills Are Falling Down All Over the Golden State.  Californians are realizing how deeply deluded they have been about the condition of their state. [...] A deliberately created housing shortage and voilà, higher property tax revenue, and better returns for wealthy real estate investors.  Ditto for water and energy.  Cram it all down in the name of being "green," and let the "renewables" manufacturers make a killing selling surveillance gadgets into every appliance to "help manage" consumption.  Meanwhile, the corrupt public utilities, with earnings capped at a percentage of costs, watch profits soar on the exploding cost for renewables.  Perennial forest fires were another wake-up call, and here as well, a red pill moment is at hand for Californians.  All Californians have to do is let the timber companies go back to work, thinning the overgrown forests, to restore a balance to nature.  But what do the politicians do?  Cope with the latest super fires by announcing that by 2035, only electric cars can be sold in California.  Because that will somehow stop the next round of fires this summer.

Why no one needs to work in Biden's America:  Experts project anyone who earned $32,000 before COVID could now earn MORE in benefits staying at home.  People who lost their jobs in the pandemic are now earning more in benefits than they did in wages, creating a nightmare economic situation that is stopping people from returning to work and in turn, driving up inflation.  In March 2019, the average weekly payment to an unemployed person was $348 when combining federal and state unemployment payments.  That nearly tripled to $938 in April 2020, when Trump passed COBRA -- a temporary economic plan that boosted weekly unemployment payments by $600 and also gave employed people one-off stimulus checks.  COBRA expired in July and the unemployment boost was halved to $300-a-week.  Now, they are $638-a-week on average and they'll stay that way until September 6 at least.

After the Riots:  Kenosha police claim they've been unfairly villainized.  For a while, it seemed as though anybody who wanted to speak poorly of the police was given a national platform.  Cable news outlets clamored for sound bites that tore into law enforcement and stoked racial resentment.  "It's incredibly frustrating to be vilified in the national media," Kenosha Police Lt. Joseph Nosalik told the Washington Examiner, adding that police officers have not been given a fair shake in the press.  He believes that police departments are up against an "instant gratification society" that allows people to trash them without knowing the facts.  Police are also not allowed to comment on active investigations, which prevents them from speaking out or standing up for themselves or their actions in real-time.

It Got Serious In A Hurry.  [Scroll down]  The current crop of corruptocrats have introduced yet another inversion in the military, the woke inversion.  The military will now be graded on its commitment to combat-irrelevant factors:  the racial, ethnic, gender, sexual preferences and political creeds of its forces, and their professed fealty to regnant political dogma.  In other words, "diversity" in everything but thought.  This inversion is huge and given the distance squared corollary, it will soon render the armed forces incapable of fighting even a war for the protection of the United States proper.  Given its ineptitude fighting offensive wars, the military will be completely useless.  The defense budget, however, will grow ever more bloated.

'Alarming rate': Demoralized cops flee police departments in record numbers.  Police officers nationwide are turning in their badges at record rates amid budget cuts, policy changes and anti-brutality protests.  An estimated 5,300 officers quit or retired from the New York Police Department last year, 200 or more cops have left the Seattle force, and in the nation's capital, the union reports that the 3,700-strong Metropolitan Police Department is down 300 badges since the D.C. Council enacted sweeping police reforms last summer.  "Officers are leaving at an alarming rate, and crime is spiking in a lot of different areas," police union chairman Gregg Pemberton told The Washington Times on Tuesday [5/4/2021].

Democrats Blamed After U.S. Steel Cancels $1.5B Project in Pennsylvania.  Executives with the U.S. Steel Corp. announced days ago that they are canceling a $1.5 billion project in western Pennsylvania that was set to bring thousands of middle-class union jobs to the region, a move that many are now blaming on Democrats and environmental groups.  On April 30, U.S. Steel President David Burritt announced that a $1.5 billion project to majorly improve its Mon Valley Works operation with state-of-the-art steel casting, rolling technology, and a cogeneration plant is being canceled.

Coming up next from the Democrats:  Fort Apache, Fear City.  Joe Biden, the press, the Democrats, and the activists have long touted the rent moratoriums in the age of COVID as just the thing, keeping their victims of lockdowns and lost jobs from being thrown out of their homes.  One problem:  Someone is not getting paid.  The Washington Post has a long, balanced, authentic report on the assorted COVID-linked rent moratoriums and what that's done for the housing stock.  The subhead gets it right:  ["]As landlords and tenants go broke across the U.S., the next crisis point of the pandemic approaches["]

Austin voters approve proposition aimed at reinstating public camping ban.  Austin voters have approved Proposition B, which aims to reinstate the public camping ban that was reversed in July 2019.  The results were 57% to 43%, with the majority voting to approve the proposition.  The camping ban makes it illegal to camp in any public area not designated by the Parks and Recreation Department; to sit or lie on a public sidewalk or sleep outdoors in and near the downtown area and the area around the University of Texas campus; and to panhandle at specific hours and locations.

Austin, TX voters overwhelmingly reject propositions pushed by progressives.  There are signs that the left has created a backlash by overplaying its hand.  Even in a stronghold of the left like Austin, Texas, where in 2019 homeless people were allowed to erect their tents on city-owned land, including parks and sidewalks, thanks to the progressive-dominated city council.  All the problems any sane person would predict started happening immediately.  And that led to a voter initiative to reinstate the camping ban, Proposition B.

"The Staffing Shortage Is Real" - Manhattan Restaurants Struggle To Hire As Millions [are being] Paid Not To Work.  Long-suffer NYC restauranteurs may have been tempted to celebrate when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced yesterday that the Big Apple would "fully reopen" on July 1.  But just as the problem of COVID-19 restrictions fades away, restaurant owners are facing the same problem that has prompted Royal Farms to offer $500 signing bonuses while some McDonald's franchisees offer prospective workers $50 just to come to an interview:  that is, President Biden's massive $1.9 trillion stimulus is paying too many American workers to stay home.

More than 200 Seattle police officers quit over the last year, many citing anti-police climate.  More than 200 Seattle police officers quit their jobs in the last year amid months of frequent anti-law enforcement, racial injustice protests and riots in the city.  Many of the officers cited an anti-police climate in the city — including in the City Council — and disagreements with police management in their reasons for moving on, leaving the department with what Police Chief Adrian Diaz called a "staffing crisis" on Tuesday [4/27/2021].  He said 180 police officers quit last year and another 66 officers so far this year.

Woke Democrats Broke American Cities.  Almost all of the largest cities in the United States are governed by hard-left Democrats.  In fact, there is only one Republican mayor among the top 15 cities in the country and only three among the 30 largest cities.  All of the problems in our urban areas today are almost exclusively the result of the failed Democratic Party leadership.  While previous generations of Democrats might have tried to find bipartisan solutions to longstanding problems, the party's leaders in 2021 are woke leftists interested only in pushing their radical agenda.  The result has been outmigration, soaring crime rates, a drug epidemic, broken families, failing public schools, an increasing number of blighted properties, high poverty and unemployment rates, an obsession with a race-based agenda, and rising antipathy toward law enforcement officers.  No wonder people are fleeing our cities in hopes of finding safety and a better quality of life.

The Gender Non-Reveal:  How Gender-Neutral Parenting Harms Kids.  The newest generation, the children of Millennials, has been dubbed Generation Alpha — and they're coming up fast.  What ideas are they bringing with them?  For starters, they are "estimated to be the most gender-fluid and anti-sexist generation yet," according to gender studies professor Dr. Kyl Myers.  Myers and her husband, Brent, represent a small but growing group of parents who are seeking to hasten this upcoming "gender revolution" by raising their own kids as gender-neutral.  Their child, Zoomer, is an example of what some are calling theybies — a combination of "they" and "babies," referring to children whose parents refuse to tell them what their sex is.

The left's war on language continues unabated.  The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) is removing the term "master" bedroom from all of its databases and listing services and replacing it with the politically correct phrase "primary" bedroom.  According to a TRREB news release, the change was suggested by the organization's Diversity and Inclusion Task Force (DITV) to better align it with Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) practices.  The release promised that the change "will also address the negative connotations surrounding 'master' bedroom, which many Members, others in the industry, and the public at large associate with terminology rooted in slavery and/or sexism.  We also heard some of your concerns about the offensive undertones associated with this term.  We know that words matter, and this is a step forward in rethinking outdated terms and modernizing the language used in the real estate industry."  Note to the TRREB and wokesters everywhere:  Banning (or bastardizing) language is not progressive; it is regressive:  a step backward.  When you try to ban words, you are saying one of two things about them:  1) either the word doesn't matter at all or 2) the word is so powerful that it can overwhelm your ability to rationally process it.  In a sane world and to a sane person, neither should be the case.

Safe Spaces Are Creating a Generation of 'Snowflake Tyrants': Dr. Everett Piper.  Dr. Everett Piper, author of "Grow Up:  Life Isn't Safe But It's Good," told Epoch TV's "Crossroads" Program that cancel culture's relentless demand for safe spaces is making America's youth emotionally fragile, less able to cope with hardship, and more prone to advocating for an ever bigger government role in allaying insecurity and providing safety at the expense of liberty.  Piper, who served as president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University for 17 years, said that his earlier warnings, that coddling America's youth by acquiescing to demands for "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" would lead to a sad and dangerous infantilization of the American spirit, are increasingly coming to pass.  "The 'snowflakes' have graduated," Piper said.  "And they now have jobs at Google and Amazon and Apple and Twitter and even Major League Baseball, where they're carrying their cancel culture, their demands for safety, into our country at large, and they're silencing everyone who disagrees with them.  This is ideological fascism, it is not intellectual freedom."

Transgender Child Commits Suicide, Feuding Parents Hold One Funeral for the Boy and Another for the Girl.  A teen in Western Australia's capital has been given two funerals.  The 15-year-old female — who identified as a boy — died tragically by suicide.  The child's mother and father are estranged.  Given the terrible situation, they had to decide:  Would she be interred as female?  Or would the identity of a boy be reflected by the burial?  Mom and dad couldn't come to a consensus.  The mother insisted her child — born a girl — find a final resting place as a guy.  In fact, as reported by 7News, she vowed to employ the full power of the court system if necessary.

Believe It or Not, a New Level of Corruption and Depravity for New York City.  The district attorney of Manhattan in NYC has announced that his office will no longer prosecute any unlicensed "massage" parlor workers (about 900 cases), nor loitering for the purposes of prostitution (about 5,000 cases).  Abigail Swenstein, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society's Exploitation Intervention Project, which works with sex workers, said that while the policy doesn't preclude the New York Police Department making arrests, she hopes officers will choose not to, knowing that prosecutors would not bring charges.  Laws against these behaviors are still on the books but will not be prosecuted.  The citizenry has not repealed these laws, but the ever wise and dictatorial district attorney will spit in the face of the citizenry (and God) by deeming these activities unworthy of punishment.  This writer could find reference to only one person, New York Assemblyman Mike Reilly, a Republican, who said Manhattan's new prostitution policy sets a dangerous precedent.  "It flies in the face of law and order," he timidly said.  To me, the fact that there is not an outcry of opposition is as grievous as the decision itself.

Woke Democrats Broke American Cities.  Almost all of the largest cities in the United States are governed by hard-left Democrats.  In fact, there is only one Republican Mayor among the top 15 cities in the country and only three among the 30 largest cities.  All of the problems in our urban areas today are almost exclusively the result of the failed Democratic Party leadership.  While previous generations of Democrats might have tried to find bi-partisan solutions to long standing problems, the party's leaders in 2021 are woke leftists interested only in pushing their radical agenda.  The result has been outmigration, soaring crime rates, a drug epidemic, broken families, failing public schools, an increasing number of blighted properties, high poverty and unemployment rates, an obsession with a race-based agenda and rising antipathy toward law enforcement officers.  No wonder people are fleeing our cities in hopes of finding safety and a better quality of life.

Broken Arrow:  America has been overrun.  The public school and universities are undermining traditional values everyday.  This has been going on for years.  Now, however, the effort is in overdrive where things like transgenderism and the hateful Critical Race Theory are taking the pride of place in the classrooms.  And perhaps worse of all is illegal immigration, The country is being flooded with illegal immigrants whose numbers will change the nature of the country in short order as has already been done in California.  And the frustrating thing is that this is happening despite it being against the will of the people and immigration laws, both of which are treated as jokes by the political establishment.  With Donald Trump out of the presidency, the American working class stands naked before the forces intent on breaking it.  The Republic is still alive, but on life support.

Are NYPD officers rushing to retire amid city's anti-cop climate?  More than 5,300 NYPD uniformed officers retired or put in their papers to leave in 2020 — a 75 percent spike from the year before, department data show.  The exodus — amid the pandemic, anti-cop hostility, riots and a skyrocketing number of NYC shootings — saw 2,600 officers say goodbye to the job and another 2,746 file for retirement, a combined 5,346.  In 2019, the NYPD had 1,509 uniformed officers leave and 1,544 file for retirement, for a total of 3,053.  The departures and planned departures of 5,300 officers represents about 15 percent of the force.  Already, as of April 5, the NYPD headcount of uniformed officers has dropped to 34,974 from 36,900 in 2019.

It's Biden's 'First 100 Days' Week.  Biden is trying to pack the Supreme Court.  Even though Biden had said on multiple occasions that he would not try to, that is exactly what he and his handlers are trying to do.  Can you imagine if President Trump had tried to pack the Court?  The Supreme Court is historically the guardrail in stopping those who lust for power and seek total control.  If a packed Supreme Court becomes nothing more than a rubber stamp to progressive ideology there will be no separation of powers nor checks and balances.  Biden has enacted more executive orders in his first 100 days of office than any other president during the same time period.  Biden has put Kamala Harris in charge of the border crisis illegal immigrants pour into America, and Harris has been down to the southern border zero times.  Zero times. [...] If someone is in the country legally, they are presumed by Biden to have Covid, urged or even commanded to wear a mask in public.  If someone tries to come into the country illegally, they are assumed not to have Covid and transported to the destination of their choice.

We are witnessing the Democrats' final revenge for losing the Civil War.  Since the start of LBJ's "Great Society" and the welfare state, Democrats have been breaking American Blacks in the same way Petruchio broke Katherine.  If one were to pay attention solely to the rhetoric, there can be no greater love than that which leftists in politics, the media, academia, and the corporate world have for Blacks.  The results of this abundant affection have been devastating.  "Hands up, don't shoot."  "I can't breathe."  "I'm a crazy white lady screaming at cops on behalf of Black people."  "Math is racist."  "Ambition is racist."  "The English language is racist."  "Whites are born racist."  "Melanin makes people superior."  (That last is a paraphrase of Kristen Clarke, Biden's nominee to head the equal rights division of the Justice Department.)  Lower academic standards.  Separate dorms.  Separate dining halls.  Critical Race Theory.  White privilege.  Ibram X. Kendi bestsellers.  BLM.  Defund the police.  ACAB. [...]

Fools' overture.  It hasn't taken long:  gas prices are rising — as are the prices of other durable and consumer goods, such as timber.  Crime is soaring.  China is making threatening gestures, and Russia is massing troops on the border of Ukraine.  There is a crisis on our own southern border, which even President and Lid-Caller-in-Chief Biden accidentally admitted recently, causing White House press secretary Jen Psaki to claim that's not what he really meant to say.  This was all eminently predictable because, as any rational human being knows, actions have consequences.  Banning the Keystone Pipeline, printing and spending trillions upon trillions of dollars, and threatening to implement preposterous environmental policies, defunding the police, and coddling criminals have had the effects that similar actions have always had.  They are the only possible results of actions such as these.

Kroger Closing Ralphs And Food 4 Less In Long Beach Saturday Over Hero Pay Law.  Kroger is closing two of its stores, Ralphs and Food 4 Less, on Saturday after the City of Long Beach mandated that the company pay employees $4 extra an hour in "hero pay" amid the coronavirus pandemic.  As customers came by the store on Saturday [4/17/2021], there wasn't much left to buy and the shelves were visibly empty, but people in the neighborhood said they wanted to shop there one more time.

Americans Exiled within America.  [Scroll down]  A corrupt voting process has deprived millions of meaningful participation within their republic.  Meanwhile, integrity of citizenship itself is imperiled by the erasure of the nation's boundaries and the granting of privileges to non-citizens.  Second, Americans have been deprived of their property, which has essentially been confiscated by the State in the interest of public "health."  Businesses have been shut down and, when partly opened, managed by bureaucrats who dictate how a business such as a restaurant may be run. [...] But most importantly, like individuals who are removed from their country, exiled Americans have experienced loss of community and communication.  The forced isolation of Americans and the shutdown of nearly all institutions have deprived Americans of supportive communities.  Churches, schools, museums, concert halls, political groups, and even family gatherings such as funerals and weddings have become tightly regulated.  Many communities have either disappeared altogether or retreated into cyberspace.

Despite Reports to the Contrary, When It Comes to Destroying American Norms Trump Had Nothing on Team Biden.  Here's an interesting exercise: plug the search term "Trump destroying norms" into Google and see what happens.  Or you can just trust me: you'll get story after story, some dating back to 2015, about how Donald Trump, with his quick tongue, profligate use of social media, and derision for the press, was sure to destroy American norms and the republic as a consequence.  Now, three months into the Biden administration, those precious norms that are definitely still around post-Trump are being seriously and actually threatened from all sides by the same progressive legislators who worked with their fans in the media to sell the idea that Trump was going to undo the fabric of American life.

Poll Shows 69 Percent of Americans Favor Legal Weed, a New Record High.  According to pollsters at Quinnipiac University, 69 percent of all Americans and clear majorities in every demographic group now favor the legalization of marijuana.  That's up from 51 percent of Americans who said they favored legalization in 2012, the first year Quinnipiac included questions about marijuana in their national surveys, and up from 60 percent who backed legalization in 2019.  The trend is unmistakable.  Support isn't just growing, it is broadening.  The Quinnipiac poll found that 78 percent of self-identified Democrats, 62 percent of self-identified Republicans, and 67 percent of self-identified independents favor legalization.  The only age demographic where support for legalization falls short of 70 percent is for respondents who are 65 and older — though even that cohort supports legalization by a slim margin (51 percent).

The Invisible Asylum: Olympia, Washington, is a microcosm of the problems created by the emptying of mental hospitals.  The story of American deinstitutionalization has become familiar.  In a long arc — from President Kennedy's Community Mental Health Act of 1963 to the present — federal and state governments dismantled mental asylums and released the psychiatrically disturbed into the world.  Though there were sometimes brutal abuses in the state mental hospitals of the early twentieth century, the closure of the asylums did not put an end to mental illness.  If anything, with the proliferation on the streets of psychosis-inducing drugs such as methamphetamine, the United States has more cases of serious mental illness than ever before — and less capacity to treat and manage them.  The question now is not, "What happened to the asylums?" but "What replaced them?" Following the mass closure of state hospitals and the establishment of a legal regime that dramatically restricted involuntary commitments, we have created an "invisible asylum" composed of three primary institutions:  the street, the jail, and the emergency room.

NYC Teacher:  Yes, 'Critical Race Theory' 'Training' Is Harmful 'Indoctrination' of Our Kids.  Ever feel like we've reached the point where daily life consists primarily of playing a never-ending game of "liberal insanity whack-a-mole"?  We smack one here insane narrative here, another one immediately pops up, there, then another one, here?  Me too.  From border-swarms of illegal alien-wannabes dressed in Biden campaign T-shirts demanding the aforementioned honor his campaign promises and "Let us in!", to "racial justice" and "abolish the police" riots — er "peaceful protests — to defiant teachers unions who continue refuse to send to their members back to their classrooms, and on and on.  The never-ending story of the grip the left has on America is a sobering reality.

New Yorker who wants to marry [his or her] adult biological child sues to overturn laws banning incest.  A New York parent who wants to marry their [sic] adult biological child is suing to overturn laws banning incest, saying marriage is a matter of 'individual autonomy'.  The parent filed the lawsuit in Manhattan federal court on April 1 asking a judge to declare incest laws 'unconstitutional' and unenforceable so that they can wed their [sic] offspring in a ceremony in New York City.  The identities of both the parent and the child are not known, with the gender, ages, hometowns and nature of their relationship not detailed in the suit, seen by the New York Post.

Rural Trump Voters Already Live in the Safe, Tolerant Utopia Leftists Claim to Want.  If I had to boil down the political wisdom I've learned over four decades of observing, studying, writing, and debating, it would be this:  Life in Rural America (which is where Republican Trump voters live and govern), is clean, safe and racially tolerant.  Most places in America where life is dirty, polluted, dangerous, violent, and plagued with racial hate and race riots, are cities that are almost exclusively populated by and governed by Democrats.

Andy Ngo:  U.S. Unsafe Due To Far-Left Terror, Erosion Of Police.  A prominent Asian-American reporter commented on his decision to flee the U.S. due to threats by Antifa.  Journalist and author Andy Ngo said he fled the U.S. due to an escalation of safety concerns.  In an interview Monday [4/5/2021], Ngo of Portland, Oregon said it's not safe for him to remain in the U.S. due to his past reporting on Antifa.  Ngo stressed he left the U.S. due to the weakening of law enforcement and a rise in popularity of far-left violence.

Americans slouching toward Gomorrah.  For the first time ever, the percentage of Americans who belong to a house of worship such as a church or synagogue has fallen below 50%, according to a new Gallup survey. [...] Violent — and other — crime is rising in virtually all major American cities.  Rates of addiction, depression and suicide are also rising dramatically.  Syringes and human feces line the streets and sidewalks of formerly paradisical cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland.  A growing number of us find it difficult to figure out what gender we may be.  Pot, 'shrooms and even hard drugs are being legalized in many locales.  Criminals are being let out of jail, while hard working small business owners are being ushered into jail.  Police departments are being demonized and defunded.  There is a growing push to legalize polygamy.  Yet it is a crime to say "All Lives Matter."

The First AOC Administration.  In less than three months, Biden has managed to erase the United States' southern border in order to accelerate the northward flow of undocumented Democrats.  He's having more success than he should in pushing for the higher taxes and onerous regulations that held down the economy when he was Barack Obama's dogsbody, both of which Biden's predecessor lowered, thereby causing the economy to take off.  Biden has reinstated Obama's invertebrate foreign policy, giving the world's bad guys the rope they need, and he's pledged to spend trillions we don't have in order to pursue the fool's errand of carbon-free energy (aka very little energy, and at mini-bar prices).  He's blessed the corrupt HR 1, which if the Senate falls for it would federalize all elections, installing voting rules so lax as to hang a "STEAL ME!" sign on all future elections.  The cherry on top of the sundae is Biden foisting critical race theory onto federal employees, including the military, which Democrats seem determined to declaw.

If it ain't broke, Joe Biden will break it.  The president is on a tear, as in tearing up arrangements that were achieving their objectives.  His early results are disastrous.  In an act of astonishing foolishness, Biden created a humanitarian and public safety crisis on our southern border by dismantling a successful policy structure that took years to achieve.  In the Mideast, he looks determined to undo the Arab-Israeli alliance Donald Trump forged by returning to the failed policies Biden helped to implement in the Obama-Biden administration.  If that were all, it would be more than enough.  But it's not all.  Biden also wants to end the Senate filibuster and took the first step toward packing the Supreme Court.  Those two moves are so destructive that even Sen. Mitt Romney, who usually saves his criticism for fellow Republicans, drew the line.

Biden's Chamber of Confected Hatreds.  Destructive, mindless wokeness and charges and confessions of "white privilege" are everywhere, and the United States government is complicit with the vicious drug and slave gangs of Mexico in the importation of large numbers of illegal migrants, up to 80 percent of whom are sexually violated on their way to the southern U.S. border.  It emerges that virtually the entire state school system and almost all of the university academy are peddling the lie that the United States was established as a slaveholding enterprise as its raison d'être, effectively up until Black Lives Matter exposed this heinous state of affairs and promised to "burn America down" if it were not changed.  We have also recently learned that the U.S. armed forces are systematically propagating within their ranks critical race theory, which is a complete and dangerous fiction and just more mud-slinging and myth-making about the nature of the country.  And now Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is trying to recruit the entire world to pledge to raise corporate taxes — an insane and fatuous concept.

Over 250 Male California Prison Inmates Request Transfer to Women's Facilities.  Since January, 261 California prison inmates have requested transfers to prisons aligning with their gender identity, 255 of them biological males who say they identify as women, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation told the Daily Caller News Foundation.  In January, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed into law a bill requiring the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to ask every individual entering its custody to specify personal pronouns and gender identity, including transgender, nonbinary, or intersex.  The California law, known as SB 132, prevents Corrections and Rehabilitation from disciplining the individual for refusing to give this information, allows for the information to be updated later, and requires staff to use the gender pronouns that the individual requested.

Quality of life plummets, taxes rocket — and New York City faces doom.  "No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session."  That's how Gideon Tucker put it back in 1866, a New Yorker who knew Albany as a former legislator, secretary of state and judge.  His wisdom, as demonstrated repeatedly over the ages, is timeless.  Yet there is something different, and especially troubling, about this time.  The possibility of permanent decline and the ultimate destruction of the New York we know is unmatched in modern memory.  With Republicans reduced to hecklers, Albany Democrats, oblivious or reckless or both, are marching toward the cliff in an Alfred E. Neuman, What, Me Worry?  Way.  The rising chorus of "Stop!" goes unheeded.  Washington is sending train loads of money to blue states to bail out their high tax, high spend habits.

Exclusive: Exodus Underway as Record-Shattering Surge of Austin Police Officers Leave the Force.  After the Austin city council voted unanimously to defund its police department by about one-third of its budget, in August 2020, many predicted that once the cuts kicked in a flood of officers would leave the force as soon as they could.  The new district attorney's policy of re-investigating police officers for closed cases is also expected to cause officers to resign or retire.  The city council's cuts officially kicked in and have been in place for a few months.  PJ Media reports exclusively that APD is now suffering a huge surge of officer departures putting it on pace to shatter 2020's record.

America's creation of the transgender child.  As a cynical Brit, I admire the US can-do attitude.  The American dream, the idea that people can be anything they want, is liberating and wonderful.  But it has a downside.  The idea of the self-made man or woman is taken very literally in the US, and accordingly a lucrative market for those who wish to change sex is booming.  This is no-longer just the preserve of adults; over the past decade a linguistic shift from "transexual" to "transgender" has de-sexed what had previously been considered an adult psychosexual disorder.  The modification of bodies to fit a stated sense of "gender identity" now extends to children.  Thus, with sleight of language, a puff of glitter and injection of hormones, unto the US the "transgender child" was born. [...] One might imagine the locus of concern would be the ethics of medicating and operating on children physically to alleviate mental distress, but it is the impact on sport which has captured the public imagination.

How the Transgender Movement is Destroying Feminism.  In 2005, I published a book with the title The Death of Feminism.  I saw it all coming.  But I did not foresee the rise of a transgender movement.  On March 31st, an allegedly feminist Open Letter Supporting Trans Women and Girls, was circulated.  Among other things, it stated that "We acknowledge with clarity and strength that transgender women are women and that transgender girls are girls.  And we believe that honoring the diversity of women's experiences is a strength, not a detriment to the feminist cause."  Interestingly, there is absolutely no mention of trans men — those who were born female but who have or want to become male.  As we now know, there is an alarming spike among teenage girls in America who hope to solve their teenage sorrows such as low self-esteem, body image discomfort, trauma based on sexual violence, eating disorders, psychiatric suffering, etc., by cutting off their breasts, surgically removing their uteri and ovaries, and taking potentially lethal hormones to prevent puberty, and to grow facial hair and muscle.

Society Pays When Prosecutors Fail to Punish Crime.  Imagine a society where prostitutes could solicit johns for sex just yards from police officers who did little more than wave them on their way.  Picture yourself walking through a park with your children as a homeless person is free to urinate and defecate beside the park bench where he is stashing the illegal drugs he bought from a dope dealer operating openly without fear of the police.  Does that make you feel safe?  Welcome to the new Baltimore, where law enforcement will no longer be prosecuting what it calls "low-level offenses."  These include possessing drugs or drug paraphernalia, trespassing, minor traffic offenses, prostitution, open container violations, and defecating or urinating in public.  The city announced the initiative last week after a year-long experiment to slow the spread of COVID-19 in the jails and prisons.

Georgia Democrats stare down a mob of their own making.  Leftist activists are busy whipping up a national boycott of Georgia-based businesses over the state's new election integrity law.  The boycott has the support of Hollywood and the White House, with President Joe Biden saying this week that he would support moving the MLB's All-Star Game out of the state as a sign of protest.  Georgia Democrats are now left trying to talk the mob down.  "I absolutely oppose and reject any notion of boycotting Georgia," Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff said in a statement on Thursday [4/1/2021].  "Georgia welcomes business, investment, jobs, opportunity, and events.  In fact, economic growth is driving much of the political progress we have seen here."  Stacey Abrams, who, having lost Georgia's governorship in 2018, rebranded herself as a voting rights activist, agreed and reminded Democrats that economic boycotts would hurt the very communities they claim to represent.

Mass Shootings:  Another Consequence of Democrat Majorities.  When most Democrats learned of the Boulder, CO shooting last week, they salivatingly checked social media to see if the alleged murderer was a white, male Donald Trump voter.  Most Republicans scoured story after story to see if he was black or a Democrat (close to redundant, I know).  I, however, did what I always do when I hear of a shooting:  I checked who lives in the area, and who's in charge.  What do you think I discovered about Boulder County? [...] In Boulder County, since 2004, the Democrat nominee for U.S. president has received a minimum of 66% of the vote; Biden got 77% last year.  In the county, there are 96,319 active registered Democrats and 36,302 active registered Republicans.  The mayor, and all eight council members of the city of Boulder, are "nonpartisan," but the Rorschach Test of the Homo sapiens species — social media — revealed that all are Democrats.

Major cities feeling the loss of police funding as murders, other crimes soar.  Cities in parts of the U.S. that slashed their police department funding last year, in part as a result of police-involved shootings, have seen an uptick in certain crimes over the past year, according to data analyzed by Fox News.  Cities such as Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas, have shifted funds from police departments to social services programs.  Such cuts have led some departments to lay off officers, cancel recruiting classes or retreat from hiring goals.  As police departments were left to make do with shrunken budgets and less support, some big cities have seen sometimes drastic upticks in murders and other violent crimes, a Fox News crime analysis found.

'The cruelty is the point'.  [Scroll down]  At one particularly overcrowded U.S. Border Patrol facility in Donna, Texas, an official told reporters:  "The capacity for this location for COVID purposes is 250.  Previous to COVID, the total capacity was one thousand.  Now, we're holding over 4,100 subjects in this location alone.  So you do the math.  We're way over capacity."  The short version:  Families are separated and there are thousands of young people jammed into holding pens awaiting processing.  There is no doubt that President Biden's policy is behind the latest surge.  The president and his administration have made clear that the U.S. will accept unaccompanied children but not family units, and not individual adults.  At his news conference last week, Biden said, "We're sending back the vast majority of the families that are coming."  Even though that is not entirely true, the U.S. message to would-be migrants, from the mouth of the president himself, is:  If you come as a family, we will turn you away.  If you send your children by themselves, we will take them.  Biden's policy has given those families a clear incentive to self-separate in the interest of at least getting their children inside the United States.

Biden issues first presidential proclamation on Trans Day of Visibility.  President Joe Biden on Wednesday [3/31/2021] issued the first presidential proclamation recognizing Transgender Day of Visibility.  The day is dedicated to celebrating transgender people and bringing awareness to the discrimination and violence they face everyday.  In his proclamation, Biden said Trans Day of Visibility recognizes the generations of activism by transgender and nonbinary people.

The 10 Radical New Rules That Are Changing America.  [#3] Racialism is now acceptable.  We are defined first by our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily — if at all — by an American commonality.  The explicit exclusion of whites from college dorms, safe spaces, and federal aid programs is now noncontroversial.  It is unspoken payback for perceived past sins, or a type of "good" racism.  Falsely being called a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist.

Australian Journalist:  Biden Making World 'More Dangerous,' Destroying Military With 'Wokesters'.  Sky News host James Morrow said during a recent broadcast that the world has become a "more dangerous place" under Democratic President Joe Biden, noting that America's enemies have started to become more aggressive around the world while Biden is focusing on making the U.S. Military "woke."  "On Friday, Chinese forces committed their largest ever incursion into Taiwanese airspace, as worries grow by the day of a Chinese invasion of the Democratic island republic.  Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Iran is on the march with its rebel militias, now attacking Saudi oil fields and building up a stockpile of missiles that has Israeli planners increasingly nervous about a potentially devastating conflict happening sooner rather than later."

America at the End of Empire.  [Scroll down]  Ascendant China is hell-bent on world domination and makes no apology for it.  America, meanwhile, is suffering from decades of accelerated, corrosive, Marxist subversion that has saddled us with a power-lusting leftist regime, aided and abetted by an unofficial state news media; a school system that has jettisoned rigorous education in favor of identity politics indoctrination; a woke corporate culture showering hundreds of millions of dollars on support for Critical Race training and on the communist revolutionaries of Black Lives Matter; an obscenely decadent entertainment industry (itself in thrall to Chinese influence) that peddles anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, anti-capitalism, and anti-white racism; and a politicized military establishment prioritizing "gender equity" over warrior readiness.  In short, America (and the Western world more generally), once the most prosperous and powerful civilization in history, is no longer operating "from a position of strength."  It is, in fact, bleeding out from self-inflicted wounds, and our enemies foreign and domestic smell the blood in the water.

On gender madness, don't let Canada be the future.  Jordan Peterson became world-famous in 2016 because he stood up to Canada's human rights law, which made it a crime to "misgender" someone.  Since then, Canada has slid even further into gender totalitarianism.  The latest example is a Canadian man who was sent to prison for refusing to adopt his teenage daughter's new masculine pronouns.  The father and mother were not raising the child together, so it was only when his daughter was 13 that the father learned that the girl's public school and his ex-wife had been working with the child to turn her into a boy.  This included pushing the child to take hormones to mimic male sexual attributes such as facial hair and a deep voice.  The father (who cannot be identified under Canadian law because doing so would also identify his daughter) went to court, saying that he needed to give parental consent before his child was permanently mutilated.  Not only did a British Columbia court rule against him, saying the father's consent wasn't necessary, but the appellate judges also lectured him to understand gender dysphoria better.

You're Racist, whether You Like It or Not.  "In my mind... this was an anti-Asian hate crime."  So declared Congresswoman Judy Chu regarding the Atlanta shooting, in which eight women died, six of whom happened to be Asian. [...] There is no point denying that the left, at this moment, controls all the major avenues of power in America — from the media to academia, from education to entertainment, from government to business, the left has entrenched itself, giving it unprecedented power over our lives.  We see this in the nationwide spread of "drag queen story time," the unveiling of a "gay Captain America," and the continual pledges of "diversity" and "equity" from companies as prestigious as Bank of America and Nabisco.  But this narrative around the Atlanta shooting marks a graduation of the left's power.  It has, in essence, declared that it can divine our actions better than we can.

How [the] 'Minneapolis Effect' Explains [the] Surge of Violent Crime in American Cities.  This past year, "defund the police" has been a frequent call from activists seeking systemic reform of the American criminal justice system.  It became a popular rallying cry after the May 25 death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis.  And Minneapolis is among cities that partially defunded police departments and proactive crime prevention programs in response to the incident.  However, the months since brought a massive surge in violent crime, a phenomenon called the "Minneapolis Effect" by two legal experts who spoke at a virtual event held March 16 by The Heritage Foundation.  Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah, and Lawrence Rosenthal, a law professor at Chapman University in Orange, California, laid out the case that the serious, protracted rise in crime is tied to rhetoric and actions after Floyd's death and the ensuing protests.

I have lived in New York City my whole life — and I fear it will never recover.  This year has been a tremendously difficult year.  Covid-19 was — and remains — scary and awful.  For so many New Yorkers, what has also been awful over the last year has been watching the destruction of New York City — undoubtedly in large part because of a pair of egomaniac buffoons:  Mayor Bill De Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo.  New York City is a fragment of itself — abandoned stores and empty streets.  The city that used to never sleep is in a slumber.  After a year in which the city permitted looting and rioting, in which kids remain largely out of school, in which crime is rising rapidly and so many of us are afraid to walk in the streets, the city is largely shuttered and in disarray.  Streets are filled with crime, the homeless are everywhere — and so many New Yorkers have left.

Climate change is the perfect tool to justify complete control.  Replacing internal combustion-powered automobiles with E.V.s is policy.  Eventually, they will acknowledge the inherent pollution in battery manufacture, the production of the electricity needed to charge the batteries, and eventual battery disposal.  The goal is to eliminate private transportation in its entirety.  In major cities, roadwork now entails reducing on-street parking while narrowing thoroughfares to increase traffic.  This is a prelude to charging a yearly fee for the privilege of city parking.  Several thousand dollars a year should modify behavior and increase revenues.  The implementation of license fees (also several thousand dollars per annum) for car ownership will come to fruition.  Limiting the right to own a car for people who allow their "social credit score" to decline by saying something untoward about government or authorities on social media, or in public, will also be a tactic.  Next will be restricted usage and a fee per mile driven with driving limited to odd and even days for portions of the population.  Social scores will dictate who is allowed to fly on commercial airliners, with ticket prices including a "carbon fee" commensurate to the seat's percentage of the flight's total carbon cost.  In addition to forcing the price of gasoline to $20 a gallon, the "price of all energy will necessarily have to skyrocket" (Barack Obama).  They will triple or quadruple the price of all energy, whether it be electricity, natural gas, or home heating oil.

Culture change is far more devastating than climate change.  In the Golden Era of Sports (1920s) through the following decades, until sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, it was traditional for people to dress up whenever they stepped outside or went to an event.  Pictures of hockey arenas and baseball stadiums show the ladies, of which there were far fewer than today, dressed in their finery and the men in suits and even dressy hats.  The hats eventually went away and the suits... followed suit, replaced by more casual but still nice outfits.  In recent years the nicer casual outfits have often been supplanted by ripped shorts, "message" tee shirts or sweatpants and sweatshirts, frequently far from fresh.  Similarly, people were instructed to stand silently and at attention for the national anthem, remove their hats and place their hands over their hearts.  This level of community spirit and respect survived for many years.  Eventually, however, as apparel standards flagged, fewer and fewer people bothered to put their hand over their hearts, or remove their headgear.  Or stand at attention.  Or stay silent.  Finally, in the last few years, as players routinely took a knee in "protest" during the anthem, others did, too.  And some fans in the stands were no longer moved to stand in honor of the flag, their country, veterans' sacrifices, or anything.

The American Police State Is Now Forming.  SAT exams originally established to foster equality and non-discrimination in college admissions are now being abandoned as — imagine — discriminatory, giving advantage to Asians and whites over Latinos and people of color.  Even a few short years ago, Howard Gardner's idea of multiple intelligences was being used to challenge the idea of the mind's executive function, measured by I.Q. tests, as invalid.  Because learning is supposedly based on "multiple intelligences," emphasis in classrooms was increasingly on group work, simple tasks like pasting pictures on colored paper to make booklets, or learning via computer "at one's own pace" with the teacher present in the classroom to promote student engagement.  Teachers are increasingly referred to as facilitators rather than as teachers.  Even without the so-called Equality Act, this writer knows an elementary school teacher whose school issued the rule that teachers could no longer say, "Girls line up here, and boys line up here."  A girls' line and a boys' line were no longer allowed.

Couple buys Riverside dream home, but seller refuses to move out in eviction moratorium loophole.  When Tracie and Myles Albert purchased a beautiful four bedroom house in Riverside, California they never realized that at the end of escrow the seller would suddenly refuse to give up the keys and leave.  "It's just draining, emotionally and financially," says Tracie.  On January 31, 2020, the couple purchased the home.  More than a year later, they still haven't been able get inside their property.

Biden's Illegal Immigration Agenda Creates Another Child Smuggling Crisis.  Those in government know full well the tragic consequences of opening our borders.  Rather than being motivated by compassion, they seek to gain power, and they're willing to sacrifice some of the most vulnerable people to do it.  The Biden administration's recent open-borders immigration policy and talk of potential amnesty has predictably resulted in a dramatic rise in unaccompanied children risking their lives to enter the United States across our southern border.  The number of children coming without parents is now more than 430 a day, with immigration experts predicting an influx of more than 100,000 unaccompanied children by the end of 2021.  Parents are paying murderous drug cartels thousands of dollars to smuggle their children across the border.  Some children are traveling across two or three countries to get here.

Monopoly scraps outdated Community Chest cards to appeal to woke folks.  After 85 years of cheap hospital bills, moderate stock earnings and maturing "Christmas funds" (whatever that means), Hasbro now plans to bring Monopoly into the increasingly "woke" 21st century.  The game-maker has decided to update its 16 Community Chest cards, which featured outdated prompts such as winning a "beauty contest," actually receiving a "tax refund" or the now-rarely seen "bank error in your favor." In their place are more contemporary cards that evoke community service and social awareness.  Swaps could include a reward for "shopping local all week," rescuing a shelter pet or helping tend the community garden.  But Hasbro wants players to decide which to include via voting.

The Culture Curators Want To Think For You.  The corporations, much of the media, the entertainment industry, major league sports organizations, academia and Silicon Valley all demand that we fall in line with how they think.  They want to approve of how we speak, what books we read, what movies we watch, what words we use, who we support politically, how we educate our children and what parts of history are acceptable to teach. [...] When one of them deems something unacceptable in its version of the world, many others follow suit, often crumbling to their younger employees' demands.  The latter has been given enough power in this age of corporate social justice to destroy the very place they work if that corporation does not bend to their demands.  The decision no longer to publish six Dr. Seuss books was made internally.  So was Disney's decision to prevent young viewers from watching "Dumbo," "Peter Pan," "Swiss Family Robinson" and "The Aristocats."

Poison, Mutilate, and Sterilize.  Before the smartphone and the Great Awokening helped make transgenderism the latest craze among adolescent girls (partly displacing older teen fads such as anorexia, cutting, and recovered memories), psychological science knew of only two main types of gender dysphoria (when an individual is dissatisfied with the sex of his or her body):  Childhood-onset gender dysphoria [... and] Late-onset gender dysphoria[.] [...] Only a vanishingly small number of American teenage girls thought they were boys until the media started hyping transgenderism around 2013.  Unhappy pubescent girls shopped online for some explanation of their discontent and found en masse that the hot new one was transgenderism.

For US, Gradual Ruin Is About to Become Sudden.  [Scroll down]  For a moment, during President Donald Trump's tenure, it seemed as though we'd returned to the sunlit uplands.  Leave aside his partisan successes, the judges, and tax cuts, for example.  Concentrate instead on what he did to secure the borders, to upgrade the military, to make America energy independent.  It's only mid-March 2021. In just six weeks, and with 60-odd executive orders behind him, Biden has largely unraveled all that and more.  This is the reality:  Biden has set us on a collision course with tyranny at home and armed conflict abroad.  He has denominated his political opponents "domestic terrorists" and directed the FBI to harass and arrest them.  He has done everything in his considerable power to surrender the country to the woke mob.  Meanwhile, the rest of the world isn't standing still.  Look for a kinetic clash with Russia, China, or Iran soon.  It's coming to a theater near you by the end of this summer, and I do not mean a movie theater.

Portland cut police funding and got a 2,000% surge in murders.  Last June, the city of Portland, Oregon, hopped on the "defund the police" bandwagon.  Now, it is flooded with gun violence, and the mayor is already backtracking from his support for the cuts.  Mayor Ted Wheeler has requested $2 million in emergency funding for the police department, pointing directly to the surge in gun violence.  At this point last year, Portland had seen just one homicide.  This year, that number is 20, with 208 shootings in the city so far.  Wheeler backed the Portland City Council's decision to cut $15 million from the police budget last June, which included disbanding police units that investigate gun violence.  Predictably, that move backfired in a city that saw 100 consecutive days of violent rioting last year.  Riots are back once again in the city, thanks to Wheeler's spinelessness.  Rioters have once again targeted a federal courthouse in the city, a reprise of the violent storming of the courthouse last July.  In June, it was reported that the city lost around $24 million due to the riots.  Damage to federal buildings totals roughly $2.3 million.

US Military:  Social Justice Warriors.  A pastor I know personally told me that one of his congregation is in a service academy, and sends him photographs of assignments and readings they are given.  The young person asks the pastor for advice on how to navigate all this as a Christian.  The pastor said he — the pastor — is a conservative, but the things that the new woke military is putting into the heads of our young people are shocking.  Let me be clear:  the pastor is not hearing about this second-hand; he's seeing photos of the actual documents.  I have asked him to share them with me so I can pass them on to you.  I'm waiting to hear back.

Conservatives: Stop Whining and Take Action.  We must now regard our open borders as a funnel for new COVID infestation, legislative threats to our Second Amendment rights, an educational system that from kindergarten through graduate and professional schools is fully committed to indoctrinating students with woke socialism instead of teaching job-earning skills.  They have institutionalized racism with the white fragility doctrine and promoted wholesale abortion not only in the United States, but around the world with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

The Top 1% Are Not Causing the USA's Problems.  [Scroll down]  In today's world, unlike the USA at the turn of the 20th century, there are hundreds of thousands of big city residents who want their kids to be in "daycare" until 9:00 p.m. (many people who work in daycare centers encounter many parents who complain that they have to pick up their kids at 6:30 pm or 7:00 pm when they would prefer more downtime by themselves).  So, we may be moving towards a system of compulsory education to age 20 or 22, or perhaps a Spartan model where children are raised by the state 24/7 from the age of 6 onwards.

The Pentagon's Fight With Tucker Carlson Proves It Doesn't Even Exist To Win Wars Anymore.  Tucker Carlson may have never served in the armed forces, but he's still decisively winning a PR war against the U.S. military.  That shouldn't surprise anyone, of course.  The U.S. military loses most of the wars it fights these days.  During America's long golden age as a country, the military typically abstained from politics and won wars.  But in the decaying Globalist American Empire, the military plays a very different role.  Protecting America and winning conflicts isn't the military's goal at all.  Instead, the armed forces have become a skinsuit.  This once-great institution has been repurposed into a vehicle for globalist and left-wing domestic political goals.

Landlord homeless, unable to evict deadbeat' tenant thanks to COVID law.  A Brooklyn homeowner unable to evict an allegedly deadbeat tenant because of new state housing laws claims she has been forced to live in her car for weeks.  Shawna Eccles, 30, says in court papers she sleeps on the couches of friends and relatives whenever she can, and in her four-door Toyota when she can't, after fighting and failing for months to evict Sharita Patterson, 33, from the two-family home in Carnarsie.  "There is no one I can stay with until I am able to evict, and all of my money covers the mortgage, water bill and property taxes," Eccles told The [New York] Post.  "If anything gets cut off, it will be considered an illegal eviction.  I have no additional funds to rent an apartment."

My Democrat Friends are Getting Very Embarrassed.  They bought into the propaganda that all the turmoil in Washington was created by the erratic and immoral behavior of Donald Trump.  Their vote for Harris/Biden was a vote to return to normal.  They didn't realize that the Democrats weren't offering a return to normal, they were offering the establishment of a "new normal."  The "new normal" includes restricted energy exploration and cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.  This has caused a loss of well-paying union jobs, damaged relations with Canada, and triggered skyrocketing gasoline prices.  It also threatens to return us to dependence on the most unstable region in the world.  To those who would like us to leave the Middle East to resolve its own problems — we can't now.  We've implemented more "humane" immigration policies, creating a flood of illegal immigrants across the border — wearing "Biden" t-shirts.  Our humane policy has given us men, women, and children sacrificing their lives pursuing the dream promised them by the Democrats.  Thankfully, we're no longer keeping illegal immigrant children in cages.  Now we're keeping them in Conex boxes.

Leftists' inconsistencies are catching up with them.  The most obvious ideological clash within the Democrat party involves biological women and fake women (i.e., "transgender women"). Since the 1960s, the Democrats have owned the women's liberation movement and a significant part of the women's vote.  Democrats support abortion, "woymn's" and "womxn's" studies, free birth control and sanitary products, compulsory equal representation of women on corporate boards, and so much more.  Democrats were going to elect the first woman president (Hillary) and will soon sneak in a woman into the Oval Office via the back door (Harris). And of course, Democrats are the party of "believe all women."  However, Democrats are proving to be a radically anti-women party with their Equality Act.  This Act explicitly "prohibits an individual from being denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual's gender identity." It also mandates that "gender identity" is not a barrier to "public accommodations and facilities, education, federal funding, employment, [and] housing...."  In other words, biological men, simply by saying they are women, will have full access to women's restrooms, locker rooms, prisons, battered women's shelters, athletic competitions, women-only business opportunities, athletic scholarships, etc.  The bill is an invitation for rape and other physical abuse.

Biden's Border Brouhaha is Just the Start.  [Scroll down]  Do you Dems not understand that unlimited immigration hurts the undereducated and underskilled PoCs the most?  Do you Dems not understand that the minimum wage prices undereducated and underskilled PoCs onto the unemployment line? [...] And do you Dems not understand that wokery like "decolonizing math" means that white Beckys go buy homeschool math books for their children and PoC children get screwed?

Cops defunded, de Blasio's wife urges New Yorkers to do their own policing.  Did it occur to any of the leftist politicians boostering for the 'Defund the Police' far-left trope that they might just be left holding the bag?  Seems not.  And sure enough, it's slowly starting to dawn on them that were played for fools.  Because in the wake of the media-vaunted 'defund police' movement, every last blue city in America kowtowing to this has, surprise, found itself in the middle of a crime wave.  Crime-plagued blue cities are now becoming unliveable, and citizens who form their tax bases are fleeing, That presents some problems for these pols.  Caracas-ization is not for the faint of heart.  But remaining fools, they don't exactly know what to do about it.  Crime in New York City is out of control, so Chirlaine McCray, the scandal-plagued wife of far-left Mayor Bill de Blasio, is now offering a bizarre new solution to resolve the problem:  Every citizen his own policeman.

The Editor says...
Sounds a lot like the Wild West.  We don't need no stinking badges!

Jill Biden, the Meghan Markle in the WH, is egregiously guilty of elder abuse.  [Scroll down]  After just eight weeks in office, Biden has been a one-man wrecking ball to American jobs, energy independence and border security.  Under Trump, the Border Patrol and ICE were allowed to do their jobs which, like all law enforcement, was and is to protect this nation and its legal citizens.  And we are to believe that Americans chose Biden to undo the tremendous successes of the Trump administration?  No chance.  Every poll, even those rigged by leftists, shows that Americans do not support the violence perpetrated by Antifa and BLM.  They do not support defunding the police in any state or city.  Sure, those anti-White racists do support those groups and policies, but they are a minority.  Ask any Black mother trying to keep her sons alive beyond the age of fifteen in Chicago or Baltimore. [...] And then there is the border.  Whoever is calling the shots for all the Biden executive orders are having a grand old time at our expense.  They are destroying the America we once knew faster than anyone could have thought possible.

Gay poly throuple makes history, lists 3 dads on a birth certificate.  A gay, polyamorous California throuple made history in 2017 when they became the first family in the state to list three parents on a birth certificate.  Their reproductive journey and legal battle to become fathers to Piper, now 3, is detailed in "Three Dads and a Baby" (out March 9, Cleis Press), written by one of her dads, Dr. Ian Jenkins.  Jenkins and his partners, Jeremy Hodges and Dr. Alan Mayfield, don't see their family — which now also includes their son, Parker, 1 — as unusual.

Trump Reloaded.  Former president Donald Trump emerged from 38 days of self-enforced silence for a lengthy speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, that was frequently interrupted with boisterous applause and chants from an adoring, mostly white and older crowd. [...] Conservatives will not disagree with Trump when it comes to the issues he mentioned.  These issues included Biden allowing more immigrants to unlawfully cross our southern border and resuming a so-called "catch-and-release" policy Trump ended, the killing of the Keystone XL pipeline, which has led to lost jobs and higher energy prices, rejoining the Paris climate agreement and withdrawing Trump's restoration of UN sanctions on Iran, and the reversal of his energy policies, which Trump claims caused gasoline prices to soar by "30 percent" since he left office.  He predicted a gallon of gas could eventually cost "$5 $6 $7" dollars unless those policies are reversed.

This Administration Is Already a Failure.  Obama's administration was a policy disaster, but it was at least a competently implemented disaster.  The Zombie Administration is a disaster in both form and substance.  What has this desiccated, old weirdo achieved in his six weeks of semiconsciousness in the Oval Office?  Well, there's putting tens of thousands of Americans out of jobs, including union guys who voted for him.  There's telling the American people that their kids can't go to school because public school teachers take priority over children because of science or something.  There's another war in the Middle East.  Those are kind of accomplishments, but not really good ones.  His administration had someone named "Ducklo" who was mean to women.  He had another who wants to be a woman and who wants to let your little boys be surgically turned into women.  And Neera Tanden's confirmation was blocked because she was a woman and totally not because she was an inept loudmouth.  If this is normalcy, what's a freak show look like?

Now's Our Chance To Create Public School Alternatives.  Throughout parts of the United States, children have not been in school for a year.  Instead, they are expected to daily attend zoom classes.  What that means in practical terms is that many kids sit somewhere at home, log in to class, turn off the camera, and go back to bed or play games on their phone throughout the "school" day.  One young man I know is one of only two students in his entire middle school class whose face appears in the zoom classroom — and that is because he is a disabled student whose mother sits with him.  The school district cannot force children to turn the camera on.  In my work counseling children, numerous children have complained to me of isolation, severe loneliness, and anger.  One formerly school-loving boy asserted that teachers don't care about their students and it makes no difference if he does his work or not.  He will carry that sentiment back into the classroom, should they ever open up.

California Bill Would Give $1,000 Fines to Retailers With Separate 'Girls' and 'Boys' Toy Sections.  Retail stores in most of California are only allowed to operate at 25 percent capacity.  A new bill in the state legislature would ensure that whatever part of their shop is allowed to be open is as inclusive as possible.  Last week, Assembly Members Evan Low (D-Cupertino) and Cristina Garcia (D-Los Angeles) introduced a bill that would require retailers to offer their toys and childcare products in a gender-neutral format.  Brick-and-mortar shops would have to display the majority of their products and clothing aimed at children in one undivided, unisex area on the sales floor.  They'd also be barred from putting up signage that would indicate whether a product was intended for a boy or girl.

Is this the dumbest state legislature in the country?  No state in the United States has had single-party political rule at the state level longer than this state.  The ruling party has held a majority in both houses of the state legislature for 81 of the last 91 years (thus eliminating Nebraska).  The last time the minority party held a majority on the state supreme court was in the 1920's.  The state has the worst ranked K-12 public education system in the country.  It has 7 state universities that grant four-year degrees but only one is ranked academically in the top 500 in the U.S. (#484).  It is estimated that an astounding 46% of the adults in the state are functional illiterates.  This state is ranked as having the highest property crime rate and the second highest violent crime rate in the country.  It has the 5th highest unemployment rate in the country and an incredible 43% of the population is on Medicaid.  It is ranked as the 5th worst-run state in the country.

We Are Living in the Ruins of Our Civilization.  It is evening, very late evening.  I am walking in the remains of what once was New York City.  Broken trash bags and discarded clothing, furniture and debris line the sidewalks, spilling out onto the streets, the bags' black plastic jerking and lurching as though some near-suffocated life within were struggling to break free of confinement.  But I know it is only rats, still moving quickly and fearfully out of habitual wariness of the humans no longer around to challenge them.  I traverse blocks of shuttered and abandoned storefronts, their housing-code-violating neon displays gone dark, the "For Rent" signs in the windows already faded and frayed.  The first higher species of being I come across is only a shadow of any such description — a teetering, drooling zombie barely maintaining the accustomed vertical orientation of humanity — its head, neck, and back doubling over further and further, heavy eyelids drooping down time and again on the remaining vestiges of any consciousness to which it only weakly clings.  I hear a dead moan as I pass.  Others around have already given up the fight.  In piles of rags and filth and the stench of their own excrement, they are laid out in corners and crevices.  I navigate around one such specimen transecting the middle of the sidewalk, with the telltale final bottle capping off its drunken stupor still clasped in its gnarled fingers.

The Chinese Communist Takeover of America Is Well Underway.  [Scroll down]  Popular culture has become a useful tool for the Communist Chinese to use.  Much of our society revolves around what we see on television, in movies, and what we listen to.  Sadly far too many people, especially young people, take at face value anything they see on the Internet, in social media, or the pronouncements of popular entertainment figures.  Unions have been infiltrated as well to the point that they no longer exist to protect the rights of and benefit American trades and workers, but to support a leftist political agenda instead.  The Communist Chinese have been subtlety indoctrinating young impressionable minds here on school campuses all across America with their Marxist ideology.  An effort that's been underway for years.  And an effort that has had a great deal of success, considering the level of self-loathing about America that they have been able to instill in a great many of America's youth for a couple of generations now.

The Great Reset Rubric:  Making Sense of Our Present Dystopia.  The Great Reset represents the best rubric we might find for grasping much of what's going on in the world today:  the prevalence of woke ideology and cancel culture; the draconian COVID responses; the seemingly endless Antifa/BLM riots; the supposed Biden presidential victory; Big Tech censorship; and the endless stream of propaganda, double think, and gaslighting propagated by mainstream and social media.  Even if not by design, as I will show, all of these seemingly disparate elements interlock in a way that support Great Reset objectives, and the Great Re-setters favor all of these developments.  Likewise, once we are able to grasp the contours of the Great Reset, we will be poised to understand the reason for the prevalence of these elements and how they all interconnect and function together to produce our present dystopia.

Warning for America:  The Four Steps of Marxist Takeover Were Activated in 2020.  Back in July 2020 Scott McKay at American Spectator wrote an amazing piece on the Four Stages of Marxist Takeover.  McKay's report is based on the words and warnings of Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov.  It's been seven months since the report was published and the situation today is even more dire than predicted.  Even McKay would never have predicted the antics of the Marxist left during the 2020 elections.  The Marxist takeover of America is well on its way.

By Offering Amnesty Now, Democrats Are Setting Up A Massive Immigration Crisis.  Perhaps Democrats could have picked a worse time to unveil their expansive immigration bill that would grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, but not much worse.  The legislation, introduced Thursday by congressional Democrats with the full support of the Biden administration, dubbed the "U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021," comes as President Biden is rolling back border security measures implemented under Trump and the number of illegal border crossings is surging.  Combined with the ongoing pandemic and shortages of food and water in Texas after freezing temperatures left millions of Texans without power last week, a perfect storm is brewing on the border.  Earlier this month, Mexico stopped accepting Central American children and families apprehended at the border.  They had previously been quickly "expelled" under emergency pandemic protocols.  Now, U.S. border officials are releasing them into communities across South Texas, often without conducting COVID-19 tests.

Mark Zuckerberg Worked to Free Criminals in Oklahoma.  A Monster Freed Early Ate a Woman's Heart and Killed a 4-Year-Old Girl.  Criminal justice reform is a euphemism for a horrifying nightmare in which criminals were set loose under pressure from billionaire activist donors to commit horrifying crimes, terrorizing cities, destroying communities, and taking lives. [...] Anderson's sentence was apparently commuted in June.  Oklahoma was a major target of an alliance between lefties and "conservatives" on criminal justice reform that predated the coronavirus mass jailbreak. [...] Anderson should have been kept locked up.  He was yet another obvious example of a monster who should never have been loose.  But he was.  And now a girl lies dead, stabbed in the eye, and a woman lies dead, her heart torn out.  The only question is how soon Anderson will be released this time.

Save the Rhino!  Today's environmental activists are so hostile to capitalism that they end up killing animals they want to protect.  Like the African rhinoceros.  Poachers kill them to get their horns, which can sell for as much as $300,000. [...] South Africa, home to the largest number of rhinos, once tried something similar.  For 20 years, they allowed people to own rhinos and sell their horns.  Rhino farmers put the rhinos to sleep with tranquilizer darts, sawed off their horns (the horns grow back) and sold the horn.  Farmers had an incentive to protect rhinos.  South Africa's rhino population quadrupled.  But in 2009, under pressure from "environmental" groups, South Africa banned sales of horn again.  The sad result:  Poaching increased sharply.  Poachers also killed park rangers who tried to protect rhinos.

Feudalism Is Coming to America, and You're the Serf.  Society is becoming more stratified, with decreasing chances of upward mobility for most of the population, whose well-being has been exacerbated by economic restrictions imposed as a response to COVID-19 pandemic, and which is to getting hit even harder with Biden's "progressive" policies.  Simultaneous with the new "aristocratic" ruling class rises a class of new clerisy that provides intellectual support of the emerging system — the media, academia, and celebrity influencers (pop culture).  The model of liberal capitalism is losing appeal around the globe for different reasons, and new doctrines are arising in its place, including ones that lend support to a kind of autocracy, elitism, and socialism that drastically curtail the capitalist methods and achievements.  They do not offer reform; they insist on a complete demolition.  The first structure of the "old" system to go is democracy.

A Word About The Biden Return To 'Normalcy'.  Less than a month into Biden's term, let's take a look at America's return to "normal":
  •   Is it our standard-operating procedure to call, without evidence, those we disagree with racists and white supremacists?
  •   Is being obsessed with, and bowing down before, identity politics who we are?
  •   Is letting males compete with female athletes playing it straight in the U.S.?
  •   Is a militarized zone around the U.S. Capitol a long-standing American custom?  What about a political witch hunt disguised as an effort to root out domestic terrorists?
  •   Is it normal for an administration to snub Israel, America's only natural and traditional ally in the Middle East?
  •   Is it routine for the president's family to conduct "corrupt business dealings in foreign countries"?
  •   Is it normal for public schools to be closed across the country because the teachers unions in a real sense own the party in power in Washington?
  •   Is it a time-honored American practice for the media to snuggle up to that party in power and treat the president as a celebrity, even a savior, and refuse to sufficiently fact-check him?

A Fifty-Year History of Anti-Patriotism in the United States.  Patriotism is under attack.  The idea of the cultural Marxists on the left is to replace traditional patriotism with a different vision of the meaning of American nationalism from the vision that has obtained since 1776, although that traditional understanding and vision of the USA has gone through modifications over decades.  Unwillingness to say the Pledge of Allegiance or even to stand for the Pledge is not a first step in that direction, but part of an endgame toward a revised understanding of what America is and what its role is in history.  The readers of this article should not be surprised if legislation for a revised American flag is offered in the halls of Congress in the near future.

An Insider Explains Why Texans Lost Their Power.  [Scroll down]  If this sounds outlandish, here's the head of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas:  ["]The fundamental decision made in the middle of the night on Monday to have outages imposed was a wise decision by the operators we have here, Magness said.  If we had waited and not done those outages ... we could have drifted to blackout.  That's not just outages, but we could lose all electricity on system, and it could take months or longer to repair that.["]  With a total ERCOT system failure, as many as 12 million customers and possibly 20 million Texans could be in the cold, in the dark, in their cars with nowhere to go — for months.  Wind power did this to Texas.  Be very afraid of the Green New Deal.

Texans Froze To Death Because Biden Admin Ordered ERCOT To Throttle Energy Output By Forcing It To Comply With Environmental Green Energy Standards.  The White House said on Thursday [2/18/2021] a severe winter storm engulfing Texas and nearby states was the type of extreme weather event that climate change is triggering, rejecting assertions by Texas officials that "green energy" caused widespread power outages.  The crisis in the largest U.S. oil- and gas-producing state has put Democratic President Joe Biden's White House squarely at odds with Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who initially did not acknowledge Biden's 2020 election win. [...] But Biden's "America last" agenda was again on full display.  After Texas Gov Abbott declared a state of emergency back on Feb 12 Biden administration ordered ERCOT to throttle energy output by forcing it to comply with environmental green energy standards, knowing full well Texans could freeze to death in their homes with zero electricity as temperatures plunged into the single digits.  Going into effect Sunday, Feb. 14, Emergency Order 202-21-1 shows the Energy Dept. was aware of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's statewide disaster declaration and that ERCOT was readying gas utilities in preparation for a demand surge.

Texas Gov Abbott Declared A State Of Disaster On Feb 12, Biden's Team Ordered Restrictions That Sent Texans Freezing In The Dark.  Governor Greg Abbott has issued a disaster declaration for all 254 counties in Texas on Feb 12 as a winter storm struck the state. [...] Texas is the only one of the contiguous 48 states with its own stand-alone electricity grid, one of the three main grids in the U.S.:  the Eastern Interconnection, Western Interconnection, and Texas Interconnection.  The Texas Interconnection, which covers 213 of the 254 Texas counties, is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT.  Portions of Texas near the state's borders are covered by the eastern and western grids.  Texas produces more electricity than it consumes and maintains a buffer referred to as the "state's reserve margin."  This margin ensures that we should never have to suffer from rolling blackouts like California.  Then why are so [many] millions of Texans without power right now?  Why are we dealing with rolling blackouts?  The answer is all-too-familiar:  our relationship with the federal government.

Kroger says Seattle's hazard pay law has raised labor costs and is forcing it to close 2 more grocery stores.  Kroger has criticized Seattle's city's hazard pay law that requires grocers to temporarily pay workers an additional $4 per hour, saying the mandate is forcing the company to close two QFC stores in the city.  The QFC stores will remain operational until April 24, QFC said Friday in an emailed statement to Insider.  The company said that it will help workers with the transition and consider any transfer requests.  "City officials need to consider that grocery stores — in a pandemic — operate on razor-thin profit margins," Kroger said in a statement.  "The mandated extra pay makes it impossible to continue operating underperforming stores."

Minnesota Nasty.  Crime, homeless encampments, riots, crime, loopy left-wing government, crime, litter, violent protests, imperious left-wing activists seeing off mainstream liberal Democrats, boarded-up shops downtown, a vicious social-media-driven politics of personal destruction, crime, crime, and crime, to say nothing of the crime — today's Minneapolis is where Minnesota Nice turns into Minnesota Nasty.  Let's talk about the crime first.  Everybody does.  "We're moving," says one longtime resident of downtown Minneapolis.  "Prior to COVID, I walked to work every day and walked home.  You couldn't pay me enough to do that now — and it's only a mile.  It's a changed city."

Cadbury under fire for same-sex kiss in new Creme Egg commercial.  Cadbury is getting creamed by critics on social media, who say the British candy company is "selling sex to children." [...] "By choosing to feature a same-sex couple, Cadbury's are clearly hoping to cause controversy and escape criticism," the petitioner alleges, "by claiming that any objections must be rooted in 'homophobia,' but members of the LGBT community have also expressed their dislike of this campaign."  The author goes on to accuse the Cadbury campaign of using sexually explicit content to provoke viewers while "seeking to hide under cover of LGBT rights."

Conservatives Must Read Marx.  When Tucker Carlson defended Trump's Wall, his antagonists didn't collect evidence against his words.  No, they threatened his advertisers with boycotts.  When Jordan Peterson refused an Ontario law mandating pronoun usage, his critics didn't mount arguments against him.  They demanded the University of Toronto fire him.  Money, jobs, resources, access — that's the target now.  Academia requires that all job candidates compose a "diversity statement," essentially a loyalty oath that imposes leftist ideology onto the hiring process.  An honest conservative doesn't survive, and that's the point.

The Compound Fractures of Identity Politics.  Every citizen fatality in the custody of a government official — like George Floyd's excruciating death in Minneapolis — deserves a solemn response and ultimate accounting, including both criminal investigation and broader assessment.  The fear and fury flowing from recent law-enforcement casualties, however, have been inflamed and manipulated by opportunists to produce something much more sweeping.  Hard facts and data about our systems of law and policing are being ignored.  Emotional hysteria is increasingly substituted for reasoned problem-solving.  There is enormous pressure to conform to approved ideological assertions, and people expressing alternate views are often railroaded.  Broad attacks on social order, widespread destruction of public and private property, and new waves of street crime have unfolded.  There is open hostility toward the fundamentals of American justice and governance.  It is now routinely claimed that "the United States government was founded on racist intellectual premises and economic practices that institutionalized oppression of people of color that continues to the present day" (to quote the Seattle Public Schools). U.S. society as a whole is characterized as a "system of oppression."  In consequence, our classical liberal traditions of fierce competition of ideas, mutual tolerance, political compromise, and individual freedom are visibly withering.  Yet there is scant resistance to any of this among elites.  Journalists, social leaders, academics, clergy, businesspeople, and many politicians show little awareness that essential American principles are being washed away.

Are you feeling safer yet?  A New York Post editorial quotes New York City police commissioner Dermot Shea:  "We have made staggering numbers of gun arrests, taking guns off the streets from felons, but when you look, three days later, four days later, those individuals are back on the street committing more gun violence."  The editorial continues by saying that years of often ill conceived criminal justice reform has set up a revolving door that frees even repeat offenders almost instantly.  And "[w]orse, because everyone knows the perp will be back in the neighborhood again — and the no-bail law lets the defense know right away who has talked — witnesses are ever-harder to come by."  Well, that's in one Democrat-run state.  What about California?  According to Hotair.com:  "Through a series of measures starting back in 2014, the state of California has made it increasingly easy for people to commit property theft and get away with it[.] ... Even in cases where they do manage to catch somebody stealing, it's too often not worth the trouble of taking them down to the station because they'll just be released immediately without bail anyway."  One result of this is that California businesses are shutting down for good.

The Dirty Little Secret of Cancel Culture.  Cancel culture isn't a singular thing.  It's a collection of strategies and tactics, each designed to use the power of the collective against the individual.  Typically, the cancel mob starts with some attacks on Twitter or Facebook. [...] Sooner or later, and this is the goal, the news media gets involved, validating those attacks by taking them as legitimate.  The end result is someone gets fired, loses a contract, or a company has its products removed from shelves.  People get deplatformed from social media or lose their mass media platforms.  It's a 2021 village shunning with real consequences.  The medieval village mob is now a virtual mob but the hysteria is the same.  In today's cancel culture, the triggers for the cancel mob are often unpopular statements, actions, or decisions, but it doesn't stop there.  The cancel mob can put a target on your back for not speaking up.  For doing business with their primary target.

Gas Prices Have Already Spiked Under Biden (And They Could Go Much Higher).  After four years of stable gas prices under President Donald J. Trump, Americans may have to get used to some pain at the pump.  Former Vice President Joe Biden hasn't even been in the White House for a month and gas prices are already up a whopping 18 percent with at least one analyst predicting that they could hit $4 per gallon in the near future.  Biden's ideologically-driven decision to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline and the expectation that his Green New Deal policies will place onerous regulatory burdens on domestic energy producers in the fossil fuel industry is already hitting Americans in their pocketbooks.  Sadly, the worst may be yet to come.

The Editor says...
Of course the worst is yet to come.  With Biden cutting off oil exploration anywhere he can, blocking pipeline projects, and dreaming of a world without carbon dioxide, the price of gasoline will only increase.  Biden and his minions, who oppose every practical source of energy, are responsible for this mess.

More businesses flee Seattle because of crime and violence.  TR International, a global chemical distributor, is moving from its home of more than two decades in downtown Seattle, crossing the county line to neighboring Edmonds.  The company is one of at least 160 businesses that have left Seattle since last March.  While some of the companies that have left Seattle is due to the coronavirus pandemic, business leaders have said that much of it could be traced back to a sense that no one is minding the store in Seattle anymore, and a lack of accountability from city leaders.

Oregon promotes teacher program that seeks to undo 'racism in mathematics'.  The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages "ethnomathematics" and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.  An ODE newsletter sent last week advertises a Feb. 21 "Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course," which is designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for "dismantling racism in mathematics."  The event website identifies the event as a partnership between California's San Mateo County Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others.  Part of the toolkit includes a list of ways "white supremacy culture" allegedly "infiltrates math classrooms."  Those include "the focus is on getting the 'right' answer," students being "required to 'show their work,'" and other alleged manifestations.

Discouraged? Remember:  Truth Always Prevails.  In 2008, presidential candidate Obama promised to fundamentally transform America.  Well, "mission accomplished."  Perhaps I give the former president too much credit, as he didn't build that, but his philosophy and policies directed our culture onto a path such that now everything has become political.  It's infected our education, science, businesses, and even health care system.  Like attending a movie in 3-D, everyone uses a political lens in which to view the world.  Sadly, it is to the destruction of us all.  Politics is a zero-sum game of winners and losers — us versus them.  If politics is our governing mindset and prevailing worldview, then we will never have unity.  A divided house falls.

Oil rigs relocate from New Mexico to Texas over Biden's permitting freeze.  New Mexico is already paying the price for the Biden administration's freeze on agency-level approvals for permits on federal lands as oil rigs relocate to private property in Texas.  Sarah Cottrell Propst, New Mexico secretary of Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources, said operators are moving rigs out of state over the "confusion" surrounding the Interior Department's Jan. 20 order requiring top political appointees, instead of career staff, to approve permits for 60 days.  The order has had little impact on states such as Texas, where only 1.8% of the land is federally owned, but could prove devastating to New Mexico, which leads the nation in oil production on federal lands and depends heavily on oil-and-gas tax revenue to fund its budget.

Biden's Misery Index.  Stagflation and the resulting high misery index could return if Biden's stated economic policies are fully enacted.  The reason will be very simple:  business will not be able to respond to market conditions by expanding output.  Business will be forced to respond by raising prices.  In other words, Biden's push to give people free goods and services creates a greater demand in the market.  He wants to pay for those giveaways by eliminating the 2018 tax cuts and by further raising taxes on the highest income earners and on the wealthiest Americans.  Biden's policies will also result in much higher energy prices.  Energy is used in the entire business process meaning the increased cost will put upward pressure on all prices.  He wants to raise the top income tax bracket to at least 40%.  And he wants to raise the capital gains tax rate to 40%.  Biden says the wealthy should pay their fair share.  But the higher tax rates will force business to an undesired response to market conditions.

The Editor says...
If everyone should "pay their fair share," that's what percentages are for.  If everyone pays X percent of their income in the form of taxes, and that's a fair percentage, then fairness extends across the board.  When the percentage goes up and up, depending on one's income, that is patently unfair.  When the percentage goes below zero, as in the case of refundable tax credits, that's really unfair.

Our Tarnished Institutions and the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  Over the past few decades, a group of people with a particular political outlook have infested most of our cultural institutions with the goal of using those institutions to advance their cause(s).  Inherent in this effort is ignoring the nominal purposes of the institutions in favor of the overarching goal(s).  As a result, news outlets no longer worry about facts.  Judges no longer follow the law.  And, most surprisingly of all, sports leagues don't concern themselves primarily with playing sports.  There are numerous other examples, but you get the idea.  Beyond the obvious problems which arise from this situation, there is a longer-term issue.  These institutions are, in effect, lying to the public.  We can't trust the news media, the legal system, entertainment, sports, etc., anymore.  They have cried wolf too many times, and the wise move is just to ignore them.

The Science-Denying Woke War on Women and Girls Is Speeding up.  The war on men and boys has been underway for nearly two decades, and now the woke Left is waging war on women and girls.  The woke activists are determined to erase the lines that biology draws between men and women.  Decades of research documents physical, biological, genetic, and biochemical differences between the sexes, but woke activists expect us to ignore this evidence in service of the concept of gender.  Gender used to be a linguistic device to denote biological sex.  In several foreign languages, such as Spanish, the article for "the" has feminine and masculine versions.  "La" and "el" mean something.  Perhaps the woke will cancel the Spanish language next.  They have already tried with "Latinx," which only 4% of Hispanic Americans prefer.  Only 3% use it, and less than 25% are even aware of it.

Midwives told to stop using terms such as 'breastfeeding' and 'breastmilk'.  Midwives have been told to stop using terms including "breastfeeding" and "breastmilk" as part of a new trans-friendly policy at an NHS trust.  Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals (BSUH) NHS Trust is the first in the country to formally implement a gender inclusive language policy for its maternity services department — which will now be known as "perinatal services".  Staff have been told to avoid using the word "mothers" on its own and have been given a list of alternative terms to use when addressing patients including "mothers or birthing parents", "breast/chestfeeding" and "maternal and parental".

To Be Inclusive of Non-Binary Parents, Hospitals Nix the Terms 'Breast Milk' and 'Father'.  We're living in the age of inclusion.  To that end, nurses are being asked to think before speaking — about nursing.  As reported by the New York Post, on Monday [2/8/2021], two UK hospitals put the kibosh on "breast milk." Words matter, and the wrong ones hurt.  Hence, medical workers are being asked to reference "human milk" — in order to include transgender and non-binary parents.  In the prenatal units of Sussex and Brighton University Hospitals NHS Trust, staff should eliminate words such as "breastfeeding."

Our Illiberal Moment.  To be adequately maintained, classical liberalism demands three key virtues.  Humility, so that each of society's competing factions might comprehend that it will not always hold power.  Tolerance, so that the habitual reaction to a difference of opinion is the shrug rather than the bayonet.  And forbearance, so that the immediate rush of victory can be subordinated to longer-term ambition.  Little by little, we are losing all three and, as they go, forgetting the good practices that have built, sustained, and improved our remarkable society for generations.

Jake Tapper and Chris Hayes Lose Their Minds 'Inciting' Against GOP And Reveal Next Step to Control the Narrative.  [Scroll down]  The GOP got "hundred of thousands of Americans" killed?  When did that happen?  "Then helped a deadly attack on the Capitol."  No, as far as I know, the GOP denounced any violence and were themselves threatened with a bomb at the RNC.  No, actually there wasn't "unprecedented death" for a pandemic.  Unfortunately, there are deaths in a pandemic as there have been all over the world.  Had Trump not been in power, if Biden had been there, it would have been far worse.  Biden wouldn't have cut off travel with China and it would have been exponentially worse.  "Destruction and misery and mourning."  Yes, there was a lot of that from mostly Democratic lockdowns, where Democrats denied aid, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proved, until after the election, exacting the most harm to the economy believing it could adversely affect President Donald Trump.  There was also a lot of that during the BLM/Antifa riots that the Democrats not only failed to condemn, but actually embraced by donating to a rioter bail fund, supporting violent rioters over the people and the police being harmed, and attacking efforts to curtail the riots by law enforcement and the federal government.

The Betrayal of the American People by Biden and the Ruling Oligarchy.  The Biden Administration is willfully and permanently undermining the economy and the future well-being of the citizenry as well as trampling on the Constitution with an unprecedented avalanche of executive orders, proposed legislation and untenable regulations.  The current leader of the United States, safe in his plush bunker, is without a clue as he and his confederates in the ruling oligarchy are more interested in consolidating power and enriching themselves than they are in the long-term welfare of the nation and its citizenry.  In their mad and childish dash to purge the nation of all things associated with Donald Trump, this cabal is deliberately being oblivious to the fact that there is but one major responsibility of the leaders of a Constitutional Republic.  That is to be certain their country is capable, in the both the short and long-term, of successfully weathering a worst-case scenario such as global war, a massive economic downturn, or a catastrophic natural disaster.  Those currently entrenched in the ruling oligarchy are pursuing policies that will leave no margin for error in the event of an apocalyptic natural or man-made disaster.

Millions of Americans Projected to Remain Jobless as Biden Packs U.S. Labor Force with Foreign Workers.  Millions of Americans are projected to remain jobless for the next three to four years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), though President Joe Biden is looking to fill American jobs with foreign workers.  In a report released this month, CBO analysts said the number of jobless Americans — all of whom want full-time jobs — will not return to pre-coronavirus levels until around 2024. [...] Before then, millions of Americans are projected to remain jobless though that has not kept the Biden administration from pursuing a labor policy that floods the United States labor market with millions of illegal aliens, foreign visa workers, and green card-holders.

California politicians demand grocery stores pay workers more; groceries close instead.  Every business operates at a risk, and the risk-reward ratio was obviously closed to the point that it didn't make sense to put effort into a store with declining profits.  Is this so hard to understand?  Apparently, it is, because an emotionally driven, fact-bereft city councilperson going by the name of Mary Zendejas, who sponsored the bill, said that "it really saddens me that they'd rather take away 200 jobs instead of doing the right thing, which is paying hazard pay for these local grocery store workers who risk their lives everyday they come in and who are putting their lives on the line every second they're working."  There is so much wrong with this sentiment.  In Zendejas's world, there is now a moral obligation of private companies to pay whatever rate is deemed appropriate by leftists on a given day.  Today it's a $4-an-hour boost because everyone is a hero.  Tomorrow it's a national $15-an-hour increase.  These are entirely arbitrary numbers, and by Biden's logic, if there is no evidence that they upset the balance of supply and demand, then why stop there?

Democratic Governors Have Devastated Their States.  Over the past year, there has been a pretty clear divide between liberal governors, who almost without exception imposed irrationally harsh covid lockdown measures, and conservative governors, who generally took a more nuanced and pro-freedom approach.  The data are now in, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they tell a story that cannot be misinterpreted.  My colleague Martha Njolomole created these charts.  First, job losses in December 2020.  She focused on the fact that Minnesota, shut down once more by feckless Governor Tim Walz, lost nearly 50,000 jobs in December alone, trailing only Michigan and California.  By contrast, Wisconsin, about as similar to Minnesota as a state can be, is on the way to recovery, adding 15,000 jobs in that month.  What state added the most jobs in December?  Texas, by far.

Former CBP Head:  Biden Has Decimated Border Protections With 'Stroke Of A Pen'.  Former Acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan slammed the Biden administration Tuesday [2/2/2021] for undoing significant border protections put into place by President Trump.  Morgan first took aim at White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki for trashing Trump's efforts to secure the border, and attributing the infamous Obama/Biden 'kids in cages' and family separation policy to Trump.  After Psaki had spoken, calling Trump's border policies "horrific", Morgan stated that "There isn't enough time to address all the spin and misinformation that the Press Secretary just sent out."  Morgan outlined that agencies within the Trump administration have been "working tirelessly" to reunite families separated at the border.

Landlords in New York suffering from lack of rent payments amid pandemic.  78-year-old Donna Szucs says she has lost thousands in unpaid rent from the tenant of a home she owns in Wyoming County.  "It's very frustrating because I have to provide him with water, heat, and everything else even though he pays me nothing," Szucs said.  Szucs has no legal recourse.  The New York State moratorium on rent, aimed at helping those who lost jobs due to the pandemic, allows for people to miss rent payments and not face eviction.  For Szucs, that's meant almost 12 months of lost wages.

Governing Elites Are Destroying the Nation They're Supposed to Run.  Consider these facts:  [#1] Before Ted Kennedy's 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, nine tenths of all new immigrants to America came from Europe; after the act's passage, nine tenths of new immigrants have come from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.  [#2] Since the 1965 Act's passage, over sixty million new immigrants have arrived in the United States, and over a hundred million more are expected over the next half century.  [#3] In 1970, 4.7% of the American population was born outside of the United States; in 2017, 13.7% of the national population was born in a foreign country. [...] [#4] Eighty-four percent of Americans born between 1928 and 1945 identify as Christians, and 50% of them still attend religious services at least once a week.  In contrast, less than half of millennial Americans today identify as Christian, and 64% rarely, if at all, attend any kind of religious service.

Is This the Normal You Voted For?  We are being bombarded by a triangulation of disinformation from the Left's political hacks, complicit media, and crony corporations.  This deceitful trifecta is a psychological operation against Republicans, populists, and conservatives—the sane coalition that alone can and must save our republic from the tyranny of "[their] democracy."  Through this diaphanous prism of realization, one can starkly comprehend the Left's game and aims:
  •   The reckless misuse and mistreatment of National Guard troops to paint a false narrative that anyone, not a leftist is a white supremacist and terrorist; and the re-weaponization of the federal government against the Left's opponents for partisan advantage.
  •   The Democratic Congress' vindictive impeachment of a former president to decapitate a populist movement of over 74 million Americans; corrosive partisan lust to expand and pack the federal courts with judicial activists, including the Supreme Court; and angling to give the District of Columbia statehood to secure more Leftist senators and a representative.
  •   Our current executive sock puppet's record-breaking torrent of job-crushing, science-denying, citizenry dividing executive orders; his pretending there was no plan for distributing the COVID-19 vaccine, while cynically plagiarizing his predecessors' plan.
  •   And, lest we forget, Mr. Biden's mendacious invitations to "unity" — the rank hypocrisy of which gnaws at the fraying bonds of the elementary fairness that is one of the last shards of civic comity.

It's Not Just 'Gender Dysphoria.' It's Now 'Rapid Onset Marxism.'  The U.S. House of Representatives passed a new rules package that explicitly strikes "gendered language" from the official House rules.  The rules prohibit the use of terms that designate the gender of familial relationships — father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, and so on — and replace them with gender-neutral terms.  Commentator Tammy Bruce, a radio and Fox Nation host, says this move Jan. 4 is "obscenely Marxist" because it "deconstructs what it means to be female."  She went on to say:  "It reduces all of us, it eliminates the value of the individual and our uniqueness as individuals."  The goal of social policing of our language is thought control, which epitomizes the Marxist agenda.

Biden's climate executive orders devastated these US workers in a day.  On the morning of Jan. 20, every room of the two-story Stroppel Hotel in Midland, SD, was filled with men and women who work on the Keystone XL pipeline.  Most of these union laborers, welders and pipefitters started their day over a cup of coffee in the hotel's common room before heading out to their jobs.  By 4 p.m., the entire place was cleared out, leaving the historic hotel silent for the first time since owners Laurie and Wally Cox took it over six months ago.  "Our whole world turned upside down with the stroke of a pen," Laurie said.  She is speaking of President Biden's executive order, signed on his first day in office, that halted work on the Keystone XL pipeline in South Dakota and immediately eliminated 1,000 union jobs.  TC Energy, the company that was developing the project, predicts that more than 10,000 jobs will be lost in 2021 due to the order.

One week in, Biden administration shows its exquisite cruelty.  [Scroll down]  So along with Biden's dictatorial executive orders comes Schumer's plan to further constrain our freedoms due to the "climate emergency."  But there is no climate emergency.  It's just another hoax, a fear-mongering ruse to create a global government.  The planet has survived all manner of climate changes.  We humans can no more affect the climate here than we can on Mars.  And even if we could, we are not responsible for the irresponsibility of nations like China and India re: filthy air.  The Paris Climate Accord is only about making U.S. taxpayers pay billions of dollars to those nations to equalize the quality of life on the planet.  Not a single prediction of the Gorist climate alarmists has come true.  Snow still falls from the sky; there are no more hurricanes than normal; polar bears are alive and thriving; droughts occur here and there as they have throughout the millennia.  But the Biden administration is going to use climate alarmism to continue restricting the American population from living their lives.  President Trump energized our economy, made us energy independent.  Biden has in the span of a week tanked it in order to make us dependent on Saudi Arabia again.  He is about to ban coal-mining, too.  What will happen to those miners?

Biden's normal is abnormal.  The media is peddling the narrative that Chairman Xiden is bringing back normalcy.  Well, let us see what the media and the rest of the Democrats consider normal.  The new normalcy is impeaching a president and trying him after his term ends and he has gone home to Mar-A-Lago.  The new normalcy is arresting and prosecuting a man for making memes on Twitter.  The new normalcy is 25,000 National Guard troops in Washington on Inauguration Day.  The new normalcy is replacing a viewing audience for the occasion with 100,000 American flags.  The new normalcy is cries of deprogramming political opponents.  The new normalcy is banning reporters who ask tough questions at press conferences.  The new normalcy is not deporting criminals.  The new normalcy is making women shower with men in the military.  The new normalcy is attempts to expel duly elected opponents from the Senate.

Environmental Extremism Is Creeping Into Every Domain of Public Policy.  Many on the left continue to place their ideology of environmental extremism above all other considerations, including economic growth, individual freedom, and the welfare of low-income Americans.  This worldview ignores critical tradeoffs and places environmental interests above even basic principles that have long served as a foundation of this nation.  Further, this extreme environmental movement has crept into almost every issue area imaginable.  There are certainly environmental issues that need attention, but sensible environmental policy doesn't address those issues in a vacuum without regard for other important concerns.  Yet, this extreme movement acts in such a manner.

Biden's Climate Orders Will Flip America's National Security on Its Head.  On Wednesday [1/27/2021], President Joe Biden signed two executive orders and issued a memorandum pushing the climate alarmist narrative and boosting the climate-industrial complex.  Biden claimed that his administration's climate boondoggle will create more jobs, but his first climate move — nixing the Keystone XL pipeline — cost 1,000 jobs right away, and an estimated 10,000 more.  His climate orders will upend America's national security as well as its economy.  "Today is 'climate day' at the White House, which means that today is 'jobs day' at the White House," Biden said as he introduced his new climate agenda.  The president repeated the canard that his transition to green technologies would create more jobs than it eliminates, without mentioning that creating this climate-industrial complex requires massive amounts of taxpayer money and more government intrusion into the economy.  Naturally, vocal criticism came quickly.

More about the Keystone XL pipeline.

Federal Reserve Warns Joe Biden Policies are Weakening US Economy.  The Federal Reserve panel sent a warning about the U.S. economy starting to suffer as the JoeBama administration starts to institute "America Last" policies.  The financial media will not directly point to the Biden policy agenda as the primary source of the issue, but the background context of a new administration is exactly the difference.  Even during the worst aspects of the 2020 COVID-19 impact during the Donald Trump administration, the underpinning of the U.S. economy remained strong.  However, now that JoeBama has taken office the 2021 COVID-19 impact is being used as an excuse.

The Editor says...
This might be Biden's goal.  Barack H. Obama had the same goal, and Biden is doing exactly what Obama would do, but with a heavier emphasis on China's benefit.

US Media Makes Heroes of Teens Who Betray Their Family Members and GoFundMe Makes It Profitable.  One of the elements in the Communist Manifesto, right before the abolition of the nation-state, is the abolition of the family.  We've seen a gradual chipping away at the health of the family under the guise of good intentions.  We've created a society where out-of-wedlock births are the norm rather than the exception.  Where state provided daycare and before- and after-school programs act in place of parents.  We have a school system that actually believes it knows best, and so you, the parent, can't send your kid to school with aspirin without the royal assent of school administrators, but school officials can arrange for your child to have access to birth control devices.  The hostility of the public school mafia to homeschooling is often packaged as one of competition for resources.  It isn't.  It is about control of what your child learns and what they imprint as values.

The push to decriminalize 'streetwalking' follows a deadly run of NYC 'reforms'.  Think Bill de Blasio's dumpster fire of a mayoralty can't get worse?  Think again:  Albany is planning to send him more street hookers.  Whoopee.  State Sen. Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat now running for borough president, considers the notice police pay to transsexual streetwalkers to be a pressing civil-rights issue — and so he's pushing legislation that effectively would make street-walking of all sorts legal.  The bill appears fated to pass — and what could go wrong with that?  Plenty.  Blame for much of what makes New York City so difficult to navigate these days rests squarely with the normalization — and outright legalization — of anti-social, often dangerously aberrant, public personal behavior.

Why the Left has to suppress free speech.  Let us begin with this fact:  The left always suppresses speech.  Since Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, there has been no example of the left in control and not crushing dissent.  That is one of the important differences between liberal and left:  Liberalism and liberals believe in free speech.  (The present leftist threat to freedom in America, the greatest threat to freedom in American history, is made possible because liberals think they have more to fear from conservatives than from the left.  Liberals do not understand that the left regards liberals as their useful idiots.)  The left controls universities.  There is little or no dissent allowed at universities.  The left controls nearly every "news" medium.  There is little or no dissent in the mainstream media — not in the "news" sections and not in the opinion sections.  The left controls Hollywood.  No dissent is allowed in Hollywood.  That is why we have "cancel culture" — the silencing and firing of anyone who publicly dissents from the left, and even "publicly" is no longer necessary.

Obey, America, for Your Own Good!  So, just to be clear about where we now stand:  The Constitution's out sick because of Chinese Flu.  You still get to say and print what you want so long as what you have to say conforms to whatever CNN has to say.  If you stick up for the Founding Fathers who fought for our freedoms, you're likely a "white supremacist," but if you destroy monuments to the Founding Fathers, you're a freedom fighter.  It's patriotic to inform on your neighbors for violating government health decrees but unpatriotic to pray with your neighbors in church.  Rioters who destroy cities are protesting for democracy, but Americans protesting for free and fair elections are threatening democracy.  It's good and noble to burn down buildings around the White House when members of Congress promise to pay for arsonists' bail, but breaching the Capitol perimeter is no less tragic than Pearl Harbor.  Social media protect speech by silencing it.  News corporations protect freedom of the press by urging the censorship of points of view.  Americans can no longer be trusted with guns because they might use them to protect their natural rights.  The only person ever to receive more votes than Donald Trump is Joe Biden, but Americans are supposed to remember at all times that Donald Trump is immensely unpopular while Joe Biden is historically loved.  And so many Americans support the incoming president that he requires a standing army to ensure his safe installation.

Clarity in Trump's Wake.  In 2021, the laws, customs, and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic since the 18th century are things of the past.  Americans' movements and interactions are under strictures for which no one ever voted.  Government disarticulated society by penalizing ordinary social intercourse and precluding the rise of spontaneous opinion therefrom.  Together with corporate America, it smothers minds through the mass and social media with relentless, pervasive, identical, and ever-evolving directives.  In that way, these oligarchs have proclaimed themselves the arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees with them as systemically racist, adepts of conspiracy theories.  Corporations, and the government itself, require employees to attend meetings personally to acknowledge their guilt.  They solicit mutual accusations.  While violent felons are released from prison, anyone may be fired or otherwise have his life wrecked for questioning government/corporate sentiment.  Today's rulers don't try to convince.  They demand obedience, and they punish.

San Francisco's "Progressive" Drug Policies Kill Hundreds Annually.  Last year, 621 people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco.  To put this in perspective, 173 people died from COVID-19, which is identified as the primary public health crisis in the Bay Area.  For years, San Francisco has tacitly encouraged drug abuse with remarkably lenient policies, and those policies are now inadvertently killing hundreds of people annually.  San Francisco uses a policy approach called "harm reduction," which stresses "culturally competent, non-judgmental treatment that demonstrates respect and dignity for the individual."  But this approach, as it is practiced within San Francisco, is inhumane and cruel.  It is destroying the dignity of the lives that some could have with more sensible policies.  In addition to overdose deaths skyrocketing, drug abuse has increased in San Francisco, and it is becoming more difficult for addicts to affect positive change.

Everything Is Broken.  For seven decades, the country's intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions — universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc.  Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as "American" — conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country.  This wasn't a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.  But, beginning in the 1970s, the economic ground underneath this landscape began to come apart.

Welcome to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer's new abnormal.  It is an article of faith for many Americans that the Donald Trump years were an aberration and that Joe Biden will usher in something close to normalcy.  I'll take the other side of that bet.  I believe the coming years are going to be at least as tumultuous as the Trump presidency.  Although Biden will not directly cause that tumult, his weakness as a leader, of his own party and the nation, will help fuel discord and make it impossible for him to forge anything resembling normalcy.  Most of those who think Biden can wave a magic wand blame Trump alone for the deep polarization gripping America.  They're wrong — Trump was elected precisely because the country already was deeply polarized.  Moreover, while Trump's personality is highly unorthodox, to say the least, he did not single-handedly set in motion the dangerous levels of strife engulfing our nation.  His successful policies on immigration, taxes and the Mideast were fairly conventional by Republican standards.

Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie.  [Scroll down]  The idea is almost too big for the mind to contain: a political class that has betrayed its country; a Supreme Court that effectively accepted and thus contributed to an unprecedented catastrophe by refusing to hear a suit filed by Texas and 17 other states alleging election law tampering; an education system that bears a disquieting resemblance to the German academy of the 1930s; a "free press" that is not a free press but a state propaganda network; a dedicated and effective president who has been discredited and attacked, including through incitement of political violence against him and his family; organizations like the Trump Accountability Project and the Lincoln Project compiling a "database of all Republicans who worked for President Donald Trump with the aim of ensuring they never land jobs in the private sector," a measure associated with Fascist and Communist dictatorships; and a nation demonstrably in the throes of destabilizing turmoil.

A message to RINOs — it's time to choose.  The Democrats and their fellow travelers on the left have some very disturbing aspirations.  Just a year ago, discussion of tyranny in America would have been considered crazy talk.  Not now.  The temperature on this pot has been turned up slowly, and now we're at the boiling point.  Just look at everything our ruling class has done in the past year.  Lockdowns have restricted our movement, commerce, and assembly.  Our rulers are not making us carry papers yet.  That would be an inconvenience for illegal aliens.  They are however, making us wear masks to demonstrate our obedience.  Big tech oligarchs are using censorship and deplatforming to censor dissenting views.  Conservative commentators such as Dan Bongino and The Conservative Treehouse have been evicted from their web servers or had their advertising revenue restricted.  Donald Trump and his followers have been banned from Twitter.  Conservative postings mysteriously disappear from Facebook.

The worst run cities in America.  The state of cities around the country is rapidly declining, leading to the greatest rates of emigration since the days of disorder and distress in the 1970s.  Eight cities stand out as the worst run in the country, when ranked with markers like costs of living, education, poverty, and crime.  These are New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington, Portland, Oakland and Chicago.  Despite billions of dollars doled out annually, every one of these cities has dire mismanagement issues.  Cities that use the most dollars per capita are some of the worst run cities.  Washington spends some $15,600 per citizen annually, over 12 times that of cities such as Miami.  New York has a budget hole of over $540 million.  Debt in many cities is driven mostly by pensions and public payrolls, with New York ranked first with its glaring $64,100 in debt per citizen, Chicago second with $36,000, Philadelphia third with $27,900, San Francisco fifth with $22,600, and Oakland in seventh with $21,100.

Here's a Perfect Explanation of Why the Capitol Hill Riot Happened.  In truth, it's been made clear to some Americans that attempting to talk it out and even take their grievances to the voting booth isn't working.  However, they flip on the news and see riots happening as those involved scream things like "black lives matter" or "defund the police."  They see this and then see politicians, media, and "experts" heap praise on these violent radicals, and politicians both defend and even encourage them.  For some Americans, they see violence get results and a dangerous idea begins to formulate in their head.

A Daring Left and a Cowed Center.  The first fact of sociopolitical life in America today is this: liberals in elite positions are frightened of the Left.  A college president may direct an institution with a $900 million endowment, meet with legislators and business heads, and boast a 30-year record of academic honors, but the sight of eight African American undergrads marching toward his office with scowls on their faces alarms him like nothing else.  A CEO may draw a $3 million salary and manage 1,300 workers, but the threat of a boycott coming from a few networked Millennials with ties to Sleeping Giant calls for immediate emergency action.  They know what they're up against.  Leftists form digital mobs, shut down events, block access, cancel, and dox.  They show up at people's homes, harass employers, and ruin businesses.  They're ruthless, they're irrational, but the tantrums they throw muck up the works and clog the pipes.  That's the advantage they press — they will tear the system down if the people in power don't comply.

Indianapolis Has Fallen:  A Red State Capital City Degrades Itself to Blue City Levels.  I had known this mid-size metropolis since the seventies when I lived here as a medical student, attending the Indiana University School of Medicine.  Then, Indianapolis was referred to as India-no-place or Naptown. [...] This year, Monument Circle swarmed not with tourists and patrons but with a succession of homeless encampments, bedecked with tents, sleeping bags, blankets, cardboard shelters, and, of course, hundreds of vagrants sleeping or milling about.  What had been one of the cleanest, most scenic, and safe downtown centers in the country had deteriorated into a third-world, garbage-strewn, threatening urban nightmare.  The entrances to the Hilbert Circle Theater and the nearby Indiana Repertory Theater were boarded up and crammed with itinerants, trash, and debris.  It was demoralizing and disgusting, an urban cesspool of dystopia and vagrancy.

Radical Democrats Are Turning Minneapolis Into A Violent Wasteland.  The world witnessed in the streets of Minneapolis this spring and summer the feature presentation after many increasingly violent coming attractions, created, produced, and distributed by a one-party, radical left government.  If you want to know what the real-time self-destruction of a city looks like, Minneapolis offers the perfect model. [...] Downtown's ghost-town feel is taking a dystopian turn as empty streets are being taken over by a resurging homeless population openly using drugs and increasingly aggressive.  The mentally ill are left to similar fates, often found huddled in bus shelters.  A decline in police and mental health resources compounds the impending disaster as winter deepens and shelters fill.

We Don't Need To Accept The 'New Normal' The Left Is Forcing On Us.  All of us have seen and heard things during this past year that would have been unimaginable in 2019, but which today are almost a daily occurrence.  We call these transformative events "the new normal."  Examples of the new normal are all around us and affect all aspects of our lives.  Defunding the police while crime skyrockets is the new normal.  Prisoners being released back on the streets, while hairdressers and restaurant owners are fined and sometimes jailed, is the new normal.  Big tech and mainstream media shutting down all voices opposing their agenda, while extolling the virtues of democracy and free speech, is the new normal.  A CNN reporter describing demonstrators as "peaceful protesters," while behind him the skyline burns, is the new normal.  Closing down all restaurants, houses of worship, and small businesses while allowing protesters to burn, riot, and loot in the name of "social justice" is the new normal.  Prisoners in certain states receiving the COVID vaccine while vulnerable seniors must wait is the new normal.  The latest COVID Relief bill, which included only a paltry sum in relief for tens of millions of desperate Americans, while granting billions in foreign aid, is the new normal.

Hey, GOP: This is Your Do or Die Moment.  If Democrats, the corporate media, and foreign interests can steal a presidential election, they can steal any congressional or gubernatorial election, easily.  If a thief can rob Fort Knox with ease, any bank on Main Street will be child's play.  If they can weaponize the CIA, FBI, IRS, and DOJ to target their political enemies, without punishment, why won't they double down next time?  For the left, crime does pay.  There has been no reckoning or accountability for the stolen 2020 presidential election.  What's to stop every subsequent election from being stolen in the same way? [...] Does anyone seriously believe that the Biden FBI or DOJ will lift a finger to investigate voter fraud?

You're It.  If the communists gain control, it won't be long before you will not be able to travel as you always have.  Checkpoints will ensure that you are permitted to travel, especially to other states and the conditions of travel in those states might vary wildly.  In some, you might have to quarantine for a period of time upon arrival.  This rules out a lot of civilian transcontinental travel.  This is part of the Green New Deal imposed through other means.  It also gives the government the right to restrict travel for purposes of political demonstration.  Private property will be eliminated.  That sounds ridiculous as I write it, but then so did the idea of shutting down the powerful American economy all because of a virus based on intentionally inaccurate death rates and wildly speculative ideas of how the virus spread.  The communists don't want private property or a middle class.  Those are means of self-sufficiency they cannot tolerate.  It sets a bad example and encourages people to live outside of their control.  They need a population that is reliant on them, in close quarters where they can be monitored by other citizens; citizens who will inform on them for any violation.

Biden's 'Dark Winter' Is A Warning About His Economy, Not The Virus.  Should President Donald Trump's election challenges fail to keep Joe Biden out of the White House, it's a certainty that bleak days will be ahead.  We're staring into the barrel of at least four years of sclerotic economic growth.  Six days after the election, Biden, employing the Democratic Party strategy of sowing fear whenever possible, warned that the country is facing a long night.  "Before the surge in COVID cases we predicted, many predicted, and the deaths rise that we've seen in December ... we head into a very dark winter ahead," he said. [...] Apparently it never occurred to Biden and his handlers that government intervention, not the virus, caused 2020's downturn.  Nor have they even begun to understand that Democrats' economic policies, filled with steep, punitive taxes, and impossible-to-jump regulatory hurdles, are a slow-motion march of the economic lockdowns that almost instantly paralyzed the economy this year.

The Democrats' Road to Hell.  The ruling political class in Washington D.C. is always making matters worse through what appear to be appropriate solutions for serious problems facing the country.  Then when they don't work out as advertised many years after they've been implemented, they tell us that they've got the solutions for the newer, more serious problems that to the unsuspecting and unknowing public seem as if they came out of nowhere, and who are clueless as to how they began in the first place. [...] Government assistance has morphed from safety net to entitlement where there is no accountability for the failures of the ruling political class that perpetually creates problems, as well as government incentives to "right social wrongs" that do the same by distorting the marketplace in ways that are not good for anyone.

How Democrats are sneakily destroying the Electoral College.  Add the Electoral College to the list of American institutions that the Democrats have destroyed (along with education, media, entertainment, Silicon Valley, sports, big cities, the justice system, the family, the FBI-CIA, the Supreme Court, etc.).  By manufacturing massive fraudulent vote counts in the big cities they control, Democrats invalidate suburban and rural votes in key battleground states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona.  Elections simply become who can produce the most votes, which is most easily accomplished in large Democrat-run cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee.  The Democrat machines that control those cities can effortlessly run up large vote counts for Democrats without fear of being found out by manipulating the voting rules and by manufacturing ballots.  Local Democrat judges "on the payroll" look the other way, while Big Media leads in the cover-up with information blackouts.  Large Democrat donors, Silicon Valley bigwigs, and geopolitical rivals like China bankroll the operation.  By relying on big city votes to swing the national elections, our electoral system degenerates into a de facto direct voting structure, thus invalidating the Electoral College and violating the Constitution.

November 2020: The Good Points:  The Presidential election of November 2020 was an unmitigated disaster to any sane-thinking person concerned with the good of America.  While unintellectual, style-obsessed political simpletons cheer the outcome based strictly on emotional rooting interests, intelligent individuals who are more concerned with full employment, energy independence, military readiness and border security than identity politics, racial/gender quotas and the microaggression du jour realize that a "Biden" administration will set American economic prosperity and social progress back by decades.  If the Democrats come into power, the government will pick the winners and losers and the country will devolve from a meritocracy to a selectocracy. [...] Under a progressive administration:
  •   Crime will increase as the police are defunded and bail/sentencing standards are relaxed and eliminated
  •   We'll get higher taxes, and have less disposable income
  •   Energy costs will increase as exploration and production are intentionally curtailed, leading to higher consumer prices across the board
  •   Progressives will refuse to "allow" life to return to normal, even after widespread dispensation of the COVID vaccines
Voters will see this all quite clearly and that's good.

Christmas Message for a Broken Republic.  The left has done its utmost to air-brush God out of the Constitution, ban the Ten Commandments from every public square, and ostracize Christ from all public discourse, while at the same time expropriating Christ's words for their conceited, bewitching subterfuge, preached from every "progressive" altar and chanted as they burn restaurants and beat Trump supporters to a pulp.  All these acts of eradication were merely rehearsals for the final ransack and rapine of the electorate now taking place.

Portland police [officers are] resigning for jobs elsewhere making less money and it's not hard to see why.  Portland police officers are resigning from the force in unusually high numbers in the middle of their careers.  Many are seeking jobs in other cities where they will be paid less money and also lose some of their time toward retirement.  According to the Portland Tribune, it's unusual for the number of resignations to exceed the number of retirements but that's what's happening right now.

Nullification Isn't Just for Democrats, Anymore.  Since the 2016 election, Democrats have made all kinds of nullification standard fare, but more pernicious than displaying a disagreeable temperament, or contrary opinion; more than First Amendment-protected civil disobedience.  Instead, making that which is legitimate, illegitimate; making what is illegitimate, legitimate.  Making what is decent, abhorrent; making what is grotesque, glorious — all enjoying approbation from a fawning media.  Any and all tactics, now including election fraud, and covering up bribery of a president to-be, are used unapologetically, with no subterfuge, and with impunity.  Truth now is subjective, conditioned on identity and whether it will be canceled by the mob, or approved by the neo-aristocracy.

The Plot to Steal America.  [Video clip]

The reimagined police as servants of the left.  We back the blue, but will they back us?  Like most conservatives, I support the police and the vital role they serve in a civilized society.  But like many conservatives, watching them stand down on orders from blue-state mayors during months of riots was jarring.  (They even stood down during a Back the Blue rally in Denver when speakers were attacked.)  Many of us asked how the police could obey such orders and allow criminals to have free rein in our streets — criminals whose victims, I might add, included over 2,000 police officers.  Don't police officers swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution?  Well, yes, they do.  In fact, that is their paramount responsibility.  Perhaps this year, it seems we witnessed the rule and not the exception — the rule being that most people, including the police, will be cowards in the face of tyrants.

What's happening in Minnesota bodes ill for Democrats.  Across America, the Wuhan virus has allowed Democrats to implement some of their long desired plans for "reforming" America in a properly Marxist mold.  One of the most hallowed plans, which academia promotes, is "de-incarceration" (i.e., ending prisons).  The other one, although it's kept hush-hush, is to end that pesky, morality-driven, hardworking, freedom-loving middle class.  Minnesota's Governor Tim Walz is working on both issues, with disastrous results for good people.  That's why this arrogant societal manipulation could soon prove to be the Democrats' downfall. [...] For the crime of feeding her family, Walz, through the Minnesota attorney general's office, is filing documents to imprison [Larvita] McFarquhar for trying to stay afloat.

U.S. City May Pass "Duress Legislation" to Give Criminals "Poverty Defense".  Elected officials in a major U.S. city plan to pass a law that will allow thieves to sell items they steal if they do it to earn money for basic needs and trespassers to set up camp on private property when it is to obtain adequate shelter.  Dozens of other crimes — including assault and harassment — will be excused under the preposterous measure if suspects are poor, mentally ill or addicted to drugs.  It is being crafted as a poverty defense and will allow municipal court judges to dismiss a multitude of crimes if poverty, mental illness or a substance-abuse disorder drove the perpetrator to commit them.  Even for a famously liberal left coast city like Seattle it seems like a bit much.  The proposal was first introduced during the Seattle City Council's budget deliberations weeks ago, according to a local news report.  It was put on hold over a budget process bureaucracy but has gained incredible steam and appears to have enough support to alter the city code early next year.  "The idea could enormously impact the city — and set Seattle apart from the rest of the country in its approach to misdemeanor crimes," according to the news story, which includes the concerns of frustrated public safety advocates who say the law will essentially legalize most crimes in Seattle.

If the Media Doesn't Report on Crime, It Won't Exist.  The Nieman Foundation for Journalism was set up at Harvard.  Like everything touching old foundations and journalism, it's a toxic disaster.  And this one is right up there with In Defense of Looting. [...] No this stuff isn't marginal.  Nieman is influential and it's part of the larger pro-crime push.  And the reshaping of the legacy media.  Even at this late date, one of the few things the local news does anymore is sports, weather, and crime.  Lefty virtue signaling destroyed sports.  The push to make every weather report about global warmunism while firing any weatherman who doesn't go along has been underway for years.

Republican Mackenzie Kelly Wins Austin City Council Runoff.  Local Paper Declines to Cover It.  In a stunning upset, Republican Mackenzie Kelly defeated Democrat incumbent Jimmy Flannigan in Austin's District 6 runoff Tuesday.  Kelly ran on a platform that includes restoring police department funding and ending the city's permissive homeless camping ordinance.  She won with 52% to Flannigan's 48%, a margin of just about 700 votes overall.  Kelly's win, and Republican Jennifer Virden's near-win in District 10, may signal a major shift in Austin voters' thinking.  The Democrat-dominated city was already up in arms over the homeless camping ordinance, which allows homeless people to camp just about anywhere they want all over the city (except city hall) since the council passed it unanimously in the summer of 2019.  That has led to encampments under overpasses and even on the fringes of neighborhoods all over Austin.

The 'kraken' is the sleeping giant now awakened within the GOP.  [Scroll down]  We're censored by big tech, smeared in the media, mocked in popular culture, and endure malicious political prosecution, as in the cases of Michael Flynn and Kyle Rittenhouse.  On the other side, Hillary Clinton destroyed 30,000 emails, federal bureaucrats broke countless laws in the Russian Collusion hoax, leftist radicals burned cities and attacked police, Obama weaponized the IRS against Republicans, and illegally imposed DACA.  The rules are clear:  Democrats can break the law whenever they want. [...] Can you imagine a country where Democrats can commit blatantly unconstitutional actions to enable voter fraud while simultaneously using the same Constitution to insist Republicans have no legal grounds to challenge them?  This is the America we're living in.

Can We Survive the Coming Socialism?  It's looking pretty grim right now regarding President Trump's chances of getting the four more years he deserves, and that he almost certainly would have received had the Democrats' cheating game not gone to all time high levels.  It's also looking like justice and honesty are going to play a diminishing role in the United States for the foreseeable future, as evidently about forty or so percent of the country is perfectly comfortable with massive voter fraud and willing to participate in it, all because they wanted to have their own way.  With that, it also looks like we are on our way towards a pretty heavy dose of socialism as the Left is now emboldened by their brazen acts of fraud and encouraged by the fact that even SCOTUS does not seem willing to challenge their crimes.

Republicans [are] Pushing Themselves Off the Cliff.  [Scroll down]  If Democrats can steal one presidential election, they can certainly steal another one, and enough Congressional elections for a permanent Democrat majority in the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government.  Elections will no longer matter as the winner will be preordained by the ruling class.  Democrats can add states to the union, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and a split California, giving them a solid Senate majority.  Eliminating the filibuster, as promised, will make Republican objections to any bill or nomination irrelevant.  A stacked Supreme Court, as also promised, will allow the left to rewrite the Constitution to suit Bernie, AOC, and George Soros, rather than Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison.  Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal will soon be the law of the land, as will open borders and tens of millions of new Democrat constituents.  Expect a carbon tax as we sign on to the Paris Climate Accord.  Iran will be back to building nukes and China will control of most of corporate America.

Seattle is considering making it legal to steal, as long as you're poor and plan on selling the items.  Remember over the summer when AOC blamed the spike in crime in New York City on parents stealing food to feed their families? [Tweet] She was roundly ridiculed for that, of course, but now Seattle hopes to make AOC's fantasy a reality by creating an affirmative defense for theft if you intended to sell the stolen items for "basic needs" like food or rent.  It's called "the poverty defense," and would not only make stealing legal, but apparently fencing items as well, and would cover over 100 misdemeanor crimes.

Judge to California's 3rd Largest County:  On Account of COVID, Release Half Your Convicts.  How do you empty a large county's jail system by half?  That's a question currently demanding an answer, as a West Coast judge has ordered that very thing.  As reported by The Daily Wire, on Friday, Superior Court Judge Peter Wilson dictated Sheriff Don Barnes must liquidate Orange County's jail system by 50%.  The decision comes following the American Civil Liberties Union's April lawsuit demanding the release of disabled and vulnerable inmates in light of the pandemic.

America's Two Plagues.  [Scroll down]  And I say, the inmates have taken over the asylum.  There is a madness loose in the society stemming from the collapse of classical, Biblical, sexual morality.  The US has become Sodom and Gomorrah and evidence of this is this latest lunacy.  In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, and the rest is history.  It led to the AIDS epidemic and to the tolerance of such low life millionaires such as Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein and his pedophilia, with Bill Clinton their soulmate in sexual predation.  It led to this sexual degenerate in the Oval Office engaged in perverse sex games with a woman young enough to be his daughter.  Clinton's historic legacy will be a semen-stained dress.  Joe Biden may be supportive of so-called "transgenderism," but there is no such thing because there is no such thing as "gender," as the "Woke" misuse that word today.  The existence of "gender" as they understand it is nothing less than magical, not scientific, thinking.  No source for this sensation is known in the body or brain.

Our political opponents are vicious, but they're also crazy.  Leftists live in a world of racial hatred, gender confusion, white self-loathing, religious loathing, American loathing, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic feelings, misogyny, misandry, homophobia, transphobia, and so much more.  Everything is defined by hatred for others.  It's impossible to live in a world imbued with hate and still be happy.  These -isms and -phobias get pushed onto young people in public schools and in institutions of higher leftist learning.  Many of these people, when they leave college or university, continue to bathe in this fetid broth of self-loathing and paranoia.

Minneapolis delivers on its George Floyd promise to defund police and wipes $8m from force's budget.  Minneapolis City Council on Thursday [12/10/2020] approved a controversial budget which is set to move $8 million of funding from the police — despite record crime rates since the May death of George Floyd.  Mayor Jacob Frey, who had threatened to veto the entire budget if the council went ahead with a plan to cap police staffing, said the vote was a defining moment for the city which was the first to be hit by anti-police protests following the death of Floyd.  The city has been plagued by soaring violent crime since then — with homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft and arson all up on last year's figures.

Alternate headline:  Democrats Abandon the War on Drugs
Drugs Declare Victory in War on Drugs.  The 2020 elections delivered a resounding victory for drug policy reformers, who won everywhere their proposals were put to a vote.  Across the country, in red and blue states, on both coasts and in between, in the Midwest and the Deep South, voters passed ballot initiatives that not only continued to reverse marijuana prohibition but also broke new ground in making drug laws less punitive and more tolerant.  New Jersey's approval of marijuana legalization was expected.  Preelection surveys consistently put public support above 60 percent, although the actual margin of victory was a few points bigger than the polls suggested.

Where's the Kraken?  Where's the Storm?  If Democrats control the federal government, there is zero chance any electoral fraud will be investigated.  The only investigations will be of Trump and his supporters.  Democrats will use the 2020 election as a pilot project, refining their ability to steal enough future elections to keep themselves in permanent majority.  Democrats will change the rules so that Republicans never have control of either branch of government again.  Added states will insure Democrat control of the Senate.  Institutionalized electoral fraud will make future elections as irrelevant as the outcome when the Harlem Globetrotters play the Washington Generals.  A good show with a predetermined result, banana republic style.  How do those countries end up?  A stacked Supreme Court will rewrite the Constitution and Bill of Rights to suit Bernie, AOC, and George Soros.  Masks, lockdowns, and censorship will become the norm.  The Mitt Romney's of the GOP will be yapping chihuahuas in cages, annoying but irrelevant.

If vote fraud wins in 2020, prepare for life to get ugly.  What kind of changes will we have to endure?  We will wear masks forever.  There will always be a medical crisis mandating them.  There will be a war on combustion.  We will be forced to drive electric cars or no car at all.  Barack Obama began this effort in 2009 with his "cash for clunkers" program.  Thanks to new regulations, we will pay much higher prices for technology and medical care.  We will have medical death panels.  It is already starting.  The first to receive the COVID-19 vaccine will be health care workers and nursing home residents.  So far, the choice is palatable, but who will be the next one to be deemed worthy of survival? [...] The war on combustion means there will be no fossil fuel to heat our homes.  We will have to use heat pumps exclusively.  Heat pumps require refrigerant.  There is already a high price for refrigerant because of previous regulations.  Expect the price to go higher.  All of this will lead to rationing of electricity.  There will be either rolling blackouts or central control of the thermostat.

Car Jackings In Minneapolis Up 537 Percent.  Honestly, who with a functional brain didn't see this coming?  As I've noted before, even if you take every dime you remove from the police budget and put it toward crime prevention measures, it'll take years before any of them show any potential results.  Defunding law enforcement now is idiotic, and now we can quantify just how idiotic.  I mean, a 537 percent increase?  That's insane, but also think about how few carjackings there were during the lockdown.  For months, few people went anywhere, which meant fewer opportunities to jack someone's car.  It was also more difficult to mill about on foot while waiting for a potential target.  That means it's very likely these numbers have skyrocketed in just the last half of the year, making it even more insane.  It looks from here like the whole "defund the police" thing has turned into the trainwreck we all expected it to become.

Where We Are.  [Scroll down]  You cannot create a world of perfect equality because people are not equal, and the attempt to make them so requires taking away the freedom of most for the benefit of what turns out to be a few.  You cannot create a government that is socially "just" because the people who will run it are the same people whose lies, bigotries, selfishness and greed created the unjust world you are attempting to leave behind.  The new rulers, corrupt as ever, will have more power than ever.  You can only make things worse.  Much worse.  I learned these truths first in my work with the Black Panther Party, a murderous street gang whom we regarded as "the vanguard of the revolution."  We did so because the Panthers were the only leftists with guns who were willing to use them.  The Panthers preyed mainly on vulnerable blacks but also murdered a friend of mine who was white.  My second awakening came with the success of the New Left's "antiwar movement," which forced America out of Vietnam.  The New Left's claims to be "anti-war" in behalf of the Vietnamese were actually two dangerous lies.  When the movement succeeded in forcing America's withdrawal from Indo-China, the Communists proceeded to slaughter two and a half million peasants in Cambodia and Vietnam.  There wasn't a single demonstration against the slaughter.  Not one.  I realized then that it was never an "anti-war" movement.  It was an anti-American movement.  The Left wanted the Communists to win and didn't care how many innocent Asians were murdered in the process.

Seattle homicides [are the] highest in over a decade as council cuts police budget.  Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan plans to sign a new city budget that will reduce the police budget by 18% despite homicides reaching record highs not seen in a decade.  Council members overwhelmingly voted last week to cut funds for police training and overtime and to eliminate dozens of vacant positions within the Seattle Police Department after months of contentious talks.  The reductions fall short of the 50% that local activists demanded amid nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice.  The council also decided to transfer parking enforcement officers, mental health workers and 911 dispatchers out of the police department.

How Liberals Can Destroy Football with COVID, and Why They'd Want To.  Football has always been reviled by the left.  It is quintessentially American:  invented in this country; played by high-testosterone, masculine men; and operating almost entirely as a super-competitive meritocracy — i.e., the test of whether someone gets to play in the NFL is whether he can play, and play better than the other guy.  In the NFL in 2020, there's no time to humor racism or any other "ism" in fielding a winning team; there's only the all-defining imperative priority to put the best players on the field and "coach 'em up" to play the game well.  All of those attributes of the sport are precisely why it has been so popular in America; it has been aligned with American cultural norms and preferences for decades.  The sport's popularity is in fact proof that America as a whole is not racist — systemically or otherwise.  Americans don't root for their team or watch the NFL in huge numbers based on a team's compliance with racial hiring quotas; they root and watch because they appreciate the best playing the best using talents that most of us don't have, and deciding on a level playing field who wins a competitive game and who loses.

Seven Quotes to Lay Out a Totalitarian America.  [Scroll down]  We have lived through the decades of gradual transition of socialist sentiments and actions in our country, becoming more socialist every day through the transition.  We have seen universities, K-12 school systems, the media, large companies, philanthropic organizations, and other entities transition from idealistic to socialist, largely unnoticed — until now.  Would Biden's administration be a massive socialist revolution into a totalitarian state?  No.  But given what has happened already, it could be the straw that breaks democracy's back.  Our transformation to a totalitarian state must be resisted.  Buckle up and stand tall.  Do not fear Black Lives Matter, Antifa, social media, the press, your school's curricula, your employer, or any of these forces.

Racism is alive and well in America.  Leftism destroys everything — absolutely everything — that it touches:
  •   It took first and second wave feminism (right to vote, equal pay for equal work) and turned it into third wave man-hating feminism.
  •   It took the Great Society and welfare, and turned them into the destruction of the black family in America, with all the pathologies that follow.
  •   It took the concept of avoiding cruel and unusual punishment when dealing with criminals, and turned it into no punishment at all, which increases crime, destroys societal trust, and puts criminals at grave risk of vigilantism.
  •   It took the idea that the state cannot promote or interfere with religion and turned it into a state hostile to religion.
  •   It took the Civil Rights movement, one premised on the fact that we are all equal before God and the law, and turned it into a foundation for dangerous, divisive, and tragic anti-white hatred.

By Every Legal Means Necessary.  The Democrats began a comprehensive assault on the electoral system several years ago in many states; they consecrated great resources to electing the secretaries of state who effectively administer federal elections within their states; they agitated and litigated in many states to change voting practices and to facilitate ballot harvesting through unsolicited mass mailings to the entirety of the voter rolls and the collection and delivery of ballots with increasingly dubious verification that they represent the will of the voters ostensibly casting them.  Many of these processes were challenged and proved unsuccessful.  But the movement to alter the election process decisively in favor of those who could exploit mass mailings to the whole voters' lists, which inevitably include a great many people who have died or moved, was greatly strengthened by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

The War on Thanksgiving.  [Scroll down]  Here we see the fruits of a generation raised on [Howard] Zinn.  While it is likely pointless to convince the vandals who attack statues and businesses that their views are misguided, we need to take the propaganda that has undermined our country and driven fellow citizens to lunacy and extremism seriously.  Thanksgiving is in the beginning stages of receiving the Columbus Day treatment.  We can't underestimate the threat of a few militant voices amplified by America's elite culture-shaping institutions.  Columbus was once nearly universally admired in America, his holiday only questioned by an odd collection of left-wing radicals and, at an even early date, white nationalists who resented the celebration of a Catholic and Italian-born hero.  Now, the holiday has nearly collapsed.  Even his statues are going undefended by the descendants of Italian immigrants who helped construct them.

"Burn It Down".  American cities are entering a period of chaos.  Protests and riots have dominated headlines, but beneath the surface, activists are launching an unprecedented campaign to overthrow the traditional justice system and replace it with a new model based on a radical conception of social justice.  In Seattle, where this campaign may be most advanced, activists have crafted a narrative about police brutality, mass incarceration, and punitive justice that leads to a natural sequence of solutions:  "abolish the police," "divest from prisons," and "defund the courts."  Over the past three decades, the city's radical-progressives have seized control of municipal government — with the notable exception of the criminal-justice system, which they see as the final obstacle to total control.  If they can dismantle it, activists believe, they can bring about their transformation of society.

Redfin says 30% want to live 'somewhere else' because of protests.  In a new study, Seattle-based real estate service Redfin really gets to the heart of the matter of the summer's Capitol Hill occupied protest zone — condo prices:  "Seattle's condo market has really struggled in general during the pandemic, but the units that are closest to the CHOP have typically been selling even more slowly than other condos in Capitol Hill," said local Redfin real estate agent Forrest Moody.  "I had one listing that was a block away from the CHOP and across the street from a Ferrari dealership that had its windows smashed," Moody goes on to say.  "The condo actually sold within five days, but that's likely because we listed it for $25,000 less than we had planned to back in February."

A warning from the future:  The US may soon look like New Mexico.  If you don't believe that the United States can become very radical, very quickly under a Biden administration, you haven't been paying attention to New Mexico.  I know what you're thinking:  When it comes to radical liberal policies, California is the gold standard.  Yet, for the past two years, New Mexico has embarked on an unfortunate mission to become just like California, but faster.  The disastrous results speak for themselves. [...] Millions of people are justifiably worried about California's radical policies spreading nationwide, but don't sleep on New Mexico.  In less than two years, we've gone from a budget surplus and low unemployment to the disaster you see today.

Seattle's downward spiral — these city actions are driving the decline.  The city of Seattle may legalize most misdemeanor crimes.  This isn't an exaggeration.  It's arguably not even the most radical idea introduced by the Seattle City Council.  Rather, it's the latest move by politicians growing increasingly dangerous and aloof to concerns in a city spiraling dangerously out of control.  In the final week of October, the Council used the 2021 budget process to forward an updated plan installing heroin injection sites, replace a specialized police unit tackling homelessness, and lay off more Seattle police, which already has record low staffing.  Seeing the writing on the wall, some of the city's best paid residents are fleeing.

The California Elections Pandemic.  The once Golden State, renowned for creating and exporting much of what constitutes American popular culture, now exports a vote-fraud rich, elections-stealing contagion across the nation. [...] A consequence of Californizing elections will be rampant cynicism.  Sullen distrust will take hold.  Voters, in droves, may elect not to vote.  Yet nonparticipation may be the best case.  In time, the nation may devolve into warring political factions, who thuggishly vie to control the levers of power.  Does that seem surreal?  Investigate Latin America, where countries are colored with rigged elections and associated violence.

Looking to Solzhenitsyn for clues about the present.  Solzhenitsyn warned America and the West time and time again that abandoning its religious foundations and embracing secularism would in turn lead to total chaos, followed by a complete loss of freedom.  America and the rest of the West are already in chaos.  What follows is the people's determination and destiny.

The Chump Effect.  We all know the feeling: when you're inching forward in the freeway exit lane, say, and another driver flies past and swerves onto the ramp at the last second; when your child has to complete her college-entrance exams within a designated time period, but your neighbor's child gets twice as long because of a suddenly diagnosed "learning disability"; when you pay extra to have your pet travel in the airplane's cargo hold but the yipping poodle across the aisle, an "emotional-support animal," gets to ride on its owner's lap for free.  You didn't know that you could get an emotional-support card just by claiming an anxiety disorder and paying a fee to an online agency?  What are you — a chump?  What makes these indignities so infuriating isn't just that a few people game the system.  It's that their selfish gambits work only because the rest of us follow the rules.  If every driver mobbed the freeway exit from the passing lanes, traffic would come to a halt.  The student who fraudulently obtains extra test time gets a leg up only if most other students stick to the original time limit.  And if every pet were designated an emotional-support animal, airplanes and restaurants would become full-time menageries.  (Some airlines have begun tightening rules on support animals for just this reason.)

Conspiracy Theory, Or Stolen Election?  I have no opinion on whether the election was stolen by the Biden campaign or not.  I don't think there is any way to know, on the current evidence, whether, if only legal votes were counted, and each voter voted only once, Donald Trump or Joe Biden actually won the election.  I do know that if the United States is to avoid banana republic status, we need to institute more secure and reliable election procedures.  No more ballot harvesting, no more millions of mail-in votes, and some reasonable attention paid to the machines and software that ultimately count the votes. [...] One more thing:  liberals are quick to dub anything they don't like a conspiracy theory.  But four years ago, I wouldn't have imagined that top officials of the FBI and the CIA would collaborate with Hillary Clinton's campaign to propagate lies in order to try to swing the election to her, or failing that, to disable the incoming administration of the candidate that they didn't favor.  That scandal has greatly expanded my, and our, understanding of what may be possible.  This isn't your grandfather's United States of America.

It's a Coup.  Just Say It!  Political science types have a word for every happening.  One is the Overton Window.  Like lots of these terms, it is not too scientific, but it well describes things observed every day.  For instance, the idea that an eight-year-old boy decides to be a girl, because he feels like it, and is then medicated with hormone therapy to look as close to a girl as science enables was once a preposterous idea.  Then it was possible, then probable, and now, voilà!  A boy is now a girl, and if you use the wrong pronoun, you lose your job!  Meet the Overton Window:  that period of time when something seemingly quite impossible becomes mainstream.

Washington State is a worrisome window into the future.  [Scroll down]  Completing our state's social-engineering trifecta is the law originally passed in 2008, and subsequently endorsed by referendum, that allows physicians to write prescriptions for lethal doses of drugs for individuals who in their opinion have less than six months to live.  The measure applies to any patient over the age of 18 who can produce an accepted form of ID, which, thanks to the largesse of our state's SB 5023, specifically excuses the applicant from providing 'Proof of citizenship, a Social Security number, or command of the English language.'  If you happen to find yourself here in Washington, are aged 17 or over, can pass the not-demanding traffic safety test and sign your form with an X, the state will happily issue you with a driver's permit valid as photo ID, and you're good to go.  It may fail to surprise readers that Washington was also in the vanguard of the same-sex marriage crusade, or that the last local politician to openly question the ethics of providing publicly-funded abortions, a Republican assemblyman named John Koster, was roundly mocked for admitting that he was guided in such matters by his reading of the Bible.  This is what 'political debate' has come to in my state.

Minneapolis authorizes $500k to hire cops from OTHER forces after officers leave in wake of BLM protests.  The Minneapolis city council has authorized $500,000 in funding for the police department to hire cops from other forces, after several officers have quit and crime has soared since the start of the year.  Council members on Friday narrowly voted 7 to 6 in favor of approving $496,800 in extra funds for Minneapolis Police Department (MPD).  The money will be used to bring in 20 to 40 cops from the Hennepin County Sheriff's Department and Metropolitan Council/Metro Transit Police to help the department tackle the recent crime wave across the city.

The Biden Threat to Law Enforcement.  Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were unambiguous throughout their presidential campaign: they believe that racism pervades policing and all other aspects of the criminal-justice system. [...] Biden's plan for "strengthening America's commitment to justice" reads like a Black Lives Matter wish list; there is no reason to think that a Biden-Harris Justice Department will not implement it.  Among its most consequential proposals, it calls for a return to the practice of imposing weakly-justified consent decrees on police departments.  During the Obama years, career attorneys in the Justice Department regularly opened civil rights investigations into police departments (called "pattern or practice" investigations) without credible evidence that an agency was systematically violating citizens' constitutional rights.  Those investigations almost invariably resulted in settlements (called consent decrees) that placed police departments under the control of a nonelected federal monitor and a federal judge; monitors collected millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded fees while they held police departments to draconian deadlines and mindless paper-pushing mandates for years on end.

Refund The Police?  Minneapolis Starts Begging For Outside Resources.  Old and busted:  We don't need our police in our city!  New hotness:  We need your police in our city!  Minneapolis' city council, which spent most of the summer and fall demanding the ability to dismantle its police force, has now started begging for police officers from neighboring jurisdictions to help them deal with skyrocketing crime.

The Editor says...
Let the city of Minneapolis rot!  Let the miserable residents contend with the fallout from their left-wing politicians' actions.

Let's Take Stock of Where We Are.  The 2020 election in particular, and our electoral process in general, have been badly compromised.  First there have been the successful efforts by Democrats to loosen electoral administration standards and practices by legalizing ballot harvesting (where partisan "volunteers" go out and collect ballots as well as "assist" voters in filling out their ballots), allowing same-day voter registration, mass mail-in voting, and the like.  On the flipside we have Democrats tenaciously fighting any efforts to shore up the integrity of the system, such as requiring ID and proof of citizenship to vote.  Couple all of this with unprecedented last minute rule changes on the eve of what was sure to be the most contested election in generations, if not in American history:  all changes designed to favor one side over the other.

A House Divided Along New Lines.  Americans used to agree on certain things.  They believed in God.  They believed that America was a force for good in the world.  They believed in the individual.  They believed in protecting the innocent.  They believed in the rule of law.  They believed that all men are created equal but are not guaranteed equal outcomes.  They believed in charity rather than subservience to government.  They hated communism and socialism, loved the challenge of innovating, and took delight in the market's response to their gifts.  They hunted and fished and went to church and minded their own business and helped their neighbors.  In the current political realignment, these beliefs are no longer universal.  Half the country holds them.  These citizens are derisively referred to national populists, but really they're the same old people who consider themselves patriotic Americans.  It's the other half of the country that has changed.  The Oligarchy of America is guided by New Age spirituality.  God is mutable, as is truth.  Abortion is a sacrament.  Individuality has given way to conformity of thought and ideas.

Why Shouldn't Black America Walk Away From The Democratic Party?  For years, Black America's absolute fidelity to the Democratic Party has been one of the bedrock assumptions of political calculations in the United States, with Democratic Presidential candidates regularly receiving some 90% of the black vote every four years.  The pattern was so pronounced that neither Republicans nor Democrats felt the need to aim campaign pitches at black Americans, Republicans because they felt it was useless and Democrats because they felt it was unnecessary.  During the same period, cities across American enjoyed uninterrupted Democratic Party control and uninterrupted decay.  Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia:  None has had a Republican mayor in the last half century.  Black Americans voted for Democrats in near-monolithic numbers since 1964 only to see the cities they lived in continue to get worse.  Now, thanks to President Donald Trump, that may all be changing.

Supporting Systemic Victimhood Is Not Caring.  Socialism has never worked.  It spreads misery wherever it has been tried.  Under the guise of caring, Biden's platform calls for new entitlements designed to meet all needs — healthcare, college tuition, guaranteed income, and the list goes on.  It's clear that those on the Left have no confidence in the minorities they claim to help.  To the left, minorities need a political Robin Hood ready to steal from their neighbor to give them what they deserve but can't earn.  What an affront to those they claim to help.  Unfortunately, the reality is that once a citizen is locked into government programs and funding, it's hard to get out.  They live too well.  To actually work and start at the bottom and work their way up in a real job means a cut in income.  They call it "The Cliff!"  Why work when being dependent can meet my needs.  Why be married when not having a husband or wife increases my benefits?

Last-Minute Voting Advice.  [Scroll down]  For me, the top issue is religious freedom/freedom of speech.  Far too many people are seemingly unaware of the threats undermining religious freedom and freedom of speech in this country.  Even with the riots and looting that have decimated many American cities this spring and summer, too many are not connecting the dots and are falling for the "mostly peaceful protests" line the media and the Democrats are promoting.  The political correctness movement has declared that people cannot speak truth about current events; only certain approved perceptions can be spoken.  Facts are irrelevant; there is "your truth" and "my truth."  The perceptions of an event or incident become the "fact" regardless of further investigation or other information that shows that distortion has occurred, such as when a person with a history of violent actions charges the police with a knife in hand and commits "suicide by cop."

Austin sees spikes in violent crime, officer retirements after defund police vote.  Austin has seen a spike in violent crime and officer retirements after the city council voted over the summer to immediately slash $20 million from the police department budget, becoming the first major Texas city to do so.  In August, Austin City Council members voted unanimously to cut about $150 million, or roughly one-third, from its police department and allocate those funds to areas like violence prevention, housing and mental health services.  Only about $21.5 million was immediately removed from the department's funding in part by canceling three upcoming cadet classes and slashing overtime expenses.  "It is demoralizing for the officers.  It is angering for the citizens because they're having to wait longer for officers to get the calls.  And it's unsafe for citizens and officers," Austin Police Association President Bill Cassidy told Fox News.

Will anti-lockdown sentiments spur the next populist revolt?  As the nation frets over the possibility of the "dark winter" that Joe Biden recently predicted, we're already seeing signs of renewed authoritarian lockdowns in many parts of the nation.  Curfews are being put back in place in a number of cities.  Orders forbidding gatherings of more than a certain number of people have accompanied them.  Far too many schools are still either closed or holding "virtual classes" that have been failing spectacularly.  There have already been signs of growing resentment toward yet another round of crippling restrictions on the activities of private citizens and businesses, along with the mounting damage these policies have done to what was one of the most thriving economies our nation has experienced prior to the arrival of the novel coronavirus.  So how much of this will people stand for before enough is declared to be enough?

Logically indisputable reasons why President Trump should be reelected.  [Scroll down]  The Democrats are tainted by their intimate dependence upon their corrupt urban political machines, personified by the grossly incompetent Democratic mayors of New York (de Blasio), Chicago (Lightfoot), Los Angeles (Garcetti), Washington (Bowser), Seattle (Durkan), and Portland, Ore. (Wheeler).  The Democrats are also severely compromised by having maintained total silence all summer as the worst rioting in America in over 50 years raged across the country and white-hating urban guerrillas and white hooligans burned and stole and vandalized billions of dollars of property and tried to destroy statues and monuments of inoffensive people such as Columbus, and of some America's greatest leaders, including those most dedicated to the advancement of African Americans:  Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant.

Anarchy in New York?  One late summer Sunday morning, Demetrius Harvard, a 30-year old Bronx man, stood on a subway platform in Greenwich Village and methodically threw construction material onto the tracks.  Bystanders tried to stop him, and someone even went into the train well to remove the debris, but Harvard persisted in his sabotage.  Eventually, he succeeded in derailing an uptown A train, injuring several passengers.  You had to read to the end of tabloid news reports to get the real story.  Two weeks earlier, in the same neighborhood, Harvard had tossed a steel bench through a bus window.  He was arrested, charged with criminal mischief, and immediately "ROR'd" — released on his recognizance — with no bail.  This cycle is now all too common in New York, where public order and safety have been buffeted by chaotic forces.  Criminal-justice reform at the state level removed bail as an option for all but the most heinous charges.

China's Communist Party is backing the left's revolution, seeking our downfall and subjugation.  The demonization of U.S. police as racists killing black people, is a tactic designed to defang the police and give free rein to marauding mobs.  A breakdown of order serves the left's attempts to gain power.  It provides a crisis, something that must not be wasted according to Obama's former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.  Disorder scares [...] normal people and makes them vulnerable to accepting radical changes like abolishing the police, a move that would result in rule by leftist mobs.  It's pathetic how privileged youth fall for this lie about the police.  They are products of our educational system, one of the institutions that the left has been marching through for decades.  The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and the German communist Rudi Dutschike are both credited with the idea of the left marching through institutions, like the schools and courts, as a means of stealthily imposing communism, probably renamed true democracy.

Exposing Liberals' 'Tiny Fraction' Lie.  [Scroll down]  [T]he threats from the left are anything but tiny fractions.  The cancel culture is not a tiny fraction.  The radicalized faculty at the university is not a tiny fraction.  The indoctrination of socialist ideas and identity politics and white privilege in schools is not a tiny fraction.  The falsehoods and half-truths spread by the media are not a tiny fraction.  The high-tech crackdown on dissenting speech is not a tiny fraction.  The division created by falsely accusing and demonizing one part of the population while exaggerating the malice and damage to provoke the rage of another heavily indoctrinated, hyper-sensitized part of the population is not a tiny fraction.  And it is self-perpetuating, since the isolated outlier incident serves as the basis for rioting and the bottomless pit of grievance and recrimination, which in turn continue to be dismissed by adversaries as tiny fractions.

San Francisco:  A string of drug stores close after shoplifters strip the shelves bare.  You'll be shocked to learn there are some serious problems in San Francisco with petty crime.  This week the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the seventh Walgreens drug store to announce it is closing in the city since last year.  The problem is a wave of shoplifting from retail locations that can add up to millions of dollars in lost merchandise. [...] The Walgreens clerks can't do anything about the theft because the company has a policy preventing them from interfering in shoplifting.  Allegedly this is for their safety but I suspect it's really because if they didn't have this policy and anyone got hurt, they would be sued.

Unemployment Figures Dramatically Favor Republican-Led States.  August's unemployment figures, just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, paint a remarkably consistent picture that correlates — almost uncannily — between low unemployment rates in states led by Republican governors and high unemployment rates in states led by Democratic governors.  Drawing national conclusions from the unemployment statistics for all fifty states, those Republican-led states that have tried to follow President Trump's lead in reopening America are doing much better in terms of unemployment than are states likely to support Biden in November.  Former Vice President Biden, while repeatedly complaining about President Trump's actions in fighting COVID, has yet to articulate a coherent COVID policy.  Remarkably, these early-opening Republican-led states do not have a statistically-valid comparative rate of increase in COVID deaths, as presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though the three states with the lowest death per 100,000 population are led by Republican governors.

Uptown Apple store in Minneapolis closes permanently.  The Apple store in Uptown will close permanently, the latest in a growing list of shops and restaurants that have recently abandoned the beleaguered south Minneapolis retail center.  Apple has had a presence near the bustling corner of Hennepin Avenue and Lake Street for the past decade.  It informed its approximately 60 employees Wednesday [10/21/2020] that the store would close.  The store had yet to reopen since March when the state's stay-at-home orders to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic forced many retail establishments to temporarily shutter.  Following the killing of George Floyd in May, the Apple store was one of nearly 40 businesses near the corner that was damaged by rioters.

The City is Killing America.  Welfare states don't create jobs.  They're what happens when there are too many people and no jobs.  We might be able to build our way out of this dead end, but we have to begin by questioning the urban model which is at the root of all of our national problems.  America doesn't need an expanding population.  Urban political machines do. [...] There is no shortage of cheap labor in America.  We don't need more of it.  Every major city is already choking on the unemployed cheap labor forces they have.  And unless we have a massive manufacturing boom, the only employment opportunities for them are in the gig economy where they can deliver pad thai and give rides to environmental consultants.  The urban model hasn't worked for America in sixty years.  The pandemic has put it on the verge of collapse as the wealthy industries that made cities their base flee into virtual workspaces.  It's time to rethink and defund cities as the hubs of our economy and our nation.

Houston Police Sgt. Killed By Repeat Offender After Soros-Funded D.A. Refused to Press Charges.  A police sergeant in Houston, Texas was shot dead Tuesday morning [10/20/2020] by a suspect who was in police custody just two days earlier, but was allowed to go free when the Democrat district attorney refused to press charges.  HPD Sergeant Harold Preston had been with the Houston Police Department for 41-years and was due to retire at the end of the year, according to the Montgomery County Police Reporter.  The local pro-police paper is urging voters to oust the D.A., whose campaign for office was bankrolled by left-wing billionaire George Soros.

My week with the baying antifa mob.  As one long-term [Portland] resident said to me last week: 'This used to be a very civil town.'  Not any more.  Of course, like every city in the West, the madnesses that already existed here have been exacerbated by the coronavirus and the ensuing decision to lock down the population and shutter the economy.  The businesses here are mainly closed, many for good.  Some were able to get through one lockdown but very few can get through multiple lockdowns or the depression to come.  As a result, downtown Portland is a desolate, dangerous place, populated by homeless people who flooded into the area over recent decades, incentivized by left-wing administrations that allowed them to pitch their tents wherever they liked.  In the main squares, unattended tables of food and drink are set out for them to pick at.  But it isn't just the virus or the reaction of the authorities that led to this wasteland.  The giveaway is the status of the few shops that are still open.  Almost all have hardboard affixed to their remaining windows.  Some have bullet-holes in them, not fired by the police.  The businesses that do still operate do so as in a city under siege.

"We want law and order": Minneapolis residents sue over shrinking police resources.  Who didn't see this moment coming for the Minneapolis city council and Mayor Jacob Frey?  The council's police-abolition posturing prompted an abrupt and widespread drain of sworn officers from the Minneapolis Police Department, through retirements, disability claims, and just plain old resignations.  The MPD canceled recruiting classes as well, while waiting to see whether their would be a force to expand or even maintain.  As police retreated, crime exploded.  And the people who have been paying the price for the city council's empty posturing ever since now want some accountability.  A group led by a former council member has launched a lawsuit against the council and Frey, essentially for dereliction of duty.

CHOP Zone Businesses Pursue Lawsuit Against Seattle.  The 21 plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against the city of Seattle for not enforcing the law against the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP, will get their day in court, though the city's liability in such matters remains in question.  U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Zilly of the Western District of Washington issued an opinion on Friday stating, "Plaintiffs plausibly allege that the City's actions — encouraging CHOP participants to wall off the area and agreeing to a 'no response' zone within and near CHOP's borders — foreseeably placed Plaintiffs in a worse position."  Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal.  The plaintiffs are 21 businesses in the area of the city that protesters declared an "autonomous zone" from June 8 to July 1 and used barriers to block off.  "Inhabitants" even declared the area was no longer part of the United States.

The Terrible Ten.  As of September 18, 2020, these are the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates in the country:  NE; UT; ID; SD; VT; ND; AL; GA; MT and OK.  The 10 states with the highest unemployment rates, all in excess of 10%, are:  PA; NJ; IL; MA; NM; CA; HI; NY; RI and NV.  See a pattern?  Of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates, only Montana has a Democrat governor.  Of the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates, only one, Massachusetts, has a Republican governor.  Additionally, of the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates, all have Democrat control of both houses of the state legislature except for Pennsylvania, with Republican control of both houses.  I live in deep blue New Mexico, one of the terrible ten with unemployment rates in excess of ten percent.  NM has had single-party Dem rule at the state level for most of the last 90 years.  In the state legislature, the last time Republicans held a majority in both houses at the same time was 1930.

'Banana Republic of America'.  We are living in times in which our leaders have intentionally cast doubt on the court.  Members of Congress have managed to earn the doubt of nearly 90% of America simply through childish partisan behavior.  They have intentionally cast doubt on the presidency through the abuse of the impeachment process.  Elected officials and the media have both cast doubt on law enforcement.  It seems nearly everyone even tangentially involved in politics now says or does whatever they think can win the moment regardless of the long-term consequences.  Bureaucrats in the state of Virginia have decided to ignore the law on the books regarding ballot postmarks.  The state legislature didn't change the law.  No.  Virginia administrative officials have simply made the choice to do something different.  On whose authority?  No one has that authority under the law, yet they insist anyway. [...] Stability no longer exists.  The rules change day to day.  The laws only apply sometimes and only to certain people.  Election results, the courts, the police and elected officials themselves are under a constant shadow of doubt.

Research Shows Critical Race Theory Is Actually Making People More Racist.  President Donald Trump announced on Sept. 5 an end to critical race theory training in federal agencies.  As explained by Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the policy change targets "training or propaganda" pertaining to "white privilege" and efforts to advance the claim that "the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or ... that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil."  On Sept. 22, the president extended this ban to companies doing business with the federal government.  He was right on both counts.  Critical race theory and similar academic left perspectives over the last decade stormed the political mainstream through a surge in news and popular media attention.  As a result, today politicians, celebrities, and corporations employ "critical," or woke, rhetoric.  Even comic books push critical themes despite hostile reactions from their readers.

There's Never Been a More Important Time to Choose Wisely.  This critical election is a choice between progressive government and its collective baggage and representative government and its free enterprise. [...] So-called "progressives" brought us such societal horrors as the War on Poverty.  Progressives are rooted in the intellectual arrogance of self-anointed "experts."  Not only are their theories proven 180 degrees wrong, but they never pay the price for their failures.  They just move on to "solve" the next problem, leaving their mess behind.  Exhibit 1 is the War on Poverty.  Contrary to good intentions, it devastated minority communities for generations and created fatherless homes for 70% of blacks without making a dent in actual poverty.  Progressives applaud "reducing" poverty from 19% of the population in 1964 to 14.8% in 2014.  But they ignore that much "improvement" simply moved people onto public support, building a dependency on welfare, food stamps, "free" lunches, and other subsidies.

Orwell Rears His Head.  On Monday of last week, to use the phrase "sexual preference" was completely acceptable.  As recently as last month, multiple gay rights publications used the phrase.  Leon Panetta had used the phrase in the past couple of years.  Joe Biden has used the phrase this year.  Merriam-Webster considered "sexual preference" to be just another version of "sexual orientation."  But then Tuesday happened.  On Tuesday, the village idiot from Hawaii masquerading as a senator, Mazie Hirono, attacked Amy Coney Barrett for using "sexual preference" instead of "sexual orientation."  By Tuesday evening, the employees of Merriam-Webster had changed the phrase in their online dictionary to note it was offensive.  No, I am not making that up.  The dictionary company literally changed it after Barrett's exchange with Hirono.  Steve Krakauer, a former CNN producer who now produces Megyn Kelly's podcast, documented the change on his social media feed.  Gay rights publications such as The Advocate went on the attack as well.  In just 18 days, "sexual preference" went from acceptable to a hate crime.

The Chinese Virus — Why We Panicked and Why We've Got to End the Panic Now.  [Scroll down]  The programmers have been busy making us, or enough of us, believe not that truth is optional, but that there is no truth, in the manner Pilate iterated.  There is only the convenience of the moment.  Who can doubt that we are being taught the truth no longer exists?  Examples are legion.  Let's take one.  A president denounces white supremacy dozens of times.  But the "truth" — the fake truth de jour — is that he has not.  How convenient!  Another beauty: many American cities were recently devastated by riots.  But the "truth" is that the rioters were "mostly peaceful."  How convenient!  It's not that the collective "we" are dumb.  "We" have been made to be dumb.  And they are trying to make us ever more dumb.  They require that we believe their fake "truth."  If we don't, we are deplorables.  At best.  Some now call for our physical destruction.  In other countries, similar things have occurred.  Perhaps even worse.  They are actively jailing people who express incorrect feelings.

Seattle mayor who praised CHOP, supported police cuts, is now 'deeply concerned' as more than 100 officers have left the force.  Democratic Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan — who once called the police-free autonomous zone in her city a "block party" amid a "summer of love" — is now "deeply concerned" over the mass exodus taking place within the city's police department.  KING-TV reported early Friday morning that a record number of officers had left the department in September, according to a new Seattle Budget Office report.  The report noted that 39 officers and officers-in-training "separated" from the department while an additional 14 officers extended their leaves.  The exodus is part of a continuing trend that has resulted in at least 118 officers leaving the force this year, KTTH-TV reporter Jason Rant said.  He added that "even this number is misleading" because "many officers are using their accrued sick time as they begin their escape to other agencies or wait for retirement."

The literally deadly results of "bail reform".  Last week, a 43-year-old Long Island man named William Farnum was being pursued in his vehicle by the NYPD. The suspect eventually crashed into a utility pole.  When the police arrived on the scene and approached to investigate they discovered that Farnum had slit his own throat in the driver's seat of his car and was dead.  The bad news didn't end there, however.  When officers attempted to notify his next of kin they discovered two dead bodies in his home.  They are believed to be the remains of Farnum's father and sister, reportedly killed by Farnum.  What's really got the local police and Republican lawmakers up in arms about this situation is the fact that Farnum never should have been out on the streets when all of this was taking place.  Scrolling through the man's recent history of engagements with law enforcement and the totality of his criminal record, he should have been behind bars.  But new bail reform laws in New York have tied the hands of judges and it was virtually impossible to keep Farnum locked up for more than a few hours at a time.

If Republican Senators Were Like Crazy Mazie.  [A] fair-minded observer cannot avoid recognizing that the poison and vitriol in American politics long preceded Donald Trump.  It was the Democrats who changed the landscape by murdering Judge Robert Bork's name and reputation for a generation.  While Republicans repeatedly treated Democrat Supreme Court nominees with kid gloves, the Democrats just assassinated one human being's character after another.  They destroyed Bork.  They came up with the most racist, stereotypical garbage imaginable against Clarence Thomas.  They lied about Brett Kavanaugh, defaming that very extraordinary man, a man who reflects so elegantly the Divine spirit that reposes within all of us.  In the presence of his dignified wife and innocent children, and before the eyes and ears of hundreds of millions of Americans, they proffered false accusations of rapes, attacks that never happened, fantasies of truly sick minds. [...] And then the Democrats pontificate and hypocritically ask why our democracy is no longer civilly bipartisan as it once was.

Destroying the Institutions We Inherited.  The annual Academy Awards were once among the most watched events in America.  In 2020, however, Oscar viewership crashed to its lowest level in history, due in large part to backlash against the left-wing politicking, sermonizing, and virtue-signaling of award winners.  Recently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which oversees the Oscars, announced that it will adopt racial, gender, and sexual identity quotas for nominees — refuting the ancient idea of "art for art's sake[.]"  Such ideology has also infected, and thus tarnished, the Grammy and Emmy awards, and left-wing virtue-signaling has also become part of the NFL and the NBA.

Conservative Answers for Poverty.  It is an unfortunate fluke of history that in the 1960s, the time when the civil rights movement crystalized and black Americans achieved equal treatment politically — what should have long before been achieved morally — was a time of moral unraveling of the country.  Religion and moral principles were increasingly seen as a barrier to freedom, rather than its source.  Prayer was banished from school, abortion on demand legalized.  But the choice of man is not whether to believe.  The only choice is what to believe.  As religion was pushed out of the public square, the new religion became government.  Government programs were increasingly seen to be the path to salvation, rather than personal commitment to eternal truths.

Hawaii "Has Committed Suicide" — Local Rages "Hardly Anyone Is Sick, But We're All Broke".  While we have grown used to the people (well, at least those who are capable for thinking for themselves) of Michigan and California complaining that the tyrannical COVID lockdown rules imposed by Governors Whitmer and Newsom are arbitrary and capricious (if not downright unconstitutional), it is less often we hear from those living on the beautiful islands of Hawaii. [...] ["]The new travel requirements will trap Hawaii residents here as securely than if they were slaves.["]

Slaughter in the Cities.  Establishment voices are finally, grudgingly admitting that murders and shootings are up spectacularly in 2020.  But the reasons, they all agree, are immensely complicated and rather boring.  Perhaps, they muse, it has something to do with lockdowns?  Or there could be any number of other subtly interacting factors.  Who can tell?  In any case, this mysterious rise in violence is beyond the comprehension, much less the control, of politicians. [...] Did anything happen in late May that encouraged criminals and discouraged cops?  The data journalists appear stumped when they try to think back that far.  But, as you may recall (it was in the news at the time), George Floyd died in police custody on May 25, and three days later the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis let rioters burn down a police station.  From there, looting and rioting spread nationwide as the press and universities extolled the Mostly Peaceful Protesters.

Pay Attention To Local Elections, Because Whoever Wins Can Make Your Life Miserable.  This year, more than any other in recent memory, we got a bitter taste of the power of local officials to enable, and even promote, rioting and mayhem in America.  Many of us have watched aghast as mayors of blue cities like Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and New York turned a blind eye or even encouraged mob rule that resulted in wide-scale violence, vandalism, looting, injury, and, yes, murder.  They have flatly rejected all offers by President Trump to bring it under control by calling in the National Guard.  Let's not forget that these mayors — along with the many other officials close to them — were elected locally.  Recall, it's local elected prosecutors, district attorneys, state's attorneys, and attorneys general that have the power to allow violent criminals to roam free after an arrest.  We see this happening repeatedly in Democratic Party-run cities like Seattle and Portland where Antifa thugs caught on camera assaulting officers and citizens are immediately set free without bail.

Media Vs. The People:  The War Over Pedophilia.  The media has been working to normalize pedophilia, but the American people keep rejecting it.  Until recently, the pedophilia pushers suffered no serious consequences for their relentless campaign to sexualize children and groom them for adult exploitation.  But the recent indictment of Netflix for distribution of child pornography has changed the dynamics.  A grand jury in Texas has indicted Netflix, a streaming giant with $20 billion in annual revenue, for allegedly promoting "lewd visual material" of a child. [...] Almost unanimously, the major film critics adored the award-winning "Cuties," lavishing praise on it as "extraordinary," "inspired," and "empathetic and analytical."  These arbiters of cultural standards dismissed criticism of the film's sexualization of children as closed-minded tripe from right-wing "pearl-clutchers."  But the American people despised "Cuties" and launched a campaign to cancel Netflix subscriptions.

Why Some People Take Q-Anon's Pedophilia Allegations Seriously.  [Scroll down]  If charges of organized pedophilia at the highest ranks of society are so delusional, then why is Obama-connected Netflix doubling down on its support of child porn?  Why has California created a legal loophole for twenty-four year-olds to engage in "consensual" sodomy and oral sex with fourteen-year-olds in the name of LGBT equality? [...] When these issues were raised during the debates about gay adoption, the constant response we heard from the left was that "children don't need to be raised by their mother and father; they only need to be loved."  If you unpack that logic, you'll see the underlying evil.  Q-Anon has figured out that terrible things happen when adults think all children want their "love" all the time.  Stalking, molestation, grooming, trafficking, and harassment of underage people quickly become normalized when the left reserves the right to say the child wanted whatever strange treatment the adults believed they were entitled to force or press upon the child.

BLM rioters move into rich, liberal suburb as resident complains that they are supporters.  Affluent liberals deceive themselves that they will get a "pass" from violent radical revolutionaries if they sympathize enough with their causes.  The latest group to begin to learn the hard way lives in swing state Wisconsin.

Protesters want to defund police.  Homicides and violence are spiking.  The homicide rate is spiking, a troubled police department is reeling from street demonstrations seeking racial justice and accountability, and the city budget is ravaged by the coronavirus economy.  The push to reshape police departments is occurring in cities across the country, but it is perhaps nowhere more evident than here in Oakland, where veteran activists want to sharply reduce the police budget but much of the broader community is struggling with what that could mean.

NYC: The example America should not follow.  New York City is becoming an economic basket case.  "'We're at war': New York City Faces a Financial Abyss," screams a New York Times headline.  New York City's unemployment rate stands at 16%, double the nation's average.  Yet, even in the midst of a "financial abyss," the animosity of New York's liberal elite remains undeterred in its hostility toward free enterprise and entrepreneurship, the pillars of job creation and economic recovery.  In a latest example, commercial real estate development firms have pulled out of a proposed project, Industry City, that was estimated to bring 20,000 jobs and $100 million in tax revenue to New York City.  After several years of fighting opposition to get approval for rezoning that would have made the project possible, they threw in the towel.

The Art of Propaganda.  An ally of BLM posted a video of herself three months ago.  The young lady ("I'm gonna stab you" to the next person with the "Caucasity" to say "all lives matter") may well represent the majority attitude of our Ivy League — she is a Harvard grad — and of much of the left.  How did this come to pass?  Her intelligence is not small.  It's in the incessant propaganda, coming not only from academia and the schools, but from the mass media — especially television and film.  It's not just the overt message, it's in the subtext.  See a villain on the screen, there's a good chance you'll see an American flag in the background.  Propaganda is exponentially more potent than it was in 1922, when Mein Kampf was written.  The electronic media are pervasive, and their product, entertainment, almost always has a political message.  To a large extent it's not merely the art of propaganda but the propaganda of art.  As for the Harvard grad, even Hitler youth did not exhibit such ice-cold hatred.  She is no longer a free agent.  Her values are "fixed" — they will not change.  Nor will the politics and values of much, if not most, of her generation.  She is the future.

Red states are outperforming blue states economically.  Overall, Democratic-run states, particularly those in the Northeast and Midwest, had larger contractions in gross domestic product than Republican-run states in the Plains and the South, according to the latest state GDP data for the second quarter of 2020, released by the Commerce Department on Friday.  Of the 20 states with the smallest decrease in state GDP, 13 were run by Republican governors, while the bottom 25 states with the highest decrease in state GDP were predominantly Democratic-run states.

The Language of Privilege:  I can speak fluent wokese.  [Scroll down]  Or maybe you have by now read about the now-infamous wokese imposition of "Latinx" (pronounced Latin-ex) to name a group of people first designated by a Nixon administration-era census as an ethnicity, and whose members either haven't heard or don't want to be termed by that label rather than the supposedly problematic "Latino" or "Hispanic."  A recent New York Times essay by progressive strategists Ian Haney López and Tory Gavito found that, "Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well.  Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted.  Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color."  But pretend you don't know that.  Keep calling Hispanics people of color.  Use the phrase "people of color" often enough that you are inclined to shorten it to "POC."

Left Wing Governor Of Washington State Freaks Out As Boeing Moves Production To South Carolina.  Jay Inslee, the left wing governor of Washington State, is freaking out because Boeing has decided to move production of its 787 airplane to the more conservative and business friendly South Carolina.  Who can blame Boeing for making such a move, especially if it benefits them financially?  Besides, in Seattle, leaders have shown that they will allow mobs of left wingers to destroy businesses.

A Case Study in Punitive Liberalism.  Never mind small business and retail shops.  Big business in Seattle isn't very happy either.  Boeing announced today [10/1/2020] that it plans to discontinue manufacturing its 787 Dreamliner plane in Washington state and consolidate 787 production in (nonunion) South Carolina.  This shouldn't be a huge surprise to Seattle, given that Boeing already moved its corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago a few years ago.  Let that sink in a moment: although Boeing said they wanted an HQ location closer to their global customer base, you really have to wonder that Chicago would be preferable to Seattle, given the parlous state (and higher taxes) of Illinois.  In other words, this should have been a wake up call for Seattle's political class.  Well, Boeing pulling its 787 production out of Washington isn't sitting well with Washington's dimwit Governor Jay Inslee.

Garbage In Garbage Out.  What is wrong with New York City?  Their streets are lined with garbage from Wall Street to Midtown Manhattan.  [Photos]  Garbage everywhere even though businesses remain closed and half the people normally working there haven't stepped foot in the city for months.

Formerly known as the Ferguson Effect:
US sees 710 additional homicides and 2,800 more shootings, attributed to 'Minneapolis effect'.  With police departments across America under siege, pushed back on their heels by the oft-violent Black Lives Matter movement, the Democratic Party and their media allies, violent crime is "skyrocketing."  That's the assessment of Paul Cassell, a professor at S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, who has dubbed the explosion of violence the "Minneapolis effect."  The professor is the author of a recent research paper titled, "Explaining the Recent Homicide Spikes in U.S. Cities:  The 'Minneapolis Effect' and the Decline in Proactive Policing."  "I think what Minneapolis is seeing is the same thing we're seeing all over the country," Cassell told Fox 9.  "We're seeing a reduction in proactive policing, and as a result of that homicide and shootings are skyrocketing all over the country."

Colonizing Trump country.  90 minutes away from the maddened crowd in DC, the farmers of Rappahannock County and their neighbors live a bucolic life amid rolling hills and mountains.  The 7,252 residents face an invasion as DC residents, who having fouled their nests, seek new territory to destroy.  They are trouble makers who seek to turn the rural county into what they left behind. [...] [Mike] Massie didn't talk to the [Washington] Post.  I don't blame him.  Never talk to a cop without a lawyer, and never talk to a reporter at all.  But the Post reported, "For many who have been here, the objections to the hay bales were the breaking point.  They could tolerate the new wine bar — and the corner store that offers seven kinds of kombucha.  But they would not allow a farmer to be told what kind of sign he could erect on his land."

The Way to Perdition.  Encountering a certain segment of our society's acceptance of burning, looting, and execution of the police, not to mention the outrage prevalent when criminals or simple bad actors get their just desserts when police exercise their duty, I have been challenged to find any rhyme or reason to excuse such actions, not only in the permissiveness our leaders attach to such activity, but the actual encouragement they offer.  Indeed, you can find many who are so completely invested in this mindset to the point they cannot cope emotionally with any pushback or appeal to traditional law, justice, or morality.  Simply put, the traditional moral parameters of good behavior no longer apply. [...] This is simply the cost of doing business in a "woke" society.  Inevitably the chaos will submit to someone's organization, for good or ill.  Possibly, it will lead to even greater oppression and tyranny from a more pervasive, more powerful entity.  And where power alone regulates activity, perdition is the inevitable outcome.  This is the fate of a society that embraces such thinking in the first place.

The Progressive Medusa.  Large swaths of the downtowns of America's large cities — New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland — are becoming unhygienic, unsafe, and uninhabitable.  Substantial corridors swarm with the homeless.  Crime is increasing but commensurately redefined as a sort of cry of the heart, no-bail social activism.  The cities are broke and yet demand more bailouts to spend more money that will ensure things get worse. [...] Stepping over human excrement, accepting that if mugged the assailant will either rarely be caught or if so, released shortly without bail, and resigned that "brick and mortar property" is not properly one's own are all no way to go through life.

Zimmerman woman paralyzed after missing window for urgent medical care during riots.  A 59-year-old Zimmerman woman told 5 Eyewitness News she had an extreme medical emergency May 29 but was delayed getting specialized treatment during Twin Cities riots and is now paralyzed from the waist down.  Retired Minnesota National Guard Master Sgt. Launette Figliuzzi said she had a spinal stroke and needed to be airlifted to a metro hospital that specializes in emergency stroke care, but airspace over the metropolitan area was restricted at the time and major highways were closed as well due to the rioting.

Civilization Requires Collective Common Sense.  Without common sense in government, civilization cannot continue.  After the summer protests and rioting in many large cities, activists demanded a defunding, or at least radical pullbacks, of the police.  So-called crime experts often concurred.  So some city governments ignored public warnings and diminished their police presence despite a sharp rise in crime in many cities.  Looting and arson were often ignored.  If you call 911 in a large American city, there is no guarantee that anyone will answer promptly and send out police to aid the endangered.  So gun sales have soared.  Some people who never before owned weapons, or even opposed the use of firearms, are now terrified to remain unarmed.  Self-protection often outweighs abstract ideology.  According to a recent Gallup poll, most black Americans favor maintaining or increasing police presence.  Often, city officials who support cutting back on law enforcement still expect their own homes and property to be constantly policed.  The same is often true of activist elites who live far from the inner city.

The War of All Men Against All Men.  [Scroll down]  With few exceptions, our culture has murdered the idea of objective truth, leaving us unable to agree on what is good, right, or true, even as regards fundamental issues.  Most of us, for example, oppose child abuse, but some critics have applauded the lewd film "Cuties" with its sexualized adolescents, and we tell children who are too young to vote, drive a car, or drink a beer that they can decide to change their gender.  Facts have also taken a nosedive in our society.  Look, for instance, at COVID-19.  Were the lockdowns necessary?  What is the actual death rate from the virus?  Why are we still wearing masks?  Has the fallout from this policy been more deadly than the virus?  It's almost impossible to answer such questions objectively, because instead of sticking to facts, we made the virus a political and emotional tennis ball.  Oppose closing schools, for example, and you risk being called a murderer.

America [is] in peril if RBG's SCOTUS seat is not filled before the election.  [Scroll down]  SCOTUS confirmation hearings used to be boring even by C-Span standards.  Senator Bob Dole once remarked that the toughest part of a confirmation hearing was for the Senate committee chairman to be able to "stare straight ahead at the witness while sleeping."  Presidents of both parties were given broad latitude to appoint whoever they liked to the courts and to their cabinet.  Unless a nominee had been guilty of serious malfeasance, they were easily confirmed.  Ideology was never a factor since it was expected that nominees shared the ideology of the president who nominated them.  This all changed in 1987.  Judge Robert Bork would have been the fifth vote to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.  Democrats decided that the ends justified the means.  Bork had to be personally destroyed.  Leading the charge against Bork were Senators Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden.  Ideology alone became grounds for disqualification.  Democrats declared every liberal nominee to be mainstream and every conservative nominee to be extreme.  After torpedoing Bork, Democrats almost derailed Clarence Thomas.

Minneapolis' Guilty Whites Think BLM Lawn Signs Will Save Them When the Mob Comes.  It's a strange time to be staying in Downtown Minneapolis. [...] If I lacked purpose, I could go for days without seeing a soul, and even chance meetings near elevators or stairwells make people scurry away like frightened rats.  No one comes here anymore.  As I walked back from NoGo Minneapolis yesterday, a man rose from his little group of thieves to follow me as I passed, putting a scarf across his face as he approached to take whatever I had.  He was different from other men in other cities who have done the same, and knew in a heartbeat my reactions mattered in this moment, if I was to walk away unharmed.  This man had nothing to lose.  The streets are eerily empty too.  Its like the day after some kind of apocalypse where shocked survivors venture out to find water, only to quickly scurry away, hugging the outline of buildings in the shadows with their faces down to the curb.  Minneapolis is lost.

Shootings soar in Portland after mayor disbands police gun unit.  Shootings in Portland, Oregon, nearly tripled over the summer after Mayor Ted Wheeler disbanded the city's police gun crimes unit, according to new police data.  The city recorded 223 shootings in July and August, up from 77 over the same period in 2019.  And a little more than halfway through September the city already had 64 shootings, or double the shootings from the same month last year.  The numbers were released last week.

Minneapolis city councilors:  Residents are feeling 'terrorized,' say police 'nowhere to be seen'.  Minneapolis city councilors told the city police chief Tuesday [9/15/2020] that their residents are feeling "terrorized" and say police are "nowhere to be seen" months after the police killing of George Floyd set off protests against police brutality.  The Minneapolis City Council called on Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo to address constituents' reports of increased street racing, carjacking, robberies, assaults and shootings.  The meeting this week came months after the city council unanimously voted to amend the city's charter to allow the city police department to be dismantled.  The proposal, which would need to be voted on as a ballot measure, would replace the police department with a Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention, "which will have responsibility for public safety services prioritizing a holistic, public health-oriented approach."

San Francisco's Deathly Compassion.  San Francisco has a serious drug problem, particularly among its homeless population.  Roughly 8,000 people live on the city's sidewalks or in its alleyways, public parks, and playgrounds.  People with needles in their arms and legs, holding glass pipes and lighters, are a regular sight.  Users go limp in doorways and tents, or they career about, dazed and distraught, or angry and violent.  Dealers selling heroin, Fentanyl, methamphetamine, and crack are ubiquitous.  So, too, are the advocates for "harm reduction," which holds that widespread drug use should be accepted but its worst effects mitigated.  Organizations such as the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the Harm Reduction Coalition, the Drug Users Union, and even the Department of Public Health, in partnership with The DOPE Project, focus almost exclusively on "safe drug use."  In fact, the Drug Users Union's goal is "to create a safe environment where people can use & enjoy drugs as well as receive services."  This attitude led to today's humanitarian crisis: thousands of people living on San Francisco's streets, languishing in an endless cycle of homelessness and addiction.

Blue States Slammed with Multiple Interlocking Crises.  Black lives (along with all other lives) are now more endangered by increased crime than they were before.  Violent crime is on the rise in the cities that rallied the hardest demanding racial justice — Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Portland, D.C., Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Seattle.  These processes are superimposed on economic recession caused by the unnecessary shutdowns of businesses and schools.  The economy — President Trump's greatest achievement — has been hit hard and mercilessly.  [...] While all Democrats-run states went to lockdown, almost half of the Republic states remained opened, with closed states imposing fewer restrictions.  Still, the blue states got hit harder.

'Enter At Your Own Risk!': Texas Police Group Puts Up Billboards Warning Those Entering Austin That City Defunded Police.  People entering Austin, Texas, from Interstate 35 will see two billboards warning them that the city defunded police.  One billboard says, "Warning!  Austin defunded police.  Enter at your own risk!" CBS News reported.  The board is referring to the Austin city council's vote last month to cut the police budget.  The second billboard reads, "Limited support next 20 miles," the outlet reported.  The billboards were put up by the Texas Municipal Police Association, which announced its campaign Wednesday [9/9/2020] on Facebook.

Never-Trumpers Need A Lesson In Basic Math.  [Scroll down]  But a Joe Biden win?  That will harm the entire country.  And the damage will last a lifetime.  If you don't think so, look at the legacy of past Democrats who were able to shove their agendas through.  Now in place for 55 years, Lyndon Johnson's Medicare, Medicaid, and "Great Society" programs account for a third of the federal budget.  (And their fiercest defenders are often Republicans.)  ObamaCare costs close to $100 billion a year (after Republicans betrayed voters and failed to repeal it).  Welfare dependency — another of Johnson's legacies — is the main cause of the disintegration of families and the perpetuation of poverty, despite Republican efforts to mitigate the damage.  For 40 years the Jimmy Carter-created Department of Education has been pouring taxpayer dollars into schools, achieving nothing on standardized tests while massively fueling college tuition inflation.  Liberal judges with lifetime appointments make a mockery of the separation of powers.  The list goes on.

Oscars' woke quota will backfire on Hollywood spectacularly.  According to last February's ratings, 93 percent of us are already not watching the Academy Awards.  Now Oscar is wondering:  How do I whittle down that last 7 percent?  Answer: woke quotas.  That thunk you heard coming out of La-La Land on Tuesday [9/8/2020] was the sound of the Academy grandly planting its face in the sidewalk by announcing it was formally rejecting the pursuit of artistic quality in favor of a byzantine quota system.  Starting with 2024 films, your project can't even be considered for a Best Picture Oscar unless it meets a set of diversity targets of the kind you'd normally expect to see credited to the Oberlin Freshperson Student Social-Justice Initiative & Sustainable Vegan Hemp Co-Operative.  Good news, whoever staged that Rob-Lowe-meets-Snow-White dance number:  You're now the second-most embarrassing thing ever associated with the Academy Awards.

Oscars' Orwellian diversity quota throws out merit.  In the latest act of craven capitulation to the BLM-Antifa mob, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decreed Tuesday [9/8/2020] that no movie can win the top award unless it satisfies a set of genetically and sexually diverse quotas.  For example, lead actors must be from an "underrepresented racial or ethnic group ... Asian, Latinx, Black, Native American, Middle Eastern, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander."  At least 30 percent of the rest of the cast otherwise must be chosen from at least two of the following victim identities:  women, underrepresented racial or ethnic group, "LGBTQ+" and the disabled.  Or the Academy gets to dictate the content of the movie so that the "main storyline, theme or narrative of the film" must satisfy the same intersectionality requirements on gender, race, sexuality and disability.  And that is just Standard A, one of four labyrinthine prescriptions for creating Academy-sanctioned art.  They all read like satire.  You have to pinch yourself to make sure you're not having some dystopian dream.

Oscars announce that films will have to meet 'representation and inclusion' requirements if they are eligible to win Best Picture.  Actress Kirstie Alley raged at the Oscars' 'dictatorial' new diversity rules last night [9/8/2020] — claiming they were akin to 'telling Picasso what had to be in his [...] paintings'.  The Academy Awards shake-up means films hoping to win Best Picture from 2024 will have to hire more black, female, LGBT or disabled cast and crew or address themes that affect those communities.  Academy chiefs say the rules are intended to 'better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience', but critics accused 'Woke Hollywood' bosses of turning the Oscars into a 'weapon against anyone who disagreed with their politics'.

Liberals figure out a way to make the Oscars even worse.  I realize that many of you will read the title of this column and assume that it's just more fake news.  How could anyone possibly make the Oscars worse than they've been in recent years? [...] From now on, it won't be enough to simply make a good movie, or at least "good" as defined by the Hollywood elite.  Now the prospective nominees for the Best Picture Award will be judged on whether or not the people involved in every aspect of the production are "diverse" enough.  This is apparently Hollywood's latest nod to the Black Lives Matter movement, though we might at least hope that it will include Hispanics, Asians and Indigenous Americans as well.

Insufferable San Francisco.  Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the American city hardly exists at all. [...] I had figured I could stick around forever.  Then I took my daughter to see The Nutcracker.  The two blocks we had to walk from the train station to War Memorial Opera House made a greater impression on my nine-year-old than any magical offering from the SF Ballet.  The city greeted her with the army of cracked nuts, the ubiquitous 'zombies' who aimlessly roam our streets.  The need to be hyperaware of their presence while pirouetting to avoid discarded syringes and human excrement left her depressed and terrified for days.  My daughter refuses to go to the ballet at the War Zone Opera House ever again.

The True Cost of Riots.  A striking case against riots is clearly expressed in the findings of Professor Mary C. King whose research demonstrates "little relationship between regional progress for African Americans and relatively proximate race riots."  Riotous behavior often results in businesses fleeing minority communities, thus depriving residents of employment and income.  Racism is an extremely sensitive matter; however, sensitivity must be tempered by logic.  African Americans have experienced substantial progress over the past century.  Eroding these gains is a possibility if rational adults refrain from correcting misguided activists.  Such was the impact of the race riots of the 1960s.  Examining the effects of civil disorder on small businesses in inner cities, sociologists Howard Aldrich and Albert Reiss found that riots not only inflicted serious property damages but in the long term they made it prohibitive to operate in inner cities, hence driving up insurance costs.  As a result, businesses migrated to nurturing environments.  Low-income residents are the major beneficiaries of entrepreneurship in the inner city, so when emotions trump logic and businesses exit these communities, the losers are poor black people.

New York Had It Coming.  NYC's streets are now too dangerous and too disturbing for normal folks to tolerate.  If they're not being attacked, beset, robbed, or murdered, they're being disgusted.  The streets are the problem that must be fixed before we can consider a resurrection for NYC. The psychotics, thugs, panhandlers, loiterers, tent campers, muggers, and everyone else making life in the city a trial need to be removed and never tolerated again.  New York City was America's premier metropolis.  It should be reserved for "movers and shakers," ne'er-do-wells should reside elsewhere.  Last year when hoodlums started dousing NYC cops with buckets of water and little was done about it, NYC's fate was sealed.  Giuliani would never have allowed the streets of NYC to descend into the chaos that de Blasio has let happen; Rudy would have stopped it cold.  If New York is to be revived, then a new policy of zero tolerance for bad behavior must be instituted.  Panhandling, public urination and defecation, nudity, sex in the streets, loitering, malingering, tent encampments, etc. should no longer be tolerated.  If New Yorkers aren't willing to forbid such things, forget about the city coming back.

Don't Be a Victim of Democrat Abuse and Voter Endangerment.  If you have been surviving in a pocket of America where Democrats have forced you into unemployment over a virus that is proving less lethal by the day, robbed your kids of an education while using teachers' unions as political weapons, turned your elderly parents' nursing home into a death camp for disease transmission, fire-bombed your favorite restaurant or neighborhood drugstore because you've been deemed insufficiently "woke" and irredeemably racist, and now deprived you of any sports or entertainment shows that don't first take a moment to tell you how awful and evil you are, then you are a victim of Democrat abuse and voter endangerment.  American cities didn't kill themselves, after all.  Democrats did that.  All this mayhem and violence in the streets — the Democrats built that, too.  Democrats have had an absolute monopoly on the way most American cities are governed for fifty to a hundred years.  They run those cities' police departments.  They control the national news media housed in those cities.  They sit on the boards of all the "woke" corporations that fuel their wealth.  They've taken over the sports leagues and replaced entertainment with sermons from the perpetually aggrieved.  They have the backing of the Chamber of Commerce, an organization that prefers Wall Street to Main Street and cashing checks from Chinese communists to aiding American workers.  And the Democrats are Hollywood.

Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best steps down, claims cuts left her 'destined to fail'.  Carmen Best, the first Black police chief in Seattle's history, left her post Wednesday, saying on her way out that the city council's police budget cuts had put her in a "position destined to fail," according to a report.  Best, 55, announced her resignation Aug 10, after the council made good on its promise to approve sweeping proposals that would slash the police department budget by $4 million and cut as many as 100 officers from the force.  "I believe 100% that they were putting me in a position destined to fail.  Cutting a police department that already had low staffing numbers, that was already struggling to keep up with the demand," Best told NPR on Wednesday.  "How are we going to provide for adequate public safety in that environment?"

The coming blue-city exodus.  While the election isn't until November 3, it looks like lots of people and businesses are, in a sense, "voting" early — with their feet.  In pre-pandemic January, I wrote here about the blue-state exodus in which thousands of blue-state residents, fed up with high taxes, heavy regulations and "woker-than-thou" policies, are fleeing the sinking blue ships and moving to red states.  Now it appears we are seeing a blue-city exodus as well.  Begin with the fact that virtually every large city in the country is run by liberals.  World Population Review lists the 20 most liberal U.S. cities, with San Francisco leading the way, followed by Washington, DC, Seattle, Oakland, Boston, Minneapolis, Detroit and New York City.  Chicago comes in at 11 and Portland at 12.

Must See Video Shows Democrats Continually Called for Uprisings and Violence.  Democrats and the media have made a sudden turn the last few days.  After months of excusing the riots and even actively encouraging them, the new narrative is that it's all Trump's fault.  They ignore that Trump has offered assistance to Portland, for example, and has been viciously rebuffed even as the city continues to suffer chaos.  They also ignore that when Gov. Evers did accept Trump's help in Kenosha, the violence dwindled almost immediately.  No matter, though.  The media believe they are the vanguards of information and the Democrats know they have them in their pocket.  So you get insanity like this must-see video which succinctly shows just who has really been stoking the flames.  [Video clip]

Cultural Suicide Is Painless.  It is not all that hard to blow up a culture.  You can do it in a summer if you haven't much worry about others.  When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter.  You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive.  But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness.  You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour.  But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins — to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023.

Eviction Moratoriums Cause Big Problems for Mom-and-Pop Landlords.  Mom-and-pop landlords across the United States are coming under increasing pressure as a patchwork of regulations and eviction moratoriums passed by the federal government, states, counties, and municipalities in the wake of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus crisis have strongly curtailed their ability to enforce their property rights.  In addition, The Epoch Times has received reports that a small number of tenants are abusing moratoriums by choosing to withhold payment of their rent — and in some cases without claiming coronavirus-related hardship.

Portland mayor piously turns down Trump's offer of police aid, finds his apartment's lobby overrun by protestors.  Portland's mayor, Ted Wheeler, has already made his city a punchline internationally, vacuously mouthing the platitudes of Black Lives Matter, and watching mobs riot and burn his city for 92 days straight, with no effort to contain it.  Democrats bristle at Republican efforts to pin rioting on poor Democrat rule, but are cut off at the pass when Portland is brought up.  Nobody can argue about the incompetence there.  Even the people in Minneapolis console themselves with the thought that as bad as their city is, at least it's not Portland.

New Yorkers keep moving out of the city to suburbs, other states.  The move is on — to leave New York City.  The exodus that began at the start of the coronavirus outbreak, with many New Yorkers departing to their beach and country homes, has continued unabated as more leave for good, according to city moving companies overwhelmed by the avalanche of would-be expats.  "People are fleeing the city in droves," says Moon Salahie, owner of Elite Moving & Storing in Yonkers, who has been working nonstop since the city began Phase 1 of its reopening in June.  Salahie said 90 percent of the moves are to the suburbs and mostly families with kids worried about the school year.  He's packed people out of neighborhoods all over Manhattan.

California Apocalypto.  Note the synergism of the California postmodern apocalypse:  The hotter it gets, the more fires burn on ecological fuel and hillside natural "compost," the smokier the air becomes, the less efficiently California's solar pathway to the future generates, the more power outages ensue, the more real people are put in danger from either being incinerated by fire or suffocated by smoke or boiled inside without air conditioning.  Last week, I asked an elderly patient at the allergy clinic whether, in the 108-degree heat, he preferred to stay outside to breathe smoke and haze, or stay inside his uncooled apartment.  He gave a novel answer:  He didn't care about the power outages since he couldn't pay the exorbitant electricity charges anyway to turn on his air conditioner.  And he added that, in California these days, you can't tell whether mask wearers are fighting the virus, the smoke, or the police.

Portlanders in Need Had to Fend for Themselves, and You Won't Believe Just One Night's Crime.  You've seen the violence in Portland.  You've witnessed the chaos caught on tape.  The cops have their hands full.  So what happens, then, when people outside the chaos need police?  It turns out they have to go it alone.  As reported by The Daily Caller, on Sunday night, 35 officers had to abandon patrol duty after a riot was declared.  That led to 80 other emergency calls being put on hold.  [Video clip]  On Monday [8/24/2020], the Portland Police Bureau issued a statement detailing the night's insanity.  Twenty-three people ages 19 [to] 44 were arrested, for crimes including assaulting a public safety officer, interfering with a peace officer, and escape in the third degree.

Why I Am No Longer a Social Worker.  A social worker who wants to continue working had better understand that he or she has to support all aspects of LGBT platforms, has to facilitate partial-birth abortions, and has to eliminate any and all references to God — no matter what he or she believes.  Alternative therapies are acceptable so long as they are goddess-driven and support mandatory vaccination.  All therapies have to pass their "ethical" (i.e. political) means testing... and they all revolve around the exaltation of the Self, even when that "self" has the emotional stability of packing peanuts.  The essential problem is this:  the Self can only be exalted in this manner once the Creator Himself has been ejected.  And that is precisely what has happened... slowly and cunningly, but steadily.

Reclaiming Our Culture from the Left.  [Scroll down]  But the education most of the rioters have received has made them abjectly incapable of thinking rationally and evaluating claims on the basis of their logical coherence and supporting evidence.  No amount of careful reasoning, no amount of evidence is going to convince most of the rioters that their rage is based on false premises, because they have been carefully educated throughout their lives to feel rather than think, and to believe that America is a nation of deep injustice with a shameful history and an equally condemnable present.  It doesn't matter that the claims that the rioters and their defenders are making are false.  It doesn't matter that police brutality affects people of all races.  It doesn't matter that thoroughgoing civil rights legislation has made "systemic racism" a thing of the distant past.  The rioters know America is evil because they have been taught it all their lives by virtually every authority they have encountered, and those authorities have also taught them that those who tell them otherwise are stupid, contemptible, and operating out of ulterior motives.  This is true of the establishment media as well as the educational system — not to mention the corporate culture, the entertainment industry, and more.

Multiple Portland companies plan to move out of downtown office spaces because ongoing BLM protests have made the area 'unsafe'.  A number of companies based in downtown Portland are set to vacate or sell their offices because on-going protests in the city against police brutality have led to 'unsafe' conditions in the area, reports suggest.  Activists have taken to the city streets for the last 82 consecutive nights to demonstrate under the banner of Black Lives Matter, but some of the rallies have descended into chaos, resulting in violent clashes with police or widespread acts of vandalism.

The Thin Veneer of American Civilization.  Nine months ago, New York was a thriving, though poorly governed, metropolis.  It was coasting on the more or less good governance of its prior two mayors and on its ancestral role as the global nexus of finance and capital.  The city is now something out of a postmodern apocalyptic movie, reeling from the effects of a neutron bomb.  Ditto in varying degrees Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco — the anti-broken-windows metropolises of America.  Walking in San Francisco today reminds me of visiting Old Cairo in 1973, although the latter lacked the needles and feces of the former.  At the present increasing rate of police defunding, homeless encampments, the emptying of jails and prisons, the green-lighting of rioting and vandalism, the flight of the wealthy, the revolutionary change to Skype/Zoom tele-working, and the exodus of upper-middle-class liberal families to safe houses in the New York and New England countryside, once beautiful New York City is in danger of becoming the nation's aneurysm.  That is, after the "recovery," it and other blue cities may be seen as permanent weak veins and arteries prone to sudden fatal hemorrhaging that could implode at any moment, and thus may become metaphorically tied off, as the country reroutes around them.

New York City is 'dead forever,' according to this proud New Yorker.  Will the city that never sleeps ever wake up?  Not according to James Altucher, a best-selling author and former hedge-fund manager (and a former MarketWatch columnist), who says that New York City is "dead forever" as its residents come to grips with the reality of the coronavirus pandemic and what it means for the fate of the Big Apple.  "I love NYC.  When I first moved to NYC, it was a dream come true.  Every corner was like a theater production happening right in front of me.  So much personality, so many stories," he wrote in a blog post explaining why his temporary relocation might become more permanent.

How Race Politics Burns Out.  [Scroll down]  The kind of racialized violence now taking place reflects what historian Fred Siegel called "the riot ideology", which has been deleterious to the progress of African Americans.  The rioting in the 1960s weakened urban economies and led to devastating losses for minority property owners and businesses.  Even today many areas burned down in the 1960s in Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit have never recovered.  Indeed despite massive expenditures to redress huge past inequities, high-poverty areas in cities have grown steadily, doubling in population between 1980 and 2018.  Looting and mayhem, long-term, don't work.  After the 1992 riots, there were pledges of massive corporate and government support for south Los Angeles.  Now, almost three decades later, the area, site of two of the worst riots in American history, has experienced a growing gap with the rest of the county in terms of homeownership, income and educational attainment.  The more recent disorders also are unlikely to spark much long-term inner-city investment.

Hollywood Apocalypse.  Gold's Gym has become synonymous with the Hollywood Dream. [...] Yet today Gold's sits amid post-apocalyptic scenes which have consumed much of LA, turning the City of Dreams into an urban nightmare from which people are fleeing in droves.  A makeshift tent city made up of flapping tarpaulins and cardboard boxes surrounds the gym on all sides.  Junkies and the homeless, many of whom are clearly mentally ill, walk the palm-lined streets like zombies — all just three blocks from multi-million-dollar homes overlooking the Pacific.  Stolen bicycles are piled high on pavements littered with broken syringes.  TV bulletins are filled with horror stories from across the city; of women being attacked during their morning jog or residents returning home to find strangers defecating in their front gardens.

The State of Our Cities That Our Media Is Hiding From You.  [Quoting Mike Doran:]  I've been exchanging messages with friends about what what's happening in our cities:  NY, Philadelphia and LA especially.  A lot of disturbing things are not making the news.  Even Republicans aren't drawing attention to it.  Here's a message from a friend about life in NY today:  "Here's my neighborhood, Mike:  An elderly man, enjoying dinner w/his wife at an outdoor restaurant, punched in the face.  A woman waiting for the subway to come stabbed in the back.  An older neighbor pausing to catch his breath told to pay two dollars in protection money or get [...] off that particular street corner.  This is just the ten block radius from where I live in the last six days."  Other friends from NY talk about shattered business districts, drugstores with locked shelves, and hundreds of homeless people and parolees, including sex offenders, being moved into hotels on the Upper West Side adjacent to schools and playgrounds, which are filled with needles again like in the 1970s.  Friends in Philadelphia report large homeless encampments in the city center and being robbed at gunpoint.  Friends in LA talk about squatters taking over empty homes in professional class neighborhoods whose residents fantasize about emigrating to Canada.

Retail and Restaurants Flee Democrat-Run New York Forever.  Crime, taxes, disease, and an anti-science approach to social distancing have chased a number of big retailers and restaurateurs out of New York forever, reports the far-left New York Times.  "In the heart of Manhattan, national chains including J.C. Penney, Kate Spade, Subway and Le Pain Quotidien have shuttered branches for good," per the Times, which adds other big box retailers, like Victoria's Secret and the Gap, have chosen to reopen in other states while their Manhattan locations remain shuttered.

New York City's Downward Spiral.  On a return visit this weekend to the Upper West Side neighborhood where I've lived for more than a quarter of a century, the fear in the air was palpable.  The population seemed to be reduced by about half.  New Yorkers steer around each other on the sidewalks, some of them walking in the street to avoid passing near a stranger.  A lady declined to ride the elevator with me and my children.  People are especially terrified of the subway, whose ridership is down 80 percent from normal levels.  Friday night, at a time when there would ordinarily be 50 or more people riding on any given car of the 1 train, there were about seven.  Downtown was morose, grim, broken.  Graffiti was much in evidence.

A mad rush for the exits as New York City goes down the tubes.  It's not just a few Upper West Siders who are fleeing New York:  Moving companies say they're swamped with calls from residents looking to ditch the city — even though the COVID crisis has waned.  One likely reason:  The virus was but the last straw; New Yorkers are fed up with the shootings and lootings, homelessness on the streets, sub-par online schools, sky-high taxes and the sheer obliviousness of pols like Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.  On Sunday [8/9/2020], The [New York] Post highlighted families who've given up on the Upper West Side — now teeming with junkies, the homeless, convicts and others — and are headed for greener pastures outside Gotham.

In Colorado, the police are canceling themselves.  The state of Colorado has been experiencing the same twin dilemmas that have been plaguing much of the country for the past several months and this has had a rather drastic impact on police forces across the board.  They're dealing with the pandemic like everyone else, and police officers have jobs that put them in constant contact with the public.  At the same time, protests and demonstrations blaming the police for many of society's ills have led the state to eliminate qualified immunity for law enforcement officers.  This puts them a greater personal risk of civil suits or criminal charges if an arrest of an uncooperative suspect goes awry.  What's the upshot of all of this been?  Far fewer interactions with the public and a significant increase in police officers retiring early or simply quitting and seeking new types of employment.

When Government Encourages Victimhood, You Have an Alternative.  According to a report from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the number of officers in the Minneapolis Police Department has been reduced 10 percent since May and the department "could lose as much as a third of its workforce by the end of the year."  Some on the city council have sought to abolish the police department.  With this development, there has been a corresponding spike in violent crime.  Minnesota Public Radio reported that as of August 4 Minneapolis had experienced more than twice as many homicides in 2020 as during the same period in 2019.  Local CBS affiliate WCCO reported that through July 26 robberies in 2020 were up 36 percent over the same time period in 2019.

Insurance payouts fall far short of what's needed to rebuild Twin Cities.  Though Gov. Tim Walz has estimated that total losses will exceed $500 million, insurance companies have informed the Minnesota Department of Commerce that they will be covering a maximum of $240 million in riot-related damage.  In the 5-mile stretch of Minneapolis that sustained the heaviest destruction, uninsured losses among local small-business owners are at least $200 million, according to the Lake Street Council.

How Therapists Became Gods.  [Scroll down]  The youth suicide rate — 14.6 per 100,000 — appears to be the highest it's been since the government began collecting such statistics in 1960.  How can that be when we are surrounded with opportunities for self-gratification and encouraged by countless "authorities" to avail ourselves of them?  Why are we so sad, so lonely and isolated when there are so many socialization programs in our schools and everyone is so "connected" over social media?  Why the misery when you can even choose a new gender?  Or even marry your own pet?  (Truly, in California "whatever" has taken on a fantastical new meaning.)  If there is no longer a God, if His moral code is irrelevant, and if self-esteem boosting therapy is the answer (and the self-actualized therapist the oracle), why do so many people feel so empty even after years and years on the couch?

De Blasio's plan to destroy New York City is working wonderfully.  It's no longer news that, once the Wuhan virus descended on New York City, the rich did what rich people always have down when plague appears:  they packed up their goods and their money and left for comfortable country homes where they could wait out the disease.  The New Yorkers who remained in the city ranged from the upper-middle-class down to the homeless.  Mayor Bill de Blasio then had the bright idea to bring these two classes together, something that's working out about as well as you would expect.  It's also a preview of coming attractions for the rest of America should Biden win the White House and Democrats take full control of Congress.

Democrats Are Destroying Their Own Cities, and it all Makes Perfect Sense.  America's cities are dying, and no one in the Democrat Party seems to want to do anything to stop it from happening.  In fact, it is Democrats who are actively managing the chaos and destruction.  Ask yourselves why that is the case.  After all, the big cities represent almost the entire base of power for the Democrat Party.  That's why the county-by-county presidential election maps always look like a sea of red with little blue islands sprinkled onto it.  Most of those islands are the counties where the big cities are.  The sea of red is where they aren't.  This isn't complicated.  Yet, right now, as we sit isolated in our homes today thinking about which useless, virtue-signaling mask we will wear when we venture out to the grocery store, Democrat mayors and city councils all over the country are willingly presiding over the complete destruction of their centers of power.

Trucking Company Owner:  Cities That Defund Police Are in for a Big Surprise.  Cities that decide to cut their police funding could be cutting their own supply lines, too.  That was the message a trucking executive carried to "Fox & Friends First" on Wednesday [8/5/2020], and it's something urban politicians — in the thrall of Black Lives Matter rioters and antifa anarchists — should be seriously considering unless they think citizens can start growing their own food.  Because if it's not safe for truckers to carry goods — they just might not do it.  And trucking companies won't be willing to risk the business.

Minneapolis Downtown Council says up to 10,000 jobs could be lost over 'public safety concerns'.  Steve Cramer, president and CEO of the Minneapolis Downtown Council, told [KSTP] concerns over public safety and the future of the city's police department have some companies looking to leave downtown.  "Almost overnight the brakes went on in downtown," Cramer said.  "The point where it all started to change was the day the City Council announced it supported defunding the police department."  Cramer said in a six-week period from that day there were 45 companies that indicated they were either moving out of downtown or were a business that was no longer moving downtown, and there were 13 companies in that group with 100 or more employees and one with 600.

Dozens Of Minneapolis Businesses Consider Leaving, Cite Possibility Of Police Being Dismantled.  Dozens of Minneapolis businesses are considering leaving downtown, citing concerns about the possibility of the police department being dismantled, CBS Minnesota reported.  A survey by the Downtown Council shows 45 business owners say they are considering leaving downtown Minneapolis because of the lack of people working and socializing in the area and also the idea that the police department could be dismantled, CBS reported.  One of the surveyed businesses that is considering leaving employs 600 people, deepening fears that the city could take another major blow to employment, which was hit by the coronavirus pandemic.  The Council did not divulge which businesses are considering leaving.

How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong.  I spoke last week to executives, TV hosts and election analysts across leading American newsrooms, and I was struck by the blithe confidence among some top managers and hosts, who generally said they've handled complicated elections before and can do so again.  And I was alarmed by the near panic among some of the people paying the closest attention — the analysts and producers trying, and often failing, to get answers from state election officials about how and when they will count the ballots and report results.  "The nerds are freaking out," said Brandon Finnigan, the founder of Decision Desk HQ, which delivers election results to media outlets.  "I don't think it's penetrated enough in the average viewer's mind that there's not going to be an election night.  The usual razzmatazz of a panel sitting around discussing election results — that's dead," he said.

Woke Mobs Demand You Must Now Explain Why You Stand For The Anthem.  Kneeling for the national anthem at sporting events used to be the occasional episode of player activism protesting the United States as an evil racist empire.  Amid the new 21st century woke revolution however, kneeling has become a key signifier for players and teams to declare which side of the culture wars one sits on.  It's those who love America versus those who hate it, the latter of which despises the American flag and all that it represents as a relic of white supremacy that must be condemned.  Those who still stand out of respect for the nation's ideals and the uniformed men and women who protect it are now the outliers forced to defend themselves in a new age of no dissent, because dissent is racist, racism is oppression, oppression is violence, and violence is not to be tolerated, even if it isn't real.

Antifa Is the Natural Product of Our Educational System.  [Scroll down]  For decades, our schools have been self-replicating machines, preaching to college students, directly or indirectly, the left-wing gospel according to Howard Zinn (and the Frankfurt School and so forth) and sending them out in turn to preach this junior varsity, critical theory Marxism themselves as teachers at whatever level at all manner of institutions throughout the country.  The youngest of those levels is perhaps the most dangerous because it's the most impressionable.  Antifa members are therefore only doing what they have been taught all along, getting rid of a cancer called the United States.  This connection between Antifa and the teaching profession is so profound that some insist the majority of those hidden behind the black masks are indeed teachers.  Others, needless to say including the liberal media, have denied this.  It's impossible to know for certain.  Antifa, like some Islamic terror groups, doesn't have a formal leadership structure; why would they need it?  They also don't keep records.  This, however, is probably a case where the cliché about smoke and fire applies.  Whether Antifa is 50 percent teachers or 20 percent teachers, it's a lot of teachers.

The Bus Never Stops.  First they told us that homosexuality was normal and that there was no need for anyone to be afraid of the ramifications of treating them as normal, even though only about 2 percent of the population are homosexual — giving new meaning to the word "normal."  About 1 percent of babies are born with a heart defect, but we don't call that normal.  Doubters said that treating as normal people as different as homosexuals would have consequences.  First thing — or maybe second thing — they would want to get "married" and have their "marriages" treated as normal. [...] What's next?  What's wrong, really, with having children watch pornography?  It's everywhere, and there's essentially no effort to eliminate it.  How do we know that?  Because there is no serious effort by Republicans to stop it.  And if children can watch it, why shouldn't they do it?  What's the effective difference?  And what's wrong, really, with sex with children, so long as there's an adult in the room?  "Don't be absurd," you say.  But you said that years ago when homosexuality was normalized.  And again when homosexual marriage was normalized.  Now when polyamorous relationships are normalized, are you saying that we have reached the terminus:  that the bus stops here?  Please.  The bus never stops.  Unless someone stops it.

This did not happen to America overnight.  These days, one of the most frequent laments of conservatives is that so much damage has been inflicted on our nation in such a short amount of time.  With the economy humming along and the nation brimming with optimism as recently as the spring of this year, it seems that our world has been transformed almost overnight into an unrecognizable cauldron of chaos, despair, and even death.  However, while the Wuhan virus, the riots, and the raging lawlessness of the last five months are a major calamity, they are really only the inevitable culmination of attacks being waged against America for several decades.  The level of these attacks has been increasing in intensity and audacity the entire time.  But although Americans found it too easy to retreat from the mayhem for much of that period, the boldness and extent of the leftist onslaught have increased to the point that no more room for surrender exists.

The Trans Cult.  A few years ago, three things happened in the course of a single week in my life.  First, a friend told me about a letter her daughter, then 11, had received from her closest summer-camp friend.  The girl had some big news:  She was now a boy.  Then, another mother told me she and her daughter were sitting at a synagogue lunch when they were joined by a man who "presented" as a woman.  And I received a lengthy email from my daughter's swim coach at the local YWCA — a man whose missives had never included anything besides practice times and requests for volunteer timers — explaining that someone on the team had come out as transgender; the coach attached an entire Washington Post article explaining how we should treat the child and the proper pronouns we should use to refer to "them."

Nearly half of 258 surveyed police agencies' budgets [have been] cut: report.  A soon to be released survey of 258 police departments nationwide shows almost half have had their budgets cut amid calls for police to be defunded despite increases in gun violence and otherwise violent crime in some parts of the country, according to USA Today.  The outlet was first to report that the Police Executive Research Forum publication, which is expected to be released in the coming days, shows cuts in the police budgets are largely being made to training, equipment.  Protesters are pushing to "defund the police" over the death of George Floyd and other Black Americans killed by law enforcement.

Let Portland and Seattle burn.  [Scroll down]  My theory regarding this flight from reality in Portland and Seattle (where I lived for a couple of years) is that those cities have long suffered from an inferiority complex vis-a-vis San Francisco.  The big city to the south makes Portland and Seattle feel like a timber mill and a fishing harbor.  Every policy decision is consequently animated with the unspoken sentiment, "What would San Fran do?  Let's outdo that!"  Congratulations, Portland and Seattle, you've managed to outdo even San Francisco in violence, vagrancy and anarchy.  Now you can live in the festering filth and feces of sociopaths who have nothing but cynical contempt for your self-indulgent self-righteousness.  But at least you feel really good about yourselves.

We're at War.  Attacking Trump's Tweet in the NYT While the Democrats Foment Riots & Ruin to Defeat Him is Treason.  [Scroll down]  The people trying to destroy us stopped caring about the rules ages ago.  They faked Russian cyber-espionage against the Clinton Campaign to discredit WikiLeaks revelations about her corruption and incompetence.  They tried to frame Trump as part of their phony Russian plot.  They used the FBI to illegally spy on Trump's campaign.  They gave Robert Mueller power and an unlimited budget to destroy Trump and as many of his allies as possible.  They organized and promoted Christine Blasey Ford's perjurous hoax.  They tried to remove Trump from office for his patently reasonable attempt to get Ukrainian authorities to investigate Joe Biden's obvious corruption.  They've caused an economic catastrophe that could very well wind up being worse than the Great Depression, gaslit the entire nation into months of debilitating fear and panic, and caused the deaths of countless Americans by lying and withholding information about a virus that all the data literally says is less harmful than the flu.  They've fomented riots across the nation and caused the murder of American police officers and ordinary citizens alike by promoting the poisonous false narrative that American cops start their day fervently hoping they'll get a chance to kill someone who isn't white.  And that's just the egregious, defamatory and destructive mass deceptions the Democrats and their allies in the corporate press have perpetrated.

The Implosion of the Left's Language Circus.  Right now, the left's power consists mostly of power over the English language.  The left has sway over education, the media, law, arts, and entertainment, especially in English-speaking countries: the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand.  Liberal-dominated industries shape the understanding and use of words.  Since the English-speaking world defines discourse for the whole world and the English-speaking left defines English words, the left now has global hegemony.  For two reasons, I believe that this will not last very long.  First, the history of Spanish, French, and German shows that language communities reach their downfall when one party's prevalence distorts communication.  Second, the three most prominent left-wing slogans in recent history — "it gets better," "me too," and "black lives matter" — cancel each other.  Eventually, skeptics will notice, or the folly will cause a social disaster.

Seattle police chief:  New limits on anti-protest gear will mean 'adjusted' law enforcement.  Seattle's police officers will now respond to protests and rioting through "adjusted deployment" methods because of a new city law that bans them from using some crowd-control tools, the city's police chief said Friday [7/24/2020].  The new law, which takes effect Sunday, "bans Seattle Police officers the use of less lethal tools, including pepper spray that is commonly used to disperse crowds that have turned violent," police Chief Carmen Best said in a statement.  "Simply put," Best added, "the legislation gives officers NO ability to safely intercede to preserve property in the midst of a large, violent crowd."

Downtown Portland businesses, derailed by pandemic, say protests present a new challenge.  Restaurants and retailers throughout Oregon have struggled to stay afloat amid the coronavirus pandemic.  Some businesses have already closed permanently.  Others say their futures are uncertain.  But downtown Portland business owners say they are facing unique challenges as they try to recover from the economic devastation brought on by the pandemic.  Many point to the raucous protests downtown and the controversial federal response, which have put the city atop national headlines.  While most of downtown is tranquil, and nearly all confrontations between protestors and police take place late at night, the nightly protests have given Portland a reputation for upheaval that businesses say is keeping shoppers away.  Office buildings remain empty because of the pandemic and tourists have yet to return, taking away a large customer base for many downtown businesses.

The Editor says...
The tourism industry in Portland and Seattle is finished, for at least a decade.  The governors and the mayors should have thought of that possibility before letting rioters have their way in the streets, night after night, week after week.

These are the innocuous words progressives want to ban you from using.  Trying desperately not to get canceled, bosses are trying to think ahead about what words might create a fake Duraflame firestorm of anger, and preemptively ruling ordinary words out of bounds.  At the Los Angeles Times, for instance, an editor has said the word "looters," which has been used many times in the paper, now has "a pejorative and racist connotation" and that anyone who is inclined to use the word should "talk to your immediate supervisor."  Translation:  Best not use the word at all, if you want to stay employed.  So what to call looters?  Non-paying shoppers?  That doesn't quite tell the story:  Ordinary shoplifters don't usually bust up all the windows.  How about self-appointed retail-justice-commandos?  Revolutionary mass goods-redistribution agents?

Cancel Culture's Dual Meaning Is a War for America's Soul.  The rabid Left is actively rewriting American history as being inherently bad from the start, as it has no excuse to change our culture if there is anything arguably good about it.  Therefore, our values, historical narrative, monuments, and anything that makes us uniquely American must be disparaged and destroyed.  Tyrants throughout history have practiced cancel culture by forcibly suppressing opposition to their authoritarianism with methods similar to what the American Left is using today.  In 2001, Americans were horrified when the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddha statues along Afghanistan's silk road despite objections from 54 Islamic countries.  Equal outrage occurred in 2015 when ISIS destroyed statues and other irreplaceable artifacts dating back to Iraq's seventh-century BC culture.  Nazis stole countless billions in art, historical, and religious treasures from Jewish families to eliminate Jewish culture.

The cleanup from the riots in Denver isn't going quickly, or cheaply.  We've spent plenty of time over the past month or two looking at the seemingly endless series of riots consuming many of the nation's larger cities.  While the violence, injuries, assaults and even deaths capture many of the headlines, the staggering amount of property damage taking place is also a part of the equation.  The question is, what do these cities do in the aftermath when downtown storefront windows have all been replaced with graffiti-covered plywood sheets, walls and roads are festooned with paint and lights, statues and other public property has been destroyed?  That's a problem that the City of Denver has been wrestling with for quite a while now.  When the worst of the riots first broke out in the Mile High City, the community and the government teamed up to try to keep up with repairs.  They no doubt hoped that the worst of the rioting would fade quickly and order would be restored.  That hasn't happened, however.  Cleanup efforts have been stymied by repeating offenses and the costs have been spiraling out of control.

Goodbye, Washington DC.  [Scroll down]  I did my part, too.  My role in the fabric of urban society, overlooked but essential, was to spend my money.  Eat, drink, shop, spend, tip, pay.  And man, did I pay: taxes, rents, then a mortgage and HOA fees.  I paid taxes on things the government deemed "bad" for me, like alcohol and cigarettes; taxes on services which organized labor deemed "bad" for them, like rideshare.  I paid gas tax, cable tax, cell phone tax, and, of course, income tax.  Lots of income tax.  All I asked in return was relative safety and to be left alone to enjoy the city.  City-living in America, for decades, meant tolerating mild inconveniences so that you could be left alone, alongside millions of others.  That was the tacit pact.  And DC broke it.

Why This Revolution Isn't Like the '60s.  The '60s revolution introduced to the country everything from hippies, communes, free love, mass tattooing, commonplace profanity, rampant drug use, rock music, and high divorce rates to the war on poverty, massive government growth, feminism, affirmative action, and race/gender/ethnic college curricula. [...] A half-century after the earlier revolution, today's cultural revolution is vastly different — and far more dangerous.  Government and debt have grown.  Social activism is already institutionalized in hundreds of newer federal programs.  The "Great Society" inaugurated a multitrillion-dollar investment in the welfare state.  Divorce rates soared.  The nuclear family waned.  Immigration, both legal and illegal, skyrocketed.  Thus, America is far less resilient, and a far more divided, indebted, and vulnerable target than it was in 1965.

The accelerating collapse of St. Louis, the most violent city in America.  St. Louis, famously known as the Gateway to the West, has become America's reigning murder capital and a symbol of urban decay — trends accelerated in recent years by a soft-on-crime mayor and a social justice-minded prosecutor.  Last month, the images of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, both armed, confronting protesters in front of their restored mansion in the historic Central West End district of downtown St. Louis previewed what a defund-the-police era may look like.  In the aftermath of George Floyd's death in police custody in Minneapolis, St. Louis, like other American cities, faced a crisis of public order.  Businesses were burned to the ground, and looters roamed freely.  Four St. Louis police officers were shot in one night.  Civic unrest was so widespread that first responders took nearly 30 minutes to reach a 7-Eleven set aflame by rioters.  The city's elected leaders have seemingly abandoned the police.  St. Louis's current condition reflects a decades-long tumble from growth and prosperity to decline and disorder.

Harris Faulkner presses Marie Harf to name a single GOP-run city in chaos: 'It's a yes or no question'.  Fox News' Harris Faulkner challenged network contributor Marie Harf to name a Republican-run city that is currently under siege by rioters during an "Outnumbered" segment on Thursday [7/23/2020].  The discussion began with co-host Dagen McDowell ticking off a list of shootings in Chicago, long a Democratic stronghold, just in the past few days as the panel discussed Mayor Lori Lightfoot's decision to accept federal assistance in bringing order to chaotic parts of the city, a reversal of her earlier position.  "What if it works in Chicago?  What if the police in that city can stop the daily murders?" McDowell said before ticking off a list of shootings and killings in just the past few days.  "What if this partnership actually works?" she added, decrying the use by some so-called "peaceful protesters" who "carry Molotov cocktails, metal pipes and hammers — is that where we are in this nation?"

One Nation Under Anarcho-Tyranny.  The America you grew up in is not the America we live in now. [...] It's not "socialism" or "communism" under which we suffer.  Our dangerously chaotic, selectively oppressive predicament is more accurately described as "anarcho-tyranny."  The late conservative columnist Sam Francis first coined the term in 1992 to diagnose a condition of "both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny — the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes."  The "criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent," Francis expounded, is achieved in such a state through: "exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation; the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through 'sensitivity training' and multiculturalist curricula; 'hate crime' laws; gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally; and a vast labyrinth of other measures."

Chicago Police Statistics Destroy Black Lives Matter Narrative.  Last week in Chicago, a protest of sorts obediently marched to the tune of hackneyed charges of systemic injustice.  The tired narrative droned on about bad policing, police targeting of the black community, and too much jail or prison time.  This kept the crowd from considering alternatives to their afternoon work, such as offering a token of gratitude to thankless peacekeepers in their own backyard, the murder capital of America.  One wonders if they know that out of the 560 homicides, 475 victims were black, killed not by the police or whites, but by other blacks.  By all means, protest.  But when people complain about the system being rigged, they need to remember they voted for their system, and they've been voting for the same system for quite a while.  The mayoral offices have been run by Democrats since before the Great Depression, which means only about 2 million out of 350 million total Americans were alive the last time the city voted for a Republican.  Most recently, Obama acolyte Rahm Emanuel helmed the city between 2011 and 2019, and currently a woman by the name of Lori Lightfoot, whose sole victory in the role comes from being the first openly gay, black mayor of the town, presides over the carnage.

Trump Has Already Won the 2020 Election.  Given the polls, you would think anyone positing Donald Trump has already won the 2020 election was some kind of blithering idiot — and maybe I am.  (I've been called worse.)  But I can't help but think that in current conditions the polls are not only not worth the paper they're printed on, digital or otherwise, they're about as accurate as a thermometer run over by a six-wheeler.  No one sensible is talking about their political allegiance these days in public — especially to an anonymous pollster.  Instead, they're buying guns, in record numbers.  Why wouldn't they?  Calling 911 has become about as useful as calling tech support for a transistor radio run over by the same six-wheeler.  The destroyed statues are the least of it.  They're inanimate.  The actual people of Seattle, Portland, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia and on and on are living a nightmare.  Violence stalks the streets of all our major cities whose murder rates are going up stratospherically.  (As I type this, the news is reporting 9 more shot in D.C.)  Have there ever been remotely as many stores and businesses smashed, many still not operating, from the Atlantic to the Pacific?  America isn't in the midst of a civil war.  It's in the midst of a national meltdown with the banana-brained neo-Marxists of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, stoned like sophomores (if that) on Foucault or some other self-important "critical theorist," leading the way to oblivion and mutual hatred (actually a return to tribalism).

Portland Goes To Hell:  The Death Of An American City.  Portland, Oregon, was once known as the quintessentially nice Northwestern city.  Its nickname, "The Rose City," was given to it by a Baptist group that held a convention there over a century ago.  Sadly, today, riot-riven Portland smells like anything but roses.  The city has been the locus of nonstop violent protests for 51 days and counting.  And really, calling them protests is incorrect:  They are acts of outright rebellion, with many participants openly calling for the dismantling of the United States. [...] Who's behind all this?  Antifa and Black Lives Matter, of course.  But they aren't the only ones.  There are lots of other leftists of various affiliations agitating the crowds. [...] This is part of a pattern of how the left works:  Destroy the rule of law, the backbone of our free republic.  Intimidate ordinary citizens into silence.  Then support and elevate rule by power of unelected street thugs in Antifa and BLM.

Here's what I saw in the first half of 2020.  [Scroll down] 
8. Liberals worked hard to manufacture "social unrest," report on it as if it were spontaneous, and "defund the police."  Libs think the solution to a breakdown in law & order is less law & order.
9. Liberals evidently figured out this "social unrest" they were manufacturing from nothing, had an effect on the election in their favor.  They may have figured this out before they started manufacturing it.  At any rate, the places run by liberals began to make silly concessions to the protestor-terrorists, that the protestor-terrorists never even requested.  Statues, dairy company emblems, rice brands, syrup brands, etc.  Evidently these apologies, changes and removals were supposed to deter the protestor-terrorists from protesting and terrorizing.  They did not.
10. Places run by liberals also had more violence, more COVID infections, more COVID casualties, more deaths and injuries from protests, and more unemployment.  These places run by liberals also had less freedom.  Their lockdowns were more stringent and the harm done to their business communities were much greater.
11. While all this was going on, our mainstream media, run by liberals, began hemorrhaging its credibility even faster than it had been hemorrhaging it in recent years... which is really saying a lot.  They began to use the phrase "mostly peaceful protests" to excess, applying it in places where it clearly didn't apply.  One anchorman even waxed lyrically about these "peaceful protests" in front of a burning liquor store.  This proves the media thinks we're all stupid.  Well who can blame them.
12. Liberals don't have a clue what all this looks like to grown ups because they never have doubts about anything and can't be told anything.

Can a Whole Country Go Mad?  This is what happens when God has been evicted from a culture.  It is indeed a strange thing that is happening to western civilization.  In the earlier stages of our culture, the existence of things unseen was hardly questioned.  Today, if you don't see it, it doesn't exist at all.  The locus of control has moved from a universe of the Divine to the essential singularity:  One's Self.  As a result of this tectonic shift, there are things happening in our culture that are truly insane.  Period.  As a result of this increasing insanity I have resigned from the National Association of Social Workers.  I am taking down the shingle that used to stand for compassion and righteousness, but now stands for nothing more than social indoctrination and lunacy, an organization that protests against the death penalty for serial killers but rallies in favor of partial birth abortion.

The Big Apple Is Being Destroyed, and Billy De Blasio Is More Concerned About a BLM Mural.  Like the Dallas Cowboys, you just need to give it time; they'll disappoint. [...] In politics, the same mindset can be applied to Democrats; give it time — they'll destroy whatever they takeover.  The Left took over the cities, and nothing has changed for residents, especially black Americans.  These cities are now nothing more than Democratic powerbases that lie, cheat, and steal from residents who keep voting leftists into power.  In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio is doing his part in destroying the city.  [Paywall]

It's not just police:  Public servants of all stripes are now under assault.  'Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?" So asks Joaquin Phoenix's Joker while meeting his social worker, motioning to Gotham outside the window.  It isn't just you or the stuff of superhero thrillers.  Gotham — the real Gotham — is in chaos, and disrespect for authority, and not just police authority, is sinking it deeper.  New York is suffering a serious slide in livability.  Those who can have already fled the city, and it's a big question mark whether they are coming back.  Each day brings a new barrage of online-message-board pleas, from people wondering if they can get out.

Are We In The First Days Of A Lawless Era?  A nation founded on the rule of law appears to be yielding to the rule of the mob.  Not everyone has surrendered.  The trend, though, is worrisome.  Too many of our "leaders" and institutions are failing us.  In 2020, law enforcement officers in this country are being treated not just with disrespect but in many instances are being abused verbally and physically.  Rioters and looters are going unpunished, not because they can't be identified or the cases against them are weak but because prosecutors (several of them backed by George Soros) refuse to uphold the law and charge the offenders.  Violent gangs have been allowed, almost encouraged, to take over city streets, sidewalks, and private property; shut down the free movement of others; and topple public monuments.

Death of a Nation.  America and Britain are under attack by anarchists and thugs, while media pimps and opportunistic politicians are excusing the mobs.  Worse, the media is in cahoots with those who say that words are a form of violence that has to be regulated.  Who would have thought it would come to this?  Our First Amendment, our most precious freedom of speech, challenged by smear artists who lust for power and control.  Unlike what Hollywood depicts as wartime Berlin, Germans bitched to high heaven over the bombing and lack of food, as did Russians during Stalin's time.  But just try to not kneel nowadays and watch your career fly out the window quicker than you can say "BLM."  Is this why we fought the wars, to not to be able to say out loud what we believe?  To be silenced by unelected street thugs, dandruff-covered academics, and spittle-flecked media leftists?

Descending into Chaos.  [Scroll down]  We have remarked the gradual, now accelerated encroachment of the socialist nightmare on the American dream, the rapid breakdown of public order following the COVID pandemic so egregiously mismanaged by our political and medical classes, the destructive riots of various groups of domestic terrorists joined by the unproductive elements of society, and the racist hysteria leading to the eruption of social violence and hatred of whites.  We have watched good people being "cancelled" by their moral inferiors.  And we have seen our political authorities either foment the mayhem or retreat into their bunkers of silence and inactivity.  These are the people descending the chain of being into the terrain occupied by the rabble, sinking from the realm of communal order into the realm of turbid misrule.

Why It [is Bad] to be a Democrat in 2020.  The Democratic Party is the oldest voter-based political party globally and the longest existing one in the United States.  You'd think wisdom would come with time.  Instead, look at them.  All you see is negativity. [...] Democrats destroy everything they touch.  Consider their accomplishments:  They banned school prayer, legalized abortion and support infanticide.  They've secularized society, replaced God with government and personal charity with social justice.  They've substituted religion for reason, blurred the lines between males and females and destroyed the nuclear family.  They've lorded over the destruction of America's youth, brainwashing kids to the point they hate America, their parents and themselves.  Look at their cities:  Democrats' cities burn as the stench of human feces fills the air.  During the pandemic, pot shops thrive while businesses and churches stay closed.  Lawlessness prevails as mobs mete out a perverted form of justice where good people get punished and criminals get rewarded.  Black-on-black murders rise.  Babies get shot without a whisper, while anarchists decimate whole city blocks because of the murder of one man.

Nightmare in New York.  This Nightmare in New York is brought to you courtesy of Gov. Andrew Cuomo; Mayor Bill de Blasio; and a cast of thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters, anarchists, and street thugs.  The once vibrant city is turning into a virtual no-go zone of looted shops, shuttered store windows, and skyrocketing murder rates.  The number of shooting victims is up 51% this year so far, and that tragic trend is accelerating.  In June of this year, there were 250 shootings, as opposed to 97 in June of 2019.  New York was already reeling from the highest coronavirus death toll in the (formerly) United States, due in large part to Gov. Cuomo approving the transfer of thousands of recovering COVID-19 patients to nursing homes at the height of the pandemic.  Then the rioting began, and Mayor de Blasio's response was to shame cops and propose cutting his city's police department budget by more than one billion dollars.

NYPD limits retirement applications amid 400 percent surge this week.  New York's Finest are putting in for retirement faster than the NYPD can handle — while citing a lack of respect and the loss of overtime pay, The [New York] Post has learned.  A surge of city cops filing papers during the past week more than quadrupled last year's number — as the city grapples with a surge of shootings — and the stampede caused a bottleneck that's forcing others to delay putting in their papers, officials and sources said.  The NYPD said Wednesday that 179 cops filed for retirement between June 29 and Monday, an astounding 411-percent increase over the 35 who filed during the same time period in 2019.

Lawlessness, the Murder of Our Children, and the Soul of America.  BLM, Inc., Joe Biden and the DNC own the death and destruction of this past weekend, in cities like, Atlanta, New York and Cleveland!  Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) have surrendered to the Radical Left (Black Lives Matter, Inc., Antifa, etc.).  The Democratic Party(DNC) has had decades to fulfill its promises to black Americans, but all it's delivered is crime-ridden cities bereft of economic opportunity.  It's time to shake things up, show the extent of DNC failure and expose BLM, Inc. for the fraud it is.  For weeks Americans have watched radical leftist anarchists and Antifa thugs engage in extreme violence and murder that will haunt many people for the rest of their lives.  Dozens of innocent civilians and police officers have been killed, hundreds of civilians brutally beaten, and more than 700 police officers were injured nationwide.  Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property was destroyed as businesses and communities in more than 42 states were devastated by arson, looting, and mayhem that activists quickly followed with a call to defund the police.

BLM's Violence & the Death of America's Cities.  The police-hating rhetoric of the openly and proudly Marxist "Black Lives Matter" (BLM) movement is doing exactly what it did five years ago — creating a massive increase in violent crime and homicide throughout urban America.  You may recall that back in 2015-16, BLM's anti-police protests and riots — particularly in the aftermath of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — intimidated officers nationwide into becoming much less proactive in dealing with criminal suspects.  A Pew Research Center report titled "Behind the Badge" — which tabulated the results of a questionnaire that was sent to thousands of officers — confirmed that 85 to 95 percent of law-enforcement officers in large police departments became highly reluctant to engage criminals except where absolutely necessary.  The consequences of the new timidity of law-enforcement were monumental:
  •   In 2015, America's 56 largest cities experienced a 17% rise in homicides.
  •   Twelve cities with large black populations saw their murder totals spike even more dramatically — e.g., by 54% in D.C., 60% in Newark, 72% in Milwaukee, 83% in Nashville, and 90% in Cleveland.
  •   Robberies surged in America's 81 largest cities during the 12 months that followed the shooting of Michael Brown.
  •   During the first quarter of 2016, homicides in America's 63 largest cities increased by 9%, while nonfatal shootings were up 21%.

Could IT Happen Here?  [Scroll down]  One reason Hitler wasn't taken seriously during the early 1930s was because the world media presented Hitler (and Mussolini) as caricatures to be laughed at more than feared. [...] Most law-abiding Americans shake their heads in disgust at what is happening.  Some view anarchist antics as more comical than threatening.  For instance:
  •   Weirdly designed pink [...] hats that look like props from a 1950s sci-fi movie.
  •   Garage door pull that had been used for months suddenly seen as a KKK noose.
  •   Bizarrely named autonomous zones that are declared separate countries.
  •   Young white girls yelling at older black cops that the black cops do not understand racism.

Six Weeks, Six Cities, 600 Murders.  The single most important issue, affecting some of the largest swaths of populations in America, is the scandal the media ignores even as it explodes in our faces.  In only six weeks, city after city operated by entrenched Democrats have seen a massive expansion in lawlessness, violence, and murder.  Stunningly, many news outlets seem gobsmacked and mystified at how or why such an explosion of lawlessness has occurred. [...] So why did all of these cities take such violent turns?  Is it because their leadership capitulated to the anger of the mobs as opposed to thinking clearly and strategically about an effective response?  Or do these Democrat-run towns literally operate with denial in good and evil?  How else can you explain that in the city of Minneapolis (where a nation watched in horror and subsequently responded to the murder of an innocent man) that within 30 days they would record 1,600 shots fired?  But then respond by voting to dismantle its police operations all together?

The Devil's Pitchfork:  Seeking the Origin of Our Present Troubles.  The progressivist campaign to destroy America is three-pronged, the tines of the devil's pitchfork, namely:  de-individuation, de-historicizing, and what I'm tempted to call pre-eminent domain (the power of the state to take more than one's physical property).  In other words, it is a war against three intimately related phenomena:  self-governing personhood, historical memory, and the possession of property, whether intellectual or private property as understood by John Locke.  Thus our ideas are no longer our own but state-injected bromides, history has been co-opted in the service of a political fantasy, and ownership is the prerogative of the state.  It is clear that the entire sensibility of the age, and certainly of the coming era, has changed dramatically, not only as the result of the onslaught of lethal political and cultural viruses like democratic socialism, "social justice," postmodern relativism and radical feminism, but of the "Information Revolution" and its carrier, the Internet, in particular the social media platforms run by a cabal of corporate oligarchs.

Saving America From the Mob.  In just six weeks, violence has increased in many cities throughout the nation.  This is the result of police officers either resigning, taking sick days, or showing less interest in challenging the criminal element.  It is an exceedingly difficult time for anyone to be a police officer today.  Police recruitment has become extremely challenging in an environment where violence toward police is increasing and police are not supported by weak politicians following the orders from the mob.  It is not only police that activists are trying to destroy.  In the past six weeks, movies have been removed, police shows have been cancelled, even cartoons have been adjusted.  In addition, countless monuments have been toppled, flags have been changed, amusement rides have been altered, product packages are undergoing a politically correct overhaul.  Other products are changing their supposedly offensive names, all to satisfy the mob.

Covid-19, BLM protests and a liberal mayor are turning the city into a no-go zone as murders skyrocket, shops are looted.  Two bullet-ridden bodies lay sprawled on bloodstained concrete steps.  Alongside, relatives of the victims are wailing and collapse to the ground.  In another part of the city, a gang of youths use spray paint to disable security cameras before robbing a corner store.  Later, video footage captures police officers sitting helplessly in their patrol car as a baying crowd hurls glass bottles at them.  This is lawless New York — a city that was once America's glittering crown jewel but which risks descending into mob rule.  Murder figures have skyrocketed and a combination of the coronavirus pandemic, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and weak political leadership is in danger of achieving what Osama Bin Laden never could: bringing the Big Apple to its knees.

CNN: Shootings, Murder Surge in Democrat-Controlled Cities.  Shootings and murder are surging in Chicago, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York City, and Philadelphia, all of which are Democrat-controlled cities.  CNN reports murders in Milwaukee are up 95 percent this year.  They note murders in Philadelphia rose 24 percent as shootings rose 57 percent, and Los Angeles witnessed a 250 percent increase in murders during the first week of June alone.  Shootings have surged by 44 percent in NYC, compared to the number of shootings at this same point in time last year, and murder is up 23 percent.

Yoga studio implodes in brutal, yet classic case of 'progressives' eating their own.  Yoga is officially canceled.  Or at least it is at Kindness Yoga, a set of yoga studios in Denver that had striven so diligently to cater to left-wing extremists but has since been eaten alive by those same zealots.  Prior to its cancellation, owner Patrick Harrington's Kindness Yoga had offered far-left zealots a utopia of so-called "progressive" ideals, according to The Colorado Sun.  "Kindness Yoga, which began in 2001 with one Cherry Creek studio called Yoga Energi, had an outward reputation of inclusivity — with its earthy studios in Capitol Hill and Hilltop, gender-neutral bathrooms and person-of-color yoga nights where 'white friends and allies' were asked to 'respectfully refrain from attending.' Kindness held an LGBTQ yoga workshop just weeks before the pandemic forced the studios to close," the Sun reported Monday. [...] Yet despite all the hoops that Harrington had jumped through to build and maintain his rep with left-wing extremists, it wasn't enough for yoga teachers Jordan Smiley, who's reportedly indigenous and transgender, and Davidia Turner, who's black.  According to them, Harrington still wasn't doing enough to bring about so-called meaningful racial "change."

Calling Racism a Public Health Crisis Can Kill Black People.  Baltimore, Cleveland, Denver, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh are among the cities that have officially declared that racism is a public health crisis.  A number of states are also moving in that direction.  Senator Sherrod Brown intends to push a similar resolution in the Senate.  The medicalization of racism has been backed by the American Medical Association, whose heads have called on "health institutions and physician organizations to explicitly denounce police violence" and urged "clinics, hospital and healthcare providers to review and reconsider their policies and relationships with law enforcement".  Considering the already fraught state of emergency rooms in urban areas where the victims and perpetrators of gang violence show up every weekend, that would be catastrophic.  It would lead to fewer doctors, fewer ERs, and worse outcomes for black patients in urban areas.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams:  Republicans will be hunted if Biden is elected.  Comic strip creator Scott Adams said there's a "good chance" Republicans will be killed if former Vice President Joe Biden is elected.  Adams, who created Dilbert in 1989, sent out tweets Wednesday claiming conservatives would be targeted with violence should the presumptive Democratic nominee win the 2020 election.  "If Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year," Adams warned in a tweet.  "Police will stand down.  Republicans will be hunted," he added.  Police will stand down.  [Tweets]  After some social media users questioned his claim, Adams said he spoke with a woman who told him she was fired from her job because her colleagues suspected she supported President Trump.  "Just interviewed a woman who was fired for suspicion of liking President Trump.  Suspicion.  Fired," Adams wrote.

The Coming Collapse of the Republic.  [Scroll down]  As I warned in 2012, there no longer is a culture war.  "What is occurring now is a pacification effort."  Its progress is why corporate America, including the now-absorbed Chick-fil-A and NASCAR, has turned decidedly to the dark side (shifted "left").  It's why prominent people, including Republicans such as Indiana senator Mike Braun, are bowing before terrorist group Black Lives Matter.  It's why mobs are enabled and good people hobbled for defending themselves from the mobs.  It's why we're seeing a complete cultural collapse — portending a political collapse.  This is partially due to a new "woke" generation having entered the corporate sphere and others of influence.  But what did you expect?  The apocryphal saying (no, it's not Lincoln's) informs, "The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."  Did you really think the Left could completely control academia for generations and that, somehow, it all would "stay in college"?

Breakdown.  [Scroll down]  To be sure, the first manifestation of the Black Lives Matter movement had a mouthpiece in the Oval Office, lacking now.  It doesn't matter.  Presidential imprimatur or no, the reborn Black Lives Matter has gained billions of dollars in corporate support, more billions in free round-the-clock media promotion, and a ruthless power to crush dissent from the now-universal narrative about murderous police bigots.  During the two weeks of national anarchy that followed the death of George Floyd, cops were shot, slashed, and assaulted; their vehicles and station houses were firebombed and destroyed.  American elites stayed silent.  Since then, police have continued to be shot at and attacked; the elites remain silent.  Monuments to America's greatest leaders are being defaced with impunity; anarchists took over a significant swathe of a major American city, including a police precinct, without resistance from the authorities.  And a push to defund the police gains traction by the day.

Get Ready to Be Canceled.  If you thought you could evade the tentacles of political correctness by avoiding a campus or classroom, steering clear of political protests, or self-censoring your Facebook posts, think again. [...] The label of "white privilege" is currently used by leftists and progressives to discount or deny speech and data that contradict the narrative of whatever movement they seek to justify.  Recently, it has been used to dispel the criticism of the violent looting and riots that followed peaceful protests decrying the murder of George Floyd.  One Minneapolis councilwoman used it to justify dismantling the police, even when private homes are broken into.  It is now a basis for dismantling statues and desecrating historical monuments.  Whether seeking to silence whites or even hurt successful communities as a means to balance or make reparations for perceived injustices, this social weapon is gaining strength and credibility.

Apocalyptic science:  How the West is destroying itself.  The most serious threat to the West is not China or Russia but its visceral disgust with itself.  A growing proportion of people — in universities, the media, politics and corporate structures — now reject the premises upon which their own thriving societies are built.  Critical Theory opposes everything that makes the West work.  Unlike traditional academic inquiry, which seeks to explain and understand with logic, analysis and the scientific method, these doctrines are less theories than programs.  Their purpose is to condemn cultural norms, tear down existing orders and transform society.  It all starts with Marx.

Violence rises in Minneapolis, as debate over role of police rages.  Minneapolis officials have described an unprecedented burst of violence following George Floyd's Memorial Day death, after an officer held him down with a knee to his neck, sparking worldwide fury and massive protests.  At least 113 people have been shot since May 25, eight fatally, according to Minneapolis police, with hundreds of reports of gunfire across the city, including several shootings in broad daylight.  The spike in violence has come amid a raging debate over the role the Minneapolis Police Department should play in addressing crime in this city.  Public confidence has so deteriorated that a majority of the City Council has pledged to dismantle the agency.  Some residents have accused officers of purposefully curbing response to crime, which police deny.  Others have decided to stop using the agency's services altogether.

Nearly 300 NYPD Officers File for Retirement as Violent Crime Surges.  Close to 300 New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers have filed for retirement over the last month amid riots against the police and as violent crime keeps surging.  According to figures released to the New York Post, about 272 NYPD uniformed officers have filed for retirement since riots over the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd began in late May.  At the same time last year, about 183 officers had filed for retirement, indicating a nearly 50 percent spike in retirements this year.

Conservatives Are Treated like Second-Class Citizens, and That's Dangerous.  What use is a federal government that refuses to protect our basic constitutional rights? [...] Democrat mayors and governors are bankrupting American citizens by preventing them from engaging in simple commerce, and they're getting away with it.  Street mobs across America are causing millions of dollars in property damage, destroying priceless historical monuments; killing police officers; and targeting random, unlucky citizens based on the color of their skin, and the press cheerlead the madness and defend the murderers and arsonists as heroes.  John Kerry just the other day threatened the United States by declaring that if Democrats don't win the election in November, they will insist on "revolution."  Revolution?  How else can you describe this incendiary cocktail of mob violence and flagrant denial of conservatives' constitutional rights, aided and abetted and kept volatile by Democrat mayors who applaud the mayhem, Democrat prosecutors who refuse to enforce the law, and Democrat-aligned corporations who happily treat conservatives as second-class citizens?

De Blasio's performance grows worse by the day, making NYC unlivable.  The New York that survived 9/11 and bounced back stronger than ever is now being brought to its knees.  The coronavirus, the economic shutdowns and the frequent street protests, mixed with pillaging and vandalism, are no ordinary hurdles, but they are surmountable — with courageous leadership.  Tragically, that's exactly what New York doesn't have.  The crises pile up like dead leaves, but leadership is nowhere to be found.  Without it, the city is fast becoming unlivable.  The slow exodus of recent years has quickened in recent months, with natives, long-timers and recent arrivals clogging the exits.

NYPD retirement filings surged 49 percent amid protests.  The New York City Police Department has experienced a significant surge in the number of officers looking to retire following the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minnesota that sparked national protests and calls for police reform.  The NYPD told Fox News that 272 of New York's finest have filed for retirement during the period between Floyd's death and June 23, a number that the outlet said represents a 49 percent jump compared to the same timeframe in 2019.  While retirements so far this year have been about the same — 135 in 2020 compared to 131 over the same timespan in 2019 — the department indicated to Fox that the recent cluster of retirement filings still awaits processing.

272 uniformed NYPD cops file for retirement after George Floyd death.  Cops are hanging up their handcuffs in huge numbers.  The flurry of Finest farewells began after the police-involved killing of George Floyd on May 25, with 272 uniformed cops putting in retirement papers from then through June 24, the NYPD says.  That's a 49 percent spike from the 183 officers who filed during the same period last year, according to the department.  An NYPD source suggested the recent departures could signal a coming crisis for the 36,000-member department, which also faces a $1 billion budget reduction amid the "defund the police" furor.

Washington Post:  It doesn't matter that the most violent cities in America are run by Democrats.  Usually, we elect mayors to do the job of running things and one of the most important parts of their job is public safety.  Especially in cities with higher crime rates, crime reduction is often a major point of discussion during election season.  For instance, Memphis, Tennessee is at the top of the per capita crime list. [...] Why would the fact that the winner is almost always going to be a Democrat not matter?  Don't Democrats tend to have certain specific views about crime, policing, mass incarceration, etc.?  Don't Republicans have a reputation for being tougher on crime, more friendly to police and prosecutors, etc.?  How can this not matter?

Anarchists and Trump's Reelection.  I love my country.  America is the greatest land of opportunity on the planet for all who choose to pursue their dreams.  The BLM movement has nothing, I repeat nothing, to do with empowering blacks.  Leftists are exploiting blacks as useful idiots to implement their transformation of America away from the divinely inspired vision of our Founding Fathers.  For decades, public education, Hollywood, Democrats and fake news media have infected youths with a poisonous lie that America is a hellhole of racism and the greatest source of evil on the planet.  Our passivity allowed leftists to transform our kids into their social-justice army of anarchists.

2020 Election Will Be a Contest of the Angry.  For nearly a month, the nation has been consumed by massive protests and chronic riots, looting, and arson.  The catalyst for the demonstrations — the violent and wrongful death of African American George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police — is itself fading from connections with the ensuing upheavals.  Statues are toppled.  Names are abruptly changed.  Careers canceled.  Police are both reviled — and walking off the job.  Retired generals are no longer seen as conservative traditionalists but radicals themselves who dare to take on the commander-in-chief.  Downtown Seattle is no longer in the control of the city government.  The internet is aflame with self-appointed sleuths.  They scour hours of video and millions of words, searching for an indiscreet past remark — as fodder to take out a political opponent, a rival for a job, or a personal enemy.

Liberalism is dangerous to your wallet and your health.  The most recent jobs report found that nine of the 10 states with unemployment rates above 14% are in liberal blue states.  Ranked from highest to lowest, they are Nevada (25.3%), Hawaii (22.6%), Michigan (21.2%), California (16.3%), Rhode Island (16.3%), Massachusetts (16.3%), Delaware (15.8%), Illinois (15.2%), New Jersey (15.2%), and Washington state (15.1%).  I call this the "blue state jobs depression." [...] It is hardly shocking news.  Liberals are anti-business, and their policies are especially hostile to small businesses.

Why Are We Letting Democrats Steal from Us?  Brainwashed, radicalized liberals have been using Trump's election as a reason to take over our streets, college campuses, corporate America, and other traditional American institutions in ways we could not have imagined.  Putting aside the Resistance movement, which began the day Trump won, these frustrated anarchists are now acting like rabid dogs let loose on innocent populations who wish to live and prosper in peace.  They have stolen livelihoods from the same people they purportedly care so much about.  They have stolen the lives of officers and individuals who seek only to instill law and order in the midst of chaos.  They are pilfering much of what has made America unique and special — including our glorious history and traditions.  From Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Butterworth's, Uncle Ben's, Cream of Wheat, and Eskimo Pie to Land O'Lakes, corporate logos that existed for over a century are now gone or soon to be removed from grocery store shelves.  When leftists see racism in Snap, Crackle and Pop, where does the insanity end?

RNC ad puts a spotlight on Dem tactics that bolster 'Marxist' attack on America.  The Republican National Committee released a new ad this Tuesday designed to highlight how "left-wing anarchists are using chaos to destroy America" as Democrats watch sometimes with tacit approval and other times with beaming support. [...] [T]he video links the ongoing madness being perpetrated across the country by Black Lives Matter extremists — think police cruisers being burnt, police officers being run down, statues being toppled, etc. — with the incendiary rhetoric of Democrat political figures ranging from Nancy Pelosi to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

The Movement to Destroy a Nation.  Nation-wide protests weeks after George Floyd's murder turned into a movement to destroy a nation.  Parading as an attack on racial injustice, the movement has turned into an obliteration of history.  This week that devastation set its eyes on faith.  Less than one week ago, protesters rekindled the call for removing confederate statues.  Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in a show of solidarity with the protest mob, removed two portraits of former House speakers who were part of the Confederacy.  From there, the momentum quickly shifted to anyone whose statue is seen as offensive, who may have held racist or politically incorrect views of another era, or who may (or may not) have owned slaves or supported slavery at any time.  Never mind that the qualifiers of what constitutes "offensive" is blurred; the momentum of eradicating history is ruled by emotion, not reason.

2020 Election Will Be a Contest of the Angry.  For nearly a month, the nation has been consumed by massive protests and chronic riots, looting and arson.  The catalyst for the demonstrations — the violent and wrongful death of an African American man, George Floyd, while in the custody of Minneapolis police — is itself fading from connections with the ensuing upheavals.  Statues are toppled.  Names are abruptly changed.  Careers are canceled.  Police are both reviled — and walking off the job.  Retired generals are no longer seen as conservative traditionalists but radicals themselves who dare to take on the commander-in-chief.  Downtown Seattle is no longer in the control of the city government.  The internet is aflame with self-appointed sleuths.  They scour hours of video and millions of words, searching for an indiscreet past remark — as fodder to take out a political opponent, a rival for a job or a personal enemy.  The people's energy, tranquilized by a two-month national quarantine and the terror of the coronavirus, has suddenly exploded in both massive protests and silent seething at the lawlessness.  The result is that for good or evil, the 2020 election is no longer really about Biden and Trump, Democratic or Republican policies, or progressive and conservative agendas.

Minneapolis Police Department Reports Increased Hostility Toward Officers.  The Minneapolis Police Department says officers are routinely walking into hostile situations and crime scenes where they are not welcome.  It happened at least twice last night [6/21/2020] alone.  Now, police officers are pleading for cooperation, as others double down asking for systematic change.  When Minneapolis police were called to a shooting near the George Floyd memorial Friday night, officers were met with resistance, and had trouble getting to the man who needed help.  And police say this is not an isolated incident.

America's Jews and Christians Are Failing the Test of Their Lives.  America is being taken over by violent mobs; a vast amount of destruction and stealing has taken place (with little police intervention and the apathy of our political leaders).  Why aren't all clergy delivering thundering sermons about the Seventh Commandment, "Thou shalt not steal"?  Does it now come with an asterisk?  A central part of a major American city has been seized and occupied by people who hate America and its values, including its Judeo-Christian values.  Heard any clergy (aside from some evangelical Christians) speaking out against it?  And most ominous by far, for the first time in American history, free speech — the mother of all freedoms — is being widely suppressed, not by the government but by the press, the universities, the high schools, the elementary schools, all the giant internet media, Hollywood and virtually every major business in America.  Christians and Jews place repentance at the center of their theologies, yet there is no place for repentance if you did or said one insensitive thing — real or alleged — even if it was 20 or more years ago.  Yet all we get from American religious leaders on this matter is ... silence.

Obeying The Law Is For Suckers.  If you watch the news, national or local, there is a disturbing percentage of our fellow Americans doing whatever [...] they want to do with little or no concern for the law.  And the law has little or no concern for itself, at least when it comes to those charged with enforcing it.  Across the country, charges are being dropped against rioters and looters.  Why?  Many of those people in position to prosecute the guilty have no interest in doing so.  [Indeed], many of them ran on the idea of not prosecuting people.  What kind of idiot would vote for a district attorney who promised to let people get away with more?  Well, from San Francisco to St. Louis, they did just that.

'If Brooklyn Can't Sleep, Bill de Blasio Can't Sleep,' New Yorkers Hold Noise Demo Near Mayor's Mansion Over Fireworks and Lawlessness.  New Yorkers are fed up with Mayor Bill de Blasio allowing the lawlessness continue on their streets, which includes shooting off fireworks at all hours of the night.  To enact their revenge, protesters lined up their cars and held down their horns for a noise demonstration near the Gracie Mansion late Monday night.

NYC sees staggering shooting numbers; top cops warn of 'storm on the horizon'.  The New York Police Department has reported a staggering increase in shooting numbers, and injuries, as officials warn there's "a storm on the horizon" — and say changes must be made.  An estimated 72 people were wounded in 53 shootings citywide from June 15 through Sunday night, an NYPD spokesperson said Monday morning.  The department saw 14 shooting victims in 12 shootings for the same time period last year, data shows.

What Happens When the Madness Ends?  At some point, tonight's hero on YouTube torching Wendy's or kicking a downed policeman on CNN, becomes tomorrow's commonplace, unnoticed felon — with a new warrant issued out on his head, and about whose fate and lengthy CV no one other than his parents much cares.  Governors and mayors can demand masks and all sorts of social distancing measures.  But once they declared that only those not demonstrating — the non-looting and nonviolent — were subject to their rules, while millions both peacefully protesting and violently looting were exempt, then their words meant nothing.  It will be impossible for them ever to be seen as credible again.  Virus or no virus, crowded freeways, and busy malls will soon be referenda on the bond of governors like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer.

Thoughtcrimes Now Prosecuted in the Land of the Free.  [Scroll down]  Practically anything, any piece of fact, statistics, sentiments like "all lives matter," any picture, any opinion expressed as civilly as possible, may cost you your job, reputation, and even life.  "Social justice warriors" are torching traditional liberal beliefs about free speech and tolerance with ideas so toxic and destructive that they shut the debate down, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation — all while calling for a "discussion" about race.  Evidently, only unarguable support is allowed. [...] We're witnessing organization after organization being bullied into searching out thoughtcrime.  We're talking about not some KKK proclamations, but cases where people were punished for common sense that was found offensive.  Even a UCLA professor may be placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" to his students, or his colleague could be suspended from his job after refusing a student's request to effectively cancel final exams for black students amid protests over the death of George Floyd.  There's a data scientist who once worked for President Obama's re-election campaign who was fired from a research firm for retweeting an academic study suggesting that nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones.  We're seeing conservative media — Zero Hedge and the Federalist — being pressed by Google to censor their content by barring them from Google's ad platform.  We're seeing corporations changing logos of their products dubbed racist on Twitter.

The City They Voted For.  Thousands of kids awaken in Crown Heights terrified & traumatized from 2 weeks of nonstop fireworks at night.  Seniors haven't slept in weeks.  Residents don't walk Eastern Parkway past 10pm to avoid being hit by fireworks.  [Video clip]

The 'cancel' crew will come for you someday soon.  A moral panic is sweeping the nation.  How we react to the pitchfork hordes will determine the fate of our country for a generation or longer.  We call what the hordes do to our fellow citizens "cancel culture," but the term is far too cute to capture the cruel, mindless and life-destroying process taking place all around us in the name of "fighting racism."  The tendency has been with us for some time, but the current, extra-crazed moment has accelerated its malignant energies:  Locked in for months due to COVID-19, we re-emerged into a society more enraged and at war with itself than ever before.  Then the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis took the ideological madness to the next level.  The great majority of Americans agreed that Floyd's death was horrific and that the police officers responsible for it must be held to account.  But that sane consensus wasn't enough, as far as the cancel left was concerned:  Enemies had to be found and eradicated.  And if there weren't enough racist enemies, then more of them had to be invented.

Flyers call for NYPD strike on July 4 so cops can show city what 'independence' from police looks like.  The chasm between the NYPD and a mayor and city who have sided with Black Lives Matter and other Left-wing groups seeking to "defund" or "disband" them has grown wider since the death of George Floyd, as police officers around the country suddenly feel under siege like never before.  Cops in New York may be planning a department-wide strike on July 4 to give the city and its pandering Democratic leaders a look at what it's like to have their 'independence' from police, as many have said they want, according to the New York Post.  The news outlet reports that cops have said flyers that are being circulated among NYPD rank-and-file officers are urging them to call in sick en masse on Independence Day as pushback against Mayor Bill de Blasio's pledge to scale back police funding amid a growing anti-law enforcement environment both in the city and around the country.

The Silent Majority can be silent no more.  This year has been one body blow after another to the nation we love.  First, there was the coronavirus, and we thought, "How can this get any worse?"  Then came the economic shutdown and the incalculable pain and suffering it brought.  Next were the riots, the radicals' unopposed seizure of a section of Seattle and the maniacal efforts throughout the country to defund the police.  Now a series of rulings from the "conservative" Supreme Court are wreaking untold havoc on the Constitution and the rule of law.  It wouldn't take a Christian fanatic or an excitable conspiracist to conclude that America is now the target of an intense spiritual onslaught — brought on by its own rampant descent into decadence.  The left has been at war with America as founded for decades, and it has made great progress in transforming our culture and institutions.

Democrats Have Failed the Black Community for Too Long.  In recent weeks, Americans have watched radical leftist anarchists and Antifa thugs engage in extreme violence and murder that will haunt many people for the rest of their lives.  Fifteen innocent civilians and two police officers were shot and killed, hundreds of civilians were savagely and brutally beaten, and more than 700 police officers were injured nationwide.  Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property was destroyed as businesses and communities in more than 42 states were devastated by arson, looting, and mayhem that activists quickly followed with a call to defund the police.  With each passing day, both of us asked ourselves the same question: where are the governors and mayors of these cities who took an oath of office to uphold the Constitution of the United States and keep residents safe from harm?  Instead of upholding law and order — also known as doing their jobs — they turned a blind eye to the violence while praising the demonstrations that the radicals were using as cover.

Free Speech is Under Full Assault.  Increasingly, we see people holding unpopular views being attacked and refused a forum in which to speak.  Through the threat of force and censorship to control people's speech, free speech is under full assault.  History is replete with others using similar tactics.  As in the times before the Nazi rise to power, the Soviet gulag era, and Mao's revolution, similar trends are prevalent today.  Freedom of speech is engaging in unrestricted speaking of one's mind without fear of retaliation or censorship.  It is the freedom to use one's natural rights to engage in complex thought and speech.  This is not a new concept.  Freedom of speech has a history centuries old, long predating the founding of this country.  Some want to control these natural abilities.  This is where the dispute lies.  One does not have to look far to find multiple examples of the threat of violence and censorship.  This ranges from online mobs to technology company and media censorship and peer attacks.  Those with differing opinions are blackballed, blacklisted, attacked, and censored out of existence.

What Type of Fool Shoots a Cop With a Taser or Wrestles Him for His Gun?  [Scroll down]  Something is very wrong and broken in America.  It is not "systemic racism" because the System is not racist.  But it is Systemic Left Propaganda.  That systemic plague endangers our culture, our values, and our civilization — and it endangers Black lives, too.  Any leftist narrative that makes heroes and icons of people who break loose from peacefully arresting cops and then shoot tasers at them, or that idolizes thugs who wrestle police officers for their guns, endangers impressionable people who believe the lies and falsehoods so propagated.  Forty-two years ago The Deerhunter, a movie set in the era of the Vietnam War, contributed to scores of accidental suicides caused by idiots playing Russian roulette after watching the film.  Today the Left media advances a new insanity, inspiring fools and idiots to shoot at cops and wrestle them for their guns, offering instant fame and martyrdom.

We Must Stop the Great Unraveling.  Across the United States, a great unraveling is in progress.  A rolling crime wave, under the guise of social activism, has left city after American city shattered and smoldering. [...] Social-justice mobs have taken aim at freedom of expression, inventing new heresies daily and ruining the lives of those who unwittingly give voice to them.  Forced confessions and language proscriptions are the order of the day.  Poetry, fiction, movies, and television shows — including children's cartoons — are canceled and excised from history.  Indeed, all art and opinion are now subject to the chopping block lest they prove insufficiently propagandistic.  To rewrite the present, the mob has rewritten the past.  They have forced upon us a distorted and grotesque version of American history.  With the support of corporations and education boards, school textbooks and curricula tell of an unredeemable America founded not on the promise of human liberty but human bondage.  What's more, this history discounts the transformative progress on racial equality for which Americans — black and white — have given their lives.

The Democrats' Corruption of America's Inner Cities.  What are the real problems in America's inner cities?  Is it all about racism, or could it be a combination of several factors?  According to a survey of Chicago parents by the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, poverty, violence, and crime are also some of the biggest concerns in their neighborhoods.  Good jobs and capitalism could solve the poverty part of the problem, but if cities make it hard for businesses to come into town or for a local person to start a small business, citizens with little mobility stay poor.  Why wouldn't these cities want the freest, most business-friendly laws and policies imaginable for their citizens?  The answer is often that politicians care very little about their constituents but care deeply about their own power and money.  High taxes, crony capitalism (meaning favors for politicians and others who have the power to give the "right" companies the contracts), excessive regulations, and a culture of "it's who you know" combine to crush entrepreneurs and small business owners who are not among those favored by the powers that be.

At Least 7 Minneapolis Police Officers Resign — 7 More in Process of Resigning.  Leftists rioted and looted over 270 businesses in Minneapolis in the last three weeks following the death of George Floyd during an arrest in the city last month.  The Minneapolis City Council voted to replace the police department last week with a "community-led public safety system."  The Minneapolis police have been abused by city officials and violent protesters.  So it should come as no surprise that seven police officers have resigned and several more are in the process of leaving.

Detroit's recent move to defund police had serious consequences, reporter finds: 'Children are dying'.  Over the last week, following the May 25 police custody killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, communities nationwide have faced calls from critics to disband police agencies or redirect funding from law enforcement operations to community development programs.  Detroit, according to a report, has seen this decade an uptick in crime because of defunding the city's police department.  The city cut back its police force and funding during a historic bankruptcy in 2014.  Funding for the police department has fallen 20 percent in the last six years.  Starting salary is $40,000 a year.  Wages for cops were cut 10 percent and have never recovered, accounting for inflation.  Health benefits for retired cops were stopped and pension payments postponed.

The Summer of our Discontent.  We are entering the summer of our discontent.  The season promises to be a long, hot struggle to maintain the integrity of our founding principles that are increasingly compromised with the best and worst of intentions.  The worst intentions are those of the rabble whose objectives we shouldn't underestimate.  They will instigate and inflame chaos and anarchy to achieve what a former president promised: "to fundamentally transform America."  They will opportunistically take advantage of the nation's weakened status from overreaction by government to COVID-19, compounded by the well-intentioned but ultimately destructive flood of trillions of dollars in "temporary" cash benefits.  The street scenes of Minneapolis and Seattle promise to play out across the country all summer, leading to November's election.

Baltimore Residents Blame Record-High Murder Rate On Lower Police Presence.  For the third year in a row, Baltimore, Md., has had more than 300 murders, reaching a new record of murders per number of residents in 2017.  Some residents attribute the high murder rate to relaxed police patrols in the city following high-profile cases of police brutality.  Officers have backed off in neighborhoods, like the one where Freddie Gray was arrested.  The Rev. Kinji Scott, a pastor in Baltimore who's held positions in local city government, says the opposite needs to happen.  "We wanted the police there," Scott says.

Atlanta riot shows the left's downhill in slide in racializing police incidents.  As tragic as officer-involved shootings of anyone is, not all of them are worth burning down a Wendy's for.  For radical activists and their enablers, this act is getting old fast. [...] [I]n contrast to the George Floyd case, where the victim died pleading to breathe on video with a bad cop's knee on his neck for 8 minutes, we now have someone who was driving while intoxicated (hello, MADD), sleeping on the grounds of a fast food joint, grabbing an officer's taser while under arrest, and using the taser against police.  And Wendy's is the bad guy?  Police are the bad guys?  This looks like the sort of nonsense that goes on at every fast food joint in inner cities every week.  Transients and drug users are often found at these establishments because of the low-cost food and availability of public restrooms.  Just read the Yelp! reviews of any inner-city McDonald's or In-N-Out burger, there will always be mentions of homeless as part of the user experience.

Anarchy, Seattle, and All That CHAZ.  Three cities, all supremely liberal, represent an American descent into anarchy against which no one is standing.  After New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said he wanted to slash the police budget, the New York City Council is going about cutting $1 billion from that budget, about 16%. That will inevitably cause a reduction of police presence around the city and, with equal inevitability, result in an increase in crime.  President Trump has said that if Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Mayor Durkan didn't restore order in Seattle, he would.  But he has done precisely nothing.  In Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed in police custody on May 25, the city council plans to disband its police force entirely.  On Friday, the city council voted to replace the police with a "community-led public safety system."  What [...] is a "community-led public safety system"?  And then there's Seattle.

The Protests May Have Started Out Legitimate, but They've Been Hijacked.  This mayhem has thus far taken the lives of at least 11 people, many of whom are black Americans.  Hundreds of others have been injured in the chaos, with police officers getting shot and protesters struck with rubber bullets.  As the carnage, looting, arson, and assaults have been allowed to continue in Democrat-controlled states and municipalities, it has become undeniably evident that the wrongful death of George Floyd has morphed into anarchism.  As lives, businesses, and personal property have been driven asunder, the criminal perpetrators are buoyed by pusillanimous Democrat politicians too timid to take back their own streets.  Whether it be Crown Heights, August 1991; Rodney King, May 1992; Ferguson Missouri, August 2014; Baltimore, April 2015; or one of many others, the script has remained the same.  In concordance with fawning state and local officials, a legitimate protest is hijacked by a throng of anarchists.

Where Black Lives Don't Matter.  Milwaukee and every other big blue city in America have been marked by a decades-long murder merry-go-round that has nothing to do with the police.  The overwhelming majority of the murdered — and the murderers — in America's cities are young black men who were cheated out of a decent education by the inexcusably substandard Democrat-run public schools they had no choice but to attend.  Because many were functionally illiterate and afflicted with arrested psychological development, they lacked the skills to hold down even the most basic entry-level job.  So what did these frustrated and angry young men do?  Most turned to a life of drugs and crime, with many ending up dead or in prison before reaching their 20th birthdays.  For generations on end, black-on-black homicides in Democrat-run cities have been an ongoing calamity for the black community.  On May 31, Chicago experienced a record 18 homicides in a single day.  Year to date, the city has chalked up 264 murders, with young black men a solid majority of the victims, which raises the question: are those black lives any less important than George Floyd's, any less deserving of our outrage?  Chicago is the poster child for urban carnage, but every big blue city in America has overseen a breeding ground for black-on-black havoc, and they've done it for the last half-century.

The True Plight of Black Americans.  While it might not be popular to say in the wake of the recent social disorder, the true plight of black people has little or nothing to do with the police or what has been called "systemic racism." Instead, we need to look at the responsibilities of those running our big cities.  Some of the most dangerous big cities are:  St.  Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, Newark, Buffalo and Philadelphia.  The most common characteristic of these cities is that for decades, all of them have been run by liberal Democrats.  Some cities — such as Detroit, Buffalo, Newark and Philadelphia — haven't elected a Republican mayor for more than a half-century.  On top of this, in many of these cities, blacks are mayors, often they dominate city councils, and they are chiefs of police and superintendents of schools. [...] The bottom line is that today's black Americans have significant political power at all levels of government.  Yet, what has that meant for a large segment of the black population?  Democratic-controlled cities have the poorest-quality public education despite their large, and growing, school budgets.  Consider Baltimore, Maryland.  In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore's 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state's math exam.  In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math.  Only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state's English test. [...] It's the same story of academic disaster in other cities run by Democrats.

Communism Is Reborn with a New Name in America.  Do some people really think that the impeachment, the corona-gulag, and the pogroms all occurred in America one after another in a completely random pattern of events?  Why did pre-planned and synchronized riots and looting suddenly arise?  Because the adventure with the coronavirus hysteria failed.  Why did the coronavirus hysteria suddenly lead to a corona-gulag being created?  Because the impeachment failed.  Why did impeachment suddenly arise?  Because "Russiagate" (or, rather, Obamagate) failed.  Why did "Russiagate" arise?  Because leftism was defeated in the 2016 elections.

Obama to the Rescue.  For three years, Resistance Media and a set of political operatives who tag-team with their allies inside the federal bureaucracy have laid siege to the American public through their proxy war against the president they hate — and the country elected.  What the resistance yearned for was the kind of imagery that galvanizes resistance movements from Latin America to the Middle East:  a spectacular act of martyrdom that would crown their campaign of new age political warfare, which began with the Russiagate conspiracy theory, which was followed by a fraudulent impeachment process staged by the same political operatives, CIA officers, and media personalities who pushed "collusion" into the public sphere, to the three-month-long coronavirus lockdowns that were portrayed as matters of life and death only to be magically lifted to combat racism, after leaving nearly 20 million Americans jobless.  The successive failures of the campaign to destroy Donald Trump and undo the 2016 election have only made the American left angrier and more willing to take desperate measures[.]

Why You No Longer Recognize Your Country.  Mass looting throughout the nation.  Police precincts burned to the ground.  Murdered cops.  An historic church in Lafayette Park set on fire.  Video after horrifying video of innocent Americans being beaten senseless by gangs of thugs, as one political party demands:  "DEFUND THE POLICE!"  Everyone is saying it:  I no longer recognize my country.  You don't recognize your country because it's not the same country.  What you're seeing is the third-world hellhole the left has been quietly assembling for us since 1970.  Minnesota, the crucible of the riots, has gone from having 2.6% foreign-born in 1990 to nearly 10% foreign-born today — and that's not including their children or illegals.  Instead of liberal but non-rioting Scandinavians and Germans, the new immigrants are overwhelmingly African, Asian and Hispanic.  In fact, Minnesota now has a much larger proportion of Asian and African immigrants than the nation as a whole.  Although the state has always leaned Democratic, thanks to its German and Scandinavian immigrants (Ben Franklin was right about them), the Norsemen elected Walter Mondale.  Recent immigrants elected Rep. Ilhan Omar.  Hey, Republicans!  Tell me again that immigration is just a "single issue."

Democrat Cities:  Fourth-World Scourges.  When the terrorists become bored and cease terrorizing, when the flames are extinguished, when those who died in the riots are buried and cremated, when the shards of glass from storefronts are disposed of, and when livelihoods are permanently lost, Democrats will still run the vast majority of the deadliest and most dangerous cities in the U.S.  Death and destruction always follow Democrat policies and culture.  Stagnant local economies.  Unsafe streets for children.  Gun crime.  Failing schools.  Breathtaking corruption.  Problems with the police.  Property crime.  Poverty.  Poor public health.  Single- or no-parent homes.  All are found in abundance in Democrat-run cities, and found overwhelmingly in majority-black neighborhoods.  So who are the true "racists"?  By every objective measure and metric, Democrat-run cities are the unequivocal worst places in America to live.

Shaun King:  Democrats Run The Cities With [the] Worst Police Brutality.  As debates about police brutality and systemic racism rock the country in the wake of George Floyd's horrific death at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King let himself utter an uncomfortable truth that other activists have been ignoring:  Democrats control all the major cities where black people are experiencing the most police brutality and systemic racism.  In a tweet on Friday [6/5/2020], the activist scolded those who tell black Americans to affect change through voting, asserting that such blind thinking may not exactly be the panacea people are talking about.

What Do They Really Want?  [Scroll down]  The New York Times reports that Minneapolis, like all the other places on fire, is one of the most liberal cities in the nation.  Surpassing even Seattle, Minneapolis has black people on the City Council.  Two of these black council members are transgender.  None of them is a Republican.  Juneteenth gets a yearly parade, and the police chief, until this week, was a black man.  They're so devoted to fighting racism that you can't zone for single-family housing anymore — ostensibly to make the housing cheaper for blacks and to keep richer whites from having better neighborhoods to move to.  This means that Minneapolis and all the other left-wing cities on fire already do everything they can to police the police — and if they go any farther, they'll have to get rid of them altogether.

Democrats Want to Abolish the Police and Confiscate Our Guns.  [T]o those of you who think this idea of abolishing the police and the Second Amendment is insane and can therefore never happen, you need to remove your head from the sand.  Here are some more facts:
  •   We went from zero to gay marriage in less than ten years.
  •   We went from zero to drag queen story hour in about ten seconds.
  •   The left is blacklisting us for referring to biological men as "he."
  •   The corporate media are now describing the burning and looting of cities as "political speech."
  •   This same media are describing peaceful protests by Tea Partiers and those ravaged by anti-science lockdowns as "dangerous" and "violent."
  •   Lego is blacklisting its own toys.
  •   The NFL just committed suicide.
  •   Drew Brees is now on his third 1984-ish public confession, a full-blown grovel tour, for the sin of expressing respect for the American flag.
  •   Legions of white people are kneeling to ask forgiveness for something they had no part of.
  •   Healthcare "experts" are telling us the coronavirus is lethal if you want to go to work, school, or your grandmother's funeral, but not so lethal if you are out en masse to support "approved" causes.
The Democrat Party has been completely radicalized, emboldened, and is currently eating itself alive in the kind of cultish moral panic we have not seen since McCarthyism or the McMartin preschool scandal.

Minneapolis Mayor Asks Trump For Aid After Riots Cause At Least $55 million In Damage.  The Minneapolis mayor is asking for federal help cleaning up and rebuilding his city after rioters caused at least $55 million worth of damage through looting, burning, and defacing public and private property.  That cost estimate is likely to increase in the coming days as government officials continue to tally the damage done in the wake of George Floyd's death, Mayor Jacob Frey said according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and the state's congressional delegation are also pushing the Trump administration and Congress for funding.

The Editor says...
If the mayor had done everything in his power to quench the riots and incarcerate the perpetrators, he might have a case.  Instead, he is asking the federal government to clean up his mess.  Let the city of Minneapolis rot!

Minneapolis Mayor Now Asking Trump for Relief Money After He Let His City Burn.  You've gotta admire the brazenness someone has to operate with to not protect their own city from riots, trash the President in the process, and then go running to the federal government for money.  Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who bears a striking resemblance to Canada's Justin Trudeau, has managed it though.  According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the damages are already at $55 million and climbing. [...] Yeah, that's not what FEMA is for, as evidenced by the fact that Maryland was denied such assistance by the Obama administration in 2015 after the Baltimore riots.  These politicians sat idly by and let their cities be destroyed.  They need to be the ones to pay for it.  These people had ample opporutnity, including usage of the National Guard, to stop the rioting, burning of buildings, and looting.  They instead chose to appease the mob for purely political reasons.  That's on them.

Liberal Mayors, Racial Politics, and Fake News.  There are three things you need to know about the unrest associated with the killing of George Floyd.  First, almost all major cities these days are governed by Democrats, usually liberal Democrats.  Second, black Americans have suffered because of the public policies these cities have adopted.  Third, the reason why city governments adopt policies harmful to black families is not because they are racists; it's because they are liberal.  In city after city, all too often black families are forced to send their children to the worst schools; they are forced to live in the worst housing; they receive the worst city services (including policing); and they are subject to the worst environmental harms.  The politicians who run these cities are Democrats.  Many of them are black themselves.  Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, is an example.

During This Spate of Racial Outrage, Here Are Some Deeply Uncomfortable Facts for the Press, the Activists, and Even Ben & Jerry's.  [Scroll down]  This is the language we normally see attached to the messaging of "Systemic racism".  The problem, however, is one of location.  While it sounds great to attribute Floyd's death to the racism built into the culture, what few are willing to do is analyze that culture.  So why don't we look into the system where this crime took place?  To start, you have as the city Mayor, Jacob Frey, an avowed leftist who follows a string of Democratic liberal leaders.  The last time a Republican was elected to run the city was 1957.  The police chief of Minneapolis is Medaria Arradondo, a black police official.  The federal representative for the city, in Washington, is the famed female POC Ilhan Omar, and the top cop for the state is another POC and former head of the DNC, Attorney General Keith Ellison.  Are these the leaders perpetuating the culture of white supremacy?  Just to add to the list, you have Minnesota headed by Democrat Tim Walz, the state is served by two Democrat senators, including Amy Klobuchar who spent years as an acting state attorney in a few offices, and even the sister city of Saint Paul has as its Mayor, Melvin Carter, another POC leader.  These would be the people operating the "racist and prejudicial system and culture".

Bill De Blasio Is A Cowardly Tyrant Fueling New York's Demise.  The grave injustice inflicted upon one person is now being compounded into a grave injustice for millions of New Yorkers.  It took decades to bring New York City back from the brink — facing crime, squalor, and bankruptcy — to the peace and prosperity that has marked it since Mayor Rudy Giuliani's tenure.  Today, Mayor Bill de Blasio seems intent on sending the city back to the bad old days, threatening to undo decades of progress while operating under the banner of "progressivism."  The twin crises of the Chinese coronavirus and the present rioting and looting have created the perfect storm for the city's demise.

Riots, Brought To You By District Attorneys Who Won't Prosecute.  adicalized district attorneys in cities across America are putting violent rioters and looters back on the streets, and letting other hardened criminals walk.  More than anyone, one man is responsible for this outrage:  Billionaire socialist George Soros.  St. Louis is a case in point.  There, prosecutor Kim Gardner let 36 people arrested for looting and rioting go scot-free, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  Gardner's office used the pathetic excuse that it needed "essential evidence" from the police, implying it had none.  One wonders how people caught in flagrante delicto could simply be released.  The answer is, Gardner is a far-left acolyte of Soros, having been the recipient during her 2016 election of no fewer than three separate donations from a Soros-backed political-action committee.

The Bloodletting and Wilding Is Part of An Agenda To Tear Down The Country.  I haven't had much time to reflect on the looting and riots that swept mostly (but not exclusively) large Democrat cities.  It was a wilding on a scale we've never seen.  It was a bloodletting and release of criminal fury.  We should be clear what is happening.  It is not protest over the death of George Floyd.  That is the spark, but not the fire.  This has been a long time coming.  At least a generation, maybe two.  The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.  You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes 'black and brown bodies,' while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair.  It's all a lie, but it's a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power.  The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.  When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don't recognize them anymore.

NYC Arsonists to Be Instantly Freed from Jail Thanks to 'Bail Reform' Law.  Arsonists who set fires in New York City, New York, during multiple nights of riots will be instantly freed from jail if ever arrested thanks to Gov. Andrew Cuomo's (D-NY) bail reform law.  For many nights now, arsonists have set ablaze New York City Police Department (NYPD) vehicles, city dumpsters, and rubble on the streets of New York City.  Those arrested for arson, if arrests are made, will spend less than 24 hours in jail.

Nearly All Rioters Freed from Jail in D.C., Most Avoid Felony Riot Charges.  Nearly all rioters have been freed from jail in Washington, D.C. and most have had felony riot charges dropped against them, and now they are only facing burglary, destruction of property, and curfew violation charges.  Arrest records obtained by WUSA 9 reveal that hundreds of rioters have been arrested over the last week in riots and looting sprees across the nation's capital.

Riots, looting and America burning — the end of the progressive dream.  There is a big debate about designating Antifa a terrorist group and what if any steps the federal government can take to stop the rioting.  But we all know who the real culprits are for turning America's streets into a war zone:  progressives and liberals.  They have filled the mind of America's youth with ideological nitroglycerine that is now exploding in our streets, while also setting the conditions that make it almost impossible to stop it.  The terrible events that have unfolded in the wake of the death of George Floyd represent the systematic failure of five decades of progressivism and liberalism.  The end of the progressive dream has now brought us all to the brink in three ways. [...]

How to destroy civilization.  The violence that is exploding across the country now has almost nothing to doing with the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by Derek Chauvin, a white policeman.  That was merely the catalyst for a process that has deep roots in American culture.  The moral is:  ideas matter.  For decades now, our colleges and universities (and increasingly our grades schools) have been preaching a gospel of cultural self-hatred.  America, according to this gospel, is evil.  The country is inextricably racist and beholden to an irredeemably exploitative economic system.  The latest retelling of this creation myth is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning '1619 Project' whose fundamental message is that America was started as a 'slavocracy.'  According to this malignant fantasy, the Revolutionary War was fought primarily 'to protect the institution of slavery.'  At last count, elements of this disgusting bit of historical revisionism were being adopted in the curricula of some 4,000 school districts.

Democrats' Chickens Come Home to Roost.  Conservatives have been warning about the dangers of Antifa and other left-wing groups for years.  No one in the Democrat media listened.  More than that, they cheered them on; defended them.  Why not?  After all, they were chanting the right things and targeting the right people, from the left's perspective.  No progressive group would condemn them:  Black Lives Matter didn't, the Women's March didn't, CNN didn't.  They were helpful in beefing up numbers and energy at protests and marches Democrats deemed helpful.  What did it matter if they threw a few rocks or Molotov cocktails?  They were throwing them at police, a group those silent partner groups had declared the enemy[.]

How do we explain the many thousands of Americans who believe they are entitled to steal?  Night after night, we have watched thieving thugs break windows of small and large businesses, charge into them, and run out with as much merchandise as they can carry.  They stuff their booty into large SUVs, many of which have the license plates removed.  They are wearing masks so [they] do not fear facial recognition software.  These riots seem to prove that, despite our protestations to the contrary, we do live in something of a third-world nation.  When that many people in as many cities that are under siege right now feel no allegiance to the law, to their families, to their neighbors, to civil society, we are indeed a nation in need of a reboot.  Fifty-plus years of the left's smearing of American values, their opposition to the nuclear family, the promotion of the idea that out-of-wedlock births are just another lifestyle choice have, as we see now, made for a population sullied by the acceptance of abject criminality.  That is what we are all seeing on our TV screens.  This is not about race; it is all about respect or the lack of it and values.

What's Trump Got To Do With The George Floyd Riots?  Almost everything connected George Floyd's tragic death and the subsequent riots involve Democratic leaders.  So naturally, President Donald Trump is taking the blame.  Start at the beginning.  George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, a liberal city (the New York Times calls it "one of America's most liberal cities") in a liberal state (that hasn't voted for a Republican for president since 1972).  In 2017, Larry Jacobs, a professor at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, observed that "In Minneapolis, we have one of the most liberal activist agendas in the U.S.  They are seeking to accomplish at the municipal level what isn't being done at the federal level."  Even that wasn't liberal enough for city dwellers, who booted out a liberal mayor in November 2017 for an even more leftist mayor, Jacob Frey.  He ran promising more affordable housing and, if you can believe it, improved police-community relations.

Who is recruiting, moving and paying the professional anarcho-rioters?  [Scroll down]  Is it really the citizens of Minneapolis who have set the city on fire, burning down small businesses as well as the police precinct building, libraries, etc.?  Who are those masked men in black with secret-service quality ear-pieces, military grade gas masks and backpacks full of Molotov cocktails?  They are very likely professional rioters, recruited, transported and paid by the likes of some George Soros front group or other anonymous Cloward-Piven devotees who share Soros' hatred of America and want to see this nation bought to its knees. [...] These are not protests.  What we are seeing is mass thievery under color of protest.  Chances are if the looters in Los Angeles were asked "who was George Floyd," they would not have a clue nor would they care.  Democrat-run cities have long valued "social justice" (different standards for different groups) and identity politics over lawfulness and basic values.  This is what you get when deviancy has been defined down so egregiously that we have citizens behaving like animals.

This is a Result of Democrat Governance.  The outrage we are seeing manifested over the past few days, is focused on the wrong target(s).  We are getting wall to wall coverage of the aftermath of the in-custody death of George Floyd.  Riots in major cities, property damage and even a few deaths are just part of that aftermath.  Innocent people are being harmed, while at the same time, some are attempting to affix cause and blame for Mr. Floyd's death on the wrong parties.  As usual, using admittedly disturbing video, there are some who in a rush to judgement and to take advantage of this terrible tragedy for their own political ends, cannot seem to wait for the facts to come out.  Instead, they instigate violence and property damage and actually harm the very folks they purport to care about.  Also as usual, the more time that passes, the more information comes out that increases our knowledge and subsequently alters our perception of exactly what happened.  Two critical pieces of such information have just come to light.

Big City Schools:  Where America's Most Vulnerable Kids Languish.  In 2010-2011, public schools in the nation's capital spent $29,345 per pupil — nearly $600,000 per each classroom of 20 students — yet the District's 8th graders finished dead last in a nationwide proficiency test in math and reading.  According to a 2015 report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 96 percent of 8th graders in Detroit's public schools tested not proficient in math, and 93 percent tested not proficient in reading.  According to a 2017 investigation by Project Baltimore, 13 of the city's 39 public high schools had zero students who tested proficient in math.  Zero!  Of the 3,841 students in the remaining 26 high schools, only 14 tested at or above proficiency in math, less than one-third of one percent.  For a half-century running, Democrat-run urban schools have robbed minority children of a realistic chance for a decent education.

California's Budget Bust-Up.  Every state and municipal budget in America will take a big hit because of the coronavirus lockdowns, but no public purse is in as much trouble as California's.  Its Department of Finance recently estimated that the Golden State could face a $54 billion shortfall in the fiscal year beginning July 1, which surely must be the largest deficit any state has ever accumulated, surpassing the $40 billion hole that nearly swallowed Sacramento in 2008.  Still, though Governor Gavin Newsome said last weekend that the staggering deficit was "a direct result of Covid-19," that's clearly not true.  Critics have long warned that the state's tax base is volatile, being increasingly reliant on wealthy residents and vulnerable to sharp contraction in the next recession.  Combine that with California's spending spree — including expenditures to fix problems that the state's own bad policies have worsened — and the swing from prosperity to penury isn't hard to understand.

Nurses give inside look at 'nightmare' NYC-run adult-care center.  Out-of-state nurses brought to Manhattan to fight the coronavirus say they found hellish conditions at the city-run adult-care center on Roosevelt Island — from patients with horrific bed sores to feces-smeared walls.  "It was just heartbreaking," said one of the RNs, a mom of four from Wisconsin who spent about 17 days at the Coler Rehabilitation and Nursing Care Center.  "Patients were in deplorable conditions — very, very dirty, bed sores, terrible odors," the FEMA-contracted nurse, 38, told The [New York] Post.

A tale of two governors.  Alas, the early "science," the early facts and analysis of COVID-19 suggests that those states controlled by the urban left are flunking by any fair mark up.  A New York (D) versus Florida (R) comparison, blue versus red, provides an early template for judging who gets high marks for crisis management.  By any measure New York is not just the national Covid hot spot, it is an international disaster area.  Andrew Cuomo's (D) state leads the nation in all statistical categories from infection to morbidity rates.  New York City (D) is now the toxic nexus for the nation.  The Big Apple is hands down the necrotic 2020 spoiler in the larger American barrel.  Badgering Washington for more of everything from the start, it turns out that team Mario miscalculated the need for damn near everything, including beds, hospitals, rescue ships, and respirators.  Mario Cuomo pushed city mayor de Blasio (D) aside and seized control of metro policy with hype and bombast, if not hysteria.  Incredibly, Cuomo was lionized by the media as "the only adult" in the room as he presided over the worst state or city medical crisis in America, if not the world.

Common Sense and Self-Evident Truth in a Post-Truth World.  Many Americans today go far beyond simply rejecting the ideas of the American founders, the claims of the Declaration, and the Constitution.  They reject the very idea of truth.  These Americans were taught in American universities that there is no such thing as truth, that truth is an outmoded concept, that we now live in a post-truth reality.  The belief that the concept of truth is outmoded is no longer confined to academia.  It has invaded the world outside academia and won a great victory there; the Oxford Dictionaries selected "post-truth" as the Word of the Year for 2016.  And a great victory it is.  Convincing Americans that there is no such thing as truth defeats the very foundation of the American idea.

Democrats seem to be enjoying this authoritarian moment.  Various Democrat politicians are competing to be the most proactive in enforcing social distancing in their communities, so the internet is awash with stories of decidedly anti-American government behavior.  This post will bring you up to date on some of the more egregious things that are happening in Democrat-run communities across America.  For sheer shock value, there's really nothing to equal a short video that's come out of Philadelphia.  The video, which has been viewed almost five million times, shows a rider being forcibly torn from a bus in Philadelphia, although not arrested, because he was not wearing a mask [...] The Daily Caller notes the irony that this violent attack "comes after Philadelphia police announced that due to coronavirus, they would stop arresting people for 'non-violent' crimes including burglary and drug offenses."  Within a short while of the video going viral, Philadelphia's Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority announced that it was no longer enforcing its short-lived mask policy.  Philadelphia is a Democrat-run city.

Did Trump Ruin Our Economy for Nothing?  Except for foreign travel, Trump didn't shut down anything.  Where did this economic halt come from?  It started in states and cities with Democratic elected officials.  Perhaps they were influenced by the fake news media during "Trump is ignoring the crisis" and overreacted themselves, or perhaps they wanted to show up Trump by taking action.  Either way, they used their favorite tool, the power of government, without any regard as to what it might do to their people.  It should be obvious from their focus on Trump, but Democrats care only about power, and so they focus on those in power.

Bet Your Life — Vote for Democrats.  New York City and California's loony politicos are hooked on identity politics and see racism everywhere, ignoring objective science.  The consequences of ignoring reality: overwhelmed medical facilities, lack of proper medical equipment, and soaring death rates. [...] In brief, Mayor de Blasio's City Health Commissioner, Oxiris Barbot, is a radical who previously served as Health Commissioner of Baltimore where she "had given the city's race rioters 'space to destroy.'"  Space which continues after her move to New York to result in a soaring murder rate.  She boasted of seeing health policy through a "racial equity lens," a lens so fogged that she concentrated on discouraging those arriving from Wuhan from going into self-quarantine and encouraging New Yorkers to attend the Lunar New Year celebrations in the city.

What the left is destroying goes far beyond politics and the economy.  It is clear that reconciliation with the left is a pipedream!  They reject reciprocal respect, based on a mutual agreement about human nature.  They can't have it both ways.  They can't demand our politeness while we are insulted by them.  They can't fabricate "crimes", knock together "evidence" and call it "justice", as Sidney Powell exposes. [...] They can't butcher the record to fit in with their slanted ideology and pretend it's "history".  They can't stake out adolescent absurdity as the correct response to the world, and expect us not to interrogate their wisdom.  If honorableness in communication is the shining standard we aim for between human beings, it has suffered the same fate as every other aspect of culture the left touches.  It's been destroyed.

Another Pandemic Known as Social Justice.  To achieve their aims, universities are watering down requirements in order to attract more women and minorities.  This portends "disastrous [repercussions] for scientific innovation and American competitiveness" not to mention the care of sick people.  Consequently, [a recent National Association of Scholars] report asserts that "social justice movement's political goals include increased federal and state taxation; increased minimum wage; increased environmental regulation; increased government health care spending and regulation; restrictions on free speech; restrictions on due process protections; maximizing the number of legislative districts that will elect racial minorities; support for the Black Lives Matter movement; mass release of criminals from prison; decriminalizing drugs; ending enforcement of our immigration laws; amnesty for illegal aliens; open borders; race and sex preferences in education and employment..." to name only a few.  Support for the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement is also part of their movement and mob violence is advocated to enforce any and all of these objectives.  The traditional mode of teaching students how to think has been replaced with teaching them what to think.

Not enough hospital beds in New Hampshire?  Blame needless regulations.  One regulation forces anyone who wants to open a hospital to have a 24 hour per day, seven day per week emergency department.  Given that emergency departments are the most expensive and toughest to staff part of any hospital, this is a huge barrier to opening a new facility.  And, like most cronyism, existing hospitals made sure this requirement doesn't apply to any hospital that had its license before the law was passed.  Another regulation forces any new hospital to take reimbursement from all payers, regardless of whether doing so makes sense for that hospital's business model.  Across the country, cash-only facilities are thriving, providing lower cost alternatives to patients.  But, under state law, they can't operate in the Granite State.  Finally, one state regulation provides for a 15-mile radius monopoly zone around smaller hospitals in more rural areas.  This guarantees that anyone outside of the southeastern part of New Hampshire will never see another hospital being built in their community, or anywhere near them.

Life in the Time of Wuhan.  [Scroll down]  Mayors who let thousands of homeless people tent out on their streets where they relieved themselves daily amid piles of rat-ridden heaps of trash and drug paraphernalia, will learn some lessons about public health.  Nancy Pelosi, who for three and a half years accused the president of treason and exceeding his constitutional powers, now begs him to assume dictatorial powers.  The mainstream media is almost entirely discounted as a source of reliable news and is reduced to posing ignorantly framed gotcha questions at the conclusions of transparent first-class White House briefings.  The notion that cities like Baltimore, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, whose leaders have undermined the rule of law and law enforcement, will suddenly be able to get the will and manpower to enforce lockdown of the residents defies all probability.

Left's Pet Issues Like Mass Transit, Reusable Bags Prove Deadly During Coronavirus Crisis.  With some experts predicting, at a minimum, anywhere from 480,000 to 1.6 million American deaths from the coronavirus over the next three to 18 months, how smart does urban living, mass transit, open borders, reusable straws, reusable grocery bags, reusable water bottles, gun restrictions, over-regulated housing, using the Centers for Disease Control to fight gun violence, and outsourcing to China look now?

Greening Our Way to Infection.  The COVID-19 outbreak is giving new meaning to those "sustainable" shopping bags that politicians and environmentalists have been so eager to impose on the public.  These reusable tote bags can sustain the COVID-19 and flu viruses — and spread the viruses throughout the store.  Researchers have been warning for years about the risks of these bags spreading deadly viral and bacterial diseases, but public officials have ignored their concerns, determined to eliminate single-use bags and other plastic products despite their obvious advantages in reducing the spread of pathogens.  In New York State, a new law took effect this month banning single-use plastic bags in most retail businesses, and this week Democratic state legislators advanced a bill that would force coffee shops to accept consumers' reusable cups — a practice that Starbucks and other chains have wisely suspended to avoid spreading the COVID-19 virus.

Also posted under Banning plastic bags.

Major crimes in NYC unexpectedly surge after bail reform law.  We recently looked at some new proposals for fixing New York's disastrous new "bail reform" law or at least mitigating some of the damage it's causing.  They may want to get off the stick and start looking at those suggestions in a hurry because a newly released report shows that major crimes in New York City took a very sharp turn upward in February as compared to the same period of time last year.  And the police have the data to show that the bail reform policies are playing a significant role in this very bad development.

America's Declining Sexual Morality.  Today's "sexual revolution" is expressed by our being told by the highest court in the land that homosexual marriage can and must be married and by women being encouraged to abort children as a "right."  In today's society, drag queens reading to little children in libraries is considered delightful by many.  Further, vast numbers of people consider one's sex designation psychological and not biological, and, increasingly, parents encourage their little children to "choose" which sex/gender they want to be.  As additional evidence of the "sexual revolution," the overall percentage of children born out of wedlock has risen from 5% in 1960 to about 40% the last three or four years (albeit much higher among black and Hispanic persons).

The Law That Ate the Constitution.  The Civil Rights Act passed under President Lyndon Johnson was meant to address an emergency situation that most Americans, even most white Americans, recognized as a national disgrace.  Over the following decades, those emergency measures would be revealed as a permanent apparatus combining "surveillance by volunteers, litigation by lawyers, and enforcement by bureaucrats."  Civil rights offered "new grounds for overruling and overriding legislatures and voters on any question that could be cast as a matter of discrimination.  That was coming to mean all questions."  If you doubt the infinite adaptability of civil rights to any subject under the sun, consider the multifarious uses to which it has been put. [...] There are pavilion-sized homeless encampments on the streets of Los Angeles, employers can hire illegal immigrants with relative impunity, gay marriage is the law of the land — all because of civil rights law, directly or indirectly.

California's Gig Law Comes For the Scooters, Destroys Independent "Juicers".  California's "gig economy" law — AB5 — continues to have disastrous consequences across the state.  The list of jobs affected or outright destroyed is huge and growing every day.  The wedding industry is collapsing.  Festivals are closing.  Theaters and music venues are closing.  A nursing shortage is now upon us because qualified nurses can no longer pick up extra side-jobs in areas like hospice care.  The law has even killed Christmas:  mall Santas can no longer contract their services.

Progressive Big Lies.  These days, fake news is the first draft of fake history.  Worse yet, today's progressives believe lies to be true despite their egregious falsehood.  Then progressive state governments act on beliefs that biological sex can be changed by choice, that an aborted human being isn't a human being, that infants surviving abortion can still be killed, that the modern industrial world can run on solar panels and windmills, that money can be endlessly appropriated and redistributed, that a region like California should dump precious water to protect a bait fish, that hordes of bums and hobos polluting public spaces require no action, and that our enemies can be mollified by soothing words and foreign aid rather than by mind-concentrating deeds.  These lies and their dangers have been worsened over the last few decades by the degeneration of education from grammar school to university.

As Trump wins praise for effective coronavirus response, blue cities do opposite, threatening its spread it through homelessness.  The left's blue cities do all they can to encourage and reward homelessness, amounting to the country's great enabler of homelessness as a lifestyle.  Blue cities employ and are expanding gargantuan bureaucracies dedicated to "servicing" the homelessness, which encourages a hunt for more "clients."  San Francisco alone spends $77,000 per homeless "client."  They also refuse to enforce quality of life laws, such as those against vagrancy, public camping, drug use, public alcohol consumption, prostitution, and public urination and defecation, promoting homelessness even more.  Some are encouraging squatting on private property.  Others are permitting the homeless to take over public parks and spaces.  Some, such as Bill de Blasio's New York, are secretly busing the homeless to other cities to keep them from creating problems in their own cities.  It's a massive tax on those who own the overpriced homes in those cities, but taxes are the left's bread and butter.  It's a money merry-go-round, all done in the name of "compassion."

Black-on-Jewish attacks in NY, black-on-Asian attacks in SF: Same progressive rule.  [Scroll down]  The second thing we see is that this person has no fear of the police, no fear of the feds, and no fear of punishment, no matter what he does.  That's the work of leftist politics that in San Francisco now requires a dollar value of $951 in thievery before any police action can take place.  Thieves know they get the first $950 free in that city.  Cash bail has been eliminated, and San Francisco's district attorney has a pinned tweet praising Bernie Sanders for praising that.  That crazed leftist "serving" as district attorney, one Chesa Boudin, is the son of a terrorist killer, raised by Bill Ayers, last seen "serving" as Hugo Chávez's translator, whose big selling point is "decarceration," and ending "mass incarceration," and who refuses to prosecute quality-of-life crimes such as public urination.  The cops in that city are throwing up their hands at having this creep at the prosecutorial helm, effectively making all street crimes get-out-of-jail-free cards.

Sorry, Democrats:  Party's Over.  It makes me smile to know that fewer people are watching CNN than have fled from California in the last few years.  These days even Jed Clampett wouldn't be convinced that Californy is the place he ought to be.  He would have the sense to take his money to Texas where the taxes are reasonable and you won't be flash-mobbed by SJWs chanting that you're an eco-criminal for striking it rich in the energy sector.  Modest as Jed's education may have been, I think he would have understood that energy is a good thing and letting junkies poop in the aisle at Costco is a bad thing.  Even cousin Jethro would have winced at the mountain of filth that Pelosi and her party have made.

Canada:  A Dead Country Walking.  Canada is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration.  A left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global warming or "climate change," radical feminism, indigenous sovereignty, expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation.  Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.  Canada is now reaping the whirlwind.  The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors, hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the country.  The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak havoc — and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a week swanning around Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no idea how to control the mayhem.

On Leaving the Golden State.  [Scroll down]  Let us talk about the authorities for a moment.  What exactly are they doing to help?  First, they threw open the borders and created sanctuary cities so that people that do not belong here can not be molested by law enforcement.  Next, they decriminalized camping in public.  People camping in public need something to do to while away the hours so they decriminalized drugs even going so far as to give away free needles.  If that were not enough, they decriminalized theft up to $950 per day.  This way any homeless person can walk into any business and brazenly steal whatever they wish without any fear of being sent to jail.  Finally, they've arranged things such that the police will no longer respond to 911 calls pertaining to vandalism or burglary.  You can watch from your bedroom window as a homeless person smashes your car windshield with a rock so as to ransack your car and if you call 911 it will be YOU that is in trouble for tying up their emergency line as someone vandalizing and robbing your car is a non-emergency and not worthy of any kind of response.

Bright Lights, Blighted City.  [Scroll down]  New Yorkers didn't bargain for what they're seeing these days.  They don't want the subways to break down so often or to spot a rat scurrying along with a pizza crust or to get slugged on the platform or shoved on the tracks by some mumbling paranoid nut.  They don't want to hurry under the construction platforms that leave the sidewalks permanently in gloom, and they don't want pieces of buildings to fall on them or their grandchildren.  They don't want to be confronted by a phalanx of panhandlers on the prime shopping blocks of Fifth Avenue or groped by a moocher costumed as Captain America in Times Square.  Or see men peeing on the sidewalk. [...] Other cities have bigger problems.  Homelessness is now endemic in Los Angeles and, especially, San Francisco.  Violent crime rates in St. Louis, Detroit, Memphis, and other places dwarf New York's.

Heightening the Contradictions.  How often does the Left come up with ideas that, on the face of it, appear absurd, irrational, or utterly insane?  The answer, is, of course, all the time.  The general response is bewilderment or incomprehension — a shrug and an assertion that "those lefties are crazy."  But in truth, they're no such thing.  There's nothing irrational about it.  It's all part of the program. [...] The same is true of any other "senseless" or "irrational" leftist program.  None of them, whether they involve introducing transsexualism to schools or placing jihadis in Congress, occurred by accident.  They were meant to happen exactly the way they did, to heighten the contradictions.

As the media focuses on Democrat candidates, Democrats are looking at Trump.  Democrats will no doubt be distressed to learn that the progressive habit of politicizing absolutely everything is giving new weight to the law of unintended consequences.  A New Hampshire woman, horrified by the uproar in the knitting world a few months ago when woke knitters went on a rampage, found herself at the Trump rally in New Hampshire and went public about the pleasant surprises she found there. [...] People who were enjoying their craft were suddenly lambasted as racist cultural appropriators and worse.  Conservative knitters fled the knitting sites, and they were joined by Independent and Democrat knitters who found it offensive to have politics invade their peaceful, creative hobby.

Decriminalization of drugs fueling meth and homelessness in California.  The same people who demand that Congress and state governments spend even more money to "combat" the twin drug and homelessness crises never seem to connect the dots back to their decriminalization policies or admit that they are causing a rise in crime.  One journalist in California is not scared to pin the tail on the donkey — in the case of the Golden State, the infamous Prop 47.  Right around 2014-2015 is when the drug crisis exploded nationwide, including in California, roughly around the same time homelessness soared, particularly in the Golden State, along with the rise in theft and other crimes.  What else happened around the same time?  California passed Prop 47, which downgraded drug and theft crimes.  The result was a logical consequence to an illogical policy.  Bill Lamb, VP and general manager of Fox 11 in Los Angeles, delivered a TV commentary last week pinning the blame for the homeless and drug problems squarely on Prop 47.

Trump's Presidency Reveals 7 Undeniable Facts About The Swamp.  [#6] Identity politics and the legislation of social justice policies have stifled the rights of free speech and freedom of association throughout the democratic nations of the western world.  And they materialized as the result of language manipulation.  Remember when gender used to represent male or female?  Yet, in that example, the word "identity" was added after "gender" thus opening a verifiable Pandora's Box of Orwellian Newspeak.  Today in formerly free societies, men and women are forced to navigate Genderqueer and Non-Binary Identities, consisting of an entirely new lexicon including neo-designations such as Agender, Cisgender, Ceterosexual, Ceteroromantic, Demigender, Enby, and Epicene; just to name a few.  Political Correctness is a means of thought control in the bubble, designed to protect imaginary victims from the societal sins of xenophobia, sexism, homophobism, and racism.

Number of THC positive drivers in fatal crashes has doubled in Wash. state.  A new study shows the number of Washington state drivers involved in deadly crashes who tested positive for THC has doubled.  According to research by AAA between 2008 and 2012, an estimated eight percent of Washington drivers involved in fatal crashes were positive for THC.  That rate now is more than double since weed became legal in Washington.  In the five years before legislation, an average of 56 Washington drivers involved in fatal crashes each year were THC positive.  In the five years after legislation, that average jumped to 130.

Democrats Don't Care About American Lives.  Democrats' vision for the perfect America includes transforming her into a wild, wild west of sex, a society in which every perversion is legalized and citizens are forced to celebrate.  A memo exposed Obama's DoJ plan to legalize 12 perversions including pedophilia and bestiality.  Colleges are laying the groundwork by scolding us about our bigoted intolerance of pedophiles.  Democrats are sexualizing children beginning in pre-k with a mandatory LGBTQ curriculum.  I Am Jazz, a book about a boy whose parents began his so-called sex change at age three, is required reading.  Once you realize that Democrats only care about furthering their agenda and American lives do-not- matter, you understand their behavior.  U.S. students are sick with strange diseases due to untested illegal alien children being sent to public schools.  Transsexuals who regret having sex change surgery are blocked from media.

Guess the State:  Democrat-Run Fiasco Edition.  The last time Republicans held a majority on this state's Supreme Court was in the 1920s.  Its Court of Appeals has never had a Republican majority.  The last time Republicans held a majority in both houses of the state Legislature at the same time was 1930.  In the 89 years from 1931 to the present, Democrats have held a majority of both houses of the state Legislature for 79 of the 89 years.  Since 1931, Democrats have held the governor's office for 69 of the 89 years.  Even when a Republican has been governor, his powers have been greatly limited because he has never held a majority in both houses of the state legislature while in office.  What state am I?  If you guessed CA, IL, NY, NJ, or MA, you're wrong.  If you guessed NM, go to the head of the class.  Since 1931, no other state has had single-party Dem rule at the state level as long as New Mexico.  And how has New Mexico fared under the stewardship of single party Democrat rule?  As we shall see, not so well.

Liberalism Causes Achievement Gaps.  This report by Chris Stewart of Brightbeam is a blockbuster.  It is titled:  "The Secret Shame:  How America's Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity For All."  Stewart is a liberal activist from Minnesota who undertook to find out why the Twin Cities' left-wing public schools have some of the country's worst achievement gaps between white and minority (black and Indian) students.  Stewart compared achievement by race in a number of cities that he classified as progressive or conservative.  The results didn't surprise me, but they shocked Stewart.  Conservative cities (as ranked by political scientists used as a reference for the study) consistently did a better job of closing student achievement gaps — sometimes, to zero — than progressive cities.

A Peek at America before 1950 and the Assault by the Left.  Picture a neighborhood composed of low and middle income families, each with two parents, no homeless people, no street drugs, safe to walk the streets at night.  Is this the figment of an overactive imagination? [...] This typical school of 1940s New York City had higher standards and grade profile than any counterpart today and operated on a budget far smaller in equivalent dollars than any current public school budget.  In these "backward" times, the schools were free of substance abuse problems, sexual promiscuity, and identity problems.  There was an abiding respect for the authority of teachers and parents and for the dignity of every person regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity.  There were clubs in my school for religion, for foreign languages (including Latin).  A Reporters' Club recorded significant events for the school paper.  There were toy drives for a local hospital...  The list of extracurricular engagements was long.

We Have Miseducated Boys and Girls Alike.  [Scroll down]  Why wouldn't a culture that worships promiscuous sex send the message to young men that their entire value revolves around sex?  And consider the stated — and hidden — messages that young men get every day:  Women should be able to sleep with as many men as possible.  (Your girlfriend won't be faithful to you.)  Divorce should be easy.  (If your own father left and you're hurt by that, who cares?  Men won't stay in a marriage.  You shouldn't expect to stay in a marriage.)  Dads are "deadbeats" or buffoons.  (Mothers are more important than fathers.)  Abortion is a constitutional right, and men should have no say.  (Your children shouldn't mean anything to you.  They can be destroyed whether you want that or not.  You don't matter.)  It isn't that every negative, oppressive trend affecting American boys is an after-effect of the sexual revolution.  Some problems Orenstein mentions — difficulty expressing emotions; fear of failure; "jock culture," with its bullying and vicious coaches — have been around much longer.

San Francisco, solid blue city of — empty storefronts and missing young people.  San Francisco is getting to be a hellhole and not just because crooks are having a field day, or a vast homeless army has prompted new tech 'innovations' in poop-map apps.  It's actually becoming a city with a hollowed out look, redolent of some place like Steubenville, Ohio or maybe Utica, New York, during the bad years, empty storefronts and missing young people.  So much for the trope that leftwing cities, with their walkable boulevards full of food trucks, handmade crafts, knitting shops, bookstores, artisan cheese shops, gourmet restaurants, and cafes are more lively and liveable than rightwing places.  For awhile, that did seem to be the story.  But it's coming to an end.  Sure, there's vast wealth.  But despite California being in an economic boom, the place is starting to look like Venezuela.

The Left's Endless Commercial Has Weaponized Popular Culture.  American consumers understand that most forms of popular culture have become nothing more than commercials for the Democrat party.  Movies, television, and music focus less on entertainment than on influencing the next election.  They have gone beyond mere leftist bias.  Artists, writers, and musicians subordinate their craft in order to present one endless Democrat commercial.  This trend is equally egregious in the case of books.  In modern bookstores, the Democrat commercial spreads far beyond the "politics" shelf.  "The gardening books advocate hiring illegal aliens.  The sports books reminisce about Vietnam."  A telling example of this trend appears in a 2018 book about the design of General Motors automobiles from the 1920s through the 1950s.  Fins, by William Knoedelseder, appears to be credible, informative, and interesting until it reaches Chapter 9.  In Chapter 9, the author apparently loses interest in classic cars and decides, instead, to tell the reader that President Trump is just like Hitler.

Democrats Have Become a Disfigured Reflection of the Party They Once Were.  [Scroll down]  We see in their contempt for federal marijuana laws, the institution of sanctuary cities, and their hostility to border enforcement a deranged lack of perspective regarding the health of our citizens, many of whom are struggling with or dying from drug usage.  The opioid epidemic we face is clearly connected to the opioid supply, and that, in turn, is clearly a border issue.  Yet they put aside the well-being of so many poor souls caught by the hook of addiction into ignoring border enforcement in order to score political hate points against the president.  Instead of looking at border issues in terms of law and national health, they turn enforcement into an ugly, defamatory argument about American and Trumpian racism.  Only 14 years ago, they were able to agree with Republicans on the need for stronger border enforcement, whereas now they try to block every Trump attempt — mandated by the American people — to bring order out of chaos on our southern border.

Chile's Collapse Foreshadows America's If Dems Win.  America's economic growth under Barack Obama was anemic, and the economy would have been even worse had the Democrats enjoyed control over Congress during his two terms.  Were the Democrats to return to the White House in 2020, all the economic gains under Trump would vanish.  All of the potential Democratic presidential nominees favor flirtations with economy-sapping socialism of one kind or another.  In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Axel Kaiser, a scholar at Adolfo Ibañez University in Santiago, warned Americans that Chile's collapse could be theirs if they too consume socialism's poisonous cocktail of high taxes, increased government spending, and excessive regulation.

Guess Who Runs the Rudest Cities in America.  Recently, an oft-cited Business Insider survey ranked the rudest cities in America.  The top 10 are all bastions of misguided liberalism.  They are sanctuaries to illegal aliens and often hostile towards law-abiding citizens by imposing oppressive taxes and silly regulations and by encouraging lawlessness by handcuffing law enforcement.

Mayhem on the Streets of NY.  Beginning on the first of this year, New York's "no bail no jail" law, enacted by the Democratic legislature and put into law by Governor Andrew Cuomo went into effect. [...] It may be true that some low-level crimes for which poorer arrestees cannot afford bail, means they languish in jail until trial, but this law is so poorly crafted that it includes crimes for which bail is warranted no matter what the economic condition of the person arrested, for otherwise there is no penalty for immediately repeating the criminal acts.  Criminals learn there are no consequences for their actions.  Of course, it won't much affect the rich, who glide about in chauffeured cars and live in gated communities or buildings guarded by doormen, but the middle class surely are impacted.  Once, again these misguided efforts to coddle the underclass have the effect of remaking our cities and states on a feudal model where the rich are protected and serfs who work and pay taxes are in constant danger from brigands and murderers.

Man accused of driving drunk, killing pedestrian freed due to new criminal justice reforms.  A man who allegedly hit and killed a pedestrian while driving drunk in East Harlem is back on the streets for now — thanks to the state's new criminal justice reforms, authorities said Thursday [1/2/2020].  Farkell Hopkins, 23, was arrested on charges of vehicular manslaughter and DWI at the scene of the deadly New Year's Eve collision, but was cut loose before he was even arraigned.  The Manhattan District Attorney's office said prosecutors still intend to pursue the case, but they now have to ensure they're able to turn over all their evidence to Hopkins' defense team within a tight 15-day time-frame, thanks to new soft-on-crime laws that went into effect Jan. 1.

Topics We Aren't Allowed to Talk About.  Baltimore may be the most depressing big city on the eastern seaboard.  Have you been there?  Everyone in Washington has.  If you want to take a train from Washington to New York, you have to pass through Baltimore.  This summer, the president told the rest of the world what it's like.  Baltimore, he said, is "rodent infested, not to mention a corrupt mess."  Why is Baltimore so bad?  How did it get so poor and hopeless?  Part of the answer is 50 years of uninterrupted Democratic Party rule.  But saying that would be embarrassing to the Democratic Party, so the party's apologists don't want to have the conversation.

Back to the pre-Giuliani era:  Serious crime up 31% in NYC's Central Park this year.  NYPD crime stats recently reported by the New York Post show that violent crime incidents in Central Park, Manhattan, have spiked 31 percent in 2018. [...] The cleanup of Central Park was one of the milestones of the era of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York that jump-started a two-decade decline in crime throughout the city.  Those gains are now being reduced due to the abolishing of pretrial bail, reduced sentencing, early release, and almost no deterrent against juvenile criminals.  The subways have already returned to pre-Giuliani-era crime levels.  According to NYPD data, there were 1,185 transit misdemeanor assaults citywide from Jan. 1 to Nov. 17, which reflects a 10.9 percent increase from the same time last year.

American Society and the Stretched Rubber Band.  [Scroll down]  Regressives have been successful in fostering a censored, politically correct environment in politics and entertainment.  They've accomplished this by resorting to character assassinations, engaging in identity politics on the basis of one's external traits, deplatforming media and entertainment personalities, and rioting in the streets in order to enforce their new code of ethics and engrain their postmodern ideology into the fabric of American culture.  Naturally, this oppressive behavior has led to a counterculture that rejects what Regressives laud and embraces what they hate.  This includes distrust of the media elite, which is intentionally dishonest, self-censoring, and heavily biased; a desire to promote patriotism and protect national heritage; and, most importantly, a yearning for politicians to fire from the hip and not worry about the laws of political correctness that devalue freedom of speech.  This brings us to President Trump, who may appear like a buffoon whose presidency is a fluke.  However, his ascendency is no accident — Trump correctly identified this counterculture as a sleeping giant waiting to be riled up.

A Liberal Order That Seeks To Shut Down Christian Charities Doesn't Deserve To Survive.  Even without full control over the government, the left has been aggressive in its use of government power against Christians who believe traditional teachings on human sexuality.  The left seems to target particularly those engaged in charitable work, rather than protecting them on account of their good works.  The left's legal wing is trying to compel Christian hospitals to perform abortions and sex-change surgeries, Christian schools to affirm same-sex relationships, and Christian charities such as women's shelters to pretend men can be women.  A purportedly serious Democratic presidential candidate wanted to tax dissenting Christian organizations, including churches, into oblivion.  The left won't even spare elderly nuns.  When the Trump administration ended Barack Obama's legal campaign against the Little Sisters of the Poor, various Democratic attorneys general made a point of continuing that unholy effort.

The Destructiveness of the Liberal Child Mind.  The Left's takeover of our schools and media has brainwashed a whole generation.  We've got millions of befuddled biological adults walking about with the minds of kids, cheering on the likes of foolish teen Greta, who should be at home practicing for her soccer meet or piano recital.  Give any of these kinderlings or their kind the reins of adult power, and what you get is an utter economic and societal wreckage.  You get the squalor, poverty, and degradation of the socialism of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, and now Venezuela.  You do get nice slogans and cool tee-shirts emblazoned with "Health Care Is a Human Right" and "Medicare for All," but such things won't put food, let alone an MRI scanner or anti-cancer drug, on the table.

How Social Work Became the Pit of Despair It Is Today.  [Scroll down]  Without a "fundamental transformation" of the mass media's constant condemnation of personal moral judgments — without a drastic change in its lionizing of hedonistic pursuits that "push the envelope" beyond every prior boundary of decency — without a rejection of its reflexive division of society into privileged and victim groups — without a massive intellectual and moral shift on the part of educators, the entertainment industry, prominent intellectuals, and folks in electronic communications, the prospect for significant improvement in the culture at large, including its ever expanding social services arena, seems bleak.

Cook County Christmas shopping, Kim Foxx style.  When state's attorney Kim Foxx announced no prosecution for shoplifting under a thousand dollars, the results were fully predictable.  Chicago and Cook County, Illinois are leading the headlong American rush toward lawlessness and the loss of civil order.  The election of Kim Foxx as Cook County state's attorney, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in backing by George Soros, has been a further disaster — with not just the scandalously lenient treatment of Jussie Smollett after convulsing Chicago and the entire country with a fake hate crime caper, but the virtual abolition of laws against felony shoplifting under one thousand dollars.

Operation Mockingbird's Racial Destructive Lies.  In a recent article, I explained that Operation Mockingbird is a program founded by the CIA in the 1950s to use journalists and front groups to spread propaganda.  Today's version of Operation Mockingbird uses intelligence agencies, academia, Hollywood, and the Democratic party to spread hatred for Christians, traditional values, law-abiding gun owners, straight white men, pro-lifers, police and the 63 million who voted for Trump.  I am encouraged that a growing number of young Americans realize they are being propagandized 24/7.  Young people are fed up with SJWs (social justice warriors) demonizing whites, anyone who is happy, successful, thin, and enjoying life.  Youths are angry for being branded an "ist" or "phobe" for everything they say or do.  These three Operation Mockingbird lies continue to wreak havoc, igniting racial hatred, division and violence.

Will Dems Leave Their Irreligious Party?  The average Democrat I know does not believe that infanticide is a right nor do they accept the nonsense that there are more than two genders.  They do not believe that open borders that allow drugs and murderous gangs into our country should be our policy.  Those that have jobs do not approve of their wages taxed to give benefits to those who are here unlawfully.  They are also outraged that children are being subjected to progressive stunts like having drag queens read to them in public while exposing their crotches.  (Don't believe this?  Google it).  They do not approve of grown men being allowed to use women's bathrooms especially when they are being occupied by young girls.  Yet all of that is being pushed by the Democrats running for president in 2020.

America's real disease is toxic ignorance.  Many factors have combined over the last 50 years to remove the moral scaffolding into which we fit incoming information and prioritize it.  Judeo-Christian values have been demonized and replaced with relativism.  Relativism implies that nothing is all good or all bad, all wrong or all right.  There are no justified priorities.  Live and let live.  Once this took hold, toxic education stepped into the breach and indoctrinated students with substitutes for what used to be "right" and "wrong."  The only truth is your own personal well-being.  So teachers set about redefining history and interpreting ideas with which the left disagrees as harm to one's person.  This makes it a small step to say "speech is violence."

New York Times puts bad light on murdered Barnard teen and exculpates the city.  The disturbingly horrible stabbing murder of Barnard freshman Tessa Majors over a cheap robbery by one-to-three thugs is an awful story.  The victim was an 18 year old female freshman, a very young-looking teenager, walking to campus around 7 or 8 p.m. when it would have been dark. [...] Unpopular Mayor Bill de Blasio, who's excused these kinds of crimes in the past has made the right noises, but it remains to be seen if he's serious.  But the Times seems to be eager to minimize the crime, cast a negative light on the victim, and exculpate the now-socialist city. [...] In any case, the Times has a big problem now that the reality of blue-city politics has hit New York in a dramatic turnaround from the Giuliani era — kids are now being murdered.  That's why they're doing their best within decency to put the victim down and insist that the city remains safe even with crime now a free for all in New York.

A Safe Space Society Is A Totalitarian Nightmare.  As the undisputed star of the new film No Safe Spaces — the hit documentary on academia's descent into Orwellian tyranny features a quick shot of a lawyer letter I wrote to some collegiate gulag apparatchiks — I wholeheartedly recommend that you go see it.  Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager take you on a guided tour of the insanity and evil that has gripped academia, and it's utterly terrifying.  You need to see it not merely to gape at the freak show but to learn what's coming for society as a whole.  The dreary conformity factories that pretend to be providing our next generation of leaders with a higher education have instead embarked on a campaign of indoctrination designed to manufacture a generation of goose-stepping creeps who use their bizarre collection of buzzwords and fetishes as weapons to suppress any kind of dissent.  And the problem is that this PC Nazism is not just limited to academia.  Eventually, these daddy-issue cadres are going to get out into the world and contaminate all of our institutions even worse than they are contaminated now.

Why Is Our Society Degrading So Badly, So Fast?  On a local level in many cities and communities, Democrats in power are by their actions undermining the rule of law.  For example, expected compliance with the law in several of our leading cities run by Democratic Party leaders, including most notably New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, is now often based on a person's economic and immigration status, race, sex, sexual orientation, and increasingly an indication of a person's political and religious affiliations.  The reason for these exemptions being granted is based on the dual ideologies of identity politics and social justice.  The creation of an implied multi-tier justice system expressly violates our fundamental value of the law applying equally to citizens from all walks of life and most importantly results in the increasingly intolerable and dangerous conditions existing on the streets of these cities and an overall perception of communities in decline.

Republicans Will Live to Regret Joining Climate Alarmists.  [Scroll down]  The data are overwhelming that implementing the proposals of climate alarmists — i.e., drastically cutting down or eliminating fossil fuels — will devastate Western economies.  According to a recent report by the conservative American Action Forum, the Green New Deal will cost up to $93 trillion.  Canada has instituted policies that severely constricted the ability of Western Canada to market its oil and gas.  Eric Denhoff, a former deputy minister of Alberta wrote:  "With more than 150,000 unemployed in a persistent, unbelievably long-running recession, Alberta has faced thousands of bankruptcies, a huge increase in suicides, and a tremendous loss of long-term capital investment that scares the bejesus out of the business community." Kevin O'Leary, founder of the O'Leary financial group, said Alberta and the West "don't have their engine of growth anymore" because "Trudeau hates energy."  Canada, he notes, has been the the poorest place of all the G7 countries to invest your money over the last four years.

Millennials Are Fleeing Cities For Refuge From Democrats' Disasters.  [Scroll down]  My home city of Philadelphia is a prime example.  Here, 60,000 residents leave per year, and half of them are 18 to 34 years old.  The reason?  Urban centers like Philadelphia are bent on destroying the very conveniences that drew millennials to the city in the first place.  Here, the combined effect of sky-high taxes and outdated regulations add up to an all-out war on millennials.  Or at least a war on the things they love the most.  Brunch, for example.  In Pennsylvania, where I live, the number of available liquor licenses is restricted by our state liquor monopoly.  These restrictions and the fact that licenses are sold at auction (seriously!) make selling booze way too expensive for business owners.

The obsessive, intolerant, despicable do-nothing-but-obstruct Democrats.  It is the Left that has undone the tenets of Martin Luther King.  It is the Left that has branded any words they don't like as hate speech and destroyed higher education in America with trigger warnings and safe spaces.  Universities have infantilized college students for a couple of decades now.  Our pseudo-professorial class has indoctrinated its students and taught them nothing but intolerance for the slightest word of opposition to their prescribed, permitted speech with which they've been inculcated.  They have severely handicapped many thousands of young people.  Ask one of them who Mao was?  Stalin?  The Holocaust?  Socialism?  About America's founding?  They know nothing, by design and what they think they know is so wrong.  But ask them about transgenderism, institutional racism, homosexuality, white privilege, etc.  They will wax rhapsodic with their infinite knowledge of those topics, each of which is relatively meaningless in the grand scheme of this once great nation.

Revolution as a Mental Disease.  Illegal immigration has a negative impact on the labor market, especially low-income Americans, by keeping wages down.  Nevertheless, half of our fellow citizens believe that any action taken against illegals is tantamount to sending them to concentration camps.  Medicare for all would lead to long waiting times, with the problem being compound by the coverage provided to an undetermined number of illegals.  In a country where 85% of people have access to quality health care, this would represent a major downgrade.  Socialism is another major electoral theme, and rejecting it in an affluent society would normally be a matter of common sense.  However, part of the secular pietist mission is to fight inequality, even if that leads to worse living conditions for the majority, provided that the object of their envy is also harmed.

After the Impeachment.  [I]f the Democrats win this sham of an impeachment proceeding and the 2020 election, we should be very frightened, because a victory will usher in an era of governance that will lead to a timeline similar to what happened to Venezuela. [...] Many of today's advocates for socialism have no recollection of Venezuela in 1992 as the third-richest country in the world.  Nor do they understand that Venezuela's socialist president ran on "income inequality" in 2001 and shortly afterward put into place the same list of "reforms" as the ones now being advocated by today's Democratic candidates and some of their more radical allies — healthcare under government control, free higher education, guns confiscated, opposition leaders imprisoned, elections suspended, etc.

Trump is 100% on His Game.  I thank God that President Trump is not like other Republicans. [...] If Trump is not reelected in 2020, Democrats will kill healthy babies even after they are born.  Sixteen-year-old girls will have double mastectomies without parental consent or knowledge in absurd attempts to become men.  Democrats will roll out the red carpet to drug dealing, murderous illegals along with illegal alien children carrying strange diseases being admitted into our schools.  The Democrats' Green New Deal promises to stop air travel, kill the fossil fuel industry, and implement a long list of insane job-killing and economy crushing initiatives.  You cannot imagine the huge number of jobs Democrats will kill or force overseas.  Trump has our economy booming.  Black unemployment has hit a new historic low.  All of Trump's unprecedented remarkable successes for America will be flushed down the toilet if Democrats take the White House.

Liberals and the Moral Compass.  [Scroll down]  All of this wandering around the darkened moral landscape is simply an inevitable consequence of tying one's values to one fashionably righteous cause after another.  In the early part of the 20th century, the progenitors of today's progressives were all for eugenics and forced sterilization.  Now they like androgyny and political censorship.  Tomorrow, perhaps pedophilia and concentration camps will be all the rage.  It depends on what novelty proves the most expedient.  Ultimately, the essence of the Left is a cynical and unaccountable leadership leading people around by their desire to feel good about themselves — as cheaply and as painlessly as possible.  It thrives on intellectual laziness and low standards of integrity.  While it is nothing really new, and these people have always been with us, there are more of them now than any healthy society can possibly support.

Report: Hollywood Adds More LGBT Characters to TV, Cable, Streaming — Now 488 Total.  GLAAD, an organization that seeks to accelerate "acceptance of the LGBT community" in American culture, released its 2019 report, Where We Are on TV, and applauded the TV and cable entertainment industries for adding more LGBT characters to their programs.  "Of the 879 regular characters scheduled to appear on broadcast scripted primetime television this season, 90 (10.2 percent) are LGBTQ," states the report.  There are also some 30 recurring LGBTQ characters, making a total of 120.  That's up from last year's 113 regular and recurring LGBTQ roles.

The Editor says...
If you haven't done so already, you should take all of the television sets out of your house and leave them at the curb for the next garbage truck.  When I got rid of my last TV in 1980, it was the programming was boring, shallow, insipid, and a waste of time.  Now, almost 40 years later, the programming is offensive, demeaning, pernicious, blasphemous, and destructive.  The commercials are nearly as bad, and the so-called "local news" is nothing but an infomercial for big government.

Feeding the Fat Green Pigs.  Land that once fed horses is now used to produce biodiesel and ethanol for cars, so food prices must go up.  Forests are felled to burn in green power stations and for green-tick buildings while grasslands are invaded by feral pests and woody weeds from the ever-growing parks and Kyoto Protocol Forests.  Birds and bats are being sliced by wind turbines, flatlands are being smothered by solar panels, access roads and transmission lines.  But electricity costs soar, supply is rationed while reliability crashes.  Behind every one of these modern maladies are troughs of Big Green Pigs getting fatter on market mandates, subsidies from consumers or tax payers, and special tax treatments.  In the background, governments fund an academic/media industry promoting climate alarmism, energy rationing and intermittent energy.  Electric cars and penny farthings were pushed off the roads by Henry Ford's petrol engines, but politicians are trying to put them back — a Tesla for the rich and a bicycle for the poor.  Consumers and industry don't count and taxpayers are there to be milked.  In this Greentopia no one needs miners, farmers or fishermen.  All are lost for a fake global warming Emergency.

Why Trump is the Black Voters' Clear Choice in 2020.  Tragically, blacks have voted monolithically for Democrats for 60 years with nothing to show for it.  Baltimore, Washington D.C., Chicago, and every other city controlled by Democrats are hellholes of black misery; black-on-black homicides, out-of-wedlock births (fatherless households), high incarceration, genocidal numbers of abortions, and school dropouts.  And yet, Democrats are still deceiving blacks with their tired old lie that every issue plaguing black Americans is the result of white racism.  My stomach turned upon hearing Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren promising to end environmental racism.  I thought, "Here we go again with another Democrat attempting to fill blacks with more victim nonsense while trashing America, claiming that even the weather in the U.S. victimizes blacks."

No Safe Spaces:  What Happens When Common Sense and Values Disappear.  The new documentary No Safe Spaces, starring conservative thinker, radio host, and writer Dennis Prager and liberal, comedian, and podcast host Adam Carolla, is a must-see for anyone concerned with the long-term viability of the First Amendment's free speech protections.  While primarily focusing on the hostility to free speech laying siege to America's college campuses, vividly illustrated with compelling clips of violent protests and civil unrest by students from Berkeley to Yale, No Safe Spaces powerfully illustrates how the movement to limit speech has moved into mainstream arenas as well.  Prager and Carolla recognize that "common sense and values" are disappearing for the first time since our country's founding.

The Source of the Media's Post-Truth Analysis.  The source of the left-liberal bias in journalism is no mystery.  You need look no further than the faculty of any journalism or communications department at any American university.  But what really needs to be understood is how the people in the fake news business came to be liberated from feeling any obligation to tell the truth. [...] For some time now, something called postmodernism has ruled on American campuses, and a core idea of the postmodernists is that claims to truth are meaningless.

Reclaiming Common Sense.  How has it come to pass that in America, a man can identify as a woman, and his linguistic affirmation by itself, at least in New York City, obligates others to refer to him as "her"?  And why is it increasingly considered mandatory to declare that men taking female hormones can compete against women in sporting events?  What aberrant philosophical doctrine, you may ask, is behind the assertion that there are sixty-three genders or that marriage must no longer be considered the union of a man and a woman?  The answer to these and other absurdities can be found in Robert Curry's new book, Reclaiming Common Sense:  Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World.

A Great Awakening to the Fight is Upon Us.  [Scroll down]  No more compromise, no more calls for bipartisanship.  Republicans have been outfoxed on that score every time. [...] The old liberal promises of compromise and conciliation were and are false (remember the pledge that when we get same-sex marriage we'll be done with sex and gender issues?).  Barack Obama's reasonableness was a disguise, Joe Biden's Scranton liberalism a pose.  Obergefell was but a step in the never-ending reduction of traditional sex roles.  The inclusion of minority literature and history in the curriculum during the 1970s and '80s wasn't to serve the ideals of diversity.  It was to redefine America as a racist creation from 1619 to the present.  The Left has been making war by other means for 50 years, changing history textbooks, peddling films that mock fatherhood and faith, designing bogus studies that show pay gaps and systemic racism.  But it's been a war nonetheless, and a successful one because conservative leaders and intellectuals have failed to assess the other side.

Lies catch up with Democrats.  For years, Democrats brushed aside concerns that by giving them an inch they would seek a mile.  But Obamacare did lead to a demand for Government Health Care For All.  Gay civil unions did lead to gay marriage and now transgendering (castrating) boys.  Beto O'Rourke wants to use gay marriage to regulate religions via the tax code.  His call for gun confiscation drew calls to shut up and not give the store away.  Democrats lie about their goals.

Fairfax County, Virginia Presents Dire Warning to America.  Fairfax's descent into its current state started with a wave immigration, much of it illegal, into the area which washed away Republican political viability.  Fairfax County became a nullification (sanctuary) county in 2018 and now puts a significant chunk of money into its budget to defend noncitizens from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, although the problem started long before that.  By 2015, 30% of the county was foreign-born.  MI-13, [sic] a brutal criminal gang, is now more active than ever, and the once marquee schools have started what will be a long slide through mediocrity to abysmal.  Fairfax just ranked seventh among the highest-crime sanctuary jurisdictions, ranking just below Chicago and tied with a nearby Maryland county that has had at least nine illegal alien sexual assaults since its sanctuary policy was declared in late July.  That's staggering.  Fairfax County now is on a list of shame with Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco.

We need to fight for the values that made America great.  The left railed against our soldiers during the Vietnam War.  The left calls those who believe in a supreme being or the commitment of marriage uninformed and anachronistic.  They're now openly saying that churches that hold traditional values should lose their tax-exempt status.  The Left doesn't care about our enormous debt, pushes for socialism, and criticizes the Boy Scouts.  The Left thinks it's OK that our schools don't teach about the founding fathers or free markets.  They want you to think America was never great.  To a degree, the pressure from the Left is working.  Americans under 30 are less interested in joining the military.  Church attendance is at an all-time-low, participation in the Boy Scouts, even after allowing girls in, has shrunk, and many are choosing not to have families.  Socialism, the single most discredited idea of the last century, an idea that led millions into poverty and tyranny around the globe, has gained a foothold in one of our two political parties.

How to Bring Down the Ideology of the Left.  The ideology of the Left is integral to the Left's power.  Democrats seek to codify political correctness into legislation as settled verities admitting no further debate.  This is despite the abject failure of their policies to solve the problems they contend need fixing.  The welfare state has spawned intergenerational dependence and misery as well as national debt.  Their self-appointed victims have not been healed by un-gendered bathrooms.

Trickle-Down Bureaucracy Is Destroying Vermont.  So much money is spent on reports, studies, and employment for state workers that Vermont's property tax rates are some of the highest in the nation.  To the extent that any of the money does come back down, it is indeed a mere trickle.  Vermont demonstrates the government bloat that plagues many states, and the effects are becoming apparent.  Vermont now has fewer than 700 conventional dairy farms — but the Vermont Department of Agriculture and the UVM Extension Service steadily increase employees, and salaries.  This is quite typical of the virus-like quality of the Vermont bureaucracy — it grows, and citizens lose wealth or leave.  Vermont has nearly twice as many full-time state employees per 10,000 residents as New Hampshire, yet Vermonters are struggling much more than their thriving neighbors.  There is no growth, and the governor has infamously offered $10,000 bribes to out-of-state earners to reside in Vermont.

Eco madness may be reason for disastrous Boeing 737 MAX safety issues.  Air travel, which accounts for 2 percent of global emissions, has become the great bogeyman for climate alarmists, sparking a backlash against airlines.  Punitive eco-taxes, aviation regulations, activist investors, green NGOs and climate-aware passengers conspire to force airlines and manufacturers to lower CO2 emissions by using less fuel, which accounts for 99 percent of aviation's carbon footprint.  No one has said it explicitly yet, but this relentless pressure to reduce emissions appears to have been a significant factor in the disastrous safety failures of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, which resulted in two fatal crashes in the past year, claiming 346 lives.  The warning from Boeing's catastrophes is that climate ideology can have fatal consequences.

The Derangement Syndromes of Our Time.  Who doesn't feel compassion?  Who wouldn't do whatever they can to help someone in need?  But there are intractable problems with compassion gone wild.  In practice, misguided compassion breeds debauchery and dependence.  Anyone wishing to see the former is invited to drive the streets of San Francisco, where they may smell human excrement, tons of which are deposited each week on the sidewalks and gutters by the city's nearly 10,000 homeless.  They may witness thousands of intravenous drug addicts buying and injecting this poison in state-sanctioned acts of slow-motion suicide.  Anyone wishing to see the latter is invited to tour pretty much any legacy housing project in America, where welfare checks and free rent made the presence of a father not merely unnecessary but economically disadvantageous.

NYC is 'Spiraling Down to Chaos' Following Attack on 20-Year-Old EMT Worker.  A union boss representing First Responders across New York City slammed Big Apple Mayor Bill de Blasio Wednesday [10/23/2019]; saying his policies have led to "chaos" that is nearing "the point of no return."  "Mayor Bill de Blasio is being asked to do more to protect first responders in the wake of an attack on a 20-year-old emergency medical technician as he was transporting an emotional disturbed person to the hospital," reports CBS New York.

Moral Relativism Taking Over Everything:  Sports, Politics, Libraries.  Portland liberals are so far removed from the truth that they've decided to ban urinals in their $195-million remodel of the Portland Building, which houses the city's administrative offices.  In an email to city employees explaining this ignorant decision, Portland chief administrative officer Tom Rinehart said, "I am convinced that this is the right way to ensure success as your employer, remove arbitrary barriers in our community, and provide leadership that is reflective of our shared values."  Similar perverse "leadership" and "values" recently led insurance giant Kaiser Permanente to promote the evil "Drag Queen Story Time."  The television ad shows a grown man dressed as a woman laughing and dancing with small children.  As Tyler O'Neil rightly notes, this is a "clear attempt to normalize Drag Queen Story Hour.  The smiling, laughing children are a subliminal message that full-grown men dressing up like women and acting sexual around children is fun, not disturbing."

Of Electricity and Ideology.  [Scroll down]  "For decades," [Kay] Grimes wrote, "traditional forest management was scientific and successful — that is until ideological, preservationist zealots wormed their way into government and began the overhaul of sound federal forest management through abuse of the Endangered Species Act and the 're-wilding, no-use movement.'"  U.S. Representative Tom McClintock, whose Northern California district includes the Yosemite Valley and the Tahoe National Forest, told Grimes that the U.S. Forest Service 40 years ago departed from "well-established and time-tested forest management practices."  "We replaced these sound management practices with what can only be described as a doctrine of benign neglect," McClintock explained.  "Ponderous, byzantine laws and regulations administered by a growing cadre of ideological zealots in our land management agencies promised to 'save the environment.'  The advocates of this doctrine have dominated our law, our policies, our courts, and our federal agencies ever since."

Political correctness versus common sense.  Not long ago, everyone understood the unchanging commonsense reality that human beings are either male or female.  Today in New York City, the rules have been changed — and failure to keep up can have dire consequences.  New York City's special 31 genders are surrounded by special legal protections.  Businesses can now be fined as much as $250,000 for refusing to address someone by his preferred pronoun.  As we have seen in the news, even in cities that have not yet have caught up with New York City in terms of imposing legal penalties, failing a test of political correctness about genders can result in public shaming or the loss of a job. [...] The important thing to understand is that the masters of political correctness are not done yet.  They have given us a glimpse of the future they have planned for us.  If they continue to have their way, more and more will be required of us, and the penalties will eventually go beyond mere fines and public humiliation.

Social and Political Disintegration Is Accelerating.  In 1960, 5% of the nation's children were born out of wedlock; but in the last few years, the percentage is hovering around 40%.  Sexual immorality is further intensified by promotion of sexual activity in our public schools.  Free condoms are regularly distributed in our educational institutions.  Some states have clinics where, after a ten-minute interview, young girls are given referrals to get an abortion (no parental or caregiver consent, for example, is needed in New York State as well as other states).  In many states, at least one parent must be informed, but consent is not required.  Little children are sitting on the laps of drag queens in library "readings" and some of those drag queens have records of pedophilia.  Homosexual marriage is now the law of the land.  Trashy exhibitionists are singing on youtube.com and throughout the media.  A million babies are aborted a year, not for "women's health" in 90+% of the cases, but because of women's priorities.  These changes in our sexual mores have led to the disintegration of the family.

Air Canada to stop announcing 'ladies and gentlemen' in recognition of gender fluidity.  Employees aboard Air Canada flights will no longer greet guests by referring to them as "ladies and gentlemen" or "mesdames et messieurs," which has been typical protocol for years, in an effort to be conscious of gender fluidity.  Flight attendants and other staff will not use the language in boarding announcements, and the company instead plans to replace the standard greetings with neutral words, such as "everybody" or "tout le monde."

Crazy and Woke on the Western Front of Progressive Insanity.  Thanks to progressive ideology as expressed in laws and court rulings, in California today you cannot arrest and hold vagrants for petty theft or possession of hard drugs; you cannot move them out of public spaces unless you can provide them with free and "permanent supportive housing;" you cannot commit demonstrably insane people to asylums; and publicly funded shelters must offer food and urgent care without any preconditions whatsoever.  Testimonials from residents of Venice Beach provide ample evidence of what happens when you impose these progressive policies on an urban area bordered on the west by some of the most inviting beaches and agreeable weather in the world.  An estimated 1,200 homeless people have set up permanent encampments in this three square mile beach town.  They almost never use actual toilets.

Disposable Humans and the Downfall of Civilization.  How has the progressive movement made evil a common occurrence?  Lack of morality, ethics, and the inability to determine what is a valued life; and what is viewed a mere inconvenience, to be removed, much like a dermatological imperfection.  Over the years I have watched the erosion of society, and the uprising of "wokeness."  Nothing has prepared me for the utter lack of regard for life as we currently see in today's world.  Serial abortion as a form of birth control, and in some cases an appalling sexual fetish is being seen more as society degrades and crumbles, before our very eyes, each passing day.

Imagining Chelsea Clinton's America.  [Scroll down]  In city after city, draconian ordinances overrode zoning laws with decades of precedence.  Investors could demolish single family homes and erect fourplexes, or more units, where one household had previously stood.  Rent control laws, combined with mandated conservation retrofits (to prevent climate change), made it hard for anyone apart from large institutional investors to maintain rental properties.  Single family homes became worth more to buyers if they were demolished and replaced with apartments.  New laws made it obligatory to accept Section 8 renters whose rent would be paid by taxpayers.  Corporate behemoths busted block after block, in city after city, turning communities into government housing projects.  Those who objected were branded as racists, deniers, xenophobes, and NIMBYs.  They were silenced.  Chelsea Clinton, of course, along with all the politically connected, well fed animals in this new Animal Farm called America, resided in a gated community.

Can we keep our Republic?  Starting with Woodrow Wilson, and continuing through FDR's New Deal, LBJ's Great Society programs, and Barack Obama's further expansion of entitlement programs and take-over of the health care industry, the country has been moving relentlessly toward more and more centralization of federal power, expansion of the federal regulatory regime, and encroachment on the freedom of states, civil society, families, and individuals.  And don't forget, along the way Republican elites have supported and abetted this weakening of the Republic.  They have created or expanded intrusive regulatory agencies like the EPA and the Department of Education, illiberal programs like race-conscious set-asides, and increased the number and scope of redistributionist programs like Medicaid and Social Security.  More recently they have joined forces with the identity-politics left to support amnesty for illegal aliens and laxer immigration protocols.  Worse yet, they have frequently endorsed and legitimized the politicized, illiberal ideology of race, "gender," ethnicity, and sexual identity that provides Democrats with tools for leveraging political power and influence in order to achieve "social justice."

Dismaying Dumbed-down Discourse.  I see the crowds cheering the 2020 Democrat candidates and wonder if they're being paid to appear, or are they really, really ignorant about what this party had become?  It is now the party of open borders, socialism, atheism, infanticide and is offering lots of free stuff that's being paid by taxpayers.  It is also the party that is completely committed to everything the "alphabet people" espouse.  The LGBQT, aka the alphabet people (dubbed by the brave comedian Dave Chapelle), has the Left convinced that there are more than two genders and thus it is perfectly fine that men claiming to be women can now compete against women in sports events and can use women's toilets — where little girls can no longer feel safe.  This is pure insanity but if the progressive left certifies it, the mentally deficient will accept it.

Progressing toward Extinction.  [Scroll down]  Many young people live in random little groups — making a semi-permanent lifestyle of the arrangements one finds in college dorms.  In our particular brave new world, people are free to lavish their attention either on themselves or, if they have some nagging concerns about posterity, on the latest attempt to save the planet.  Banning of plastic straws is both easier and apparently more noble than nurturing new human beings.  Though still shackled to some semblance of their animal desires through myriad and faddish varieties of sex, today's young people are, at least, unshackled from the animal consequences.  This is what is now called progress.  People can hope to binge-watch some anesthetic pablum to the end of their days, uninterrupted by the squeal of their progenies' voices or the irritating patter of their tiny unshod feet.  Children are an inconvenience, and grandchildren are worse.

The Left to America's Children:  Your Past Is Terrible, and Your Future Is Terrible.  A rule of life is that everything the left touches it ruins: art, music, Christianity, Judaism, race relations, male-female relations, universities, high schools, elementary schools, late-night comedy, sports, liberty, journalism, the Boy Scouts, national economies, language and everything else it influences. [...] To this list, we can now add childhood and children.

Portland Bans Urinals In $195M 'Gender-Neutral' Remodel of Government Building.  The City of Portland has banned urinals in the $195 million remodel of the Portland Building, which houses administrative offices for the city.  While urinals use less water than toilets, they are a relic of a bygone era when men and women were recognized as biologically different.  A spokeswoman told NBC affiliate KGW News that she could not estimate how much it will cost to remove the urinals, which have been a feature of the building since its construction in 1982.  Chief Administrative Officer Tom Rinehart explained the urinal ban in an email to employees last February.

'The Leprosy of Unreality' and the Demise of the Left.  Evidence of the splintering social fabric is already apparent.  Rumors of crimes at the hands of the Democrat-controlled Deep State abound and undermine public trust.  Snowflakes demand places safe from the real world.  Children are recruited into the fairy tale of rescuing the planet from an imaginary dragon.  Through childish games of dressing up as boys when they are women and wearing lipstick despite being men, our youths are indoctrinated into insanity.

The 50 most miserable cities in America.  Not the worst, just the most miserable.  We've identified the 50 most miserable cities in the US, using census data from 1,000 cities across the country, taking into consideration population change (because if people are leaving it's usually for a good reason), the percentage of people working, median household incomes, the percentage of people without healthcare, median commute times, and the number of people living in poverty.  Often, these cities have been devastated by natural disasters.  They've had to deal with blight, and with high crime rates.  Economies have struggled after industry has collapsed.  These cities also tend to have high rates of addiction.  The state with the most miserable cities was California, with 10 in the top 50.  New Jersey was second with nine, and Florida had six.

California Shocked To Find Bill Decriminalizing Retail Theft Resulted In... More Retail Theft.  A few years ago, California passed one in a series of bills aimed at emptying the jails and prisons.  Proposition 47 carried the disingenuous name of "the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act and its stated purpose was to keep non-violent offenders out of jail.  To achieve this goal, the state decriminalized a number of lesser offenses, including retail theft.  The law raised the value of the amount of merchandise someone could steal while still only being charged with a misdemeanor to nearly one thousand dollars.  To the great surprise of the government, people noticed this change and began taking advantage of it.  They have now recorded multiple years of steadily increasing, organized robbery.  These plots are known as "mass grab and dash" thefts and they generally involve large numbers of young people all entering a store at the same time, grabbing armfuls of merchandise and dashing back out to their vehicles and hitting the highway.  Not only are robberies on the rise, but arrests and prosecutions are down.  Who could possibly have predicted this?

Gun Control:  Wrong Solution to the Wrong Problem.  When liberals spend years telling people that life isn't sacred, should they really be surprised that more people treat life as not being sacred?  There have been more than 61 million abortions since Roe v.  Wade in 1973. Every single Democrat candidate in contention is applying the Pete Buttigieg "breath" standard, meaning they all support abortion up to, and perhaps beyond, birth.  When you make an effort to devalue life in the interest of political expedience, people will be affected in tragic, horrible, and surprising ways.  Mother Teresa once said "the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.  And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?"  That's a mighty good question.

The American Left Is Completely Insane.  It isn't just elected Democrats at the national level.  Cities like Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles and San Francisco — run by Democratic mayors and city councils — have high rates of crime and homelessness.  San Francisco and Los Angeles have growing cases of typhoid fever, tuberculosis and other diseases borne by fleas and human feces, piles of which coat the streets.  California's legislature has not been able to solve those grave problems.  But it has banned plastic straws in restaurants.

The Broken Promise of American Cities.  Hope for a better future in California is rapidly becoming a stillborn dream, as the connection between decay and the politics of progressivism becomes painfully clear.  The proponents of this secular theology may be getting a wakeup call soon, as the Golden State's cities teeter on the edge of bubonic oblivion, with rats teeming through the streets of Los Angeles, even forcing temporary, partial closures of City Hall.  Skid Row has unfurled its filthy tendrils into the halls of the Los Angeles Police Department's Central Division station, with officers falling ill as vermin lay siege to their precinct.  But the explosion of the rat population, catalyzed by the feculence of homeless encampments across the state, has not deterred lawmakers from advancing a bill to ban rat poison in the name of human health and environmental concerns.  In the progressive mind, even mentioning the risk of disease caused by these policies is somehow tantamount to racist dog-whistling.  San Francisco, the rainbow flagship of our brave new world, even has a "no-kill, catch-and-release" policy for rodents.

Bill would require gender 'X' option on all state documents.  Advocates for a gender "X" designation on state documentation say making people chose male or female is akin to making them lie, while opponents argue that a person's sex is a biological fact.  "If you look at your Massachusetts driver's license, it lists 'sex,' not 'gender,'" Andrew Beckwith of Massachusetts Family Institute told the Herald.  "The concept of 'gender identity' is based on internal feelings, but sex is binary (male or female) and grounded in biology, and we believe that a state ID should reflect that objective fact."  A bill that would require an "X" option on all state documents that ask for gender identification, including driver's licenses, birth certificates and voter registration, went before the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight on Tuesday [9/10/2019].

On Destroying America.  We are lied to, deceived, and manipulated constantly to believe what isn't so. [...] I can remember several generations back when common sense was common.  No longer.  Criminals are treated as victims.  White people are labeled as oppressors and must apologize for it.  Deranged people who need help are ignored, treated as normal, or just doing their thing.  And they are everywhere, creating chaos, as designed and expected.

The Left's determination to destroy us from within.  [Governor Newsom of California], and the rest of the Democrat governors and mayors that destroyed their own states and cities, have not only ruined the municipalities that they control, but have destroyed countless lives — namely, of those who barely subsist on the streets of these cities:  Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Seattle, Baltimore, Chicago.  (Chicago and Baltimore are the murder capitals of the nation.  Both have among the strictest gun control laws in the nation.)  They willingly promulgate the drug use of their homeless (they pass out free syringes) and seem to tolerate the vast homeless encampments and all they entail:  discarded needles, public defecation, crime, disease — in short, the destruction of the cities they've been allowed to take over and ruin.

Criminologists Mislead Us.  There is significant bias among criminologists.  The reason for that bias is that political leanings of academic criminologists are liberal.  Liberal criminologists outnumber their conservative counterparts by a ratio of 30-to-1. Ideology almost perfectly predicts the position of criminologists on issues from gun control to capital punishment to harsh sentencing.  Liberal criminologists march in step for gun control, oppose punitive prison sentences, and are vehemently against the death penalty.  In 2012, the National Academy of Sciences commissioned a study on the growth of incarceration.  It showed that from 1928 until 1960, crime rates rose slowly each year.  After the 1960s, crime rates exploded to unprecedented levels of violence until the 1990s.

The Ferguson Effect comes to New York:  NYPD arrests plummet in wake of officer firing in Garner case.  What is it about the Left that fails to understand that painting cops as racists has consequences?  In the wake of the firing of a police officer over the death of black cigarette street seller Eric Garner, New York's police are focused now on just playing it safe.

Countering Progressive Nihilism.  America's homeless epidemic, along with a shocking rise in deaths from drug overdoses, stem from the same root cause:  liberal progressive ideology.  The seductive power of this ideology, which brims in equal measure with overwrought compassion for the less fortunate alongside fuming resentment towards the "privileged," has earned it a dominant position in American culture. [...] While countless critical issues are being ignored or made worse thanks to the influence of progressives, two of them, homelessness and drug related deaths, stand out.

25 common sense truths that you're no longer supposed to say. 
  [#14]   Just because a white person criticizes or gets into a conflict with a minority doesn't mean it has anything to do with race.  In fact, the vast majority of the time it doesn't.
  [#15]   Drag queens are deviants and shouldn't be allowed near children, much less allowed to be part of story times for kids.
  [#16]   There are only two genders.
  [#17]   If America were oppressive for minorities, they'd be leaving the country, not coming here in droves.

The Left's Neverland.  Now, over 150 years after the Civil War, we find ourselves living in a world that has tucked reality away in a locked cupboard and our schools, our media, and many of our churches don't want it to get out.  We live in a TV-Internet-Smartphone world where our music is mostly canned, our connections with people are at least once-removed, and our children never look up.  The virtual has taken over to a point where people actually think we can alter history by removing statues and painting over murals, and they have to change history because Neverland has to have its own annals, its own chronicles.  Neverland is not America.  This explains why both Obama and Hillary could talk with such disdain about half of the population.  We aren't their people.  They were running to be president of Neverland, not of traditional America.

Vermont Is Going Insane.  Will the Rest of America Follow?  [Scroll down]  Thirty-plus years later, our youths have been corrupted by unhealthy food, limitless violence in television and pornography, phone and internet obsession that leaves them anxious and stressed, and Facebook that feeds toxicity. [...] Studies have found that 30% of college students don't know how to boil an egg; 52% of high school students don't know how to change a tire; 70% of young people have no clue how to sew on a button.  Yet we grown-up adolescents are yoking them with responsibility to "lead" us to solve our social ills while they can't find jobs, many require psychiatric medications, and the national deficit has exceeded the capacity of the human mind to comprehend.

Transgender insanity:  Another big battle in the war on common sense.  A women's shelter is being sued for turning away a man dressed in a nightgown.  Really.  According to the reports, a very large and very inebriated man dressed in a nightgown showed up at a women's shelter in downtown Anchorage, Alaska seeking entry.  He was not admitted to stay the night.  As a result, the shelter is now embroiled in a legal battle.  The Anchorage Equal Rights Commission (AERC), an administrative agency within the municipality of Anchorage, has brought a discrimination case against the shelter.

War on cops in Philadelphia.  Many people across the nation watched the hours-long standoff and shooting of Philadelphia Police Officers on TV.  Nine officers were injured and six were wounded by gunfire.  Thankfully, no officers were killed, and the gunman finally surrendered.  The following day I spoke to a Philly cop who had been on the scene.  He scoffed at the idea of Philadelphia Mayor James Kenny and Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner arriving at the hospital to visit the injured cops.  He called the two "anti-cop liberals."

Terror without trust.  Already it has proved impossible to cap the number of genders.  The epithets "racist" and "Nazi" are applied to an ever-growing number of people who find themselves guilty of offenses that didn't even exist until recently.  It is so powerful it even knocks over the woke.

Missing the Point of Gun Ownership.  If there were ever a survey asking gun owners why they buy guns, I'd wager the majority of them would say that it basically is for protection.  The Second Amendment was not written for hunters but for the people's self-protection, including protection from tyranny.  The first thing smart dictators do is remove guns from registered owners. [...] There have always been guns in the country but mass shootings of innocents were rare until the 1960's. [...] Would there have been a Columbine massacre if God had not been removed from the schools?  Most of the mass shooters fit the same profile.  Most are single males and come from broken homes.  Nearly all have been under the influence of marijuana or psych drugs.  Not sure if any of these murderers were regular church goers but I doubt it.

U.S. Attorney Blasts Soros-Backed Philly D.A. For Putting Police in Danger With 'Culture of Disrespect'.  In a blistering statement Thursday [8/15/2019], United States Attorney William M. McSwain lashed out at the District Attorney of Philadelphia, saying his "vile rhetoric" and lax law enforcement policies were putting police in danger.  Larry Krasner, the Philly D.A., is a far-left former civil rights defense attorney who has sued police more than 75 times, and has defended far-left Occupy Philly activists and Black Lives Matter agitators.  Left-wing hedge fund billionaire George Soros helped put Krasner in office by donating an overwhelming $1.45 million to an independent political action committee backing his campaign in 2017.

Leaving the Democrats.  I have had a great life in the greatest country on earth.  All along the way, the Democrats have stepped on me, taxed me more, lied to me, called me names, and demand I give up my rights.  Democrats were the ones pushing environmental causes at the expense of humans and government takeover of healthcare.  They have mismanaged everything they get their hands on, and then blame others for their own deeds.  I watch them lie and cheat and twist words.  Democrats have alienated their own base to the point they have to argue for foreigners to come into this country illegally in order to vote for Democrats, mainly by calling those of us opposed to this "racist." [...] I am now called racist, homophobic, misogynist, and Islamaphobic.  A gun-toting, Bible-believing bitter clinger.  A deplorable.  A white nationalist.  Nazi.  I can't remember all of my Democrat party subtitles.

This Is What LGBTQ Organizations Are Doing to Society.  Virtually every week, there seems to be another issue that preoccupies the country.  But while our attention is focused on President Donald Trump, Google, Charlottesville, Russia, impeachment, Jeffrey Epstein, the next elections, racism, a trade war with China, the #MeToo movement or something else, LGBTQ organizations are quietly going about their work dismantling ethical norms, making a mockery of education, ruining innocent people's lives and destroying children's innocence.

Twilight Zone Nation.  How in the world did we get to this Rod Serling place where drag queens are reading to our children in our libraries?  How, in a rational universe, did four ignorant, left-wing, lunatic women attain breathtaking power in less than a year?  When did sex trafficking become such a huge crisis?  How is it that facts and evidence and law have no pull at all anymore?  We find ourselves, apparently all of a sudden, in a place where telling bald-faced lies about anyone we want to slander is acceptable behavior, where billions of dollars of government money is unaccountably missing and no one seems really upset by that malfeasance, where pedophilia is working its way into appropriate behavior.

Will Any Single Intervention Eliminate Mass Shootings?  [Scroll down]  The next part of this puzzle is the very definition of "mental illness."  The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatry has been modified many times.  The most recent revision has removed most of the "gender dysphoria" diagnoses, normalizing the alphabet soup of sexual preferences.  This is done in the face of the fact that LGBTQ-whatever "gender preferences" are associated with higher mortality than binary male/female identities.  Doctors are supposed to "first do no harm."  Normalizing a health risk creates harm.  This means that the DSM changes are not medical, they are political.

Where does politics meet the divide?  Does Rashida Tlaib's rhetoric inspire the protestors outside Mitch McConnell's home?  Is Elizabeth Warren responsible for the shooting in Dayton that left nine people dead?  Does Ilhan Omar own the anger of American's when she says that white men should be profiled?. [...] Is Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and her baseless environmental screeds responsible for El Paso?  The shooter's manifesto "An Inconvenient Truth" not echoing the President, but liberals, AOC, and Al Gore's claims that we will be dead as a result of dwindling resources within 12 years?  Does Joe Biden's latest gaffe comment mean he is a White Supremacist, believing that while he might work on behalf of the poor brown and black kids, white children are superior?

Trump administration seeks to juice dishwashers by scrubbing energy regulations.  For years, consumers have complained about slower, noisier dishwashers that produce dirtier dishes, the result of tighter federal efficiency regulations that the Trump administration is now seeking to unload.  The Energy Department last month proposed a rule to create a new dishwasher product class that would finish a normal cycle in an hour or less by using less stringent energy standards than permitted under the current rules.  Sam Kazman, general counsel of the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, which led the charge for the regulatory clean-up, said the ever-tighter restrictions on energy and water have produced machines that take twice as long without getting dishes as scrubbed as earlier models.

Researchers: Crumbling family structures are contributing to mass shootings.  A study by the Family Research Council says that crumbling traditional family structures are contributing to a wave of mental health issues that often lead people to commit mass shootings and other violence.  "The fact that we have an epidemic of absentee fathers in the home and that we have a disintegrating family structure in America, which is brought about by a variety of things, is a major issue and a major cause for what we see happening in these mass shootings," Ret. Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, Vice President of the FRC, told The Epoch Times.

El Paso Shooting:  Latest Atrocity Exploited by Democrats.  The deranged gunman's views are all over the ideological map.  However, his environmental views are clearly the result of progressives dominating public education and fake news media.  This quote from the manifesto exposes his insane progressive environmental views.

The link between pot and mass shootings may be closer than we think.  You can't walk through the streets of Manhattan these days without smelling weed.  Even as evidence mounts of the health problems associated with marijuana, New York has insisted on joining other greedy states scrambling to legalize this deceptively dangerous drug.  It makes no sense at a time when American youth is suffering from an unprecedented mental health crisis.  And, in all honesty, we cannot rule out a connection between increasing marijuana use, mental illness and the recent spate of mass shootings by disturbed young males.

The surprise isn't that we had two mass shootings in 24 hours, it's that we don't have many more.  After the El Paso and Dayton shootings at the end of last week, a friend of mine was asking how we can "pull young men out of the 4chan/8chan toxic cesspool." [...] The problem with this kind of thinking is that there are certainly toxic forums out there, but they're just toxic pools down river from our toxic culture.  I challenge you to listen to the kind of common rhetoric coming out of college campuses ("Hearing words I don't agree with is violence"), places like Twitter ("It sure would be a shame if something happened to your kids") and our standard political discourse ("You're a Nazi" for wearing that hat.)  and tell me that they're not toxic as well.

El Paso proves we live in a mean culture.  Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick went on a one-of-a-kind rant Sunday on Fox television:  "What do we expect," he asked, "when kids play video games instead of going to church?"  One of the shooters reportedly was acting out in real life a violent video game character.  Children just entering grade school today are being exposed to a boatload of vile and venom.  To gratuitous killing.  To music that celebrates it.  "Garbage in, garbage out."  American children are being programmed in a culture that is vengeful, covetous, and mean.  When they put it all together and make it a reality, why are we so surprised?  They are simply doing what they've been taught.

An Open Letter to Democrats Who Insist Politicians "Just Do Something".  Thousands can die in America's impoverished inner cities every year — with illegally acquired guns — and Democrats are silent.  Perhaps it's because they're the ones running those cities, like Chicago, Baltimore and Destroyt.  And decades of Democrat leadership have enabled the worst breed of gangsters by criminalizing gun ownership by law-abiding citizens.

Social Media's Transition from Novelty to Malignancy.  [Scroll down]  The most recent and troubling development in social media is the mob mentality.  Often the sharing of an opinion elicits a storm of response, and vastly wider distribution, via a person's now-expanded network of friends and followers.  Far from sharing ideas and feelings frankly and spontaneously, many people now assiduously avoid triggers, anything remotely resembling judgments of others, and even witticisms that might offend. [...] We now have a kind of Online Stockholm Syndrome.  You tread lightly with your social media audience or risk caustic online retribution and even real-world consequences like shunning, loss of a job, having your business boycotted, or worse.

President Trump Shatters Left-Wing Myths.  President Trump is boldly providing much-needed relief to the American people. [...] And now he has pinpointed what we have all seen, namely:  decades of liberal-run major cities, whose liberal policies, corruption, and mismanagement have degraded these urban centers and harmed their inhabitants.  The liberal "icons" that have controlled these areas for decades have allowed them, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to degenerate from once great cities to districts akin to hellholes.  No, it is not about the race of the leaders, but their liberal policies:  witness what Bill DeBlasio is doing to New York.  Untouchable liberal icons such as Elijah Cummings are to blame, grandstanding about the U.S. southern border while remaining indifferent to what is happening within their own district, unless as an excuse to demand that more funds be channeled their way.

The Voters Do Deserve to be Neglected.  One hears pundits on the Republican conservative side of the discussion bewailing the misfortunes of the people of Baltimore in Elijah Cummings's rat-infested district.  They say, "The people of Baltimore deserve better.  The American People deserve better."  No, they don't.  They deserve exactly what they have.  They deserve their rats and their crime rate.  America still is, for now, a republic that operates on democratic principles of voting.  The people of Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, and St. Louis all have elected one Democrat after another to lead them.  St. Louis has not had a Republican mayor since 1949.  Detroit since 1962.  Chicago since 1931.  Baltimore since 1967.  When people in a two-party country continue for more than half a century, without interruption, electing candidates from the same party to lead them, even as their once-great cities fade into rat-infested murder centers, then those voters do indeed deserve exactly, precisely what they have.  They do not deserve a whit better than they have chosen for themselves.

Baltimore Is Worse than Trump Thinks.  Democrats have gotten away with too much for too long in the cities they've super-majority controlled:  Baltimore, St. Louis, Philadelphia; Detroit; Chicago; New Orleans; Newark; Oakland, on and on.  Children become permanently entangled in inter-generational familial poverty, squalor, drugs, guns, failing schools, juvenile violent crime, and lack of economic mobility.  The end results of Democrat dominance are more shocking and horrifying than most realize.  It's high time for reasonable Americans to accept an uncomfortable and deadly truth:  Democrats destroy everything and everywhere they attach their tentacles to.  The utter, abject failures of Democrat-run cities are the most egregious cover-up by the DMIC in American history.

Trump Speaks the Politically Incorrect Truth.  These majority-minority districts frequently elect useless demagogues, who deliver little, other than the rhetoric of flattery and blame.  Cummings and his colleagues Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) are all archetypal cases.  Not infrequently, extensive corruption is the handmaiden of these politicians — Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick comes to mind.  Trump's message in recent weeks is straightforward: those who purport to represent these poor and desperate people provide little in the way of good government or service to them.  The state of America's lost cities — Detroit, Baltimore, Birmingham — is familiar to anyone with eyes to see.  One boarded-up building after another.  Crime rates that rival Venezuela's.  Police insulted and attacked by shameless young people.

The Democratic Washing Machine.  The Democratic washing machine is so named because it was Democrats who decided to ruin a durable product in a mature industry.  In the name of saving electricity and saving water, they couldn't save just a little electricity and a little water.  No, they had to force manufacturers to create a product that used almost no water.  And to save electricity, they turned the control panel on the washing machine into something resembling the bridge of a starship, with so many options you have to study a detailed manual even to figure out how to turn on the device.

A failure to assimilate.  Decent Americans of all colors have silently watched out-of-control black criminals destroy city after city because raising any questions, doubts or objections bring down storms of career-destroying, job-ending accusations of white racism or Uncle Tomism.  This is the race conversation America has needed for so long, a conversation where black destructiveness and visceral hatred of anything not black gets called out and held to account rather than excused and let go.  For decades in the inner-city thugs have murdered, raped, and destroyed with impunity as beleaguered police come under attack for doing their jobs.

Why Do Democrats Run All of the Dangerous and Rodent Infested Cities?  Rep. Cummings, while being very obsessed with Russia, seems utterly bewildered with the idea that anyone could dare question why so many billions of federal dollars flow to places like West Baltimore when they are obviously doing no good.  Look at other cities in similar dilapidation and there holds a unique truth:  Democrats run them all.  How long will sewage run down the streets of San Francisco?  How long will St. Louis, Detroit, and Baltimore, continue to rotate as the nation's most dangerous crime infested metros?

A Spirit of Lawlessness Has Descended Upon America.  We have raised an entire generation of Americans who have no respect for the law, and now we are reaping what we have sown.  I cannot even begin to tell you how alarmed I am by some of the videos I have been watching lately.  As you will see below, all over the nation, young people are brazenly flouting the law, obstructing and assaulting law enforcement officers and committing criminal acts in large groups.  I think "lawlessness" is perhaps the best word to describe what is happening, and many believe that what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.

The Co-Conspirators in the American Left's Takeover of the Democratic Party.  Using the cudgel of the mainstream media, the entertainment complex and the education establishment combined with the apathy and cowardice of the Republican Establishment, the American Left had successfully, within 25 years after the Reagan landslides, inculcated into a plurality of the American people a belief that there are no moral absolutes and that the state, not God, is the source of the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and thus the state can deny those rights to whomever it chooses.  They are creating the belief that this country's founding documents are arcane, racially insensitive and unsuitable for today.  They teach they young that this nation is and always has been racist and oppressive, that religious liberty, the right to bear arms, and unfettered freedom of speech are subject to the whims of the state.

Immorality Embraced by So-Called Christian Love.  Situation ethics — introduced in 1966 by Joseph F. Fletcher — came into vogue as a way to excuse pre-marital fornication by Christians, and anything that could be considered Christian judgmentalism was muted by the liberal churches.  In the name of love, increasing numbers of churches became tolerant of sin.  In the contemporary church world, tolerance of sin is no longer considered kind enough or loving enough.  Now, as seen by Joel Osteen's recent appearance at an LGBTQ event, celebration of sin is the step beyond tolerance.  A "woman's right to choose" is openly embraced by many members of the National Council of Churches.  Likewise, homosexuality among the clergy is acceptable.

The Left is following Communism's playbook for revolution.  This process continues and is manifested in the widespread antipathy for sexual propriety, faith, and all that is great and good — and in the lust for perversion, socialism, feminism, multiculturalism, "transgenderism," and anti-Americanism in general.  We see it in the tearing down of statues; removal of long present Christian symbols; leftist propaganda and decadence in schools and entertainment;, prioritizing of illegal aliens over citizens; revising of American history and impugning of whites; and in attacks on the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and all things traditional.  This destabilization of the American mind and moral compass now has begotten, as it must, societal destabilization.  This is reflected in, most obviously, the flooding of our nation with unassimilable foreigners via a purposely porous border.  This serves the Cloward-Piven goal of overloading the system to cause breakdown, necessitating replacement of it with, the theory goes, a socialist one.  Of course, this human flood strains schools, hospitals, and services and resources in general.

How Washington Has Helped Destroy American Civil Society and Family Life.  The welfare state is another significant driver of the decline of the nuclear family.  Unsurprisingly, the black family is massively impacted.  In 1965, 25 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock.  In 2016, that rate had increased to 70 percent and even topped 80 percent in certain urban areas.  In the 1940s, this number was five percent, which was comparable to that of white children.  The Hispanic out-of-wedlock birth rate in 2016 was 52 percent, while for whites it was 30 percent.  The rise in children born out of wedlock cannot be separated from the massive expansion of the welfare state under Johnson's Great Society.

The American Left Is Racist, Not President Trump.  The problem with silencing an entire generation of white people in the name of fighting racism is that while they have been silent, extreme environmentalism, anti-white racism, and creeping socialism have swept across American culture, taking over our schools, universities, entertainment and media industries, our corporations, and government at all levels.  Unchecked, this will destroy the country.

Trump is not a racist; he's pushing the Overton window to normal.  For the past 60 years, Leftists have been pushing the Overton window steadily (duh) left.  From the manic colors of the LGBTQRSTUV+ rainbow, to contending that people can magically use hormones and surgery to "change" their gender, to "shouting your abortion," Leftists are introducing entirely new (and frequently insane) ideas into the realm of acceptable public conversation. [...] Think of ideas that were normal just a decade ago:  using pronouns consistent with biological sex, worrying about Muslim-inspired terrorism, admiring the Founding Fathers, believing that a traditional male-female marriage is optimal for raising children, mentioning the Judeo-Christian God in public, questioning anthropogenic climate change, or being anything but mindlessly positive about a member of a "Progressive protected victim class."  Nowadays, thanks to relentless media, entertainment, political, and educational pressure, voicing those ideas creates the risk that the speaker will be shouted down, humiliated, fired, or even physically attacked.

How Bureaucrats Ruin Everything From Dishwashers To Gas Cans To Cars.  Have you ever wondered why dishwashers today take twice as long to do a worse job of cleaning dishes?  Or why it's so much harder to get gasoline out of a new gas can?  Or why cars made decades ago always turn heads, while today's are drab in the same way?  There's a simple answer to these modern-day mysteries:  Government regulators.  Take the dishwasher.  Earlier this month, the Department of Energy announced that it would revise its rules regarding dishwasher efficiency.  Why?  Because the existing rules — which set limits on how much electricity and water a dishwasher may use — are forcing manufacturers to build machines that are worse than ever.

Dallas Drag Queen Show Promoted to Infants.  The City of Dallas Public Library is currently advertising a controversial and divisive drag queen show to be held at the Grauwyler Park Branch location and that the show is appropriate for age groups from infants to 11 years old.  The drag queen performers for this public library event during the day are employees of an adult night club venue where children of this age are not permitted to enter.  The drag queen event is scheduled to take place at a public library Saturday [7/13/2019] at 1 pm where children will be able to "hear stories, sing, dance, and interact with these fabulous ladies" according to the library event page.  This Dallas event follows on the heels of a similar and controversial drag queen event that was canceled by the city government of Leander, and in Houston where two drag queens involved with these shows were discovered to be registered sex offenders.

Pelosi vs. AOC: It's a Beautiful Thing.  Everything about modern leftist ideology is extreme.  It is extreme in substance, and its practitioners are self-absorbed, sanctimonious, uncompromising and often irrational.  Intersectionality zealots are disciplining white feminists for their selfish advocacy.  Biological males are dominating female athletic events courtesy of the transgender movement.  Leftists of color and female gender are dissing old white men despite the men's long records of dedication to the sacred cause of progressivism.  Some women of color are being told they are not black enough to lead the cause.

Democrats are Officially the Party of Derangement.  If any of the 20 Democrats win in 2020, we can officially say goodbye to our democracy as we know it.  College campuses have already been destroyed.  The two left coasts are a disaster and demographic changes are leading to several purple states turning blue as the Democrats' refusal to address the immigration crisis proves successful in their quest for power.  More ignorant, arrogant, and bigoted representatives will be elected to Congress in the manner of AOC, Omar and Tlaib and Republicans will find themselves more and more marginalized.  We can only hope that the majority of Americans watching this disaster unfold wake up and realize that intolerance for thee ultimately leads to intolerance for me.  Democrats do not care about Americans' rights — they seek totalitarian power.  They need to be stopped.

Julian Castro Pounds the Table, Demanding Abortion for Men, Too.  [Scroll down]  In this case, I guess Julián Castro's support for transgender abortion contains some semblance of warped logic.  Not that this highly implausible and as yet scientifically impossible scenario is worth mentioning in a presidential debate when you are already limited by time and must choose your words wisely.  And not that there are other more practical, more pressing issues to be dealt with.  But that's what you get from a political party that wants to fund the kinds of procedures that could put babies inside men's bodies, while simultaneously fighting for laws that would allow these same babies to get ripped out again.

Mastercard to unleash massive identity theft wave across America by allowing "gender fluid" individuals to use any name they want on their credit cards.  A recent Mastercard company announcement explains that many members of the LGBTQIA+ community are experiencing "major pain" from having to use credit cards, debit cards, or prepaid cards that don't "reflect their true identity."  So, Mastercard plans to fix this by allowing LGBTQIA+s to use any made-up name they want — swinging wide open the door for mass identity theft.

The Editor says...
Identity theft is one thing, but this opens the door to fraud, most of all.  One cannot take advantage of credit if the customer, the merchant, and the bank can't even agree on the customer's name.  Anyone who is so confused and so mercurial about his or her own name should have a credit rating of zero.  Pay in cash or be gone.

Woman's 'Hail Satan' invocation prompts walkout from Alaska town meeting.  Several government officials and attendees walked out of an Alaska government meeting south of Anchorage this week when an official who's also a member of the Satanic Temple ended the opening prayer with "Hail Satan."  The Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly's previous policy stated that those delivering the invocation must be a member of a recognized church, but the rules were changed last October when Alaska's Supreme Court decided in favor of the ACLU that the policy was unconstitutional, according to Alaskan Public Media.  Iris Fontana, the Satanic Temple member, was one of the plaintiffs in the case.  An atheist and a Jewish woman were also involved in the lawsuit.

'Hail Satan' opening prayer at Alaska government meeting prompts walkouts, protest.  Several attendees at a government meeting open to the public in Alaska walked out in protest after an opening prayer praised Satan.  The Associated Press reports the prayer, where a woman declared "Hail Satan," was given by Satanic Temple member Iris Fontana, who won the right to open the meeting with an invocation of her choice.

Student Gets Kicked Out of Class For Saying There's Only Male and Female.  This is just an amazing video to watch.  Hat tip to Rod Dreher for covering it.  The student, Murray, tells the teacher that there are only two genders, male and female.  The teacher tells him that the national authority says otherwise.  [Video clip]

Progressives Seek To Make Segregation Great Again.  The progressive left touts segregation on college campuses.  You have probably already heard of minority students requesting separate dorm facilities and safe spaces.  But there is another aspect of college life that the left wants to segregate:  Graduations.  Virginia Tech University recently started offering ten segregated graduation ceremonies that are separated by race, sexuality, and other identity groups.  Students are allowed to participate in the graduation of their choosing.  The ceremonies are open to anyone who wishes to attend, but the participants must fall into the right category.

Marijuana damages adolescent brains, health professionals write in op-ed.  Two health professionals penned an op-ed in The New York Times on Sunday that despite society's shift on marijuana use, it does not change the fact that the drug is not safe for high school and college students.  Kenneth L. Davis, the president and chief executive of the Mount Sinai Health System, and Mary Jeanne Kreek, the head of Laboratory of the Biology of Addictive Diseases at Rockefeller University, cited studies that show a "deleterious impact on cognitive development in adolescents."

San Francisco and Los Angeles.  If you are planning a visit to San Francisco or Los Angeles, may we ask why?  On a casual walk in downtown San Francisco or Los Angeles, tourists will encounter streets and sidewalks strewn with drug needles, garbage, and feces.  Gang activity is high in both cities.  Both cities find themselves saddled with liberal/progressive governmental policies.  As one serious result, living conditions for low-income residents of San Francisco and Los Angeles routinely reach toxic levels.

Reality is Not an Option.  What is "equality before the law" when some people are entitled to extra protections under hate crime laws?  What is "basic human decency" when, to be a victim, one must identify a group of people as oppressors and revile them publicly as a class? [...] There isn't the slightest evidence that illiterate third-worlders or a tattoo-defaced generation of the sexually confused are inclined to be either tolerant or productive citizens.  There is plenty of evidence that many of these disorderly creatures have good old-fashioned tribal axes to grind.

Texas town overrun with crime and disease.  The mayor has had enough.  Uvalde is a small town of 17,000 inhabitants, and they are now overrun by illegal immigrants and an international cartel smuggling operation.  Uvalde is 40-60 miles from the border, but it might as well be right at the border.  "We are in no man's land.  The state is not doing anything; the federal government is not doing anything," the mayor, who is begging the politicians to get involved, said.  "We are getting nothing.  I've lived here all my life and have never seen anything like this.  The people in the communities are getting scared.  What is coming that we don't see?  Who knows?  People up north and in D.C. have no clue what is going on here.  They don't realize that these people are not being screened for diseases.  We're fed up."  Situated at the crossroads of major highways coming up from border towns in the Laredo and Del Rio border sectors, Uvalde has now become a dumping ground for migrants coming north.  And they are not just coming from Central America.

Venezuela: hyperinflation leads to new banknotes for second time in a year.  Venezuela is releasing new banknotes for the second time in less than a year, the central bank said on Wednesday, after hyperinflation eroded the effects of an August 2018 monetary overhaul meant to improve availability of cash.  Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, last year cut five zeroes off the currency and prices.  The move was supposed to ease shortages of cash that pushed most of the economy toward debit and credit card operations and put heavy strain on digital commerce platforms.  Banknotes of 10,000, 20,000 and 50,000 bolivar denominations will begin circulating on Thursday [6/13/2019] to "make the payment system more efficient and facilitate commercial transactions", the central bank said in statement.

Minneapolis' Sacred Stupidity.  [T]oday's generation of Democrat machine politicians in charge of our cities don't bother trying to sell themselves as capable administrators anymore.  How can they, when Los Angeles' trash piles rival those of Kinshasa, homeless bums micturate on passing taxicabs on New York streets, it's recommended that one wear galoshes on the streets of San Francisco so as to avoid ruining one's Ferragamos by stepping in freshly-lain human feculence, and New Orleans is inundated each time there's a hard rain because the city's pumps and drainage infrastructure are virtually untouched by improvement despite billions in spending for just that purpose?

Deep Blue Connecticut Is A Model For How Not To Run An Economy.  Connecticut is currently facing a $3.7 billion-plus deficit, but the problem is much worse than it looks.  Research found that Connecticut has the worst-funded pension system in the country for the second year in a row.  Unfunded pension liabilities amount to $117.7 billion and unfunded liabilities for other post-employment benefits (OPEB) amount to $36.7 billion.  While the 6.35 percent general sales tax rate isn't raised, the new budget expands the sales tax base to include more goods and services.  The sales tax would expand to include parking, dry cleaning, laundry, interior design services and safety apparel.

Brown and Out in Beverly Hills.  Leftists advance incrementally.  Their template is as simple as it is predictable:  Ask for a little, and swear that the demands will end there.  Most regular folks will give in because decent people generally seek compromise.  But to leftists, compromise is merely a temporary step, a strategy.  "We don't want gay marriage, we just want equal partner benefits!  Civil unions will shut us up."  "Don't Ask, Don't Tell is fine.  It's not like we want the military to pay for tranny surgeries!"  "Gender discrimination laws will not lead to the government forcing women to let men use their bathrooms."

Life In the Socialist Paradise of Bernie Sanders and AOC.  Venezuela is the latest chapter in the long story of socialist crimes against humanity.  Venezuela reminds us how long a country can circle the drain, destroyed by socialism but still hanging on by its fingernails.  Reuters, a liberal news source, has the latest on Venezuela's long goodbye, but never mentions the fact that it is socialism that destroyed what once was one of the world's richest countries.

Who Are the Big Babies Now.  This is the mediocracy at work.  They revile greatness to mask their own inadequacies.  Hence, contrived hate crimes, fat shaming, participation medals, identity politics, demand for rights already accrued, for lopsided equality, for affirmative action, resentment politics, no-platforming, and other corrosions of democratic health.

The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness.  Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness.  The number of people in the United States living alone has gone through the studio-apartment roof.  A study released by the insurance company Cigna last spring made headlines with its announcement:  "Only around half of Americans say they have meaningful, daily face-to-face social interactions."  Loneliness, public-health experts tell us, is killing as many people as obesity and smoking.

California Is The Future The Liberal Elite Wants For You.  [Scroll down]  Already, petty crime has been effectively legalized.  Crooks get a free pass on the first $950 a day they steal. [...] And now pot's effectively legal here, which is spectacular.  Just what Cali needed — more people on a drug that makes them dumber and lazier.  Take a walk down the street and see the sights!  Look, there's a schizo with his cargo shorts around his ankles baying at the billboard informing you about how no human being is illegal!  Oh, and there's another homeless druggie muttering to himself about alien carrots stealing his vital essences as he pushes along his stolen shopping cart heaped with refuse.  If you're appalled or distressed by this, you're the bad guy.  Caring means letting lunatics and addicts wallow in the elements enslaved by their insanity and/or sickness.  Shame on you for wanting your kids to be able to play outside.  Hypodermic needles and piles of human waste on the sidewalk are just part of the price you must pay to dwell in the sun.

Law enforcement, media changed standards for Trump.  One of the more unfortunate effects of the Trump-Russia investigation — and there have been many — is the weakening of traditional standards of argument and proof in the public debate over allegations that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to fix the 2016 election.  (Just for the record:  It didn't.)  In particular, angry disputes about the president have done terrible harm to the principle that an investigator, be it a journalist or a prosecutor, should meet at least some standard of proof before leveling an accusation.

Perfect storm brews in Portland Maine as Mayor, Council welcome illegals.  Currently, there are three major factors leading up to the storm in Portland.  All three involve illegal immigration:  [#1] Portland has had an incredible influx of illegal immigrants over the last few years.  [#2] Immigrants are supported by a heavily strained, taxpayer-funded city welfare system.  [#3] City officials are encouraging the situation while being unable to provide satisfactory solutions to the problems they have created.

Green Policies Turned California A Charred Black.  More than half of California's roughly 105 million acres are owned by the federal and state governments.  It is on these sprawling parcels that the wildfires tend to rage before devouring private land, homes, and businesses.  Public lands "have proved far more vulnerable to forest fires than properties owned by private groups," Hoover Institution scholar Richard Epstein wrote in California's Forest Fire Tragedy. [...] The loudest voices assign blame for the fires to man-made climate change.  But the human activity primarily responsible for the destructive spread of wildfires is public policy favoring burned timber over harvested timber.  While maybe well-intended, laws inspired by the 1970s environmentalist movement, which is determined to make sure saw blades and trees never meet, have stoked the furnaces.

San Francisco:  The Radical Left in Charge.  In America's largest coastal metropolises, Democrats rule.  For all intents and purposes, there are no Republicans.  Today, for instance, the New York City school commissioner is hard at work trying to destroy the city's public schools.  He is firing white administrators.  He is telling school principals to give special privileges to minority children.  He wants to dumb down New York's premier high schools, in the name of diversity.  And yet, New York is not quite in the league of San Francisco, now become America's urban basket case.  It is worth noting that the city is home to House Speaker Pelosi, who is hard at work slandering the president of the United States.

Leftist Heartbreak in San Francisco.  Like most big cities, San Francisco is poorly run, stridently progressive, and overly regulated.  Unlike many other big U.S. cities, it's located on one of the most scenic spots on Earth and has delightful year-round weather.  I take no pleasure in seeing such a glorious place run into the ground by bad leaders (and voters), even if I occasionally struggle with Schadenfreude.  But oddly enough, San Francisco's harshest critics these days are not on the Right.  To many progressives, San Francisco has turned from a source of their love and affection into a painful disappointment.

'Sky-High' Trash Piles Found In Los Angeles, Raising Concerns About Typhus.  Apparently, problems with waste are not limited to San Francisco.  NBC4 reported Monday [5/20/2019] that "sky-high" piles of rotting trash were found around Los Angeles, leading some to worry about a new typhus outbreak.  "Even the city's most notorious trash pile, located between downtown LA's busy Fashion and Produce districts, continues to be a magnet for rats after it was cleaned up months ago.  The rodents can carry typhus-infected fleas, which can spread the disease to humans through bacteria rubbed into the eyes or cuts and scrapes on the skin, resulting in severe flu-like symptoms," the outlet reported.  [Video clip]

San Francisco's Quality-of-Life Toll.  San Francisco is the nation's leader in property crime.  Burglary, larceny, shoplifting, and vandalism are included under this ugly umbrella.  The rate of car break-ins is particularly striking: in 2017 over 30,000 reports were filed, and the current average is 51 per day.  Other low-level offenses, including drug dealing, street harassment, encampments, indecent exposure, public intoxication, simple assault, and disorderly conduct are also rampant.  Many in law enforcement blame the crime wave on Proposition 47, which in 2014 downgraded possession of illegal narcotics for personal use and theft of anything under $950 in value from felonies to misdemeanors.  Anti-incarceration advocates disagree with that argument, but theft is indisputably booming, and narcotics activity is exploding on sidewalks, parks, and playgrounds.  When compounded with other troubles for which the city is now infamous (human feces, filth, and homelessness, which is up 17 percent since 2017), San Franciscans find themselves surrounded by squalor and disorder.

Surprise! Learning about Cotton in School Is Racist Now.  I currently live in Arlington, Va., and do not vote in local elections.  It's not that I don't want to vote, but there is literally no one [...] on the ballots who could even pretend to be anywhere close to being a conservative.  The problem isn't my lack of desire, it's that I don't have anyone to vote for.  As one of the most progressively leftist communities in this country, my local government is completely devoid of any representation of my beliefs and values.  So, I was not surprised to read ARLNow's article about an Arlington elementary school teacher who has found herself in hot water for having her students study cotton.

Planting of Cotton at Arlington Elementary School Prompts Discussion.  A cotton plant growing at Campbell Elementary School drew criticism online today, but Arlington Public Schools said allegations that staff were going to make kids "pick cotton" was a misunderstanding.  "At no time, never, was the school going to have students pick cotton," said APS spokesman Frank Bellavia.

NY Times:  Venezuela's Economic Devastation Comparable To Countries Destroyed By War.  Democratic socialism is working in Venezuela.  It's working to make everyone miserable and hungry.  The sign in the photo [left] reads:  "Maduro is hunger."  The NY Times reports the economic decline Venezuelans are now experiencing is unsurpassed in the past 45 years outside of countries in the midst of war.

The Editor says...
Socialism doesn't work in Venezuela.  It also doesn't work in Zimbabwe or Cuba.

Death Always Follows Democrat Policies.  In my upcoming first book, 10 Warning Signs Your Child is Becoming a Democrat, I avoid policy and hone in on parenting.  I believe that if my playbook is followed, we can ensure that future generations of our youth don't grow up to be Democrats.  Substantive health care fixes, cures for cancer and AIDS, and the first man and woman on Mars will be as useless as a Willard Romney endorsement if we don't win the youth battle within the four walls of our homes.  I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the abhorrently increasing zeal for abortions during any stage of pregnancy.  The residual effects of Democrat polices, in addition to producing killer kids, also kill our unborn.  All of it is by design; nothing in politics is coincidental.

America's largest cities drowning in debt, with Chicago leading the way, study finds.  America's 10 largest cities, largely Democrat strongholds, are drowning in municipal debt, according to a new report from government watchdog Truth in Accounting.  The report sought out "to determine what ... overlapping financial entities mean for taxpayers' bottom line."  Truth in Accounting said its purpose was to "calculate the various bills (and surpluses, when available) at the city government level and divide them out to determine a per-Taxpayer Burden."  The two cities with the highest burden:  Chicago and New York City; Chicago's combined taxpayer burden:  $119,110; New York City's combined taxpayer burden:  $85,600.

Life if the Democrats take control.  Democrats back in power would continue to appoint Leftist Judges who would continue to limit Conservative speech in the open forum or on public media such as the Radio.  These same judges would continue to tear away our basic foundations where they find Religion an enemy of their goals.  Consider what life would be like if the face book options for gender become law.  Facebook gives its members the choice of 58 types of gender identification.  Are you ready to deal with that if the Democrats continue to push such that concept.  Marriage continues to be under assault.  TV shows are now glorifying the 3 person marriage.  Do not believe me?  Watch SWAT on CBS.

Why Have Department of Defense Suicides Spiked?  The Department of Defense has a suicide problem.  Thank Presidents Clinton and Obama[.]  Prior to 1993, the Department of Defense (DOD) used to screen recruits, officer candidates, and service academy entrants for mental, personality, and suicide behavior disorders.  Now they don't. [...] When men and women had enlistment physicals, they were evaluated by a physician for obvious physical defects and to also see if they had an apparent mental or personality disorder.  Any potential recruit screened with mental, personality, and suicide (and a range of other) behavior disorders were considered unfit for service.  Then President Clinton signed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell law.  DOD's policy that screened for personality disorders and mental illnesses during the pre-enlistment physical was terminated as a function of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell law.  The law removed all screening for DSM categories of homosexuality, sexual and personality disorders and mental illnesses.

The Destructive Equality Act of 2019.  My dictionary defines psychosis as "a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality."  We now have a majority of members of Congress who are prepared to pass into law that the sex individuals are born with — their chromosomal and physical reality — will take a back seat to how those individuals choose to define their own sexual identity.  Henceforth, we'll be done with the idea that there is some objective reality independent of what of any particular individual decides it is.  I once complained that our society was denying morality — right and wrong.  Now we're beyond this.  We're denying reality in its entirety.

Why are so many Democrats so reprehensible in exactly the same way?  For the past fifty years, the imposition of multiculturalism and all that it has entailed, two generations have been taught that tolerance of all things must supersede all other values.  Ergo, we've arrived at a place in which the bulk of one of our two political parties has, if inadvertently, embraced evil in the name of tolerance — radical Islam, all variations of sexual orientation including pedophilia, the absolutist notion that all minorities are victims, all women are victims.  We must now accept the trope that all white men are bad, a blight on civilized society.  How destructive is this to our country?  It is devastating, and they do it purposefully, these Democrats.  They have become the embodiment of Cloward-Piven and Saul Alinsky.

New York Blocked A New Pipeline And Guess What They Just Found Out.  The "Keep it in the ground" crowd has a lot of influence with the Democrats who control the government.  That why, back in 2013, when the new Constitution Pipeline was proposed to carry natural gas from Pennsylvania's rich shale oil fields to New York, activists were able to block the construction despite it already having been approved by federal regulators.  Similarly, when National Grid (the local energy consortium) requested an extension to the Williams Co.  Transco pipeline, they were also tied up because of the outcry from environmental activists.  Here comes the surprise that nobody could have possibly seen coming.  The city and its surrounding downstate region are still expanding with new construction projects, but their energy suppliers have told them that they will not be able to supply natural gas to any new customers because they're already at capacity.

A World Without Morality.  If the theoretical end point of liberal democracy is a world without boundaries, physical or cultural, then it is a world without morality.  After all, morality is a world of fences and gates that control human behavior within the closed social system.  In order for there to be a moral order, there must be order and that must include boundaries.  Once the boundaries lose their purpose, the fences and gates are simply gravestones in a cemetery of a long forgotten people.  No one cares if the kids knock over the grave stones.  In fact, in a world without form, the hunt for something to level becomes increasingly urgent as there is less and less to knock over.  Once the statues of the great men of the past are removed, their names must be removed.  Once the basics of family life have been destroyed through divorce and feminism, the innocence of childhood is attacked via the degeneracy of transgenderism.

Sanctuary Laws and the Death of E Pluribus Unum.  "Sanctuary" laws that shield illegal aliens may have the veneer of compassion, but their implementation is setting the stage for confrontations between federal and local law enforcement officers with conflicting orders.  The short-term result could be dead or wounded officers.  In a broader context, these laws raise the specter of a constitutional crisis and a breakdown of social order.  Sanctuary laws are an existential threat to America and need to end. [...] Sanctuary laws are a gateway to chaos.  If such rebellion is allowed to stand, are there any limits at all?

'MeToo' Hysteria:  Handshakes In The Workplace Could Be Next On Chopping Block.  Employers seeking to avoid lawsuits in the hypersensitive age of the #MeToo movement are looking to ban even the most innocuous professional courtesies, including handshakes.  Last week, Kate Palmer, associate director of advisory at human resources consultancy Peninsula and an alleged "expert" on the matter, said that employers may soon seek to ban "all forms of physical contact to avoid confusion about what kind of touch is appropriate," according to The Sun of Britain.

Here's how many square feet you can afford to rent on a median income in these popular US cities.  You may make the big bucks in the big city, but that doesn't necessarily mean your pad is going to reflect that.  When it comes to finding the perfect spacious apartment, you have to take into account both your location and annual salary.  And in some cities, such as New York City, Boston or Los Angeles, you may just have to accept that you'll always feel a little cramped.

Watch Former Fed Prosecutor Smash Anti-Trump Commentator's Biased Version Of "Truth".  The facts are undeniable regarding the Mueller investigation.  After nearly two years and tens of millions of dollars wasted, there was no collusion and no obstruction — period.  The media is now working double-time to try and spin that reality into something else.  If they are allowed to do so this is no longer America because if a president isn't free to do his job then none of us are.  If you support attacking President Trump then you support attacking everything this country once stood for — namely freedom, liberty, and the right to self-expression.  And it has been the Democrat Party and the media who have created this very real division that is now tearing the nation apart.

A mysterious condition makes marijuana users violently ill.  Before the meal began, Moon joked with Jagger that it would be her last supper.  A few hours later, she was at home vomiting uncontrollably.  She'd spend the next few days in the hospital.  Moon had previously been diagnosed with a condition called cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, or CHS.  Very little is known about CHS, which was first identified in the early 2000s.  The recognized hallmarks of the condition are heavy, consistent marijuana use, violent vomiting and nausea, and a tendency to use extremely hot baths or showers for relief.

The Editor says...
Romans 6:23.

Transgender Rights:  Judge Warns Girls Have No Right to 'Visual Bodily Privacy'.  A federal judge is allowing a lawsuit against transgender facilities in a school district to proceed, but warned the student-plaintiffs that, if the government allows boys who claim to be female to use the girls' bathrooms and locker rooms, then the girls have no right to "visual bodily privacy."  Judge Jorge Alonso of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division is allowing a lawsuit to proceed against the school district that adopted the Obama-era transgender policy permitting boys claiming to be female to use the girls' bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms.

San Francisco's Slow-Motion Suicide.  The city's current concentration of wealth likely doesn't represent the beginning of a golden-if-sinful era, but the end.  Magnificent in the distance, San Francisco is now shockingly ugly up close.  In the decade I have lived here, the city has achieved the seemingly impossible:  It has combined the expensive and the bland and the appalling into a new form of decadence.

West Virginia Leads Nation in Homeownership Rate; New York and California Rank Last.  West Virginia ranked No. 1 among the 50 states for its homeownership rate in 2018, which was 74.7 percent, according to new housing data released by the U.S. Census Bureau.  New York and California ranked 50th and 49th with homeownership rates of 51.0 and 55.1, according to Table 15 in the Census Bureau's Annual Statistics on Housing Vacancies and Homeownership.  The Census Bureau calculates the homeownership rate by dividing the number of owner occupied housing units by the total number of occupied housing units.

How Chicago Democrats Created Trump's Border Wall Problem.  After World War II outmigration became a concern for all big northern Democrat-controlled cities since the growth of suburbs and the baby boom prompted young couples to leave big cities and seek more space for their families.  But this outmigration created a huge problem for the big Democratic cities from Boston to Los Angeles: how to restore and stabilize their city's population and keep control of Congress.  The solution was to allow illegal immigration and support them with benefits.  Providing illegal immigrants with benefits such as food stamps and housing were crucial, since illegal immigrants were not well educated and did not earn enough income to be self-sufficient.  This concern prompted President Lyndon Baines Johnson to establish the Great Society welfare programs, and he himself admitted the programs were intended to strengthen America's big cities.  LBJ stopped the agricultural guest worker program, called the Bracero program, just at the time he started the Great Society.  This allowed illegal immigrants to come to Chicago and not worry about being educated well enough to support themselves.  The lack of income was made up through free benefits.

Doctors Are Now Giving 8-Year-Old Girls Testosterone, Claiming They're 'Transgender'.  According to medical doctors and a parent of a gender non-conforming child speaking on a panel for the Heritage Foundation, their quest to stop dangerous transgender treatments on minors has exposed that "government-funded research now allows wrong sex hormones such as testosterone to be given to girls as young as 8," reported The Christian Post on Tuesday [4/2/2019].

I have my 'Trump 2020' cap!  Without fear of punishment for their crimes, the enraged Deep State is now trying to remove Trump by absurdly claiming he obstructed justice.  These people are relentless and evil.  If Trump is not re-elected, Democrats will pass a law to kill babies after they are born.  Sharia law will gain more strongholds in our culture.  Our economy will tank due to job-killing crazy green policies.  Single-payer health care will empower Democrats to dictate who lives and who dies.  The LGBTQ agenda will be forced down our throats.  Reading and quoting the Bible will be illegal.  These are not exaggerations, folks.  All of these anti-freedom and anti-Christian initiatives are being pushed right now by Democrats.  President Trump is the main obstacle, courageously standing in their way.  The Democrats have become the party of full-blown lawlessness.  Democrat-controlled sanctuary cities boldly break our immigration laws.  Democrats encourage illegals to break our immigration laws at the border.

One Bad Apple.  Globalism, multiculturalism, and socialism have done the trick:  destabilized traditional family values with all these new mores like same-sex marriage, gender-neutral bathrooms, and prepubescent transgender rights.  But basically people feel mocked and set aside by the elite who run this town, those in City Hall, the media, and the hatchet-faced women of glossy magazines.  Pseudo-lefty-trendy magazines like The New Yorker fail to address the fact that Hispanic, Chinese, Korean, even African-American societies are conservative by nature.  These phonies pretend to speak for the underdog, but converse only with each other.

'Seattle Is Dying' because Liberalism Is Killing It.  If you haven't seen the KOMO News special Seattle Is Dying, you need to.  The hour-long show does a sound job of depicting the ugly decline of one of the most beautiful places in America.  However, the piece misses the forest for the nasty, dirty, twisted trees.  Part of the root of the problem in Seattle is political, but Seattle Is Dying virtually ignores the liberal politics behind Seattle's foul decline.  As John Sexton at Hot Air put it, "[t]here's really no escaping the fact that the current situation is the result of political decisions."

Look at the science and stop the march toward legalized marijuana.  Despite myths to the contrary, marijuana is a serious health risk.  It does indeed result in unhealthy dependence among nearly one-third of users.  It is a definite risk (perhaps deadly) for lung health, and it is especially dangerous for heart health.  Some studies also show that it substantially increases risk for a form of testicular cancer.  To be specific on heart risks, the National Institute on Drug Abuse reports:  "Limited evidence suggests that a person's risk of heart attack during the first hour after smoking marijuana is nearly five times his or her usual risk."  Meanwhile, the measurable consequences for states that have legalized recreational marijuana have been bracing.

Green Insanity Is Flooding Towns and Destroying Lives.  Having written extensively in these pages on the catastrophic flooding of the Missouri River basin in 2011, I believe that the occasion of this present flood disaster plaguing Nebraska, Iowa, and South Dakota has given rise to many questions.  Foremost, I have been asked if there is an environmentalist element, as there was in 2011, when the Corps of Engineers intentionally permitted the flooding of eight states in order to further their highest priority (as per the Master Water Control Manual) of "habitat restoration for riverine wildlife" at the expense of the original top priority, flood control, and the preservation of human life and property.

United Airlines Goes Gender-Neutral or Whatever.  In over a century of manned airflight, there's one nagging problem that has never been addressed:  Misgendering.  That ends today.

Leftists Have Turned San Francisco Into A Nightmare Of Drugs And Homelessness.  There's no denying that San Francisco is one of America's most beautiful and recognizable cities, but it has been racked with problems thanks to leftist policies that have driven drug addiction and homelessness through the roof.  The Daily Wire's Kassy Dillon and Colton Haas traveled to the city by the bay and spoke to experts and homeless people about the conditions that have encouraged the spread of drugs, disease, and more.  During their trip, they could see the awful condition the city is currently in.

More than a third of New Yorkers say they can't afford to live here.  More than a third of all city residents say they can't afford to live anywhere in the state — much less the Big Apple — and believe economic hardship will send them packing in five years or less, according to a dismal new poll.  That's 41 percent of city dwellers who say they can't cope with New York's high cost of living, according to a Quinnipiac poll published Wednesday [3/20/2019].  Separately, 41 percent fear they'll be "forced" to pull up stakes and seek greener pastures where the economic climate is more welcoming.

Changing the Rules.  The news cycle is so unnaturally shrill as if it was the status quo itself was screaming.  From unenacted policies to the automatic assignment of blame to Western civilization the news cycle has become one continuous rant.  Referring to the root causes of the Christchurch mosque massacre a Slate article argued: "we are a nation born of shame.  A white-majority Australia exists only as the result of a genocidal invasion."  Speech has never been more dangerous nor points of view more opposed.  When the demand isn't "why didn't you denounce this" or "why didn't you apologize for that" it is may be "why did you misgender me?"  You can go to jail for saying "he" instead of "she".

Major Science Journal Embraces 'Nature Rights' Movement.  Nature rights" is a hard-leftwing and anti-free market movement — once on the fringe but now growing increasingly mainstream within environmentalism — that doesn't seek tighter legal regulations over our use of the natural world, but rather, advocates personalizing nature toward the end of granting flora, fauna, ecosystems, and geological features human-type rights.  In a saner era, the idea of granting rights to "nature" would be laughed off the public stage.  But it's not funny.  The nature rights movement is serious, it is growing in power and influence, and it becoming alarmingly successful.  Indeed, the movement has made important strides in the last few years:  four rivers have been granted enforceable rights, including the Amazon and Ganges.  So too have glaciers.  An orangutan was declared a "non-human person" in Argentina and granted a writ of habeas corpus to be released from a zoo to a sanctuary.  Most recently, a special election in Toledo, Ohio passed that granted "rights" to Lake Erie.

President Trump Saves Thousands of Lives.  So what happened in 2015 and 2016 to cause the violent crime rate, including the homicide rate, to rise after decades of decline?  I can't think of any explanation other than the Black Lives Matter movement and the relentless attacks on law enforcement that it engendered, which were supported by the Obama administration.  But what happened when Donald Trump took over in the White House?  The homicide and violent crime rates began to fall again.  If the New York Times's projection is correct, the second year of the Trump administration saw a steeper decline in the homicide rate.  Again, what could possibly have caused this change?  I can't think of a plausible theory other than the Trump administration's renewed support for law enforcement and the waning of the anti-police Black Lives Matter movement.  Something happened beginning in 2017 that has saved thousands of lives.  If it wasn't the new administration in Washington, what was it?

The financial collapse of the Democratic mayors.  Recently, non-government organization Truth in Accounting published a report about the financial condition of the 75 largest cities of America.  As it turns out, 63 out of 75 cities in America were not able to pay bills at the end of the fiscal year of 2017.  The final result of this study was the calculation of the burden borne by taxpayers in these American cities.  The formula is simple:  the financial balance of the city (positive or negative) is divided by the number of inhabitants.  The result is a good assessment of how effectively the city authorities work, depending on the positive or negative financial balance of the city per capita.

KOMO News' Special: Seattle Is Dying.  "People didn't use to use the word embarrassing about Seattle, but they use it a lot now," the narrator to a new KOMO News special titled "Seattle is Dying" says.  The focus of the special is homelessness and the ways in which it has changed the city.  There's a section featuring angry residents of one area of the city who are screaming at their representatives for action.  They want the tent cities managed and they're tired of calling the police only to find out the police can arrest people but those same people will be back on the street, sometimes within hours.

7 Reasons Why the Equality Act Is Anything But.  [#1] It would penalize Americans who don't affirm new sexual norms or gender ideology.  Jack Phillips' case went all the way to the Supreme Court after the Colorado Civil Rights Commission accused the bakery owner of discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation when the self-described cake artist declined to create a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding.  The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, but le the law in question, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, intact.  Until last week, Phillips was in court again defending himself against the same agency under the same law.  The day after the Supreme Court ruled in Phillips' case, Autumn Scardina, a lawyer who identifies as transgender, requested that he create a "gender transition cake."  After Phillips declined, the state Civil Rights Commission found probable cause under the law that the baker had discriminated on the basis of gender identity.  Thankfully, the commission last week dropped the case, and Phillips agreed to drop his own lawsuit accusing the state agency of harassing him for his Christian beliefs.

Antifa-Controlled Portland Police Bureau Faces Mass 'Exodus' As 50+ Officers Quit Over Insane and Dangerous Far Left Policies.  As Portland trends further and further from Democrat to Marxist, the rank-and-file officers of the Portland Police Bureau have been put in the unenviable position of being ordered by the mayor to cater to the far left protesters and rioters like Antifa.  At the same time the officers also face a more and more irate public, angry at the police bureau's propensity for ceding the city to the protesters on a regular basis.

From Democratic Socialism to Total Destruction in Venezuela.  During the 1970s, Venezuela's per capita income was higher than the sum of all other Andean nations, including Chile.  The country had the lowest taxes in the region, coupled with a stable democracy.  Since the US left the gold standard, only the Swiss franc and the Venezuelan bolivar managed to maintain their value.  In 1980 the Venezuelan bolivar was worth more against the U.S. dollar than in 1880.  It remained that way until the 1973 elections when both the legislative and executive branches came under the power of a single democratic socialist party, Acción Democrática, while simultaneously the Arab oil embargo that year produced a huge increase in oil prices.  [A]s a result government revenues increased by a factor of 4.  The government than embarked in "democratic socialism", systematically applying the same theories supported now in the USA by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Democrat Lawmaker and Teamster President: 'Chaos' in Schools Since Obama-Era Discipline Policy.  A Democrat state senator and a Teamsters president said the dramatic drop in school suspensions in New York City since the Obama-era policy urging more lenient forms of discipline for minority students has led to "chaos" and a lack of "accountability" for dangerous behavior.  New York state Sen. Leroy Comrie told CBS New York that schools in his Queens district are losing the confidence of parents.  "They're taking their children to other schools even if they have to pay for private schools," he said.  "They don't want to have to have their children in an environment where they're assaulted and there's no accountability."

Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and the Leftist Takeover of the College Campus.  When one observes the modern-day college campus, one observes nothing but the Marxist-leftist indoctrination of America's youth. [...] One has to look no farther than Boston University to find courses with titles such as "Dismantling White Privilege, Power, and Supremacy."  Any course that attempts to induce guilt for one's ethnicity is undeniably subjective in nature.  Consider the debates on sex, sexuality, and human physiology.  There is arguably mainstream societal acceptance that there are more than two "genders" and that sex and sexuality are in no way linked.  Furthermore, if one even questions the eligibility of male athletes in female-only sports, he will often be labeled a bigot, or at the very least old-fashioned.  No empirical research is needed to realize that much of American history is now scrutinized rather than honored.  American military involvement is commonly preached as oppression rather than liberation.  Everything from the nuclear family to supporting ICE is under scrutiny.  There is a systematic dismantling of American values that were once accepted as objectively good and now maligned as evil.  When objective truth and reality no longer exist, the Left can rewrite the rules to society — and it has.  Where do all of these ideas come from?  Primarily college campuses.

Blacks and the Democrats.  What has been the payoff to the black community for religiously voting for Democratic leadership?  To start, although blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population, they account for nearly 50% of the homicides.  According to the National Council for Home Safety and Security, the top 10 most dangerous cities in the United States for 2018 had Democrats as mayors, and according to the 2019 American Community Survey, 9 out of the top 10 poorest cities also have Democrats as mayors.  Many of these cities have the largest population of African-Americans in the country.

The Problem Is Legislative Overreach, Not Executive.  In 1975, two years after Richard Nixon negotiated the Paris Accords and ended the war in the Vietnam, the Communist North Vietnamese reneged and invaded South Vietnam.  Instead of defending the South as Nixon promised we would do in this event, President Gerald Ford looked on helplessly as the Democratic Congress would not permit it.  At the same time, the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and turned the country into a death camp.  Because the Democrats hated Nixon and Republicans, and saw no political advantage to intervening, they permitted our allies to be slaughtered and enslaved.  A year later, in 1976, Ford signed the National Emergency Powers Act, which would allow special powers for the president should this kind of emergency arise and the legislature decides to play politics as people die or great injustices occur.  Trump Is Right on the Law and the Merits President Trump's recent decision to invoke this act and fund a border wall was in response to the Democrats in Congress refusing to cooperate.

Students Across US Now Majoring In Marijuana At Colleges.  Colleges are now adding cannabis to their curriculum.  Grace DeNoya is used to getting snickers when people learn she's majoring in marijuana.  "My friends make good-natured jokes about getting a degree in weed," said DeNoya, one of the first students in a new four-year degree program in medicinal plant chemistry at Northern Michigan University.  "I say, 'No, it's a serious degree, a chemistry degree first and foremost.  It's hard work.  Organic chemistry is a bear.'"

Socialism destroys prom:  School officials ban kids from riding in limos because everyone can't afford it.  Socialism invariably destroys everything it touches, including even proms.  Back in the day, some kids used to enjoy saving up enough money through the semester so they could rent a lavish limo for their year-end senior prom.  But thanks to the socialist mindset of one New Jersey school's officials, this tradition is no more.  According to Trenton radio station WKXW, officials at Lakeland Regional High School made a decision this year to ban students from driving to their prom or renting a limo.  Instead, every student must pay $15 to be driven to the prom at Rockleigh Country Club on a chaperoned bus.

Male Christian Wrestler Forfeits State Championship Spot Rather Than Wrestle Girls.  An 18-year-old high school wrestler in Colorado has given up a potential spot in the Colorado high school state championships because he chooses not to wrestle two young ladies saying it violates how he was raised to treat women.  Brendan Johnston of The Classical Academy in Colorado says those values — despite some light complaints from at least one of the young ladies he would have faced — are informed by his Christianity and, after a discussion with his coach and some deep thought on the subject, he's decided to stand behind his principles despite knowing it would mean a shortened competition.

Girls' sports being decimated by biological males claiming to be females.  There are only two genders in this world of ours, male and female, and it doesn't matter how someone "identifies," that biological fact is established and unalterable. [...] With that being said, the Left is nevertheless hard at work trying to convince us that gender is a 'fluid' thing and in some cases, an outright choice, so old societal constructs like "male" and "female" sports are no longer necessary or relevant.  That's why they go along with allowing biological males to participate in (and dominate) all-female events simply because they 'identify' as a girl, claiming — remarkably and unbelievably — that there are no physical differences between the sexes.

From Roy Rogers to Infanticide.  America has moved on.  Democrats, Hollywood, and fake news media say America no longer wants white guys like Roy Rogers on TV, infecting our kids with Christian morals and family values.  America has moved on from the biblical teaching that there are only two genders.  NYC recognizes 31 different genders.  Facebook gives customers 56 gender options.  Leftists believe they are far more sophisticated and intelligent than Bible believers and Americans living in flyover country.  Leftists say determining a baby's gender by its genitalia at birth is idiotic.  They say we must allow the child to evolve into the gender it wants to be.  This insane child abuse has led to hundreds of kids as young as four years old identifying as transgender and changing their sex.

If There's a Hair in Your Soup, Thank New York's Commission on Human Rights.  [Scroll down]  New York City had long ago rolled through the usual spectrum of legal protections for everyone from ex-cons to transgender men.  And the Commission has been desperately concocting new legal protections.  Its latest initiative declares that employers, including in the health care and food service industries, may not prevent employees, regardless of race, from wearing dreadlocks because that's racial discrimination.  The Commission's new guidelines insist that employees have "the right to keep hair in an uncut or untrimmed state."  Schools, public and private, are also forbidden from banning dreadlocks.

Emotional support pit bull mauled 5-year-old girl: suit.  A woman has filed a $1.1 million negligence lawsuit after her 5-year-old daughter was mauled by a pit bull — which was being used as an emotional support animal — at Portland International Airport when she petted it.  Mirna Gonzalez and her children were waiting for an Alaska Airlines flight to Texas on Dec. 18, 2017, when she stepped away to grab a coffee, the Washington Post reported.  While she was away, Gabriella asked if she could pet the dog, which suddenly bit her in the face and left her bloodied.

The Editor says...
The whole concept of "emotional support animals" came from the far left fringe.  Those whose only god is the government, and whose primary concern is their own feelings and emotions, must depend on warm and fuzzy animals to cope with situations that the rest of us consider routine.

Disarming Law Enforcement in Portland.  Portland today is much changed from the city that I grew up in.  Signs of urban decay and degradation are everywhere.  Streets are littered with trash, human feces, and drug needles.  Transient camps and villages dot the city.  Vagrants roam the streets and threaten pedestrians and businesses owners.  A Portland resident calls the police every 15 minutes to report an incident involving a homeless person.  Still, the city's progressive politicians and activists would like residents to believe that law-enforcement officials pose a greater threat than public anarchy.  Portland's attitude toward law enforcement has become so negative, in fact, that neighboring Washington County will no longer offer coordination or support to the Portland Police Bureau.

Based On 'Discrimination' Law, Iowa Jury Awards Trans Woman $120,000, Access To Male Prison Facilities.  A jury in Iowa has concluded that the state discriminated against a former Iowa Department of Corrections nurse because the employer wouldn't let her use the bathrooms with male employees.  The jury also said the Iowa Department of Corrections denied Jesse Vreogh health care coverage for "medically necessary surgery" — i.e. a double mastectomy to look more like a man.  The jury awarded Vreogh $120,000 for the "emotional distress" of both instances based on Iowa's sexual orientation and gender identity law, which was introduced in 2007 and signed by Democrat Gov. Chet Culver.

Venezuela Isn't Just a Failed State.  It's a Failure of the Left.  If we look at government spending as a percentage of GDP, Venezuela seems far from socialism.  In recent years government spending in Venezuela has been measured at about 40 percent of GDP, with the caveat that these statistics are not fully reliable.  For the U.S., the corresponding figure is about 37 percent.  Yet emerging economies typically cannot afford the same government programs as wealthier countries, and they cannot run them with the same efficacy.  Poorer countries that try to expand their governments to size of wealthier countries, such as Brazil and Venezuela, typically encounter sub-par economic performance.  These are indeed stories of big government run amok, as some of conservatives are suggesting.

The 5 Biggest Widely Accepted Lies in Politics.  [#5] Diversity is a strength:  While you might be able to make the argument that diversity of thought is a strength, diversity itself is a weakness.  In fact, much of the political infighting, hatred, and disagreement in modern American politics centers around diversity.  Every disagreement between a liberal minority and non-liberal white American is summed up as racism.  Every failing of a woman or female disagreement with a man is summed up as sexism.  We can't have a sane immigration policy because it's declared as racism against Hispanics.  Accusations of racism and sexism have almost completely replaced arguments and rational thought on the Left because who needs to have good ideas if you can just argue that your opponents' arguments are invalid because they're bad people? [...] All across the planet, the more diversity you see in culture, the more strife, bloodshed and, problems you see.

Venezuela was my home, and socialism destroyed it.  Slowly, it will destroy America, too.  The first time I couldn't buy food at the grocery store, I was 15 years old.  It was 2014 in Caracas, Venezuela, and I had spent more than an hour in line waiting.  When I got to the register I noticed I'd forgotten my ID that day.  Without the ID, the government rationing system would let the supermarket sell my family the full quota of food we needed.  It was four days until the government allowed me to buy more.  This was fairly normal for me.  All my life I lived under socialism in Venezuela until I left and came to the U.S. as a student in 2016. Since the regime in charge imposed price controls and nationalized the most important private industries, production plummeted.  No wonder I had to wait hours in lines to buy simple products such as toothpaste or flour.  And the shortages went far beyond the supermarket.  My family and I suffered from blackouts and lack of water.  The regime nationalized electricity in 2007 in an effort to make electricity "free."  Unsurprisingly, this resulted in underinvestment in the electrical grid.  By 2016, my home lost power roughly once a week.

Major League Baseball Ditches 'Disabled List' Over Social Justice Concerns.  Major League Baseball will replace the "disabled list" with the "injured list" for the 2019 season amid concerns that the term "disabled" was insensitive.  The "disabled list" has been part of professional baseball since the mid-1960s (though there are records of some teams using a "disabled list" as far back as the early 20th century), and it's become second nature to refer to an injured or exhausted player as "on the DL," but MLB has been reportedly playing around with the idea of renaming the injured roster in order to better reflect the condition of players who skip games for medical or physical reasons, according to ESPN.

Unisex toilets in schools are leaving girl pupils 'too afraid to use the loo'.  Schoolgirls are too afraid to use unisex toilets over fears of 'period shaming' from boys and sexual harassment, campaigners warn.  A growing number of schools are ditching separate-sex loos claiming they are not inclusive to transgender children and are a breeding ground for bullying.  But some girls are avoiding going to the toilet during school hours because of cruel taunts from boys and a lack of privacy, according to the Daily Express.

LGBT Activists Teaching Judges To Yank Kids From Parents Who Won't Transgender Them.  On Thursday [2/7/2019], the Health and Human Services committee of the South Dakota House killed a bill that would have protected the right of parents to refuse to consent to medical or psychological treatment for a child suffering from gender dysphoria if the treatment "would induce, confirm, or promote the child's belief that the child's sex or gender identity is different from the child's sex presented at birth."  Proposed House Bill 1205 also provided that "no public authority or official of this state may take any adverse action against a parent for exercising this right."  That such a simple affirmation of parental rights could not clear a committee in this solidly red state should terrify parents, as it lays bare transgender activists' plan:  use the government to force parents to affirm a false sex for their child, agree to hormone blockers, and accept a transition to their son or daughter's preferred gender.  If parents refuse?  Removal of the child from the family, due to alleged medical neglect.

Transgender Man Awarded $120,000 in Discrimination Case at Iowa Prison.  In 2015, Jesse Vroegh, a registered nurse working in an Iowa prison, asked his employers at the state Department of Corrections to allow him to use the men's restrooms and locker rooms at work because he was transitioning from female to male.  But the department denied his requests, citing its concerns about the "rights of the male officers" and saying that transgender issues were "too controversial," according to a lawsuit.

A Transgender Hero Breaks Ranks.  Even though it's still young, the transgender movement has occasioned many bizarre and horrific stories.  But even in that company, the saga of Jamie Shupe stands out.  Born in 1963, Shupe has been married to his wife, Sandy, for three decades; they have a daughter.  He spent eighteen years (1982-2000) in the U.S. Army.  In 2013 he began identifying as a transgender woman, claiming that he had struggled for years with a deep sense of being different and had been harassed in the military because he was perceived as gay.  After declaring that he was a woman, he "lived for a year in Pittsburgh, got hormone treatments and a name change," but never had a sex-change operation.  Finding Pittsburgh inhospitable for a trans woman, he relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he continued living as a woman for another two years.  In 2015, the New York Times profiled Shupe as part of a splashy, upbeat series celebrating "transgender lives."

Texas Dad Court-Ordered To Not Call 6-Yr-Old Son 'He' As Ex-Wife Transitions Him But Not His Twin Brother.  You think your ex-spouse issues are bad?  Well, they're probably not as intense as Jeffrey Younger's.  The Texas father's embroiled in a ferocious custody battle as his former wife attempts to raise their son — James — as their daughter, Luna.

Another Gift from Socialism in San Fran!  Syringes Everywhere.  San Francisco has more drug addicts than it has students enrolled in its public high schools, the city Health Department's latest estimates conclude, the SFChronicle reports.  There are about 24,500 injection drug users in San Francisco — that's about 8,500 more people than the nearly 16,000 students enrolled in San Francisco Unified School District's 15 high schools and illustrates the scope of the problem on the city's streets.  It represents an increase of 2,000 serious drug users, the article says, but doesn't mention how many non-serious drug users there are and what the definition entails.

San Francisco Has More Drug Users Than High School Students.  Most of the people shooting heroin in BART stations are doing it there because they have nowhere else to go.  Last year there were local news reports about the extent of drug use at BART stations.  Those reports embarrassed the city and led to some effort to clean up the public areas, but it remains an uphill battle.  Over time, the addicts wind up collapsed in a stupor inside the stations, on the streets, or on the trains themselves.

Typhus Epidemic Spreads Across Liberal Utopia of Los Angeles Due to Mountains of Trash, Growing Homeless Population.  A typhus epidemic is worsening in the liberal utopia of Los Angeles, California due to a growing homeless population and mountains of rat-infested trash.  Nothing says "progressive" more than a medieval infectious disease like typhus fever spreading through a city in the year 2019.

Typhus Is Spreading in Liberal, Rat-Infested LA County.  There are a lot of rats in LA, and, NO, for once we don't mean the politicians although many qualify.  We mean the little furry creatures who live in squalor and spread diseases.  Last September, a documentary called 'Rats' was screened as a Landmark Theatres Exclusive Midnight Event.  It was frightening because it's real.  Infestations of rats are seen in major cities and elsewhere, and when garbage is left to rot in homeless areas, they become a more serious threat to life.

The Ruling Class and an Undeclared Civil War.  Unlike any other period in the nation's history, one stratum of society, the American elites of the past half-century, by their control of education, entertainment, the media and politics, have totally dominated and overwhelmingly and negatively influenced the culture and national character.  They are chiefly responsible for what it is today.  This American aristocracy is now entirely made up of those who have no recall or firsthand experience of the years of adversity prior to 1940.  Their entire point of reference is never-ending affluence and the pursuit of pleasure within an overall framework of world peace.  Yet this assemblage is dominated by a comparatively few committed ideologues and so-called intellectuals who are dedicated to permanently altering the economy and American culture.  Nonetheless, they have been very successful in attracting many others by appealing to their vanity and avarice.  Thus entrance into this class is not entirely a factor of birth or wealth but rather that of developing a mindset of superiority similar to the evolution of cliques within a high school setting.

The Mayors of the Worst Cities in America are Running for President.  Newark is the most dangerous city in New Jersey, Tallahassee is the most dangerous city in Florida, and South Bend is the most dangerous city in Indiana.  But instead of fixing their failed cities, the current mayor of South Bend, and the former mayors of Newark and Tallahassee want to run for president.  Mayor Peter Buttigieg has announced that he's forming an exploratory committee for a 2020 run.  Media reports have focused on the possibility that he might become America's first gay millennial president, instead of on the fact that he's headed a city since 2011 which has double the national and statewide violent crime rates.  And a city where Hispanic poverty rates are 10% higher than the national average, African-American households have double the poverty rate, and Asian-American incomes are halved.  South Bend was recently rated one of the "worst cities" to live in.  The unemployment rates are higher than average, the property values are lower, and even the water quality is below average.  Gushing media reports about the gay millennial mayor, a Harvard grad and a Rhodes scholar, overlook South Bend's poverty rate of 24.7% and that 45% of households are living near the poverty level.

Levin: The Left is discouraging assimilation.  LevinTV host Mark Levin began his radio show Monday evening reacting to Tom Brokaw's comments on Meet the Press over the weekend, in which he said Hispanic immigrants should assimilate and learn English. [...] "They don't want assimilation on the Left.  It's not about Hispanics or any other group," Levin explained.  "They play to groups.  They require groups.  The progressive mindset requires groups."

Who Benefits From Democratic Control?  What cities are the deadliest for blacks?  The Trace, an independent nonprofit news organization, answers that question.  Using 2017 data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program, The Trace listed the 20 major U.S. cities with the highest homicide rates — factoring in both the number of people murdered in cities and their populations.  Chicago, with 589 murders in 2018 — one murder every 15 hours — is often called the nation's murder capital.  But that's dead wrong.  In 2017, St. Louis had the nation's highest murder rate, at 66.1 homicides per 100,000 residents.  Baltimore came in second, with 55.8 murders per 100,000 people.  Detroit was third, with 39.8 murders per 100,000 people.  Other cities with high murder rates included New Orleans; Kansas City, Missouri; Cleveland; Memphis, Tennessee; and Newark, New Jersey.  With 24.1 murders per 100,000 residents, Chicago ranked ninth in the nation.  It was followed by Cincinnati and Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., was 17th.  Now here's the kicker.  Of the 20 most dangerous major cities, all but one had a Democratic mayor.  In many of these cities, the Democratic Party has ruled for a half-century or more.

I Have a Dream for Black History Month.  Democrats and fake news media do not view Black History Month as an opportunity to celebrate black achievements.  Instead, they exploit the holiday with old racial injustices experienced by few blacks alive today.  Their evil purpose is to make young blacks who have never experienced an ounce of racism hate our country, hate whites, and continue voting for Democrats to save them.  This great Democrat deception continues to devastate black communities.  Cities like Chicago; Washington, D.C.; and Baltimore, controlled by Democrats for decades, are plagued with high black poverty and addictive government dependency, high black school dropouts, high black fatherless households, high black incarceration, and high black-on-black homicides.

Holes in the Map.  One more part of America has been allocated to another alien population — squatters who have been brought here to feed on us and to drive us out.  But where do we have left to go?  This isn't progress — though it is progressive.  This situation did not occur by accident.  It is the product of a premeditated and deliberate social policy.  When immigration is talked about on what sneeringly masquerades as news, it is always painted in fatalistic phrases that make it sound like an unstoppable force of nature — as though the people surging into America were a swarm of Mexican butterflies or a herd of East African wildebeests that had somehow overwhelmed the TSA.  This invasion is portrayed as if there were no plan involved at all — just some primal urge that arises spontaneously in third-worlders that can't be stopped.  This is the narrative fashioned for the convenience of the unaffected.  That they might feel good about themselves while enjoying a little schadenfreude at our expense.  They do not see the consequences.  They see the dream.

Britain's 'First Transgender Family' Now Transitioning Their 5-Year-Old Son To Female.  A family dubbed Britain's "first transgender family" has announced that they are encouraging the gender transition of their five-year-old son, Jayden.  According to the family, Jayden, a biological male, likes dresses and hates "everything about being a boy."  The little boy's "step-dad," Greg Rogers, is a 27-year-old biological female who now identifies as a male.  The child's mother is a 21-year-old woman named Jody.  Both Jodi and Greg are furious that concerned citizens (referred to as "trolls" by many U.K.-based outlets) have reported them to social services for apparent child abuse.  The couple, however, maintain Jayden — who is on track to medically "transition" in a few years — is properly cared for.

Pelosi's Equality Act Could Lead to More Parents Losing Custody of Kids Who Want 'Gender Transition'.  Americans have long understood that children are best cared for by their parents.  The state can only intervene in the family when there is demonstrable evidence of abuse and neglect.  This has long been established in our laws.  But now, transgender ideology is silencing doctors and challenging the way courts define parental abuse and neglect.  Last year in Ohio, a judge removed a biological girl from her parents' custody after they declined to help her "transition" to male with testosterone supplements.  The Cincinnati Children's gender clinic recommended these treatments for gender dysphoria (the condition of being distressed with one's biological sex).

The devil is using the Democratic Party to destroy America.  The brutal reality is that the Democratic Party is not the one of even a generation ago.  It has become radicalized; hostile to biblical values and religious freedoms; disrespectful to individuals and institutions; unashamed in using profanities and employing intimidation in the media and public square; increasingly irrational, lawless, dishonest, hypocritical, corrupt and mean-spirited (remember the Brett Kavanaugh hearing?); and finally, flippant in dismissing "due process" and our two foundational societal pillars of the sanctity of human life alongside the sanctity of man-woman marriage.  Here's the deal: as we've watched the difficult-to-believe destruction of the 108-year-old Boy Scouts of America because they capitulated to forces the Democratic Party championed, let us consecrate ourselves at this defining time to intercession, gospel proclamation, "salt and light" activism and courageous, uncompromising obedience to God.

On January 1, I became a criminal in my hometown of Boulder.  It's not the intolerance of progressives that is so insulting.  It is the denial of their intolerance that is so abusive.  When I was growing up it was the liberals who more often held the moral high-ground.  Those of us raised in the 1970's heard it all the time — "the end doesn't justify the means." [...] Progressives have not just rejected that proud tradition, they have remade it into the ugly opposite — the end justifies all:  Coercing speech with speech codes and forcing cake bakers to create statements against their core religious beliefs; social justice warfare and identity politics; the nanny state banning everything from plastic straws to tobacco products; and forcing private health insurance products at gun-point.

Political Correctness Is Ruining Sports.  For the second consecutive year, Mack Beggs, an 18-year-old transgender wrestler, has won the Texas girls' Class 6A 110-pound division.  Born a female, Beggs is in the process of transitioning to a male, or so she thinks.  Beggs, who takes a low dose of testosterone, had wanted to compete against boys, but Texas public high schools, which have yet to get with the progressive times, require athletes to compete under the gender on their birth certificate.  Last year two girls, not wanting to risk being injured by her, forfeited against Beggs.  So did a girl this year.  Whether they were compelled to undergo empathy training I don't know. [...] Transgenderism is a problem in the Olympics, too.  Per the latest rules, transgender "women" must test below a specified level of testosterone for more than one year in order to compete.  But while this is doubtless somewhat effective, aren't these athletes, with their still bigger, still stronger, and still more durable bodies, out of place even so?

The Worst Enemy of Black People.  Malcolm X was absolutely right about our finding solutions to our own problems.  The most devastating problems that black people face today have absolutely nothing to do with our history of slavery and discrimination.  Chief among them is the breakdown of the black family, wherein 75 percent of blacks are born to single, often young, mothers.  In some cities and neighborhoods, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is over 80.  Actually, "breakdown" is the wrong term; the black family doesn't form in the first place.  This is entirely new among blacks.

Wealth, Poverty, and Flight:  The Same Old State of California.  [B]oth legal and illegal immigration have also radically changed the demography of the state.  It is not just that about 40 percent of the nation's 11 [to] 20 million immigrants live in California, a state in which now one in four residents was not born in the United States.  Rather, it is the result of two or three generations of mass influxes of impoverished residents who on average arrive without a high-school diploma, English proficiency, capital, or often legality.  California now hosts one of three Americans who are on some sort of federal, state, or local welfare supplement.  About a fifth of the state lives below the poverty level.  Half of all births in California were paid for by the state-run Medi-Cal program, and 30 percent of Medi-Cal births were to mothers of undocumented immigration status.  The San Ysidro border crossing between Tijuana and San Diego is the world's busiest, where some 70 million people cross on foot and in cars into and out of California each year.

Transgender Man Goes Full Roid Rage after Being 'Misgendered' in GameStop.  It's an amazing time to be alive, full of wonder and terror and confusion all mixed together in a soup of "what could possibly happen next?" that keeps us all on our toes.  Today's dose of insanity comes from a viral video of a transgender man who had a testosterone-fueled meltdown because someone called him "sir" in a GameStop in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  The minimum-wage employee who took the brunt of the all-male rage-a-thon should win Employee of the Year for trying his hardest to diffuse the situation.

The ILL-inois exodus continues.  Meanwhile, every state in the Midwest, including longtime laggards Kansas and South Dakota, are gaining population.  What does ILL-inois have that these other states don't?  One-party Democratic rule by state party boss and the state House speaker for over 30 years, Michael Madigan of Chicago, who will remain the most powerful politician in Illinois even though the Land of Mary Todd Lincoln Spending will have a Democrat governor in a few weeks.

Stand by for a wave of male prison inmates claiming to be transgender females.  Two federal judges now have ruled, setting the precedent of transferring a male prison inmate to a female prison because he claims to feel that he is a woman and poses as one, and, in the current instance, has undergone surgical mutilation of his reproductive organs.  The "transgender female" is referred to as a "woman" and "she" in the following report from the Associated Press:  ["]A transgender woman serving a 10-year sentence in Illinois for burglary has been moved from a men's to a women's prison in what could be a first for the state, her lawyers announced today.["]  The transfer was forced by a federal judge whom the AP does not wish to identify.  (Why?)  That judge evidently accepts the politically correct line that, contrary to settled science, sex is not determined by chromosomes.

Five homeless vagrants face no charges in attack on cop seen in viral video, says Manhattan DA.  Attacking a cop has joined fare beating and public urination on the list of subway misbehavior Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance won't bother prosecuting.  Officer Syed Ali — an Army combat vet who served in Iraq and Afghanistan — had no trouble fending off five homeless vagrants with his baton and his feet as they came at him one by one on Sunday night.  The attack, captured on video, was viewed 4 million times on Twitter.

NYPD officer fights off aggressive drunks in the subway but none of the attackers are charged.  While most of us were getting ready for Christmas, NYPD officer Syed Ali was working a transit beat in the NY subways Sunday night [12/23/2018].  This particular night, five intoxicated men were harassing a woman on the platform of the East Broadway station. [...] Officer Ali, who is a combat veteran, was praised by the Mayor and various NY authorities for dealing with the drunks without escalating the situation. [...] But some were upset that the men who harassed the subway rider and tried to fight a police officer were released and won't be charged with anything.

Seattle Under Siege.  Seattle is under siege.  Over the past five years, the Emerald City has seen an explosion of homelessness, crime, and addiction.  In its 2017 point-in-time count of the homeless, King County social-services agency All Home found 11,643 people sleeping in tents, cars, and emergency shelters.  Property crime has risen to a rate two and a half times higher than Los Angeles's and four times higher than New York City's.  Cleanup crews pick up tens of thousands of dirty needles from city streets and parks every year.

Remembering a Farm Christmas.  I realize today that we kids were what we now call "free-ranged," in the sense that we had no locks on any of the doors of our farmhouses.  Even at seven in the morning we simply took off into the orchard and vineyard and by late afternoon might end up anywhere we pleased on the farm, without much worry about checking in with our parents.  Everyone was a guardian of everyone else.  Certainly, there then were few of the problems — with gangs, chop shops, and meth labs — that characterize the Central Valley of today.

The exodus of New York City's endangered middle class.  New York City's shrinking middle class is now in full retreat, as masses of our most endangered population depart the city in numbers not seen since the Depression, according to analysts.  After decades of sharp income erosion in the face of relentless taxes, escalating living costs and wage reductions through technological changes, the full extent of this shocking exodus is laid bare in the latest US Census data.  That shows the city is losing 100 residents each day — with departures exceeding new arrivals.

New York leads nation in population loss.  New York State leads the country in an undesirable category.  New data from the U.S. Census Bureau says New York tops the nation in population loss.  The report says nine states saw a drop in population between July 1, 2017, and July 1, 2018.  New York led the way at a loss of 48,510 people.

Texas city featured in Al Gore film lost millions in green energy investments.  A green energy scheme to supply a small town in Texas with 100% of its electrical needs via cheap solar and wind power is, instead, costing the city almost $7 million.  Georgetown, Texas was featured in the sequel to Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth as the "future" of American power generation.  But falling fossil fuel prices are making the scheme ruinously expensive for the town.

Least-Educated State:  California No. 1 in Percentage of Residents 25 and Older Who Never Finished 9th Grade; No. 50 in High School Graduates.  California ranks No. 1 among the 50 states for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed ninth grade and 50th for the percentage who have graduated from high school, according to new data from the Census Bureau.  Texas ranks No. 2 for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed [the] ninth grade and 49th for the percentage who have graduated from high school.  9.7 percent of California residents 25 and older, the Census Bureau says, never completed ninth grade.  Only 82.5 percent graduated from high school.

'Let Them Come To Venezuela' And See Socialism For Themselves.  Venezuela was once the most prosperous country in Latin America, but today almost 90% of its population lives in poverty.  Venezuela's economy is in shambles.  Recently, Venezuela's own government released a report showing that its annual inflation rate accelerated to a whopping 833,000% in October alone.  In practical terms, Venezuela's misery means that it is not uncommon to see children rummaging through the garbage for food.  And as basic medical supplies and medicine run dangerously low, newborns and the elderly die unattended in Venezuelan hospitals.

As for Me and My House...  New York City has legalized a "third gender" on birth certificates.  Not that long ago, over 40 states passed resolutions supporting God's definition of marriage — between one man and one woman.  According to the Public Religious Research Institute, a majority of Democrats, Republicans, blacks, whites, Latinos, Catholics, and white mainline Protestant denominations support so-called "marriage" between people of the same sex.  The majority of evangelical Millennials support redefining marriage.  Years ago, LGBTQ activists claimed that openly homosexual leaders admitted into the Boy Scouts had no intention to change the organization from its founding on Christian principles.  As it turned out, first on the LGBTQ agenda was to remove "morally straight" from the Scout Oath.  We are living in a pretty sick time when "morally straight" is deemed hateful and offensive.

12-Year-Old Boy Named Trump Bullied, Ridiculed, Punched on Bus; Is Forced to Change his Name.  An 11-year-old Delaware boy named Joshua Trump was forced to change his last name after liberal indoctrinated children at the school bullied him and beat him.  Joshua's parents said it was so bad they decided to use the boy's father's name at the school from now on.

The Editor says...
Where are the "zero tolerance" anti-bullying enforcers?  On the other hand, why wasn't he known by his father's name in the first place?

James Comey, Menace to Society.  The intolerant progressives have virtually criminalized Christianity and Judaism while protecting Islam.  Even left-wing Jews are now openly anti-Semitic.  Progressives have been largely successful in outlawing the scientific notion of gender to embrace the sheer moonbattery of the "fluid gender" crowd.  So besieged with the desperate plight of LGBT persons, millennials actually think they make up 40% of our population when they are only about 4.5%.  For an even tinier percentage of people, elementary school bathrooms must be open to anyone and everyone, even men pretending to be women.

Does Freedom of Religion Mean Satanic Displays in State Capitols?  In the Illinois Capitol Rotunda this month, several traditions are being celebrated.  We find a nativity scene for Christmas; a menorah for Hanukkah; and, alongside these displays, an arm holding an apple, with a snake coiled around it.  This snake sculpture is a gift from the Chicago branch of The Satanic Temple.  Called "Snaketivity," the work also has a sign that reads, "Knowledge Is The Greatest Gift."  This revolting travesty is a result of decades of decisions pertaining to the non-establishment of religion asserted in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Starbucks sidebar:

Starbucks is a company that is apparently doing everything it can to go out of business.

Survey Shows 1 in 5 Millennials Sees U.S. Flag as 'Sign of Intolerance and Hatred'.  A survey released on Nov. 27 found that one in five millennials views the American flag as "a sign of intolerance and hatred," and two in five think it is okay to burn Old Glory.  The "State of American Patriotism Report," which was designed to assess the patriotism and historical knowledge of young Americans, also revealed that six in 10 millennials (ages 22-37) believe the United States is racist and sexist.

Jared:  The Birdbrain of Alcatraz.  As anyone with an amoeba's understanding of recent history knows, beginning in the early '60s, assorted [...] liberals jettisoned logic, common sense and a basic understanding of human nature by releasing criminals from the prisons where they belonged.  Instead of punishing criminals, we would give them social services, education and job training — with the implied understanding that they wouldn't move next door to any of the reformers.  The experts assured a disbelieving public that these policies would reduce crime.  As Thomas Sowell writes in The Vision of the Anointed:  Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, the stage was set.  Liberal criminologists' soft-on-crime policies were in place.  We only needed empirical evidence.  "THE RESULTS:  Crime rates skyrocketed.  Murder rates suddenly shot up until the murder rate in 1974 was more than twice as high as in 1961.  Between 1960 and 1976, a citizen's chances of becoming a victim of a major violent crime tripled."  Prior to this period, crime had been declining for three decades.

Why Are So Many Millennials Ignorant Anti-Americans?  A new YouGov poll asked more than 1,000 people aged 14 and up about their knowledge of the country's history and institutions, and their patriotic feelings toward the U.S. The nationwide survey, sponsored by the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness, produced some alarming results.  Basically, it found younger generations — millennials (age 22-27) and Gen Z (age 14-21) — are less likely to love and respect the country.  And they're less informed about American history, and way more likely to embrace socialism.  Is that just evidence of youthful ignorance?  Or is it the result of a school system that indoctrinates children in leftist ideology?

Even California Cannot Defy Nature Forever.  [Scroll down]  Last year, we saw near-normal levels of precipitation.  If our life-giving reservoirs of the state's vast California Water Project and federal Central Valley Project are currently not full, it is mostly because millions of acre-feet of stored water were released to flow into the San Francisco Bay estuaries and the delta — contradicting most of the original mandates of the water projects of providing flood control, power generation, lake recreation, and irrigation for California residents. [...] Left unsaid is that more than 130 million trees died throughout the state's foothills and mountain ranges during the drought of 2011-2016 and were not removed from the forest floor, providing an immensity of natural kindling for fires.  To walk in a Sierra Nevada forest during summers requires navigating not just over fallen limbs and branches, but also rotting trees — all amid dead brush and dead but still-towering brown pines.  Gone are the periodic meadows and open spaces of the 1960s and 1970s, when logging companies harvested trees, thinned out the forests, replanted what was cut, and cleaned up the forest floor.  Yet given California's stringent anti-logging regulations of the last 20 years, there is no real California timber industry left, at least as it once was.  And scavenging even dead trees prompts a great debate, as environmentalists lecture on the advantages of letting the dead wood be.  Or, as Sierra Club organizer Daniel Barad put it in a January 2018 Sacramento Bee op-ed:  "Dead trees are vital components of the forest ecosystem and should be removed only when necessary."

Why is violent crime on BART on the rise?  San Fran is not a safe place to visit — tens of thousands of car break ins each year, and a 1.7% arrest rate.  The city gives out 4.4 million syringes for drug users — how do you think the druggies get the money for the drugs?  BART is a guaranteed crime zone.  You go on the system knowing you will be a crime victim.

Even Astronauts Fear the Left.  There are many reasons I pity today's younger generation of Americans.  Among them are:
  •   The unconscionable debt we are leaving them.
  •   The obliteration of male and female as separate and distinct categories — and the sexual confusion that is left in its wake.
  •   The emasculation of men and the de-feminization of women.
  •   The undermining of the value of marriage.
  •   The lack of God and religion in their lives — and the consequent search for meaning in the wrong places.
  •   The receiving of indoctrination, rather than education, in most schools from elementary through graduate.
  •   The inability to celebrate being American.
Tragically and ironically, each one of these was brought on by the very group many young people identify with:  the left.

The lowdown on the miscreant who got us into this mess:  Woodrow Wilson.  Claremont Review of Books, the brainiest and best publication in the conservative world, published my review of a new biography of America's first progressive president, Woodrow Wilson.  It's an honor to write for CRB, which kindly unlocked the paywall for my piece, entitled "The Great Resenter."  CRB is the only only political-intellectual journal that I read cover to cover.  If you don't subscribe, you should.  Progressive historians present Wilson as a paper saint, but the man was a monster.  He was an unreconstructed defender of slavery and a rancorous apologist for the Confederacy.  His whole academic and political life was devoted to tearing up the Constitution and replacing it with a progressive dictatorship.  This resentment against a Union that had crushed his native south in the Civil War drove his obsession with a world government with power to issue orders to the United States of America.

Democrats favor improving infrastructure as long as it takes longer and costs more.  Why can't the United States build or repair infrastructure on a par with countries in Europe or Asia?  Why can't we have all the nifty new airports, bridges, and trains that seem to spring up overnight in other parts of the world?  The answer, in one word, is Democrats.  Two groups that are virtually owned-and-operated subsidiaries of the Democratic party retard infrastructure progress here.  One is labor unions, and the other is environmental activists.

Colorado Will Soon Allow People To Select "Gender X" On Driver's Licenses.  Colorado residents who don't identify as a male or female will soon be able to select "Gender X" on their driver's licenses, thanks to recent court decisions.  The change will go into effect on Nov. 30 and comes from an emergency rule made by judges overseeing legal cases in which transgender individuals fought to change the sex listed on their driver's licenses from their biological sex to their preferred one.  "This is an important step for the state of Colorado that the state documents reflect our values," Colorado Department of Revenue executive director Michael Hartman told the Denver Post.  "People are people no matter their sex identification."

The Editor says...
I wonder how the judges decided this was an emergency.  But aside from that, I guess that means those Gender X people who get arrested can't complain about which jail they're sent to.  Until they make the state build special facilities just for them.

More People Are Leaving California.  But Still Not Enough.  California's Democrats have long held a stranglehold on the state's government.  Dianne Feinstein, who was born during the Great Depression and still doesn't have a single gray hair, is the one who unsuccessfully tried to screw up the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation.  She just won another Senate term over a Bernie Democrat who wanted to spend even more.  Gavin Newsom, another ex-San Francisco mayor, just got elected governor to replace another Democrat, Jerry Brown, who was term-limited twice.  So, voters are can expect to reap their reward.  California's governing party has never encountered any problem it couldn't let fester into a full-blown crisis.  For instance, the absence of reservoirs adequate for the growing population.  But, by golly, it's right on top of the high-cost, high-speed railroad to connect two minor cities in a state built around cars.  The government will then throw gobs of other people's money at any problem.

Why won't liberals admit their homeless policies don't work?  It's appropriate that the UN special rapporteur devoted to adequate housing has visited encampments in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Mumbai — and San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley.  The homeless situation in those cities and others around the country is positively Third World, a blight that shows the persistence of human folly, and misery, despite what we take to be our steady progress to greater enlightenment and prosperity.  San Francisco is a crown jewel of the new economy, and a sink of vagrancy.

Movie review:  Roger & Me [Rated R]:  Michael Moore blames capitalism for the downfall of Flint, Michigan instead of the trade unions that bullied businesses & forced them to ship jobs overseas (due to excessive taxation) or the fact that Flint has been under Democratic leadership since 1973.

How Progressives Killed Birthright Citizenship.  Progressives may very well have set the table for the end of birthright citizenship by executive order or legislation during the 1990s.  This was not their intention, of course, but in their unprincipled pursuit of political power, they unwittingly might have choked off all attempts to cover birthright citizenship in a constitutional mantle.

More than half of movies have been R-rated in the past 50 years.  The MPAA is marking the 50th anniversary of its film ratings by releasing data on how movies have been rated over the last half-century.  The R rating has been placed on by far and away the majority of the movies since then, more than half of the almost 30,000 titles that have been given classifications.  The breakdown:  Since 1968, the first year of the rating classifications, there have been 17,202 movies rated R, 5,578 rated M/GP/PG, 4,913 rated PG-13 and 1,574 rated G.  Just 524 movies have been rated X or NC-17, reflecting the re