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, © 2024 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.)

This Election is a Referendum on Us.  We have accepted steady erosion of our social compact because it is too arduous to reason with the unreasonable, too frustrating to speak calmly with those who shout, too uncomfortable to speak over the screams of the nihilist tribes.  We have stood by in silence as the fabric of our society unravels, tacitly engaged in a dangerous appeasement with the left. [...] Evidence of this threat abounds.  The public has not only lost trust in government but also in journalists, the judiciary, universities, and medical institutions.  We can't rely on legacy media to report the truth.  Religion is mocked.  Morality has been replaced by shallow, narcissistic virtue signaling and fake empathy.  Patriotism is too often seen as a partisan issue.  "I see you are flying a flag," quips a neighbor.  "I didn't know you were Republican."  Parents are blocked from knowing what transpires in their children's classrooms.  Many universities seem to offer only three majors:  grievance, arrogance, and ignorance.  Officials take our money and spend it to serve their personal ideology without asking our approval.  Words like truth and faith have been hollowed out.  Preferred pronouns become more important than national security.  Gratitude is replaced with resentment.  Good faith dissent is stomped into silence.  DEI has banished meritocracy in the military and many other organizations.  Skepticism against authority — vital to a healthy democracy — is rebuffed with cancellation.  Is this the country we want to live in?

America Has Its First Show Trial.  Everything the Left touches it destroys.  The Justice Department and the American legal system are only the most immediate examples.  Here are 25 other examples:
  [#1]   Universities.
  [#2]   High schools.
  [#3]   Elementary schools.
  [#4]   Children's innocence.
  [#5]   Marriage and family.
  [#6]   Children who say they are the other sex.
  [#7]   Journalism.
  [#8]   Women's psychological health.
  [#9]   Black life.
  [#10]   Black-white relations.
  [#11]   Art.
  [#12]   Music.
  [#13]   Architecture.
  [#14]   The military.
  [#15]   The FBI.
  [#16]   The CDC and NIH.
  [#17]   The American Medical Association and most other medical associations.
  [#18]   Medical schools.
  [#19]   Free speech.
  [#20]   Women's sports.
  [#21]   The border.
  [#22]   Religion.
  [#23]   The economy.
  [#24]   Fighting crime.
  [#25]   America's major cities.

The Editor says...
That looks like a long list, but #1, #2, and #3 are the same; #11, #12 and #13 are the same; and #24 and #25 are almost the same.

The Editor continues...
The list in the article above is informative, but over the last year or two, I have compiled my own list of things that have been ruined for everybody by socialist Democrat busybodies:
  •   Public schools
  •   Singing the national anthem [1] [2]
  •   The reasonable assumption that everybody in America should speak English
  •   The reasonable assumption that nobody crosses the international border with impunity
  •   The reasonable assumption that only U.S. citizens vote in our elections
  •   The expectation of civility and decorum in public places
  •   The reasonable assumption that the results of presidential elections will be accepted by all parties
  •   The circus [3] [4] [5]
  •   Columbus Day
  •   The Boy Scouts
  •   Animal crackers [6] [7]
  •   Statues of historical figures
  •   Aunt Jemima [8] [9]
  •   "Merry Christmas"
  •   Six Flags [10] [11]   (Not that I care; nor do I care about Bud Light.)
  •   Public libraries [12] [13]
  •   Harmless depictions of cartoon violence
  •   Locally-owned radio stations with local announcers
  •   Television
  •   Restrooms in public places
Others have compiled similar lists: [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]

Tyranny by Any Other Name Still Stinks.  One of the peculiarities of our own time is that so many people remain blind to the totalitarianism growing and spreading around them.  Western governments have seized the authority to tell us what is true and what must be censored as harmful "disinformation."  They openly spy on our phone calls, read our emails, record every Internet search and keyboard click on our computers, and monitor our social media conversations.  They tell us which "politically correct" words we must use and which words are outlawed for inciting "hate."  They have criminalized reading from parts of the Bible or acting with religious conviction.  They insist on manipulating the value of money and rigging markets in ways that confiscate the meager savings of the have-nots and further enrich the well-to-do.  Corporations and government ministers work together to spread the same propaganda.  Mainstream news media operate as compliant mouthpieces for the State.  Banks discriminate against customers due to their personal beliefs.  Companies fire employees for not being sufficiently "woke."  Prosecutors contort statutes into weapons that can be used to punish innocent people for their political speech.

The Bezmenov Plan:  Is America now in the Last Stage?  [Scroll down]  And it's not hard to recognize the plan being followed is parallel to the blueprint plan revealed forty years ago by Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, who explained the four stages of communist subversion:  1) Demoralization, 2) Disorientation, 3) Crisis, and 4) Normalization.  The United States has been under prolonged internal attacks of demoralization for several generations, through the educational system and the culture which have delivered messaging that disparages the United States and derides traditional values.  The second stage, known as disorientation, is most successful after a large portion of the population has been demoralized.  Covid-19 brought about disorientation through mask mandates, social distancing, quarantines, lockdowns, and the abandonment of best medical practices of preventative and therapeutic treatments.  Another important part of disorientation that was inflicted on America at that time was the ginned-up racism after the death of George Floyd, which triggered rioting, looting, and destruction of several billion dollars' worth of property and the tearing down of historic statues and memorials in many cities across the United States.

We Must Have Courage To Take Back Our Country.  Fifty years ago, the seeds of our destruction were planted with the beginning of the social justice movement, the anti-war movement, identity politics, and alternatives promoted as equal to or superior to intact nuclear families.  We were told, "Do your thing," without regard for society's needs.  A new version of communism stormed our shores, led by teachers' unions, free love, and blaming whites for every wrong imaginable.  We must scream against this lie at the top of our lungs before, collectively, we forget who we are.  No one will be able to skirt unscathed what's coming.  There's an undeniable feeling among conservatives that we lack the necessary will to retain our Republic.  J6 demonstrated the unrestrained power of government to assert supremacy over its citizens.  Millions have been cowed from speaking out against the gathering darkness, and our government shows little regard for respecting the Constitution.  What's happening to Trump in Manhattan is breathtaking.  Yet, as far as Democrats are concerned, this is only the beginning.

This is the Stupidest, Most Venal Leadership Class in History.  Let's examine the results of your "work", since your boy, Clinton, Rhodes scholar and corporatist stooge, took power in '92:
  [#1]   Clinton's blithe handing over of manufacturing to China created homelessness. [...]
  [#3]   You have allowed the cartels, Asian and Mexican, to take over in every single state.  In Arizona, they own the governor and the government. [...]
  [#7]   In D.C., where you live, only 19% of high school graduates can do math and only 35% can write or read English.
  [#8]   You've made food insanely expensive because of your grovelling to the climate cult which has made energy prices soar, when we have enough energy to be independent. [...]
  [#11]   You foisted Obama on us who doubled the debt, more debt than every other President combined.
  [#12]   Then you inflicted Covid on us, which was deliberate, to destroy Trump.  Another $10 Trillion in debt.  Millions of small businesses destroyed.
  [#13]   Then you lied and cheated and stole 2020, which has been proved many times over, and foisted a sick, mean, thief on us, (whose corrupt disgusting son sold us out to the worst regimes on earth), and who added $3 Trillion to the debt in 2023 alone.  You then boast of a recovering economy which is just flat-out stupid.
  [#14]   And then came Ukraine, a war which you started out of sheer vanity and self-importance, giving your corrupt associates at NATO something to do and shifted hundreds of billions of dollars into a failed state, failed because of you.

No, Supporting Trump Is Not 'Idol Worship'.  Do you want to know why Trump-supporters feel as strongly as they do?  Because in their hearts, they believe that if Trump had remained as the 45th president of the United States through to the present day, the following would not have happened:
  [#1]   A tragic withdrawal from Afghanistan, with 9,000 Americans reportedly left behind along with billions of dollars of equipment that appears to have made it to...
  [#2]   Hamas in Gaza, that then perpetrated a historic massacre and subsequent attacks in Israel with the help of...
  [#3]   Iran, who recently received billions of dollars via frozen assets thanks to the Biden administration. [...]
  [#4]   And of course there's the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has so far led to more than 500,000 deaths and, as of September 2023, more than $75 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars sent to a corrupt regime.
  [#5]   Let's not forget record-setting opioid deaths in the United States, likely impacted by...
  [#6]   Uncontrolled immigration (including drug cartels) at America's borders that is contributing to a...
  [#7]   Rise in crime as millions of illegal aliens are flooding across the U.S.-Mexico border.  That also leads to...
  [#8]   Rising costs for taxpayers, who are already struggling to pay for homes, health insurance, food, gas, and oil heat in the northeast.

The Editor says...
Moreover, the price of gasoline is twice what it should be, because Joe Biden, from his first day in office, has choked off the domestic supply of petroleum in every way he can.  And the price of Diet Coke has doubled since Joe Biden was installed in the White House.

Our Establishment's Alternate Realities.  Leftwing journalists and activists, and even Democratic politicians, who all supported defunding the police, now cannot escape the resulting street violence and unleashed murderous predations.  Everyone knows the culprit is the post-George Floyd effort — with Biden administration complicity — to defund the police, end cash bail, institutionalize catch-and-release of criminals, and show more sympathy toward victimizers than victims.  Yet neither state nor local officials nor Joe Biden himself even admits to a crime wave.  The more the public is attacked and avoids major downtowns, the more it polls furor over the crime wave.  The more our officials, in gaslighting style, claim such alarm is all in our collective heads, the more they themselves are attacked by the very criminals their policies empowered.

Even Starbucks Is Failing in Crime-Ridden San Francisco.  First, Whole Foods closed and now Starbucks is shuttering a slew of locations in San Francisco.  The Seattle coffee giant announced Tuesday that it would close seven of its 59 locations in the city, effective Oct. 22.  The city's "doom loop" is speeding up.  Starbucks didn't mention crime in its official reason for leaving the City by the Bay.  "There are several factors Starbucks considers when tasked with the tough decision of closing a store, but it is all part of ensuring a healthy store portfolio," Jessica Borton, Starbucks' regional vice president for Northern California, said in a statement to district managers.  That corporate-speak doesn't say much, but it's hard not to think that crime and the city's deteriorating street conditions didn't play a major factor in this wide-scale shutdown.  Starbucks has been known to jump into woke causes, then dodge woke consequences.  It's not surprising to see the coffee chain go mum on the crime issue.

What the Left Did to Our Country.  [Scroll down]  What we are witnessing seems to be utter nihilism.  The border is not porous but nonexistent.  Mass looting and carjackings are not poorly punished, but simply exempt from all and any consequences.  Our downtowns are reduced to a Hobbesian "war of all against all," where the strong dictate to the weak and the latter adjust as they must.  The streets of our major cities in just a few years have become pre-civilizational — there are more human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco than were in the gutters of Medieval London.  The FBI and DOJ are not simply wayward and weaponized, but corrupt and renegade.  Apparently the perquisite now for an FBI director is the ability either to lie while under oath or better to mask such lying by claiming amnesia or ignorance.  Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.  In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist.  Nothing escapes it — not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Who Will Say No More to the Current Madness?  [Scroll down]  Like Britain from 1939 to 1940, America is in existential danger.  The Biden administration has utterly destroyed the southern border — and immigration law with it.  Biden green lighted 7 million illegal aliens swarming into the U.S. without legal sanction or rudimentary audit.  China spies inside and over the U.S. with impunity.  Beijing has never admitted to its responsibility for the gain-of-function Covid virus that killed a million Americans.  President Biden printed $4 trillion at exactly the wrong time of soaring post-COVID consumer demand and supply shortages.  No wonder he birthed the worst inflation in 40 years.  In response, interest rates tripled, gas prices doubled.  Our military is thousands of recruits short.  It lacks sufficient munitions.  Following Biden's humiliating pullout from Afghanistan, vast troves of arms were abandoned in Kabul.  Billions more in scarce weapons were sent to Ukraine. [...] The Biden renegade Department of Justice, CIA and FBI have become weaponized.  Ideology, politics, and race — not the law — more often guide their investigations, intelligence operations and enforcement.  The downtowns of our once majestic major cities are becoming unlivable.  They are mired in refuse and trash, violent crime and homelessness.

Sorry, DC — Too Many Americans Remember.  [Scroll down]  Conversely, we could boil down all of the various Machiavellian plans being unfurled today by Western governments seeking our surrender into a single order:  forget.  Forget your history and your ancestors' sacrifices.  Forget your religious convictions.  Forget your natural rights and freedoms.  Forget the importance of personal liberty, property, and privacy.  Forget the sanctified bonds of marriage.  Forget the unbreakable bonds of families.  Forget the sacred duties of parents.  Forget that forced experimental medical treatments are crimes against humanity.  Forget that climate cultists were warning about global cooling just years before warning about global warming.  Forget that one-world-government types who wish to control all farming methods and hydrocarbon energies have depended on climate models that have been consistently wrong.  Forget that race relations had drastically improved during the last century before the callous race-hustlers re-emerged with new intensity to divide human beings again.  Forget that paper money backed by gold once had value.  Forget that warrantless government surveillance is a sign of tyranny.  Forget that J6 election protesters have been persecuted as "insurrectionists" while Antifa and Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists have been protected from prosecution.  Forget the lies told to justify earlier wars so that new lies can be told to justify the next.  Forget that a government's legitimacy comes from the people's consent.

The quiet riot against insanity in America is gaining strength.  How have we gone from America's low-inflation, high tax revenue, full employment economy, with an expanding middle class, energy independence and rock solid military to the kowtowing disaster of the last two years?  The only possible conclusion is that this is a long-term and well-planned operation to kneecap America.  Accepting that the most prosperous nation on earth is suddenly falling into poverty, crime and wokeness, and our citizens are happily voting for more, requires a level of insane thinking that is unprecedented, yet we now have...
  •   Ballot counting machines that can't count ballots
  •   Judges who refuse to judge
  •   Anti-American American presidents
  •   Prosecutors who don't prosecute
  •   Peaceful protests labeled as domestic terrorism and domestic terrorists labeled as peaceful protestors
  •   Representatives who don't represent
  •   Corporations that don't seek profit
  •   Banks that don't protect their depositors' money
  •   News reporters who don't report the news [...]
  •   Teachers who don't teach, advocating graphic books on sex for children too young to understand sex
  •   Psychologists and physicians encouraging dysphoria insanity in vulnerable children — while keeping parents clueless
  •   Men playing women's sports and assaulting girls in their locker rooms
  •   Doctors who don't heal, promoting vaccines that kill
  •   Groups demanding reparations from people whose ancestors mistreated their ancestors
  •   Free speech that isn't free

Dissecting Obama.  Not so long ago, America had a great economy, the lowest unemployment ever for a range of demographic groups, energy independence, an increasingly secure southern border, a strong international profile, and no new wars.  It had freedom.  It had national pride.  And all because it had a highly skilled president of unabashed patriotism who was devoted to the best interests of his people.  Now we're being readied to eat bugs while our overlords dine on steaks.  To live in "fifteen-minute cities" while they fly to conferences in Fiji.  To tighten our belts to prevent rising sea levels while they luxuriate in sea-level mansions in Malibu and Martha's Vineyard.  In a direct challenge to parental authority, common-sense values, and sensible pedagogical priorities, government schools indoctrinate children in Critical Race Theory and transgender ideology.  To shatter our sense of security and restrict our freedom of movement, Soros prosecutors turn major cities over to violent felons.  Patriots rot in jail for meandering around the Congress for a couple of hours two years ago while young people are encouraged by their teachers to celebrate Antifa and BLM thugs who have burned houses down.  Blacks who love liberty are smeared as "white supremacists" while Muslims who love jihad are depicted as virtuous victims.  Then there's what happened during the pandemic.  Churchgoing was banned, violent street protests permitted.  Small businesses were forced to close and went bankrupt; giant chain stores stayed open and reaped record profits.

Critically thinking about what's happening to America.  Let's briefly step back and see several examples of where America's opponents are attacking, and what successes they have had to date.
Target: Standards.  Strategy: Promote relativism., where all points of view are equally valid, and that all truth is relative to the individual.
Target: Religion.  Strategy: Undermine Judeo-Christian beliefs and morality.
Target: Men.  Strategy: Emasculate, feminize and weaken men.  Specifically, this is mostly about "de-privileging" white men.
Target: Women.  Strategy: Defeminize women, dilute the role of mothers, corrupt the definition of "woman," allow men to compete in sports as women, etc.
Target: Families.  Strategy: Redefine what a conventional family is, and undercut its importance. Promote pornography to undermine healthy adult relationships.
Target: Education.  Strategy: Propagandize children.  Emphasize conformity instead of critical thinking.
Target: Initiative.  Strategy: Undermine by awarding participation instead of accomplishment.
Target: Citizens.  Strategy: The collective's rights take priority over individual rights.  Additionally, the planet's rights supersede those of humans.
Target: Economy.  Strategy: Waste enormous sums on foolish political agendas, driven by lobbyists, which are not in the best interest of citizens or the country.
Target: Financial System.  Strategy: Undermine the Dollar on a variety of fronts from bitcoin to CBCD.
Target: Industrialization.  Strategy: Corrupt the electric grid with unreliable, expensive renewable energy, while opposing fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
Target: Science.  Strategy: Use apostate "scientists" or "experts" to misdirect real Science analyses, and to confuse the public about what Science is.
Target: Unity.  Strategy: For example, inflame racism to incite discord and distrust among fellow citizens.
Target: Patriotism.  Strategy: Inject WOKE, DEI, CRT, etc. ideologies in our education system to sabotage citizen support for their country.
Target: Propaganda.  Strategy: Utilize mainstream media as a major source of disinformation on societal topics ranging from COVID to climate change.
Target: Free Thought.  Strategy: Trick citizens into questioning their own thoughts by normalizing non-sensical situations (e.g., there are more than two genders, etc.).
Target: Elections.  Strategy: Corrupt the election process so that key legislators are not always elected by citizens. Resist meaningful audits to avoid exposing this.
Target: Border Security.  Strategy: Allow essentially anyone who chooses, to come into the country — including criminals, spies, etc.
Target: Military.  Strategy: Use many of the above tactics to weaken our military.

What's Next for Wokeism?  Twenty-five years ago, I told a friend that we would likely bear witness to the acceptance and even protection of several abhorrent social or political practices.  That came true, but it didn't stop there. [...] During the 1980s and 1990s, the social norms listed below were largely unacceptable; eventually the practices became mainstream through the strident promotion by activists and ineffective pushback by traditional institutions:
  •   Open homosexuality, coupled with the very public promotion of the lifestyle
  •   Gay Marriage
  •   Transgenderism
  •   Sex by consenting children with young adults
  •   Open Borders
  •   Anti-Capitalism
  •   The acceptance of recreational drug use as acceptable behavior
  •   Rampant crime and reduced punishment
  •   Society no longer requires work to live
  •   Single-parent constructs as equal to two-parent families
Take a moment to reread this list.  Nothing surprises us anymore.  History teaches us that radical social change usually ends badly, even for progressives.  All of the above continues to have a significant stigma for many Americans.  There is general agreement that promoting negative moral or societal values can and usually will have a deleterious effect on society.  With no national debate, the redefinition of our country has almost been achieved.  Today, our ability to be shocked must surpass a very high threshold.

Bidenana Republic.  Readers may believe calling America a banana republic is an exaggeration but think about it.  Congress is in the midst of passing what is laughingly called a budget.  Half the money comes from taxpayers.  Half the money is borrowed.  All the money goes to special interests.  The FBI provides the muscle.  In 2016, it investigated Hillary who sent 33,000 emails to a trucking company in Red China.  The FBI granted immunity from prosecution to her staff and helped destroy key evidence.  Jimmy the Weasel Comey said that since she didn't mean to break the law, he would recommend not prosecuting.  He made that recommendation days after his boss, Loretta Lynch, and Bill Clinton had an impromptu 45-minute talk on an airport tarmac.  Clinton said they discussed their grandchildren.  By grandchildren, he meant that vacancy on the Supreme Court.  At the same time, the FBI tried to con a judge into approving wiretapping of Donald Trump.  In a rare act of courage, the judge turned them down in June but in October the judge caved in and the FBI spied.  A lot.  We do not know if the FBI ever stopped spying.  There sure seem to be a lot of leaks about what The Donald is doing.  When the FBI isn't covering up crimes and spying for Democrats and RINOs, it is entrapping civilians.  Democrat Governor Whitmer was in jeopardy of losing her job when an FBI informant convinced four losers to hatch an asinine plot to kidnap her.  This is why many people believe that the FBI and Capitol Police enticed people to enter the Capitol, which was closed to the public at the time, on January 6, 2021.  This allowed Nancy Pelosi and the rest to recast a rally on the National Mall as an insurrection.  This led to a post-presidency impeachment trial.  These people are nuts.  But these people are in power.

The Democrats' Contempt for the American People.  The inflation rate is still hovering around 8-9%, in contrast with the 1.4% when Donald Trump left office.  A record number of people (853) have died at the U.S. southern border in the past 12 months (and those are only the ones we know about and not including the people, including children, that were raped, robbed or killed on the trek through central America to the border).  Fentanyl pouring across the Southern border is killing 100,000 Americans a year.  Crime is way up in all major cities.  North Korea has resumed firing ballistic missiles over Japanese territory and has restarted its nuclear weapons program, both of which had been stopped under the Trump administration.  China has humiliated the United States on U.S. soil and is preparing to invade Taiwan.  Russia, which, according to the Democrat-media storyline, was supposed to be Trump's boss, invaded Ukraine soon after Biden's inane remark that a little invasion might not be a big deal, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and massive economic dislocation around the world, while Trump remains the only president in the past four presidents that has not presided over Russian aggression against a neighbor.  Biden, who criticized Trump for cozying up to dictators, has gone begging the Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, for oil to bring down U.S. gas prices.  Economic experts are once again talking about a major recession in the near future.  Trust in American institutions, including the media, the FBI, etc., is at an all-time low.

How Young Americans Unwittingly Voted to Ruin Their Lives.  In short, it seems that young Americans voted for the people who are ruining their lives.  It is the Left that is primarily responsible for the unprecedented levels of depression and despair among young people.
  •   The Left deprived children of school for nearly two years — for no valid reason.
  •   The Left ensured that young children would not see anyone's face outside their home for nearly two years — again, for no valid reason.
  •   The Left frightens young people about their future — through its hysteria over global warming — in a way that no group ever before frightened young Americans.
  •   The Left has destroyed the healthiest beliefs in a citizen's life — especially in the life of a young citizen:  belief in God and belief in one's country.  God, religion, patriotism, and the national flag have all become objects of mockery.
  •   The Left lies to them about everything — from nonbinary genders to the founding of America to the extent of white racism in the country to opponents of the Left being fascists.
  •   The Left works feverishly to prematurely sexualize children by talking about sex and the nihilistic falsehood of sex being "nonbinary" to children beginning in kindergarten.
  •   The Left encourages taking children as young as 5 years old to observe and participate in "Drag Queen Story Hours" featuring men dressed as women reading and dancing for them, often in a sexualized manner, and then having some of the children do the same.
  •   The Left works feverishly to diminish the authority and stature of parents, the most important people in a young person's life.
  •   The Left has created the unprecedented explosion — not only in America, but in recorded history — of young people who think they are really a member of the opposite sex.
  •   The Left corrupts young people's ability to think clearly by suppressing commonsense dissent.  Everyone knows it is grossly unfair for a man to compete in women's sports.  But if a man says he is a woman, we are supposed to believe it and to assert that it becomes fair.  And any girl or woman who says it is unfair is threatened with expulsion from her team, the end of her chances for a sports scholarship to college and social ostracization.

What Is Conservatism?  Before diving into the fundamentals of conservatism, it may be useful to recognize what it is not.  What I mean is that Republicans should remind themselves what they are opposing in today's political climate.  Consider what the left has affected in recent years:  It has affected the whole of education, beginning with schoolchildren being exposed to a radical and aggressive sexual agenda with sexually explicit reading materials and drag queen story hours all the way up to higher education, where radical ideologies have been normative for decades.  It has tainted confidence in the sciences, with recent years revealing scientific "experts" denying basic biological fact by failing to define a woman, promoting blatant medical propaganda, and squashing medical freedom by threatening, punishing, firing, and silencing opposing voices (even when they are respected experts themselves). [...] It has also affected the economy insofar as it has threatened national energy independence; produced hyperinflation; and, of course, promoted continual dependence on the Federal Reserve.  It long ago infected entertainment via Hollywood, but also more recently infiltrated other arenas by promoting woke sentiments in sports, music, late-night shows, and comedy.  It has produced a culture of death, devised turbulent foreign policies, fostered corrupt alliances, emboldened criminals, weaponized technology companies, tarnished intelligence agencies, and more.  These recent advancements are the direct result of leftist ideology concentrated in the Democrat party.

The Left Were the Mad Scientists, We Were Their Lab Rats.  As the midterms approach, one way of looking at America's current disaster is that we, the American people, were lab rats.  And since 2021, the Left were the mad scientists, eager to try out their crackpot leftist experiments on us.  The result is that the housing market is tottering on the verge of collapse.  As interest rates soar, our $31 trillion national debt crowds out everything else in the budget.  Inflation roars at a rate of 8-9 percent per annum, higher than at any time in 40 years.  Yet the prices of the stuff of life — food, fuel, shelter, energy — are far steeper still than the official rate.  No one is safe from thugs anymore — whether a commuter on a New York subway or the Pelosis in Pacific Heights.  The country reportedly has a 25-day supply of diesel fuel — the energy source that runs the nation.  Meanwhile, we keep draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of oil — a commodity we have in abundance but refuse to produce fully.  We never fixed the supply-chain crisis of last year, and so still face shortages of key consumer goods.  The labor participation rate is at an all-time low — given fat government COVID subsidies, the Siren-song appeal of staying home after the lockdowns, fear of COVID, and millions of workers with long COVID.

Our government's executive branch is deliberately destroying liberty.  How are they destroying us?  Let me count the ways.
1.  Electoral Fraud.
    A.  2000 Mules.
    B.  Electoral Insurrection (treason).
2.  Destruction of the Economy
    A.  Funding COVID development ("gain of function") in the Wuhan Lab; deliberate exaggeration of the COVID crisis; and COVID lockdowns.
    B.  Elimination of fossil fuels; creation of energy dependency; intentionally driving up gasoline prices; and pushing for electric cars.
    C.  Deliberately enhancing inflation.
    D.  Inviting unlimited immigration for cheap labor and Democrat voters.
    E.  Climate change hoax.
3.  Destruction of the Family
    A.  Promoting abortion
    B.  Promoting sexual perversion and transgenderism.
    C.  Using public education as a platform for sexual grooming and turning children against their parent's values.
4.  Establishment of Federal Police State
    A.  FBI persecution of Mama Bears as "domestic terrorists."
    B.  Property destruction by government brownshirts.
    C.  COVID lockdown, so the US is becoming "democracy with Chinese characteristics."
    D.  Corrupting the legal system by mob intimidation of the Supreme Court.
    E.  Government censorship of speech; classifying truth as "misinformation".
    F.  Breakdown of law and order.
    G.  Government efforts to disarm the public.
5.  Destruction of the US Military
    A.  Wokism
    B.  Seeking war with Russia and China
    C.  Mandated vaccinations

Imagine the Unimaginable.  Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory.  They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable. [...] The traditional bedrocks of the American system — a stable economy, energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a professional judiciary, law enforcement, and a credible criminal justice system — are dissolving.  Gas and diesel prices are hitting historic levels.  Inflation is at a 40-year high.  New cars and homes are unaffordable.  The necessary remedy of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the disease of hyperinflation.  There is no southern border.  Expect over 1 million foreign nationals to swarm this summer into the United States without audit, COVID testing, or vaccination.  None will have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigration law.  Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded.  District attorneys deliberately release violent criminals without charges. [...] Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the budgets of millions of Americans.  An American president — in a first — casually warns of food shortages.  Baby formula has disappeared from many shelves.

Biden's COVID Testing Fail.  On Monday, January 10, [...] Joe Biden unilaterally declared that everyone will get up to eight free at-home COVID tests per month, to be covered at no additional charge by insurance companies. [...] COVID tests are notoriously unreliable, and in most cases, unnecessary. [...] We are talking about government creating a new mandate that is actually impossible to either deliver or afford. [...] They didn't acknowledge the fact that this quantity of tests is unavailable.  They didn't provide for the cost; they didn't give the providers, public or private, a chance to research this deliverable and negotiate with manufacturers or deliverers first to see what might be achievable.  The Biden-Harris regime simply didn't think it through at all.  And, for the shrinking percentage of our population who care about the law, it's worth noting that, in addition to being impossible, this order is completely unconstitutional.

The Editor says...
Here's the gold nugget in the article above:  "The Biden-Harris regime simply didn't think it through at all."  Exactly! 
  •   That's why they started printing money and handing out "stimulus" payments to everybody. 
  •   That's why they think it's a good idea to defund the police, while letting violent criminals out of jail because they might catch Covid. 
  •   That's why they encourage (or force) businesses to hire marginally-qualified ethnic minorities, just because they're not white,
  •   That's why they think if they eliminate failing grades it will improve the quality of the public schools. 
  •   That's why they killed the Keystone XL pipeline regardless of its effect on gas prices. 
  •   That's why they opened up the Mexican border. 
  •   That's why they pay unmarried women to reproduce. 
  •   That's why they want everybody to drive an electric car — but please don't recharge it, because electricity is already in short supply. 
  •   That's why they thought it would be okay to remove religion from the public schools. 
  •   That's why they see nothing wrong with using a cell phone or a TV set as a babysitter. 
  •   That's why they think we can eliminate hydrocarbons and get by on solar panels and windmills. 
  •   That's why they elect politicians who promise to create "green jobs," even though there are no such jobs. 
  •   That's why mail-in voting is allowed. 
  •   That's why school teachers are unionized. 
  •   That's why they insist on everyone wearing a useless face mask. 
  •   That's why they celebrate men competing in women's sports, and transvestite sex perverts reading books to little kids at the public library. 
Nobody on the left stops to ask, Where is this going to lead?

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.

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.

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.

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:

America's Tipping Point.  As we look through the "death by a thousand cuts" of woke American culture...
  •   transgender surgery performed without parental consent
  •   men competing in women's sports
  •   abortion near and after birth
  •   "Climate Change" and Earth worship to replace Jewish and Christian values
  •   Critical Race Theory
  •   lawlessness in inner cities
  •   unrestricted illegal immigration
  •   and a hundred more
...we see that the "overstory" was political correctness:  "Everyone is entitled to their opinion, even if they're 100% wrong.  I don't want to be thought of as racist, sexist or intolerant."  But now,
  •   when your son comes back from spring break to announce he's a woman in a man's body
  •   you lose a promotion to a totally unqualified person based on gender and skin color
  •   your restaurant is forced to replace its gas stoves
  •   you're told you will have to drive an electric car when there are already brownouts in your state
  •   the media tell you Biden is at the top of his game, Kamala Harris is winning in the polls, the economy is the best it's ever been, and elections are safe and secure
  •   and a thousand more,
a new overstory has emerged:  "common sense."  You now say, "I'm fine with other people holding crazy ideas, but if it hurts me, my family, or my country, I'm not putting up with it anymore."

DOGE (and Fiscal Reform) Will Double Your Income.  Government and (via permission given to) the banks, have stolen our wealth, captured our labor, leaving us with a measly 10% of our life's energy to work with, to grow.  Unless of course, you sign onto the grift, then you get cashed out.  The rest is paid to the government and to the banks, where it seethes in a vicious circle to further immiserate us.  Their principal energy is bent towards shutting us up.  All that changed on November 5.  You can't have a free America and a locked down world.  That's a recipe for bullets, blood and the guillotine.  Massive fiscal reform will release that money and return it to you.  The result will be a boom for the ages.  Try to stay with me on this.  It will be all anyone will be talking, shouting, complaining about for the next 18 months.  And it is the only way to save the culture.  No green economy, fancy derivative, debt forgiveness, UN plan or tax will stop a thousand years of misery.  Only this.

Media Was Fine With Milk and Egg Prices, Panics Over Guacamole Prices.  After years of telling Americans not to worry about high milk, bread and egg prices, the media is panicking over a threat to their staple: guacamole.  [Tweet] [...] Now maybe I'm a little biased because despite living for nearly a decade in Southern California, I'm not sure why anyone would even eat the stuff, but when your problem is being able to afford guacamole, instead of milk, bread and eggs, you have a coastal elite problem.  California used to produce a whole lot of avocadoes, but since Democrats took over and decided to wipe out the water supply for farmers and destroy dams to create artificial droughts, the avocados either come from Florida or Mexican cartels.

Portland Pro-Crime, Defund The Police Activist Gets Her iPhone Stolen And This Video Is Delicious.  Independent journalist Kevin Dahlgren captured the moment the unidentified woman pleads with the vagrants who she believed had her phone.  'If you stole it from rich scum, by all means keep it and sell it, but I'm, like, really [lovely],' the woman said in the clip taken by photographer Tara Faul.  'If you guys come up with my iPhone, I will give you more than... Like, I'm an honest person,' she added.  Dahlgren later reported that, despite her pleas, the woman did not get her phone back.  The woman also claimed she would not call the police, according to the journalist.  It's not clear what the woman was doing in the area or how her phone was stolen, but Dahlgren described her as a liberal activist.  [Video clip]

The Influence of Herd Mentality on Sexual and Gender Identity.  In a recent study (Gallup 2024) of sexual identity in the US, 30% of female respondents between 18 and 26 self-identified as LGBTQ.  In the Ivy League colleges, the numbers are even higher for both men and women.  At Brown University, a 2023 study showed that 40% of the students identified as such.  How did this come to be?  In fact, how did the idea of being born a different gender or being born gay come to be accepted by huge segments of the population?  How is it that 3 million Americans say they are transgender, and almost one million Americans say they identify as animals (furries)?

Enough Already with the F-Bombs.  I have a satellite TV system with a handful of movie channels featuring new movies made for cable, and every time I click on one in the middle of some story — no matter the format — cops and robbers, comedy — within ten seconds — I am not kidding! — an actor spits out [the F-word].  And as soon as I hear that word — I find it ugly and grating — I click to the next channel and — I am not kidding! — with ten seconds, an actor, even an actress, spews the same four-letter word.  Then I click immediately to the third channel and... same thing.  I no longer can watch such "entertainment."  The behavior also exposes, every time, the scriptwriter's unwitting admission that he suffers from a limited vocabulary in the rich English language.  American culture has become unbearably vulgar, which adjective commonly connotes dirty words that usually concern bodily functions below the waist.

The Editor says...
Yes, it does appear that nobody under 30 knows how to express himself or herself forcefully without using profanity, and this condition has spilled over into television programs.  Most of you would eject a stranger who came into your home cursing and swearing.  Why do so many people tolerate the same behavior from the TV set?  You have only yourself to blame if you don't unplug the television and leave it out by the curb for the next garbage truck or neighborhood scavenger.  Nothing requires you to own a television, and the TV industry long ago passed the point where their programming does more good than harm.  If thousands of people cut the cord and stop watching television, the TV execs will eventually get a clue and clean up their products.

Eliminating Biden's EV mandate.  While Biden's EV mandate and lavish subsidies have wrought havoc in the auto industry, it has also affected the dependability of the U.S. energy grid.  Our energy grid was once a source of affordable and reliable power.  Historically, America's power grid has been mostly supplied by coal, with natural gas and nuclear power as significant contributors.  All these energy sources are extremely reliable, affordable, and have the ability to produce the enormous amount of energy necessary to support the U.S. economy. [...] Under Biden, the federal government has mandated the retirement of reliable and conventional energy plants while rewarding utilities with extravagant profits for the construction of so-called green energy sources such as wind and solar.  What's more, the push for green energy has been advocated for by giant utility companies and green lobbyists.  Unsurprisingly, this has led to the destabilization of the energy grid and ever-rising energy prices as well as more frequent blackouts and brownouts.  Ironically, the EVs that Biden, Left-leaning ideologues, and green lobbyists want to force Americans to drive require huge amounts of electricity from a grid they are making less reliable.

No one should believe economists — they are apologists for bad policies.  Here are some of the actual Biden, Harris policies that led to high inflation:  Doling out massive amounts of taxpayer money to buy votes when the economy was already rapidly growing.  There is no excuse for running a $2 trillion deficit this year, in a supposedly growing economy.  They're just masking the problems.  Flooding the United States with millions of illegals because Biden and Harris reversed Trump's policies and ignored the law.  Issuing massive amounts of new regulations is clearly inflationary.  Blocking pipelines and drilling on federal lands while publicly seeking to destroy companies that use natural resources to produce reasonably priced energy causes inflation in the U.S. and throughout the world.  Forcing people and businesses to buy expensive health insurance policies instead of fostering freedom of choice.  The media and other Democrats intentionally lie and claim that Obamacare has made health insurance more affordable; the truth is that prices have skyrocketed for 14 years because of the Affordable Care Act.  Throwing money at colleges for 60 years has certainly added to inflation.  Then, we had a president who dictatorially paid off the loans using other people's money and debt, which is also inflationary.  Forcing car companies to make expensive electric cars and trucks that people don't want is obviously inflationary.  It raises the prices of gas-powered cars, which covers the losses and all the capital investments.

Confected emergencies and the new world order.  [Scroll down]  Without the "Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity" ("DIE") emergency, would we have tolerated the sexualisation, feminisation, and castration of our children?  Would we have tolerated men punching women in boxing rings for televised sport?  Would we have tolerated gangs of thugs targetting and raping vulnerable young women, or beheading those of us who criticise their beliefs, or the blasphemy laws protecting them?  Would we have tolerated the placement of rapists in women's prisons, or boys in girls' changing rooms, or men as heads of rape crisis centres?  Would we have tolerated men in dresses, with no ability or interest in war fighting or operational readiness, commanding our military forces?

Biden and Harris Raided Medicare to Fund Green New Deal:  Premiums Are Now Set to Spike.  When Democrats rammed through the Inflation Reduction Act during the days they controlled all of Washington, D.C., it ignited a chain reaction that led to higher Medicare costs for America's senior citizens.  "Nearly two years after its passage, the IRA has diverted nearly $260 billion from the projected Medicare 'savings' to pay for special interest handouts like large tax credits for costly electric vehicles, enormous subsidies paid to big health insurer-PBM corporations, and funding health care programs for illegal immigrants," Ron Fitzwater, Chief Executive Officer of the Missouri Pharmacy Association, wrote in an Op-Ed in the Missouri Times.  "The Biden-Harris administration is not protecting Medicare; they're stealing from it," he wrote.

Is Obama connected to the Dem panic about Hegseth as Defense Secretary?  The military is both America's last and first line of defense against foreign enemies inside and outside of America's borders — and for decades now, the Democrats have been chipping away at it.  Democrats have demoralized the military by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in Vietnam (we won the Tet offensive), Iraq (we'd won until Obama pulled us out, leaving a vacuum for ISIS and Iran), and Afghanistan (we were at least maintaining until Biden gave us the most humiliating retreat in American history).  Democrats have structurally weakened the military by focusing on climate change, not defense.  And Democrats have corrupted the military at a core level by bringing racial identity politics to what was once the best-integrated institution in America and by flooding it with people who have a deviant sexual agenda.  Pete Hegseth promises to stand against all of that.

Tariffs, Inflation, and the Donkey that Cried Wolf.  [Scroll down]  Why is it that the Democrats object to the inflationary aspect of tariffs, and they never object to the inflationary effect of anything else they advocate?  Over the past four years, the Democrats have caused the costs of diesel fuel and gasoline to jump by fifty to a hundred percent.  That was inflationary.  Did the Democrats ever apologize for that?  Over the past four years, they also printed hundreds of billions of dollars in fiat money to give to illegal aliens, green energy companies, weapons systems for Ukraine, and big city bailouts through such pork-laden programs as the Inflation Reduction Act.  This was all inflationary, but it didn't stop them.  They fought to close coal plants and spend mints building worthless wind turbines and solar panel farms, producing the least efficient and therefore most expensive energy possible for our overtaxed electric grid.  This increased cost of energy has driven up the cost of manufacturing, the cost of refrigeration, the cost of cooking — everything from foods and beverages to manufactured goods has gone up because of the Biden-Harris war on energy.  That's inflationary.  But that didn't stop the Democrats from advocating such policies, did it?

Blue City Blues.  In reading through the stories of problems in America's larger cities, one notices commonalities.  When cities make the news for all the wrong reasons, those covering them often mention their leaders.  The 25 largest cities in America all have Democrat mayors, and as of 2023, over 85% of the largest American cities are mostly populated by and led by Democrats.  That stands to reason.  The colleges and universities that are turning out people with advanced degrees have faculties that are overwhelmingly left-of-center.  The high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools likewise have faculties that lean left.

Not what Trump was — but what Harris wasn't.  I received a Facebook message written by an old friend whom I went to high school with back in the Midwest. [...] My friend's comments accentuated the fact that wealthy liberals (especially in the D.C. area) have for so long been isolated from real America that they don't know what most Americans are feeling these days.  For the last three-plus years, we've dealt with the Biden-Harris Administration giving their blessing to boys in the girls' locker room, regular folks having to buy only half a tank of gas to have enough money left over to buy lunch, or reading about unvetted immigrants killing and raping our citizens while feeding at the government trough.

What Trump's astonishing comeback means.  Prosperity and improved public morale were reversed when COVID-19 struck and riots erupted in the wake of the death at police hands of a black drug abuser called George Floyd.  Even though these riots were promoted by Democrats, a chaos-averse public turned to a familiar and seemingly less divisive figure, Joe Biden, whom voters judged more likely to bring back order and stability.  Trump's refusal to accept that he lost helped Democrats win two Senate seats in Georgia and led to a riot by Trump supporters at the nation's Capitol.  In January 2021, it seemed a good bet that he was a spent political force.  But then Biden enthusiastically smashed his promises of centrist government and normalcy and pushed an agenda of unregenerate leftism.  He threw open the southern border, flooding communities across the country with unvetted migrants from around the world.  He stoked historically high inflation with massive debt-financed spending, which eroded everyone's paychecks, especially those at the bottom of the income scale.  In addition to the greater costs of their own groceries, housing, and transportation, voters had to pay for all those items being showered by Democrats on to Biden's illegal immigrants.

With a True Vote Count, Trump Wins in a Landslide .  Many feel that the November 5 election should rightly be a referendum on corruption and misuse of power, specifically the Biden-Harris abuse of power that may be unparalleled in America's long history.  Consider:
  •   The exposure of massive corruption and compromise of the Biden family — during and after the time Joe Biden served as vice president — including tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments, and notably from entities with connections to America's number one enemy, the CCP.
  •   The adoption of an open border policy that enabled as many as 20 million illegal immigrants to enter the U.S. during the four-year Biden-Harris term, overwhelming our health and education welfare system, escalating the risk of terrorist attack on our soil, and increasing the likelihood of massive election irregularity.
  •   The two-tiered justice system on display in the political prosecution of Donald Trump, the arrest and imprisonment of J6 protestors — many of whom committed no crime — and the instigation of open season lawfare and jail sentences on most everyone on Trump's team from his first term. [...]
  •   The out-of-control deficit spending, money-printing and borrowing, pushes the U.S. ever closer to insolvency and the demise of the dollar, while having the immediate effect of spurring inflation in energy and food prices — with the greatest burden on the poor and lower class, many of whom now find the essentials of everyday living unaffordable.

Corporations, Childless Cat Women, and Politicians.  We are in the midst of a profound cultural shift whose implications we refuse to look at because too much of the establishment is invested in consumerist lifestyle libertinism.  One reason all societies up to our day were interested in and regulated marriage is that it was the way by which societies perpetuated themselves — and societies had an interest in survival.  Only in our time has that instinct of self-preservation been subverted by constant claims of "autonomous individualism," an isolated individualism that results in even natural things like the man-woman relationship and marriage becoming suspect.  If all this "social progress" was leading to greater general happiness and "joy," that's not apparent on the streets of America.  Depression and suicide among minors are growing.  Marriage is delayed or deferred until one of the latest points in life on record.

Chaos and Crime:  Legacy of the Biden-Harris Border Policies.  Upon being inaugurated, one of the responsibilities Joe Biden and Kamala Harris assumed was to keep the American homeland secure and safeguard our sovereign borders.  Nearly four years later, looking at the catastrophic, unprecedented border crisis that has unfolded on their watch, can anyone say with a straight face they have fulfilled that obligation?  The answer, unequivocally, is no — and Americans are the ones paying the price.  From the beginning, Biden, Harris, and other key officials in their administration were determined to end President Donald Trump's effective border security policies — regardless of the consequences.  They also refused to enforce long-standing immigration laws that administrations of both parties have enforced.  According to a new report by my committee, the incoming Biden-Harris team was warned by current and former Department of Homeland Security law enforcement during the presidential transition of what would happen if they embarked on this path — and yet, they chose to do so anyway.

Canada is disintegrating.  What happens in a country without cultural conservatism?  Look no further than Canada, where the national identity is disintegrating.  In 2015, soon after taking office, the new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gushed to a fawning New York Times that, "There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.  There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other — but there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada."  Along with his fellow travellers in the institutions, he set to work ripping the country's historic identity to shreds.  The three prongs of the attack involved setting fire to its past, promoting LGBTQ and critical race theory in schools and government, and unleashing an unprecedented wave of mass migration.  Only now that the full impact of this cultural revolution is sinking in is the country waking up.  Even the mainstream liberal left admits things have gone too far.

2024: Voting by Facts, Not Feelings.  When Harris and Biden stepped into office in 2021, they inherited Trump's 1.4% inflation rate.  They quickly exploded the overall inflation rate to 19.75 by passing the American Rescue Plan Act.  Then, in August 2022, the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act because of Kamala's tie-breaking vote.  That act authorized $891 billion in additional spending, massively increasing inflation.  Harris's philosophy of restricting gas and oil production had a substantial detrimental effect on American consumers.  The national average cost of gasoline under Kamala rose 47%.  Americans paid $2.28 per gallon under Trump, but that same gallon would cost $3.35 today.  Under Kamala, filling up a 20-gallon gas tank would cost Americans $67; under Trump, it would cost only $45.60, or $21.40 less.  The increase in fuel costs put incredible hardships on truckers who ship various goods across the country.  The unnecessary increase had a catastrophic domino effect.  Groceries became more expensive by 20%, electricity went up 28%, and rent went up 21%.  Nearly everything Americans purchased became far more costly.

Our Current Government Is No Longer Constitutional.  A recent Wall Street Journal editorial tells us that notwithstanding the proven sheer impracticality of it, the new greenhouse gas emissions rules that the Environmental Protection Agency promulgated require that battery-powered and plug-in hybrid vehicles constitute 32% of new automobile sales by 2027, and 71% by 2032.  Never mind that EVs are vastly inferior to gasoline-powered vehicles and extremely dangerous because they catch fire in minor accidents.  Still, coal, gas, and nuclear are out, and wind and solar are in.  The hills are alive with solar and wind farms, but what do they plan for when the sun's not shining and the wind's not blowing?  Where can you find a charging station when you need one, how long will it take to charge your EV, and how far can you drive before you next charge?  Since one terrorist with a .22 rifle can take out a substation, we might want to contemplate life without electricity.

Drug Costs Explode As Kamalanomics Massively Backfires.  Go to Kamala Harris' campaign website and among the very short list of alleged achievements is this:  "She cast the deciding vote to lower drug prices and cap insulin prices for our seniors."  The only problem is that drug costs for seniors have skyrocketed since Harris signed that bill.  Harris is pointing to the criminally misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act," which got zero Republican votes, and which was supposed to lower the cost of prescription drugs by giving, as Harris puts it, "Medicare the power to negotiate lower drug prices with Big Pharma."  When George W. Bush established Medicare Part D, he let private insurers negotiate with drug companies over prices and then compete for seniors' business.  The result was a program that cost both seniors and taxpayers far less than government bureaucrats had expected, offered seniors a wide range of options, and had premiums that barely budged for more than a decade.

"You've got to take responsibility for what happened in your administration.".  Oops!  The above quote may be Kamala Harris's most devastating, grievous error in her sit-down with Bret Baier last night.  We can be sure that those words escaped her mouth before she realized what she was saying. [...] With that quote, she admitted that she and Biden are indeed responsible for
  [#1]   The horrific withdrawal from Afghanistan.
  [#2]   The mind-numbing, tragic consequences of their open border.  At least ten million migrants have entered the country unvetted, thousands of criminals among them.  Sex- and human-trafficking has exploded as a result.  So has crime across the board.
  [#3]   The war in Ukraine — millions lives lost there.
  [#4]   The Hamas attack on Israel, due to their obvious anti-Israel bias.
  [#5]   The irresponsible spending that gave us the highest inflation in decades.
  [#6]   The evisceration of our military with DIE and transgenderism.
  [#7]   the gift of billions of dollars to Iran that has funded the subsequent terrorism against Israel.
  [#8]   The lawfare unleashed on Trump, all of it manufactured out of whole cloth to take him off the board.
  [#9]   The weaponization of the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, etc. that has led to peaceful protesters being imprisoned for exercising their First Amendment rights.
  [#10]   The fact that Joe Biden is owned by the Chinese Communist Party — he owes his wealth to them.
  [#11]   The administration's disastrous response to the hurricanes.
By her standard, Harris must "take responsibility" for all of the above.

The U.S. government [is] now effectively a criminal organization.  Think of the millions of illegal aliens, many of them criminals, allowed to cross our border in recent years.  Countless numbers of whom have been given cell phones, pre-loaded credit cards, driver's licenses, and been transported around the country and put up in nice hotels.  Or sent to 'battleground states.'  For some reason.  Coincidence, I'm sure.  The government doesn't want you to think about the staggering amount of crime, sex-trafficking, and fentanyl that has come across the border with them.  Mention this, and you will likely be accused of racism, xenophobia ... or of spreading 'misinformation.'

Communists Out of the Closet.  [An earlier] article described the Cloward-Piven Crisis strategy that Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two radical Columbia University professors, dreamed up.  Their first target was the welfare system.  They hoped that signing up every person eligible for every public service would overwhelm the system and cause its collapse.  In the ashes, they would then suggest the solution:  a guaranteed annual income for all Americans.  (Note that such proposals have been added to Biden spending bills but were stripped out).  They went on to target voting and were the authors of the National Voter Registration Act (i.e., Motor Voter).  That law made voter roll maintenance much harder while making non-citizen voting much easier.  Since then, the Crisis strategy has expanded into virtually every area of our lives.  Almost everything we are witnessing in our nation today is part of it.  From tidal waves of illegal immigration (don't call them "migrants," which is leftist terminology; they are illegal aliens), the fentanyl crisis, suicides at record numbers (especially among the young and members of the military), to the war on energy, the war on morality and sexuality, the War on White America and the War on Black America (yes there is one of those too) — everywhere you turn the Left has put our nation at war with itself, with the ultimate goal of overwhelming it to the point that the entire society degenerates into chaos and civil war.  That end goal will provide the pretext for the powers that be to declare martial law, seize our guns and take over by force if necessary.

The 2020 Theft Saved This Country.  First let's state the obvious:  of course Trump won in 2020.  The statistics are overwhelming.  Leftists often try to use statistics to "prove" racial discrimination in all sorts of situations.  For some reason, they don't seem to have the same desires and statistical certitude regarding the overwhelming statistical evidence that Trump won.  Combine this with the truckload of obvious — and unexplainable — shenanigans across many states and it is clear the rightful winner was Trump. [...] If Trump's win had been acknowledged he would have been President the last 3.5 years.  A whole lot of bad things in this country and across the globe wouldn't have happened.  But they did.  But these actions and their results have acted as a catalyst to real change.

Ideological Excrement Has Poisoned the West.  The West has seen the destruction of marriage, and now even the destruction of the human being as male or female, promoted as progress, both in the name of equality.  Constant disestablishment of norms recognized by nearly every civilization, all in the name of "equality," is an attempt to create civilizational sanctification achieved by ceaseless flagellation deemed necessitated by a radicalized definition of "equality."  But the endless punishment of a given culture's norms only leads to wounding and hardened scarification of the individual's and society's conscience, their innate sense of moral order.  The never-ending revolution in the name of "equality," the constant wounding and amputation of foundational principles only leads to sickness and to the great equalizer of death, be it individual or collective.

How Biden, Harris and Granholm Made a Looming Grid Crisis Immeasurably Worse.  Last May — that's [M]ay of 2023, not this year — I wrote a story at Forbes about the looming crisis in the US power grid due to a shortage of high-capacity power transformers and their mucked-up supply chains.  At the time, it was a crisis that had been developing for more than 2 years — since late 2020.  It was a rising issue the U.S. Department of Energy, led by Secretary Jennifer Granholm, was about to make immensely worse by forcing manufacturers and power companies to comply with new, completely unneeded efficiency standard imposed on products that already function at well over 99% efficiency.  Republicans in congress were becoming increasingly alarmed by the DOE effort, which would exacerbate the supply issue by forcing makers of these scarce transformers to retool entire factories and create entirely new components in order to comply.

Natural Disasters and Unnatural Expectations.  Hurricanes can be predicted; the devastation they leave behind often cannot.  Hurricane Helene left some people on its path alone, while causing devastating flooding for others. [...] Sure, there are charities, more than ever, in some places.  But charities exist on donations, and many such donations have dried up in recent years, as DEI/ESG policies have encouraged corporate donors to shift their corporate donations away from traditional charities toward other, more politically-directed nonprofits. [...] In fact, the biggest disaster in the country for the past four years hasn't been caused by Mother Nature at all, it's been caused by the abandonment of our borders by Basement Joe Biden and Border Czar Kamala Harris.  There's been a shift in the way that charities work in the United States; too many of them now focus on sheltering and feeding the tens of millions of illegal aliens and "refugees" that clutter our cities, big and small.  Many hotels and motels have no vacancies, because they're full up with Latin Americans, Africans, Haitians, and Asians, who walked here, drove here, or were flown in by the Biden-Harris regime, over the past four years.

CNN gets all puppet-y again.  It is not fear: [...] To tell the public about how disastrous it is that Biden and Harris have built up the finances of Russia, Iran, and non-state terrorists with high energy prices.  [¶] To tell the people how much more dangerous the world has been since they took office.  [¶] To tell people how they kept schools and businesses closed due to the COVID lies of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC, and a host of other bad actors.  [¶] To tell the people that Democrats fired people who chose not to take a COVID vaccine.  [¶] To tell people how Democrats are willing to damage women's sports.  [¶] To tell people that Biden and Harris have weaponized the Justice Department by going after him, Catholics, parents, pro-life people, Elon Musk, and other Trump supporters.

Progressivism: An Arrogant and Deadly Worldview.  After Lyndon Johnson declared "war on poverty," the federal government spent trillions of dollars only to make Americans relatively poorer while greatly increasing wealth inequality.  Four decades after the creation of the Department of Education, American children have never performed so poorly on standardized tests.  Barack Obama and the Democrats insisted on "saving" Americans from high medical costs by nationalizing health care — only to give us a broken hospital system that is even more costly.  Anything the government touches turns into an inefficient and poorly run enterprise, which is why so many Americans correctly feared that Obamacare would create the medical equivalent of the U.S. Postal Service or the local DMV.  In turn, "the best boys from the best colleges" have turned postal employees and Department of Motor Vehicle personnel into essential workers for registering voters and collecting ballots.

Economic Collapse In Slow Motion.  The commercial real estate market is in the doldrums across much of the U.S., but it is especially bad in some places.  Like Minneapolis. [...] Why are Minneapolis's problems so acute?  Because of crime.  Formerly a low-crime city, the George Floyd riots and accompanying attacks on law enforcement have caused a dramatic increase in the rate of serious crime.  That has caused businesses, as well as individuals, to avoid the city.  With leases continuing to expire, there is no reason to think the downward trends have bottomed out.  The City of Minneapolis, meanwhile, is exploring ways of redeveloping George Floyd Square in a manner that will, in the mayor's words, "honor the life of George Floyd, and point toward a more equitable future."  Somehow, I don't think that is the focus that the city needs if it is to recover economically.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris owe the world an apology for the perils they've created.  If President Biden had any decency, he'd limit his United Nations speech Tuesday to two words:  I'm sorry.  Kamala Harris should echo that.  Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates once warned (all too rightly) that Biden had been "wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades."  Over the past four years, Joe and Kam have continued that pattern, leaving the world facing its most perilous threats in decades.  Start with the disastrous bugout from Afghanistan, executed in blatant defiance of every military adviser and the plan left in place by the Trump team.  That bugout enabled the Taliban to triumphantly retake control of the country, humiliating America and seizing billions in weaponry our forces left behind — erasing all the progress made in 20 years of fighting.  Worse, it sent the message that Washington can't be trusted as an ally, that aggressors could get away with almost anything.

The Grim Specter Haunting America.  Many of us have experienced our malaise firsthand.  If we haven't, friends and family have.  If they've been spared, it's in every news report: rampant suicides, addictions, homelessness, unpunished violent crime, a border clobbered by hordes of criminals and terrorists, towns inundated with illegal immigrants dropped at their doorsteps and draining their public services, intra-familial murder with parents killing children and children killing parents, the elderly beaten by hoodlums, children changing their gender, drag queens enticing our kids.  Our streets aren't safe, our schools aren't safe, our malls aren't safe, and our presidential candidates aren't safe.  We send our loving, mentally intact children off to college only for them to return politically and culturally radicalized, addicted to drugs, and treated with medications for a long list of entirely new mental conditions.

Kamalism Will Destroy America.  The 2020 riots showed Kamalism in action.  The regime's paramilitary operation, BLM and Antifa among others, sparked the fire that lit the riots; the regime's intellectuals justified them; corporations and foundations funded them; the media covered them over; politicians fanned the flames; and the regime's justice apparatus, including Kamala herself, freed law breakers.  Even the military got into the act, denying Trump needed resources.  According to Kamalism, it's fine for boys to compete against girls in school sports.  A child can have an abortion or sex change without parental consent.  And it is somehow impossible to know what a woman is.  This is all obviously insane.  But it gets worse — much worse.  Under Kamalism we usher in millions of illegal immigrants with cultures different from our own and then insist on not assimilating them.  The regime's military is increasingly focused on racial and gender quotas at the expense of military readiness.  Kamalism also wants to put an end to the traditional mother/father family.  Kamalism plays Americans for foolish children in need of close supervision, which can only be provided by their "betters": the destructive Left.

The Catastrophic Costs of Government-Dictated Green Energy.  All the energy related problems we have experienced in recent years, which have been a lot:  high gasoline prices, higher heating bills, higher electricity bills, and unreliable electricity, which is a huge problem we need to talk much more about, are the result of government-dictated green energy.  And its very simple.  When you shackle the most cost effective and scalable source of energy, fossil fuels, and you subsidize unreliable solar and wind, that wouldn't otherwise be competitive, energy necessarily becomes more expensive, less reliable and less secure.  So again, it's very simple.  Unfortunately the current administration and many others are engaged in a denial campaign blaming our energy problems on everything but their own policies.

ABC's Trump fact check blows up.  Those blue cities also tend to harass and prosecute officers for doing their jobs, while simultaneously denying them necessary and constitutional tools like stop and frisk, so in self-defense remaining officers tend to do as little as possible, and particularly avoid contact with black criminals, who tend to commit the most crimes, largely against honest black people.  Citizens quickly learn the police aren't going to respond to calls for service, even 911 calls, and even if they do, they're not going to solve any crimes, so they quit making reports.  Criminals, knowing the police are pretty much going to ignore them and people aren't going to report their crimes are delighted, and do things they wouldn't think of doing in communities with fully functional criminal justice systems.  Ending bail and refusing to prosecute criminals doesn't help.  Those same blue cities, knowing crime rates are at obscene, politically deadly, levels do all they can to cover up, and have long since stopped reporting to the FBI.  The politicians of any city with out-of-control crime rates tend to avoid talking about them, but blue cities, unable to admit their beliefs and policies are insane and encourage crime, are particularly unwilling to admit the truth.

Car Insurance up a Whopping 55% in Biden-Harris Admin's America.  Car insurance rates have skyrocketed under the leadership of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and Americans are feeling the squeeze.  Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that car insurance prices rose 55 percent from January 2021 — when Biden and Harris first took office — to July 2024 — the last year of their first term.  [Advertisement]  Once again, their policies are to blame.  As Breitbart News previously reported, Americans' auto insurance rates are rapidly rising due to the pro-migration policies of Biden and Harris, putting millions of these new migrant drivers — "often without driver training or English language lessons" — on the road, increasing risk.  [Advertisement]  As Breitbart News detailed, "Since 2021, Biden has imported roughly ten million legal, illegal, and quasi-legal migrants.  The huge inflow has stalled wages and raised housing costs and has also imposed many other civic and social costs on ordinary Americans."  [Advertisement]

Who's Ready for World War Three?  Americans broadly remain blissfully oblivious regarding how close to World War Three we are and have been since early 2022.  Repeated warnings from U.S. military and intelligence leaders about this dire state of affairs, which this newsletter reported in detail, with looming war against Russia, or China, or Iran — or worst of all, Russia, China and Iran — have fallen on deaf ears.  Not to mention that, given the parlous state of America's military, amid recruiting and retention problems, shortages of weapons and munitions, plus the anemic condition of our defense industrial base, the Pentagon would be hard-pressed to prevail in even one major theater war, while it would almost certainly lose, probably fast, when confronted by three of them at once.  This alarming strategic situation keeps failing to register with the public, even in an election year.  Americans seem not to care that World War Three looms, while the Biden-Harris administration, whoever is actually running it, is eager to distract the public from the geopolitical catastrophe they've sleepwalked America into, while allowing our military to further degrade.

Tolerance is where nations go to die.  We are tolerating our kids being indoctrinated instead of educated in our schools.  We are tolerating the mutilation of their genitalia, and the consequent theft of their sexual health in their adult years[,] often aided and abetted by their "educators."  We tolerated lockdowns and the mandatory introduction of experimental mRNA vaccines into our bodies.  And being told we couldn't attend the weddings or funerals of our loved ones.  And it appears highly likely that we are going to tolerate the ruination of our economy, as we are tolerating the destruction of our urban areas.  It seems a near certainty that we will tolerate the demise of the nuclear family, as we are halfway there already.  In fact, odds are, we will tolerate the utter dissolution of our society, and the death of America herself, as we have tolerated an open Southern border.

The US Is Spiraling Down the Doom-Loop Drain Hole Rapidly Now.  First, we hit a level of debt years ago that seemed astonishing at the time when the national debt topped one-trillion dollars for the first time in over 200 years of being a nation.  Recently, we hit the insane level where just the deficit that adds to the debt each year hit one-trillion dollars a year.  We, then, soared almost immediately right past that to where we had a trillion-dollar deficit more than twice a year.  And now, today, we finally hit the outer limits where just the annual interest on the debt is a trillion dollars.  If anyone thinks we are not caught in a debt doom loop, consider this: we can only pay that interest by taking out more debt just for debt service.  So, we're forced to take out a trillion in new debt each year just to cover the interest on the old debt, and that amount is growing quickly.

New poll: 81% say cost of food is rising faster than income.  According to a new poll from a D.C-based nonprofit No Kid Hungry, the number of Texans negatively affected by grocery store prices continues to increase, with a vast majority (81%) reporting that food costs are outpacing their incomes, and around half (49%) revealing that they've either cut back on meat consumption, or given it up altogether to remain in budget.  The second statistic is exaggerated among lower-income families making less than $50k, with children in the public school system, where it goes from around one-out-of-two to almost three-out-of-four (71%).  These survey results echo an earlier poll, conducted this past spring in New York, where almost nine-out-of-ten (85%) respondents said food prices were accelerating past their incomes; [...]

The Debate at the Kitchen Table.  If the dryer or oven breaks, and costs a couple hundred to fix, versus two or three times that to replace, that was always a difficult debate, but we knew how to have it, how to weigh the pros and cons of getting a few more years out of it versus just getting a new one.  But today, with the tyrannical climate hoax — based restrictions that the federal government has placed on household appliances, whole new issues, and incredibly higher costs, must be factored in.  If your gas furnace or central air unit breaks today, there's the one price to just repair it, which is higher every year, of course.  But now there's something new:  new refrigerant mandates, and the double phase furnace mandate about to kick in, mean that if you replace it today, it will cost a lot, but if you wait a couple years, the replacement will cost twice as much as that — because the Biden-Harris regime has banned the perfectly functional, affordable technologies that have worked well for decades, and mandated high-end versions instead, for both manufacture and sale.

It is a joke when journalists claim they care about journalistic integrity.  Trump handed off a rapidly growing economy, not a disaster, with extremely low inflation and a fairly secure border, yet somehow he must be defeated.  Trump did not put out a fictional dossier to destroy his political opponent.  That was Hillary and the DNC.  Trump did not use the FBI to spy on and lie about his political opponent.  That was Obama and Biden.  Trump did not illegally spy on and jail journalists.  That was Biden and Obama.  Biden, Harris took a rapidly growing economy and low inflation and destroyed the purchasing power of Americans, especially the poor and middle class.  Biden, Harris took a relatively peaceful world and destroyed it by building up the finances of Iran and Russia.  Biden, Harris took a fairly secure border and opened it up, decimating cities and towns throughout the U.S.

It's Not the Fed That's Causing Inflation.  In their first week in January 2021, Joe and Kamala cut off every source of oil within their jurisdiction.  In the very next month, three things happened: our domestic production of oil plunged from 13.1 million barrels per day to 9.7, oil prices doubled from $55 to $110 per barrel, and the monthly inflation rate leaped from 1.4 percent to 9.6 percent.  The red-herring inflation chart they offer shows inflation peaking six months later, which distracts from the fact that their action was the sole cause of inflation.  It is a "trailing average" chart.  It takes the 9.6-percent monthly rate and averages it with the previous 11 months, which averaged 1.8 percent, and so on.  Thus, the peak of inflation appears to happen six months after it actually peaked.  A monthly chart would show the truth: that the reduction of oil supply was the direct cause of inflation.

A Harris Victory in 2024 Would Make the U.S. a One-Party State.  The election of 2024 will be epochal for the United States.  It will be as impactful on the course of the nation as the election of 1860 and the ensuing Civil War.  This November's election will determine whether the U.S. remains a viable constitutional republic or becomes a one-party state.  If Vice President Kamala Harris wins, the result will be the realization of President Obama's intent, voiced in his famous 2008 remark, to "fundamentally transform" the United States.  Thus, the election is important for all Americans, particularly the voting public, to be aware that should Harris win, then 2024 is likely to be the last free, fair, and competitive election in the U.S.  If she does win, then the U.S. by 2028 will be a one-party country, with the Democrats in permanent control, as California, Illinois, Massachusetts, or Hawaii are at the state level today.

Rising traffic deaths are the result of woke policies.  The number of traffic-related deaths, adjusted for population growth, remained relatively static for decades until 2014, when that number jumped by 20% and started a trend upwards. 2014 also marked a change in practice by the IMPD (Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department) and many law enforcement agencies around the country following Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri.  Michael Brown was killed while attacking police officer Darren Wilson.  The early narrative was that he was shot while surrendering to the officer with his hands raised in the air.  Despite being counterfactual, the early narrative was powerful and unrelenting.  Subsequent public pressure caused police agencies to pull back from police initiating traffic stops and other common law enforcement practices.  This rollback of law enforcement was termed "the Ferguson Effect."  The IMPD fell in line.

Kamala Harris caused America's inflation nightmare; here's how.  Two years on, it's time we rename the Inflation Reduction Act as the Inflation Expansion Act.  The Inflation Expansion Act (IEA), passed two years ago, marks a significant turning point in the economic policy of the United States.  Spearheaded by Kamala Harris, whose decisive vote in the Senate enabled the bill's passage, it has wreaked havoc on the American economy.  Its effects are palpable: inflation has surged, energy prices have skyrocketed, and the cost of living has become increasingly unaffordable.  The Biden-Harris administration's ironically-titled "Build Back Better" agenda, which underpins the IEA, has exacerbated these issues.  From an economic standpoint, the IEA's purported goal was to reduce the deficit by $58 billion.  Instead, it has resulted in an alarming deficit increase of over $796 billion.

Here's The Real Story Of How America's Squatter Epidemic All Began.  There's a squatter epidemic taking place in cities across America.  With lax eviction laws and back-logged court systems, blue cities have empowered a whole cottage industry of housing crime.  Professional squatters use fake leases to turn nice properties into trap houses.  Often, they turn to violence to keep the owners off "their" property.  And good luck getting an eviction, which can take years to rule on let alone enforce.  If squatters can show they've resided in a property for as little as 30 days, it's almost impossible to get them out.  From the smallest apartment to the grandest estate, no one is immune.  How did we get here?

The politics of police defunding.  The "defund the police" campaign that started over four years ago has done catastrophic damage to our country.  In the wake of said campaign, a number of politicians — including President Joe Biden — have pushed for the removal of funds from police forces, diverting them elsewhere in an effort to "teach a lesson," as it were.  However, the real lesson came in the backfire of the campaign.  Thousands of officers, particularly in New York, have left their posts as a result of the lack of support and many still believe that, even in the aftermath of this with a massive increase in crime, it's still the "right move" when it comes to the concerns of their community.  Tell that to Oakland.  The California city has seen a massive number of criminal acts over the past few days, including shootings and a hit-and-run incident, along with robberies and much more.

America: A Nation Committing Suicide.  It is the business of politicians to aspire to power, to tell us that our problems are because of the other party, and to divert our attention from where it should be — on ourselves.  If we so focus, many I believe will conclude it is hard to see a future for a nation with fewer and fewer children, greater and greater government and debt, and less and less economic growth.  Per the Congressional Budget Office, growth of the U.S. population averaged 0.9% per year from 1974 to 2023.  It projects from 2024 to 2054 it will be half that — 0.4% per year.  For a population to hold steady, to not shrink, the average fertility rate must be 2.1 children per woman.  We have fallen well below this to 1.67, and CBO projects it will stay there.  The implications are an aging population, with fewer and fewer of working age and an increasing burden of the expenses of an aging population — greater retirement costs and health care costs.

The Editor says...
Whose fault is that?  Which party supports homosexuality, gender confusion, abortion, and feminism?

'Joy' and 'Hope' in Kamala Harris's America:  Car Insurance Prices up 54%.  Americans are having a hard time finding the "joy" and "hope" that Democrat elites touted during their August convention, as they struggle to pay their bills while the cost of goods skyrockets.  This includes car insurance prices, which, under Vice President Kamala Harris's watch, rose 54 percent.

Do People Vote on What They Know or How They Feel?  As I have written previously, when liberals govern, things are worse for low-income minority families than elsewhere:
  •   Nearly half the homeless people in the country now live in California.
  •   The New York City school system is among the most segregated in the country; and San Francisco ranks up there as well.
  •   In Washington D.C., black students attend schools with 55 percent higher poverty rates than white students and score an average of 5 grades lower on achievement tests.

The Editor says...
And what about Atlanta and Chicago and Baltimore?  More of the same.  Electing a black mayor doesn't solve anything.

Economic prosperity and environmental protection.  [T]he Biden-Harris administration's environmental policies have been defined by regulatory overreach and economic disruption; their approach to climate change and environmental protection has often been characterized by stringent regulations and ambitious goals that have led to increased energy costs and economic uncertainty.  These policies have placed undue burdens on businesses and working-class Americans, who have borne the brunt of higher energy prices and reduced economic opportunities.  Kamala Harris, as the Democrat nominee, will continue these policies, exacerbating the economic challenges faced by many Americans.  The expansion of regulatory frameworks and the push for aggressive climate agendas threaten to stifle economic growth and job creation, undermining the progress made during Trump's presidency.

Same Pig, Different Lipstick:  Covid and the Green Revolution.  Green Revolution practices have caused serious environmental harm.  Aquifers are being depleted as irrigation water is pumped from the ground faster than rain recharges it.  Unimaginable amounts of fertile soil have been washed or blown away.  Fertilizers and pesticides pollute soil, air, and water beyond the agricultural lands themselves, including rivers and oceans.  Converting forests, grasslands, and wetlands into farmland has destroyed much wildlife/game habitat and lessened atmospheric carbon uptake.  Consequently, the natural resources needed to produce food have been degraded, portending eventual, widespread crop failure and food shortages.  Economic and social damage has also been done.  Green Revolution inputs were too costly for small farmers.  Therefore, they couldn't compete against larger, well-capitalized, or debt-leveraged growers, whose higher yields glutted markets and depressed prices.

Here is an example of what 60 years of Great Society anti-poverty programs can yield.  For the last 60 years, Democrats have claimed that their war on poverty and all their handouts helped lift people up.  Instead, it encouraged single parenthood and single parenthood is the greatest indicator of who will end up in poverty.  The result of these supposedly empathetic policies is generational poverty. [...] There is nothing compassionate or generous about encouraging single parenthood.  There is nothing compassionate or generous about giving away subsidies on everything to make people dependent on the government.  There is nothing compassionate or generous about refusing to enforce border laws and flooding towns with more people who will be dependent on the government.  There is nothing compassionate and generous when Democrats block poor and minority children from opportunities to go to better schools.  And there is nothing compassionate, generous or smart in destroying companies that produce reasonably priced energy.  That destroys the poor and middle class.

Kamala Harris' Oakland Is a Disaster.  [Scroll down]  Oakland has every imaginable advantage of climate and geography.  The weather is immaculate [...] and the city has a major port that is practically a tax gold mine.  Yet, Oakland always seems to be on the verge of full-on implosion.  With the departure of the Oakland A's, a Major League Baseball team, at the end of this season, the city will lose its third and last major sports franchise in a decade.  The loss is symbolic of a city that feels like a collapsing settlement at the edge of the Roman Empire on the eve of the Dark Ages.  It's worth noting that without the last-minute sale of the dilapidated Oakland Coliseum, the city was looking at a budget shortfall of over $100 million.  The sale hardly solves the long-term problem.  Oakland is pondering doling out reparations to black residents, but a reparations panel said it needed $5 million just to draw up a plan.  This is a city that's used to treating taxpayers like a piggy bank for grifting.  Of course, Oakland has been associated with high crime rates for decades, but following the mayhem of 2020 the challenge became acute.  In 2021, the Oakland City Council in effect voted to defund its already beleaguered police department.  Crime exploded.

The World Is on Fire Thanks to Biden and Harris.  When President Donald Trump left office, there was peace throughout the world.  Today, there are ongoing wars in several regions of the world and other conflicts could escalate into war at any time.  While Trump was President, Russia did not invade any countries, in contrast to what happened during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. [...] In August of 2021, the United States demonstrated tremendous weakness during the withdrawal of our military forces from Afghanistan.  The debacle resulted in the death of 13 American military heroes and billions of dollars in military equipment left behind for the use of the Taliban terrorist regime.  In addition, Biden and Harris abandoned the massive Bagram air base in Afghanistan.  The base featured a 12,000-foot runway, a 50-room hospital, and 100 parking spots for fighter jets.  In their haste to depart the facility, the United States military left behind 3.5 million items, including armored vehicles, weapons and ammunition.

Kamala Harris polling better than Donald Trump?  The Biden administration locked up patriots who strolled through — or near — "The People's House" on Jan. 6, some of whom are still imprisoned, but has supported legislation that lets hardened criminals go free.  Moreover, it has made deals with countries that sponsor terrorists — and with terrorists themselves, when it is not actually paying them or gifting them advanced military equipment.  The Biden administration has let illegal aliens in by the umpteen millions and treats them better than it does American citizens.  Biden administration policies have caused rampant inflation that has eaten up a significant part of Americans' earnings and made home ownership for many young families virtually impossible.  Democrat and Democrat-appointed judges have thrown the book at Trump for imagined or comparatively trifling "crimes" while treating much more serious offenses committed by the likes of Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton with kid gloves.

The Denigration of America's Great Cities.  [Scroll down]  Kamala Harris and her supporters will blame the urban decline on racism, capitalism, white supremacy, historical economic divide between white persons and minorities, and American republican constitutionalism.  Though there are elements of all these issues affecting the conditions of American cities these are not the major cause of the decline I have witnessed.  The cause is intentional and ideological and found in communities run by progressive Democrat mayors.  The Great Society programs pushed by President Lyndon Johnson accelerated the growth of urban slums after a period of economic energy following World War II.  Marxist philosophical programs have furthered urban decline during the past three decades and was given an additional push by the Obama administration.  The Biden administration has furthered this effort through its border policies, excessive targeted domestic spending, and rhetoric.  Defund the police efforts have shrunk these forces of protection.  The chaos these mayors and DAs have created via additional crime, declining economic opportunity, racial division, fewer prosecutions, and increased taxation allows these above narratives to appear real.

America's Lab Rats?  Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who could care less when the experiment blows up.  Consider:  Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace?  Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory at the iconic Union Station in Washington as radical students and green card-holding guests deface statues with threats that "Hamas is coming" while spewing hatred toward Jews — and all with impunity?  A wide-open border with 10 million unaudited illegal immigrants?  Once beautiful downtowns resembling Nairobi or Cairo — as paralyzed mayors spend billions without a clue how to remedy the self-created disaster?  Fast food drive-ins priced as if they were near-gourmet restaurants?  In truth, this apparent rapid cultural, economic, and political upheaval is well into its third decade.

Deep State Carnival Barkers Distract Us with Kamala.  Pay no attention to the sky-high interest rates making home ownership unaffordable or the sky-high inflation that has doubled the cost of basic necessities.  So what if the average person's paycheck barely covers monthly gas and grocery bills?  Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris identifies as a female "person of color."  She is a shiny object that should help everyone forget about personal financial troubles.  Don't worry about the fifteen million illegal immigrants that have streamed across the border in the last three years.  Ignore the precipitous rise in violent crime and the growing homelessness crisis.  Diversity remains our strength!  And crime statistics can be easily manipulated to reflect a better reality!  Forget about mail-in-ballot fraud and other voting crimes.  Democrat secretaries of state and Democrat attorneys general have vouched for the security of our elections.  Democrat judges have vouched for those Democrats' vouching.  Anybody who objects is simply an "election-denier" who should be imprisoned for "insurrection."

Trump's Courage and Biden's Failures.  One is tempted to become one of those awful conspiracy theorists who might propose that this presidency has been planned from election day November 2020 through the Biden Executive Orders reversing most of Trump's Executive Orders through the Afghan debacle, through the inflation debacle, through the Ukraine v.  Russia debacle, through the deficit debacle, through the Transgender Visibility Day being held on Easter Sunday debacle, through the campus riots against Israel and Jews debacle (which continues without real-time censure or comments from the Administration), through the lawfare prosecution and persecution of J6 defendants (whatever happened to habeas corpus?) debacle, through the decline in the dollar in international markets debacle, through the illegal mass immigration debacle, and through the fentanyl death debacle, the shifting away from Medicare to Medicare Advantage debacle, the computerization of elections debacle, the Balkanization of America into so many sub-ethnicities and sub-groupings debacle, and now the recommendation of Kamala Harris for President debacle.

A 'Livable America' According to Radical Leftists.  A number of celebrities and VIPs of the radical left, including one who betrayed our Vietnam veterans while they were putting their lives on the line for this country, have been warning that if President Trump returns to office, life in America will not be livable, as it presumably is under Biden.  Whoever believes this must also believe, or pretend to believe, that America is more livable when the following conditions are in place:
  •   Immigration laws are violated to allow foreigners to enter this country illegally, disregarding the warnings, official and unofficial, against terrorist infiltrators. [...]
  •   You can go to prison for disagreeing with the government's policies, dictatorship style, [regardless of] the Constitution. [...]
  •   Cities under Democrat mayors make the list of worst in the country to live in. [...]
  •   Crime is promoted instead of fought, with policies that decriminalize felony and make the police stand down where it occurs. [...]
  •   Increasingly less of your income is yours to keep, as taxes keep growing, unabated. [...]
  •   Small businesses are crushed under excessive regulations, forcing many out of business. [...]
  •   Big businesses send jobs overseas, leaving American workers and their families struggling to survive. [...]
  •   Babies that are not wanted are killed before they leave their mother's womb and disposed of like trash. [...]
It is necessary for one to be totally insensitive, brainwashed, and uninformed to permit such conditions, and to have missed the fact that President Trump acted vigorously to end such barbaric attacks against the American people.

The Editor says...
This page seems to accumulate bullet lists, but that's the easiest way to list all the poisonous fruits.

When will Democrats be held responsible for their Trump-hating rhetoric?  We tolerate a lot of things.  To wit:
  •   Democrats and the media falsely accused the Trump campaign of colluding with the Russians.  And no one cared.
  •   Democrats, the media, and 51 top intelligence officials ludicrously claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop "had all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign."  And no one cared.
  •   Antifa, BLM, and assorted thugs burned down parts of our major cities, did billions of dollars in damage and killed and injured dozens of people.  And no one really cared.
  •   Statues of past heroes and historic figures — even including Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill — were vandalized or destroyed.  And no one cared.
  •   We were locked down for many months on end and told that we couldn't even attend the weddings — or funerals — of our loved ones.  Our kids were kept out of school.  Many folks were told that their jobs weren't all that important.  Many businesses closed.  And no one really cared. [...]
  •   Hardly a day goes by that we don't hear of an illegal immigrant raping, assaulting, or murdering someone.  And no one truly cares.
  •   The Biden administration has repeatedly tried to imprison its primary political opponent — to save our democracy — and no one truly cares.  Least of all spineless RINOs and other Republicans.

Coming Disaster - Nearly 50% of Small Business Will Not Survive if Biden Gets 2nd Term:  Survey.  A survey of small business owners found almost half believe a second term for President Joe Biden would be the iceberg that would send their enterprise to the bottom.  Forty-nine percent of those who responded to the PublicSquare/RedBalloon poll said their businesses "definitely" or "probably" would not make it through four more years of Biden.  Seven in 10 business owners said they were holding off on adding staff and six in 10 said they expected stagflation — when prices rise but the economy does not grow.

Another Biden 'Achievement': Interest Payments [are] Now Second Largest Federal Spending Category.  If you want to know just how dire the federal government's fiscal situation is, consider the fact that interest on the national debt for the first time now tops every other spending category but one, according to the latest monthly report from the Treasury.  This "achievement" has been brought to you by President Joe Biden.  According to the report, the federal government spent $682 billion in "net interest" payments so far this fiscal year (which ends Sept. 30). That's more than all the money spent on "health" ($670 billion), national defense ($644 billion), and income security — which includes payments to the poor ($508 billion).

Americans Feel The Heat As Bidenflation Climbs Toward 20%.  The dark reality of Bidenomics is the alarming 19.5% inflation under the President's watch, which is 5.7% annually.  When he took office, inflation was at just 1.4%. Since March 2021, inflation has consistently remained above the Federal Reserve's 2% target for 40 consecutive months.  Under Biden, the federal debt has increased by $6.9 trillion.  To finance his spending spree, the Federal Reserve printed money from nothing.  The increased money supply, without a corresponding increase in goods and services, reduced the value of each dollar, causing prices to rise quickly and leading to high inflation, effectively acting as a hidden tax on everyone.

Dethroning Biden.  Joe Biden's cognitive decline has been obvious since he launched his presidential 'run' in 2019. [...] Once he was 'elected', the cognitively impaired Biden was used as a rubber stamp to push their agenda. [...] The results of the Biden administration's misgovernance are open borders, out-of-control inflation, rampant crime, targeting of dissenting citizens, identity politics giving preference over merit, and spending on gratuitous foreign wars and items such as the Green New Deal.

Can They Cheat a Dementia Sufferer Back into the White House?  Biden is damaged goods — for reasons discussed and politically.  Four years ago, Biden was running as a challenger.  2020 was a referendum on Trump's performance.  This year, the roles are reversed.  Even a healthy Biden would have to defend the indefensible.  The cost of living is killing average wage earners.  The border remains wide open.  Crime has skyrocketed in cities.  Campuses were roiled with anti-Semitism.  Biden's handlers are edging us closer to war with Russia.  Where's the prosperity, where's the peace?  Compounding Biden's troubles is the unique feature of this race: a former president is contesting a sitting president for the White House.  That hasn't happened since the 1892 Cleveland-Harris contest.  Was life better under Trump or is it better under Biden?  That's a no-brainer for most voters.

Too Many Rights?  Our Constitution worked successfully for almost 200 years until a litany of newly perceived pseudo-rights burst upon the scene, devaluing our core historical rights.  How did we transition from a generally accepted interpretation of the Constitution to where we are today, where almost anything can be inferred?  By corrupting or diminishing core tenets and understanding of the Constitution, we have created discord and distrust in our court systems that will deliver you any answer you want if you shop the right court or judge in our court system.  Millions of individuals see what is happening as intentional and contrived, with an end game of weakening our country and seeding the ground for what's to come.

Bringing in the lawyers won't solve this problem.
Joe Biden Threatens to Send Out Attorneys General to Go After Grocers in Plan to Combat His Food Inflation Crisis.  Grocery prices are soaring thanks to Joe Biden's tax-and-spend policies.  The US economy is in bad shape because of Joe Biden's war on domestic oil and the 'Green New Deal' disguised as the 'Inflation Reduction Act.'  Moody's Investors Service recently cut the US's outlook to negative.  Moody's lowered its ratings outlook on the US government citing high interest rates, government spending, and deficits.  Inflation is still high, grocery prices are up more than 19%, gas prices are still high and more than 15 million illegal aliens have poured over the border since Biden was installed in January 2021.  Most Americans are struggling to put food on the table thanks to Joe Biden.

What exactly are Biden's achievements in his first three-and-a-half years?  Here are some things Biden deserves credit for, which may be why he isn't so popular:  Mass migration from a dissolved border, which has made cartels rich, increased drug-, human-, and child-trafficking, is destroying cities, and putting pressure on schools, police, housing, and health care, and made our southern border is now the deadliest border in the world; dictatorially and unconstitutionally paying off hundreds of billions in student loans; making the world much more dangerous, as Biden's energy policies are essentially funding Russia and Iran (we are funding both sides in the Ukraine-Russia conflict); and destroying women's sports by making them compete against men.

The deliberate murder of virtue.  For decades, the American Left has been making a deliberate and successful attempt to kill virtue.  Much of what they do demonstrates a disregard for normal traditional American virtues such as decency, consideration, productivity, respect, decorum, honor, and moderation.  The truly virtuous would never dream of announcing their sexual preferences in public. [...] The Left have taken a careful and systematic approach to destroying American virtues such as hard work, modesty, humility, consideration of others, and planning for the future.  In their places, the Left decided that it was virtuous to be demanding, slothful, narcissistic, godless, and sexually profligate.  The Leftist virtue-killers think the government has its own money to give to them for doing nothing.  Taking what belongs to others and lazing about the house and streets with it is not virtuous.  It is theft; taxpayers pay for the progeny and sloth of these unvirtuous slackers.  If the Left can remove time-honored virtues such as productivity and merit, they create a national movement where they can be taken care of by others without consideration for those who really pay.  You get a nation of unvirtuous entitled slobs.

An affront to America.  [Scroll down]  Ultimately, the Democratic voters are responsible.  But they'll tell you they didn't know.  They've been lied to by the Democratic Party.  The fabled and very effective Democratic propaganda machine lies to Democrats as well as us poor Republicans.  You have to think for yourself lest the lying Wizard behind the Green Curtain leads us all into oblivion.
  •   Joe Biden doesn't like Donald Trump, so Joe blew away Trump's border control policies and we now have a disaster.
  •   Joe Biden doesn't like Donald Trump, so Joe blew away Trump's energy independence policies and we now face an energy shortage.
  •   Prices are 20% higher and interest rates more than doubled under Biden than under Trump.
  •   With the high prices, high interests, and the influx of illegals, there is a housing crisis under Biden.
  •   There is war in Europe under Biden, there was peace under Trump.
  •   There is war in the Middle East under Biden.  The Trump Abraham Accords, which promised Middle East peace, are on life-support and anti-Semitic violence rages throughout our country under Biden.

Barack Obama and the Stupidity of the American Voter.  Is the American media establishment fair, balanced, and independent?  Do the FBI, CIA, IRS, and Justice Department stand for the rule of law, judicial fairness, and the American way?  Is the GOP a formidable political foe, working hard to contain the excesses of crazed liberal Democrats?  No, not remotely, and you gotta be kidding.  The despicable media spread the lies they're given, enthusiastically and in unison, often using the exact same language.  It's almost as if they've been given a script to follow.  They have.  If the current American justice system didn't have two standards, why, it would have no standards at all!  A simple comparison of the judicial treatment afforded, say, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump makes that abundantly clear.  You're free to burn down a city, if you're BLM, but say prayers across the street from an abortion abattoir, and you're going to prison.  As for the GOP, those pretenders and senders of strongly worded letters and subpoenas that are thrown into the circular file as soon as they're received, they have a perfect avatar in former Senate leader Mitch McConnell:  a chinless, bespectacled turtle.

IRS: Illinois loses $10 billion in income from 87,000 people moving out.  More than 87,000 people moved out of Illinois taking with them nearly $10 billion in income, according to the latest Internal Revenue Service data.  For the last six years, the total lost adjusted gross income is more than $47.5 billion.  For nearly a decade, annual population estimates from the U.S. Census show Illinois losing population.  For well over a year, Gov. J.B. Pritzker has denied the state's population decline, saying the Census is getting it wrong.  In May, he doubled down.  "You should take what I'm saying as truth that actually when we count people, it turns out we're gaining," Pritzker said.  The U.S. Census did recently revise Illinois' population upward from previous estimates, but the state still continues to lose population.  It's not just Census data showing Illinois' loss.  Moving companies routinely show Illinois among the states with the most people moving out year after year.

All of a Sudden, A Crisis Is Revealed.  The first official presidential debate of 2024 was held on June 27, and the reactions are fascinating. [...] While the Right has been talking about this issue for years, this is the first time that most such voices of the Left have done anything but deny the fact of Biden's incapacity. [...] But most importantly, they weren't embarrassed when mountains of undeniable evidence proved his criminality — and the criminality of his family — in a pay-for-play pattern that has been going on for decades.  And they weren't embarrassed when he appointed incompetents, criminals and freaks to be cabinet secretaries and department heads, ranging from an airport kleptomaniac in drag to a man wearing a plastic nursing chest prosthesis for imitation breastfeeding.  And they weren't embarrassed when his policies caused record deficits, unprecedented inflation, a collapse in the American standard of living, a flood of illegal aliens, a lethal crime wave, and the destruction of our standing as a net exporter of energy.

Joe Biden is not the problem.  Watching the CNN roundtable after the debate was comical, if not tragic.  For months (years) Republicans have been asserting that Joe Biden was not competent, and that it is not he who is running the White House.  Today, those assertions are vindicated.  Anyone thinking that Joe Biden is making policy decisions, or setting the direction of the White House is smoking dope.  To say that the CNN "brain-trust" was apoplectic is an understatement. [...] Here's the problem for Democrats — of the top concerns of the American people; immigration, inflation, jobs and the economy, Social Security/Medicare, foreign entanglements, abortion, crime and public safety, it doesn't matter a hill of beans who takes Joe Biden's place on the ticket — Hillary, Michelle, Whitmer, Newsom, Pritzker, or Kamala.  It is not Joe's policies that have failed the American people.  It is leftism writ large.  Interject any of the above-mentioned names onto the Democrat ticket and the trajectory of Americas destruction continues apace.

America Is In Shambles Because Of Democrat Policies, Not Just Joe Biden.  The jig is up.  Here's what disillusioned Democrats and independents and moderates need to know.  What all the blue-state refugees who now live in Texas and Florida instead of California and New York City need to admit.  What all the fed-up middle-class families and forgotten nonwhite voters in the suburbs need to remember:  These aren't just Joe Biden policies that are disastrous.  They're Democrat policies.  Abortion.  Economy.  Crime.  Immigration.  Lawfare.  Foreign policy.  Health care.  It doesn't matter what pet issue has voters down in the dumps.  Democrats are in lockstep on the losing side.  And anywhere they aren't in lockstep — like on whether Israel is a victim of terrorism or a group of oppressive "colonizers" — they tow the radical line.  You think a Democrat switcheroo is magically going to secure the border and end the unmitigated illegal alien crime wave?  Not a chance.  Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, Biden's expanded asylum, repeal of Remain in Mexico, outrage over shipping migrants to Martha's Vineyard, support for ripping down border razor wire, and playing footsie with Mexican cartels are all fruits of the same poisonous tree:  Democrats' antipathy for the U.S. border.

Cast Away Illusions and Prepare for Struggle.  The hour is already very late.  We are ruled by a regime that deeply hates and fears the bulk of its own people, and is demonstrably willing to do whatever it takes to retain power.  A regime that characterizes its political opposition as "extremists" and "domestic terrorists," and uses its security services to surveil and intimidate even the most ordinary dissenting citizens, treating them as enemies of the state.  One that wields the law as a weapon, flagrantly showcasing a two-tier legal system as it routinely seeks to arrest, humiliate, and destroy its political enemies while shielding its friends and foot soldiers from accountability.  A regime that now holds hundreds of political prisoners.  That has turned the tools of its military counterinsurgency apparatus on its own people.  That colludes with the world's most powerful technology and media companies to establish vast systems of mass censorship, propaganda, and reality distortion.  That has successfully corrupted nearly every public and private institution with a distinctly totalitarian state ideology.

Freight Train of Regulations Coming to Destroy Small Businesses.  The Job Creators Network said that $1.2 trillion in new regulations is about to hit America and will directly affect small businesses.  That's on top of the $1.9 trillion we already lose to regulations, $10,000 per household.  It comes to $10,000 in new regulations on top of $15,000 in regulations we already pay.  Twenty cents of every dollar you earn is snagged by regulatory costs that you never see on top of taxes on top of new rules.  There are manufacturing restrictions on pretty much everything in your house, including dishwashers, water heaters, ceiling fans, lightbulbs, gas stoves, washing machines, and, of course, air conditioners.  The new rules for the climate change hoax will raise the price of a washing machine by $200 and the furnace by $500.  The cost of refilling your air conditioner will increase by over $1000.  It could push some products like gas stoves out of existence altogether.

Searching for America's Identity.  After 171 years without a doctrine of separation of church and state, the Supreme Court of the USA in 1947 by a mere 5-4 vote declared that this separation is necessary and sacrosanct.  And by 1962 and 1963, both Bible reading and prayer were declared by the Court forbidden in our public schools.  By 1973, a woman's right to an abortion on demand was declared a constitutional right, and legitimate thereby in every state in the Union.  Only recently did the Supreme Court reverse itself, after 60 million-plus abortions, to allow each individual state to make its own abortion laws as its voters see fit.  Abortions are not inherently a national, constitutional right.

California's Minimum Wage Continues to Destroy Restaurants.  Would you rather have some jobs available at $12 an hour or no jobs available at $20 an hour?  The answer may vary depending on whether you're a business owner or job seeker — or politician or bureaucrat.  Regardless, the opening question, which is of the kind late economist Walter E. Williams often asked, should be pondered with news that California's new $20 minimum wage is continually claiming victims.  The latest is a San Francisco McDonald's franchisee who'd been in business for 30 years.  This pales in comparison, though, to one of the new minimum wage's first victims:  Rubio's Coastal Grill.  That chain is closing 48 Golden State locations — more than a third of its 134 remaining restaurants across California, Arizona, and Nevada.

A Door Closes, A Window Opens.  The roster of "Joe Biden's" failures is so deep that all Mr. Trump has to do is remind the audience what they well-know adds up to an apparently deliberate effort to wreck the nation:  the open border and the growing record of atrocious crimes committed by illegal aliens plus the immense anxiety about the intentions of jihadists and other nefarious foreigners ushered in by Homeland Security; the idiocy of our role in the Ukraine War and how easily the conflict could be concluded by willing negotiation; the cratering on-the-ground economy of goods and services (minus government hand-outs, bail-outs, subsidies, and statistical shell games); the out-of-control Deep State intel blob that is eating away at our basic liberties; the insane race-and-gender hustles aimed at sowing hatred and disordering normal modes of human relations; and much more that has been done to insult and humiliate the people of this land.

Behold the Monster You Created.  [Scroll down]  Well, my friends.  You miscalculated. [...] You supported drug legalization on the farce that you cared about boosting tax revenues when in reality you just wanted to enjoy your daily edible because apparently your life in the first world, middle-upper class, most privileged society in recorded history is just too unbearable without cannabis to ease your omnipotent suffering.  But you have since discovered that they never intended legalization to end with cannabis, and your once-beautiful city is now a feces-covered open-air fentanyl market.

Biden EPA Rules Will Cause Blackouts for Millions of Americans, Study Warns.  President Joe Biden's aggressive climate regulations targeting fossil-fuel-fired power plants will create widespread electric grid instability and lead to mass blackouts impacting millions of Americans, according to a recent study commissioned by North Dakota's state government.  The research, conducted in May by the firm Always On Energy Research, concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency's recently finalized regulations are not technologically feasible and will foreseeably lead to the retirement of coal power generation units.  Intermittent and weather-dependent green energy sources, such as wind and solar, will replace such retired generators, leading to unreliable conditions, the study found.  The study largely echoes concerns that have been voiced by the U.S. grid watchdog, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation; regional grid operators; and power utility companies.  Four regional grid operators that oversee the infrastructure supplying power for 154 million Americans warned after the EPA regulations were first proposed last year that grid reliability would "dwindle to concerning levels" under the regulations.

The Revolution Will Not Be What You Expect.  America today is far removed from the unreconstructed America that student radicals in the '60s hated.  From the boardroom to the stock room, America is now almost entirely woke, groveling in abject and continual apology.  Diversity and inclusion are enshrined in our national life, despite the constant lectures on race.  Movies and television are full of "people of color."  Our national sports heroes are almost all black.  Mixed-race couples dominate our national advertising.  (Fortunately, we have an army of grievance professionals available to interpret the "systemic" racism in our every word and gesture, which they will do for large sums of money.)  In addition, marriage redefined is the law of the land.  Gay pride is celebrated for the entire month of June.  Homosexuality is mainstream.  On transgenderism, parents in some states are still trying to establish their right to stop their minor children from being sexually mutilated without their consent.

Police demoralized, military demoralized, trains derailing, airplane parts falling, and products recalled.  Why?  Police departments around the country are shorthanded, defunded, demoralized.  Many officers have retired, retired at their desks, or walked away, because they aren't valued — or, worse, are demonized.  All for working long hours for not great pay ... and putting their life on the line for public safety.  And, if they do arrest somebody for even violent behavior, the perps often are sprung the same day, no bail required.  This has led to the majority of American citizens being less safe than perhaps ever before.  Our military is far less capable than it was just a few short years ago.  Patriots, Christians, MAGA types, and conservatives have been deliberately drummed out of the services in favor of more left-leaning individuals.  Competence — let alone excellence — has been dismissed in favor of diversity, equity, and inclusion. [...] Recruiting goals are not close to being met.  The U.S. Navy, 600 ships strong at the end of Reagan's presidency, is now down to just 283 mostly functioning vessels. [...] All of this was predictable.  In fact, there is no other possible result of an all-out assault on competence, reason, and productivity.

Joe Biden's Foreign Policy:  A Series of Failures.  [Scroll down]  The withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan marked the end of the twenty-year "War on Terror," declared by President George W. Bush after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  The Afghan operation aimed at destroying the Taliban terrorist group ended completely at the wrong time — the agreements with official Kabul and the Taliban reached during Trump's presidency were multiplied by zero.  In consequence, the Taliban seized the entire country.  The withdrawal of troops was long overdue.  The twenty-year presence in one of the most problematic regions of the world cost at least $825 billion since 2001 (several experts say that these numbers are seriously underestimated), and the lives of 2,300 soldiers.  Our troops left the country at the time of a Taliban offensive, removing the last shield protecting Afghan civilians, while also leaving the Taliban weapons worth billions of dollars, including helicopters, armored vehicles, artillery systems, rifles, and much more.

Will New York City Die of Stupidity?  Since the 1960s many of America's foremost cities, notably Detroit, Newark, St.  Louis, and Baltimore have exhibited sharp declines in population, economic vitality, and overall quality of life.  Today, other major cities such Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and even New York City may soon join this list.  Our urban failures cannot be explained by the usual destructive forces.  No foreign invader sacked them or bombed them into rubble; no earthquakes or plagues made them unlivable nor have economic depressions rendered them irrelevant. [...] Like carbon monoxide poisoning, urban decline comes slowly, often barely noticed and decades may pass before a tottering-on-the brink city must be rescued by Washington.  If one word explains this slide toward disaster, it is stupidity and, particularly, stupidity month after month, year after years and is the barely noticeable nature of insanity that makes it so difficult to reverse.

The Left Knows Leftism Doesn't Work.  Do not expect the radical left to survey the wreckage of socialism and communism in history and accept that statism impoverishes people and erodes their freedoms.  There will never be admissions by our elite that progressivism exists mainly for the acquisition of power by the utopian and virtue-signaling few, who ensure that they are never subject to the baleful implementation of their ideological agendas on the rest of us.  [Advertisement]  Still, leftists look around at what they have done to America in the last four years and implicitly know that the plan did not work, the people detested it, or both.  [Advertisement]  How do we know this?  By a variety of barometers.  [Advertisement]  None of the major Biden "achievements" — 10 million illegal aliens across a nonexistent border, key components of the cost of living 25-30 percent higher than in 2020, wars and chaos abroad, DEI racial and tribal obsessions, wars on fossil fuels — poll at even 40-45 percent.  Biden's own approval ratings, as the nominal architect of the most left-wing agenda since the Roosevelt administration, hover between 36 and 34 percent.  [Advertisement]

Rejecting the Status Quo Is the Only Way to Survive.  For years we've been bouncing around in a pinball universe designed by Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury.  When the government isn't policing our language or arresting little old grandmothers for engaging in wrongthink, it's busy helping Mexican drug-smugglers hook Americans on Chinese fentanyl and encouraging young boys to chop off their willies.  The Gestapo FBI spends most of its time hunting patriots as "domestic terrorists" and orchestrating elaborate entrapment schemes to justify bloated budgets.  The Josef Mengeles at the CDC work to create new diseases that will require experimental "cures."  The Department of (in)Justice can't stop locking up Americans for their political beliefs while lecturing the country about the importance of thwarting tyranny.  So much insanity now grips the United States that the great dystopian novels of the last century appear downright tame by comparison!  The easiest way to navigate this Kafkaesque environment is to follow a simple rule:  whatever the government says, believe the opposite.

No more than spectators?  Today we are witnessing the final stages of Western civilization.  The agents of destruction (the Marxist Left) have seized control of all levers of power, social and institutional.  One after another the avenues of redress of grievances have been shut down.  Academia and the press, as well as Hollywood, have reshaped public opinion.  The system of checks and balances, so precious to our freedom, has been dissolved into an all-powerful executive branch.  The legislative branch is mere window dressing much like the Roman Senate under Caesar while the judicial branch has become another bureaucracy accountable only to the executive.  The Marxist Left feels no need to hide its true intentions of fundamentally transforming our constitutional republic into a communist welfare state.  The mask has come off because the transformation is complete.  Political prisoners are held without trial while rival politicians are victims of show trials.  The FBI, CIA, Justice and State departments are mere toys in the hand of the executive.  The Supreme Court is neutered by outright physical threats from the unchecked mob.

Nashville School Shooter's Writings Leak: 'I Hate Everything About My Gender'.  This week the Tennessee Star published a description of previously unseen writings by Audrey Hale.  The Star is one of the papers that is part of a lawsuit trying to force the Metro Nashville PD to release the documents, but this did not come as a result of their efforts in court.  Apparently someone just leaked several dozen pages, all of which had been left behind by Hale in her car.  One entry about civil rights was written 35 days before the attack. [...] Audrey Hale considered herself trans and went by Aiden Hale at the time of the shooting which took place on March 27, 2023. Just 16 days earlier, Hale wrote a diary entry titled "My Imaginary Penis." [...] Hale also wrote that she would "kill" for puberty blockers but that they were introduced too late for her as she's already gone through puberty by the time she knew about them.  Later in the same entry, Hale describes how she fantasized about being a man using her stuffed dolls to simulate intercourse and taking photos of the whole thing.

Will the United States Become a Third World Nation?  What generally defines "Third World" includes pervasive poverty, dilapidated infrastructure, lack of sanitation, inadequate modern healthcare, rampant crime, ineffective education, and violent political instability often reflecting ethnic rivalries, not democratic elections.  Law reflects the whim of the powerful; not following written precepts.  Third world governments also have a penchant for crushing national debt and wild spending.  Invariably, a very rich minority governs masses living in squalor.  What separates First World nations like the U.S. from Third World nations like Nigeria is not vast natural resources.  Third World Nigeria abounds in natural wealth while First World Japan has little.  The key difference is human capital, a collection of multiple traits, especially brain power and a strong work ethic, and absent these traits, a modern capitalist economy cannot exist.  Expats in Third World countries routinely complain "nothing works," and the corrupt government cannot fix or maintain anything.  Countless outward signs of a typical Third World nation have recently emerged in the United States.  Most visible is the physical decline of major cities: filthy streets, unsanitary homeless encampments, open drug dealing and use, unpunished crime, burgeoning slums "off limits" to ordinary people, and a general incivility.

A Dude Has Just Been Crowned Miss Maryland USA.  A man has been crowned Miss Maryland USA.  Transgender male Bailey Anne has beaten dozens of women to win the prestigious women's pageant title.  [Video clip]

The Editor says...
Nobody dares to object.

Remote tribe gets hooked on internet porn.  Teenagers in a remote Brazilian tribe have become hooked on pornography months after they were given high-speed internet access via Elon Musk's Starlink.  The indigenous Marubo people, who for hundreds of years have existed in small huts along the Itui River in the Amazon, were connected to the billionaire's satellite network in September.  The community embraced the technology, marvelling at the life-saving ability to call for immediate help when grappling with venomous snake bites as well as being able to remain in contact with faraway relatives.  But, since a group of men arrived at the camp with antennas strapped to their backs to connect the remote tribe of 2,000 people to the internet, there have been some less desirable consequences.  Critics warn tribe members have become "lazy", reclining in hammocks all day glued to their phones to gossip on WhatsApp or chat to strangers on Instagram.

The Editor says...
Where did this isolated tribe of natives get the money for the satellite terminals, the internet service and the smart phones, or laptops, or other devices?  It sounds like they are neglecting their occupations, but what were those occupations?  If they're so isolated and primitive, who told them how to set up the equipment?  And what magnanimous wealthy globalist decided these guys needed to be on the internet?

The End of the Nation-State.  Indeed, nowadays there are as many as 195 recognized states in the United Nations, but many of those are known as failed states — Somalia, Haiti, Syria, and Yemen, for example — and one organization that measures such things, a Fund for Peace think tank in America, found in 2023 that two dozen others are so fragile that they cannot provide a full range of basic state functions, plus another 84 that have one or more warning signs of failure. [...] But we don't have to go traipsing around to find the best example:  it is here.  The America of 2024 could no longer be called a nation, in the sense of a common culture, common loyalties, common beliefs, common religion, common ideology, common vision, common allegiance, or even common language.  It does not have a common agreement on what marriages should be or how many genders there are (ABC news in 2024 counted 53 in use), or what the country's history has been or even what year it started, or what constitutes a crime; it does not have a working system for public education in any state; it does not even have defended borders, the minimum task that a civil body must fulfill to be a nation.

The Merchan Scale.  [Scroll down]  We have a lot of problems with government in this country, not because the people don't know how to fix them, but because the government has ceased to give a hoot what the people want.  They don't want high electric bills and spotty service, but everything the EPA and government has done is designed to create just that.  They don't want high food and transportation bills, but the president himself signed executive orders to create the situation that would cause it.  They don't want crimes to go unpunished, but every major city and many states have engaged in a revolving door policy for criminals.  Come in, get booked and walk out.

One day in the life of Joe Biden's America.  What's this single day's news?
  •   Joe Biden is spending his Memorial Day weekend honoring George Floyd
  •   Biden's vaunted Palestine pier to supposedly deliver humanitarian aid has ripped off from its moorings, been blown out to sea, and has washed up on the shore. [...]
  •   San Francisco's city government is apparently brimming with criminals according to a whistleblower report, so by all means let's expand government
  •   Biden has denied Catholics a permit to hold their Memorial Day Mass at Arlington cemetery for [the] first time in decades
  •   Special Counsel Jack Smith has launched a desperate new bid for a gag order on President Trump for talking about the FBI making plans to use lethal force on him
  •   New York state Justice Juan Merchan gave his jury in the Trump hush-money trial bad instructions on unanimity of the premise and legal eagles are complaining
  •   The Nevada state supreme court ruled unanimously against a Democrat bid to block voter identification [...]
  •   Illegals from Chechnya have rolled in through Joe Biden's open border and are now spying on U.S. military bases

America the disgusting.  The concept of America was and is beautiful. [...] Now we have new tyrants, we're not getting educated, we're not growing our personal fortunes due to Bidenflation, we're not engaging in forming traditional nuclear families much anymore, and we're not even having many babies.  We have certainly lost the notion of the "gentleman" or "lady."  We have long ago lost the idea that "children should be seen and not heard."  That is a shame.  Children are not developed people with much to offer the country until they are civilized and educated.  Until they are, they should not have an international platform on which to spread their venom, their bad habits, their Marxist ideas, their silliness, and their hubris.  Not to mention their utterly horrific narcissism.  America has become a land where the DEI-incompetent flourish and get nourished by other incompetents.  We have become a nation of the garish, where otherwise attractive news anchors tart themselves up in drag queen eye and lip makeup, and where TV commercials unappetizingly serve up bottoms, armpits, and "packs" as they hawk full-body deodorant for men and women.  It's disgusting.

Memorial Day Weekend in the City.  In rabidly anti-gun cities like New York, Chicago, and D.C., no matter how many thugs and robbers are heavily armed, the law-abiding citizen is not allowed to be, and he must walk defenseless if he walks at all.  Are they changing that policy this summer?  In the blue states where the so-called progressives have proudly "eliminated cash bail," even criminals who are caught and prosecuted are still set free to rob, rape, or brawl again, without so much as requiring a single dollar bond to make sure they ever return for trial.  They are just set free as soon as the documents are filed for the last crime.  Are they changing that policy this summer?  Every day, we read or hear the news: over a hundred thousand unknowns per month cross our intentionally porous border with Mexico, heading north.  They aren't all from Mexico, but that's where they fly, from Asia and Europe, from Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.  They all come to Mexico so they can walk across the border and blend effortlessly into these United States, unfollowed and largely untrackable.  Some are decent folks who mean no harm; many are hardened criminals, from more violent cultures than our own, either lone wolves or members of countless foreign crime syndicates.  What about them, you pompous Democrat governors, mayors, and police chiefs, we ask?  Are you doing anything to close off this dangerous spigot this summer?  For generations now, we have seen judges, governors, legislatures, law schools, and newspapers join forces to attack standard minimum sentencing guidelines; to attack the concept of capital punishment, no matter how richly deserved; and to push the spread of alternative punishment like "community service" in lieu of prison time.  Anything and everything they can think of, to increase the odds that known criminals will be back through the revolving door, infesting our streets and alleys, our parks and beaches, within the hour.  Are they changing this policy, too, this summer?  Hardly.

Study Finds Teen Marijuana Use Tied To Dramatic Increased Risk Of Psychosis.  A study published Wednesday found that teens who use cannabis are 11 times more likely to be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, according to NBC News.  The study was led by researchers from the University of Toronto and examined teenage patients who used cannabis within the last year and those who did not, according to NBC News.  When the study was further limited to teens who were sent to the emergency room or hospitalized, it showed a 27-fold increase in the likelihood of being diagnosed with psychotic illness.  "I think that there's enough evidence out there for us to give recommendations that teens probably shouldn't be using cannabis," Andre McDonald, a postdoctoral research fellow at McMaster University and lead author of the study, said, according to NBC News.  "If we can somehow ask teens to delay their use until their brain has developed a little further, I think that would be good for public health."

The Editor says...
Somehow?  Ask?  Delay?  I guess self-control is a thing of the past.  So is parental authority.

And the taxpayers all went out of Massachusetts.  Let's add another state to the list of blues losing people and taxpayers.  It's Massachusetts, or one of the original 13, but another one bites the dust, proving the reality that going blue has consequences. [...] According to the story, people are leaving because of three reasons:  a high tax burden, expensive housing, and health care costs.  There goes Obamacare again!  Another reality is that remote work policies have made it easier for "prime age" workers to leave.  Why does that matter?  Prime age workers buy homes and cars, and pay taxes.

Climate Change 'Solutions' Are Harming the Environment.  As whale deaths mount on the East Coast, The Heartland Institute along with our allies at CFACT and the National Legal and Policy Center have filed a lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order on Dominion Energy's plans to begin pile driving for construction of the base and tower portions of 176 giant offshore wind turbines it plans to erect at great economic and environmental costs off the coast of Virginia as part of President Biden's "all of government" approach to fight climate change.  CFACT has established a great resource devoted to the myriad environmental problems — including the threat to the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale (NARW) from the push for offshore wind along the East Coast.  These turbines are being erected right in the middle of NARW and other protected marine mammals' habitat and migration routes.  In the rush to erect these turbines quickly, the federal government and Dominion played fast and loose with the rules and permits, in particular failing to follow the law and proper procedures in accounting for potential comprehensive, cumulative whale impacts.

U.S. Intelligence Deserves the Distrust It Is Generating.  President Obama sought to change the demographics and the political complexion of the federal work force, and intelligence leaders such as CIA director John Brennan (2013-2017) made clear that they intended to change the organizational cultures of agencies in politically significant ways.  They succeeded brilliantly, with overt activism in defense of Obama/Brennan changes beginning in 2016, when Trump emerged as a potential threat to the "progress" that Obama's policies allegedly had achieved.  This radical change became glaringly obvious when former CIA deputy director Michael Morell invoked his CIA credentials in a New York Times op-ed to rationalize endorsing Hillary Clinton for president while harshly criticizing Trump.  Morell then became one of the "talking heads," along with Brennan, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, former CIA director Michael Hayden, and several dozen less-senior people whom the mainstream liberal press promoted as legitimate observers of everything relevant to their anti-Trump campaign.

New study finds risk of suicide jumps 12-fold after gender surgery.  A new study has found that people who've undergone transgender surgery boast a much higher risk of committing suicide.  Published last month in Cureus, a medical science journal, the study specifically found that "[g]ender-affirming surgery is significantly associated with elevated suicide attempt risks."  The researchers reached this conclusion by analyzing the healthcare data of 90 million adults aged 18 to 60.  They specifically looked at emergency room treatment data for those who'd undergone transgender surgery.

Mike Schmidt destroyed Portland with freed criminals, drug use and empty stores.  Mike Schmidt, the leftist prosecutor in Portland, Ore., is asking voters to give him the opportunity to serve four more years as head of the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office.  In an interview with local media last October, he graded himself an "A" for his performance.  But if the past four years of record homicides, decriminalized antifa rioting and surging street overdoses represent Schmidt as his best, Portland may not survive another four years with him at the helm.  Schmidt's re-election is being challenged by his subordinate, Nathan Vasquez, a senior deputy district attorney and moderate candidate who promises to prosecute crimes and restore the office's relationship with police, which was broken by Schmidt's open cop hatred.

The Deep State and Globalism.  America's decline from a previous high mark in the quality of life of its citizens was a topic that was not covered by the mainstream media.  Today that decline needs no reporting, for it stares us all in the face.  The pretense of leftist VIPs that America is a better place than ever and on the right track shows the quickness of leftists to lie.  The drive toward a new world order, since its presidential proclamation in 1991, is obviously not taking us to a world fit for human habitation.  It is a world certain to be run by men with no real interest in humanity, as the World Economic Forum demonstrates.  Such leaders as these are unfit to govern anyone, let alone everyone.  Millions are noticing a world that is not on the right track and is not headed toward a better place than ever.

A Landmark on the Road to Decline.  Every dimension of our socio-political order — all three branches of the federal government, and many blue-state governments; popular entertainment and high-brow culture; mainline churches; corporate boards and C-suites; national security and defense agencies, and education from K-12 to universities — has been corrupted by illiberal, if not antihuman ideologies that undercut the foundations both of our political freedom and equality, and the morality and ethics that nourish both.  We've known for decades that our educational systems have been failing to educate the young, even as politics, social fads, and culture war propaganda have replaced foundational skills like reading, writing, basic science, critical thought, and history.

What has Biden accomplished in his presidency?  Devastation.  Biden and his sycophants in the media sing his praises on a daily basis, pretending he has been an effective president.  In fact, all he has accomplished is desecration on every level. [...] Biden drained our strategic oil reserve to keep gas prices momentarily low through midterms.  He has yet to refill it.  The inflation caused by his administration's and Congress' irresponsible spending is destroying the lives of millions of American working families who now struggle to pay for groceries, health care, housing, electricity, insurance, as well as gasoline.  What was Biden's answer when asked about his inflation?  He replied that "people have the money to spend."  He has no idea of the disaster he has caused or how it affects people.  The debt is now $35 trillion and going up by a trillion dollars every 100 days!  The nation is headed for an economic disaster of epic proportions.  By the end of this year, the interest on that debt will exceed our national defense spending!  All the money spent must be borrowed.

Suicide Risks 1200% Higher After 'Gender Affirming' Surgery.  [T]his isn't what we have been told.  At least not what the MSM, the medical establishment, the President of the United States, every civil rights organization, or anybody in the Establishment has told us. [...] There is rarely a correlation between what the mainstream media puts out and what is actually true.  Sure, they are perfectly willing to report facts when they don't upset their narrative, but the goal of their "reporting" is to reinforce a false view of the world that corresponds with their ideological priors.  This is how we get years of propaganda that insists that parents face a choice between a live daughter or a dead son.  Never, ever have the statistics even hinted that this is the case.  There was zero evidence of this assertion, yet it was made every day, several times a day, to "prove" that children needed to be sterilized and mutilated in the most horrific ways in order to preserve mental health.

This Is Not the 1960s.  [T]he United States in the 1960's was a far different country than it is today:
  •   During the 1960s the vast majority of Americans believed the United States was an exceptional country and were extremely proud to be Americans.  By 2023 only 39% were extremely proud to be Americans.
  •   Seventy-years ago just 15% of Americans wanted the country to go more in the direction of socialism; in 2019 43% of Americans believed socialism would be good for the country (young adults — 50%)
  •   This was also a far more religious nation with the vast majority of its population steeped in an attendant sense of national and individual moral responsibility.  In 1965, 70% of Americans said religion was "very important" to them, by 2024 that number had fallen to 45%.  In 1962, nearly 50% of Americans attended religious services on a weekly basis, in 2021 just 29%.
However, the marches, demonstrations, and unrest of the 1960s do have one thing in common with the current chaos not only in America's colleges but throughout the nation.  That decade planted the seeds for the Marxists to overwhelmingly dominate America's institutions.

Fast Food Workers Make $20 Min.  Wage in California, Now Everyone Wants It.  California implemented a $20 minimum wage only a month ago, which many workers celebrated.  However, the initial optimism has given way to concerns as massive layoffs sweep various industries.  Who could have predicted that?  Also, not every fast food worker is getting $20 an hour.  Now, all want wage increases, and the unions are pushing for more with no end in sight.  Before you know it, more layoffs will follow, and businesses will fold.

Stories of Young People Whose Bodies Were Sacrificed on Altar of 'Gender Ideology Cult'.  The cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries being prescribed to young people struggling with their gender identity are "experimental," according to Mary Margaret Olohan.  "We don't actually know what kind of effects that the puberty blockers and hormones are having on these young people," Olohan says of women and men who attempt to change their bodies to appear as the opposite sex.  In her new book "Detrans:  True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult," Olohan shares the stories of detransitioners, such as Prisha Mosley.  As a young woman, Mosley took testosterone and had a double mastectomy before she chose to detransition and return to living as a female.  Now an adult, she is expecting a child, but will never be able to breastfeed her baby.  "I'm very happy for her and glad to see that she is able to bring new life into the world," Olohan says of Mosley, but added that "we don't know if other people will be able to do the same."

The Real Reason Pro-Hamas Protesters Wear Masks.  Some of the mask-wearers themselves maintain that they are trying to "stay safe" — in what they believe is the ongoing COVID "pandemic."  Other observers have postulated, however, that this is an effort by the protesters to hide their identity. [...] The central reality to gauge here is that unisex/desexualized dress satisfies leftists' morbid pining for enforced sameness.  It is crucial, in their world, to erase physical as well as emotional differences and attractions between people.  In the utopian endgame, humans must all be replicas of one another and be devoted to the cause, the revolutionary state, and to its all-knowing administering of "equality" and "social justice."  It is no surprise, therefore, that Western leftists were enthralled with the Maoist social engineering experiment.

Retail Theft Ring Busts Reveal Some Hard Truths.  Los Angeles County Sheriff Department detectives proudly announced a complex and successful sting this week.  A retail theft ring has been caught red-handed, with millions of dollars' worth of make-up, perfume, pharmaceuticals, and more, stolen from stores in and around California, much of it still bearing store tags. [...] Where do these ringleaders get the army of foot soldiers to do the swiping, the smash-and-grabbing, the flash-mobbing?  For the past few decades, the leftist approach to the problem of urban crime has been to empty the jails and just hire more social workers.  They disregard or statutorily reduce sentencing guidelines for property crimes, so that even after shoplifters, burglars and other robbers are convicted, they are released back into the community almost immediately.  Should anyone be surprised that crime is rampant, when the government is knowingly releasing every thief they catch via a revolving door policy?

This Economy Does Not Look Good.  Core inflation rose at a 3.8 percent annual rate in the first quarter and 2.9 percent in March, the Commerce Department reports.  Fearful of renewed inflation, the Federal Reserve will not ease up on the money supply and will keep interest rates at their highest level in more than two decades, as Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced on Wednesday, which should slow economic growth further.  Meanwhile, President Biden is doing his very best to destroy the economy via regulatory brutality.  The American Action Forum reports that Biden "agencies published $875.3 billion in total costs" on the U.S. economy in just one week in mid-April, including tighter emission standards for cars, tougher efficiency requirements for light bulbs, and silica exposure limits clearly meant to end coal mining.  Biden's one-week regulatory bacchanal amounted to "[j]ust $20 billion less than what President Obama did in two terms!" notes AAF President Douglas Holtz-Eakin.  The contrast between Biden and Trump is ten times as dramatic as that: $1.37 trillion by Biden to $30.1 billion by Trump by April of year four of their respective administrations.

Communist Defectors Warn About Four Stages Of Subversion — And America Is On The Last One.  Forty years ago, a KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, revealed the systematic plan Soviet communists used to take down countries and establish a communist-type society and regime.  More recently, a Chinese defector immigrant, Xi Van Fleet, has been on a crusade to warn Americans about the parallels between what is happening in America today and what Mao did in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. [...] While America is still in the crisis stage, some subversion experts argue that the lawfare, censorship, and cancellation regimes that now exist are really part of the last stage of communist takeover known as normalization — Bezmenov's fourth and final stage.  If America's borders remain open and the American people are denied access to information, become accustomed to rigged elections, accept limitations on free speech, and acquiesce to the rewriting of history, the constitutional republic that was the United States will be gone, and the new world of communist global elite control will be normalized.

It's the Economy... Again.  By this November 5, a high electoral price from the Democrats may be called in due to a fractured American economy.  In the runup, there are several negative economic indicators flashing red — factors soon to converge in force, each one predicated on Biden's incompetence.  His economic climate tells against the erstwhile middle class, or the legally voting 'majority,' and its prosperity.  The collective, negative impact of Biden's combined and often unilateral federal actions, the upshots of bad policies and mismanagement, suggests that we will soon have a new, expanded class of 'the poor' in the United States — an historical phenomenon that has eventually manifested itself in every country subsequent to communist/socialist takeover.  Biden's policies and directives are coalescing and advancing in a hushed, cumulative economic effect very quickly.

Moral Anarchy:  An Understatement.  Every perversion known to mankind is being embraced and gradually legalized.  The idea that morality is created by each individual as he makes decisions throughout each day is a step beyond anarchy.  Since Lawrence v. Texas decriminalized homosexuality, we have been in a state of moral anarchy.  Crude and licentious parades with many naked or almost naked men celebrating sodomy are considered by many to be positive and invigorating.  The abrogation of Roe v. Wade in the recent Dobbs decision does not end abortion, but simply leaves the existence of abortion laws up to each separate state.  There are so many different laws now on when it is legitimate to abort a baby.  Thus, the people have decided that it is legitimate for citizens to decide when a life is a life.  The truth is that a life begins and is a life at conception.  That is what the Holy Bible teaches and has been the basis of the sanctity of life — announced even in our Declaration of Independence — for thousands of years.

Democrats Have Deliberately Shattered The Ties Binding America.  Two generations of leftist media, a broken education system, and a corrupt government that protects itself at all costs have brought us to this day.  By and large, our youth have lost their ability to look rationally at what is required of them to shape their own future.  They feel simultaneously entitled and angry.  Ask them, and they'll tell you that the Baby Boomers were the last generation to make it.  They feel justified to malinger and complain about the remaining scraps.  Biden told them they were entitled to abandon their student debt obligations.  15% of Americans want to leave our country.  Never before have so many been so disenchanted that they effectively see the American Dream as dead.  The clock is ticking down our remaining time, however much that is.  There is time left to make a difference.

We Won't Live By Your Wokeness.  A young woman who came to the pregnancy center where I work shared this story with me.  She had a pediatrician appointment for her baby girl last week.  She brought her infant, dressed all in pink, into the doctor's office.  After stating the baby's female name, the doctor asked, "So, have you decided what gender you're assigning to this child?"  She was stunned.  She said she just stood there until the word "female" came out of her mouth.  This wasn't the first time I've heard this line of questioning in a pediatrician's office.  A friend told me her daughter was asked the same thing on her first visit to the doctor's office with their infant son.  The question, "gender assigned at birth" is now on many medical forms.  A man I know was at a new doctors' office and the paperwork included an entire page on "gender identity."

Which Major City Will Completely Collapse First — Los Angeles, Chicago or New York City?  In 2024, virtually all major U.S. cities have certain things in common.  First of all, if you visit the downtown area of one of our major cities you are likely to see garbage, human excrement and graffiti all over the place.  As you will see below, some of our core urban areas literally look like they belong in a third world country.  Most of our politicians don't seem too concerned about doing anything to clean up all the filth, and so it shouldn't be a surprise that rat populations are absolutely exploding all over the country.  In some of our largest cities, the total rat population is numbered in the millions.  Meanwhile, rampant theft, out of control violence, endless migration, predatory gangs and the worst drug crisis in the entire history of our nation have combined to create a "perfect storm" of social decay that is unlike anything that any of us have ever seen before.  Millions of law-abiding citizens and countless businesses have been fleeing America's largest cities, and property values in our core urban areas have been absolutely crashing.  We really are in the early stages of a full-blown societal "collapse", and things just keep getting worse with each passing day.

The Democrats' Anti-Business Policies Create The Food Deserts They Decry.  Riots [...] are just one way a community can be destroyed.  Another, far more insidious, is common crime.  With riots, everyone can point to the damage and clamor for rebuilding, but with common crime, once the window is replaced or the body chalk is washed away, the neighborhood looks exactly the same as it did before.  But of course, it's not the same.  From citizens being scared to walk down the street to kids having to dodge junkies as they walk to school to upstanding members of the community not visiting certain neighborhoods — and not spending money there — the fear of violence has devastating consequences on any community.  Food deserts are one of those consequences.  Retailers typically are not charities.  They exist to make money.  When violence, security costs, and shoplifting make it so they can't make money, they usually close.  Hence, when all the food stores close, you have said "food deserts." [...] Why all this matters is because the chickens are coming home to roost.  Across the country, from San Francisco to Seattle to New York to Boston, stores are closing because of crime.

U.S. Cities Fall Into A "Doom Loop" As The CRE Crisis Absolutely Explodes.  In the entire history of the United States, we have never witnessed an urban collapse of this magnitude.  During the pandemic, millions of Americans started working from home, and many of them have never returned to the office.  Meanwhile, rapidly rising levels of crime, homelessness and migration have transformed many of our inner cities into extremely dangerous places.  As a result, thousands upon thousands of businesses have left our core urban areas in search of greener pastures.  So now there is lots and lots of commercial real estate space that is sitting empty, and commercial real estate prices have absolutely plummeted.In the entire history of the United States, we have never witnessed an urban collapse of this magnitude.  During the pandemic, millions of Americans started working from home, and many of them have never returned to the office.  Meanwhile, rapidly rising levels of crime, homelessness and migration have transformed many of our inner cities into extremely dangerous places.  As a result, thousands upon thousands of businesses have left our core urban areas in search of greener pastures.  So now there is lots and lots of commercial real estate space that is sitting empty, and commercial real estate prices have absolutely plummeted.

The Editor says...
What do all the doomed cities have in common?  Socialist government, un-punished crime, homeless bums in the streets, and illegal immigrants everywhere.

The Founding Fathers' Fears Are Coming True, and the Damage Is Intentional.  The Founding Fathers, in all their prescience, wrote the Constitution to protect We the People from the very onslaughts we are seeing today, some two-and-a-half centuries later.  Donald Trump represents a clear and present danger to the pinko-Americans who have infiltrated every institution in the United States, and we can all see how the Constitution somehow doesn't protect this one man. [...] Need more evidence that our nation is on life support?  Our replacements are being invited to cascade over the southern border by politicians who were elected to protect us from such an onslaught.  Criminals, many of whom aren't even citizens (yet), operate with impunity within our borders.  Fentanyl, created by China and sent to the Mexican drug cartels for assembly and distribution, floods over our phantom southern border and kills roughly 80,000 Americans annually while enriching the Chinese and Mexican drug lords, yet nothing changes.  Have you wondered why?  Worse, the destruction we see taking place in the United States is 100% intentional.

The Bargain with Government Is Coming Apart.  [Scroll down]  Take education, for example — a paradigmatic service people expect from government.  People are openly challenging public schools, which spend more on racial and sexual ideology than on reading, writing, and arithmetic.  On crime prevention, perhaps the number-one benefit derived from government, problems abound.  Crime is surging.  Progressive no-bail policies are releasing offenders the same day they are arrested.  Terrorists and criminals are flooding across our borders unvetted.  At the federal level, we're more vulnerable to attack than we have been in decades because we redirect defense spending from war-fighting to DIE seminars.  If you are a low-wage worker, open borders allow illegal aliens to pour in and take your job.  The government is not keeping its end of the bargain.  Insecurity is the word of the day.

Planet Fitness Founder Admits the Truth:  Company Has Pretty Much Been Destroyed.  You let perverts go into any locker room they want, and it will destroy your company.  The Alaska Planet Fitness isn't the only one that's been having problems with mentally ill individuals going into the locker room of their choice, regardless of their biological gender.  North Carolina and other states are seeing the same shit.  Now, the founder of Planet Fitness is admitting defeat. [...] You pander to the communist "woke" left, and this is what happens.  They will happen to any company that bends their knee to the communist Democrat agenda.

Democrats Will Champion Despicable Pedophilia Within Five Years, or Less.  Transgenderism is validated by psychiatric and other medical professions that stopped caring about patient welfare long ago, and instead, champion woke delusions.  The profit motive exerts tremendous attraction; there are millions to be reaped from hormone treatments and sex-organ mutilations.  To opine that the deviant "road to progress" will lead to pedophilia is not mere conjecture.  Preliminary moves in that direction have already been undertaken.

The Brainwashing of America.  Brainwashing is defined as "the process of pressuring someone into adopting radically different beliefs by using systematic and often forcible means."  In case you haven't noticed, that is the kind of pressuring presently threatening the "blessings of liberty." [...] Rather than anger, good people seem to be owning the accusations and in turn acquiescing to abuse like mistreated pets.  Riots are purposely incited by implicit suggestions that retaliation for things like racism is justified.  Police are disrespected, shot, and killed.  Terrorist states are enriched, and foreign wars financed with tax money siphoned from government coffers.  Our border, language, and civilization is being decimated, and Third World diseases infect our citizens.  Meanwhile, everyday Americans are portrayed as inherently evil.  To ensure voters' voices are drowned out at the ballot box, instead of forbidding illegal entry, our government presses beaten-down taxpayers to feed, clothe, enrich, and accommodate hordes of illegals that include swindlers, murderers, and rapists.  As stunned citizens lick the wounds inflicted by government, progressives support an invasion of military-aged men armed with tactical game plans printed in Chinese.

Words Aren't Enough.  The more and better-distributed sources of information that fill the search engines and radio programs, the harder the truth is to hide.  That's an important role in the ultimate battle for America down the line.  The border fiasco is all Biden, the lower wages are all Biden, the inflation is all a product of Bidenomics, the debt is all Biden, not because he came in with a clean slate, but because he has increased spending to the point that we now owe over a trillion dollars a year, just to pay interest on the debt.  That's more than we spend on the Department of Defense.  In January of 2021, when he took office, the debt was 21.6 trillion dollars and that was after the lockdowns and the pandemic.  U.S. debt today is 34.6 trillion dollars and adding a trillion dollars every 100 days.  Our tax collections run at about 4.5 trillion dollars a year, with budgets ranging from 6.5 to 7 trillion dollars a year.  The spin is that we need these illegals to help the economy.

99 Reasons I'm In Mourning.  High rents and theft are a key reason many dollar stores are closing in medium and large cities.  However, dollar stores in rural locations are thriving.  Dollar General just opened its 20,000th store in Alice, Texas, with plans to open 800 more this year!  By focusing on rural locations, they have less competition, lower real estate expenses, and less chance of retail theft.  (At least not at levels seen in larger cities where culprits walk in, shove items into bags, and walk out knowing there's little chance they will be arrested and/or prosecuted.)  Who knows how long the other dollar chains will last?  Family Dollar, whose parent is Chesapeake, Virginia-based Dollar Tree, Inc., announced it will close 600 Family Dollar and Dollar Tree stores.  The Dollar Tree empire employs nearly 212,000 employees (retail staff, distribution center, and store support).  How many will be affected by the announced Family Dollar and Dollar Tree closures?

St Louis Is Dying.  We all know that prominent coastal Blue cities are in deep trouble, but this report in the Wall Street Journal reminds us that almost all large cities are run by idiots driven by Democrat ideology.  Democrat ideology is toxic.  In cities across America a doom loop has set in.  [Tweet]  Saint Louis, it seems, is seeing its central business district die a slow and painful death.  Office buildings have been clearing out, and with them the businesses that supported the workers have been leaving to set up in greener pastures.

The Most Important Election in American History?  The ideological division in America is the greatest it has ever been — even during the pre-War Between the States era.  And the contrast between the two candidates (regardless of whom the Democrats finally nominate) could not be more dramatic:  one a decided pro-American patriot, the other an unequivocal Leftist totalitarian heading a party that gives every indication it hates everything traditional America stands for and wants to continue to take the country down a determined leftward, morally decadent path. [...] America isn't anything even close to what it was in 1960. [...] But, until Obama, and especially Biden, we didn't realize the depth of the anti-Americanism, the full intention of what the Left was trying to do with and to our country.  We noticed the increasing immorality and growth of government, but the horrific degeneracy, decadence, and economic recklessness have exploded in our faces the past few years.

Is The Great Illusion In Ruins?  [Scroll down]  Now, as we enter the fourth year of the great experiment, America is $35 trillion in debt, borrowing $1 trillion every 100 days.  Home mortgages are at 7 percent.  Key prices for food, insurance, rent, and fuels are 30-40 percent higher than when Biden entered office.  The nation has been humiliated and emasculated abroad.  Racial relations are the worst in a half-century.  The military is in virtual receivership.  Biden is polling about 40 percent approval and is behind in key swing states in most of the 2024 polls.

Biden Administration Environmental Rules Estimated to Cost Americans Almost $1 Trillion.  Mandates, mandates, mandates; subsidy after subsidy.  All of these cost money, and we're occasionally reminded of just how much.  The Biden administration seems determined to shatter all the norms when it comes to unilaterally deciding that they know best what's good for us Americans and are willing to spend our money to those ends.  Now we see the cost; the environmental rules alone implemented by this administration (without input from Congress) are projected to cost Americans more than $845 billion.  As if the fiat-currency dump fueling inflation wasn't enough already.

99 Cent Only Stores Shuttering all Locations, Citing Crime and Inflation as Key Factors.  One of the first places I discovered when I moved to California in the late 1980s was the 99 Cents Only Store.  One of my apartments was in walking distance of one, and I could buy a week's groceries for $20.  Those halcyon days are long gone, not just for me and others, but for the iconic 99 Cents Only Store.  When the company had to raise their price point from $0.99 to $1.01 a few years back, you kind of got the sense they weren't going to outrun this.  It was finally the weight of inflation and the COVID pandemic that did them in. [...] The press release did not mention rampant retail theft as a reason, but you know that factors in as well. 99 Cent Only Stores are extremely soft targets, with very little security presence.  In California, with Prop 47 in place, retail theft of up to $950 won't even be prosecuted.  So, thieves could take out three-quarters of the store and get away scot-free.

Who Are the Real Conspiracy Theory Nut Jobs?  Remember how the left ridiculed us for predicting disaster once Biden got into the White House?  They were quite sincere and convinced that we were wrong.  They said with conviction, "Oh no, you are wrong!  Biden will be a president for all the people.  The world will be relieved at his presence.  Peace and security will ensue."  Now, Biden is overseeing a vast human tragedy at the border, soaring gas prices, racial hatred, and the world on the brink of war.  Not only were we right — we were too right.  It has degenerated faster than even we imagined.  We emphatically warned that he would rain down calamity after calamity.  That he would cause soaring gas prices, inflation, a spike in murder rates, unrest in the Middle East, and war.

A GOP Landslide in November.  The Biden Democrats have opened the southern border to about eight million illegal aliens, many of them military-age single males.  Assume only half of those aliens are males and one in a thousand are in terrorist sleeper cells infiltrated by Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or Iran.  That adds up to 4,000 attackers spread all over the country, which is 200 times greater than the twenty that Al-Qaeda planned for its attack on September 11, 2001.  Instead of thousands of deaths, the casualties could be hundreds of thousands.  That death toll would overshadow the body blow to American cities from millions of unscreened "migrants" whom Democrat governors and mayors are subsidizing with free housing and free money.  The answer from Biden Democrats to the terrorist threat is to ban the terms "Islamic terrorist" and "jihadist" from intelligence reports at the Pentagon and the FBI.

The Democrat party is a Potemkin village.  The Democrat party as a democratic institution is a false front.  Our judicial system has been Stalinized; Democrats are free to break all laws, conservatives will be punished severely for minor infractions.  Our law enforcement agencies have been thoroughly weaponized.  Rampant crime is the chaos the Democrat party needs to further its agenda.  What has been done to the people who were present at the Capitol on January 6 is Stalinist in the extreme as is the lawfare perpetrated against Trump.  On top of that, Biden intentionally destroyed the energy independence we enjoyed under Trump.  His open border has forever altered the demography of the nation and not in a good way.  The migrants pouring over the border are not coming to be productive citizens; they are coming to be taken care of by American taxpayers.  They are not grateful for what they are receiving, and they expect more.  That's what we get when other countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending their worst our way.  Democrats routinely, endlessly present themselves as the party of democracy while they censor narratives and opinions they do not like.

Maintain Your Brain.  Generations ago it wasn't uncommon for educated people to memorize chunks of The Iliad, building up their minds by forcing them to do all the rewarding work associated with real reading: assembling images, keeping track of plot and character structure, juggling themes and challenging ideas even as you carried the story along.  Then came mass media.  Newspapers shortened attention span, movies arrived and did visual assembly for you, TV mastered mental junk food, MTV replaced story with montages of interesting nonsensical images, then finally the Internet came and made it possible to endlessly follow your own random impulses instead of anyone else's schedule or plot. [...] Inventions like TikTok, which I'm on record saying shouldn't be banned, are designed to create mentally helpless users, like H addicts.  If you stand there scrolling and thinking Next! enough, your head will sooner or later be fully hollowed out.  You'll lose the ability to remember, focus, and decide for yourself.  There's a political benefit in this for leaders, but more importantly there's a huge commercial boon.  The mental jellyfish is more susceptible to advertising [...]

New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco And Baltimore Were Once Such Beautiful Cities.  If America is heading in the right direction, why have so many of our major cities become cesspools of violence, drugs, theft, trash and homelessness?  Once upon a time, millions of young people from all over America flocked to our rapidly growing metropolitan areas.  Today, there is a mass exodus out of our largest metropolitan areas due to the absolutely deplorable conditions.  If you are not yet convinced that we are a nation in decline, spend some time wandering around our core urban areas.  The shiny new cities that previous generations of Americans built for us are degenerating at a pace that is absolutely stunning.

'The River Is Essentially Dead': How Enviros' Push To Save Salmon Ended Up Killing 'Hundreds Of Thousands' Of Them.  A well-funded environmentalist group played a key role in the push to remove dams in the Pacific Northwest's Klamath River ahead of premature deaths of thousands of salmon.  American Rivers — an organization that has received millions of dollars from left-of-center environmentalist grantmaking organizations in recent years — was "the orchestrator of the Klamath dams removal project," according to Siskiyou News, a local outlet in Northern California.  The drawdowns of several reservoirs pursuant to the scheduled removal of four dams in the river preceded the deaths of "hundreds of thousands" of young salmon in the waterway, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.  The push to remove the dams is often marketed as beneficial for salmon, as proponents of the plan — including American Rivers — have argued that the dams obstruct the natural movements of salmon as well as their access to habitat.  However, weeks after beginning the process to remove one of the systems scheduled for deconstruction on the river, a large number of the 830,000 young salmon released into the river on Feb. 26 had died as of March 2, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW).

The losers in Biden's America.  The future is not bright for most people under 50.  You are seeing (and will see) a continued deterioration of the dollar and a diminishing standard of living if you vote for Democrats.  As Ronald Reagan succinctly stated, "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.  We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness."  Freedom and (market) opportunity have served prior generations of Americans.  Joe Biden and Democrats have a vision for America, where freedom and opportunity are subverted to the interests of the state.  "You will own nothing and be happy." [...] If you want to buy a home, rent a home or apartment, eat, or drive, you are getting hammered by Bidenomics.  The affordability of homes for new buyers is all but out of reach for most Americans.  Rents are skyrocketing.  The cost to fill up a car or truck is 50% more than it was when Donald Trump left office.  Eating out has gotten expensive, even for fast food, with McDonald's meals reaching $18.  In California, wait until the minimum wage for fast food workers goes to $20/hr.  Your meals will also increase in cost to absorb this expense.

Joe Biden's winners.  The top of Biden's winner list has to be illegal aliens.  As the saying goes, what you promote, you get more of.  Joe Biden and his surrogates have actively promoted the arrival of more than 7 [to] 8 million new illegal aliens since his inauguration, when he overrode Donald Trump-era policies and instituted new executive orders, opening the floodgates.  Illegal aliens are being housed, fed, given stored value cards, free medical treatment, and "the promise" of amnesty.  A peripheral beneficiary of our open border is the Mexican cartels, who are making bank, trafficking drugs, adults, and children. [...] On the heels of illegal aliens are non-governmental organizations and other leftist activist groups, who are grifting the government to the tune of billions of dollars per year.  Woke Catholic charities, woke Protestant charities, woke attorneys, woke hotel chains and housing authorities all benefit from the continuation of the border surge.  Leftist homeless groups benefit from the continuation of, not the elimination of, homelessness.  If they "solved" the homeless crisis, they would be out of work.  Not the "people" in said sanctuary cities and states, but leftist Democrats, who benefit from the increased number of congressional seats afforded them, by the increased counts in the Census, soon to be the right to vote.

We Should Fight First for the Bill of Rights.  [Scroll down]  The military recruiting crisis is so bad that the Army is now seeking retirees to come back in a desperate move to fill "critical position vacancies."  According to the directive, "There is no age limitation, although personnel older than 70 are not normally recalled."  No worries, America.  Everything's fine.  We're just looking for a few good men with experience — and senior citizen cards! [...] I guess all those commercials highlighting a "woke" military culture and fondness for men in drag didn't quite puff up enlistment figures enough to intimidate global adversaries.  Truth be told, bringing back the Old Dogs might be the only way to save an otherwise sinking ship — but only if yesterday's soldiers are permitted to turn today's soldiers into something more than their preferred pronouns.  The Armed Forces are in dire need of an ideological fumigation that can drive the "woke" mind virus out for good.  Unless the branches return to a culture that celebrates honor, strength, and merit, DIE-obsessed Marxists will continue to transform America's once-intimidating fighting forces into a puny pack of politically correct toy poodles.  Nothing invites aggression so much as perceived weakness.

Domination Through Chaos and Fear.  [Scroll down]  What do you imagine the BLM and Antifa riots are about?  Or the "Defund the Police" movement?  Eroding trust in rational systems and behaviors creates radicals and radicalization empowers the worst elements of a society.  Without enforcement of existing rules about civil campus behavior, radical students and professors overcome the moderates on campuses.  Those desirous of honest debate or who take different non-radical views leave or shut up, and the mission of the institution is corrupted and destroyed. [...] I think it's safe to say that we can expect more of this drive for power through manufactured chaos, and you've no real choice except to resist bullying as well as you are able.

Trump's Third Act has begun.  The gears of the machine have become visible.  We can all see the FBI is rotten and the DOJ is weaponized.  We know the border is open intentionally.  We know the cartels are working with our government.  We know our elections are DESIGNED to not be auditable and there's only one reason for it.  We can see Biden is not in charge.  We know the Ukraine war was always about its energy resources and who gets to own them.  We know our rising debt is ruinous.  We know our experts are liars.  We know our pharma and food industries are poisoning us.  We know our government is racist.  We know the corporate media is essentially owned by Democrats who are controlled by intelligence entities and they are actively brainwashing the population.

Biden and the insurmountable.  Black voters seem to have matured a bit.  Street interviews and polls suggest that an increasing number realize that they re-enslaved themselves to the Democrat party and received little by way of meaningful benefits in return.  Yes, they got welfare, cheesy food stamps, and drug-infested housing, but look what it cost them:  their dignity, a husbandless family, females working two and three jobs to feed their families, alienation from their churches, more crime, and you know the rest.  Biden inflation has eaten any wage increases workers obtained during the Trump years.  The cost of essentials is devastating for those on the lower-socioeconomic level.  Furthermore, competition from Biden illegals is beginning to create adverse employment opportunities, and it will only worsen.  The military was an employment refuge for many black and white citizens, who gained many social benefits and positive life experiences as well as post-service education stipends.  Now the military cannot fill its quotas because of what Biden has done by way of sexualization.

Judge McAfee Ruling Is The Latest Blow to Public Trust in Government.  Quite simply, of late, the unbelievability of the government's positions and actions has escalated significantly:
  •   We are supposed to believe that the southern border is secure, the millions of impoverished, military-age males flowing into our country pose no threat to our economy, culture, or national security, and the only people opposed to this invasion are racists.
  •   We are supposed to believe America is a fundamentally, systemically racist country.
  •   We are supposed to believe a new economic principle holding that paying the same price for a smaller bag of Doritos is intrinsically different from and somehow more sinister than paying a higher price for the same size bag of Doritos.
  •   We are supposed to believe that our withdrawal from Afghanistan was a well-planned and brilliant success, not one of the worst military and foreign relations disasters in our lifetimes.
  •   We are supposed to believe that DEI is a far better rubric than merit for making all our institutions — even our military — better.
  •   We are supposed to believe that it is perfectly fair and right for biological male athletes to compete against biological females — despite the former being dramatically overrepresented in winners' circles.
This list could go on for pages, but some of the examples are far weightier than others.  The Russia Hoax, arguably the most corrupt, treasonous scandal ever orchestrated by the cabal of governmental agencies, opposition party, and media, delivered a massive body blow to government credibility.  The COVID scandals — from identifying origination to lockdowns to the efficacy of the vaccines — and the Hunter Biden laptop scandal fully exposed in the Twitter Files release were a one/two punch combination that left government credibility on teetering legs.

Biden's Bloodbath.  The Left is castigating presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump for warning that there would be a "bloodbath" if he's not elected in November.  The dishonest media wasted no time taking the comment out of context (he was talking about tariffs on foreign auto imports) and falsely claiming that Trump was cooking up an insurrection — or maybe even WWIII. [...] While left-wing media parrots are weeping and gnashing their teeth about Trump using the word "bloodbath," there are very real bloodbaths that the policies of Joe Biden and the Democrats have caused:
  •   A million dead babies a year, courtesy of Democrat policies and bolstered by their evil minions at Planned Parenthood
  •   13 troops killed during Biden's botched Afghanistan withdrawal — 13 families who lost mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters.
  •   55,000 deaths a year from Fentanyl overdoses thanks, in part, to Biden's refusal to protect our southern border.
  •   The highest increase in suicide rates in two decades.
Democrats yapping about bloodbaths are complete and utter hypocrites.  Nothing Trump has done comes close to the ghastly, ongoing genocide of innocents on the tables of abortion clinics.

New Inflation Numbers Keep Economic Concerns Front and Center.  Inflation tickedup in the latest figures from the U.S. government's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), released March 12.  It's not a huge rise, but enough to keep the eroding value of the dollar in the headlines, feed Americans' dissatisfaction with the economy, and be received as very bad news by the White House.  The president and his allies work hard to claim credit for what they tout as a thriving economy, but all they've done is link the Biden brand to rising prices and a general distaste for the president's management.  "The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.4 percent in February on a seasonally adjusted basis, after rising 0.3 percent in January," according to the BLS.  "Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.2 percent before seasonal adjustment."  That's a big improvement over the 9.1 percent that inflation hit in 2022.  But it's still a reminder to the public that the money in their wallets buys less with each passing day.

The Editor says...
The 9.1 percent inflation from 2022 is not erased or mitigated by the 3.2 percent inflation the following year.  This is a shell game, and if you watch TV news, you lose.

Consequences Minus Truth.  Are you feeling more confident that the US military can competently defend our country?  Probably more like the opposite, because the manipulation of language is being used deliberately to turn our country inside-out and upside-down.  At this point we probably could not successfully pacify a Caribbean island if we had to, and you've got to wonder what might happen if we have to contend with countless hostile subversive cadres who have slipped across the border with the estimated nine-million others ushered in by the government's welcome wagon.  Momentous events await.

Becoming Haiti:  How Biden Is Transforming America Into a Gang-Infested Wasteland.  What is transpiring in Haiti is so post-apocalyptic — so unspeakably brutal — that it would be impossible to believe were it not for the steady stream of phone videos and first-person testimonials substantiating the media reports pouring out of the country.  "Millions of Haitians Face Starvation as Gangs Aim for Total Takeover, Free 5,000 Prisoners," reads one recent headline.  "Haiti Gangs Launch Main Airport Seige, Massacring People 'Indiscriminately' Days After Massive Jail Break," reports another.  This weekend's Washington Post report, titled "Haitians shot dead in the streets and there's no one to take the corpses away," paints a picture of the scene on the ground: [...] The situation is grim, even by Haitian standards.  (And the situation in Haiti has been varying levels of grim for the past 200 years.)  Reports suggest that a gang leader named "Barbecue" — a reference to his enthusiasm for burning people alive in their homes, not to his culinary prowess — is now "the most powerful man in Haiti."  Barbecue's gangs recently stormed two Haitian prisons and released thousands of prisoners before launching a full-scale attack on Haiti's main airport.

Tyranny Is Rising as Freedom Falls.  The U.S. military is being used to patrol subway stations and police the U.S.-Mexico border, supposedly in the name of national security.  The financial sector is being used to carry out broad surveillance of Americans' private financial data, while the entertainment sector is being tapped to inform on video game enthusiasts with a penchant for violent, potentially extremist content, all in an alleged effort to uncover individuals subscribing to anti-government sentiments[.]  Public and private venues are being equipped with sophisticated surveillance technologies, including biometric and facial recognition software, to track Americans wherever they go and whatever they do.  Space satellites with powerful overhead surveillance cameras will render privacy null and void.  This is the state of our nation that no is talking about — not the politicians, not the courts, and not Congress:  the government's power grabs are growing bolder, while the rights of the citizenry continue to be trampled under foot.

Watch the Destruction of New York City in Real Time.  The New York City police are finally arresting some of the violent migrants.  There were two attacks in Times Square, where there are multiple migrant shelters.  Two of the suspects are members of one of Venezuela's most violent gangs, Tren de Aragua.  The gang has a strong and visible presence in New York, Chicago, LA, Miami, and elsewhere.  Venezuela's Communist President Maduro opened the prisons and sent the criminals to our border.  Thank a Democrat.  Currently, there is a manhunt now for 16 other people who stabbed a teen in the back.  Cash [Jordan] says the majority are fleeing extreme poverty.  We understand that, but we can't take in the entire world. [...] Cameras are everywhere, but they don't do much since they don't give clear photos.  It also doesn't matter because the criminals are released immediately.  There are mobs of foreign people here illegally, running around, doing whatever they want.  They grab phones and belongings from tourists while zooming around on e-bikes.  Watch what has happened to New York City under Progressives:  [Video clip]

CNN beclowns itself by confirming the escalating cost-of-living crisis while trying to pin it on Trump.  A recent article from Matt Egan at CNN admits that Americans have a problem paying for things... but neither he, nor any of the outlet's other employees ever bring up Joe Biden or his policies as a significant cause of the problem; [...] Egan says the problem has been building for years instead of admitting that inflation didn't start increasing rapidly until Biden took office.  Despite COVID and supply chain issues, inflation remained below 2%... until Biden.  The economy was growing rapidly pre-Biden, despite the entire country having come to a screeching halt over a virus, yet he signed the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, and fulfilled his campaign promise to destroy affordable energy (oil), which sent prices skyrocketing.  He compounded the inflation problem by issuing executive orders to open the borders: housing, food, education, healthcare, law enforcement, energy, and other things are obviously strained when millions of people are suddenly thrown into the mix, bringing no wealth and anti-American cultures and ethos.  The federal budget is around 60% higher than before COVID, and they are borrowing trillions each year.  That obviously puts pressure on prices and forces an increase in interest rates.  Here's how Egan framed it though, to distract from the obvious:  ["]From the historically unaffordable housing market and budget-breaking day care rates to high car prices, the United States has a cost of living problem many years in the making.["]

Is New York City Really Dead?  Far too many edicts coming from Mayor Eric Adams' administration are simply mind-boggling.  The city has been invaded by illegal immigrants from several countries and the mayor has ordered that they be sheltered in hotels, schools and senior residencies, displacing senior veterans, and resident citizens.  In addition, a pilot program will be giving them $10,000 prepaid debit cards to buy certain items.  What?!!  Needless to say, the recent political judgments against President Donald Trump and his businesses have induced a "get out of NYC asap rampage."  No one wants to do business here if biased judges can officiate over kangaroo court cases against political enemies.  Those families who can move are relocating to red states but there are many of us without the resources to do so.  There are also many like me who prefer to stay and fight.  New York City used to be the greatest city in the world and as I was born here during its glory years, the very idea that it's doomed is unacceptable.  I believe that everything that is wrong with the city is due to misguided, progressive politics, primarily instituted by Democrats.

The Editor says...
Just because you know who caused all these problems, that doesn't mean the city isn't doomed.  The damage may already be irreparable.

Why Americans No Longer Trust the Healthcare System.  Trust is foundational in relationships, whether between individuals or between individuals and institutions.  A Gallup survey from last summer found, "Americans' faith in major societal institutions hasn't improved over the past year following a slump in public confidence in 2022."  Notable other examples where surprisingly few Americans have "a great deal or quite a lot of confidence" in major institutions include Congress at 8%, big business and television news at 14%, and the criminal justice system at only 17%.  The medical system fared slight better with 34% of Americans expressing confidence.  But two thirds have lost trust.  Doctors, hospitals, and healthcare systems used to be held in high esteem, but no more.  Aren't these the "experts" in white coats? [...] In terms of one's own healthcare decisions, "35% of American adults believe it's safe to trust advice from experts" By party however, only 22% of Republicans trust the experts compared to 52% of Democrats.

50 is the new 20.  People who do the shopping for their families know that inflation is not "under control," as President Biden and his advisers are insinuating.  When was the last time any of them went food-shopping or filled up their own gas tank?  "The economy is booming and everyone knows it — except for the American people," wrote former Treasury secretary Larry Summers this month in a working paper on inflation and the cost of money.  A January Gallup poll found that 45% of Americans think the state of the economy is "poor," and 63% say it's getting worse.  What's the reason for the disconnect?  Well, statistics and politics have a lot to do with it.  The primary measure of inflation, the CPI (Consumer Price Index), is constantly being manipulated and redefined to achieve the desired results.

Morning Again, Again.  In 1984, the Reagan-Bush campaign aired a political commercial that helped seal their landslide re-election, winning 49 states and 525 electoral votes.  "Morning in America" is an iconic piece of political history — a video that is fondly nostalgic for the Boomer generation because the Reagan years were a golden time of peace and prosperity. [...] Time and again, Biden issues policy directives that are disgustingly immoral.  Have we really reached the point where we are not allowed to say what is a man and what a woman?  Are we required, on penalty of loss of employment or expulsion from school, to refer to "non-binary" individuals as "they" and "them" instead of he/she and him/her?  Do we really wish to allow repeated shoplifting if it falls below $900 per occurrence?  Do we want open borders with tens of millions of unvetted individuals entering our country?  Do we want to see our living standard cut by 6% or more annually as a result of inflation, driven largely by out-of-control government spending?

The Stinking Privilege of the Green New Deal.  A few years ago when I was building my house, [...] I followed the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum template, contracted the job myself.  I wanted to build a healthy house, which meant as little chemical off-gassing as possible.  Despite my savings, which were considerable, it still cost 40 percent more than a traditional stick-frame.  The geothermal system cost $35,000 more than traditional heating and no, I have not "made back that money."  Today that cost would be north of $150,000.  We're all in this together, right?  The only reason I am not bankrupt is that where I live is so restricted as to land use, housing prices have skyrocketed.  Only the rich can afford to live here.  My property with its "improvements," which is to say my money and labor, is now worth 30 times my initial investment.  This is known as old-fashioned economics, wherein you restrict supply and prices, via demand, go up.  This too is a perfect micro-illustration of the "Green Economy" or the the "Green New Deal."  It is "green" only for the wealthy or privileged by virtue of education.  It is very, very "green" for those who profit from it.  The people who took my extra money, other than the giant suction hose of government, were mostly those demanded by "green" theology:  engineers (5), lawyers (3), surveyors (2), wildlife consultants (2), and permitting bureaucrats.  Those requirements have doubled in the intervening years.

The green movement is stripping away life's small luxuries, one by one.  Our former colonial masters, the micro-managing misery merchants of the EU's institutions, have agreed on a new way to interfere in our lives with a deal banning sauce sachets and regulating the air inside boxes.  When you fly away on holiday in six years, you may need to pack your own ketchup to address both concerns.  If your suitcase is too empty it might be considered wasteful packaging and be either quarantined as an eco-crime, or stuffed with images of sad-eyed Swedish children whose future you have stolen.  The goal of the snappily titled Revision of the Packaging and Packing Waste Directive is to reduce packaging waste, which is on the rise.  In 2021 each EU citizen generated 189 kg, up about 17 percent over the decade.  This raises questions over the utility of the previous legislation.  Self-evidently it failed.  However, the intention is noble, reducing the impact of some materials, deemed polluting, on the environment, including for example hard to recycle plastics.  All packaging on the EU market will have to be recyclable by 2030.  The best way of encouraging such change is inventing better alternatives.  The rise of plastics over the last 100 years is due to their utility.

Klamath Dams Down:  Will Ranches Survive?  The largest, most devastating dam removal experiment in modern history has reached the point of no return.  As of January 23, 2024 — despite opposition by a majority of local residents — the four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River have been officially breached.  Ironically, dam removal proponents claimed the project would help salmon, but now the Klamath River is being polluted with millions of cubic yards of decomposed algae, organic deposition, chemicals, and fine silt that has built up behind the dams.  Dead steelhead trout and other species are floating to the banks.  Any salmon spawning beds in the Klamath River were undoubtedly destroyed.  At press time, conditions in the Klamath River were not likely survivable for the salmon juveniles that were beginning to emerge from the tributary rivers and creeks on their way to the ocean.  There's no way of knowing the survival rate of those juveniles until it's time for them to return to their natal spawning grounds as adults (fall of 2025 for coho salmon; later for Chinook salmon).  But there is cause for great concern:  by one estimate 26 million cubic yards of sediment is stored behind the dams.  No one knows how much of it will slough off into the river, or how long the river will remain in its turbid state, or how much of the sediment will settle on the river-bottom.

Oregon Realizes Drug Decriminalization Has Failed Spectacularly.  I'm not trying to get anyone's hopes up here too much, but it's just possible that we are witnessing a turning of the tide in terms of the progressive fads and policies that have been sweeping the nation over the past couple of decades.  First, we saw the "defund the police" movement turn into a "refund the police" effort (at least in some places) as voters began to feel the bite of rising crime levels.  Many progressives who formally sympathized with less strict immigration laws have been changing their tune after witnessing a literal invasion of our country numbering in the millions.  And now, out in Oregon, previous successful efforts to decriminalize hard drugs have morphed into a push to "recriminalize" those same substances.  It's not just talk, either.  The state legislature passed a measure this week that would roll back the previous decriminalization rules and the Governor has already indicated that she is inclined to sign it.

The Dark and the Light.  The poison killing our country is pervasive untruth.  Every institution we have relied on to run the public interest has become a factory churning out lies, evasions, and misdirection — not unlike the way mRNA "vaccines" turned the cells in your bodies into tiny generators of spike proteins destroying your organs.  Likewise, half the population, apparently, thinks this is a good thing, that we need more lawfare — the perversion of law by attorney perverts — and that we need ever more lies, evasions, and misdirection (just as the degenerates who run Harvard declare their student body needs more mRNA boosters to remain in school).  Since the doctors have all failed — miserably and dishonorably — America needs an exorcism. [...] Are you asking yourselves:  what will satisfy these maniacs?  Anything short of the ruin of our country?  What will their coveted power be worth in a ruined country?  Mr. Trump volunteered to play the role of exorcist in this grand psychodrama.  Whatever else you make of him, he has shown a lot of fortitude.

Radical Democrats Want The Same Fate For America As Hamas Does For Israel.  [Scroll down]  This worldview is institutionally endemic from the campus to the boardroom to the federal bureaucracy.  It — antiracism, progressivism, intersectionality, gay race communism, et al. — is the basis of our de facto state religion.  Those who are filtered through and direct American institutions cling to this ethos with religious zeal.  That presents a serious threat to the lives and safety of the American people.  Observe how adherents of this worldview embedded within the U.S. government foment chaos and violent crime by refusing to enforce the law at the southern border.  Currently, legions of fighting-age men from across the globe, including several suspected Islamic terrorists, are illegally flooding across the shared border with Mexico before finding themselves in the country's heartland, where they've committed hundreds of thousands of violent crimes.  But whole generations of people are reared to sincerely believe this isn't a problem.  They believe the U.S. is an illegitimate nation whose institutions seek to target and oppress nonwhite residents, such as these illegals.  From their earliest days in the education system, virtually every child in America is taught to despise the nation and its culture because it is deemed "oppressive" and infringes on an abstract, ever-expanding notion of "rights."

The Feminization of America.  We are witnessing a new rise of authoritarianism in opposition to freedom.  Men do not want to be ruled.  Look at the national submission to COVID mandates:  this was a pure feminine reaction favoring security.  We are on the brink of total submission to authority.  "Please, keep me safe!  That's all I ask!"  We the People, men pointedly, meekly allowed ourselves to submit to loss of freedom imposed by a vastly overreaching government.  We consented to be so governed.  The despair of men who have lost their role and identity as independent and strong seems to be cheered on in the guilt-ridden media who see masculinity as a sickness.  Their concern is that men are not adapting as anticipated... some are resisting.

Defeating Michelle Obama (or any other Democrat).  [Scroll down]  They've spent the last three years taking a wrecking ball to our liberty and individual rights while continually lying that we're doing that — always repeating their big lie to make it the truth.  You can always tell what they've been doing because they accuse us of doing it.  They ripped open the border to an illegal invasion, but somehow, some way, it's the fault of the pro-freedom right, because we didn't legalize the invasion and funnel more money into its facilitation.  They're causing rampant inflation, printing money to buy votes, but somehow, it's also our fault, because we noticed. [...] All indications are they are going to wait until the convention to play the Biden bait-and-switch on the people.  That helps them, because if we focus just on him and the disaster that has been his regime, a fresh face wipes that all away.  Hence, we have to hammer the party instead so the Democrats can't get away with their usual treachery.  The far left is always thinking three or four steps ahead of the game.  That's why leftists had Joe take the fall for the economy with the "Bidenomics" label.

Privacy Is a Fundamental Value.  The administrative class delights in imposing its views on the rest of us, especially when it involves our private lives.  Small businesses are made to prepare wedding cakes for gays; young children are forced to study sexual practices from which they ought to be shielded; workers are made to attend classes on DIE in which, if they are white, they are accused of racism and exploitation, even as they are the ones being exploited by racism.  We live in a world turned upside-down, and it can only end in chaos.  For the woke class that now governs our country, it's not enough that gays and transgenders, now treated as minorities and thus victims, are granted complete equality and full human rights.  What they seem to want, and what the administrative class imposes on the rest of us, is superiority and oppression of others who are straight.  Everything gays and transgenders demand is granted by administrators, judges, corporate leaders, and politicians who are afraid to refuse them because of the stigma of seeming to be "anti"-minority.  Even when it imposes harm on the rest of society, the wishes of gays and transgenders come first.

Federal Reserve records massive losses, makes up fictitious value called 'deferred assets' to compensate.  When inflation started rising rapidly after Biden took office, the Federal Reserve and others falsely called it transitional.  Biden campaigned on, and has governed on, policies to intentionally destroy reasonably priced energy.  As a result of these radical policies, energy prices soared, and energy inflates the cost of everything.  Crude oil is used in over 6,000 products, and crude oil is still up over 90% from the day Biden was inaugurated.  Yet I have not seen members of the Federal Reserve call out Biden for his energy policy as a great cause of inflation.  Biden's green policies are forcing car companies to produce electric cars, which are losing them a massive amount of money, because the public doesn't want them.  Then the car companies jack up the price of gas-powered vehicles so they can cover the losses, and make profits to cover the cost to manufacture the more expensive E.V.s.  Consumers, especially the poor and middle classes, are hit with huge increases in car payments.  I haven't heard the Fed say how that contributes to inflation.  Because of the increased cost of cars, car repairs and insurance rates are soaring — a "staggering 23%" increase for repair costs in just one year, and a "26%" increase for insurance rates, which equates to a $500 per year jump.

I never thought I'd see.  There are days when I wake up in an America I hardly recognize.  Some of that is my age, but much of it is astonishment.  A part of me is thankful that my grandparents are not alive to witness what we all are.  They would not have tolerated what we now take for granted.

The Absurd Democrat Border Con.  In 2021, Joe Biden opened wide an inherited, secure southern border that had finally stopped mass illegal immigration.  When he overturned Donald Trump's efforts, a planned flood of over 8 million illegal immigrants entered the U.S. Almost all arrived without background checks, health screening, or vaccination certificates — but with massive needs for free housing, education, healthcare, and food entitlements and subsidies.  For four years, Donald Trump battled the courts, his Democratic opposition, and the open-border establishments within his own party to ensure legal-only immigration.  Somehow, he rebuilt some of the old porous border fence.  He had begun to build his long-promised new wall to the Gulf of Mexico.  He had ended Obama-era catch-and-release.  Would-be refugees had to apply for asylum in their home country.  Trump leveraged Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to police his own border and stop cynically transiting millions of illegal aliens into the U.S.  There was general Democratic Party opposition to all of Trump's measures, both through Congress and via the courts.  For the last three years of Biden's mass influx, the left has applauded open borders.  That is, until late last year, when overwhelmed southern border state governors began busing and flying illegal immigrants en masse to northern sanctuary-city jurisdictions.

Inflation is real, and it is the result of the Democrats' print-money-and-spend-it policies.
McDonald's Shares Tumble After Executives Acknowledge Price Inflation.  McDonald's executives have finally acknowledged that their $18 Big Mac meals and other inflated prices are putting off lower-income customers.  "We certainly know consumers are more wary or weary of pricing," Chief Financial Officer Ian Borden told investors during a Monday earnings call. [...] A Big Mac burger, a medium beverage, and a medium fry meal now costs $18 in some locations, up $10 from 2018 when former President Donald Trump was in office, Breitbart News reported in November 2023.

CBO report says [the] US deficit [will] skyrocket in [the] next decade.  The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Wednesday released a report projecting that federal budget deficits will skyrocket to well over $2 trillion per year in the next decade.  The baseline in the CBO's annual budget and economic outlook covers the 2024 to 2034 period and projects that the budget deficit will rise from about $1.6 trillion in 2024 to $2.6 trillion in 2034, with deficits topping $2 trillion each year after 2031.  As a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) — or the size of the U.S. economy — the deficit rises from 5.6% of GDP in 2024 to 6.1% of GDP in 2034.  That comes after the percentage briefly dips in the late 2020s due to the projected expiration of tax provisions from the 2017 Trump tax cuts resulting in increased tax revenue for the government.

Biden's 'Middle Finger' To Americans. Police say that at least 12 illegal aliens pummeled two NYPD cops outside a taxpayer- funded shelter in Times Square on January 27.  Among five arrested, four were released without bail, three hours later.  Unrepentant, Jhoan Boada, 22, waved his middle fingers as he left court. [...] "Why aren't they in jail right now?" New York City Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry demanded Thursday.  "They brutally attacked a New York City police officer and a lieutenant.  Our criminal justice system is upside down.  It fails every day."  This incident encapsulates life under the Joe Biden Democrats:  BINO — A Border in Name Only, rampant illegal immigration, disdain for law enforcement, far-Left "prosecutors" who lionize criminals, pushover judges with bleeding hearts, illegal aliens fueled by entitlement rather than gratitude, and an ever-expanding sense of chaos.  The American people did not vote for this, nor did they ask for the crime explosion that Biden and his border-hating Democrats have detonated.

A Tale of Two Canals.  The United States chose to give up the Panama Canal during the Carter administration.  With our rigorous processes for major capital projects, it's inconceivable that a Panama Canal under U.S. control would have undergone its recent expansion without making proper provision for the necessary additional water sources to prepare for an extended drought. [...] What we teach in our business schools, how our manufacturers source the materials they make and sell, which business choices are rewarded or punished by Wall Street investors — and most of all, who we elect to public office — makes a difference.  Sometimes a very costly difference indeed.

Hell Must Be Empty.  Ever since Obama's presidency, Democrats have demonized police officers and lionized criminals.  They lied about "hands up, don't shoot"; maligned cops as Klan members with badges; and instigated race riots throughout the country.  They excused criminal behavior, cut bail requirements, reduced felonies to misdemeanors, and celebrated unethical prosecutors who have used their powers to lock up police officers for spurious charges while treating violent crime as some kind of race-based civil right.  Barack Obama and Eric Holder (the corrupt attorney general who regularly abused the law to protect friends and target political enemies) set the country down a dangerous path, where criminal gangs are psychologically empowered to target law enforcement officers for assassination and municipal politicians are so desperate to prove their soft-on-crime bona fides that they release violent criminals from jail in order to make room for unjustly indicted cops.

Culture crash; thank the liberals.  Remember when America's great cities were great?  San Francisco, New York, Chicago and other major cities were centers of art, culture, wealth, sophistication, and shopping.  Now, the cities are overrun with vagrants.  Liberal judges decided that people have a Constitutional right (see, Martin v. Boise) to camp on the sidewalks and poop in the gutter, because stopping them from doing so constitutes cruel and unusual punishment for violating the laws that prohibit them from doing so.  Crimes such as shoplifting have been de-criminalized.  The outcomes are predictable to anyone but a liberal:  This new retail mode where payment is optional has produced more cases where people choose not to; Store owners, from small family-owned hardware stores to Walmart, are leaving the cities because they can't make money if they can't charge for their goods; liberals are shrieking "racists!"  Laws against dangerous drugs have been relaxed.  The result is more dangerous drugs and drug addicts.  Duh.  Then there are the illegal aliens.  Lots of them.  Tens of millions of them.  The liberals who preside over the cities virtuously signaled that these illegal aliens are welcome in their cities.  To their surprise, the illegal aliens took them seriously, and took their cities by storm.

Is America Already A Dead Country?  The Democrat party's open southern border has allowed millions of able-bodied, unvetted young men into the United States.  Is a terrorist attack coming?  The porous border was the number one issue for New Hampshire primary voters — and New Hampshire is quite a distance from the southern border.  It was also top of mind for Iowa's voters, another state far from Mexico.  Let's assume 7 million unvetted illegal alien invaders have waltzed into our country since January 2021.  If just one-quarter of 1 percent have malicious intent to do us harm, that would be 17,500 people, all of whom are scattered across the United States, with many receiving free housing, free medical, free education, free driver's licenses, free iPhones and, in some cases, free ballots.  It is estimated that the United States government has so far spent more than a whopping $450 billion on these illegal invaders.  Think what ONE person can do when they go on a murderous rampage at a school, shopping mall, or Las Vegas hotel, and then multiply that by the possibility of thousands of terrorists waiting to cause injury, death, and havoc from sea to shining sea.

Biden is drowning in three disasters of his own making.  Responding to the killing of three American soldiers by Iranian proxies this weekend, President Joe Biden's Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Middle East is now more volatile than at any moment since 1973.  At around the same time, Biden finally admitted that the southern border is in "crisis," just as his Department of Homeland Security announced 300,000 migrants were arrested for illegally crossing into the U.S. in December, a number dwarfing all previous records.  Again, at the same time, inflation ticked higher last month, as a record number of people find they cannot pay their rent and consumers owe more personal debt than ever before.  Workers can't afford a home or a car, and their real wages are lower than when Biden took office.  There is upheaval, even chaos, at home and abroad.  Every one of these crises — Iranian aggression in the Middle East, chaos on our border, and higher prices at home — are all disasters created by Biden.  His policies caused each, which is why, if anything, the president's 40% approval rating isn't low enough.

Rolling Blackouts in Hawaii Offer a Case Study For Michigan.  Rolling blackouts in the Aloha State presage things to come in Michigan.  Michigan's new net-zero and "100% clean energy" policies mirror Hawaii's "goal of 100% renewable energy by 2045."  These energy plans are causing both states to rely on more weather-dependent wind and solar, which means that reliability issues are becoming more pronounced.  On Jan. 8 and 9, heavy rains hit much of the island of Oahu.  News releases from Hawaiian Electric, the island's main electric utility, explained that during the storm two large generating units at the Waiau Power Plant had gone offline.  In an email, company officials said that water damaged a control system at one plant.  The system at a second plant "tripped after a tie-in to the grid was damaged, likely by weather."  That was unfortunate timing, for as the utility noted, it had also recently taken several generation units offline for scheduled maintenance.

The Army's 'Recruitment Crisis' Happened When White Recruits Stopped Showing Up.  A DEI-driven 43% drop in white recruits caused the Army's 'recruitment crisis'.  The military recruitment crisis that has crippled our defense capabilities has been talked to death by generals, politicians and pundits who have blamed everything from rising minimum wages to obesity to Gen Z culture for the problem.  They have raised enlistment bonuses to unprecedented levels, spent fortunes on ad campaigns that feature lesbian weddings and doubled down on DEI as the answer to the crisis.  And yet the crisis has grown worse.  That's because recruitment was a self-inflicted problem caused by a woke racist military.

Joe Biden, the demolition man.  President Trump worked hard with Central America to close the border; on day one, Joe Biden worked very hard to open that border back up.  Trump worked very hard to cut off funds from Iran, to stop the sponsorship of terrorism, and Biden turned the spigot back on, deluging the regime with billions of dollars.  Trump gave the world the Abraham peace accords; Biden gave the world a massive disaster by sparking conflict after conflict between nations with fragile relations.  Trump worked very hard to keep oil prices low and make America energy independent; Biden told the world we were going to destroy our domestic oil industry, which jacked up the global price, and allowed Iran to fund the terrorists and Russia to fund its war.  I don't understand why Iran is still sponsoring all these attacks since the Biden administration has told Iran in strongly-worded terms, many times, to stop sponsoring terrorism.  But, according to the media, other Democrats, Nikki Haley, and many establishment Republicans, it is Trump who causes chaos.

'This is Your FBI,' thanks to DEI.  [Scroll down]  "The FBI does not appear to be getting experienced, 'mature' candidates, such as the former cop, former military person, the professional career person, the lawyer, accountant or engineer."  Sound familiar?  The U.S. Army has the same problem.  The brass can't seem to recruit anybody who can do a push-up.  Who in their right mind wants to risk their life by joining an organization run by entitled, shiftless incompetents who despise them?  "The FBI is now a joke among other law enforcement agencies because of its apparent investigative failures, political targeting of certain individuals/groups, and woke adoption... The FBI is considering hiring candidates not accepted by other law enforcement agencies."  The G-men have Diversity Recruitment Events — "straight white males may not attend."  In other words, there's no room for a modern-day Inspector Lew Erskine.  But Dylan Mulvaney or Jussie Smollett — come on down!

A world war, not a civil war.  The de-stabilization of the West goes beyond the invasions.  Western leaders turn their back on the Lord as the devil collects the souls of nation upon nation.  Countries no longer praise the men who freed them but instead shame today's white people for what are declared past sins.  In Canada, Justin Castreau made up a story about Catholic boarding schools killing Indian students and burying them in shallow graves — without evidence.  Conveniently, they won't dig up the alleged graves because that might disrespect them.  In America, LGBT groomers use child porn in schools to recruit kids.  Public schools have become a poor man's Epstein Island.  I won't go into the transmania today because it sickens me so.  Given the attempts at suicide by our society, how can historians not conclude that the terrorists won 9/11?

Racing to Death.  Today young men and women are more likely to die from drug overdoses, especially fentanyl, though tomorrow it may be some other trendy drug.  Though different from car racing, the underlying cause of death is the same:  the heedlessness and overconfidence of youth within a society that in nearly every media venue glamorizes speed, drugs, and sex.  If only the young would recognize the dangers of life and their own limits — in other words, if only they would become conservative and wise beyond their years — then little of this would happen.  But of course, they do not, and in 2022, there were 105,452 deaths from drug overdoses and 42,795 deaths from car crashes.  Altogether, there were 218,064 "unintentional deaths," so approximately 70,000 accidental non-auto deaths unrelated to drugs.  In addition, there were 49,449 suicides in 2022.  I suspect that most of those dying in these careless and destructive ways do not value their lives as they should.  The underlying cause is not just that the young are heedless — the young have always been so — but that they have become increasingly heedless, and dangerous to others, in recent years.

The Editor says...
It appears to me that the public schools are teaching nihilism, secular humanism, and recklessness, instead of teaching civics, ethics, good citizenship, history, and common sense.  Public school kids seem to have little regard for right and wrong, but they're very aware of what they can get away with at any moment of the day.  Teaching philosophy and Christianity, or at least the Golden Rule, would help.  But alas, the Communists have taken over the public schools, directly or indirectly, thanks to the Socialist Democrats; and the internet has taken the place of fatherly advice, so this is the fruit.  Young people today don't know how to act in church, in a restaurant, in a theater, or on the highway.  We expect them to behave and they won't.  The first thing you have to wonder about teenagers racing their cars (or their mothers' cars) in the street is where are their fathers?

300,000 Illegal Border Crossings In December.  Biden's failed policies have created the crisis at the southern border.  In Biden's first 100 days he took more than 94 executive actions on immigration, including halting construction of the border wall and ending the successful "Remain in Mexico" policy.  Illegal immigrants have confirmed this:  "The border is open... everybody believes that the border is open.  It's open because we enter.  We come in, free, no problem... We came illegally."  The Biden administration lost track of at least 150,000 illegal immigrants during the summer of 2021.  Joe Biden and "border czar" Kamala Harris are nowhere to be seen, with each only having visited the border once since taking office.  It's not just Biden; Democrats in Congress have consistently voted for policies that make the border and country less secure.  Democrats aided sanctuary cities and sent stimulus checks to illegal immigrants, opposed legislation to fund Title 42, and repeatedly voted against funding the border wall.  Democrats voted against hiring more border agents, deporting felons, preventing illegal immigrants convicted of crimes from becoming permanent residents — and voted against strengthening the successful Remain in Mexico policy.  Democrats voted against funding for counternarcotic operations and ensuring the enforcement of immigration laws at the border.  Democrats voted against ensuring all local and state law enforcement are permitted to cooperate with federal immigration officials to track illegal immigrants.

Is Biden Poison-Pilling Trump?  Biden is a disgrace.  No other president in history has done more to cripple a country than the former senator from Delaware: devaluing the dollar, raising energy prices, forcing people to stay home, firing workers who showed up because they wouldn't take a government-mandated experimental vaccine, causing massive instability in Ukraine through failed diplomacy, leaving thousands of men, women, and children behind in Afghanistan, who, because of his failed policy, now live under tyranny and death.  Biden's failure to protect Israel by doing business with Iran cannot be forgotten.  His encouragement of sanctions of immoral health practices — even encouraging and supporting genital mutilation among "trans" youth — is criminal.  Pandering to every progressive pipe dream, no matter the cost, including the inefficient desire to be carbon-neutral without any credible science or benefit to support his goals, is psychotic.  All of this adds up to a country that has been mortally wounded, with blow after blow of egregious and sociopathic leadership.  This is the legacy of the Biden presidency.

The Editor says...
Leaving stink bombs for the next president is exactly what Obama did.  This is just more evidence that Obama is still the acting president in 2024.

2024 — America's Year of Living Dangerously.  During Biden's tenure, the U.S. military has suffered historic shortfalls in recruitment, the disastrous humiliation in Afghanistan, a new DEI commissariat that wars on meritocratic promotions and assignments, the politicization of generals and admirals, the hyped but otherwise inane effort to root out mythical white supremacists and "domestic terrorist" bogeymen from the ranks, and the expulsion of some of our best soldiers for their reluctance to be vaccinated, many of them having developed natural immunity from prior infection.  The Pentagon is short on ships and planes.  U.S. weapons stocks are dangerously low, drained by the abandonment of billions of dollars of equipment to the Taliban, the resupply efforts to Ukraine and Israel, the failure of the Biden administration to fund the restocking of our munitions and to ramp up resupply production — and a $35 billion national debt fed by $2 trillion annual deficits.

America's Healthcare Potemkin Village.  A 2020 study compared ten-year (2007-2017) performance of top healthcare stocks to patients' access to care.  The time period extended from before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — passed in 2010 and implemented in 2014 — to after full implementation and thus included effects associated with the ACA on stocks and on patients.  Over the ten years, the seven largest healthcare stocks all increased in share price, with average gain of 307 percent (range: 157 to 635), while the Standard & Poors Index gained 80 percent.  Over the same time period, the maximum average wait time to see a primary care physician increased from 99 days to 122 days.  As stockholders gained value, patients lost access to medical care.  While this is a statistically significant (p<0.0001) temporal association, that does not prove cause and effect.  One may infer causation based on how health insurance companies profit.

Bidenflation strikes:  If you waited to buy your 'Forever' stamps, you're out of luck.  [Scroll down]  And now you know why every business or every organization is begging you to switch to online bill delivery and offering you all types of goodies if you do.  You also know why you, an over-30-something, are now paying your bills online, fees included, to avoid high-priced stamps and questionable delivery resulting in late payment fees.  You've even become accustomed to receiving online wedding and other gala (and not so gala) invitations, announcements, etc., tucked among the daily multi-platform, multi-multi messages jamming your computer and/or cell phone.  Faster and cheaper can't be beat.  Oh, and not so by the way, for those of you with long memories, which includes 21-year-olds, in 2021, when President Joe Biden (D) took office, the price for a first-class forever stamp was 55 cents, so today's first-class stamp price increase comes to 23.5 percent in just three years.  A fine example of Bidenomics in action.  Get used to it; more to come.

Minds To Think.  For a lot of us, there is no excuse to be uninformed and unprepared by now, but there are so many who come across bits and pieces of the picture without the will to put them together and form a strategy for resistance. [...] They see the pandemic for the fraud that it was, for how it destroyed whole swaths of American cultural freedoms, but still they complied.  They accepted, they were too timid to just tell people no.  They cling to their current lives, living in the hours before the devastation of the American experiment, holding onto careers that no longer exist, jobs that will not even be there in a year.  They protect their bank and 401k accounts as if the entire worldwide economic reality hasn't drifted into fantasy, held aloft only by the belief that debt doesn't matter, that going digital will provide control, but where is that ability to control without electricity?

National Populism and the Rise of Donald Trump.  Conservatives have lost control over organizations that have shaped their communities over the years.  Many judges and lawyers no longer respect a settled body of law.  Churches no longer preserve our foundational Christian heritage, and college professors don't enforce firm standards of academic accomplishment.  Globalist progressives have taken over all the vital institutions.  Now, even parents are timid about enforcing discipline and passing on traditional family values to their children.  Conservatives are mocked as people who cling to their Bibles and their guns and are labeled as fascists, haters, homophobes, and worse.  The ruling class has given us $35 trillion in national debt; an underfunded, politicized, and emasculated military; more than 8 million illegal aliens; massive police defunding; 100,000 dead each year due to fentanyl; and a highly partisan DOJ and FBI.

You're Going To Get Dirty.  [Scroll down]  If you want freedom, you're going to get dirty.  By all evidence, we are mere steps away from a global war.  I believe the Western powers will lose it, that when it starts the U.S. will have its legs ripped out from under it by the nearly one million foreign fighters who have been allowed to infiltrate the U.S. through Biden's traitorous open borders.  That's when the internal fighting will begin while the military is busy getting annihilated overseas.  I am less convinced of a nuclear exchange because I don't think either Russia or China believe they need to resort to it and there is no one in the United States chain of command who believes enough in the righteousness of America to use them to defend it.

'Their' Democracy:  Tyranny Comes to the US.  I am angered that Americans are being conditioned to loathe our shared history and the very people who made our modern country possible.  Even our founding documents have been labeled potentially harmful.  Make no mistake: these actions are happening because of unscrupulous politicians, bureaucrats, and others who are intentionally destroying our nation's heritage to obtain greater power, control, and wealth.  In place of the constitutional republic gifted to us by our founders, these charlatans promote "their" democracy.  Even though our founders rejected direct democracy because it leads to tyranny through mob rule, our elites have managed to convince Americans otherwise.  As a result, in pursuit of their democracy, our political class has amassed unsustainable national debt and created an enormous welfare state.  While declaring unity, our democracy cheerleaders encourage racial animosity.  One way is by falsely claiming white supremacy as our country's greatest threat.

The Hysterical Style in American Politics.  The [Covid] lockdown caused untold economic chaos, suicides, and health crises.  One result was the 120 days of looting, arson, death, destruction, and violence spawned by Antifa and Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of the tragic death of George Floyd while in police custody in May 2020.  Suddenly, a hysterical lie took hold:  American police were waging war against black males.  The details around Floyd's sudden death — he was in the act of committing a felony, resisting arrest, suffering from coronary artery disease and the after-effects of COVID, and being high on dangerous drugs — were off limits.  The riot toll reached $2 billion in property damage, over 35 deaths, and 1,500 injured law enforcement officers.  A federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic church were torched.  Police forces were defunded.  Emboldened left-wing prosecutors nullified existing laws.

Inflation is around double of what it was when Joe took office.  The Biden campaign workers, posing as journalists, are out in full force:  They are telling the poor what great benefit they are getting now that inflation is now down to less than 4% [...] The analysts are making month-to-month and year-to-year comparisons, ignoring the rises that have already happened and not been compensated for with higher salaries.  What voters are comparing, though is what prices were like before Joe Biden took office and what prices are like after Joe Biden took office.  That makes the TIPP CPI Index, which makes that comparison, much more useful.  What's their reading this month? 16.6% higher overall than it was when Joe Biden took office "with no signs of easing."

2024 Promises the Expansion of the Green Energy Scam.  Years ago, I wrote a post about how cheap air travel to Europe was ruining America.  My point was that the Americans visiting Europe were confusing what they experienced as a tourist with the reality of life in Europe.  These progressive American fans of two-hour lunches and 6 months of maternal and paternal leave didn't have a clue about how average Europeans lived.  Indeed, a couple of years later, the Foundation For Economic Education came out with a study that showed the poorest 20% of Americans were better off than the average European.  Basically, the average European suffers from high taxes, high prices, tiny homes and cars, and, increasingly, less freedom.  But tourists sipping tea in London or shopping in Paris rarely, if ever, see this, or understand it if they do.  Nonetheless, with little understanding of economics or history, they decide that America must become Europe.  Socialism, Obamacare, and gay marriage are just some of those European imports that Americans have to deal with today.

DEI, Airplane Crashes, and Bad Medicine.  How safe are you nowadays on commercial airliners?  How safe will you be tomorrow?  Are airlines sacrificing safety at the altar of "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)?"  Who do you want piloting the jetliner you're on, the best, most experienced pilots or box-check hires?  Flipping the page, medical schools will graduate bevvies of DEI doctors as the decade unwinds.  What if you need open-heart surgery?  Cancer treatment?  Won't you need a sound diagnosis for starters?  Will the most capable physicians attend you?  Or will you have to settle for the right color, right gender, right sexual orientation, pick-your-pronouns person in a white lab coat?  The nation is being plagued by incompetence.  Plenty of that is from lax parenting, subpar education, trophies for just showing up, and a debauched culture that discounts hard work and competence.  Forget excellence.  While that's bad enough, DEI adds another corrosive layer.  People are receiving degrees and certifications for superficialities.  Merit is shunned.  Standards [a]re being dropped in too many instances and exceptions made.  Victimhood is ginned up and fobbed off as part of progressive social reform.

Joe Biden's Scary Speech on Jan. 6.  Just recently, ahead of the anniversary of Jan. 6, President Joe Biden gave a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to kick off his 2024 campaign. [...] Politically speaking, the purpose of the speech was clear.  Given that Biden has among the lowest favorability numbers ever recorded for a sitting president, he cannot make the election about his achievements.  Because he has none that warrant his reelection.  In every way, he has made America a worse country.  He has terribly damaged the economy — increased an already unsustainable national debt; changed an energy-independent and energy-exporting country into an energy dependent and energy-importing one.  He hurt America and the world by withdrawing — and in the way he withdrew — American troops from Afghanistan.  He showed that America cannot be counted on by those who depend on us.  He abandoned $7 billion in weaponry, much of it now being used by Islamic terror groups. [...] He has created the first large set of political prisoners in American history — hundreds, soon perhaps thousands, of Americans sentenced to prison for merely entering the Capitol, or for just being present on the Capitol grounds, on Jan. 6.  He has weaponized the Department of Justice against his political opponents, and is overseeing the prosecution of an ex-president and political rival for the first time in American history.  From his first day in office, he has stoked racial tension in America.  His inaugural address was the most hate-filled and divisive inaugural address in American history.  He has so demoralized the American military that recruitment levels are at their lowest ever.

Chronicles of Decline.  Internal data reviewed by Military.com show that "the Army's recruiting of white soldiers has dropped significantly in the last half decade."  The "most significant drop" occurred from 2022 to 2023.  Army officials and data experts are baffled by all this.  The ones interviewed by Military.com blamed "partisan scrutiny of the service, a growing obesity epidemic and an underfunded public education system."  It's a bold move to react to a decline in white recruitment by arguing that white men aren't enlisting anymore because they're dumb, fat, and stupid. [...] Recall that in 2021, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a "stand down" to confront "extremism" in the ranks.  In practice, that meant lecturing people about our perennial bugaboo: "white supremacy."  And while troops were reminded of the importance of staying apolitical, their superiors encouraged them to support Black Lives Matter.  People noticed that discrepancy.  Sen. Tom Cotton gathered written complaints from members of the military who were put off by what seemed to be a double standard about what is and is not considered "extremism."

Bidenflation Steady At 16.6%, With No Signs Of Easing.  The dark reality of Bidenomics is 16.6% inflation under the President's watch.  When he took office, inflation was at just 1.4%. Inflation has stayed above the Federal Reserve's 2% target for 35 consecutive months since March 2021.  Average hourly earnings for all employees dropped 2.5% to $11.10 in December from $11.39 in January 2021 when Biden assumed office.  Despite nominal salary increases at their fastest pace in years, American workers are now worse off than when the President took office.  In summary, the prices have increased by 16.6%, while real wages have declined by 2.5%, meaning Americans have taken a 2.5% pay cut under the current administration.  To put it differently, people now need 19.1% more income than they had in January 2021 to maintain their living standards.  How do Americans make up the shortfall?  Many must take up a second job, tap into their savings, or supplement with credit cards.

Small Town, USA learns the hard way that welcoming lawbreakers has negative consequences.  A few days back, AT published an essay by contributor C.S. Boddie that highlighted a recent tragedy in Colorado:  an illegal alien, who had been deported four times before, killed a mother and her 16-year-old son, as he drove (allegedly) completely inebriated near a high school.  The illegal had four "alcohol-related driving" convictions under his belt, and just days before, he'd received probation, community service, and work release from a Colorado judge; Boddie's piece also included a number of other "chilling" examples underscoring the deadly consequences of admitting millions of scofflaws.  But dead Americans aren't the only casualties — say adios to Whitewater, Wisconsin, a once-safe and once-quaint midwestern town.  Whitewater recently came into the national spotlight after a letter to the Biden regime got picked up by conservative media.  Local police chief Daniel Meyer, had appealed to Washington to request help for the influx of illegals that have cropped up since 2022, putting a "strain" on reasources, and bringing in problems like these:  [Tweet]

We Are in an Abusive Relationship with Our Government.  California is now covering the costs of genital-mutilating surgeries for illegal aliens.  Leftism's slippery slope invariably leads to depraved absurdity.  Consider how Governor (receding) Hairdo and the Pyrite State's other communist saboteurs have greased the shifting ground under Californians' feet:
  [#1]   There is no illegal immigration crisis.
  [#2]   There may be a crisis, but California taxpayers won't be paying for it.
  [#3]   Taxpayers may have to foot the bill for the illegal immigration crisis, but California will do nothing to incentivize illegal immigration.
  [#4]   After further review, these aliens aren't "illegal," but rather "undocumented."
  [#5]   Health care is a human right.
  [#6]   California must provide "undocumented" aliens healthcare.
  [#7]   Mutilating the genitals to make them look like the opposite sex is health care.
  [#8]   California taxpayers must pay for "undocumented" aliens' genital surgery.
  [#9]   Californians who object to paying for undocumented aliens' genital surgery may be guilty of "hate" crimes and will be prosecuted.

White Men Don't Want To Join An Army That Tells Them They Aren't Wanted.  The U.S. Army is experiencing a sharp decline in the number of white recruits it's bringing into the service, a new report found.  According to data analyzed by Military.com, "A total of 44,042 new Army recruits were categorized by the service as white in 2018, but that number has fallen consistently each year to a low of 25,070 in 2023, with a 6% dip from 2022 to 2023 being the most significant drop."  The report further noted how "[n]o other demographic group" has experienced such a downward trend in recent years, and that the "rate at which white recruitment has fallen far outpaces nationwide demographic shifts."  Much like the Navy and Air Force, the Army missed its recruiting targets for the 2023 fiscal year, with the branch coming up 10,000 recruits short of its goal of 65,000.  When discussing the matter with reporters in October, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth claimed the Army understood its 2023 target was a "stretch goal" and described the branch's plans to launch a "new 'talent acquisition' enlisted occupational specialty dedicated to recruiting" to help stymie the problem.

Army Recruitment of White Soldiers Plummets, Take a Wild Guess Why.  Military recruitment is in trouble, with the U.S. Army missing its goal by about 10,000 new soldiers in 2023. [...] The Army is now having to absorb more deployments with fewer deployable soldiers, meaning those who do sign up are facing more time away from their families.  In turn, that incentivizes potential recruits to look elsewhere.  It's a vicious cycle of stretching what is there while creating the conditions for continued failure to hit recruiting goals. [...] Why are white people looking at the Army and deciding not to join when they were doing so at nearly double the rate just five years prior?  One only needs to look at the changes within the military over the last several years to figure that out.

Report: U.S. Army Sees Massive Decline in White Recruits.  Over the last several years, the U.S. Military has struggled to meet recruitment goals across all branches, perhaps most of all with the Army.  One of the reasons for this has now been explained.  White men are no longer enlisting in the numbers they did in the past.  Families which used to encourage young men to enlist are doing so in far fewer numbers for reasons which are obvious to many.  New woke policies, the vaccine mandates and the embrace of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies mean white recruits are looked over for advancement in the US Military today.  All of these factors have all contributed to this decline in white recruits.

Joe Biden's Scary Speech on Jan. 6.  Last Friday, ahead of the anniversary of Jan. 6, President Joe Biden gave a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to kick off his 2024 campaign. [...] Politically speaking, the purpose of the speech was clear.  Given that Biden has among the lowest favorability numbers ever recorded for a sitting president, he cannot make the election about his achievements.  Because he has none that warrant his reelection.  In every way, he has made America a worse country.  He has terribly damaged the economy — increased an already unsustainable national debt; changed an energy-independent and energy-exporting country into an energy dependent and energy-importing one. [...] He has done terrible damage to the most important freedom — freedom of speech.  Among other things, his administration worked with Big Tech before and since the 2020 election to censor political speech.  He has created the first large set of political prisoners in American history — hundreds, soon perhaps thousands, of Americans sentenced to prison for merely entering the Capitol, or for just being present on the Capitol grounds, on Jan. 6.  He has weaponized the Department of Justice against his political opponents, and is overseeing the prosecution of an ex-president and political rival for the first time in American history.  From his first day in office, he has stoked racial tension in America.  His inaugural address was the most hate-filled and divisive inaugural address in American history.  He has so demoralized the American military that recruitment levels are at their lowest ever.

Electricity Prices Are Soaring:  It's Time to Hold the "Energy Transition" Accountable.  Electricity prices in the United States are skyrocketing, with all-sectors electricity rates reaching new all-time highs in 2022 and 2023, but wind and solar advocates like to pretend that these energy sources are not responsible for the rising electricity costs paid by American families and businesses.  However, recent reports from Regulatory Research Associates (RRA), a division of S&P Global Commodity Insights, evaluating requests from electric companies to raise their prices (known as rate cases) clearly show that rising electricity prices are largely being driven by spending billions of dollars on wind turbines, solar panels, natural gas plants, and new transmission lines in pursuit of the so-called "energy transition."  Our deeper-dive into the eight-largest rate increase requests, as identified by RRA, reaffirms these findings by quoting directly from rate cases filed with state regulators, debunking the idea that wind and solar aren't causing electricity rates to rise, once and for all.

A Culture in Collapse.  In the last six months, we have borne witness to many iconic moments evidencing the collapse of American culture.  The signs are everywhere and cover the gamut of politics, the economy, education, social life, popular culture, foreign policy, and the military.  These symptoms of decay share common themes.  Our descent is self-induced; it is not a symptom of a foreign attack or subterfuge. [...] What is happening to us is not due to an adherence to a too strict conservative tradition but is almost exclusively the wage of the progressive project.  In short, we are seeing fissures that America has not experienced in our cultural history since the Civil War.  The radical Left apparently feels such chaos, anarchy, and nihilism are necessary to topple past norms and customs and thereby adhere to a socialist, equity agenda that no one in normal times would stomach.  Some of the decay is existential and fundamental; some anecdotal and illustrative.  But either way, while decline came about gradually over decades, its sudden and abrupt chaos during the three years of Biden's presidency has shocked Americans.

Yet Another Trans Shooter.  Once is an event.  Twice may be a coincidence.  Three times is a pattern.  Four?  Five?  Six?  At what point does it become a trend?  [Tweet]  We are now at the "it's a trend" stage.  We still don't know much about the shooting, and early reports are usually unreliable.  But the evidence is mounting that the shooting in Perry, Iowa, was perpetrated by a mentally ill boy who identified as "genderfluid," was an LGBTQ+ activist, and pushed alphabet ideology.  [Tweet]  2023 seemed to be the year for transgender shooters, and it looks like 2024 may continue the trend.  Given that there isn't a lot of evidence that I am aware of that transgender-identifying people have in the past been particularly prone to shooting large numbers of people, we have to ask, "What has changed?"  And I think the answer is obvious:  a lot of things have changed over the past couple of years, and they have all been pushed by the Left.

Anti-Intellectualism and the Left.  The smug superiority of many on the progressive Left never ceases to amaze me.  They regard Republicans, especially of the MAGA variety, as knuckle-dragging cave people with diminished intellectual abilities while they are really the one's with contracted brain function.  Every societal issue, such as unfettered illegal immigration, record unchecked spending, and disastrous U.S. foreign policy, involves proof of how the Left is incapable of higher than the most rudimentary thinking.

There Was a Time When Governments Tried to Make Their People Better.  The Biden regime seems hell-bent on celebrating and subsidizing the worst tendencies of human nature:  not only every conceivable manner of perversion, but resentment, envy, the privilege of protected classes rather than advancement on the basis of merit, and so much more.  It is not hard to suspect that Biden and his henchmen have some vested interest in encouraging Americans to become worse people, harder to get along with and more difficult to deal with.  What could more effectively justify an authoritarian crackdown than a population that is as obstreperous as it is immature?  One outcome of all this will be that Americans will become worse people than they used to be.  A government can't expect to celebrate mental illness, demanding that everyone take it as normal on pain of ostracism, deplatforming and worse, and exalt skin color and gender over competence and expect that Americans will continue in large numbers to value being rational, competent, and capable.

Nearly 60 Years After Congress Killed Off Mental Hospitals, Complete Breakdown of the System Has Lawmakers Attempting to Bring Them Back.  What people think is compassion sometimes brings bad results.  Fail to confront the slacking employee and other workers have to carry more of a load.  Be a pal to your children and then be frustrated by their disrespect.  Lavish welfare and then wonder why unappreciative people won't work.  And then there's the running away from obligations to protect the mentally ill from themselves and from society.  Perhaps you've had the same thoughts as I — the grand experiment in mental health care of the past half-century or so has failed.  Just witness the aggressiveness of babbling panhandlers, the general filth of helpless people living on the sidewalks, the destruction of cities such as San Francisco.  Believe it or not, the left-leaning Politico published an article Monday that gave a nod in the direction of some kind of return to the involuntary commitment of some mentally ill people.

We Want Disruption, Not Chaos.  Peter Strzok and Lisa Page used their positions in the FBI to create an "insurance policy" against our electoral choice.  Their plan certainly introduced a bit of chaos into the 2016 election.  Leftist groups filed lawsuits against virtually every action President Trump attempted in office.  Those suits caused a great deal of uncertainty and confusion about America's path forward.  The longest shutdown in U.S. history was brought about by Democrats to avoid funding a border wall.  It caused weeks of political disorder and years of unrestricted national invasion.  When the Mueller investigation spent three years investigating a crime that never happened — based on fabricated evidence provided by Hillary Clinton — we experienced years of political upheaval.  When General Mark Milley informed his Chinese counterpart that he would inform them of any surprise attack Trump planned, it introduced chaos into our military chain of command.  Anthony Fauci was responsible for a healthy dose of chaos when he illegally funded "gain of function" research at the Wuhan lab, creating a virus, which the Chinese "leaked," leading to a global pandemic.  It was a stark demonstration of the chaos men are capable of who have more ego than wisdom.  We also experienced a bit of chaos when San Fran Nan conducted two impeachments, based on hearsay and disagreements.

Why Is Everything So Stupid?  [Scroll down]  This past week, many analysts were suggesting that the Ivies be shuttered, given the performance of their Vice-Chancellors in Congress.  Academia is lying to us, corporations are lying to us.  Every institution is corrupted.  Individual lives are substantially impacted, population growth has collapsed.  We are deliberately refusing growth to Africa and inflicting cruelty far above any colonialism caused.  The shame of this will last a hundred years.

The Corruption of Everything.  Sexuality has been corrupted.  Men claim to be women and vice versa.  Drag queens set the kiddie agenda in schools, and transsexuality has become epidemic, although de-transitioners are becoming more noticeable these days.  Meanwhile, young lives have been ruined because of this fad.  In addition, no TV or streaming drama is complete without the obligatory sex scene.  This has made family watching almost impossible and even non-prudes like me squeamish.  Sex scenes are not even necessary to enhance the storylines.  It's just another way the left can degrade something beautiful and sacred.

Markets and Miracles.  Government handouts changed people's thinking.  They taught millions of Americans:  You are entitled to a check.  No longer was it individuals' responsibility to help families, neighbors and ourselves; now it was clearly government's job.  The result is that people became dependent on handouts.  Government rarely teaches people to be self-sufficient; handouts encourage you to be helpless.  Welfare created something never seen before in America:  a near-permanent "underclass."  Welfare told parents:  don't get married; you'll lose benefits.  Don't work; your check will be reduced.  Above all, make sure the father isn't home when a welfare worker comes.  If he is, your check may be reduced or eliminated.  This changed incentives that motivated parents for generations.  The result has been ruinous for millions of children.

Biden Dept of Energy Continues War on Consumers.  We all know the routine.  Water-saving toilets that don't flush (flush twice), water/energy-saving dishwashers and clothes washers that don't clean (run two cycles), lightbulbs that don't light, dryers that don't dry (run twice), and all the ancillary nonsense that comes from the intervention of the regulatory state.  What Biden and the progressive movement call the "green new deal" effort toward "sustainability," including the ban on gas stoves and internal combustion engines, simply results in a diminished quality of life, a loss in lifestyle productivity, and the exact opposite outcome from their expressed/intended purpose.  It's an abject mess of stupidity, pushed under the guise of environmentalism.  Today the Biden Dept of Energy (DOE) takes it one step further with rules and regulations on fridges, freezers and fans. [...] Now we will see air conditioning units that don't cool, fridges that don't chill, freezers that don't keep things frozen and fans that do not move air.

Crime Soars As Punishment Vanishes.  Portland, Oregon, decriminalized drug use in 2020. Fentanyl pills — all coming through Mexico with ingredients from China — sell for only a dollar or two, down from three times that in 2020.  (This is one notable area where "Bidenomics" actually lowered the price of something.)  Kevin Dahlgren has worked with the homeless for 30 years and calls Portland "the largest open-air drug zone in state history."  He has written, "I have found more dead people and seen more overdoses this year than in all the other years of my working and volunteering, combined."  In Washington state, theft up to $750 is only a misdemeanor, and just like in big California cities, prosecutors often choose not to prosecute shoplifting.  In November, unionized workers went on strike at three Seattle-area Macy's, saying the chain "is not doing enough to address shoplifting, violent shoppers, and other safety threats to workers and customers."  One worker said that when she called police to report "a repeat shoplifter that even law enforcement was familiar with," she was suspended without pay.

73 Three and Four-Year Olds, Hundreds of Children Under Six Sent to Disgraced NHS Transgender Clinic.  Children as young as three years old have been referred to Britain's socialised medicine's 'Gender Identity Development Service' transgender clinic, with hundreds of young children referred in the past decade.  382 children aged six and under have been referred to the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in the Tavistock and Portman Trust, known commonly as the National Health Service's transgender clinic, in the past ten years new figures from the Trust reveal.  The numbers, published by the Daily Mail, reveal how even the youngest children have been pushed into interacting with the controversial clinic, and that the numbers being referred to GIDS have soared in recent years.

Chesterton's Fence.  The lesson of "Chesterton's Fence" tells us to not tear down a fence until we know the reason it was erected.  It may have been built for a good reason of which we are unaware, and tearing it down would reap horrible consequences.  Traditional marriage?  Not important, get rid of it.  Traditional roles between the sexes?  Oppressive!  Traditional values?  Racist and colonialist!  The cultural suicide the West is committing can be explained by viewing the Judeo-Christian institution as a very old, paint-peeling, building column.  The impulse of modern man was to beautify things by chopping them down, without realizing that this was supporting the entire building of Western civilization.  A building that is now collapsing.

Then why is New York still a "sanctuary city?"
Eric Adams Suggests Migrant Crisis Will Result In Rampant Crime.  Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams raised concerns that the city's migrant crisis will create more crime during a press conference Tuesday.  Migrants that are arriving and unable to work in the U.S. legally have become a challenge for the city, Adams said during the news conference, where he was asked about rising crime.  Out of the more than 100,000 migrants that have arrived to the city, only 2,200 have been approved for work permits, Anne Williams-Isom, the city's deputy mayor for health and human services, said.  "When I talk about the devastation impact that the migrant and asylum seekers, people only think about the volume of people that are coming in.  There are byproducts to this, cuts to services, like we had to postpone a police class, looking at some of the budgetary cuts, having a body of people, many young, who can't work," Adams said.

The Editor says...
Those problems were all self-inflicted.

Use the Colorado Precedent.  Americans will not be defended from the antagonistic members of society by behaving themselves.  They want to, they have been taught their whole lives that there's nothing worth fighting for, that's not the way civil society operates, even while they are amidst the most uncivil society ever devised in the homeland.  They are being shown scenes of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China on their own streets, in their own courts of law, and they still refuse to see it.  They have endured a biological weapon unleashed on them; seen young, strong athletes drop dead on football fields across the land and they still don't break free of the trap into which their mind has been captured.  Invasions of illegals from every nation in the world have descended upon their borders and strolled through with the guidance of border patrol officers.  This is at the behest of a single president, a single department in the government in violation of the will of the people.

Finally, Destruction for Destruction's Sake.  America's cultural degradation began in the late 1960s.  The counterculture was the primary agent.  Libertinism has been battling traditionalism ever since, with traditional America giving ground, sometimes in inches, other times in feet, proving that it's much easier to destroy than preserve and build.  In this quest to ruin America, institutions, public and private, have been thoroughly infiltrated — actually, in some ways, ceded by traditionalists.  Schools, media, and entertainment have seen decades of steady retreat by traditionalists who prefer other pursuits.  Culture is the captive of the degenerate elite.  Americans are required to swim in the cesspool that nihilists choose to fashion or shut up and slink away — for the time being.  Any objection deemed a notable threat leads to cancellation, a form of oppression.  Government and private institutions are used to cancel objectors.  If not stopped and reversed, the oppression will only increase.

Secession Without Secession.  [Scroll down]  It's a trend that has been taking place in New York, San Francisco and any other "sanctuary cities" where they separate themselves from United States laws they don't like, even when they find their separation is a burden too difficult to bear and seek financial aid from the rest of us to make it bearable.  This is the insanity that has gripped the United States after several internal coups against the rule of law and replace it with the rule of power that we see playing out everywhere in the US today.  January 6th protesters are charged with insurrection, but leftist/communist/Muslims take over the capitol during session and a few arrests take place, but nothing like the dragnet set out by the FBI for J6ers.  That's the rule of power.  Any attempt to restore the rule of law, such as vacating the chair when McCarthy betrayed the whole Republican Party, is met with incredible pressure and the corruption of whoever is finally selected as the Speaker of the House.  But that's just under Republican control.  This never happens under Democrat control, because they are the ones behind the coups, who benefit from the rule of power.

COP 28 is the Codification of Elite Hate, and Lies all the Way Down.  [Scroll down]  Such are the fruits of the modern environmental movement.  Wherever they go, they destroy.  In Dubai this past week, at Cop 28, they devised a slave system for the world.  After their globalist system is in place, the only people who will make money will be the cartels.  It'll take a couple of decades, but our world will be a slave state run by criminals, just like my gorgeous province that both sets of paternal great grandparents settled in the 1880's when there were 4,000 people in Vancouver.  They built the water systems, clear cut the neighborhoods, built churches, founded schools and the hospital and made a welcoming city replete with one hundred years of peace and prosperity.  Now, fathers are knifed in front of their children outside of Starbucks, and people lie on streets dying from fentanyl and native women are so desperate they prostitute themselves to serial killers, organ harvesters and slavers.  All that goodness extinguished under violence and greed and, above all, the wilful ignorance of the comfortable.  Many, many cities are experiencing the same and under COP28 it will get worse.

Americans Must Choose Between Civilization or Its Destroyers.  When Joe Biden entered office in January 2021, the U.S. was naturally rebounding from more than a year of Covid-enforced lockdowns.  Overtaxed supply chains were still fragile.  Pent-up demand was soaring.  Consumers were flush with government cash.  Trillions of dollars had been printed and infused into the economy to ward off a feared recession.  All economists advised not to increase the deficit, spike further consumer demand, and expand entitlements.  Instead, the Left did just the opposite.  Four trillion dollars were printed and distributed.  In no time, Americans, recovering from Covid, next experienced the worst, but entirely preventable, inflation in 40 years.  Three years later, prices on staples remain 30-40 percent higher than when Biden took office.  Mortgage rates tripled.

ESG, DEI, and the Rise of Fake Reporting.  We know that the modern West has developed a jaw-dropping degree of totalitarianism, wherein the bureaucracies of the state and the corporate sector coordinate together to cripple humans outside their power networks and media channels.  But what are the mechanics of this coordination?  To understand one of the games they play, consider the rise of measures and standards associated with DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) — both occupants of a highly abstract thought dimension and the latter an especially incomprehensible word salad.  ESG as a phrase was coined in a 2006 United Nations report, gradually gaining adoption by private companies like BlackRock via the production of annual ESG reports.  Governments then started supporting these voluntary efforts, and eventually began making them mandatory.  Since early 2023, corporations in the EU have been compelled to report on ESG. [...] Bahar Gidwani, co-founder of a company called CSRHub, a compiler and provider of ESG company ratings, estimates that the collection of ESG data alone is already costing companies $20 billion worldwide.

Average Monthly Mortgage Payment Explodes to $3,322 In Biden's America.  The average monthly mortgage payment in Joe Biden's America has soared to $3,322, per analysis from the Wall Street Journal.  That $3,322 is nearly double the average monthly mortgage payment when His Fraudulency assumed office.  When former President Trump left office, the average monthly mortgage payment was $1,787.  [Tweet]  "Homeownership has become a pipe dream for more Americans," writes the WSJ, "even those who could afford to buy just a few years ago."

The Totalitarian Three-Step.  This simple political dance can be done to many types of "music," for it has only three steps.  We have seen its familiar choreography in efforts against racism and crime, in steps to preserve our national security, in efforts to support agriculture and education, et al; whatever the tune, the steps are the same:
  [#1]   Manufacture a "crisis"
  [#2]   Offer "emergency solutions" people would never accept except for the "crisis"
  [#3]   Results achieve the hidden goal, unrelated to the supposed problem [...]
We can see how this "dance" played out in the 2008 housing bubble collapse:  Step One, the "Crisis": Bill Clinton manufactured the "crisis," saying poor people couldn't afford to buy their own homes.  Of course, poor people have never been able to afford their own homes, so why was suddenly a crisis?  That situation is actually a motivation for good behavior: work, save money, defer children until you're more financially secure, use alcohol (or drugs) only moderately, if at all, etc.  But no, to Clinton and the left it was suddenly a "housing crisis."  Step Two, Emergency "Solution":  Force banks and mortgage companies to lower housing loan standards so people who can't afford homes are able to get loans anyway.

This Is the Age of Regress.  It took a long time, and it was a protracted painful process for Western civilization — white male Western civilization — to achieve everything we have and take for granted, and are now losing to an invading horde.  Today, Enlightenment values, science, and Western culture have disappeared under the jackboot of "decolonization," "indigenous knowledge," "transphobia," and "Islamophobia."  Objective knowledge and the concept of intelligence are now forbidden "white constructs."

Saving America Starts with Rejecting Digital Currency.  The downward spiral of America is punctuated by: 1) massive corruption of elites inside and outside government who go along with manipulating the masses through creating and sustaining narratives that benefit them while keeping citizens largely ignorant about what is really going down, including threats to their health and their very survival; 2) the loss of confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections, which demoralizes the public and undermines the legitimacy of government; 3) the erosion of privacy, property rights, and freedom; 4) the Biden administration's deliberate open-border policy to facilitate the influx of millions of migrants for political purposes; 5) the politization of the judiciary and the attendant two-tiered justice system that has undermined the rule of law and order; and 6) the atomization of American society and the deterioration of family and community resulting from elite narratives that divide people — primarily around race and gender; and 7) uncontrollable government profligacy and accompanying kickback corruption — the continuing trajectory of which is certain to bring insolvency and collapse of the U.S. monetary system, sooner than later.

Trump's One Simple Campaign Message for Reelection.  Since Biden took office in January 2021, prices for essential goods and services have risen from 20 to 70 percent without a commensurate increase in wages.  By so many measures, we individually and collectively are worse off than four years ago.  The debt and deficit have exploded, along with interest payments on the debt.  We are at war in Ukraine and the Middle East.  Purchasing power is down while crime and drug overdoses are up.  Illegal migration, that which we know about due to millions of "getaways", is approaching 10 million, more than the population of most U.S. states.  Trump's energy independence has been replaced by much higher fuel and energy costs under Biden.  The question Donald Trump needs to ask voters is simple.  Do you like the way things are now or would you rather things go back to how they were four years ago?  Four years ago isn't some hypothetical walk back in time.  Trump was president then and was responsible, in large part, to the state of America.

Biden administration is 'spooked' over price complaints.  A Five Guys customer's video complaining about the extremely high prices of the items at the fast-food chain has resurfaced on multiple social media platforms.  Michelle Newell posted the clip to TikTok explaining that she and her husband had paid $42 for two cheeseburgers, a side of fries and two milkshakes.  The visibly upset patron told viewers that the couple had visited a Five Guys location on a Saturday afternoon for lunch.  Newell shared her anger last year — but a check by DailyMail.com Friday evening confirmed it remains just as expensive to buy the same meal.  Newell said she ordered a regular cheeseburger for herself, another cheeseburger with mushrooms for her husband and a side of fries.  The couple also got two milkshakes.  She said that 'we're absolutely done' and businesses are 'playing with their customers'.  According to the Five Guys current menu, regular-sized cheeseburgers cost $12.09 each, while regular fries are priced at $6.89.  [A]nd milkshakes cost $5.89 each.

The Editor says...
In my opinion, Whataburger makes a better hamburger for one third of the Five Guys' price.  But the word is getting around, which is why there's almost never a crowd at Five Guys.  Even so, the price of everything is going up rapidly, so the prices at Five Guys are not all that extraordinary.  They're just ahead of the curve.

Add pee to the poop destroying American cities, with Baltimore as Exhibit A.  One of the solid hits that Ron DeSantis landed on Gavin Newsom during their Thursday night debate was his waving a map graphically illustrating that San Francisco is covered with human fecal matter (aka poop), something that magically vanished only when a Chinese dictator came to town.  San Francisco may be the worst city for human poop, but it's not the only problem facing urban America.  In Baltimore, the fact that the city has become a giant urinal is destroying the city's historic buildings. [...] In Baltimore, a Democrat hellhole with gorgeous 19th- and early 20th-century architecture, public urination is eating away at the buildings:  ["]Many of downtown Baltimore's buildings are slowly being washed away.  The problem is less flooding and rain, more golden showers.  That's right, pee is eroding thousands of historic buildings downtown, the exterior bases corroding with every spurt.["]

Inside the Woke Air Force.  The military has always excelled at forming our diverse citizenry into a unified force — it embraced "E pluribus unum."  However, the U.S. Air Force is currently indoctrinating airmen in neo-Marxist ideology and creating activists thorough its Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) programs.  Some will push back and claim that DIE is simply about being inclusive of diverse viewpoints, and if this were the case, there would be little controversy.  Yet when senior leaders discuss diversity, as in DIE, the word has a neo-Marxist meaning.  Herbert Marcuse in his 1969 "Essay on Liberation" stated the following: "the familiar (used and abused) vocabulary of freedom, justice, and equality could thus obtain not only new meaning but also new reality," with a "methodical subversion of the linguistic of the Establishment."

Bidenomics: Big Mac Extra Value Meals Selling for $18, Up $10 from 2018.  A Big Mac burger, a medium beverage, and a medium fry meal now costs 18 dollars in some locations, up $10 from 2018 when former President Donald Trump was president.  The skyrocketing costs could impact the 2024 election, as the soaring inflation under President Joe Biden reflects poorly on his economic plan of so-called "Bidenomics."  The Big Mac Value Meal's price increase is just one example of continued inflation, the New York Post's editorial board reported.

The Editor says...
The Big Mac is expensive in the same places that a gallon of gas is expensive, and for the same reasons.

Where's America's Conor McGregor?  [Scroll down]  The U.S. is now effectively bankrupt from these policies, these New Green Deal, industry killing, inefficient policies, thus putting our national security in the hands of our creditors, or inflating our currency to the point of worthlessness.  They've chosen treason over pursuing policies that would benefit the American people.  They've chosen foreigners as their constituencies, allowing millions of illegals, some of them with a tactical purpose, to flood our borders and displace the population.  Some of them serve China and some of them serve Islam or the objectives of big political donors wanting the cheap labor illegals provide.  None of them serve America.  The importations have allowed big corporations to use child labor, children with no identity, no accounting for their time, no true benefactor for their tiny souls.  They labor in service to the global elite in one way or another, something completely illegal, but not out of the reach of those who daily disregard any law with the aid and assistance of our broken political system.

The World Is On Fire And Biden's Spineless Foreign Policy Isn't Helping.  When we look around the world, we see a world on fire and tensions at an all time high.  Thousands of innocent civilians murdered in Israel on Oct. 7th by the savage Hamas terrorists.  Hundreds of thousands of pro-Hamas protests in major cities such as London, Paris, Sydney.  Thousands of Americans and foreign nationals inciting violence against Jews with a Cornell student calling on his fellow students to "slit the throats of Jews" on campus.  This is all happening in 2023.  [Other examples omitted for brevity.]  So yes, the world is on fire right now and that is because America has a senile and weak Commander-in-Chief at the helm right now who talks out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to foreign policy.

Dems Are Getting Mugged By Reality, Often Literally.  Some Democrats are waking up and noticing that the policies they've been cheerleading have produced violent crime waves, a massive migrant crisis, and genocidal antisemitism.  One would hope the public at large is catching on as well.  Just over the past few weeks, we've seen a spate of headlines about lefty, soft-on-crime Democrats attacked on the mean streets they've helped create.  [Examples omitted for brevity.]  At the same time, Democratic mayors are finding their cities being mugged by the illegal immigrants that Biden and his open-border cronies have let flood into the country.  New York City Mayor Eric Adams recenty announced plans to cut $4 billion from the city's budget, including canceling the hiring of new police officers, to pay for the influx of more than 100,000 illegals in the past year.

New York is now the 'least free' state, thanks to Democratic policies.  New York state once again ranks as the "least free" in America, as a new Cato Institute report nails woes The [New York] Post has long decried.  Cato's libertarians rank the Empire State dead-last, 50th, for policies impacting economic, social and personal freedoms — and even where it scores slight gains (for legalizing pot and reforming criminal justice), Albany plainly screwed up. "Combined, state and local taxes are crushing.  Debt is down from years past but is still the highest in the country at 26.1 percent of income," notes the report.  No wonder the state's seeing a huge exodus to Florida (No. 2 in freedom, behind New Hampshire, and first in economic freedom), with Miami now looking like a credible threat to displace Gotham as the nation's financial capital.  New York's endless and onerous state regulations also drive away businesses (and jobs and people) — and its growing green "climate" rules will send power costs soaring and further degrade the state's livability.

Put a Chick in it and Make Her Gay.  And Lame.  There is no peace in the streets, EVER, your people have started three wars in the last two years.  You kill millions of babies and agitate to kill more babies.  You've demanded so much money for social justice, we are broke ten times over, and risk a Weimar Germany hellscape.  Your repulsive politicians have enabled criminal cartels to loot the public purse.  We are being invaded by millions of military-aged men on the border, and at the border, hundreds of thousands of women and children are raped and being sold into sex slavery.  Women — most women — have zero consciousness of any of this.  Almost one hundred thousand children have vanished into the sex trade.  But they want the border open because COMPASSION. Never mind the sharp uptick of crime, sooner or later, honey, you are going to want a gun and a man because the world you created — go girl — is so dangerous.  YOU ARE THE STUPIDEST WOMEN WHO EVER LIVED.

Our Institutions No Longer Curate Civilization.  Schools, by and large have abandoned the task of inculcating self-restraint and, instead, have adopted the dubious project of boosting self-esteem.  Factor in single-parent households, empty houses of worship, and demoralized and de-funded police departments, and you can easily see the trouble we're in:  Our instruments of civilization have fallen into disrepair.  One result is a major problem that hardly anyone in or out of government ever discusses; namely, that an enormous number of American youth have not learned either self-restraint or the difference between right and wrong.  These kids' images appeared in everyone's living room during the George Floyd riots.  They continue to make the evening news when they band together as flashmobs and ransack department stores or commit worse atrocities.

Americans now unwilling to fight for their country?  A disheartening new poll conducted by the Echelon Insights research institute purports to show that 72% of American voters would not be willing to volunteer to fight for their country if the United States faced a major conflict. [...] So let's take a look at why we won't fight.  Here are 21 reasons, some admittedly tied together.
  [#1]   Nearly all of us have become soft and spoiled by our relative wealth and ease.
  [...]
  [#16]   A lack of familiarity and experience with firearms, vehicles, machinery, etc., and a desire to largely stay apart from them.  (Completely opposite of American youth's attitude from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam.)
  [#17]   Helicopter parenting, which prevents kids from experimenting, "inventing," and developing a spirit of adventure.
  [#18]   The attacks on "toxic masculinity" and the simultaneous feminization and infantilization of society.
  [#19]   Some too distracted by watching sports, streaming television shows, video games, gambling, social media, and porn to dedicate the time and energy to much of anything else.
  [#20]   Too many consumed with "self-medication" via pot, alcohol, fentanyl, opioids, etc.
  [#21]   Too many overweight and out of shape.

And Now, a Few Words from Election '24.  As it stands today, the Biden administration has propagated the expansion of divisive and destructive things like open borders; a looming recession; high gas prices; trillions in debt; funded enemies; fentanyl deaths; unprosecuted crimes and riots; energy shutdowns; "gender" madness infiltration; a woke and neutered military; indoctrination instead of education; caliphates enriched with U.S weapons; corporate-targeted censorship; ignored election integrity laws and more.  I could go on, but I don't have all day.  And recently, the FBI has designated Donald Trump and his legion of supporters as "domestic terrorists" who embody a "persistent, evolving, and deadly threat" to the United States.  So, it's not the FBI — who is actually advancing further division in the American electorate — who is the bad guy, but the group of traditional Americans who want their freedoms and country back.  Even Hillary Clinton advanced the idea, with respect to Trump supporters, that "at some point, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members."

Democrats finally solved the illegal immigration problem!  Here are a few of their actions:
  [#1]   By turning off the fossil fuel spigot, they made us dependent on marginally effective and costly energy sources.
  [#2]   By mandating excessively stringent EPA clean air standards and other regulations, they forced us into buying expensive and inefficient electric vehicles that have few re-charging stations and depend on Chinese-sourced materials for their batteries.
  [#3]   By "tweaking" the tax system, they can punish wealthy Americans for their industriousness and innovation.
  [#4]   By dumbing down our educational system in the elementary through high school levels, they can create new generations of history-illiterate automatons who will do their bidding at the ballot box.
  [#5]   By instituting "emergency measures" via executive orders as part of their federal, state, and local toolbox, they can effectively circumvent existing legislation and give themselves carte blanche to declare any challenge to their orthodoxy an "emergency."
Ingenious.  Martial law without the guns.  Liberty infringement by executive fiat.

Misguided environmentalists have made our cities filthy.  If you've visited a big city in recent years, you've probably noticed that the streets are strewn with trash, litter is scattered all over the sidewalks, the buildings are covered in graffiti, and off-putting smells seem to emanate from every corner.  Take San Francisco for example, which not that long ago was considered one of the most beautiful cities in America.  Today, the Golden City is one of the filthiest, with a "dirtiness index of 189.03, ranking 9th among the 40 cities included in the report" and a "litter index of 210.2," which ranks fifth.  San Francisco's streets are riddled with garbage, needles, and human feces.  Its sidewalks are overrun with homeless encampments.  And its public spaces, once enjoyed by tourists, have become open-air drug markets in which vagrants can do as they please.

The eclipse of America's greatness.  The commencement of our decline probably can be traced to the Boomers' "God is Dead," "Flower Power" culture of the 1960s.  That is the generation that allowed an entire generation that followed it to be indoctrinated by a "progressive" secular theology, which incubated in our schools and supplanted the Jewish and Christian principles upon which this nation was founded.  That is the brainwashed generation that is now coming of age and taking control of our country's levers of power.  And yet, the remaining aging Boomers pretend to be shocked when the new "humanist" religion they enabled displaces divinely inspired concepts that once undergirded our most unique Constitution — like the inherent value of human life and the rule of law.  That is the presently emergent ideology now taking hold in our nation, wholeheartedly committed to the advancement of politically malleable secular concepts like diversity, inclusion, and equity.

If You Oppose Tyranny, You're on the FBI's AGAAVE List.  Isn't it amazing that so many hippy-dippy teenagers who "fought the man" during the '60s and '70s grew up to be more authoritarian than anything they experienced in their youth?  Isn't it surreal that so many of them produced children who embrace authoritarianism as a quasi-religion?  Just what kind of counter-culture creates generations of government bureaucrats who instinctively demand that Americans do exactly as they're told?  The same people who once fought to have their voices heard now insist on silencing all dissent.  The same people who used to see mainstream culture as antithetical to authentic art now demand that only one "politically correct narrative" ever be expressed.

It's not about Israel:  We are the target.  Let's apply Occam's Razor to the question, "what is the motive behind Biden's actions as president?"  Biden's first steps were to systematically dismantle everything Trump had accomplished during his presidency.  Using the "global warming emergency" as his excuse, Biden ended drilling for oil and natural gas and moved us from energy independence to having to rely on our enemies to obtain dirtier oil.  His appointees to the military focused on wokeness, not readiness, and ended up with weakness.  His support of Ukraine, to the tune of $60 billion, with another $53 billion allocated, has depleted our military of the supplies and ammunition we need to defend our own country.  He spent money we didn't have for projects we didn't need, and has run up the national debt to $33.7 trillion -- fueling massive inflation that is ruining the lives of the "average Americans" he claims to represent.  He immediately began ignoring the law and opened our borders to all comers — terrorists, drug dealers, human traffickers, and common criminals.  Fentanyl is now killing over 110,000 Americans per year, the equivalent of a Boeing 757-300 crashing every single day.  Biden has done everything in his power to support Iran.

If America Does Not Win, Its Enemies Do.  In January 2021, Iran was on the verge of economic asphyxiation, barely able to continue financing Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. [...] Russia had not yet invaded Ukraine.  Chinese President Xi Jinping was not threatening Taiwan.  Then came the Biden administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan; Russia's invasion of Ukraine; China's spy balloon, unstopped until it had finished collecting information over America's significant military sites for a week; the Biden administration's cancellation of the China Initiative that had been effectively combating Chinese espionage; failure to close illegal Chinese police stations throughout the US; no response to roughly 70,000 Americans each year killed by Chinese fentanyl; a US southern border overrun by seven million migrants, and reported a known 1.5 million "gotaways" who have presumably evaded announcing themselves for a reason; around 1,800 young Chinese men, in packs, with simialar clothes, haircuts and tattoos who pretend not to speak English, some of whom US border guards recognize as members of China's military; failure to prevent China buying American farmland, possibly either to grow their food or destroy America's — especially near US military bases; a California laboratory with mice bio-engineered to carry at least 20 deadly pathogens ready to be released into the US; Confucius Institutes that had been closed down but were renamed and are now spreading from universities to high schools; China's subversion of America's children by a "Trojan Horse" named TikTok; financing Iran's nuclear weapons and terrorism programs by ignoring sanctions on Iran to enable it to profit by close to $60 billion, funding the Palestinian Authority to the tune of nearly $1 billion, unconditionally, despite its deadly pay-for-slay "jobs program," and last week, Secretary Janet Granholm inviting the Chinese and Russian officials to inspect a US nuclear testing facility.

New York loses 10 billionaires in four years as magnates flee for Florida.  New York has lost 10 billionaires in the last four years — three of whom fled to Florida — leaving tax coffers lighter by tens of millions of dollars annually.  This year 62 New York-based billionaires appeared on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans, compared to 72 in 2019 and 65 last year.  Investor and Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris, whose net worth was valued at $5.7 billion last year, has grown his fortune to $6.9 billion — but he packed his bags for Florida.  Other billionaires who have relocated from Gotham to the Sunshine State in the last four years include hedge funder Daniel Och — whose net worth now stands at $3.6 billion — and investor Carl Icahn, who's worth $6.9 billion.

The Nashville shooter's motive was leftist beliefs.  It has taken about seven months, but we now know what was going through the head of the Audrey "Aiden" Hale, the Covenant School mass murderer.  No thanks to politicians, though.  They have been delaying the release of the handwritten "manifesto" for months.  While it was expected to show that Hale had mental health issues (as it can be argued any mass murderer does), it was speculated that the reason for not releasing the document was because it would have shown the trans-man was targeting the school staff and students because of their Christian beliefs. [...] In fact, the cover-up probably did more harm to the trans community than releasing the manifesto would have done.  This is because it caused the trans activists to show their true colors by occupying state capitals.  They made transgenderism part of the motive through their actions, tying their cause to a mass shooting.  The cover-up tends to be worse than what is being hidden because it compounds the original problem.

Leftist cities:  Be careful what you wish for because you're going to get it.  A young friend of mine moved to Portland, Oregon, because, as a nascent hipster, he thought Portland would be a cool yet affordable place to live.  After less than a year there, he can't wait to leave.  The coup de grace to his dreams of a life in the hipster capital of the Pacific Northwest was the mini tent city that sprang up immediately outside the door of his apartment building.  Apparently, stepping through human feces, needles, and used condoms just isn't hip. [...] In 2020, Oregon voters decided to decriminalize the possession of hard drugs.  Technically, selling them is still a crime, but the police in Portland don't police that crime.  With a dramatically reduced force, why bother?  When your city has gone in a few years from one of the safest cities in America to one of its murder capitals, policing drug sales is a low priority.  The city has been adding police to its roster again, but it's a case of too little, too late.

5 Items to Remember for When Disaster Strikes.  "We, the People," through the bitter experiences of the past two decades, no longer trust our major political, financial, medical, and educational institutions to safeguard our lives, our freedoms, and our property.  Our nation had been invaded by eight million illegal aliens.  We have allowed fentanyl to destroy our inner cities.  We have let Marxist-Leninist politicians to empty our prisons and they have allowed crime and prostitution to flourish.  We have let out our illegally elected president run up the national debt and destroy our energy independence.  Our national media, with few exceptions, have become the yapping lapdogs of the Marxist Democrats.  America has crossed the tipping point.  We can clearly see that the inevitable politically caused disasters such as terrorism, overseas conflicts, and economic downturns will not be met with rational, coherent, and comprehensive solutions from the current federal or state authorities.  Each of us is now personally responsible for the survival of his family and friends.

American Jews on the Left Are Just Shocked by Their Fellow Leftists.  The Left — specifically schools of education and teachers unions — has ruined elementary schools and high schools.  And it has destroyed universities as institutions that allow open dialogue.  The Left affirms the lie that men can become women and women can become men, and it works to crush the lives and careers of anyone who denies that people can become the other sex.  The Left supports the demise of women's sports by fighting to allow any man who says he is a woman to compete in women's sports.  The Left supports putting children who say they are the other sex on hormone-blocking drugs, and supports allowing girls under the age of 21 (and sometimes under 18) who say they are boys to have their breasts surgically removed.  The Left has been waging the most successful war against free speech in American history.  As a result, almost half of America's young people say they believe in free speech but not in "hate speech," which, of course, means they do not believe in free speech.  The Left asserts that the human fetus at any stage of development is, literally, worthless, certainly worth less than a dog, if the woman carrying it wants an abortion.  The Left has essentially destroyed mainstream journalism.  Mainstream media no longer hold truth as an ideal.

What Really Is Going On In Nashville.  [Video clip only.]

Payback: Nashville Police Department Suspends 7 Detectives Over Leak of Transgender Shooter's Manifesto.  As RedState's Bonchie reported Monday, at least part of the manifesto of transgender Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale was leaked to talk show host Steven Crowder, and the writings revealed a disturbed person who wanted to punish students at the school as well as privileged white people.  Hale killed six people, including three children, in a March shooting spree at a Nashville Christian school before she was taken out by quick-acting police officers.  The leak also enraged Nashville Democrat Mayor Freddie O'Connell, who demanded an investigation.  After months of deflecting on the issue, officials had refused to release the writings and have never given a satisfactory explanation.  According to a report, revenge came swiftly, and the Nashville P.D. on Wednesday suspended seven detectives: [...]

Why Much More Than the Manifesto is Needed on Nashville Shooter Motivations.  Following conservative pundit Steven Crowder's release of three pages of a "manifesto" written by the Nashville school shooter, controversy erupted over whether Crowder selectively publicized content to bias the public against leftist dogma.  One the pages implicates "white privilege" — a favorite bogeyman of critical race theorists and the progressive left — as motivation for the killing rampage. [...] Instead of denouncing Crowder, his critics should decry the government authorities who arbitrarily kept this killer's writings from the public.  Multiple media outlets requested the shooter's manifesto through public records only to be denied by the Nashville Police Department and FBI.  These outlets, including Star News Digital Media Inc., are suing for the records in both district and federal court.  Even if all documents authored by the shooter are released, however, insight into the killer's motivations will remain seriously incomplete.  The murderer's medications also need to be public information.

Audrey's Manifesto.  Audrey Hale is the transgender mass murderer who killed six people, including three small children, at a Christian school in Nashville.  Soon after her murder spree, it came out that she left behind a "manifesto" that described her motivation.  The authorities have withheld that document from public view, contrary to the usual practice, presumably because it makes the "trans" movement look bad.  Someone leaked three pages of notebook paper in Hale's handwriting to Steven Crowder.  These pages are not the "manifesto," although they may come from the same notebook.  Rather, they appear to be the notes that Ms. Hale made on the last days of her life:  [Tweet]

As if the political embarrassment is as bad as the shooting:
Nashville Mayor Launches Investigation into How Images from Shooter's Manifesto Were Released.  Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell (D) launched an investigation Monday into how purported images of the transgender Nashville shooter's writings "could have been released." [...] Metro Law Director Wally Dietz clarified that he will undertake an investigation at O'Connell's direction. "At the request of the Mayor, I am initiating a full investigation with multiple law enforcement agencies to determine exactly what happened," Dietz said.  Beyond confirming the beginnings of the investigation, Dietz walked the same line as the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) and the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD), stating, "I cannot confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents due to the existing lawsuit."  Early Monday, Breitbart News spoke with the TBI and communications director Josh Devine, who said, "We're aware of the images, yes, but we're not offering confirmation on their authenticity."

Nashville Mayor Wants Legal On Trans Shooter Manifesto.  Since the March 27, 2023, shooting at the Covenant Christian School, many of us have been clamoring for release of the shooter's writing.  Many journals, a suicide note, and a memoir were left by transgender shooter Audry/Aiden Hale.  Today, three photocopied pages were obtained by a podcast host and the Nashville Mayor is incensed.  Furious.  Legal action involving possible local and Federal authorities is being looked into, according to Mayor Freddie O'Connell.  If this is beginning to sound like more tangling of the woven web, you are so right.  Without wasting anytime at all to mourn the six victims of the Christian School shooter, the media and opinion writers have blamed various aspects of Tennessee life:  Our Governor and open carry and a so called anti-Drag bill.  It couldn't have possibly been a severely mentally ill human.  It had to be the gun culture and hatred in Tennessee.  Now, a rational being might think that the dead sicko's writings might be important for the psychological community to study and for the general public in spotting signs.  A month after the shooting, we were told that the writings would not be released completely because they were too disturbing.  Which might be a reason they should be released.

The Nashville school shooter's manifesto reveals the left's favorite message.  On March 27, 2023, a woman entered The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, and slaughtered three nine-year-old children and three adults.  It was only because police were nearby that she was stopped.  The woman, who claimed to be a so-called "trans man," left behind a manifesto.  However, while police departments and media outlets are usually quick to release statements from mass murderers, government officials in this Democrat-run city refused to do so in this case.  Steve Crowder, though, obtained the first three pages of the manifesto, which he released today.  In addition to showing an obsessive level of preparation (this was no spur-of-the-moment killing), the manifesto shows that the killer was motivated by one of the left's favorite mantras:  "white privilege."

Nashville Trans Shooter Couldn't Spell White Privilege, But Knew She Hated It.  Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who called herself Aiden Hale in her fantasy life as a male, was a product of what the Left has done to education.  She couldn't spell "white privilege," but she knew it was evil, and was determined to do her part to eradicate it from the face of the earth.  On March 27, 2023, she took a rifle into Nashville Covenant School, a Christian school in that city, and murdered three nine-year-old children and three adults, one of whom was black.  Audrey Hale epitomizes what the Left inculcates into America's children: bitter hatred and envy, violence, gender confusion, and abysmal ignorance of what everyone used to take for granted as necessary to learn in order to function well in society.  Ever since her mass murders, Hale's "manifesto" has been a closely guarded secret.  On Monday, however, political commentator Steven Crowder released several pages of this manifesto, making it clear that Hale acted out of hatred for Christians, white people and the wealthy, three groups the Left very much wants us all to hate.

Manifesto of trans Nashville school shooter [was] leaked, [and is] full of anti-white hate.  A leaked manifesto reveals the Nashville trans school shooter had a violent hatred of the "little crackers" with "white privilege" that were murdered.  First obtained and released by the Louder with Crowder conservative Rumble show, the three-page handwritten document shows Audrey "Aiden" Hale meticulously planned their last moments and the mass school shooting at The Covenant School on March 27.  Three young children and three school staff were killed before Hale, 28, was shot dead by responding police.  The manifesto, written in a spiral notebook, has various screeds and thoughts scrawled down by pen.

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Goes Woke, Gender Non-Conformity Will Be Front and Center.  A treasured national tradition is getting a little less family-friendly this year.  Americans looking forward to the quintessential national holiday are getting a rude awakening with word that the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in Manhattan is going to showcase more than street versions of musical numbers and marching bands from around the country.  The transgender agenda will be taking center stage for some of the screen time, and one of Hollywood's biggest liberals will be the featured performer.

San Francisco McDonald's Shuts Down After 30 Years amid City's Decline.  A McDonald's in downtown San Francisco, California, has shut down as the city grapples with numerous issues plaguing businesses in the area. [...] Meanwhile, local bank branches are closing up shop at their San Francisco locations due to the city's economic decline and numerous other woes, Breitbart News reported Wednesday.  The report added, "some of the closures in San Francisco are related to the ongoing exodus of retail businesses, many of which were exhausted by the persistent problem of shoplifting."  The Fox Business article also highlighted the fact McDonald's has been concerned after California said it would institute a minimum wage increase that the business feared would not be a good thing for its franchisees.  Workers' baseline pay will rise to $20 an hour come April 1.

California's EV Conundrums.  The crude oil industry's time in California is limited, and the oil-refining industry is behaving as any industry would in comparable circumstances, by transitioning its operations away from gasoline to activities that will prove to be more profitable in the long run. [...] Refineries are also shutting down because California has imposed a new regulation that bans the sale of gas-powered cars and light trucks by 2035 and the State requires 35 percent of new car sales to be zero-emission vehicles by 2026.  It makes no economic sense to invest in new capacity in a state that has de facto outlawed the industry's existence in a few years.

The DNC Con Job to Come.  We watch the news clips, on our televisions or computer screens, and cringe, as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris stumble over their words, even uttering gibberish when prepared remarks are on the printed page in front of them.  It has been clear from the start that neither one is up to the intellectual requirements of this (or any) job.  When we can manage a sense of humor, we laugh and attribute it to dementia with Biden, to sheer stupidity with Harris.  When we are not in a mood to laugh, however, we reflect on what it means to our reputation on the world stage, as our enemies — military, economic, and cultural — delight in our momentary weakness and move to take advantage while the getting is good.  We watch our nation's suffering as a result — homeownership out of reach, career advancement opportunities disappearing, the prospect of retirement evaporating.  We watch other nations suffering as a result as well — Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Europe's energy dependence upon Russia, Iran's attack on Israel through its pawns in Gaza.  We know that all this is happening for one reason:  the weakness of America, caused by the Biden-Harris regime.

Red Light District Erupts in New York with Influx of Venezuelan Prostitutes.  A whole new red light district has erupted in New York City with a mass influx of Venezuelan migrant women working as prostitutes.  "Roosevelt Avenue in the Corona neighborhood of Queens is filled with Venezuelan migrants offering sex services in the open-air, so-called 'Market of Sweethearts," reported the Daily Mail.  Prostitutes have even been seen working in the neighborhood during the day and sometimes soliciting children as they leave school.  New York Mayor Eric Adams, who previously warned that the migrant crisis would dramatically alter his city, said that the eruption in prostitution just represents yet another example of its impact.

Joe Biden Isn't 'Managing' Or Confronting Problems.  Joe Biden Is The Problem.  There's a simple pattern that the media follow when covering each new crisis that pops up during Joe Biden's catastrophic presidency:  A calamity occurs either domestically or abroad, and rather than examining the cause, the media instantly frame Biden as a hero at battle. [...] But back to Biden.  He's not confronting or managing a series of events that happened to him.  He and his party actively created them.  Or, at minimum, they created an environment that anyone could have predicted would lead to them.  Russia has long insisted that NATO stop expanding along its border.  The second Biden got into office, he pushed for Ukraine's membership.  Israel had its country under relative control for years right up until Biden's team gifted Iran, the Jewish state's greatest threat, $6 billion worth of goodies.  We were energy independent until Biden said we couldn't be.  The economy was working itself out until Biden and his party thought it would be a good idea to pump hundreds of billions of dollars more into Covid-era welfare ("childcare" and "living assistance").  And let's not start on the electric vehicle scheme, wherein car companies grabbed another round of multi-billion-dollar taxpayer funds, courtesy of Biden, for a product that barely works (and for which manufacturers are now rolling back their production of).

They shut down the coal-fired power plants and look what happened.
Rollin', rollin', rollin' blackouts in... Tennessee?!  [W]hat has the TVA — America's largest government-owned utility, by the by — given up and replaced that brings them to a place where they have to institute rolling blackouts?  The first thing to consider is the influx of people the region is seeing.  According to the TVA's own webpage [...] It sounds like everyone who didn't move to Florida stopped in TN. [...] But if you can't keep the power on, those gains will be fleeting.  The second thing to consider is, again, the fact that the TVA is owned by the federal government.  It puts them under extraordinary pressure to go along with whatever the latest "thing" is as far as the clean/renewable energy push goes, and it seems this is where it's starting to trip them up.  They're shooting for "net zero" emissions by 2050.

Oakland, California, is falling apart.  Last month, at a small church in East Oakland, Calif., hundreds of fed-up city residents gathered outside of a community safety meeting held by Mayor Sheng Thao and District Attorney Pamela Price.  The group was as diverse as it was united, and despite the reduction in their quality of life over the past year, there was a palpable energy of hope.  Seneca Scott, a community leader, hosted the get-together under the banner of his Neighbors Together Oakland (NTO) organization.  A one-time Oakland mayoral candidate, Scott formed the group in 2021 as a response to the influx of outside money and special interest groups that have contributed to his city's decline.

Now All Americans Can See the Insanity of the Biden Energy Strategy.  We've been warning regularly on these pages that the Biden war on American fossil fuels is not just an economic calamity, but a national security threat as well.  We have known for fifty years that terrorist organizations like Hamas are primarily financed with petro-dollars.  Just as Biden has aided and abetted the Russian war machine in Ukraine, he has enriched Middle East oil-producing nations like Iran as well.  Our latest CTUP analysis finds that the reduction in US oil output under Biden from the Trump trend has cost the U.S. roughly $500 million a day.  Much of that money has been transferred week after week from American producers to nations hostile to the U.S. and Israel.

The Late Hour of Our Republic.  It is my belief, and solely my own, that we, the United States of America, have been captured by the powerbase of the elite and that our representatives and senators now respond to that powerbase, that the people, that are the powerbase of America, have been conquered.  It was done in secret, behind our backs, not in a war or through attrition, but by trickery and now whatever fighting we do for our nation is done for the powerbase of the elite. [...] I tell you that the disinterestedness of our elected officials in our pleas to rectify the election process is a symptom of this capitulation to the powerbase of the elite.  They don't care, because they don't have to.  Anything that could implicate them in the fraudulent elections is discarded by those same elite.  This is the same with the immigration laws, with the laws against theft, rape and murder.  They don't matter, because we do not live in a constitutional republic.  Our rights have been subsumed by their system of graft and clout, of power and prestige.

Joe Biden has blown up the world.  On day one of the Biden administration, he canceled the Keystone Pipeline, putting thousands of skilled workers out of work.  Over the ensuing months, he canceled oil leases, stopped fracking, and drained our strategic oil reserve.  All this was surely intentional; he means to starve the American people of energy, making what is available more expensive by the day.  Like Obama, he means to transform America, and not in a good way.  The most catastrophic stunt Biden pulled was the tragically ill conceived withdrawal from Afghanistan.  He left billions in state-of-the-art military equipment to the Taliban along with the Bagram Air Base, which sits close to China.  Thirteen young American patriots were killed by the sheer ineptitude of their leaders.  This tragic maneuver telegraphed Biden's, and thus America's, weakness to every leader in the world.  Russia thought taking Ukraine's Russian-speaking border regions would be a cakewalk.  Our careless warmongers in the Biden administration thought their puppet-of-the-oligarchs Zelensky would easily defeat Russia with billions of U.S. dollars.  The military complex wanted that war.  All of that went awry.  Here we are a year and a half later; Ukraine has lost half a million people and is still begging for billions more in aid.  None of this would have happened if Trump had been in office.

Over 545,000 New Yorkers left the state in 2022, headed for Florida, Texas and further: census bureau.  Beset by high taxes and quality of life woes, 545,498 New Yorkers left for other states in 2022, according to US Census data.  Top destinations included Florida — the most popular choice — followed by New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania as well as more distant states like Texas and California.  The exodus was partly offset by more people moving to the Empire State in 2022 than any year over the last decade, with 301,000 new residents making the transition.  Despite that uptick, New York still suffered a net population loss of 244,000.

Watch Out, You Might Get What You're After.  The crumbling debt sodden American Empire is being led by an outright moron and anyone expecting Biden to do anything other than make things worse, has probably been jabbed five times, has a BLM, Israel, and Ukraine flag in their Twitter profile, and still thinks Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation.  The U.S. provoked Ukraine conflict has drained the coffers of the U.S. and EU of hundreds of billions, while depleting their precious armaments, just as WW3 launches.  With the Middle East set to explode in a ball of fire, the world's flow of precious oil, is in danger of being cutoff abruptly.  Luckily, Dementia Joe depleted our Strategic Petroleum Reserve for election purposes, leaving us with 17 days worth of supply.  Maybe Biden's green energy windmill and solar farms will fill the gap when gasoline prices soar to $6.00 a gallon and 1970s like gas lines become common again.

In the Mouth of Marxist Madness.  Americans [are] under siege from an Orwellian deep state that manipulates the public by distorting history and undermining the meaning of words.  In a nation that celebrates George Floyd as a hero, clings to the "Hands up, don't shoot" lie as a sacred "truth," and blames Hillary's election loss on Russian bots, propaganda is king.  The U.S. government fights racism by institutionalizing racial preferences.  It supports Black Lives Matter and Antifa domestic terrorists while locking up American patriots as "domestic enemies."  It replaces impartial justice with "social justice" and equality under the law with "equitable" special privileges.  "Climate change" communism kills property rights.  Meme-makers are imprisoned, but Russia collusion hoaxers are not.  Gene-altering serums are called "vaccines."  And generations of judges have replaced the U.S. Constitution with their own postmodern revisions.

Obama's Racist Chickens Have Come Home to Roost.  Rather than elevate black people, the far left has created a situation where black crime is legal and white people are racist if they notice.  Shoplifting alone has gutted major cities, and most of the videos we see show black perps.  Some localities have made it illegal to try to stop thieves.  Businesses even fire employees for trying to stop criminals from stealing, to the point that the stores close and the workers lose their jobs.  Hundreds of businesses have left West Coast cities and taken their jobs with them.  Once flourishing cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland are turning into ghost towns.  Crime, drugs, and tent cities have taken over, as planned by the Marxists looking to enslave us all. [...] This is what happens when lefty politicians convince black people they are "victims" and then make crime an entitlement.  Black crime is now acceptable.  What could go wrong?  The truly insidious move here is that someday a reckoning will occur.  Whether a patriotic president wins or globalists take over our nation, criminals, many of them black, who enjoyed surfing the Democrat-created crime wave will likely end up in prison, never realizing they were pawns.

Billionaire suggests that Northeast cities like NYC and Boston are hemorrhaging income due to political ideology.  With a single tweet, Chamath Palihapitiya, the CEO of Social Capital, recently became the provocative main character of the day on X, formerly known as Twitter.  Palihapitiya sent out a screenshot of a Bloomberg article based on how six southern states had contributed more to U.S. gross domestic product than the northeast corridor of Washington-New York-Boston for the first time in history.  But it was his accompanying caption that sparked hot debate: "Go woke, go broke," he said, implying that the ongoing culture war and economic policies of northeastern states had facilitated the migration of wealth and economic power to the South.  While tweeps weighed in with their own thoughts — including fellow billionaire Mark Cuban — here's what the numbers show is really going on. [...]

Seattle lawmaker furiously denies her support for defunding the police is to blame for soaring crime in city.  Council member Kshama Sawant said the city should not add police resources to the Central District neighborhood after 24 children had to crawl to the bathroom of a daycare facility following a shooting.  The incident happened on Monday outside of the A-4 Apple Learning Center, with a 47-year-old man being shot on the street.  A bullet pierced through the window of the center, with co-owner Appollonia Washington telling staff and children inside to 'army crawl' to the bathroom and hide.  In response, the facility shared a statement slamming the City Council and its members for allowing violence to 'plague' the area.

Joe Biden Has Killed the American Dream.  If you only paid attention to the mainstream press, you'd be inundated with a constant stream of articles ensuring you how great the economy is. "Look at the jobs market," the headlines have blared while promoting the supposed historic resiliency of our present moment.  The full-court press has been so strong that the Biden administration has even taken to labeling it "Bidenomics," a marketing ploy that has proven less than ideal.  What looks good on paper, though, is often not representative of the real-world impact.  Thus, Joe Biden's current economic malaise, for which Americans are assured they should be incredibly thankful, is hitting American families far harder than Paul Krugman's latest cherry-picked bar graph indicates.  Shockingly, if you ignore how much things actually cost across the board, you can spin a rosy picture in which a greatly delayed slowing of the rate of inflation is actually an incredible accomplishment.  But back in the real world, this reality still remains.

Where There is No Respect for Life, Evil Flourishes.  The loss of respect for life has also begun to dramatically infiltrate the American ruling elites and the overall society as over the past two decades the following, previously unthinkable, changes have occurred within the United States:
  •   Unfettered abortion up to the point of birth and post-birth infanticide has become a policy position of the Democrat Party.
  •   Euthanasia is openly discussed and supported by an ever-growing (73%) segment of the population.
  •   Sexually confused teens are being coerced into mutilation and permanent disfigurement in order to appease the gods of transgenderism, accompanied by an unabashed campaign to legalize pedophilia.
  •   A significant plurality of Americans is demanding the censorship, imprisonment, and persecution of their political adversaries while they, and recent Islamic immigrants, are openly supporting and justifying the slaughter of Jews by Hamas.
  •   Tribalism has been mainstreamed and with it the belief that certain ethnicities or races are inferior to others and also responsible for society's ills, therefore, they are deserving of disrespect, abuse and discrimination.
The path the United States is presently traveling will inevitably lead to the darkening shadow of unfettered evil descending upon the land leading to national self-destruction.

"Barry's Fingerprints Are All Over This".  Obama didn't travel to Cairo, Egypt for his first foreign policy trip accidentally; he did it with great intent and purpose.  The layers and layers of ideologues he and Hillary embedded in the institutions of the State Dept are as deep as the layers of ideologues Obama embedded in Main Justice and the intelligence community.  The time when Barry needed to give directions is long past.  The embeds are self-aware, acting on purpose, and the outcomes we see today are simply manifestations of that activity.  It is also worth remembering there's an entire new generation of people, who were in their 20's and 30's comfortably oblivious to what was taking place between 2009 and 2017, when the embeds were installed.  That era of the American people is only now starting to have their own slow awakening to the damage as it surfaces.  When Obama aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, only a small percentage of the American people actually saw the big picture and realized the potential for long term issues.

Due to Dem-Backed Law, Prostitution Spreads In California.  Californians are complaining about barely-clothed prostitutes roaming the streets in broad daylight, an issue heightened by Democratic Gov. Newsom signing Senate Bill 357, local officials say.  SB 357, which was authored by Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener and backed by the ACLU, decriminalizes "loitering with intent to commit prostitution."  Critics say the law effectively decriminalizes prostitution in California.  National City Mayor Ron Morrison, an independent, recently criticized the law, telling Fox News that prostitutes are now "wearing less than what you would consider a scanty negligee" and "flaunting it in everybody's face."

The Editor says...
There is a very effective way to get scantily-clad whores out of the streets:  Stop voting for Socialist Democrats.

Can We Please Stop Pretending There Aren't Animals Among Us?  Political correctness has been immolated and replaced by its tantrum-throwing progeny, "woke," which decided that ignoring crimes by minorities is no longer sufficient.  One must now cheer on, say, rampant shoplifting, lest one find oneself the target of a fusillade of Antifa spittle launched by spoiled demons from spendy neighborhoods who grew up in lavish bedrooms full of participation trophies.  I remember when pedophiles were considered monsters. [...] The next step in the cultural Marxism playbook is making it a-ok for terrorists to rape Jewish women, mince Jewish babies, and burn Jewish people to death in the name of Allah.  If you ask the rich kids of Harvard, they'll actually tell you the Israelis are to blame for the recent carnage.  I'm not sure who is responsible for such hatred, the brats themselves or their chardonnay-sucking "cool moms" who never said "no" to them.

Thanks to Biden's Open Borders, in Dem Cities it's Black vs. Brown.  The last time the black vs. brown tension was this thick, you could cut a chunk and fry it as the Black Lives Matter riots were tearing Chicago into pieces.  Black protesters led by media-protected white leftists tore up downtown to hurt Donald Trump's re-election prospects.  This was their insurrection.  It took lives and cost billions of dollars in damages in cities across America.  They tore up the downtowns and black neighborhoods and black-owned businesses.  Then Mayor Lori Lightfoot was in literal panic.  But in Chicago, the BLM rioters and their white Democrat Socialist handlers did did not tear up the old and iconic Latino neighborhoods on 18th and 26th street.  Why is that?  Because Latino street gangs publicly threatened to shoot Black Lives Matter rioters if they were found in the Hispanic neighborhoods.  And so, BLM backed off.  But now?  The tension if not the physical damages are high, with longtime black residents told to step off the corner, to step back and give their place in line to illegal Latin immigrants who are being courted as new prospective voters by Biden Democrats.  Black voters have been betrayed.

A Clockwork Orange as Left-wing Politics.  Starting with Antifa and BLM riots of 2020 — fully supported by leftist local governments — urban centers in Democrat-led cities like San Francisco have spiraled into a "doom loop" wherein urban business flees "flash mob" looting and skyrocketing violent crime.  A few examples:
  •   San Francisco:  After flash mobs looted Neiman Marcus and other stores, two dozen retailers have left.  Walgreens closed 12 San Francisco stores, while upscale Nordstrom pulled its two stores, including its Westfield mall flagship.  Australian furniture retailer Coco Republic, which invested heavily in its showroom off Union Square, abruptly closed the store less than a year after opening across from Macy's.  Once fashionable Union Square is now a ghost town.
  •   Los Angeles:  Even two years ago, 20+ robbers at the popular Grove shopping center used a sledgehammer and assorted weapons to smash one of a Nordstrom's windows, reportedly taking men's clothing.  That was child's play, however, compared to the recent flash mob of 100+ that looted a 7-Eleven.
  •   Philadelphia:  Even the examples above pale in comparison to the two-night Philadelphia flash mob spree featuring caravans of hundreds who wrecked dozens of stores, including T-Mobile, Apple, Lulu and Footlocker outlets.  One of the looters, a social influencer calling herself "Meatball," gleefully livestreamed the event to 181,000 Instagram followers, rationalizing it by explaining "Everybody gotta' eat."  A tearful "Meatball" seemed less gleeful when charged with six felonies.

Could Kevin McCarthy's Ouster Be a Tipping Point?  [Scroll down]  You don't need me to recount how our country differs from when you grew up.  You don't need me to tell you that we are nearing the end of a social and economic war where we are on the losing end.  You don't need me to tell you that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and a veritable army of anti-Americans have taken over our country and are rapidly depleting not only our culture and world standing but are figuring out how to empty your pockets and turn us into a beggar nation.  Like the French, we watch it happen in real time.  The fundamental difference today is that we've had much more time to assimilate what is happening to us, yet we stand mute and feckless as our world collapses around us.

Portland residents [are being] told not to call police for help.  Portland officials were proud of themselves in 2020 when they defunded the Police Bureau by $15 million instead of increasing it by $3 million as planned.  One commissioner was even upset that the council didn't remove more from the budget. [...] A year later, the council was trying to add funding and retain the city's police officers.  "The added police spending is occurring amid a year of a record number of homicides, the city's greatest police staffing shortage in decades and reform recommendations made by the U.S. Department of Justice," PBS reported.  It was too little, too late.  The damage was done, and the city has yet to recover.  In fact, the city government is telling residents not to call police unless their lives are at risk.  Given how dangerous Portland has become, it might not affect the volume of calls to police because more residents' lives are at risk from criminal activity than ever before.

Far Left San Francisco:  Less Than 3% Of Restaurants Have NOT Been Vandalized In Last 30 Days.  As lawlessness in San Francisco shows no signs of abating, local businesses are reeling from the consequences.  A recent survey from the Golden Gate Restaurant Association reveals that a staggering 97% of 74 restaurants surveyed in the city have fallen victim to graffiti or property crime in the last month.  While the liberal mayor pours money into temporary relief, the persistent problems of crime, homelessness, and open-air drug use are driving businesses and consumers away.

Dealing with Consequences.  [Scroll down]  Consider the crime wave that is currently ruining cities with Democrat mayors.  Far-left Soros funded district attorneys such as Alvin Bragg and Chelsa Boudin and George Gascón have made the decision to not prosecute criminals.  As a consequence, crime is rampant and 'Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety' are nonexistent.  To say that Biden has removed our opportunity to vote on his decisions concerning his policies would be a major understatement.  But that's only half the story.  Biden is trying to create a consequence-free society.  Decisions have consequences in the real world, but not in Biden-world.  Making decisions without consequences is simply not possible.  Every decision has consequences, be they favorable or unfavorable, expected or not, intended or unintended, or some combination thereof.

Unsuited for the Senate.  Prior to Schumer's decree, Fetterman was voting from the Senate's doorway, but no more.  Last week, sporting a G. Gordon Liddy mustache that seemed more suited for a character in the Far Side, Fetterman presided over the Senate in short-sleeves and shorts.  Fetterman's apparel is fit for the locker room, not Congress.  Dressing like an adolescent is contempt for the office and the people he represents.  Schumer has no more regard for the Senate decorum and dignity than does Fetterman.  The Biden administration has appointed two men in dresses to senior positions, so you could argue Fetterman is just following suit — minus the suit.  Democrats constantly lament about White male privilege but have changed the protocol for a White male who would be just as comfortable in an orange jumpsuit.  Gone is any pride of appearance.  Standards of professionalism and propriety are disdained.  Once upon a time in America, casual dress was for weekends and tailgating.  Now it is everyday wear in the U.S. Senate.

Radical Democrats' greatest fears are religion, truth, honesty, and integrity.  I am confident that most Americans are worn down by all the chaos that exists in our country, Independent, Republican, and Democrat voters alike.  We have a president who is clearly age-disabled.  We have 2024 presidential elections where both party leaders are accused of corruption.  Women and girls are under attack.  Parents are asked to surrender their children to the state.  Children are taught to lie to parents.  Religious freedom is considered a terrorist act.  Crime and homelessness are rampant in cities.  We can't afford food, gas, or a house.  Our educational standards have failed.  A costly war is in Ukraine.  Simply being "white" makes you racist.  Immigration is out of control and destroying communities.  The black community's need for school choice is ignored.  Citizens are fearful after defunding the police.  Radicals are destroying American history.  Corruption exists with our press and social media.  As an older senior, I ask, how did it get this bad in just three years?

Guess who's upset now about illegal aliens depressing wages.  Karl Marx once wrote of repeating events in history that they occur "first as tragedy, then as farce."  That was my reaction to an article appearing in the Thursday, September 22 New York Post.  The article focused on complaints of existing illegal aliens in the metropolitan New York City area.  The huge influx of illegal aliens has them occupying 50% of the hotel rooms in the city.  They are sleeping all over the sidewalks in Midtown Manhattan.  Mayor Adams has declared that the costs of dealing with them "will destroy the city."  NYC has prided itself on being a sanctuary city willing to house and feed any and all illegal aliens.  Daily television showed city authorities meeting the arriving buses from the border, shaking hands and greeting the new illegals.  But the large flow from the border has swamped the system.  As was posited in Field of Dreams: "If you build it, they will come."  They did, and they did.

Biden Marches With Autoworkers While Causing Their Problems.  The UAW is demanding a 35% hike in pay and benefits over four years, as well as automatic cost-of-living adjustments, just like in the 1970s, along with a four-day workweek.  The inflationary 1970s are calling Biden, and they want their benefits back — with a post-COVID-19 four-day twist.  According to news reports, Biden told workers, "You should be doing incredibly well."  But he has singlehandedly, through the power of his executive branch, caused them to face job losses and higher inflation.  By changing his policies, Biden could address some of the fundamental reasons for their strike; namely, job loss because of mandatory vehicle electrification and higher inflation resulting from his war on fossil fuels, resulting in higher energy costs.  Both were imposed by the executive branch without support from even the Democratic Congress in place during Biden's first two years in office.

The Role of the Smartphone and Digital Content in the Left's Revolution.  Christopher Rufo, Douglas Murray, and Victor Davis Hanson have all pointed out that we are in the middle of a cultural revolution that is assailing our culture, values, traditions, and institutions, our national security and sovereignty, our economy, our Constitution and rule of law, and our overall quality of life.  The percentage of Americans saying they are worse off is at its highest level since 2009.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this obvious decline is that leftists have managed to convince a very large portion (in many cases a majority) of Americans to support the divisive and corrosive policies producing their own destruction.  What arguments have leftists used to accomplish this?  Chiefly, though not exclusively, they have employed a trifecta of completely nonsensical tropes about race, gender, and climate.

It's not working.  First, I do think that the economy is hurting people big time, from the price of gasoline to the price of cereal to everything else that you can imagine.  I see this every Sunday when the waiter puts the lunch bill on the table.  More than once, my wife has given me that "I don't believe this" look.  Add to this the border crisis which is now a national problem rather than only El Paso, Texas.  For a while, the media could avoid talking about the border.  It's different when New Yorkers see migrants sleeping on their streets or Texas border cities are screaming for help.  Second, more and more Americans do not want to destroy their country in order to destroy Trump.

I Bet You We're Not Better Off Now With So Much Gambling.  I'm no puritan, I honestly don't care what you do with your money as long as you don't expect me to subsidize it or make up for your mismanagement of it.  The problem is, we are all being asked, or made, to subsidize it now.  When gambling took some effort, things were different.  Yes, there were still degenerate gamblers, but not that many.  Now, in states like Michigan, you can play casino games for money on your phone with your credit card.  What could go... right?  Nothing.  I keep citing Michigan because I grew up there, and was back not that long ago and noticed a lot of television commercials for casino apps.  There are three full casinos in the city of Detroit.  The argument for allowing them was the reported million dollars per day going across the Detroit River to Casino Windsor, with their neon sign glowing its siren song to people who couldn't resist its call.  The city and state want a piece of that action, so they got their own.

Berkeley Retail Shutting Down Just Like San Francisco.  Rising crime, looting, and tolerance of drug-addled transients taking over the streets has led to an exodus of retail establishments from San Francisco.  Now another Democrat-controlled California city is enjoying the same exodus of retail establishments:  Berkeley.  Here YouTuber Metal Leo looks at streets near Cal Berkeley University, where store after store after store are closed, boarded up or for lease.  [Video clip]  Banks, pharmacies, cinemas, pizza chains: all closed.  The only thing that seems to be open are Starbucks.

Is the Left Happy That They Got Their Wish?  Critical legal theory has now trickled down into most of our large cities.  It insists that criminals are not criminals at all, but rather victims of prior racial and class oppressions.  Thus their victims should blame society for their injuries, not their predatory victimizers.  Critical legal theory is a sort of Marxist redistribution schema — the middle class almost deserves its equal share of violence commensurate with that of the inner city.  As a result, in Chicago and Oakland and hundreds of other cities, prosecutors let out criminals without bail or sometimes even indictments — in part out of spite and hatred of middle- and upper-middle-class America that supposedly deserves a payback for its bourgeois indifference, in part out of sheer ignorance of the unleashing of human nature once all deterrence is removed.  And the result?  Anxious liberal professionals are fleeing our major cities in the greatest out-of-state migrations since the 1930s.  Or they simply avoid their own downtowns.

All Over America, Blue Cities Are Facing A Severe Shortage Of Police Officers.  Do you remember a few years ago when blue cities all over the nation wanted to defund the police?  Needless to say, that didn't work out too well.  Wherever police budgets were slashed, crime rates shot up.  Today, we are in the midst of a massive crime wave that is sweeping the country.  In fact, it has gotten so bad that even many our most liberal politicians are desperate to restore law and order.  But that won't be so easy, because after everything that has transpired blue cities are discovering that they are having a really difficult time finding enough warm bodies to serve in their crime-ridden communities.

The Destruction of the United States Is Intentional.  Here's What Will Happen Next.  The commies began the operation decades ago.  As Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov warned, the college professors and civil rights leaders indoctrinated — or as Bezmenov calls it, demoralized — generations of Americans and convinced them to hate their nation and, frequently, themselves.  The Soviets successfully infiltrated the black communities, convinced them they were less than, and let the anger seethe into subsequent generations.  That is why we see highly educated and successful black folks like the Obamas, MSNBC's Joy Reid, and the deranged Cori Bush screaming about racism, even though they are one-percenters.  If systemic racism were real, how did these poor, indentured serfs get so far?

Why Do The Poor Countries Always Stay So Poor?  It's now more than sixty years since the independence movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s transformed nearly all of sub-Saharan Africa into independent countries.  Hopes soared for a new era of progress and prosperity.  But six plus decades on, with essentially no exceptions (maybe Botswana?), the 49 countries of sub-Saharan Africa are about as poor as ever. [...] The funny thing about the bad luck of sub-Saharan Africa is that it seems to afflict all 49 countries at the same time, even as elsewhere in the world at least a few countries (South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand) are able to find the magic recipe to rise out of poverty.

The Feds Sue New York Landlords for Not Allowing a Tenant's Emotional Support Cat.  Federal housing officials are charging a pair of New York landlords with violating fair housing law for making no exceptions for emotional support animals in their "no pets" policy.  On Monday, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced it had filed a complaint against Ronit and Voyl "Tom" Mecham — owners of a two-unit rental property in Jamestown, New York — for denying a tenant's requests to keep a cat on the premises.  The Mecham's tenant, whose name is redacted in the complaint, had requested in November 2021 that they be allowed to have the cat as part of the treatment they were receiving for unspecified mental health issues.  The tenant said they would provide a doctor's note justifying the emotional support cat.

They Were Too Young to Consent but Now They're Old Enough to Sue.  An unnamed woman who once identified as transgender filed suit last week against the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Nebraska Medicine, and three doctors for "negligence and lack of informed consent" after she had a "gender-affirming" double mastectomy at the age of 16 in 2018.  Now a young woman, the plaintiff will never nurse her children, assuming she is still able to bear them after four years of testosterone treatments that "caused significant mental and physical harm."  All because the medical industry — I used to call it "healthcare" — decided that surgery and hormones were the answer to a troubled teenager's emotional and mental health issues and, according to the lawsuit, bulldozed her into their preferred "treatment."  That poor kid doesn't seem to have ever stood a chance against the adults arrayed against her.

To Market, to Market.  Among the factors weighing heavily on public disaffection with Democratic governance is the downturn occasioned by their policies, which hamper production, raise prices, and allow widespread retail theft.  Robert Barnes has done the math: "Under #Trump, real median family household incomes rose 15% in just 3 years, the highest rate since after World War 2.  Under #Biden, real median family household incomes fell 5% in just 3 years, the fastest rate of decline since the Great Depression."  To be sure, the bien pensant big thinkers don't see this as a problem.  The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman offers up a defense — essentially, voters shouldn't believe their lying eyes.  "The economic data have been just surreally good.  Even optimists are just stunned," says Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.

How Woke Lefties Ruined Aspen.  That story begins only 150 years ago with, appropriately enough, a somewhat crackpot idea called "free silver."  For the last quarter of the 19th century, the idea kicked around that the government should buy large quantities of silver to create an easy money supply.  And for a time, it did just that.  Aspen, originally called Ute City, had some of the largest silver deposits on Earth, and it boomed, reaching a population of more than 12,000. Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893, ending the artificial demand for the metal, and Aspen became a quasi-ghost town with a population at the dawn of the 20th century of only a few hundred.  After a long downturn, Aspen boomed again immediately after World War II, with skiing as the new silver.  Beaton tells with verve the very human story of Army veterans and Chicago businessmen coming together to create a ski resort.  Aspen's first modern chair lift was opened in 1947, one of the longest in the world.  Aspen became not just a town, but a brand — now one of the most prestigious in the world.  But Aspen then had a second downfall.  The 1960s introduced America to drug abuse and other moral laxness on a widespread scale.

Inflation accelerated in August to 3.7% as consumer prices heat up again.  Inflation accelerated for a second straight month in August, reversing previous declines as consumers continued to grapple with the rising cost of everyday goods.  The Labor Department said Wednesday that the consumer price index, a broad measure of the price for everyday goods including gasoline, groceries and rents, rose 0.6% in August from the previous month, in line with estimates.  It marked the steepest monthly increase this year, underscoring the challenge in taming high inflation.  Prices climbed 3.7% from the same time last year, faster than both the 3.2% reading in July and the 3.6% estimate from Refinitiv economists.

We Haven't Had a Year This Bad Since Obama Was President.  The last time Americans saw a drop in household income as large as we did last year, Barack Obama was president.  The Census Bureau on Tuesday released its calculations for the change in real median household income for last year.  By its calculations, the median income of U.S. households fell in 2022 by 2.3 percent, the worst decline since 2010.  History may not necessarily repeat or even rhyme, but it certainly rings a bell on occasion.  The last time household income suffered a decline as large as it did in the second year of Biden's presidency was in the second year of Biden's vice presidency.  That's before taxes.  Once you calculate in changes to the taxes paid and subsidies handed out, household income fell 8.8 percent.

Criminal Justice is Just Plain Ugly.  I think that the crime problem, the mass incarceration problem, and mental health problem arise out of the liberal cultural beliefs and liberal political power that our liberal friends have used to impose their beliefs and culture on the rest of us.  And for most people not in the laptop class liberal culture and power make things worse.  But I could be wrong.  Earth to liberals:  Urban violence and murder rates are a witch's brew of fatherless homes, welfare, and the separation of sex from marriage and child-raising.  And You Did It.  Earth to liberals:  Mass incarceration and three strikes laws are the knee-jerk response of ordinary people to the rise of crime and violence that amped up in the Sixties with the Great Society.

Are You Better Off Today Than You Were Four Years Ago?  Another metric is food inflation as all Americans need to purchase and consume food.  Food inflation currently sits at 4.9 percent compared to 1.8 percent four years ago.  It has more than doubled in the past four years, with no sign of slowing down.  At a macroeconomic level, is our national debt higher or lower compared to four years ago?  In 2022, the national debt was $30.8 trillion.  Four years ago in 2018 it was $21.4 trillion.  In four short years it increased by almost $10 trillion.  It took America until 2008 to even reach $10 trillion in debt and in four short years we added 230 years' worth of debt to our ledger.  That's what America owes.  How about what America spends?  The annual U.S. budget deficit was $665 billion in 2017, rising to $2,772 [billion] in 2021.  This is more than a fourfold increase in spending money we don't have.  Budget deficits used to be measured in the billions.  Under Biden they are in the trillions.

The 'Climate Emergency' Is a Hoax.  The Biden administration, however, appears not to be concerned about the widespread poverty and massive starvation that will be caused by the unavailability of cheap and reliable energy in underdeveloped countries, or the inflation caused by the skyrocketing prices that are crushing Americans "barely able to afford one meal a day". [...] The Biden administration also does not seem concerned that it is killing wildlife, sea life and the fishing industry by installing offshore wind turbines along the Atlantic seaboard, or that mandating electric vehicles will throw virtually the entire auto maintenance industry out of work (EVs do not need routine maintenance), or that lithium batteries not only explode but cost thousands of dollars to replace.  The administration even wants military equipment, such as tanks, to be electric, as if there were charging stations in the middle of foreign deserts in the event of a conflict.  Moreover, according to NBC News, volcanoes, unimpressed with executive orders, "Dwarf Humans for CO2 Emissions."

Tom Cotton:  Military Citations Using 'Themself' Instead of 'Himself' or 'Herself'.  Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) on Friday sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin demanding he explain the Pentagon's apparent decision to use the "gender neutral" term "themself" instead of "himself" or "herself" for decoration and award citations.  Cotton, an Army veteran, wrote to Austin:  ["]I write regarding the Department's decision to incorporate 'gender neutral' language into decoration and award citations.  Our military apparently will now use 'themself' — which is not even a word, I hasten to add — instead of 'himself' or 'herself' to describe heroic or distinguished actions.["]

Why San Francisco is the car break-in capital:  Low-risk, high reward.  In case you've somehow missed all the news coming out of San Francisco for the past several years, the city has the highest rate of property crime in the country.  The SF Chronicle published a story today asking the obvious question:  "Why is it so bad here — and not elsewhere?"  The answer the article comes to is not entirely satisfying but it does make some amount of sense.

Exploiting Transgender Kids as Emotional Support Animals.  Do y'all remember the time an emotional support animal was kicked off a United flight for being disruptive?  In this instance, "being disruptive" included a pig defecating and screaming in the cabin.  Passengers were quick to complain about the stink, noise, and awkwardness of it all because, when you pay good money to fly, doing so without a barnyard experience is a reasonable expectation.  Thankfully, over the last decade, emotional support animals have been kept on a tighter leash since they are not now, nor were they ever service dogs.  Airlines have reeled in their restrictions and put a muzzle on the idea any animal can fly under the "if it fits, it sits" mantra.  Everybody knows that the owner of that peacock, hamster, boa constrictor, cat, or hedgehog does not rely on the animal to aid in the performance of specific tasks.  Rather, they don't want to leave their beloved animal behind.  Levity, affection, companionship — that's why we have pets!  We also have therapists.

'Prosecute Them': Dem Who Backed Efforts To 'Dismantle' Police Says She Was Carjacked In Front Of Her Kids.  Shivanthi Sathanandan, the second vice chairwoman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), said in a Facebook post that she was violently attacked and carjacked Tuesday in front of her two children.  Four men allegedly broke Sathanandan's leg and beat her with their fists and guns in front of her two young children at her Minneapolis home before stealing her car and fleeing the scene, she said in the post.  Sathanandan, who had previously backed efforts to reduce the police force, urged fellow Minneapolis residents to "take back" their city and prosecute violent criminals in her post following the incident.  "We need to get illegal guns off of our streets, catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM," Sathanandan wrote.

Leftist Activists Used To Be About Fighting 'The Man.' Now They Are 'The Man'.  For decades, the left defined itself by its opposition to authority, gleefully fighting the old conservative fuddy-duddys in power.  But as a slew of formerly rebellious rockstars have learned, the left has since become the very thing it used to fight.  Alice Cooper, a famously painted-up rock icon since the '70s, came under fire for a series of benign comments regarding the current transgender pandamonium.  "I'm understanding that there are cases of transgenderism, but I'm afraid that it's also a fad, and I'm afraid there's a lot of people claiming to be this just because they want to be that," Cooper said.  "I find it wrong when you've got a six-year-old kid who has no idea.  He just wants to play, and you're confusing him telling him, 'Yeah, you're a boy, but you could be a girl if you want to be.'"  For this perfectly innocuous statement, Cooper lost a brand deal with Vampyre Cosmetics, which accused the musician of transphobia.  Clearly, the LGBT community is so oppressed and powerless that banal criticism of them results in losing work.  Cooper didn't express anything hateful, he simply cautioned of too many people hopping aboard the current cultural bandwagon and that these procedures have permanent consequences.  For that, Cooper was accused of "spewing debunked bathroom predator myths" and "leaning on right-wing, anti-trans scare tactics" by Rolling Stone, an outlet that used to be about covering music but has since moved on to political hackery.

A 'poop' rampage in Wyoming is an important insight into today's homeless.  The headline at the Daily Mail was eye-catching: "Squatters take over Wyoming city:  Vagrants leave millions of dollars worth of damage to motel and 500 lbs of human feces in downtown area — as Casper fights off a homeless invasion."  It was an image at odds with how we think of Wyoming; that is, a clean, naturally beautifully conservative state.  But the homeless plague is everywhere, and the situation in Casper reminds us that most of today's homeless are not just ordinary people down on their luck; they are dysfunctional drug addicts who are the inevitable result of 60 years of leftist drug policies.

Rousseau and the Collapse of American Constitutionalism.  [Scroll down]  So today in America the new social contract proposed by the Democrats provides, for example, that if you decide to be a man, be a man.  If you decide to be a woman, be a woman.  If you want even more personal freedom, be either from time to time.  If you are a girl, then America is your oyster.  If you don't want to have a baby, don't have a baby.  With immigration, if you want to be an American, come here and be an American.  If you want to join the ruling elite, just register for college.  Someone else will pay your tuition and, presto, without much effort you will have your passport into the new American elite.  If you struggle with illness, taxpayers will free you from that hardship.  But there was a bait-and-switch in Rousseau's design template.  None of us really will have individual authority to live as we might wish.  We must surrender our rights to the collective which has all sovereign power.

The Decline of American 'Civilization'.  The glorification of violence and sex in a society is uncivilized.  These things appeal to the most squalid nature of man, his most carnal appetites, not his noblest.  Uncontrolled lust and violence are characteristics of the lowest common denominator of humanity.  Jungle instincts must be restrained, contained, and overcome for civilization to exist.  Any society that refuses to do so will suffer dire consequences, as indeed we see in America today.

Report: 90% of Online Content May Be AI-Generated Garbage by 2026.  A recent report from Europol warns that by 2026, as much as 90 percent of online content could be generated by artificial intelligence, raising concerns that the web might be even more jammed with useless garbage in a few short years than it is today.  Futurism reports that a recent study by Europol suggests that by 2026, up to 90 percent of online content could be artificially generated.  This staggering figure has sent ripples through various sectors, from journalism and art to technology and law enforcement.  Synthetic media, which refers to content generated or manipulated using artificial intelligence, is not a new phenomenon.  However, its rapid proliferation has raised eyebrows and concerns alike.

Unsafe and 'looking like a dump': How Brighton's controversial eco policy went to seed.  Borage, yarrow, knotgrass and ribwort; for the enthusiastic forager there are herbs enough to fill an apothecary's cabinet.  This is no countryside hedgerow, however, but rather the pavement outside a £1.5 million house in Hove.  Five-foot tall horseweed growing up between the cracks in the paving slabs has become a familiar sight for the residents of Brighton and Hove.  On some streets a tapestry of grass has formed that makes it impossible to walk in a straight-line down the hilly streets.  It is a verdant sight, but not, however, a welcome one for residents.  "My mother is 89 and if she's walking around on these pavements, she can't do it," says one local who preferred not to be named. "I worry about her falling all the time."  For the past four years nature has been left to its own devices after the then Green Party-led council in 2019 banned toxic weed killers that include chemicals such as glyphosate following a petition from residents.

Glyphosate, best known as the active ingredient in the weed killer Roundup, has been the subject of many studies and legal challenges regarding its potential to cause cancer, specifically non-Hodgkin lymphoma.  Its environmental damage, particularly to soil quality, is also well documented.

Why wind and solar power are running out of juice.  Alternative energy madness — and that's what it is — has had its biggest impact in California.  But New York and New Jersey have adopted most of that state's mandates.  Sales of new internal combustion vehicles will be banned beginning in 2035 in the states.  All of the electricity sold to retail consumers will have to be "zero-emissions."  Homeowners and building owners will be forced to replace gas- and oil-burning space and water heaters with electric heat pumps.  And, gas stoves will be regulated out of existence.  New York also will soon implement another California import: a carbon "cap-and-invest" program, which will impose a tax on fossil fuels sold by wholesalers and utilities.  The billions of dollars collected each year will provide a green slush fund, allowing the governor and legislators to hand out money to their politically favored cronies, as has so often been the case in the past.  Washington State began its "cap-and-invest" program in January of this year.  Modeled after California's, Governor Jay Inslee promised the program would have "minimal impact, if any.  We are talking about pennies."  Instead, the program has raised gasoline prices — almost 50 cents per gallon so far this year.

Let's Call It Treason.  Millions of people around the world are beginning to figure out that there is a force, an evil cabal trying to take over the entire planet. [...] National leaders are going out of their way to destroy their collective countries.  These chief executives and oligarchs, feeling a New World Order is inevitable, are merely vying for high position in what they think will be a new society.  It is not more evident than here in the United States.  These leaders make decisions that no one understands[,] destroying the election system of the greatest democracy in the world, ignoring the needs of their citizenry, destroying the military and police departments, with no regard for national security, citizen safety or law and order.  Gone is energy independence, dozens of food processing plants (its become a global phenomena), hundreds of farms (meat and dairy are bad, but bugs are good).  Millions of illegal migrants pour into our countries without vetting, background or medical checks.

A compendium of everything wrong with Barack Obama's legacy.  President Obama's assault on Americans' constitutional rights and protections as well as on the nation's constitutionally defined governmental institutions and their respective authority entailed myriad particulars.  It included undermining of First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and religious freedom.  It extended to usurpation of the legislative authority of Congress and disregard for the constitutional authority of the Supreme Court.  In addition, Obama compromised the rule of law and protection of rights more broadly.  He ignored the findings of lower federal courts.  He subverted federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, and other departments of the federal government, to illegal politicization and lawless attacks on perceived political enemies.  He promoted federal intrusion in and subversion of state and local law enforcement, also in the service of political ends.  The collective impact of Obama's abuses of power, the "transformation" of America that he so often promised, was the creation of a less democratic, post-constitutional, authoritarian nation.

"Nonviolent Crime" Is a Myth.  Five days after sustaining serious injuries, a San Francisco store clerk named Yowhannes "John" Tewelde has died.  He was beaten with a baseball bat by a man whom he tried to stop from stealing beer from his store.  Tewelde's death marks yet another homicide in the Bay Area, which, between San Francisco and Oakland, has seen an enormous amount of crime and mayhem in recent years.  The nature of Tewelde's death illustrates an important reality that progressives working to ease up on supposedly nonviolent crimes don't seem to appreciate: even "minor" offenses like retail theft, open-air drug use, and smoking on subway platforms are frequently backed by a threat of violence.  Had Tewelde not intervened, allowing the thief to take what he wished, progressive prosecutors like former San Francisco district attorneys George Gascón and Chesa Boudin probably would have refused to prosecute him, citing the nonviolent nature of the offense.  All we'd have is a lowly shop owner forced to shoulder the cost of a few cheap beers.  No big deal, right?  Wrong.  The decision to ignore the theft would allow an individual who was in truth both willing and able to kill over $10 to remain on the street.  It would be only a matter of time before he did something terrible.

Why anyone who supported COVID fascism has no right to complain about inflation and housing crisis.  Inflation is very simply defined as too much money chasing too few goods.  Our government decided to spend and then print more money (by a mile) than ever before while shutting down supply chains!  Now we are dealing with endless long-term debt and the expense of servicing it, which is inducing even more inflation, forcing interest rates up, and creating the housing crisis we are living with today. [...] Regardless of who would be president in 2021, that inflation cake was baked.  Obviously, Biden increased spending even more and locked up our energy supplies, placing more pressure on energy prices.  His Ukraine policies made it even worse.  However, the core inflation would be with us today regardless of which party is in the White House, because, with few exceptions, both parties equally embraced these terrible policies of loose money.

The Biggest Environmental Scandal In The World.  A dead whale washed ashore on Takanassee Beach in New Jersey in the early evening yesterday.  Police blocked off the area so tractors could be brought in to remove it.  "We were sitting on the beach yesterday, and I noticed it when people started running up to it," said Soraya Nimaroff, who lives nearby.  "I'm very sad.  It is very sad."  Yesterday marked the 60th known whale death on the East Coast since Dec 1, 2022.  Whale strandings have increased markedly since 2016.  The North Atlantic right whales are headed for extinction.  Their population has dropped to 340.  There have been 200 humpback strandings and 98 strandings of right whales since 2017.  "It caused us concern enough to ask, 'What is happening?'" said Cindy Zipf, executive director of the Long Branch-based nonprofit Clean Ocean Action (COA).  "We looked into what was different about this December and early January."  The only thing she and other researchers found was offshore wind exploration.

The return of animal sacrifice.  We look back with bewilderment at the ritual sacrifice of animals by our ancestors.  Whether it was the Celtic people's sacrifice of livestock to appease pissed-off deities or the Ancient Romans' slaughter of oxen so that Jupiter might be more sparing with his stormy weather, it was all a bit mad.  We would never be so superstitious, we tell ourselves.  I'm not sure that's true.  Consider the proposed slaughter of hundreds of thousands of cattle in Europe in the holy name of Net Zero.  This is the return of pagan lunacy, surely.  Irish farmers are under pressure to 'cull up to 200,000 cows' in order that Ireland might meet its 'climate goals', reported the Financial Times at the weekend.  The Irish government is considering proposals to bump off that amount of cattle over the next three years to help it achieve a 25 percent reduction in its agricultural emissions.  Cows produce methane, you see, and methane is bad.  It's a greenhouse gas.  Farming accounts for 40 percent of Ireland's greenhouse-gas emissions, so it has become a natural target for the Net Zero zealots.  Every EU member state is under pressure to make strides towards Net Zero, and if that entails the sacrifice of livestock, so be it.  Save the planet, slaughter the cows.

Washington power company raises rates to cover increased expense due to climate legislation.  A Washington utility company jacked its rates on residents as a result of the Democrat-passed cap-and-trade program, but was prohibited from informing its customers as to the reason why, according to a new report.  The Center Square reported that the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission (UTC) approved a request by Puget Sound Energy earlier this month to raise its natural gas rates to cover the costs of Washington's cap-and-trade program, part of the Climate Commitment Act, which was passed by the Democrat-controlled state legislature and signed into law by Democrat Governor Jay Inslee.

Save the Rule of Law By Destroying It?  Some truths are so staggering in their ramifications that Americans simply shrug and tune them out as if strangers in a strange land.  Is their current bewilderment because modernist America is unrecognizable — a nonexistent border, downtown homeless juxtaposed to hipster professional elites, DEI racial essentialism, cities reverting to precivilizational wastelands, millions exiting blue states to red, an FBI and DOJ gone rogue, the normalization of violent theft and assault, biologically born men sandbagging women's sports and their locker room privacy?  We are reaching the point where the once unbelievable has become the banal, as a single generation has done its best to undo the work of a prior 12 generations.

Portland's Predictable Doom Loop.  At one time not so long ago, Portland leaders turned the sleepy town into a progressive hub for the creative class, spending billions on 19th-century light rail Choo Choo trains to convey bus riders to their planned utopia.  The more the plans failed, the more the planners planned, as Ronald Reagan once said.  Because of the hard hand of the planner class, a corrupt system of regulatory capture, and the certitude of those who know better than we do how to run our lives, Portland leaders never really stopped to consider if anyone wanted what they were selling.  They went on blithely singing kumbaya and giddily handed the match to the activist left, which lit the Molotov cocktail that sparked the city's self-immolation.  Now these leaders have regulated, locked down, and scared away a third of the downtown office buildings.  When San Francisco hit this marker it was called a "doom loop."

Dick's Sporting Goods Is Learning What the Consequences of Going Woke Are.  Go woke, go broke.  That's what conservatives say, and unfortunately, sometimes it's just rhetoric that doesn't materialize.  Still, there are times when the adage proves true.  Enter Dick's Sporting Goods, the woke outdoor company that has prided itself on inserting itself into various cultural battles.  As RedState reported, shareholders were greeted with bad news recently when it was revealed that Dick's saw a 23 percent drop in profit over the last quarter.  That sent the company into a freefall.  On August 21st, the stock price was $141.  Two days later, it was at $108.  That's a dramatic drop for a well-known retail brand with so many years in the game.  The question is, what led us here?  According to Dick's own admission, a sharp rise in retail theft has severely hampered profitability.

New York loses $1 trillion in Wall Street business as firms flee the city: report.  A giant, sucking sound is coming out of Wall Street — and it's siphoning staggering sums of money out of the Big Apple while handing business to Florida and other states farther south.  Nearly 160 Wall Street firms have moved their headquarters out of New York since the end of 2019, taking nearly $1 trillion — yes, that's trillion with a "T" — in assets under management with them, according to data from 17,000 companies compiled by Bloomberg.  Looking to dodge rampant crime, stiff taxes and an increasingly exorbitant cost of living, 158 fed-up financial firms representing a whopping $993 billion in assets have packed up and left the Big Apple, taking thousands of high-paid employees with them, the data shows.

Woke blue cities defund themselves.  'Defund the police!' they yelled in 2020, that famous summer of love:  They did that.  Now they're discovering — the hard way — that they're actually defunding themselves. [...] [New York] businesses are fleeing for the same reasons that the people are fleeing:  Bad government.  After all, the picture is largely the same:  Run one of the world's most expensive cities.  Tax them up the wazoo.  Demonize corporations.  Embrace COVID lockdowns.  Defund the cops, or else incentivize them to retire at their desks.  Let the homeless and drug-addicted roam freely.  Let the organized theft rings shut down the retailers and restaurants.  Let every car be subject to smash-and-grab robberies.  Let vital city services, such as the subway, become dangerous no-go zones.  Lose an analyst or two every so often to random violent crime.  Ensure that public schools are not worth going to.  And most important, mock and laugh at those who do the logical thing, which is move someplace else where the costs are lower, the taxes are lower, the bums know they can't camp out in front of someone's headquarters, and the criminals know that they're headed to jail every time they loot a business.

Historic LA hotel devolves into housing projects, repairs cost taxpayers more than $11.5 million.  Built in 1926, The Mayfair Hotel in downtown Los Angeles was a historical treasure, a unique marriage between the glamor of Old Hollywood and the elan of the Roaring Twenties, and then California Democrats got ahold of it.  The Mayfair once hosted the first ever Academy Awards after-party, but now it houses Skid Row. [...] (How could anyone think inviting drug-addled derelicts into a luxury hotel wouldn't end up this way?)  Like stereotypical crazy bums, the transients housed at the Mayfair "punched through walls," trashed appliances and bathrooms, smashed windows to throw objects onto the street below, and left fentanyl-covered tinfoil sheets strewn about.  And, in predictable fashion, the idiotic decisions of the left aren't limited to only affecting leftists, and the havoc spilled out onto the street.

Ukrainian Corruption Disqualifies Biden From Serving Another Term.  In the 30 months since Trump departed the White House, American cities have been in free fall towards becoming crime-ridden infestations of homeless public misfits, drug addicts, and violent criminals.  Uncountable millions of illegal aliens have flooded across the southern border and been distributed around the country at unsustainable cost to America's education system, social service network, and law enforcement organizations.  The country has been commercially strangled by a green terror which implausibly purports to be saving the planet but is contributing to the reduction of the disposable income of the great majority of Americans.  Public education standards are crumbling; the academy and media are largely in the hands of anti-American elements.

Democrats' proposed wealth tax spells doom for entrepreneurs and economic growth.  A group of far-left lawmakers has introduced yet another bill to soak the rich.  The new bill is called the Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Reverse Community Harms Act — the OLIGARCH Act, get it?  It would introduce an entirely new tax on wealth above $120 million, starting at 2% and climbing to 8%.  This new tax would be in addition to the income tax.  Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) claims the legislation is designed to "tax extreme wealth, reduce inequality, and combat the threat to democracy posed by aristocracy."  But it would more accurately be described as an economic devastation bill.  Indeed, it should alarm anyone who wants to start a business, build up wealth for retirement, leave an inheritance for their children, or just see the economy grow for everyone.

Don't expect the greens' 1,600 percent mistake on ocean plastic to get them to change course.  For climate warriors and enviro-radicals, the science (their science, anyway) is always "settled."  That is, until it isn't.  The latest backtrack?  Turns out there's less plastic in the oceans than claimed.  Far less.  Per a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience, just 500,000 metric tons of plastic end up in the world's oceans each year, not the 8 million tons previously bewailed.  That's an overestimation of 1,600%!  Meanwhile, worries about ocean plastic have fueled restrictions on the use of a range of products — shopping bags, utensils, straws — no matter the inconveniences or side effects.

The Result of Incorporating Saul Alinsky's Eight Marxist Rules for Radicals Into The Governance of The Republic.  In just two years the Biden/Obama administration spent the US Government into an additional unsustainable and unheard-of increased National Debt "of an additional $4.9 Trillion in spending".  That reckless spending increased the National Debt from $27.7 Trillion to an unrecoverable National Debt to $32.6 Trillion.  That irresponsible and uncalled-for spending on Climate Change and Social Programs, while terminating the drilling for crude oil on government land, has created the massive inflation Americans are faced with; it is the worst inflation in over 40 years. [...] That massive new spending of $4.9 Trillion in just 2 years, by the Biden/Obama administration, is one of the eight recommended ways to change the US Constitutional Republic into a Socialist State by installing Saul Alinsky's Eight Marxist Rules for Radicals.  The Biden/Obama administration intentionally increased the National Debt to such a large deficit in a short two years, in order that it will never be able to be repaid by the United States.  The annual interest on that National Debt will have to repaid by a constantly increasing taxes on the American people, negatively effecting the US economy, and personal wealth.

Biden's Iranian Hostage Deal.  Since January 20, 2021, the Harris-Biden administration has delivered a relentless cycle of incompetence, ineptitude, incoherence, corruption, subterfuge, and scandals.  The citizen suffers due to inflation, high crime, the open border, crumbling infrastructure, and a lot more.  If they dare to raise their voices they are targeted much like the regime's foremost political opponent, President Donald Trump.  Internationally, the regime has weakened and demeaned the US.  Following its hasty and unplanned withdrawal from Afghanistan that betrayed allies within the country.  It also handed that country back to the most dangerous terror organizations in the world.  The Harris-Biden administration has managed to make the U.S. appear untrustworthy, dishonorable, and unreliable.  The withdrawal doubtlessly emboldened President Putin to intervene in Ukraine after repeated provocation from surrounding NATO countries.  The war in Ukraine continues to this day and there is no way for anyone to know what actually is happening because most of the Western media is pushing a narrative and not covering facts.

Climate and Capitalism.  [Scroll down]  In Rhodes, Greece, this week, a resident published his video of fires being set at night, all at the same time across a ridge of trees.  This is an almost perfect climate psy-op.  Fires, and then film the misery of tourists sleeping in the airport waiting to leave.  And then there is this:  [Tweet]  I'm starting to think it is a world-wide scam of set fires meant to scare us into more regulation, more giveaways.  In Canada we have arrested dozens of fire-setters, and dozens are still being sought.  Fires and fear promote the idea that "nothing has been done," but in fact, behind the scenes, everywhere, the Iron Triangle of the movement has installed palettes of regulation on every town and county, every rangeland, parkland, wilderness, forest and mountain.  Wherever you go, metaphorically or not, there is a sign that says:  Do Not Enter.  It is killing all productive activity, it is killing the economy of every nation.  "Climate change" is now eating capitalism.  It is a profit center for both government and business.  In 2002 Goldman Sachs built a division that sold "climate solutions" by way of tax and carbon credits.  This zero-sum game is trading in the misery of hundreds of millions.

The Trump Indictment and 2024.  Over the past sixty years while America slept and the citizenry reveled in unprecedented peace and prosperity, the Marxist/socialist movement, after decades of living in the shadows, has successfully infiltrated many of the nation's vital institutions while promoting creeping immorality and societal corruption.  The institutions targeted by the American Marxists were those in the fields of education, entertainment, and the media.  The radical left knew that dominion over of these institutions would be the first step in achieving their ultimate goals: control of the Democrat Party, hegemony within the federal bureaucracy, and the domination of the judiciary.  Their success to date has been extraordinary.  Today, liberal (socialist) professors on college campuses outnumber conservatives by a ratio of 17 to 1 (in 1968 it was 2.7 to 1).  This same imbalance also infects the nation's K-12 public schools through the radicalized teachers unions.  As a result, two generations of Americans have been subjected to unending socialist indoctrination and revisionist American history.

Anheuser-Busch's Collapse Continues as It's Forced to Sell Off Some of Its Brands.  Anheuser-Busch's downfall has been a brutal lesson to corporations about how the people have had it with woke culture engagement.  Especially when it comes to being a brand that claimed to represent the heart of America and its values.  Now, A-B is apparently being forced to sell off a few of its brands in order to stay afloat.  These include Shock Top, Breckenridge Brewery, Blue Point Brewing Company, 10 Barrel Brewing Company, Redhook Brewery, Widmer Brothers Brewing, Square Mile Cider Company, and Hiball Energy.  All of these are craft beers, meaning that A-B is cutting a solid chunk off of its craft beer portfolio.

Bidenomics is really just a ploy to destroy American energy.  While jetting across the country trumpeting the supposed success of "Bidenomics," Vice President Kamala Harris had this to say, "Most Americans are a $400 unexpected expense away from bankruptcy."  What's not to love?  The White House must not be seeing the same headlines we are about record inflation, declining income, and concerning job trends.  President Joe Biden's rampant spending has destroyed the economic comfort and prosperity of the previous administration — something even the most devout anti-Trumpers are becoming nostalgic about as family budgets grow tighter and tighter.  Biden erroneously claims that his energy policies are a panacea that will offer Americans the best of both worlds, saving money and protecting the environment.  The president has made poor policy choices about many things — but when it comes to energy, he's never been more wrong and has weakened our country in the process.

The Destruction of Common Law.  By defunding the police in major cities, and by showering leftwing district attorney candidates with millions of dollars in campaign funding, the Left systematically eroded the law as we know it in our major cities.  As a result, downtowns are after-dark, no-go zones, as once great metropolises resemble veritable combat theaters.  Cities are becoming depopulated as consumers and businesses no longer find it safe to conduct commerce.  Criminals and homeless now routinely break the law with impunity.  Public violence, defecation, urination, fornication, and injection do not even rate as misdemeanors.  The Left has redefined violent crime to such an extent that shoplifting is no longer actionable.  Flash mobs that take over streets and swarm to loot stores are rarely if ever arrested.  Security officers who apprehend thieves or intervene to stop violence are more likely to be prosecuted than criminals themselves.  There is no longer any immigration law; it has been utterly destroyed by Joe Biden.  Seven-million illegal entrants flood into the U.S. and, along with the Mexican government, make demands on their hosts to accommodate their illegality.

America's Debt Rating Downgrade Shows Washington Is Still Building Back Bankrupt.  While the press and the American people focused on the Justice Department's latest indictment of President Trump, another no less significant event was taking place on Tuesday afternoon.  Specifically, Fitch Ratings announced it had officially downgraded the United States' credit rating.  The action by Fitch comes a dozen years after Standard and Poor's downgraded the federal government's debt rating, meaning that two of the three credit rating agencies have stripped Washington of its vaunted "AAA" status.  It is but the latest indication of how presidents and politicians from both parties have ignored the serious fiscal problems within our nation — and yet another warning of the reckoning we will ultimately face as a people.

The High Cost of Crime:  Oregon County Loses $1 Billion as Residents Flee Lawless Portland.  Residents who fled Multnomah County, Oregon, in 2020 took over $1 billion in income as they searched for a better life in other areas.  The news is according to an analysis of data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Oregonian reported Sunday.  "Numbers gleaned from annual income tax returns provide the most detailed information available on where Americans are moving — and taking their money," the outlet said.

The gas is high.  It's hot here and some countries are cutting back on production.  The heat is the heat and I've lived plenty of it in Texas.  In fact, I remember when our second son was baptized back in 1988 that it was 108 around here.  That holy water must have felt great on that baby's head.  I remember 1980 when we had a whole 30 days of 100-plus temperatures.  What I don't remember was gasoline going up.  So what's the other reason?  Countries cutting back production.  Of course, why is that even an issue when Texas and Alaska could take care of our energy needs?  Why are we suddenly depending on countries for one drop of oil?  The answer is the Biden administration listening to the climate-change fanatics who want to attack the problem by having American families paying more for energy.

And Chicago, and Houston, and Portland, and San Francisco, and St. Louis, and New Orleans, and Baltimore, and Philadelphia.
How the Left's is turning New York into a crime-ravaged, drug-infested nightmare.  Give us pizza or give us death!' So chanted New Yorker Scott LoBaido a few weeks ago in downtown Manhattan before he started hurling large slices of pizza over the gates of New York's City Hall.  LoBaido, a conservative artist and activist, was staging a lone and eccentric protest against a new green crackdown on coal and wood-fired ovens.  Opponents say it will badly hit the city's already struggling small businesses — particularly its iconic pizzerias — which face paying tens of thousands of dollars to install oven filters that must be regularly inspected. [...] The city is suffering a crime epidemic so bad even ice cream and laundry detergent are security- tagged in shops, and endless anti-business measures are driving down earnings, but politicians appear more preoccupied by the culture wars: woke causes and green issues, such as air pollution.  Yet for all the concern about air quality, the authorities have only themselves to blame for the all-pervasive stench of contraband weed on its streets, a consequence of officials' disastrous tinkering with cannabis legalisation on the grounds of 'racial equity', which has led to the proliferation of 1,400 illicit marijuana shops.

In the Name of Climate Change:  Travel Restrictions and the Great Reset.  If you experienced unprecedented delays during air travel this summer, the airlines likely blamed it on the weather.  You might have been surprised, for bad weather wasn't reported in the news.  But here is what should surprise and shock you even more.  The real reason — a shortage of pilots and air traffic controllers (ATCs) — is linked to the Great Reset, the agenda to control people and restrict freedom conceived by the global elite and being implemented through leftist groups and their sympathizers.  It is now well known that Klaus Schwab, chief of the elitist World Economic Forum (WEF), set the Great Reset in motion during the pandemic, calling it an opportunity to "reflect, reimagine, and reset the world." The COVID lockdown also connects to the story of the recent flight delays, because it was during the pandemic that travel restrictions were imposed worldwide and pilots and ATCs were laid off.

Liberalism Is a False Gospel and a Counterfeit Religion.  Liberalism is a false and counterfeit religion that is incompatible with the Judeo-Christian worldview that built the United States and much of the western world.  The year 2023 is the 100-year anniversary of J. Gresham Machen's prophetic book Christianity and Liberalism.  This book is just as accurate today as it was prophetic when he wrote it.  His central thesis 100 years ago was that liberalism is its own religion, distinct and incompatible with Christianity.  It acts as a parasite on Christianity, and can only be accurately understood as a separate and false religion.  Machen was right, of course, and the past 100 years of decline in American life bear him witness.  Search the past century across the globe and you will find scores of previously Christian nations that adopted liberalism, declined every meaningful way, and lost their faith.  Most of these Judeo-Christian nations have attempted to accommodate it rather than defeat it.

Our society's 'top brains' have gone mad — and dysfunctional politics is the result.  There's a lot of craziness in the air these days.  But for the most part it seems to be flowing from the top down, not bubbling up from the bottom.  It wasn't farmers and factory workers who came up with the idiotic COVID responses — nor was it they who originated the more or less criminal idea of conducting "gain of function" research on making dangerous viruses more dangerous.  It wasn't shopkeepers and bus drivers who thought the way to deal with burgeoning urban crime was to get rid of police and release criminals without bail.  It hasn't been landscapers and auto mechanics championing the notion that a child in the single-digit age range can make a lifetime choice about his or her genitalia or maintaining that even criticizing that idea is itself a species of "violence."  Ordinary Americans haven't been claiming the way to promote free speech is to censor people or the way to end racism is to classify everyone by race and consequently treat them differently.

The GOP Death Wish.  The American economy is in freefall.  Our borders are wide open to taxpayer-funded freeloaders and criminals, cities are ridden with crime, filth, drugs, and homelessness.  America is needlessly pushing a hot war with the largest nuclear power in the world.  Our children are being trafficked or indoctrinated with woke sexual and gender deviancy.  Republicans are either silent or playing along.  There is little difference between the DNC and GOP on so many core issues, making the GOP increasingly irrelevant as a political party.  Instead, we are ruled by a uniparty, unified in its goal of self-enrichment and power, with little regard to the well-being of America or the wishes of American voters.  What's the solution?

Toronto principal killed himself after being singled out during DEI training.  This story was already being cited as cause for concern about corporate DEI training even before last week when it took an even darker turn.  Earlier this month the National Post reported that retired Toronto principal Richard Bilkszto was suing the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) over the treatment he received during diversity training sessions. [...] So this training is routine in Canada but what wasn't routine was Bilkszto's reaction.  Instead of going along with it, he stood up to the trainer.  And that quickly resulted in him being told to shut up and sit down because he was white.

Will the European Union Devolve into a Group of Third-World Countries?  For the past 30 years, politicians throughout the E.U. kowtowed to the green parties and eco-terrorists in their countries by declaring war on the carbon atom and the hydrocarbon bond based on the fraudulent man-made global warming hypothesis.  Many politicians in Europe joined the global warming chorus with full-throated support; it assumed the element of noblesse oblige.  In 2018, British prime minister Theresa May stated: "There is a clear moral imperative for developed economies like the U.K. to help those around the world who stand to lose most from the consequences of man-made climate change."  The implication from the prime minister's remarks:  those who don't support the fraudulent hypothesis are immoral.  Today, energy costs in the U.K. have trebled from just two years ago, and rampant inflation throughout the E.U. is at a level not seen since the 1970s.  The price advantage manufacturers once enjoyed in international markets is gone, in the process smashing the continent's once-harmonious labor relations as unions throughout the E.U. in every economic sector from transportation to manufacturing to health care strike for higher wages to offset higher energy and food costs.

Democrats whine about Con Ed hikes caused by their own dumb policies.  Better sit down before you open your next Con Ed bill:  Rates are set to soar, starting next month — and double over the next two years.  If you're a progressive, you can't complain.  What did you think would happen, based on your anti-fossil-fuel, big-spending, anti-business agenda?  On Thursday, the state's Public Service Commission OK'd hikes of 9.1% for electricity and 8.4% for gas, starting in August, along with additional jumps though 2025.  At that point, typical bills will have doubled, from about $70 a month to $140 — or an extra $840 a year.

The Editor says...
Maybe electric cars aren't such a great idea after all.  Maybe it's not a good idea to eliminate coal-fired power plants.  Maybe your windmills will stop on the hottest day of the summer, or freeze on the coldest day.  Maybe your solar panels won't work at night — oh wait, that's a certainty.

The imposition of transgender madness: The bottom-up approach.  The astounding speed with which a delusional fantasy has been imposed on society — that people can become the opposite sex simply by saying so — requires explanation.  This obliteration of nature's (and God's) most fundamental truth of our lives and the resultant diminishing of the reproduction of our species clearly vectors toward societal and civilizational collapse.  It destroys fertility when surgical and chemical interventions are used, and this dooms the society successfully targeted to decline relative to the rest of the world unaffected by the craze.  (Have you heard about transgenderism spreading in Russia and China?)  The indoctrination of young children into the ideology means that even among those whose bodies are not mutilated or poisoned, the post-adolescent sexual attraction and bonding necessary for the population to remain stable is diminished.  So far, the strategy to impose this on American society has been top-down in nature.  The educational system, from preschool through grad school, has largely been captured by the left, and their bureaucrats and teachers have often eagerly acted as indoctrinators and enforcers.

Austin Is Quickly Turning Into A Blue City [...] With High Levels Of Violence.  These are common scenes particularly over the weekends in Austin Texas with brawls and violence all over the downtown area as people get drunk at the clubs.  The last Republican mayor In Austin was way back in the mid 80s.  [Video clip]

Salesforce CEO Warns San Francisco's Downtown [is] "Never Going Back To The Way It Was".  San Francisco is a 'hellhole' that epitomizes everything wrong with how progressives govern cities.  That's because Democrats in City Hall believe that most criminals are victims — don't arrest them — which allows for open-air drug markets, homelessness, and violent crime to thrive.  Due to failed social justice reform policies, the business conditions in downtown San Francisco have become challenging.  Furthermore, the ongoing structural decline in demand for office space has thwarted any potential economic recovery in the area.  [Tweet with video clip]  Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce, the city's largest employer and anchor tenant in its tallest skyscraper, understands the metro area is in trouble.

How does the city bounce back from this?  One of the enduring mysteries of life is how people and societies can see disaster coming and do nothing to avoid it. [...] We are seeing this principle in real time with the collapse of cities like San Francisco and Portland.  They have been liberal bastions for so long that the idea of bucking the Democrat Party is unthinkable, no matter how bad things get.  And they are getting very very bad in both cities.  San Francisco has produced some of the most powerful politicians in California.  Off the top of my head, I can name the current governor, Gavin Newsom, the current VP, Kamala Harris, and of course Senator Diane Feinstein.  Many of the most powerful people in the legislature hail or hailed from the city, and the tradition of moving up the ladder from SF to the heights of power is ancient in political terms.  When the Democrat Party took its radical Left turn the city moved with it — led it, in fact — and the results have been disastrous.

The Classic Psychology Text That Predicted Today's Urban Decay.  It's a question that most Americans who follow the news ask themselves daily:  "How can the residents of so many of the nation's largest cities keep supporting local officials who tolerate the ongoing destruction of their communities?"  Why this May, for example, did the citizens of Chicago — a city where 21,000 students cannot demonstrate a basic competence in reading, science, and math — choose the teachers union-backed candidate, Brandon Johnson, for mayor?  Especially when Johnson's chief opponent, Paul Vallas, had promised the electorate sensible school reforms?  Why, a few years earlier, did San Franciscans elect a mayor, London Breed, whose obvious reluctance to crack down on criminal behavior has since forced the city's largest mall to close, two of its best hotels to declare bankruptcy, and tens of thousands of high-earning taxpayers to move away?  Why has there been no serious movement to get New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to initiate proceedings to remove Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who refuses prosecute "low-level" crimes, all while promising to downgrade felony charges and to decriminalize resisting police arrest?

Imploding Cities Will Drag All of Us Down.  First, a quick refresher on the compounding problems of urban areas.  Chief among them is that big cities are dark blue, and thus they've become crucibles of Left-wing policy failure.  Uncontrolled crime, roving drug and mental-illness zombies, and swarms of sanctuary-recipient asylum scammers are crowding out reasonable people and businesses.  The normals who remain to take advantage of access to cultural events (such as they are) and restaurant variety are also subject to totalitarian social controls and two-tiered justice systems that punish them when they fight back against criminals.  But no matter how desperate the situation becomes, city councils can be counted on to double down on woke policies, then double down again.  Businesses are fleeing.  In the ones that remain, shopping for basic goods has become a frustrating exercise in waiting for an associate to unlock the case so you can grab a razor and some toothpaste.  Add in today's high interest rates, which make owning and running a business prohibitively expensive, and the writing is on the wall.

Blue City Struggles With Police Officer Recruitment After Droves Of Retirements: Report.  New York City is struggling to recruit more police officers after a mass amount of experienced officials retired, according to the New York Post.  The New York Police Department's (NYPD) March officer exam far underscored the amount of applicants the department expected, with 1,300 signing up to take the test compared to the 3,000 expected, sources told the NYP.  This year's second exam, which took place on Thursday, didn't meet expectations, once again, despite incentives given by the NYPD.  "The NYPD's best recruiting tool has always been word of mouth," Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry told the NYP.  "But right now the word is, 'Stay away.'"

10 Paradigm Shifts that Shatter Establishment Illusions.  [#1] Now people understand that the left's real mission is to reject reality.  Castrating boys so that they can pretend to be girls is not "healthy."  Perpetuating racism as social policy is not "justice."  Imposing a "woke" State religion over personal conscience is not "moral."  Aiding and abetting child sex-trafficking and drug-smuggling at our borders is not "compassionate."  Stealing property is not "equitable."  Just as with Leninism and Maoism before, today's leftism is evil.

Will Someone Please Wake Me From This Nightmare?  When Joe Biden became president, America was on a solid footing, inflation was under control, we were energy independent, the price of gasoline was under $2.00, and things in America were great.  Now most of that has been undone, and nothing is being done about it. [...] While Trump was president, nearly 500 miles of wall were built and immigration was controlled.  Biden has opened the border and invited all to come, and they are coming by the millions.  When Biden became president, America was energy independent and we were even selling energy abroad.  Biden stopped construction of oil pipelines, stopped drilling on public lands, and began a campaign against fossil fuels, the very product that has made America great. [...] Under Trump there was little inflation, prices were fairly stable.  Biden has spent billions by just printing the money.  This is classic inflation and is hurting everyone with higher prices for everything from food to hardware.  This is especially true for gasoline, the price of which is also affected by the Biden energy policies.

Is the 2024 Election the Last Gasp for America?  The American economy is in freefall, Washington, D.C. is spending money we don't have.  Our borders are nonexistent with millions streaming across, many unskilled, illiterate, disease-carrying, criminal, or potential enemy combatants.  We are already engaged in World War III by proxy against the largest nuclear power in the world, for no discernable U.S. national interest other than enriching the military-industrial complex and politicians.  Social norms and traditions are out the window, where men can claim to be women just because they say so, in defiance of biology and common sense, and we must shut up, agree, as well as praise their courage.  Government has been weaponized against political opponents in the manner of the Soviet Union or East Germany, where an elite ruling class exempts itself from justice and the Constitution, while any opposition is crushed under the jackboot of a tyrannical government.  Elections are rigged, not as a conspiracy theory, but in the opinion of most Americans.

'60s Denialism: Affirmative Action's Last Ditch Defense.  [Scroll down]  Almost unnoticed, a labyrinth of soul-crushing social programs was taking root and would soon be institutionalized by the Lyndon Johnson administration under the rubric of "The Great Society."  At the time, the only person brave enough — or crazy enough — to call attention to the damage done by these programs was Johnson's undersecretary of labor (and later U.S. senator), Daniel Patrick Moynihan.  In his remarkably prescient report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," Moynihan sounded the alarm in 1965, the same year the Great Society was launched.  "The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling," Moynihan warned.  Causing the dissolution were the sundry social programs that promised women financial security on the real but rarely spoken condition that there be no married father in the household.  Until about 1960, the income gap between backs and whites was narrowing.  After 1960, with the surge in single-parent households, it began to reverse itself.

A Third of Seattle Residents Are Considering Leaving, Citing Crime and Costs.  One-third of Seattle residents are considering packing up and moving elsewhere, largely citing home prices and crime, according to a Seattle Times/Suffolk University poll conducted in June.  Roughly 33 percent of Seattle residents surveyed say they are seriously considering moving out of the city, while 67 percent say they are not.

The underlying, uncomfortable, reality at the core of America's malaise.  Massive corruption in government.  Lying by public officials.  Office holders receiving bribes.  Unjust prosecution of political opponents.  Justice meted based on political affiliation.  News and information dissemination based on allegiance to a particular world view.  Parents denied the right to mold and shape their own children and instead being forced to yield those rights to the state by law.  Forced celebration of deviant behavior with a demand for approval of same, or else.  The compromising of a once muscular military into one which is inundated with self-defeating progressive policies.  And we could go on.  The symptoms of decay noted above are occurring virtually unabated in this country right now, and in the West in general, and are directly linked to the widespread adoption of leftist ideologies.  These have been embraced by many in our institutions, public and private, and have captured the imagination of our youth.  Ironically, they represent policies that only a decade or two ago would have been scorned and reviled by those same individuals who now accept and promote them.

Energy Provider Warns of Impending 'Crisis,' 'Blackout Conditions' Driven By Biden Plans.  The U.S. faces an "impending energy crisis" as the Biden administration pursues a transition away from fossil fuels, an electricity cooperative warned Wednesday.  Moon Lake Electric Association, which serves parts of Utah and Colorado, accused President Joe Biden of being "unrealistic" in his emissions reductions goals, according to Deseret News.  "It's unrealistic and it's too ambitious," CEO Yankton Johnson reportedly said.  "They need to pull back on the throttle, pump the brake and think about what they're going to do to individuals."  Johnson's comments came after the Biden administration announced billions in investments for green energy.  The president seeks to achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035, net-zero emissions in the economy by 2050 and 50 percent of new vehicle sales being electric by 2030, according to the White House.

Let's celebrate humility.  As I reflect upon the decadence of the last several decades, I think America would be better served by a Humility Month rather than a Pride Month.  Certainly, there are some very loud voices dominating the culture right now, but no one group has cornered the market on moral decay.  We all bear some responsibility.  The shamelessness and depravity permeating our culture are on a scale far beyond that of previous generations, so we must have gone wrong somewhere.  This depravity is the result of, not the cause of, our problems.  Our misplaced priorities have led us into a snare.  One by one, the things we have given ourselves to instead of God, family, and community have hoisted the banner of pride, asserting their sovereignty over our lives.  Whether it is sports, film, music, shopping, or dining, the enterprises we have pledged our allegiance to have seized the reigns of the culture and are driving us like cattle.  Over the years, we've been seduced and manipulated to compromise our values and rationalize selfishness.  Pride turns life into a game that coerces us to abandon the essential and pursue the frivolous.  Putting points on the board becomes more important than relationships with people.

Christians, It's Time to Learn from Hamtramck, Michigan.  Every June, the LGBT movement throws a tantrum fit that would put any cranky toddler shame.  Their goal?  Acceptance and attention.  It's as if they were toting a screechy, ear-piercing megaphone for the sole purpose of shaming Americans for holding traditional values.  Of course, they enlist other mercenaries to help wage their war on god-fearing Americans — Target, Kohl's, Pet Smart, and even Cracker Barrel.  Corporations, in their zeal to be in the "in-crowd," muck up their logos, apparel, and storefronts with bright, bold, unmissable rainbows.  Public institutions hoist the Pride flag high on their poles, peddle LGBT propaganda, and deck out police cars and firetrucks in a paint box explosion of kaleidoscope colors.  This year, even the White House, in a move that should make anyone with a sense of decorum cringe, chose to display the Rainbow Flag sandwiched between two American flags in a shocking violation of the U.S. Flag Code.  And let's not forget the U.S. Airforce, which deemed it fitting to release a picture of a soldier saluting the Pride flag.  It's like we've stepped into a technicolor dream world where the queering of America is now a national priority.

Corporate America Doesn't Hear Anybody.  Obviously the Democrats don't hear the people. [...] They are complaining that Biden is not getting enough credit for bringing down inflation, inflation that he created.  Oh, and while inflation may be officially at 4%, that's only because the government doesn't include all of the things people need in their inflation calculation.  And it's still significantly higher than when Biden took office.  Nor do they include the devaluation of money which is also inflation that people must deal with.  And real wages have declined as well.

Portland Real Estate Nightmare.  [Scroll down]  Well, for a lot of people and businesses, it's too late.  Such as Kevin Howard, for whom the City of Portland refused to do anything about the homeless people breaking into his property and trashing the place.  And who then fined him because the place was trashed. [... How did this happen?]  Easy.  You let Social Justice Warriors take over your city.  This is the expected outcome.

Summertime in SoCal, and with green recycling, here come the rats, roaches, flies and maggots.  [H]ere in San Diego, where we are under a state mandate to recycle our green garbage — food scraps, food-soiled paper, and yard clippings — fresh new environmental problems are abounding.  According to local T.V. station KFMB:  ["] [...] Some people said they're concerned the waste could attract rodents and other animals.  "We understand it's something that people have to get used to and put into practice," said Director of Environmental Services Department, Renee Robertson.["]  Did I hear that right?  Did she just say we need to get used to having rats and roaches around the old middle-America ranch house now going for a million dollars on the market, with property taxes indexed to it?  I think that's what she's saying, because people are reporting problems because they use the government system.

Living in a Media World.  Our country is now divided into two numerically equivalent ideological blocs.  Not surprisingly, those in the leftist bloc have been generally impervious to what conservatives and Republicans have exposed as scandals in their camp.  And there have been lots of them.  This long train of abuses would include Hunter Biden's acceptance of bribes from foreign governments, his father's likely involvement in Hunter's influence-peddling, the Democrats' weaponization of the administrative state against both political opponents and religious Christians, the witch hunt against Trump carried out on the basis of the discredited Steele dossier, and Biden's and Hillary Clinton's scandalous treatment of classified material.  Democratic iniquities might also include promoting programs to sexualize children, the championing of LGBT and CRT indoctrination in public schools and the military, our humiliating setbacks in foreign affairs, and the sacrifice of American energy independence in pursuit of a Green New Deal benefiting Communist China.

Transgender Lawsuits Reveal Horrors of Procedures.  Kayla Lovdahl is the perfect test case as a 13-year-old who was approved for "transgender surgery:" She could not conceive, at the time, of the possibility of suffering a lifetime of disfigurement and chronic pain.  Ms. Lovdahl, now 18, has retained an attorney, Charles Limandri, who has employed such emotionally charged words as "barbaric and cruel" to describe the medical team's actions in causing his client deep physical and emotional wounds.  Essential to his case is the claim that Lovdahl was hopelessly ignorant of the statistical reality that nearly half of trans surgeries result in serious and life-threatening complications.  How can a 13-year-old grasp what it means to remove perfectly healthy breasts (in female-to-male transition)?  Sanitizing the language, Lovdahl was informed she could opt for "top" and/or "bottom surgery."  She had never heard of the term "double mastectomy" as she was wheeled into surgery for what the medical team had described as "top surgery."  Her harrowing surgical experience was spared "bottom" mutilation.

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud.  If Americans cannot trust their government to oversee free and fair elections, then what exactly can Americans trust their government to do?  To guard the country's borders from invasion?  Nope.  To enforce the law impartially and safeguard citizens and their property from violence?  Not anymore.  To vigorously defend Americans' constitutionally protected rights?  Not when the federal government attacks their free speech, freedom of religion, right to bear arms, and freedom from warrantless searches.  To maintain the monetary value of the nation's currency?  Not with reckless money-printing and spending.  To protect American sovereignty and avoid long-term foreign obligations?  Not when the U.N., WHO, and WEF rule from afar.  In every way, the federal government has failed to fulfill its principal obligations to citizens of the United States.

Biden's Economic Program is Made in China.  As reported by New York Times Magazine at the time, Joe Biden's goal was to transform the economy from the get-go: "The Biden Team Wants to Transform the Economy.  Really." Nearly two-and-a-half years later, the damage and chaos of that transformation process are obvious: continuing high inflation (especially energy, food, and gasoline prices), rising interest rates, recession predictions, a stagnant economy, depleted individual savings, sky-high credit card debt, and other indications of stagflation and recession.  Who has benefited from the Biden economy?  Green new deal grifters benefit from the gargantuan tax subsidies and federal spending on transitioning the US economy from hydrocarbon energy sources to "clean" sources, especially solar and wind energy.  The communist Chinese are happy to benefit from Biden economic policies that ultimately mandate and subsidize green products from Chinese companies at the expense of the US companies who produce and use hydrocarbons.

Resistance.  In order to get anywhere, begin any sort of resistance to the WEF, UN or WHO, one has to start with the designation, or belief by a majority of the people, that the current government is presiding over a failed state.  That determination or designation originates from an international definition.  From Britannica, it includes this paragraph:  ["]A failed state is composed of feeble and flawed institutions.  Often, the executive barely functions, while the legislature, judiciary, bureaucracy, and armed forces have lost their capacity and professional independence.  A failed state suffers from crumbling infrastructures, faltering utility supplies and educational and health facilities, and deteriorating basic human-development indicators, such as infant mortality and literacy rates.  Failed states create an environment of flourishing corruption and negative growth rates, where honest economic activity cannot flourish.["]

Did You Breathe Smoke Last Week?  This is Why.  [Scroll down]  Meanwhile, Canada has arrested dozens of fire-setters in the last few weeks, and Quebec and Alberta are running full-bore investigations.  The new Premier of Alberta was blocked from Facebook for saying so.  Not one pontificator knows what has happened to the forests since Rio and the 92 Earth Summit.  Since then the regulatory structure created by the U.N.'s FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) has been instituted all over the world.  It is a new method of forest management - "sustainable" - that throws over 1000 years of silvaculture.  A forester takes seven years of wickedly difficult education to be able to manage forests.  What the UN did was send a bunch of heavily indoctrinated, radically-undereducated hysterics into the forests - which cover one-third of the world - and proceeded to destroy them with a "no-touch" policy.

This is some of the garbage we can expect with indoctrinated kids and greedy lawyers.  These children say that their lives have been destroyed because of coal and oil so they are suing Montana. [...] Lawsuits and policies should be based on the truth and scientific facts, not on easily manipulated computer models and made up predictions which have consistently been wrong, like this lawsuit and the radical green policies which are being forced on the American people.

Trump's Indictment and the Collapse of Confidence in Our Institutions.  Before turning to the charges facing Trump, consider their larger political setting, which begins with any democratic government's most fundamental responsibilities:  preserving public order, ensuring its citizens' safety, and applying the law fairly.  The institutions charged with those responsibilities are crumbling at the local, state, and federal levels, and millions of voters on both sides of our gaping ideological spectrum know it.  Each blames the other and accepts no blame for themselves.  This collapse of public order is painfully obvious in many major cities, where violent crime, massive organized shoplifting, and homeless encampments have become dangerous facts of ordinary life.  Law-abiding citizens, the backbone of those cities, have found the quality of their lives declining.  They bear much of the blame themselves.  They elected the district attorneys who refuse to prosecute serious crimes and so encourage even more.  They elected the mayors and legislators who justify such rampant disorder under the heart-warming name of "social justice."  How do armed robberies, looting, and gang violence qualify as social justice?

This Is Your City On Democrats: Philadelphia.  Evidently it is the deepest desire of Democratic Party activists to turn the streets of American cities into needle-strewn wastelands of drug addicts openly shooting up and [defecating] on the street.  Because that's the results that the Democratic Party drug- and crime-tolerant policies create time and time again.  Here's a video of the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia.  [Video clip]

Has Atlanta Seen the Light?  It's no secret that cities take the positives and negatives of the human experience and multiply them exponentially.  Of course, we know that many of the worst tendencies we're seeing in cities today are the result of Democrats' policies.  George Soros-funded district attorneys are refusing to enforce laws and bring criminals to justice, while sanctuary city policies are bringing in illegal immigrants at the expense of law-abiding and tax-paying citizens.  Racial and political animosity that groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa brought into America's cities, short-sighted approaches to homelessness and drug addiction, and pandemic-era government intrusion did untold amounts of damage to urban areas.  The state of our cities has suffered tremendously on the heels of Democrat leadership. [...] And people are fleeing Democrat-run cities in droves.  That's a trend that's likely to continue unless the leadership in cities can get a handle on crime.

How Bad Does It Have to Get?  Murders, street crime, white-collar crime, shoplifting, trespassing, abuse of power, illegal drugs, legal drugs, illegal immigration and open borders, election-tampering, institutional decay, homelessness, illiteracy, phony racism, real racism, corrupt politicians, vengeful district attorneys, child abuse, domestic partner abuse, disregard for human life, a weakened military, the rise of authoritarianism, expanding ignorance, AI, CRT, DIE, poverty, inflation, radical environmentalism, gender fluidity, lowered standards and weakened values, flight from personal responsibility, death of the meritocracy...  the list goes on, and it's getting bigger by the day.

Radio Free America.  [Scroll down]  Woke companies like Walmart, CVS, Target, and even specialty brands like Old Navy were sucked into "doing the right thing" and building in "underserved" areas of big cities.  Now, those very same names are pulling out in droves as they count their losses in the billions, but won't mouth the reasons why as established corporations, they can't survive in buzzing districts.  The truth is obvious, but wokeism won't allow you to say that the principal causes are shoplifting, violent crime, weak or unenforced laws, and courts that return the most profligate and violent offenders for endless rounds of mayhem.

Video shows Austin's 'crown jewel' trail trashed by hidden homeless camps.  Jamie Hammonds said city policies have pushed homeless into areas where the public can't see them[.]  An Austin, Texas, resident is raising awareness of the city's homeless problem and its unseen impact on greenbelt areas.  Jamie Hammonds, an investigative filmmaker who runs the organization Documenting Austin's Streets and Homeless, or DASH, shared videos Wednesday on Twitter, showing a homeless encampment in the Violet Crown Trail after roughly a year of neglect.  "It's destroyed.  It will never be the same," Hammonds tweeted.  A real-estate agent concurred, saying the "environmental damage from these camps is immense."

San Francisco's doom loop accelerates.  The owner of 2 major San Francisco Hotels, including the city's largest hostelry, has announced that it is walking away from its mortgage on the two properties, surrendering them to the lender. [...] "Concerns over street conditions" is a delicate way of describing the takeover of much of downtown SF by drug addicts, currently termed "the unhoused" as if the main problem were high rents, when in fact the thousands of vagrants ruining the city are attracted from all over the country by the tolerance and active financial and social services support they receive.  They leave feces and urine on the streets, shooting up in front of the dwindling crowds of passers-by who have learned to avoid what was not very long ago one of the most attractive and vibrant cities in the world.  The high office vacancy rates, the lower return of workers to offices, and the reduced convention schedule that trouble Park's management are all closely related to the takeover of downtown (and other neighborhoods) by bums and junkies.

Dying San Francisco Sustains Another Massive Blow.  Not too long ago, San Francisco was still a remarkably beautiful city, although even then it could change on a dime.  One could be in the midst of a leisurely stroll down a gorgeous street filled with chic cafes, turn a corner, and find oneself without warning in the middle of a large crowd of menacing homeless drug addicts.  Now, after decades of far-Left misrule that has picked up speed in the wake of the COVID hysteria, the city's dirty, degrading, and dangerous areas are growing rapidly and taking the whole place over, and the city's remaining sane people are fleeing.  The end is near for the Golden Gate City:  the day is approaching when its ruins will bear silent witness to the ways in which Leftism destroys human societies.  In anticipation of that day, a luxury hotel chain is leaving town.

Two of San Fran's largest hotels are bailing out.  Another week and another business is pulling out of the formerly great city of San Francisco.  Well, two businesses actually, though they are owned by the same parent company.  The Hilton San Francisco Union Square Hotel is the largest in the city.  The Parc 55 Hotel is the fourth largest.  Both are owned by Park Hotels & Resorts, which is stopping payments on a massive loan for the two hotels and allowing them to go into foreclosure.  It is simply no longer safe or profitable to operate such an operation in San Francisco.  The CEO of the company described the move as a "very difficult, but necessary" decision.

Reporter Confronts KJP On Men In Women's Locker Rooms Possibly Driving Up Suicide Rates.  A White House reporter confronted White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about suicide rates increasing among young girls as school administrators allow males in women's locker rooms.  Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley suggested school administrators allowing males into women's locker rooms drives up suicide rates during a Sunday CNN town hall with Jake Tapper.  Haley said, "My daughter ran track in high school.  I don't even know how I would have that conversation with her.  How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms?  And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year.  We should be growing strong girls, confident girls."

It's Not About Politics!  Too many people still believe what we see on the news is politics as usual.  It is not.  Politics departed long ago.  What we are witnessing, what we see demonstrated everyday, is good vs. evil. [...] Normalizing homosexuality, pushing transgenderism, even celebrating them is not politics.  Hospitals operating on children, mutilating them, removing perfectly normal reproductive organs or creating faux body parts as a poor substitute is not politics.  Observing major corporations getting into politics like never before is not mere politics.  Watching these same corporations changing their wares to heighten the Left's narrative is not politics.  Major store chains selling clothing to hide genitalia to enhance the cloaking of actual gender or allowing men in women's bathrooms is not politics.  Thousands upon thousands of homeless living on sidewalks in major Democrat cities while allowing hardened criminals to prey on the innocents is not politics.  Authorizing marketing execs to destroy their brand just to normalize abnormality and then watching other companies follow suit is not politics.  Inviting drag queens to display their deviancy to children in public libraries and classrooms and then calling it 'promoting imagination' is not politics.  Finding thousands of ballots over and above the number of voters in any precinct or allowing people to vote without proving who they are is not politics.  Opening borders to millions of unvetted, unknown people from foreign countries the world over is not politics.  Giving up energy independence is not politics.  Punishing political rivals with censorship is not politics.  Spending trillions on what no one can identify is not politics.  Politicians and Deep Staters committing treasonous acts for decades without repercussion is not politics.  Permitting people to 'serve' in Congress and the presidency who are mentally incompetent or even dead is not politics.  Using 'climate change' to amass power and money is not politics.

Is America's collapse inevitable?  [Harold] Robertson gives it heft and dimension by discussing how America began to shift from a meritocracy to a diversity system in the 1960s, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  He then explains how it became embedded in American employment culture.  Of course, moving away from a system that discriminated against people based on race is a good thing.  The problem is that, thanks to how "diversity" has been interpreted, we've embraced a whole new style of discrimination.  Now, the most important characteristic a person can bring to a job is skin color, sex, and sexual orientation or "identity."  This metric, when applied across American culture, especially within the government, but with increased aggression in education and the workplace, practically ensures that the people responsible for America's public and private systems won't be the "best"; they'll just be the most "diverse."

Complex Systems Won't Survive the Competence Crisis.  At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated.  In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths.  A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people.  The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast's gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack.  Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports.  A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio.  Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off.  Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.  While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention.

Is the Sleeping Conservative Dragon Finally Waking Up?  How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us?  They don't see much backing for the current border policy and illegal immigration, yet it continues.  Conservatives feel that most Americans reject the trend of biological men dominating female sporting events.  They fear American jurisprudence has become now vastly weaponized and warped.  Certainly, former President Donald Trump will be more likely indicted by a politicized New York City prosecutor for supposedly overvaluing his net worth over a decade ago than would be a current violent street criminal clubbing a subway commuter.  In 2020 torching a federal courthouse or massing at the White House grounds, in efforts to get at the president, earned either few arrests and little or no jail time.  In 2021, if one entered the Capitol and illegally paraded around like a buffoon, he could get a five-year prison sentence.  Traditionalists feel that sky-high energy prices, out-of-control urban crime, a depressed economy, high interest rates, and a politicized FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and Pentagon are all needlessly self-created messes.  How then did these extremist policies that have little popular support become institutionalized?

The Editor says...
The sleeping dragon might wake up, but if the elections are corrupt, will it matter?

The Party's Over.  The red fascists masquerading as our Democrat political party have obliterated the home of Truman, Kennedy, and LBJ.  What remains is a shell, a Trojan Horse packed full of crazy-eyed warriors prepared at every moment to commit murder and mayhem to advance their power.  There is no polite answer to the armed killer at your door.  In too many places, the police have been depopulated and terrorized.  Our prosecutors have been emasculated and suborned.  Even our armed forces are being hollowed out and rendered unfit for combat.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.  [Scroll down]  Debauchery is an oft-recurring theme in the demise of empires.  Societies develop an abnormally immature obsession with sex.  An obsession that requires increasing deviancy to satiate coupled with concurrent abuse of children and the marginalization and exploitation of women.  Meanwhile, the use of drugs and alcohol expands exponentially.  Debauchery is a symptom of the absence of meaning in people's lives leading to the self-destruction of society and concomitantly a loss of a sense of duty and patriotism.  Other symptoms common among many empires in the last stages of decline include:
  •   Massive and growing disparities between rich and poor and an undisciplined and over-extended military.
  •   An intensification of internal political hatreds and a corresponding inability to reconcile in order to save the empire.
  •   An ever increasing level of self-serving corruption and patronage among the ruling class.
  •   A massive influx of unassimilated foreigners whose allegiance and cultural ties are with their native lands and not the host nation and who do not feel obligated to defend the empire.
  •   Severe financial and economic crises linked to the unending debasement of the currency.
  •   An ongoing and irreversible decline in monotheistic religions that emphasize self-sacrifice, temperance, a sense of duty as well as honor and integrity.
Additionally, while the decline of empires is precipitated by internal factors, the final collapse is marked by defeat at the hands of powerful external enemies.

America Is Destined for Dictatorship.  Fathers are increasingly nonexistent in the lives of kids who are routinely abused, sexually, emotionally, and otherwise, in state-run institutions.  Everybody talks about the abuse the Catholic Church has tolerated with respect to pedophile priests, but the public schools are infinitely worse.  Parents who do care enough to oppose it are tarred as domestic terrorists and targeted by the Justice Department.  Extended families exist as real connections less and less.  We're terrible at love and romance, worse at raising our children.  We have to stage organized boycotts of the Disneys and Targets of the world because organic signals from the market aren't strong enough to dissuade stupid woke corporations from bombarding us with smut.  And those who attempt to uphold timeless societal standards are derided as "culture warriors" and prudes.  The internet is covered with videos of looting, mob violence, street chaos, murder, beatings, carjackings, and other mayhem.  People break out their phones to document the horrors and earn clicks on social media rather than act to stop it.  There is no confidence in our governing institutions, and there shouldn't be.  They're mercilessly corrupt.

Arrest of Chicago 'Peacekeeper' police substitute demonstrates the folly of 'defund the police'.  A man wearing the vest of the new "Peacekeeper" corps deployed over the Memorial Day weekend, to stem the mayhem on a holiday weekend that has become an opportunity for murder tallies to soar, was arrested for a violent attack. [...] One of the many fantasies of the progressives is that there is something inherently wrong or dangerous with police.  Instead of armed police capable of using the threat of violence to restrain offenders, unarmed social worker-like alternatives can reduce violence by sympathizing with offenders and understanding the root causes of their behavior.  The Chicago Police Department's 1,700 vacancies are so catastrophic that Democrat politicians are desperate to deflect blame for their support of defund the police and anti-cop measures.  Chicago's new mayor, Brandon Johnson, ditched his former defund-the-police rhetoric during the campaign but still won't commit to adding funds to the police.

The Consequences of American Meritocracy in the Rearview.  While some differences persist between races or between sexes, the reality is, Americans of all stripes have more opportunity than virtually any place on the planet.  Indeed, black median household income in the United States ($38,800) is higher than that of every country in the world but four, while at the same time, the poorest 20% of Americans are richer on average than most Europeans.  And the "gender wage gap" is gone, too.  What's more, advancement is alive and well, demonstrated by the fact that 20% of America's richest citizens are self-made, starting their lives in poor households.  The fact that 60% of are self-made from the middle class or below shows exactly how much opportunity there is in America.  But a funny thing happened on the way to leaving stereotypes and its discrimination behind and focusing on content of character; the nation was hijacked by the party of the KKK and Jim Crow.  Suddenly, at the very moment when America had achieved something very close to a true meritocracy, the modern Democrat put its only vehicle to power, the Victim Industrial Complex, into overdrive.

How to Destroy a People.  Wokeness is not about "rights" — it is about favoritism on a colossal scale.  It is about transforming America into a Marxist totalitarian state based on a coalition of groups antagonistic to traditional American identity.  And so, ultimately, it is about destroying America as we have known it for over 200 years.  The special consideration that these groups demand comes at the expense of ordinary citizens — those decent, hardworking, family-oriented citizens who now find themselves forced to the back of the bus.  Ordinary Americans pay the higher taxes necessary to fund the privileges that marginal groups now claim; ordinary folks are expected to nod in agreement as their children are subjected to woke brainwashing; ordinary people are told they must swallow the idea that the needs of homosexuals, transgenders, transvestites, criminals, illegal aliens, environmentalist radicals, communists, atheists, and anarchists come first — in education, hiring, culture, politics, and the news.  There is little space or funding left for everyday Americans, who are told that they are less important and "outdated" and even "hate-filled" just because of their noble beliefs in Christianity, self-responsibility, decency, and goodness.

The Extensive Corruption of Morals in the USA.  [Scroll down]  Thus, we are not surprised to learn that the district attorneys of many cities, including New York, do not prosecute prostitution any longer, but treat it as a form of maladjustment to be treated therapeutically, not punished as a legal and moral wrong.  Lotteries today have invaded millions of bodegas and grocery stores.  Casinos are no longer just to be found in Nevada, as was the case in the 1950s and 1960s, but exist in states throughout the nation.  Swearing is common in corporate offices and boardrooms.  The F-word has become commonplace; when this writer worked in a corporate division of industrial engineers even in the 1990s, it was the expletive of choice.  In our era, instead of cruelty to animals, as existed in the early 19th century, we see the destruction of millions of babies, many of whom are dissected while alive in order to retrieve their body parts and sell them.

Let's Check In And See How The Largest Metropolitian Areas In The United States Are Doing.  Our largest cities are being run by progressive politicians that have been working very hard to implement extremely ambitious progressive agendas.  So how is that working out?  In this article, I am going to check in on the three largest metropolitan areas in the United States to see how they are doing.  Have they been transformed into "liberal utopias" that can serve as examples to show the rest of the world how they should be doing things?  Not exactly.  Instead, conditions have gotten really bad in each one of them and things are getting worse with each passing day.

Convicted Murderer Freed By Innocence Project Becomes Drug Dealer And Murders A Man.  Shaurn Thomas, a black man who was freed for murder in Philadelphia by the Innocence Project and given $4 million in restitution by the state, allegedly became a drug dealer upon release, killed a man for owing him a $1,200 drug debt and told his accomplice it was his "third" homicide.  Shaurn Thomas was a millionaire, but prosecutors say he killed a man over a $1,200 drug debt.  Thomas was paid more than $4 million three years ago after spending 24 years behind bars for a murder conviction that was later overturned.  [Video clip]

A new whistleblower describes the horrors of "gender-affirming care" at Texas Children's Hospital.  [Scroll down]  No.  It won't turn out well.  There's absolutely no proof that a transgender surgery will "cure" patients' depression or whatever mental health issue they're going through, which I believe is real.  We have a generation of kids with mental health problems.  It's very sad.  And we need to treat those problems correctly, not by recommending that they change genders to fix their mental health problem.  That's never worked.  It never will work.  There's no proof that it will work anywhere in the literature.  So yes, we're ruining them.  They're going to wake up in ten years and discover that they're infertile, that they can't have children, that their sexuality is completely dysfunctional.  That they can't function as a normal human being.  And ultimately, I believe that that realization is going to cause them to harm themselves — when they wake up and realize that they've already been ruined.

Manufacturing Mental Illness.  We must all understand that "transgenderism" is a mental disorder.  But not just any mental disorder.  This one is being force-fed into the minds of our children from the earliest of ages.  We are "manufacturing' mental illness.  We are creating psychopaths in the "laboratories" of our modern American culture.  There was a time when sexual predators were not allowed within 1000 yards of a school building.  But now, schools — both public and private — are inviting them in specifically to indoctrinate and groom children of all ages, even in pre-school.  Pity the one who would dare to stand against this evil — they'll be labeled as "hateful bigots," ostracized from their communities and sometimes even jailed, for daring to stand in the gap to protect children.

Things Really Are Looking Up Under Biden.  [Scroll down]  The problem is that they are all the wrong things.  Inflation, interest payments, debt, illegal immigration, labor force dropouts.  Those are all way up under Biden.  To show this, we've put together a series of charts. [...] During President Donald Trump's entire four years in office, the Consumer Price Index climbed a total of 7.3%.  In less than two-and-half-years under Biden, prices have shot up 16%.  That's not because of Putin's war.  It's not because of greedy oil companies.  It's not because cattle farmers don't have enough competition.  Nor is it because of any of the other lame excuses Biden has peddled.  The one and only reason prices are skyrocketing is Biden's $5 trillion spending spree.

The Union Is Not a Suicide Pact.  From my point of view, never have so many Americans been so consciously aware that things must change.  The federal government's response to the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks has been endless war and the construction of a national security surveillance state that now targets Americans as "domestic enemies."  Its response to mass communication through social media has been the implementation of State-sanctioned censorship.  Its response to widespread calls for border security has been mass sponsorship of illegal immigration.  Its response to Americans' rising demands for personal freedom has been COVID lockdowns, a centrally directed economy, and a declaration of war against "white supremacy."

The Cataclysm to Come.  The United States, ripped apart internally, has become ever less willing and able to lead internationally.  The doctrines that built the United States and Western civilization, assimilated from ancient cultures over thousands of years, are being methodically dissolved.  America is entering an uncharted, revolutionary time.  The foundation of American life, abundant food, energy autonomy, a sound economy, sound education at all levels, and enforceable and equal application of the law, are eroding.  Our society is "fundamentally changing," and these changes are not for the better.  Hard-left fanatics have absorbed the Democrat party and are transforming the country with woke and equality-of-result agendas.  Prosperity and leisure have misled a complacent society into thinking the modern age no longer needs to worry about law and order.

Is Sanity Returning?  I'm referring to the firestorm rejection consumers are giving to Anheuser-Busch (AB), specifically to buying and drinking Bud Lite. [...] AB's executives, Hollywood celebs, academia, TV networks, Big Media, Big Tech, most large corporations, and most government agencies have collectively decided they know what's best for you, know exactly what you need, and have proceeded to shove it down our throats while forcing their political insanity onto society.  You must hate President Trump — Check; every TV network and celebrity continually echoes that mantra.  We will teach racist ideology to your children, and you'll learn to love it — Check; Democrat-controlled school boards cram Critical Race Theory (CRT) into every school curriculum.  Demand gun control/gun confiscation — Check; every mass-shooting is not because the shooter is deranged or mentally ill; no, it's the gun's fault and Dems demand guns be confiscated.  Americans must have and support open borders to flood the country with illegals and change the voter base — Check; Biden and Dems have refused to control the border, resulting in five million (but who's counting) illegals in slightly over two years (thanks, Joe).  America needs a weakened military more focused on White rage than defeating our enemies — Check; all service branches are struggling to recruit new members.  So, given the large numbers of idiotic, woke businesses and lunatic government/military agendas, Anheuser-Busch managed to outstupid them all.  AB used a girly-man transgender to advertise Bud Lite (BL) to the average working man.

Utility Scale Solar Kills Jobs.  Does it matter that utility scale solar has a negative effect on the environment — destroying farmland, forests, wetland, recreational land?  Does it matter that property values are driven down?  Does it matter that the mining of cobalt, lithium, rare earths and copper to build solar panels and battery energy storage systems is done by slave labor in the Congo and China?

When reality hits, it will hit hard.  The work ethic has vanished in large portions of the population.  The military cannot find enough recruits.  We are now at the stage of super-saturation, with corruption, debt, and debauchery leading the list.  All this has come about due to one cause — to keep the government in power, at any cost to the people being ruled.  The impending disturbance that will bring it all crashing down cannot be precisely foretold, but that is because there are so many possible events that it is inevitable that one of them will occur.  One need only look at the headlines to see it.  Black swans abound.  Worse yet, many threats are under-reported, or distorted to conceal their true magnitude.  Is it hopeless?  The short answer is yes.  Nothing in the short term can pay off the debt, restore the work ethic, and return public morals to the levels of sanity.

All This Failure Is Deliberate.  I recently had a reader ask, "Why is Joe Biden still President?" [...] Everything Biden has done has been a disaster.  The economy is teetering.  The border is non-existent.  The banking system and the dollar are crumbling.  Our enemies are taking advantage of the weakness they perceive in the White House.  Crime is out of control in most of our once-great cities.  Traditional morality and decency are in the toilet.  Our children are being butchered and groomed for the hedonistic pleasure of a cadre of sexual deviants.  Women athletes are losing hard-earned rights because of the "transgender" movement, something that almost no one had heard of five years ago.  Government spending is without restraint and, as a result, inflation has soared, and America's middle class is being squeezed into near oblivion.  The education system continues to produce semi-literates who will do — what? — in the future.  No patriot wants to join the military anymore.  The list of Joe Biden's cataclysms is endless, but my space in this column isn't, so I mention only a few of the most egregious catastrophes this man and his ideology have foisted upon the nation.  Why is he still President indeed?

The age of manufactured crises.  This week, with the eclipsing of Title 42, the U.S. southern border has gone from a hot mess to a full-blown emergency.  We were pushed into the conflict with Ukraine and Russia as well.  Before that was the debacle in Afghanistan.  Our leaders killed drilling for oil and terminated pipeline projects which led to elevated gas prices and fueled inflation.  If inflation was a concern, you'd never notice it from our leaders.  They pumped trillions of dollars into the economy to make inflation worse (and had the gall to call it an Inflation Reduction Act.)  Even when there isn't a crisis, the current administration creates one.  For example, claiming gun violence and trans-oppression are national emergencies.  You can almost hear them, "Let's make loans easier for people with bad credit ratings," which is destined to ignite a housing crisis down the road.  If that isn't enough, looming on the horizon is a Taiwan crisis, the Sudan, and perhaps an incident or two with North Korea.  Rather than get in front of an issue and calm it, actions are taken (or not taken) to ensure that problems are allowed to fester and explode.

Liberals sure like dead black men.  We are a nation led by a party that is bent on destruction.  On the West Coast, Democrats are destroying dams in the name of nature.  Elsewhere, they are destroying nuclear plants in the name of safety.  They are destroying coal plants in the name of global warming.  They are destroying sections of interstates in the name of racism.  Black men kill black men by the thousand each year.  Liberals ignore those actual murders.  Instead, they turn the media spotlight on the very rare occasion when a black man dies at the hands of a white person.  The murkier the details, the louder liberals screech.  Liberals are playing America.  When President Obama said if he had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin, he created this monster we still grapple nearly a decade later.  Martin was beating George Zimmerman's head against a sidewalk when the victim pulled his gun and killed his assailant.  The death of another teen thug, Michael D. Brown, gave libs an excuse to destroy Ferguson, Missouri, a quiet suburb that black people used to escape St. Louis.  The list goes on, ending in the overdose death of George Floyd while in police custody.  Liberals used their rationalization to destroy cities.

Never-ending Daycare as a Way of Life.  Teenagers today would not survive in that world where there were no cellphones, Internet, constant entertainment and "safe spaces."  I have never heard the term "safe" as much as I have heard over the last couple years.  The world is not safe regardless of how anyone perceives it.  For those who hold this perception as true, I suggest going to a foreign country and experiencing how different America truly is. [...] What happened?  We, as a group, decided to get soft.  Technology has provided an environment where one can live an easy and soft life.  We subconsciously agreed to not let anything bad happen to our children.  Everyone won and everyone was told they were the best.  Even when they weren't even close.  This fiction twisted our American youth with no non-painful remedy.  We sent these kids out into the world with a distorted view that everything was going to go their way and when it did not it was acceptable to throw a temper tantrum and blame others.

What Have We Learned?  We've learned that white liberals will ignore crime stats and sacrifice their kids to black bullies simply to show the world how "not racist" they are.  They will take a useless/dangerous shot — and, astonishingly, give it to their kids — to avoid being called a "conservative."  Libs will cheer for an obese, mentally ill man when he dons a dress and beats their daughter in a "beauty" pageant.  Progressives don't see a problem with turning adult males with Down Syndrome into drag queens.  They will ignore any news that doesn't come from a state-sanctioned news source, lest they be called a "conspiracy theorist."  Liberals will dutifully prove they aren't "transphobic" by applauding — extra loudly — as a bearded lady steals their daughter's place on the college swim team.  Kids of liberals seem to pay the high price of mommy signaling her "virtue" to the world.

The Impending Thermidor Reaction in Jacobin America.  [Scroll down]  So, the world became topsy-turvy.  Throwing a firebomb into a police-occupied patrol car earned a light sentence, while protesting illegally at the Capitol won a decade in prison.  An American who did not get vaccinated was to be thrown out of the U.S. military; an illegal alien crossing the border unlawfully without a vaccination might earn a free phone and free lodging in a big-city hotel.  The more the government printed money it did not have, the more the country was slandered as cruel and mean to its underclass.  The more standards were dropped for admission, hiring, promotion, and retention, the more employers were deemed unfair and bigoted.

American Despotism.  Democratic long-term rule over cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago shows the country's trajectory.  Gentrifying cosmopolitans drive out middle-class voters with high rents and plan tent cities of drug users and street defecators.  Homicides in major cities rose 44 percent from 2019-20, another 5 percent from 2020-21.  Nationwide they rose 30 percent, a 60-year high.  Even as the homeless filled cities like Los Angeles, the elites welcomed in millions more illegal immigrants, who bring the Mexican drug cartels' wars with them.  As Houston reported skyrocketing homicides, the Harris County sheriff reminded deputies to share their personal pronouns in introductions.  No longer prosecuting property theft, cities like Dallas and San Fran- cisco released criminals from prison to terrorize the public and only enforced violations on citizens who could pay fines.  The city of Chicago decided not to prosecute gangsters involved in a deadly public shoot-out because they were engaged in "mutual combat."

A Grand Alliance to Overcome the Elite Betrayal of America.  For the first time in history, the ruling class of a powerful nation has abandoned its fellow citizens.  What is happening in America today is more than a return to feudalism, although the new economic model into which we're being herded is correctly compared to feudalism.  The reality is actually much worse: America's elites view ordinary citizens as no longer necessary.  Because of globalism, they are replaceable.  Because of automation, they are superfluous.  Because of environmentalism, they are unsustainable.  These factors explain what is otherwise inexplicable: Constitutional conservatives and Christians, and the values they profess, are now stigmatized by establishment institutions as often, if not more often, than they are praised.  Nationalism and religious faith empower individuals and communities to resist a ruling class that has abandoned them.  That makes them a threat.  They recognize that the ideology of America's ruling elites is itself leading to disaster.  They recognize that America's elites have decided the nation's middle class is disposable, and this is the real reason they are pushing an agenda of woke degeneracy and extreme environmentalism, designed to lower birthrates and reduce standards of living.

Why do liberals support legislation that obviously harms them?  The reality is that the U.S. economy is hardly growing, inflation is still at more than 5%, and the Chinese are arming rapidly while America's defense budget shrinks in real terms.  Biden's progressive policies have set us on a course of self-destruction.  Everyday life is noticeably worse than it was when Biden took office, what with lower real wages, supply chain shortages, higher taxes (many of them hidden from view, like the 1% tax on share buybacks that, in effect, constitute a wealth tax on investors and retirees), weakness overseas, and a weakening dollar.  Every visit to the grocery reveals the misery spreading across America: there are fewer shoppers, each of them purchasing less.  Even such a successful and well run company as Kroger saw fourth-quarter 2022 results decline from 2021 with EPS of 0.62 vs. 0.75 and gross margins decline.  Layoffs are mounting in the tech sector and other industries, and banks have become more selective in making and renewing loans.  The office rental market is hard pressed, and, on top of declines in 2022, home builders are "on the verge of a steeper downturn as buyers pull back."  America is headed toward self-destruction, yet almost half of Democrats want Biden to run again.

Your favorite snacks really ARE shrinking.  If you've picked up a bag of Doritos recently and thought it had less chips in it, you're not going crazy.  Some of America's favorite snacks have shrunk by up to 20 percent in the last 25 years as companies cost-cut amid rising inflation, a move dubbed 'shrinkflation'.  It is not just chips.  Fast food, cereals, soda, ice cream and dressings have all been kept at the same price or even made more expensive despite shrinking in size.

The 2024 Presidential Election.  America is at a tipping point.  Will we continue the downward spiral into a fascist third-world dictatorship?  Can we change course back to a constitutional republic that values the free will of men and women, freedom of speech and assembly, the rule of law, and equal justice?  Already in the descent to an authoritarian state, free speech is suppressed and thought is censored and replaced by Orwellian New Speak enforced by the thought police.  The free press is transformed into shameless state-run propaganda outlets that run the approved false narrative of the day.  The state takes guns away under the guise of public safety.  The thought enforcers of the state supersede local control of the police.  Scapegoats are created.  Yes, the evil of the 1930s is again rising.

Modern day brown shirts.  Goal #15 of the CPUSA, which was read into the Congressional Record in 1963, stated:  "Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States."  Some of the other listed CPUSA goals that have been not-so-coincidentally pursued by radical Democrat Party activists over the past several decades include:
  •   Infiltrate the press.
  •   Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
  •   Get control of the schools.
  •   Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity.
  •   Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity (now to include "transsexualism") as "normal, natural, healthy."
We have all been sleeping while the radical Left — the militant arm of the Democrat Party — has achieved most of these objectives over the past 50 years!  All of this nonsense has been normalized to our collective detriment.

The Disposable Biden.  By any national metric, we're all far worse off now than we were before Biden stumbled through the doors of the Oval Office like a lobotomized polio victim.  His "stiff gait" is an indicator of serious neurological decline which has become a brand of sorts.  It's Biden's version of Trump's rambunctious mane.  But, instead of signaling a raucous virility, Biden's halting and unbalanced gate communicates fundamental weakness and morbidity.  The leader of the free world?  How about sock puppet? [...] Our institutions have been poisoned by feckless, political appointees.  But, the watershed moment in deep state corruption manifested itself when Barack Obama sauntered into the White House, and Karl Marx followed with him.  Every apparatus of deep state power fell under the full control of left wing radicals, installed by the Obama administration — a phalanx of unelected officials that still occupy key positions today.

The truth about morality.  The birth-control pill helped to reduce the stigma of losing one's virginity before marriage.  This, in turn, indirectly reduced the stigma of premarital pregnancy.  This, in turn, reduced the perceived need for the birth control pill.  Once the initial phase of these events had occurred, the floodgates were opened, and what quickly followed was what is called, the sexual revolution.  This revolution was supposed to have freed women from the injustice of sexual repression.  Instead, it led to millions of women becoming pregnant and abandoned, left on their own, to raise their fatherless children.  Many of them were, as a result, raised in poverty and amid crime.  The welfare state sought to correct this mistake by subsidizing single motherhood.  This, in turn, predictably increased what it subsidized.  Today, the harm wrought by the abandonment of sexual morality has left us with a society that cannot even recognize the good and natural differences between the sexes, even to the point of denying that there are two complementary sexes, and certainly denying that they are a naturally ordained partnership, one without which, society suffers consequences so pervasive that many people call them good.

The real surprise here is that New York City still has tourists!
New York City is starting to smell like dirty bong water, disgusting even the tourists.  [Scroll down]  The bottom line here is that the failure to enforce pot laws and the decriminalization of marijuana use inevitably leads to public consumption and a lot of bums whose lives revolve around pot-smoking as a lifestyle choice, camping out on the streets.  The link between homeless encampments and pot smoking is very strong.  The failure to clear those encampments or enforce any laws against petty crime means lots more pot stench to breathe in.  The other issue is that excessive pot-smoking is linked to a lot of crime.  Medical studies have shown that pot-smoking in young men with genetic vulnerabilities, is connected to the emergence of schizophrenia.  Many schizophreniacs commit hard, impulsive violent crimes.  Virtually all mass shooters are prodigious pot consumers.  Pot consumption is a part of this whole dysfunctional picture.

America's Transgender Craze.  Future historians may look back on 2023 as Peak Trans Women insanity. [...] Who can forget the mediocre male swimmier Lia Thomas winning swimming championships as a female?  Meanwhile, a trans weightlifter will even compete in the upcoming Olympics and do so as a woman.  A transgendered athlete recently defeated 14,000 female competitors in the London marathon.  Far less publicized is that state prisons now contain 5000 men who identify as women while some 1300 are inmates of federal prisons.  What is going on?  Is America experiencing a mass psychosis where men wake up as "women" and demand to be treated as females?  Has our water supply been massively contaminated by estrogen?  Or are we just experiencing a harmless fad like purple hair?  This men-becoming-women trend is the other side of what occurred decades back as women increasingly moved into traditional male fields.

A Woman by Any Other Name is Still a Woman.  A famous line from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet", meaning that things are what they are, regardless of what you choose to name them.  This is why modern man uses language to precisely define people, places, and things, irrespective of how we might feel about said things.  The same can be applied to men and women, or boys and girls.  They are what they are, regardless of how we choose to name them.  Such thinking was common sense for centuries, but now in our post-enlightenment culture, accepted descriptors are somehow verboten, requiring a new language with cumbersome verbosity replacing simple one or two syllable words.

Feminism's Strange Trans Fruit.  Leaving the fight against the trans movement, specifically the men who demand that we all play along with their supposedly feminine identities, entirely up to women would relinquishing to feminists (and their many male allies and puppetmasters) exactly what they want.  They want it to be impossible for the public to see a distinction between feminist and woman, as if all females are enthusiastic participants in a feminist Borg collective.  In fact, one of the most potent tools of feminism in recent decades has been to say "Women need X" when the truth is that feminists want X and don't care what the rest of women actually want.  This conceals feminists' actual, far smaller numbers.

It's Never Been About Tucker, Trump, or Fox News.  America is going to hell in a handbasket.  Not in the surreal world created by TV and social media, but in the real world.  A civilizational inferno has engulfed America and the people we've elected to fight it have done nothing of substance to contain it.  We're not dealing with people who merely disagree on how to put the fire out.  We're dealing with political pyromaniacs who set the fires, watch them burn, and work to stop anyone who tries to put them out.  They're facilitating illegal immigration, weaponizing government, redefining crime and punishment, changing the definition of inflation to spend more, corrupting our election system, cheering and funding a tyrannical gender revolution, and butchering history to institutionalize a cultish gospel of black victimhood.

The Greatest Threat to America.  America has recently witnessed an assault on freedom of speech, watched the White House send condolences to the trans community after one of its members murdered innocent children at a Christian school, and learned of a proposed tax plan that would hurt the finances of millions of Americans by adding four trillion dollars in new taxes.  But perhaps most indicative of a threat from within, this administration has ushered in a period of unprecedented domestic chaos by attempting to forcefully vaccinate citizens, prioritize DEI over equality and common sense, and crater military enlistment by promoting wokeness.  Every administration presides over some level of disagreement on issues amongst the general public, but nothing compares to the confusion they are causing young American children to endure, especially during such a crucial time in life for a child's development.  All these problems will have a devastating impact on America's long-term future if not stopped dead in their tracks.

The Ruling Class's Stalinist Purge.  Whenever human dignity is pushed to the shadows because agents of the State bully and taunt those with character, evil grows.  Whenever individuals are forced to betray their consciences to save loved ones from wretched fates, evil grows.  Whenever government institutions demand reverence for lies while blaspheming religious truth, evil grows.  Whenever people are punished for their beliefs, ostracized for their dissent, or purged from the public square, evil grows.

Insanity is being normalized.  Imagine waiting for all the possible information about the food on your plate and waiting to eat until it is all processed and discovered.  You would simply starve to death and die.  So you eat, based upon the experience that broccoli and prime rib will sustain you.  A nice glass of wine (which one day is, one day isn't, and a third day is supposed to be good for you) is a nice touch as well.  We just act because we must, based on common sense.  You work with what you have and what you know and make the best decisions possible.  It's how we must navigate the world.  So what happens when you dump something like "critical theory" into everything?  The whole point of critical theory is to take simple and understood concepts and turn them into a jumble of gobbledygook in which your normal understanding of what things are and how things work into a total mess.  That mess is created, actually, with a purpose.  That purpose is that we are subjected to a tyranny of those who claim to be in the know about the real state of the world, and the means is destroying your heuristic.  Your understanding of how the world works becomes destroyed.  It is paralyzing.

Murders jumped 10% since 2021 in major Democrat-led US cities thanks to soft-on-crime policies: study.  The murder rates in major US Cities have soared more than 10% in the past two years — with most homicides occurring in Democratic areas with soft-on-crime policies.  In a study released by WalletHub Wednesday, researchers found that Memphis, Tennesse; New Orleans, Louisana; Richmond, Virginia; Washington, DC; and Detroit, Michigan are suffering from the biggest homicide rate problems.  All five cities are led by left-wing mayors.  After comparing the rise in murder rates in 45 of the country's most populated cities between 2021 and 2023, scholars noticed that killings were rising faster in Democrat-led cities than in their Republican counterparts.  Though the Covid-19 pandemic can be blamed for the initial jump in homicides, scholars theorized that soft-on-crime policing has exacerbated the issue in progressive cities.

Adolescent Menopause In Autistic Girls: Is This What We Really Want?  When an adolescent girl claims she is really a boy in the wrong body, these are safe assumptions:
  •   She is likely to be on the autism spectrum and experiencing difficulties associated with that condition.
  •   She is likely to have engaged in suicidal or self-harm ideation.
  •   She is likely suffering from other issues like sexual trauma, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.
  •   She is likely already in the throes of puberty — physiologically, mentally, socially, and spiritually — and absolutely miserable.
Puberty blockers will stop bone and breast development, may leave a girl short and stunted for life, and will put a girl into menopause, adding tortuous suffering on top of everything she's already experiencing with puberty and her teen years.

Biden's theme is "finish the job."  Have you seen the job thus far?  What's happened to the economy under Biden's policies?  Despite the glowing reviews from the White House press briefing lectern, real wages have gone down, not up.  Income levels are down and people have drained their savings trying to keep up with rising prices.  All of that was directly driven by inflation which has remained at or above 5% for almost all of the Biden presidency.  And that inflation was a direct result of the trillions of dollars in imaginary money that was pumped into the system in the name of "stimulus."  None of this is any sort of partisan politicking or hyperbole.  The figures are all out there for everyone to see.  And then there's the situation that started on the southern border almost immediately after Joe Biden issued his first executive orders.  They don't call it the Biden Border Crisis for nothing.  We are now up to more than 6.3 million illegal immigrants that have invaded the country since January 2021.

The great sorting that's taking place in America.  [Scroll down]  Lastly, of course, there was the leftists' highly political response to COVID, which divided liberty lovers from those with totalitarian instincts.  At this point, many conservatives want nothing to do with the GOP.  All these trends have accelerated under Biden and are exploding at a rate that is impossible for Americans to ignore, whether in terms of border security, economic policies, national security, military readiness or, most significantly, the transformation of America's very fabric (racial, sexual, the family unit, etc.).  No wonder, then, that we're experiencing a Great Sorting. [...] What's also a sea change is the way in which the COVID experience shook Americans' faith in science and medicine, in public schools, and in academia.  That support was normative in the 20th century.  These changes are accelerating.

My Monday rant on saving civilization.  Justice, to the Left, means people destroying things, stealing things, committing violence, and tossing people out of the public and economic square.  Creating inflation in order to eliminate the middle class.  [Tweet]  We live in a society now where killing babies and old people is considered a positive good, and paying people not to work in the midst of a huge labor shortage is considered just.  Where performing sterilization on children before they even reach puberty is to be celebrated.  In Minnesota, in just one day, the Minnesota Senate passed 3 bills that shock the conscience:  banning so-called conversion therapy for transgender people, which is just giving counseling to troubled youth and not a cult reprogramming as implied; making Minnesota an abortion sanctuary where non-custodial parents can take their children for "care;" and the same "sanctuary" law that allows such parents to get "gender-affirming" care for children despite not having custody rights and violating court orders.  The Democrats cheered and clapped after they passed all 3 bills.  This is their vision of a just society.  It is, literally, evil.  The intentional destruction of our society.

RFK Jr.  Says Middle Class Was 'Systematically' Wiped Out by COVID-19 Lockdowns.  Democratic 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said COVID-19 lockdowns across the United States decimated the middle class, suggesting that it has yet to recover.  "The strength of a nation comes from a strong economy and a vibrant middle class," Kennedy told Fox News over the weekend, "and we have wiped out the middle class in the country systematically."  The 69-year-old, who is a prominent skeptic of vaccines, stated that COVID-19-related policies benefited the elite ruling class at the cost of the middle class.  Those lockdowns, he asserted, shifted $4 trillion in wealth from the middle class to a "new aristocracy of billionaires."  Those lockdowns "created 500 new billionaires," Kennedy stated.  "The Oxfam report, which came out this week, shows that the billionaires that existed at the beginning of the pandemic, the people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeffrey Bezos, Bloomberg, etc., increased their wealth by 30 percent during the pandemic.  From the lockdowns.  And [Bezos's] Amazon got to shut down all of its competitors."

Eric Adams: New York City Is Being 'Destroyed' by President Joe Biden's Migrant Crisis.  New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) said New York City is being "destroyed" by President Joe Biden's migrant crisis during a panel discussion in Washington, DC, hosted by the African American Mayors Association.  "The city is being destroyed by the migrant crisis," Adams bluntly stated. [...] Adams seemingly took a shot at other New York City officials, accusing them of not fighting hard enough to get federal resources to the city.

The Editor says...
Does the mayor think New York City is the only place that's being affected?  Has he changed his mind about the wide-open Mexican border?  Why is more federal spending the answer to every problem?

Marijuana: One Problem After Another.  Last month, Oklahoma voters rejected the legalization of recreational marijuana.  Hopefully, this means the word about all the problems associated with marijuana use is getting around.  In New York City, licenses for legal pot shops have been slow in coming so illegal shops have proliferated, leading to the sale of illegal drugs and attracting more than 500 violent robberies last year alone.  Mayor Eric Adams noted there are as many as 1,500 of these illegal shops in the City.  They open near schools and target kids. "We are losing our grip," he said.  Licensed shops also target kids with candy-flavored gummies and other cannabis products.  It's Joe Camel all over again.  Legalized marijuana is also a factor in Colorado's rising crime rates.  It attracted criminals to the state initially, and now the homeless and others are committing armed robbery and burglary to get the money to buy marijuana.  The same pattern is playing out in other states.  Legalizing marijuana was supposed to reduce crime but, instead, the illegal drug market has mushroomed and violence has increased.

Austin Has Turned Into Another Liberal Hellhole.  Massive spikes in crime, violence, and homelessness thanks to the city being run by liberals have put Austin on the fast track to becoming the next leftist statistic.  [Video clip]

A Lesson in Corporate Wokeness: The Disaster After Making Aunt Jemima a Pariah.  In 2020, amid the Black Lives Matter upheaval seen across the country, companies were bending the knee on a regular basis.  Many brands and corporations came out with statements and pledges about altering their practices and evolving their corporate structures, with "diversity" being thrown about in their mea culpa.  Of course, lost in these self-congratulatory announcements was the unspoken admission they did not realize they were making:  If you are promising to no longer be "racist," that means you are stating you had previously been a racist company.  In the flurry of these Wall Street struggle sessions was a number of brands eradicating their corporate mascots that could be interpreted as racially insensitive.  Uncle Ben has disappeared from boxes of rice.  Land O'Lakes removed the famed Native American woman from its boxes, leaving the land and lakes on its packaging.  Joining these dispatched designs was the classic breakfast staple brand Aunt Jemima.

New York City is Discovering that Legalizing Marijuana Wasn't Really a Great Idea.  Decriminalizing marijuana, we've been told to the point of stupor for years, would simply be a matter of recognizing the way society has changed and coming to a mature accommodation of a widespread current practice.  It would free up valuable police resources to deal with actual crimes and real criminals, and end a longstanding injustice in which — you guessed it! — people of color were, we were told, disproportionately targeted for arrest and prosecution.  So the state of New York has legalized marijuana, and how's it going?  Doritos and Patchouli oil sales through the roof?  Maybe.  But there have been a lot of unexpected downsides.

DIE Means the Death of Military Professionalism.  Since 2018, from record highs at the end of last century and into the post-9/11 era, positive civilian impressions of the military plummeted.  This decreased trust is, in no small measure, due to bipartisan public perceptions of a politicized military from both the left and right.  A 2022 Ronald Reagan Institute survey noted that half of respondents attributed military politicization to a "woke" agenda.  It is a sentiment certainly shared by some in civilian leadership and many current military members and veterans.  The Reagan Institute polling does not define "woke."  Ipsos polling, however, suggests that the meaning of "woke" can be fluid.  Although "woke" may have different definitions, for many, it is associated prominently with Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE).

Your Doctor Asking For Your Pronouns Isn't Just Annoying, It's A Sign Of The Industry's Decline.  Last summer, I went to establish care at a new doctor's office.  My beloved pediatrician, one of the few true family doctors left in the industry, had once kindly offered to keep seeing me until I have my own children, but I was in the midst of a post-college move, and that was no longer feasible.  So I found myself in a waiting room wading through the moat of new-patient forms that stand between patients and doctors all across America.  As many of those forms now do, this one wanted to know not only my sexual orientation and sex, but also the so-called gender I was "assigned at birth," whether I identified as transgender, and my preferred pronouns.  As if that weren't enough, when the nurse walked me back into the doctor's office, she proceeded to ask me the same questions again.  I might have pointed out that I'd already had to endure this interrogation once — I know I made a face.  Looking back, I wish I'd thought fast enough to remind her that sex is an immutable characteristic that is neither "assigned" nor "reassigned," but I was just ready to get out of there.  Needless to say, I never went back.  A colleague of mine had a similar experience filling out an online form for his daughter's upcoming medical visit.  After spending 20 minutes trying unsuccessfully to click "submit," he realized that while he'd already selected "female" under the tab for "gender," there was a small, separate box he had overlooked labeled "sex" where he had to select "female" again.  Plenty of patients have been forced to jump through hoops like these.

The War on Pronouns is Really a War on Language.  One recent example I noticed was linked by msn.com and included the headline, "Non-Binary Ex-Biden Staffer Sam Brinton's Family Calls Them A Liar, Claims Their Abuse Story Never Happened."  The headline is incomprehensible by traditional rules of grammar.  The reader would not know who is meant by "Them" and "Their."  Even if we are familiar with Sam Brinton and his story, we would not know what people his family calls "a liar."  The plural words tell us that there are multiple third parties that Brinton's family accuses.  We are misled and distracted by those plural pronouns.  An innocent reader would not have concluded that Brinton, himself, is the real target unless the reader undertook the process of clicking on the link and reading the article.  The reader would then have to remember the new mandate that requires us to misread plural pronouns as applicable to single people — as the individual subject's whim dictates.  Singular is now plural.  Plural is now singular.  Words have no meaning.

Welcome to the cornfield.  [Scroll down]  To lift that fog it is crucial that the language that allows it to occur be fought at every opportunity — and we can start with refusing to allow a few undeniably false and manipulative terms that have entered the societal conversation to be used as cudgels for the progressive/woke/equitarian power and manipulation complex.  Misinformation, denialism, disinformation, malinformation, trigger, safe space, equity, systemic, existential, intersectionality, zero anything, toxic, cis, they, zir, anything-ist, anything-ism, and on and on and on — all these words and terms are used to distort meaning, undermine objective facts, and purposefully use a devious combination of familiarity and confusion to lead society down a path it would never even consider if it could truly and immediately decipher their impact.

When Did the U.S. Become East Germany?  How long will it be before dissent is criminalized in this country?  Mothers and fathers are being stripped of their parental rights, and children are being told to be the functionaries of government.  The Sanderses and AOCs would love nothing more than to elist them to spy on their families and report their involvement in disinformation, misinformation, and "anti-government" activities.  Wealth redistribution schemes are disguised as green policies.  Our retail shelves have in recent times looked like the bare counters of communist East Berlin.  We're told that we have to make do with less, and fewer choices are in our best interest.  Our economy would be full-on GDR-ed if the Sanderses and Ocasio-Cortezes had their way.  The left is unrelenting in its ambition to take more of the economy out of the private sector and place it in the hands of elected Democrats and administrative tyrants.

Can We Do Anything About America's Decline?  Twenty-first-century America was on a trajectory of gradual decline — until it began to implode.  Was the accelerant the COVID-19 pandemic and unhinged lockdowns?  Or was the catalyst the woke revolution fueled by the 2020 summer of exempted rioting, looting, arson, and violence?  Or was it perhaps the deranged fixation on removing Donald Trump from the presidency and destroying the rule of law in the process?  Or all that and more?  Now with the election of Joe Biden, what had been a fast-tracked decline has accelerated at such an astonishing rate we can scarcely recognize our country. [...] America is in a similar position to where it was in 1861, 1929, 1941, and 1968 — only perhaps worse, given in all those cases, there was at least a president and Congress that identified and reacted to the crisis, whereas today our elected government is what caused the crisis.

The Revenge of Moriarty.  [Scroll down]  Unfortunately, the dark spiderweb enveloping America is being woven not by one isolated fiend but by a multitude of them, disciples of a sick and toxic leftist ideology.  And for far too long, conservatives stood by and let the spiderweb spread, thread by thread, until we too became caught in it.  Now, infamies once thought unfathomable or unspeakable by a moral society are being more than embraced, in fact mandated.  The radical Democrats doing this have taken power from the docile normal people, aided by their education-brainwashed acolytes.  Hence, the foundations of the country have lost substance while a perverse fantasy carries governmental — if not yet constitutional — weight.

The shoplifting blues.  Once upon a time, we used to call shoplifting stealing.  But recently, shoplifting has been the latest episode of "No justice no peace."  In other words, there are many blue city district attorneys who don't think that shoplifting is worth arresting you.  Let them steal and let the corporate cats eat their losses.  Well, it turns out that the corporate cats have limits and can't just sit back and let their stores get sacked.

Let's be blunt — legal weed is turning New York workers into zombies.  Not just because decriminalized marijuana led to proliferating mayhem in the five boroughs.  Not just because stinky smoke hangs everywhere, seeping into subway cars and even Broadway theaters — the overture to "My Fair Lady" at Lincoln Center was "accompanied by an acrid aroma that wasn't Liza's flowers," my friend Stephen M. Silverman recently remarked.  It's also because of a forbidden-to-utter truth, in an age where raising the minimum wage ever higher has become mantra — namely, a license to get high has turned service employees into zombies.

British Columbia breaks new overdose records one month after decriminalizing all drugs.  Seven years after the province of British Columbia declared the drug epidemic a public health emergency, and just one month after the decriminalization of all drugs, overdoses continue to skyrocket.  According to the Canadian Press, B.C. tragically set three new overdose records this March, just the second month after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's federal government allowed the province to decriminalize all drugs starting February 1, 2023, in an effort to combat the crisis.

The West Declares War on Itself.  For Americans who cherish self-government, free speech, and personal liberty, the reality of today's America is jolting.  How can Hillary Clinton's campaign, Barack Obama's FBI, and an assortment of sordid Intelligence Community actors conspire to frame Donald Trump as a Russian spy in a veritable coup d'état without suffering any legal consequences?  How can the IRS target Americans for their political viewpoints and be rewarded with bigger budgets and more armed agents?  How can the FBI illegally spy on a presidential campaign, target parents concerned over the content of their children's public education, and label half of America "extremists," and not be disbanded?  How can the Department of (in)Justice seek to punish Americans' speech and religious faith as impermissible expressions of "hate" and deprive Americans of their Second Amendment protections without being immediately defunded as a threat to the Bill of Rights?

The public sector unions can't print money.  Chicago, Portland, Milwaukee, etc. are all a big mess.  It goes like this:  the taxpayers move out and the public sector unions elect their man.  So what happens now?  We will see, but this may be a blessing in disguise because the finances of these cities are going nowhere. [...] At some point, many of these cities will run out of money because the check from the state legislature, or COVID, is not in the mail.  The businesses will move out and take their taxes with them.  And the schools will collapse because they can't cover costs.  You can strike all you want but the teachers of Chicago may have to make concessions or lose their jobs.  That's not what they voted for but that's what they will get.  So reality is around the corner and it's not pretty.

Oregon is dealt a blow [by its own socialist policies].  As much as Oregon has to offer, our housing unaffordability, homelessness, increasing taxation, drug addiction crisis, untreated mental illness, gun violence, traffic deaths and educational mediocrity are changing the calculus for many about where to live, raise a family or retire.  A year's decline in the state's population does not spell our doom — at least not yet.  But the census provides bracing data that shows too many people have decided Oregon is no longer where their future lies.  The state depends on population growth to fill jobs, provide tax dollars for public services and inject the energy and perspectives that build thriving neighborhoods and communities.  A stagnant or declining population instead dictates a future of cuts and diminished opportunities that can lead to even more people moving out.

Is It Time to Panic Yet Over the State of America?  The economy is a mess with daily news stories about another country abandoning the U.S. dollar for trade and commerce, favoring the Russian ruble, Chinese yuan, or gold, but no longer the U.S. dollar.  What happens as these countries, now making up most of the world population, start dumping dollars?  Today's current inflation will look the good old days.  As these dollars otherwise held and used by many countries flood back into the U.S., "too many dollars chasing too few goods" will go into overdrive, fueling hyperinflation, destroying the savings and pensions of most Americans, leading to economic misery as we see in Argentina or Venezuela.  Politicians are oblivious, those of both parties continuing to throw money into a losing proxy war in Ukraine, adding to a national debt that we soon will be unable to even pay the interest on.  Is that panic time?

The common denominator in the recent big problem banks: ESG.  Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank both were multi-billion-dollar bank failures.  First Republic and Credit Suisse were multi-billion-dollar banks that's required large cash infusions to avoid failure.  Writing in the Washington Examiner, Paul Tice points out that all four institutions followed PC prescriptions for enlightened corporate leadership, basically the recipe for ESG (and DEI). [...] The line connecting ESG policies to the bank failures is indirect, or, if you will, a dotted line.  The proximate cause of the SVB failure was not loans to politically correct environmental startups, but rather too many long term Treasury securities in its portfolio of assets.  But the fact is clear, at least in the case of SVB with which I am most familiar, that management took their eyes off the ball of risk management.  Risk management roles remained unfilled for a time, and some risk managers clearly prioritized ESG over actually, you know, managing risk.

The Trump Trials: Changing the Subject.  Going into a presidential election year, the incumbent president looks to be facing a difficult reelection campaign.  Persistently high inflation numbers remain a problem.  Energy prices are still up.  America's southern border is being overrun with illegal border-crossers and fentanyl.  Major bank failures have raised the specter of a banking crisis.  There are multiple House of Representatives investigations covering Biden family finances, the weaponization of government agencies, China, and the origins of COVID.  For the current administration and its supporters, the answer is as easy as it is familiar:  change the subject to Donald Trump.

The end of cities.  I recently reviewed the results of the mayoral election in Chicago, which appear to have sounded the death knell for America's third-largest city.  The buildings will remain and the people without the means to escape will still huddle in their homes (at least those who have homes), hoping to avoid being the next statistic in a crime wave that shows no signs of abating.  Commerce has slowed to a crawl and its once-famous entertainment district is now too dangerous for most to risk an evening out on the town.  At the Washington Examiner, Stephen Moore takes a similarly dim view of Chicago's prospects, but he notes that the Windy City is not alone in its downward slide.  Many cities across the United States are simply becoming unlivable.  And the real tragedy in all of this is that the decline was completely avoidable.  But an epidemic of suicidally dangerous liberal policies has opened the gates for the barbarians that were always waiting outside.

Donald Trump, Tiberius Gracchus, And America's Imminent End.  [Scroll down]  It has taken less than 20 years since Barack Obama promised to "fundamentally transform" America for the country to change from a functioning but imperfect republic into a farce of a country characterized by a banana-republic-level tyranny.  With a complicit bureaucracy, Obama used the IRS to target political opponents, the Justice Department to coerce banks into blacklisting businesses he didn't like, and Obamacare to give government unprecedented control over Americans' health decisions while doubling the cost.  He unconstitutionally opened the immigration spigot that has now become a torrent.  Within six months of taking office, Obama would set the tone for an administration that would set race relations back 50 years.  His "evolution" on gay marriage would give cover to the spineless Supreme Court to impose that travesty on the country and lay the ground for the fascist LBTQ hellscape America endures today.  And finally, he weakened two of the most foundational elements of American society:  The military and residential communities.

What Would a Real Manchurian Candidate Do Differently than Joe Biden?  The Biden regime has taken a wrecking ball to the economy.  In one of his first acts, Biden shut down domestic oil and gas production, which spiked gasoline prices to stratospheric heights.  The Democrats' Infrastructure Bill, the Orwellian "Inflation Reduction Act", and the bloated Omnibus spending bill added trillions to the national debt and brought US inflation to 40-year highs.  Other symptoms of the horrible Biden economy include (1) the personal savings rate is near seventeen-year lows, according to the St.  Louis Fed, (2) credit card debt is at record levels, according to the St. Louis Fed, and (3) real wages in the United States fell, year-over-year from April 2021 to November 2022, according to the Mises Institute.  Then there is the relentless push to transition the US economy to green technology through the implementation of environmental, societal, and governance standards that led to the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and the continuing US banking crisis.

Is America lost?  I have been struggling with a near depression this past week regarding the current state of the country.  Objectively speaking, the State of the Union is not strong.  Inflation is out of control, our banking system is teetering on the brink, our legal system is being turned into a political weapon, our cities are becoming crime-ridden war zones, our education system is collapsing, and our moral boundaries have eroded.  There's more, but that is enough to make one cry.  Everyday Americans are at least peripherally aware that things are amiss.  They tell pollsters that the country is on the wrong track.  But when given the opportunity to actually do something about the rot, enough Americans go to the polls and choose to continue the policies that have brought us to this point.

Downtown S.F. on the brink: It's worse than it looks.  The downtown area, the city's primary economic driver, is teetering on the edge, facing challenges greater than previously known, new data shows.  The wounds suffered by the economic core are deep, and city officials have yet to come up with a plan to make the fundamental changes that some economists and business leaders argue could make the area thrive again.  "A general economic decline is what we're trying to avoid," said Wade Rose, president of Advance SF, a business group that advocates on behalf of several major employers in San Francisco.  The group is working with the city on short-term ideas to bring more people back downtown, but Rose agrees that the problem needs a rethink in the long run.

San Francisco, RIP?  [S]omething like three-quarters of San Franciscans who deserted the city during covid have not returned.  The same phenomenon has been observed in cities like Portland and Minneapolis, while other cities, like Salt Lake City, have rapidly bounced back.  But Salt Lake City is not run by liberal goofballs. [...] When you go downtown and you don't feel safe and you see people "using the street as a toilet," you stop going downtown.  There is nothing mysterious about this.

America's Broken Windows.  The U.S. government actively engages in viewpoint discrimination and political censorship.  J6 political prisoners rot in jail.  Churches are firebombed for refusing to redefine the institution of marriage or insisting on protecting the sanctity of every unborn life.  Children are sexually groomed in the classroom for the pleasure of perverted adults.  Medical doctors castrate and mutilate confused minors before they have had a chance to truly live.  News media spread endless waves of State-controlled propaganda while accusing political dissenters of being propagandists.  Intellectuals publish a bloated collection of narrow groupthink while accusing free thinkers of being too dumb to understand the issues.  Patriotic Americans who love their country are branded "domestic terrorists" while anti-American zealots who insist America is irredeemably racist are rewarded with prizes.  A presidential candidate who destroyed subpoenaed evidence and fabricated an international Russian conspiracy that divided the nation suffers no legal consequences, yet an elected president who took no salary while surviving one Deep State attack after the next is persecuted still today.  These are the rotten fruits of Marxist seeds.

Will you like what's coming?  At the rate things are going, we'd better start preparing for life under perpetual Democrat or Uniparty governance.  Here are just a few points to ponder about what that life might be like.  Feel free to share with Woke family and friends.  Do you like the dark, i.e. living in the dark and carrying flashlights and candles after the sun goes down?  You'd better because there will be lots of opportunity once Uniparty-induced brownouts and blackouts take hold because of our power grid's inability to supply dependable power as the war on fossil fuels takes hold.  Exaggerated?  Read about California in the last 20 years.  Do you like extreme heat in your house in the summer?  See above. [...] Do you like extreme cold in your house in the winter?  See above.  By the way, don't depend on firewood.  They'll ban it.  CO2, you know.

Could It Happen Here?  It Is Happening Here.  My field of study in graduate school was communism.  As a fellow at the Russian Institute of Columbia's School of International Affairs, I was, if I remember correctly, one of seven students in the entire university to major in what was known at the time as "Communist Affairs."  I cite this in order to make this point:  In my wildest dreams, I never imagined what I was studying would ever apply to the United States of America, the freest country in world history.  I assumed that communism was, for various reasons, something that happened elsewhere — most obviously, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia and North Korea.  What were those various reasons?  One was the absence of freedom in the history of those countries.  Another was that all those countries were, with the exception of Cuba, outside of Western civilization.

Top 11 Priorities for America in order to save the Republic.  Now that the USA is experiencing a second communist POTUS (Obama then Beijing Biden), all morals are being flipped upside down, rights to free speech and press are being flushed down the toilet, and the infrastructure of functionality is being crippled, on purpose, by the powers that be in Washington D.C.  Somehow Beijing Biden got 80,000,000 votes, even though every campaign event he threw had fewer people attend than a bad middle school basketball game on a rainy day.  Somehow, peaceful US citizens are in jail (without a trial) for over two years for protesting a crooked election, while violent criminals from Antifa and Black Lives Matter walk the streets after destroying property, businesses, and lives protesting staged events.  Somehow, US citizens are supposed to support Ukraine, where the leaders are corrupt Nazi sympathizers, and send them all of our money and weapons, while the USA crumbles from inflation, supply chain issues, lack of proper military defense, and a demented leader who molests children at his speaking events.

When Will This Climate Madness End?  What do gas ranges, Dutch farmers, and moose have in common?  In a normal everyday context, very little.  But in the world of apocalyptic climate change, everything. [...] The enlightened climate cult solution is to ban everything that adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and embrace everything that lowers the concentration of greenhouse gases.  For example, gas ranges and ovens are bad because they use fossil fuels like natural gas and propane to cook food.  If gas stoves are banned, electric ranges and ovens can fill the gap.  No worries, right?  The same argument can be made for fossil-fueled vehicles.  Ban them, and switch over to electric vehicles.  Ditto for fossil-fueled power generating stations.  Ban them, switch to renewable sources, and have a happy day.  This sort of logic extends to another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.  In the Netherlands, the Dutch Government is trying to force up to 3,000 farms to close to meet European Union pollution limits on nitrogen oxides and ammonia.  This means that almost no form of agriculture is safe from climate change diktats.

Why a desperate America may soon annex its 51st state.  US government finances are appallingly bad.  The national debt exceeds 100% of GDP, annual deficits run into the trillions of dollars with no end in sight, and major trust funds for Social Security and Medicare will soon run out of money.  Political incompetence is mind-blowing; politicians fail to be able to even identify problems, let alone understand them, let alone reach compromises to solve them.  Ditto for central bank incompetence.  These people simply cannot understand how, by keeping interest rates at zero for nearly a decade and conjuring trillions of dollars out of thin air, they engineered record high inflation.  And they also fail to understand how their actions to 'fix' inflation are causing widespread havoc in the economy and financial system.  Social divisions across the country are extreme.  Censorship and cancel culture prevail, and corporations now wag their fingers at their own customers to "be better".  The education system is in pitiful shape, with many politicians and school board officials turning classrooms into activist training camps.  The population is terribly unhealthy.  Obesity and drug addiction are epidemics.  Plus there's an obvious mental health crisis that drives far too many people to commit horrific acts of violence on innocent people, including children.  National security is in decline.  Military readiness is down, yet top officials seem more concerned about diversity and inclusion rather than the ability to prevail in war.  The rule of law has been perverted, including for political purposes and self-aggrandizement.

Austin Seems to Be Circling the Liberal Drain as a Massive Brawl Engulfs the Street Saturday Night.  [Video clip only.]

Crisis breeds fascism.  Democrats and RINOs never let a crisis go to waste because a crisis allows them to expand their powers.  9/11 is just one example.  Bush and company used it to add a Cabinet-level department, make the unpatriotic PATRIOT Act law, and start two wars they later would abandon.  Washington does not wait for a crisis to come along.  The deep state turned President Trump's actually peaceful protest on the National Mall on January 6 into what they called an insurrection.  DC now has the power to jail dissidents.  They also beta-tested their facial recognition apparatus.  The border crisis allows Democrats to flood Republican states with illegal aliens by sending them to Wyoming and other states instead of sending them home.  I don't know where to begin in enumerating the extensions of power under covid.  It was overplayed by DC which jacked up the numbers by giving hospitals cash incentives to label deaths as being with (not necessarily from) covid.

It All Began With the Pill.  If the Nobel Prize Committee had the category of Most Influential Invention of the Last Century, one candidate might be the Pill, the contraceptive that came into widespread use in the 1960s and triggered a chain reaction of one tectonic, societal earthquake after another.  I was a college student at the time and watched it happen. [...] The Pill's advent ignited a tsunami of fornication, a.k.a. premarital sex and adultery, that led to a further tsunami of millions of couples divorcing, the invention of no-fault divorce, millions of tears, and millions of broken families.  The Pill produced "Women's Lib" and women like Hillary "Lady Macbeth" Clinton, who sneered at motherhood and wanted a "career" just like a man.

The green foods time bomb.  Green propagandists continue to inflict lethal damage to our electricity industry here in Australia — and it has become unreliable and expensive.  City food supplies cannot survive without reliable refrigeration at every level, from farms to retail stores.  Thus, unreliable green power supplies will produce unreliable food supplies.  Their intrusive green energy infrastructure is also nibbling away at our grasslands and farms, thus reducing their capacity to produce food.  Less recognized is the damage green propagandists are doing to our health and our food supply by attacking animal foods, and promoting grains, vegetables, seeds, and fake foods for humans.

How Much Longer Can Western Governments Spit on Their People?  Ordinary citizens did not empower central banks to print money and manipulate markets, so as to create a ticking financial time bomb that will almost certainly unleash the world's worst economic depression — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not spend taxpayer funds on biological weapons programs that may or may not have led to the release of COVID from a Chinese lab — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not choose to throw out common sense, the Scientific Method, and an elementary school-level understanding of medical ethics to impose draconian lockdowns, mass surveillance, and coerced experimental injections on a global scale before either the pathogenic disease or its reputed "vaccine" could be properly studied — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not choose to have their businesses shut down and livelihoods destroyed — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not choose to eviscerate Western economies in the name of "science" — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not choose the largest welfare and stimulus programs in world history, nor the unprecedented levels of inflation that were the obvious consequence — governments did.  And ordinary citizens have certainly not chosen to have the World Economic Forum's Western acolytes scoop up farmland, ban hydrocarbon mining, and impose strict carbon limits that have logically unleashed runaway food and fuel prices, economic insecurity, and depleted savings — that self-defeating strategy was the brainchild of Klaus Schwab and his merry band of WEF arsonists.  Yet from COVID to currency collapse, Western powers insist on escaping blame.

The Federal Reserve shot itself in the foot.  By now, most understand that SVB failed due to an extreme mismatch in maturities between its deposits and its assets.  Can you believe that the Federal Reserve has fallen prey to the same mistake?  Further, the Feds' own actions caused its problems.  Ever since the Federal Reserve started printing U.S. dollars in 2008, called Quantitative Easing (Q.E.), we have expressed grave concern that the Treasury bonds the Fed was buying were short-term and therefore subject to a rising interest rate environment.  Further, those Treasuries decline in face value as rates rise.  That has all come to pass.  The Federal Reserve shot itself in the foot: since the same entity that printed dollars (Q.E.) invested those dollars (Treasuries), and then raised interest rates (FOMC), which impacted its income and its balance sheet (the value of the Treasuries also declined when the Fed raised rates), the Federal Reserve is the instrument of its own demise.

Why patriotism and hope in America are collapsing.  Americans are losing faith and interest in their country and its future.  There is no other way to read the devastating results of an opinion poll published on Monday [3/27/2023] by the Wall Street Journal. It finds that only 38% of respondents think patriotism is very important, not much more than half the number who thought so as recently as 1998, when the poll was first conducted.  Likewise, there has been a massive decline of interest in religion:  Thirty-nine percent now say it is very important compared to 62% 25 years ago.  America was founded in large part by people who wanted the freedom to practice their different faiths unmolested.  Thus, a founding purpose of America is being rapidly discarded by the inhabitants of the current culture.  Having children was regarded as very important by 59% of respondents a generation ago, but by only 30% now, effectively a halving of concern to perpetuate the nation with succeeding generations.

Overcoming America's Political Paralysis.  Why are some Americans having such a hard time figuring out what is happening to our country?  And for those who do see, why are so few taking action?  One in four Americans say they know someone who died from the COVID vaccine, and 50% now have less trust in government health experts.  Sixty-seven percent say they "weren't surprised" hearing that COVID came from a Chinese lab.  Most voters agree that the FBI has been weaponized by the current administration, and 61% believe that government agents helped provoke the J6 riot.  Ninety-one percent think bail should be set for criminals who may be a danger to the community.  Fifty-four percent think Biden is lying about his family connections to China.  Fifty-five percent of Arizona voters say issues in Maricopa County likely affected the 2022 results.  Sixty percent think climate change is a false religion, not scientific fact.  Most Americans now have zero trust in their government — the way it responds to health crises, the fairness of our law enforcement agencies, or its ability to conduct free and fair elections.  We think our president is a puppet of China.  So why does life seem to continue as normal?  In other countries, when elections are stolen or Social Security benefits are taken, it means rioting in the streets.  Why do we put up with policies pushing climate change and wokeism that make zero sense?  Who could entertain the idea that children can be given sex change treatments when just a few years ago, they were expelled from school for taking an aspirin without permission?

Holding the right people responsible for the global energy crisis.  America's grid is in decline and about to get far worse due to policies that 1) reward unreliable electricity, 2) prematurely shut down coal plants, 3) criminalize nuclear, and 4) force electric vehicle use.  The root cause of our grid's reliability problems is simple:  America is shutting down too many reliable power plants — plants that can be controlled to produce electricity when needed in the exact quantity needed.  And it is attempting to replace them with unreliable solar and wind.  Nationally, as demand has increased over the last 10 years we have seen a decline in reliable capacity (gas, coal, oil, nuclear, hydro, battery storage) by 5%.  Will batteries make unreliable solar/wind reliable?  No.  Battery storage is expensive and can only provide a given "capacity" (e.g., 1 GW) for a few hours, and only then if fully charged.  Planned batteries are nowhere near enough to compensate for solar and wind's unreliability.

Warriors Don't Want to Fight for a Woke, Anti-American Military.  The House Armed Services Subcommittee for Military Personnel held a hearing last week to discuss the growing national security crisis arising from the military's cratering recruitment numbers.  A potpourri of Pentagon nincompoops all universally lauded the Defense Department's ideological obsession with "lived experiences" and "diversity for diversity's sake."  While championing the Marxist military's decision to waste over six million man-hours of training on the dangers of "extremism" and "white privilege" and the seminal importance of "diversity, equity, and inclusion," not one Pentagon official could muster a real answer as to why recruiting numbers are so disastrous.  The touchy-feely, group hug-loving mandarins proved experts in Critical Race Theory but poor problem-solvers when tasked with the actual duties of their jobs — building and maintaining lethal military forces filled with top-notch warriors who will fight to win.  Intentionally dividing Americans against each other and pouring salt in old wounds obliterate personnel cohesiveness.

There is a Simple Fix to Economic Chaos.  Some of us have been saying this for a very long time:  green will bring down the world.  Green creates a vicious circle, a term you may remember from Economics 101.  It is when the serpent eats itself, no wealth is created and collapse results.  That is what we are doing with ESG, with carbon taxes, with the forced adoption of unreliable vertiginously expensive green energy.  It has skewed every single market.  No one is investing in sound enterprise, and anything once sound is a Jenga tower, unstable, rotting from within.  This.  This is what threatens to bring down the world.  Green is built on subsidies.  And not just government subsidy.  Every mutual fund, every hedge fund, every multinational and every local or national corporation has a green monster within preventing innovative investments, sucking profits and growth.

The problem with trying to understand Democrats.  As a former member of the Democrat party, I still stay in touch with many of its members who are my close friends.  However, one thing that strikes me is that my friends are almost universally in denial of what the current administration has brought upon this once great nation in just two years of being in office.  The reality of a soaring crime rate in our nation's cities, runaway inflation that was once termed "transitory," our disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan — which served as the catalyst for Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, all seem to elude them, as if it never happened.  When presented with any hard evidence or facts, they are not only in denial, but typically push back with emotion minus facts as if they live in an alternate universe where they can pick and choose the "facts" that fit their own party's narrative.

Woke-Poisoned Hollywood Has Doomed the Once-Unbeatable Movie Industry.  Hollywood, specifically the film industry, is going through a legitimate, serious, and potentially fatal phase.  No one likes the movies anymore.  The key to a healthy industry — audience goodwill — is evaporating quickly.

The ripple effect of Joe Biden's mismanagement.  The banking crisis is like a brick thrown into our economic pond.  Busted banks don't just sink silently to the bottom, never to be heard of again.  Their plunge sends ripples out across the entire surface that wash into every financial inlet of our lives.  If you think this has nothing to do with you because you didn't invest in Silicon Valley Bank or keep an account there, think again.  The spreading circles of its demise will splash you if you merely feel the pinch of high interest rates or buy groceries. [...] Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen ignored the $250,000 upper limit on secured deposits and, to "stop the contagion," implicitly guaranteed all $17.6 trillion deposited at U.S. banks.  This put Washington on the hook for twice as much as the Federal Reserve actually has.  It means, as has been noted, that depositors are freed from market discipline — they can't lose their stash — so they needn't be careful where they put their money.  They'll go to banks that offer big rewards by taking big risks.  This is a short-term rescue at the cost of long-term instability.

Banks Might Have Stabilized, But The Biden Contagion Is Still Spreading.  'The U.S. banking system is sound and resilient," Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell said on Wednesday in an effort to calm depositors worried about more bank failures.  That was the same day the Fed raised interest rates another quarter point to deal with inflation that has been running at four-decade highs for nearly two years.  The two problems, along with so many others that families are confronting right now, have a common cause:  President Joe Biden's disastrous economic policies.  While another banking crisis might have been contained — a reassurance we take with a grain of salt — the Biden crisis will continue to metastasize as long as he and his administration are calling the shots.

Government Isn't the Victim; It's the Perpetrator.  Around the country, almost every problem Americans endure is a result of Big Government action or inaction.  Government overspending and central bank money-printing have crushed the value of ordinary Americans' income and savings.  The Intelligence Community's use of the PATRIOT Act and other unconstitutional tools to violate Americans' Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless searches has not only eliminated privacy, but also made every citizen a suspect.  The Biden administration's choice to leave America's borders wide open has exacerbated crime, drug addiction, and identity theft while breaking city budgets and local communities.  Washington, D.C.'s endless bureaucratic rule-making touches every part of every American's life.  What products can be bought and sold?  What can a citizen do on or with his private property?  What speech should be censored because the government judges its content "hateful" or unacceptably contrary to the bureaucracy's official point of view?  While Congress never stops passing laws, agencies never stop exponentially compounding those laws with new standards, rules, and regulations that micromanage everything Americans do.

San Francisco supervisor Hillary Ronen begs for more police in her district after voting to defund in 2020.  A San Francisco district supervisor is calling for more policing in the crime-ridden city — despite advocating to defund the police in 2020.  Hillary Ronen, Democrat, represents District 9 on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.  During a Budget and Appropriations Committee meeting on Wednesday, she made an impassioned plea to add more officers to the Mission District, which she represents.  Ronen was attacking San Francisco's police chief for spending a large amount of overtime on an anti-retail theft program instead of prioritizing police presence in her district.

How to Prevent More Meltdowns like Silicon Valley Bank.  The Fed was more aggressive during the COVID pandemic.  When federal and state governments locked down the economy, the government determined that it should pay the people it put out of work.  The Fed became so aggressive with Q.E. that the presses that printed money had trouble keeping up.  Money was so easy to obtain from the government that billions were fraudulently delivered to criminals.  Some of this easy money found its way into bank deposits, which were used to purchase securities paying very low interest rates.  To the surprise of the Fed and Janet Yellen, inflation resulted from their policy of free money.  They couldn't believe it.  They said it was transitory and then blamed Putin, Trump, oil executives, greed, and a virus.  While there are many reasons for inflation, the primary reason is quantitative easing and the flood of cash the Fed poured into the economy for a decade.  After waffling for months, the Fed decided that inflation was real and started raising interest rates in an attempt to control the inflation it created.

Geopolitical Catastrophes Multiply as American Power and Influence Crash to New Postwar Lows.  In only two years, Joe Biden's presidency has produced multiple catastrophes from which recovery will be difficult, if it is even possible.  Domestically, we see the banking system teetering on insolvency, as the rapid escalation in interest rates has devalued long term Treasury notes that used to be considered a safe place for banks to park funds in excess of what could be safely lent.  The reason for these Federal Reserve interest rate hikes is the inflation that was immediately triggered by Biden's jihad against domestica oil, gas, and coal production, that triggered an inflationary spiral that continues today, devaluing the life savings of thrifty Americans, and pushing food and energy costs up so fast that many families have had to drastically reduce their standard of living.  Bad as these catastrophes are, the potential for serious damage to the welfare of the American people from the military and diplomatic policies of the Biden administration is much worse.  Losing a war — or even just fighting a nuclear war — makes a mere Depression look like a day at the beach.

Really?  There was high inflation under Jimmy Carter, and the banks didn't collapse.
The Banking Mess Is Another Consequence of Biden's High Inflation.  The complexities around, and solutions to, the current banking crisis lie well beyond my core competency, so I'll leave those matters to others.  What I will say is that it's indisputable that much of the upheaval can be traced back to the Biden administration's disastrous inflationary policies, which have forced the Fed to hike up interest rates as a form an anti-inflation 'chemotherapy' for the overheated US economy — actions that have, in turn, directly and heavily contributed to unpleasant externalities like the collapse of Silicon Valley and Signature banks.  Biden and his team were directly warned about the highly risky spending they were jamming through in partisan, Democrat-passed behemoths, including by respected Democratic economists.  They didn't listen, then pretended the warnings never happened once the resulting "transitory" inflation was undeniably non-transitory after all.

SVB loaned millions to useless startups making greenie things no one wanted to buy — WSJ's Strassel.  Is there anything more ... Soviet ... than a bank that lends money to companies making things no one wants to buy?  That's the missing puzzle piece we needed on why Silicon Valley Bank went belly up, and Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has found it, persuasively arguing that yes, the failure of the bank was indeed premised on ESG, which descended into wokester lending priorities, creating the abnormal conditions that left the bank ripe for a meltdown.

The Left's Criminal Abuse Of The Young.  Democrats have long portrayed themselves as the great guardians of the children.  In truth, they are destroying the young.  The harm they've done to children, teens and young adults has spiked in recent years, from scaremongering about global warming to pandemic lockdowns that have unnerved a generation to teaching them a divisive, politically charged curriculum.  According to an online medical journal, the University of Calgary has determined there was a spike "in emergency department visits for attempted suicide and suicide ideation among children and adolescents" during the period of "social isolation" that coincides with the pandemic lockdowns.  The university conducted a meta-analysis of 42 studies representing more than 11 million pediatric emergency department visits in 18 countries, and compared "the data on visits prior to the pandemic with those that took place during the pandemic, up to July 2021."

Putting 'diversity' and 'equity' first nearly crashed the economy.  Several years back I asked what it would take to halt the diversity, inclusion, equity obsession in America.  What would it take to get back to excellence and competence as the only criteria for employment?  Perhaps it would require the bridges to start falling down.  Though I suspect that if they did then certain people would claim they'd only fallen because of "structural racism."  Still, this week we had a good reminder of just how over-tolerant we have been of this insane, anti-excellence agenda.  Because although the bridges haven't yet started to collapse, the banks have.  And one reason is that the banks in question prioritized equity over excellence.

Elections Have Consequences; Stolen Elections Have Catastrophes.  "Put the adults back in charge," they whined.  "Donald Trump will break the world," they lied.  Well, they manipulated election rules to certify suspicious vote totals that preposterously portrayed senile Joe Biden as the most popularly elected president in history; censored and locked up anyone who complained; and covered up their crimes with J6 show trials drenched in untruths meant to hide from history the Uniparty's underhanded machinations in outright stealing a presidential election.  The whole mess was so banana-republic-yucky that Biden was inaugurated behind barbed wire and a show of military force befitting the small junta who attended the successful coup's celebration.  And as a result of the Uniparty's installation of Dementia Joe as White House marionette, the American people have been plagued with crime, inflation, political persecution, COVID tyranny, deadly battlefield retreat, open borders, staggering drug deaths, proxy wars, bankruptcies, bank runs, endless new regulations, a plummeting standard of living, economic panic, and social volatility.

Failing Accountability Leads to Chaos.  Trust in our institutions is collapsing, according to a recent Gallup survey.  Less than a quarter of the public is confident in:
  •   The Supreme Court — 25 percent confidence
  •   The Presidency — 23 percent confidence
  •   Newspapers — 16 percent confidence
  •   The criminal justice system — 14 percent confidence
  •   Big business — 14 percent confidence
  •   Television news — 11 percent confidence
  •   Congress — a whopping 7 percent confidence
The only institutions that exceed 50 percent public confidence are the military and small businesses. [...] [T]hose institutions remain necessary for a civilized society to function.  They provide order.  But when they fail:
  •   Media doesn't inform
  •   Bureaucrats don't serve
  •   Commerce doesn't provide prosperity
  •   Schools don't prepare future citizens
  •   Law enforcement doesn't protect
  •   Judges don't ensure fairness
  •   Politicians don't lead

The Biden Economy Is Falling Apart.  The Biden Economy — hailed Monday morning by Presidentish Joe Biden as "strong" — seems like it's falling apart, everything, everywhere all at once.  NYSE halted trading of Charles Schwab, whose shares fell by more than 20%, and even a few Etsy sellers have been impacted by the fallout of Silicon Valley Bank's (SVB) collapse. [...] What went wrong?  In a word: Inflation.  In a few more words:  The higher interest rates needed to combat inflation smashed the cheap-money expectations that SVB's bond portfolios required.  Other sectors of the economy that have become addicted to historically low interest rates include high-tech, particularly startup firms, and the housing market.

Biden blames Trump deregulation for Silicon Valley Bank failure.  President Biden said Monday that the U.S. banking system is "safe and secure" following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and closure of Signature Bank last week.  "Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe.  Your deposits will be there when you need them," Biden said in remarks at the White House before leaving for a three-day visit to California and Nevada.  Biden blamed the bank collapses on former President Trump's 2018 decision to scrap some Obama-era banking rules.

Inflation was only 'transitory' they said.  First off: These collapses did not occur in two days.  The problems have compounded over time and should have been very easy to spot by regulators and "experts" on Wall Street.  The collapses were not caused by too few regulations.  For years, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates artificially low.  Those low rates caused investors to chase up the value of stocks, houses, commercial real estate, crypto currencies, and other things.  But those low rates did not punish the poor and middle class with rapidly rising prices on food, energy and other necessities.  Trump kept inflation low with energy independence, fewer regulations, and lower taxes.  Energy prices affect almost everything we use and do.  In 2020 when we were hit with COVID, we flooded the economy with money to help businesses the government forcibly closed and individuals who had lost their jobs.  We had supply chain problems.  But we still didn't have high inflation because we still had low energy prices thanks to Trump's policies of domestic energy production.  From April 2020 to the end of 2020, jobs grew 16 million (much faster than under Biden); still, no high inflation.

Putting God's Wisdom Back In The Classroom.  Perhaps the single biggest factor contributing to America's rising crime rate can be traced back to 1962.  That was when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a voluntary, non-denominational prayer recited by school kids in New York State classrooms violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.  For the record, the prayer that ignited that controversy reads as follows:  "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country."  These 22 words were so repellant to Steven Engel, a founding member of the New York Civil Liberties Union, that he became the lead plaintiff in the effort to prohibit the recitation of them.  After years of dogged effort, Engel succeeded in preventing children from acknowledging God in school.  What has replaced prayer in schools during the 61 years since the Engel v. Vitale decision?  New York City Mayor Eric Adams knows.  Adams, a retired NYPD captain, told the city's religious leaders during an Interfaith Breakfast in Manhattan earlier this month, "When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools."

Chilling Contrast in Army Recruitment Ads From Russia, the U.S., China, and Britain Point to Ominous Future.  While "woke" has insidiously metastasized throughout American society, the rapidly spreading cancer perhaps portends most ominously for its continuing effect on America's Armed Forces.  The Twins of Woke, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley have worked tirelessly to transform the greatest fighting force on the planet from "a few good men" to even fewer self-identified genders with self-assigned pronouns.  If it wasn't the U.S. military we were talking about, the failed social experiment would be somewhat humorous — instead of a potentially clear and present danger to the security of the United States.  As it stands, I'd have a hard time suggesting enlistment to a loved one or friend.  [Video clip]

You think crime is out of control in New York City now?  Just wait.  New York City cops are resigning at a "record-breaking pace in 2023, and there is no sign that the bleeding will slow.  [Tweet]  Bad crime policy leads to more crime.  Fewer police to keep the city safe leads to more crime on top of that.  It's not hard to see how this ends.

Ranchers say their jobs have become "1,000 times harder" in the 2 years Biden has been in office.  The economy is a disaster, as anyone could see.  But for ranchers who have to operate on razor-thin margins, it's unlike anything they've seen in decades.  It's harder than ever to be a man working the land.  And besides that, the undue burden of the Biden administration's draconian rules and regulations is making it impossible.

Oh, nothing - just the second largest bank failure in U.S. history today.  Part of what happened is explained in [a] series of tweets.  SVB, thanks to the COVID emergency rules adopted by Jerome Powell — who is still in charge of the Federal Reserve — was no longer required to hold any cash on hand to meet its "reserve requirement." [...] Why that detail matters is because this bank's problems started with an announcement Wednesday that it was in the middle of a cash crunch and looking at a possible sale as a way of raising funds.

Conservatives Point to 'Bidenflation' as Cause of Silicon Valley Bank Closure.  Prominent conservatives throughout politics and media reacted to the sudden closure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on Friday.  Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is already standing firm against bailouts for the bank, and many are pointing to "Bidenflation" as a driver of the implosion.  Gaetz appeared on Steve Bannon's War Room where Bannon asserted that the closure was "100 percent because of Biden's policies."

It's Not Hard to See the Future of America Under this Manchurian President.  President Biden is not only compromised but exemplifies the ultimate Manchurian President.  I also see him as a traitor to our nation — plain and simple.  His actions and deeds, controlled by those we do not yet see, are purposefully destroying our democracy, legal system, freedoms, independence, and republic. [...][ It's evident that Biden is but a simple puppet, a marionette.  The question is, who exactly are the puppeteer(s) pulling his strings?  I also believe Biden, like his son, is compromised by the Chinese and the Russians.  Just look at the actions he's taken since January 2021. [...] Whomever his puppeteers are, they are undoubtedly far left, not favorable towards America, view our Constitution with disdain, and look to change America forever.  They pull the strings of their marionette named Biden, the Manchurian President, from behind the red Marxist and fascist curtains.  The strings are pulled to purposefully change America from a champion of liberty, opportunity, freedom, and democracy to an autocracy, dictatorship, and tyrannical system.

Cruz: Biden Enriched Cartels Whose Revenue Increased 26x Since 2018, We Need to Pressure Mexico, Not Invade It.  On Tuesday's broadcast of the Fox News Channel's "Jesse Watters Primetime," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) stated that President Joe Biden "is the best thing that ever happened to the Mexican drug cartels" and cited the massive surge in cartel revenue since 2018 and argued that the solution to cartel violence isn't to invade Mexico or go to war with it, but rather, to pressure the country to act against cartel violence.  Cruz said, "Well, listen, those who kill American citizens must be held accountable.  And, at the first instance, this wouldn't happen if we had responsible presidential leadership.  Joe Biden created the chaos at the border.  Joe Biden stopped building the wall.  He reinstated catch and release.  He pulled out of Remain in Mexico.  And what Joe Biden has done is he's turned these vicious narcoterrorists into multibillionaires. [...]"

Life Among the Ruins.  We are suffering an epidemic of premodern barbarism.  The signs unfortunately appear everywhere.  Over half a million homeless people crowd our big-city downtowns.  Most know the result of such Medieval street living is unhealthy, violent, and lethal for all concerned.  Yet no one knows — or even seems to worry about — how to stop it.  So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection continue unabated.  Progressive urban pedestrians pass by holding their noses, averting their gazes, and accelerating the pace of their walking.  The greenest generation in history allows its sidewalks to become pre-civilizational sewers.  In a very brief time, we all but have destroyed the downtowns of our major cities — which will increasingly become vacant in a manner like the 6th-century A.D. Roman forum.  All accept that defunding the police, no-cash bail, Soros-funded district attorneys, and radical changes in jurisprudence have destroyed deterrence.  The only dividend is the unleashing of a criminal class to smash-and-grab, carjack, steal, burglarize, execute, and assault — with de facto immunity.  Instead we are sometimes lectured that looting is not a crime, but lengthy incarceration is criminally immoral.

Walmart Closing its Last Two Stores in Portland, Oregon in March.  In late March, Walmart is closing the last two locations it has in Portland, Oregon.  The company's official line about the closings is that it has to do with store performances, customer needs, and other corporate speak.  Does anyone doubt that this probably has a lot to do with theft?  Portland is a hotbed of leftism, and for the last few years, shoplifting has become a norm for the left.

What's the Real Reason Political Anxiety Is So High?  [#1] Governmental power and control.  The only reason we have anxiety, stress, and worry about what happens in government is because the government is ridiculously, uncomfortably powerful.  If our political enemies (whoever they happen to be) take power, they could exert tremendous control over our lives.  So on some level, a bit of anxiety is reasonable.  [#2] It doesn't help that we're in the era of the 24-hour news cycle.  Media companies come in all shapes and sizes, from corporate juggernauts to independent journalists, and everyone is racing to publish news stories for the public to consume on a constant basis.  There is no more reading the morning paper; we are constantly bombarded with information.  Even if some of this information is positive, it's easy to become overwhelmed and feel anxious as a result.  [#3] Bad media incentives.  It's ironic that the very news organizations publishing stories about high rates of political anxiety are the same ones (perhaps) intentionally stoking those anxieties.  Media companies aren't necessarily incentivized to tell the truth or commit to quality journalism; instead, they're incentivized to get clicks and attention.

The Day Your Doctor Won't Treat You If You Aren't the Right Kind of Patient Is Closer Than You Might Think.  Could the day come when you are denied medical treatment because you're white, male, or a member of some other group of "oppressors"?  Of course it could, and it's coming sooner than you might think.  Even in solidly red Tennessee, where Donald Trump won 60% of the vote in 2020, a new report has revealed what the Tennessee Star on Friday called "the pervasive infiltration of woke diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideologies in Tennessee medical school curricula and programs."  Could this have an impact on the quality of your medical treatment?

Injustice of the Court.  I was encouraged to look at sacrifice for my nation as the highest honor.  I saluted the flag, got choked up at the sound of the national anthem.  Now, I have to ask what purpose would my sacrifice serve?  Would it be to keep Hunter's diary a secret?  Would it be to hide all the crimes of pedophilia among our representatives, senators, presidents and judges?  Would my sacrifice be to see drag queens in Kindergarten?  Would it be to keep political prisoners of the current regime?  Would it be to fund extortion and brutality of parents concerned about their children and the schools they go to?  The problem that has been created is that as a patriotic son of the founding ideals, I would have to fight against all of that, against the crooked institutions of today.  I could not, in good conscience fight to sustain this treason.  It's a paradox created by their lies and deceit that I could not fight for the government of my nation, but am forced to try and bring it to heel, to bring it back under control.

Beating the Balrog.  What we are seeing is evil so strong that it's almost bubbling up out of the ground.  The pivotal evidence is the way we are treating children.  The Left likes to talk about "systemic racism," but I argue that what we're truly seeing is systemic, Satanic, child abuse.  If we don't rip children limb-from-limb from the womb (and sell their body parts), we raise many of them in households where they are ill-fed, ignored by parents too busy to really pay attention, and too secular to take them to church.  We send them off to government schools that have failed horridly (A third of our children cannot read at grade level, then we lock them out of their schools, where they at least had friends.  Then we have stuck them with an overload of questionable vaccines, and now we have allowed sexualization at an alarming pace culminating in the schools getting involved in grooming young children for sex with adults and, even worse, sexual mutilation without parental consent.  This is not just human evil.  We've gone back to the time of Baal and Moloch, idols that demanded human — i.e.  child — sacrifice.

Joe Biden Puts Liberal Theories to the Test.  Theory 2 — Government spending is good for the economy:  Whenever the American economy suffers a downturn, the left defaults to one government solution.  The theory is that sufficient government spending will trigger economic growth.  Leftists tax the population, give a little bit back to the citizens, spend the rest on liberal causes, and call it stimulus.  Joe tested this theory by spending nearly $5 trillion on various COVID relief, infrastructure, and inflation reduction boondoggles.  Did it help the economy?  No.  Instead we've gotten:
  •   inflation at a 40-year high;
  •   families spending more to service the national debt than they do on their home mortgages;
  •   a $7-trillion loss in stock market value — much of which is our retirement savings; and
  •   a $9,000 drop in personal savings in one year.

Are You Tired of Having Your Intelligence Insulted Yet?  You, most likely being a mere normal, are probably looking around at the current state of things and wondering just how we managed to get to this point.  Food prices continue to skyrocket, energy prices remain stubbornly high, and if you were thinking about buying a house, you can forget about it with current interest rates.  Meanwhile, real wages are down, meaning your buying power is diminished coming and going.  That's just a small taste of what Americans are going through, and you'd expect the nation's leadership to provide some guidance among the malaise.  At the very least, you'd think they could admit there's a problem.  Instead, the Biden administration insults your intelligence.  [Tweet]

Crime and No Punishment in Massachusetts.  The Massachusetts state legislature must have failed to pass a 142-strikes-and-you're-out legislation just days earlier.  The liberal legislature deems such legislation too harsh on misunderstood criminals, who deserve just one more chance.  The criminal in question, Derek M.  Lindsay, was the berserker dad who made national news in May 2007 after he got into a fight with parents and police at a McDonald's playground after telling his kid to push the other kids out of the way to get to Ronald McDonald.  But that was among his least serious offenses.  More recently, he had been charged in March of this year with attempted murder for stabbing someone at a local tattoo parlor.  So naturally, the local judges let this model citizen go free back into society back in March.  Thus, his 143rd arraignment this week.  Throughout Massachusetts, but particularly in the City of Taunton, such events are commonplace.

The Sudden Dominance of the Diversity Industrial Complex.  Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values.  The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren't yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative.  Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life.  They are now.  Seemingly in unison, and with almost no debate, nearly every major American institution — including federal, state, and local governments, universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies and major retail brands — has agreed that the DEI infrastructure is essential to the nation's proper functioning.  From Amazon to Walmart, most major corporations have created and staffed DEI offices within their human resources bureaucracy.  So have sanitation departments, police departments, physics departments, and the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education and energy.  Organizations that once argued against DEI now feel compelled to institute DEI training and hire DEI officers.

Cloward & Piven Are Laughing All The Way To The Welfare Agency.  Food shortages are ubiquitous.  Baby formula to Brussels sprouts to ground meat to eggs continue to run in short supply as prices rise.  Suspicious fires, bombings, and "accidents" at food processing plants are blamed without explanation along with droughts, avian flu, and the dreaded (supposed) COVID-19 super-duper "sub-variants."  Government regulations reducing the application of certain fertilizers on farms in Holland, Spain, France are proliferating, forcing crop, flock, and herd reductions.  Results: farms closing, creating more food shortages, unemployment, and increasing welfare rolls.  Public outcry and political pressure have been suppressed through ignorance caused by the media.

Ultra-Wealthy Flee the Big Apple as High Crime and Excessive Taxation Chase Them Away.  I'm not a math whiz, but I'm not incapable either, so let's do some calculations... 1,452 residents worth over $25 million left in 2021, plus a whole bunch before that.  That's a lot of deserters.  I plug that into my Excel spreadsheet and it says, "a whole lot of tax revenue just fled for the hills."  You might think, well, New York has plenty of taxpayers, it's not that big a deal.  But consider this: the top one percent of earners in New York account for close to half of the state's income tax revenue.

Taking Back America.  As I travel, I constantly see tattered American flags blowing in the wind.  They are a metaphor for the state of the Union.  It is emblematic of how our country is being hollowed out.  We have a Manchurian leader who is gutting us of our rights.  The latest assault is Biden's determination to put us under the domination of the World Health Organization, who will determine our health care. [...] In fact, the goal of Marxists is the total annihilation of freedom.  No matter how many times the communist dream is proven to result in nothing but misery, it seems to get resurrected.  And historical ignorance is the means by which the next generation gets sucked in.  Consequently, a statue of Teddy Roosevelt that used to invite visitors into the Museum of Natural History is taken down.  On the other hand, a statue of career criminal George Floyd is erected despite the fact that Floyd committed three armed robberies, three violent home invasions, six burglaries, three car thefts, beat four victims senseless and held a gun to a very pregnant belly of his robbery victim.

The 'Great Awokening' Is Transforming Science and Medicine.  The "great awokening" touches every elite institution in America, mostly radiating out from our compromised system of higher education.  One of the most disturbing and illuminating aspects of this cultural revolution is how much it is transforming science and medicine.  A video of medical students at Columbia University reciting an updated version of the Hippocratic oath that injected elements of critical race theory made the rounds on social media recently.  As many have noted, this "student-led initiative" sounds cult-like.

Thanks to rampant leftism, Austin, Texas, heads for Mad Max territory.  I lived in Austin, Texas, in the mid-1980s and found it a lovable city.  It had a vibrant cultural community, beautiful neighborhoods, and a massive campus that felt surprisingly safe and normal for a girl who had graduated from the degrading madness of UC Berkeley.  Now, though, Austin is a city in thrall to hard leftism, and the only vibrant thing there is the out-of-control crime.  In 2020, Austin moved to the forefront of leftist-run cities that enthusiastically embraced the defund the police mantra. [...] Leftism promises heaven and invariably delivers hell.  Cities with leftist governance have more crime, more filth, more homelessness, more public urination and defecation, and more underperforming schools than conservatively run cities.  What works to maintain a city is what always works: Policies that encourage responsibility and discourage crime.  Abandon those principles and, suddenly, once-shiny American cities begin to look like Mad Max outtakes.

The collapse of civilization on the altar of equity and diversity.  The Biden administration has gone stark raving mad.  While they surely know better, they are moving ahead with the false notion that "diversity is our strength," that forced "equity" will make the country a better place.  It began under the Obama administration, the purposeful ginning up of the most vile racism since slavery; but this time Black against White.  Before Obama took office, there was actually near racial harmony in America.  The American left has become so radical now, "diversity hires" are now a thing.  We are following in the footsteps of South Africa and mandating racial quotas.  What has that meant for South Africa?  Their economy is in near collapse.  Their electric grid is failing because no one knows how to fix it.  The country is wracked by violence.  Mandated equity, the primacy of race over merit, means civilizational failure.  Why have there been so many near misses in air traffic?  Why so many railway derailments?  Why horrific events like the murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis?  Those cops were clearly not qualified to be Memphis police.  When standards are done away with, this is a predictable consequence.

5 'dirtiest' cities in America run by Democratic mayors, study says.  The top five dirtiest cities in the country are run by Democrat mayors, a new study has found.  Among 152 of the biggest cities across the United States, Houston won the No. 1 spot for dirtiest city, followed by Newark, New Jersey, San Bernardino, California, Detroit and Jersey City, New Jersey, according to a study released Thursday by LawnStarter.  LawnStarter measured each city across four categories: pollution, which measures things like air quality and greenhouse gas emissions; living conditions, like the percentage of homes containing mold or rats; infrastructure, which measures waste output and regulations; and consumer satisfaction, or the percentage of residents who find the city dirty.  Houston, which is run by Democratic Mayor Sylvester Turner, ranked No. 1 in overall score for the dirtiest city.  It ranked third in the nation on pollution, fourth on poor living conditions, 12th on infrastructure and 34th on consumer satisfaction.

LA Times Asks: 'What's the Matter With Portland?' Answer: Leftist Ideology.  "What's the matter with Portland?"  That was the question asked in a lengthy and interesting report in The Los Angeles Times.  The piece was enlightening in the sense that it did capture the mentality that has led to the city's awesome dysfunction.  It highlights how despite that dysfunction — rising crime, rampant open-air drug use, and many other signs of urban decay — many of the city's residents are simply unwilling to acknowledge how ideology and bad policy have turned the Oregon city that should be quite pleasant to reside into a shell of its former self.  Some residents, such as Flora Gonzalez, who lives in a blue-collar neighborhood now beset by crime, can see clearly what the problem is.

What Kind of Military Does Our Country Need?  Much has been said and written about America's increasingly woke, politicized military and its negative impacts on recruiting and readiness.  Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attracted widespread criticism when he spoke of "white rage" and reportedly hid nuclear codes from President Trump while telling his Red Chinese counterpart he would provide advance warning of any planned U.S. attack on China.  Even cadets and midshipmen at the nation's military academies are undergoing woke indoctrination in Critical Race Theory, transgenderism, "toxic masculinity," and so-called Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, which many military experts fear will harm unit integrity, morale, and war-fighting capability.  And now there is a new wrinkle at our academies:  the Spectrum Club, which "actively bridges the relationship between Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Questioning (LGBTQ) cadets [and midshipmen] and their allies" and "serves as a safe haven for LGBTQ cadets [and midshipmen] when they need support[.]"  Since the introduction of women to our military academies in 1976, our armed services have struggled mightily with the issue of sexual fraternization among cadets and midshipmen.  Why, then, would these institutions not only permit, but celebrate clubs based solely on sexual orientation?  One doubts whether heterosexual clubs would be approved, nor should they be.  And do we really want future military leaders who are so fragile as to require "safe spaces"?

America Is Becoming a Corrupt Country.  James Q. Wilson and George Kelling introduced the concept of "Broken Windows" in an essay in 1982.  In essence, they said that allowing a neighborhood to decay physically will lead to a rise in crime.  The existence of disorder makes more disorder more acceptable.  In what may have been the most successful anti-crime experiment in history, Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton applied this theory in a stunning reversal of crime in New York.  The Big Apple became one of the safest cities in the world.  In recent years, as liberals have rejected the enforcement of the law against small crimes, the rapid decay of communities has been tragic further proof that "Broken Windows" was right.  If you send a signal that crime is acceptable, you will get more criminals.  If you send a signal that corrupt government officials are acceptable, corruption will become a way of life.

Here's your proof of a rigged and stolen 2020 election.  It's clear the election of 2020 was rigged and fixed.  We all know it.  And Kari Lake's stolen election in 2022 was even worse.  The theft of Kari Lake's Arizona election makes Bernie Madoff look like a small-time shoplifter.  But I'm not talking about any of that.  To me the proof the 2020 election was stolen is the state of the nation.  Open your eyes.  The consequences of a stolen election are all around us.  The supply chain is crippled.  Highways, ports and infrastructure are crumbling.  Blue states are banning trucks from the roads.  Grocery prices are skyrocketing.  Egg farms are burning to the ground.  Eggs cost $10 per dozen — if you can find them.  Over 100 food plants have burned to the ground in the past year.  Trains are derailing.  The East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment may be the worst ecological disaster in U.S. history.  Experts are calling it "our Chernobyl."  There is a mushroom cloud of deadly chemicals floating over the farm belt.  Animals are dying.  Fish are dead.  People are sick.  And it just happens to have poisoned hundreds of thousands of acres of prime Midwest farmland.  The same exact thing that's happening to food and farmland is happening to energy.  Under former President Donald Trump we had energy independence and cheap, plentiful energy.  Under President Joe Biden we have soaring gas and electricity prices, energy shortages and depletion of our national fuel reserve.  In the middle of this, our government is desperate to ban gas stoves.

Biden installed: What could possibly go wrong?  Whoever pulled the strings to install Biden should go to prison.  Whoever is really calling the shots and implementing such terrible policy — lockdowns, vax mandates, restricting the capture of domestic energy, mandating DIE, ESG, CRT, etc. throughout every institution and corporation in the US — should be sent to prison for treason.  Whomever they are, they are traitors to this nation; they're waging a war against the American citizenry.  The vaccines alone have killed thousands; their pro-criminal policies have killed countless innocents; the open border has caused the deaths of thousands of migrants, and of law-abiding Americans who fell victim to criminal aliens and/or the fentanyl crisis.  The economy is the worst it's been in four decades.  Our national debt is $31 trillion — the interest alone is $750 billion a year.  None of this is sustainable.  The "green agenda" is climate communism to control how we all live.  If their "15-minute cities" come to America, there will be a second Civil War.  They want to mandate EVs but there is not enough lithium on the planet to put everyone in an electric vehicle.  That is a fantasy that will never be realized.

Destroying Meritocracy Is Deadly.  After Christmas, Southwest Airlines simply canceled 71 percent of its flights.  It blamed staff shortages due to storms.  The airline seemed incapable of ensuring enough of their pilots, attendants, crews, and airport staff could get to work.  The Federal Aviation Administration in January canceled all flight departures from the United States for two hours due a computer safety system collapse.  Thousands of additional flights were canceled, many for over 24 hours.  Something has gone terribly wrong.  Either the Department of Transportation and its Secretary Pete Buttigieg, or the head of the FAA, or the quality of either ground crews, pilots, or air traffic controllers — or all combined — are putting American travelers at mortal risk.  If not corrected, these near-death airline experiences and the near collapse of the U.S. commercial aviation system presage catastrophes to come. [...] Many of the major airlines have established racial and gender quotes for government pilot training programs.  United Airlines has set quotas to ensure half of its trainees will be minorities or women.  Since 2013, the FAA has been lowering standards for air traffic control qualifications to achieve de facto race and gender quotas.

Real and Fake Worlds: Why the Trains are Failing.  In the olden days, you didn't need a college degree to get a real job.  You took an IQ test to get a job.  In Griggs v.  Duke Power Co, the far left wing Supreme Court all but outlawed these tests.  Employers thus started to required university degrees for jobs that a smart and ambitious 19 year old could have begun learning via on-the-job training and mentorship.  All the smart kids were forced to attend college.  Most of them realized, "If I am going to go through all this hassle, I may as well sell insurance for State Farm upon graduation."  Banning IQ tests for jobs, more than any other policy, hollowed out the middle.  Millions of smart kids got left behind.  We should care not for their sake, but our own.

The Libertarian-Socialist Axis.  Policies inspired by socialists make it easier for private corporate and financial interests to form monopolies, since the regulatory excess inspired by socialist ideals drives smaller potential competitors out of business.  Examples are plentiful.  Complying with environmental regulations requires an overhead burden that will overwhelm the financial capacity of a small company, but can be absorbed easily by large companies.  Complying with union work rules and wage demands is easy for monopolistic companies because they pass the higher labor costs on to consumers.  But similar compliance kills companies too small to have a captive market.  Enforced scarcity caused by mandates designed to combat "climate change" allows vertically integrated companies to raise prices, reap big profits, and expand, since their underlying costs haven't changed.  In short, socialism eliminates competition, which empowers the biggest corporations on earth to get even bigger.

Why Biden infringes on the right to bear arms.  Advocating that guns are the reason for increasing crime is a distraction from failing crime-control policies.  These policies are the reason crime has steadily risen: 1) a decrease in prosecuting violent crimes,  2) an increase in catch and release bail,  3) defunding cities' and towns' police forces,  4) an increase in early prison release, and  5) an increase in little or no jail time for violent offenders.  Those are the real reasons for increased violent gun related crimes, not law-abiding citizens' gun ownership.  The philosophy that the police and prisons are the reason for high crime is wrong and not the belief of mainstream America.  The Left would love for everyone to believe that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens result in high rates of gun-related crimes.

When We Describe America's Largest Cities As "War Zones", We Aren't Exaggerating One Bit.  Denver was once such a nice place to live.  So what happened?  Unfortunately, it appears that illegal immigration is fueling much of the crime that is happening in the Mile High City, and every year it just gets even worse.

Those Abandoning Blue States Should Abandon Democrats, Too.  A recent New York Post article declared that, in a "staggering exodus," in 2022, more residents of New York moved to Florida "than any other year in history." [...] In what is almost certainly an effort to cover for Democrats, CBS News practically ignores the politics of the Blue State Exodus and benignly points to "more affordable housing and plentiful jobs" in red states as the main reasons for citizens fleeing Democrat-dominated states.  CBS News brushes off the idea that higher taxes in blue states are contributing to this mass exodus, and it fails to mention at all crime, COVID-lockdown policies, and the like as reasons for the growing number of "leftugees."  Much, and likely the vast majority, of the population loss in blue states is due to those fleeing even higher-taxed and more crime-ridden large U.S. cities.

Targeting kids for addiction.  There is no doubt that the well-funded and decades-long push for marijuana legalization has been successful.  Maryland will soon join the sad reality that marijuana is now legal recreationally in 21 states and D.C., and legal medically in 37 states.  Proponents of marijuana legalization tout that making the drug lawful will decrease arrests.  But what is it doing to our communities and why have they started to target children at younger and younger ages?  Addiction-for-profit industries have always targeted young audiences.  The younger the addict, the longer the cycle of addiction, the greater the profit.

Dem-Led City Reports Highest Violent Crime Rate In 15 Years After Defunding Police.  Seattle's violent crime rate rose to its highest point in 15 years in 2022, with reported homicides surging by about 24% compared to 2021, according to the Seattle Police Department's (SPD) Year-End Crime Report, more than a year after the city cut its police budget.  Rapes and aggravated assaults increased by about 4% and 5% respectively, contributing to 5,591 total reported violent offenses, a roughly 4% spike, the report shows.  Though arson and burglaries declined, 1,596 more motor vehicle thefts were reported, and Seattle ended up with an around 4% higher overall crime in 2022 despite a fourth-quarter reduction.  Seattle's City Council reduced SPD funding by almost 17% in its 2021 budget following the George Floyd protests of summer 2020.  The city's 2023 budget funds Democratic Mayor Bruce Harrell's officer recruitment and retention plan but eliminates 30 unfilled SPD positions, The Seattle Times reported.

The Mess of an Address.  After listening to the State of the Union address, Americans know why the latest Reuters poll has President Joe Biden at 41 percent approval.  Vice President Kamala Harris polls even lower — despite the obsequious efforts of the most biased media in history that has, in effect, merged with the Democratic Party.  The nation was reminded again why only 37% of Biden's own party want him to run again.  Only a quarter of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction under his leadership.  Given all that, what could a president possibly tell a nation when he entered office inheriting a 1.4% inflation rate only to spike it to 7%?  How did Americans' 30-year mortgages of 2.7% soar to 6.5% in less than two years?  How does a president explain that eggs climbed to $7 a dozen, or a thin steak hit $15 a pound, or a sheet of plywood reached $95?  How does a president explain to Americans that gas averaged $2.39 a gallon when he took office and, even after draining the strategic petroleum reserve, it is still $3.50 a gallon — and recently spiked at $5 a gallon in many states.  Can Biden explain why once affordable, or even cheap natural gas more than tripled in price in less than a year?  What can a president say when in his first two years over 5 million foreign nationals poured into the United States — all illegally across a nonexistent border?

A Century of Homicides.  The revolving door crime wave exploded in the 1960s, putting the criminals back on the street before the police could fill out the paperwork.  Over the last year I talked to a thousand people about crime and not one, including criminal justice professionals and elected officials, could tell me how this revolving door started in the 1960s.  Some suggested the Great Society, drugs, or the disintegration of the American family, but these came later.  Crime shot up like a Saturn V rocket because it was deliberate policy to open up the jails and let criminals walk.  Supreme Court justices, other top judges, intellectuals, criminologists, and the U.S. attorney general all proclaimed prison confinement a medieval idea and that behavioral 'scientists' would simply rehabilitate the criminals.  The results were disastrous.  Homicides more than doubled and all other categories of crime quadrupled or more.  Progressives refused to reverse course and fought against sentencing reform for decades.

The left took over an important cultural institution while you weren't looking.  If you were raised in America, you probably grew up reading books published in the "Little Golden Books" series.  It's likely, too, that parents associate that label with trusted and wholesome products.  Well, they're probably still wholesome (no sex, obscenities, or other nasty things in these books), but recent content has taken both a shallow and a leftward turn, with the Little Golden Books starting early to turn your kids on to pop culture and to "wokify" them.

Denver: Rocky Mountain Hellhole.  Seven years ago, Business Insider published, "14 reasons why Denver is the best place to live in America."  They recommended everyone consider Denver as "your next hometown" citing a strong job market, low unemployment, great restaurants, and practical perks such as a low crime rate and good schools.  That was then.  How is Denver doing now as "trendy and desirable"?  In answering that question, the Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle published, "Denver becoming America's crime capital."  That's quite the turnaround in less than a decade, especially when we think of New York City, Baltimore, or Philadelphia as America's crime capitals.

Here's Everything Biden Won't Tell You About The Disastrous State Of Our Union.  The state of our union is a complete, unmitigated disaster.  The economy is in shambles, the border is two years into the worst migrant influx in U.S. history, taxpayer dollars are flying into the hands of a corrupt Eastern European regime without oversight, and our No. 1 enemy — Red China — has compromised our president, our politicians, our phones, and our skies.  Much as he did in his lie-riddled speech last year, President Joe Biden will likely try to use his State of the Union address to Congress this week to credit himself for helping the nation back onto its feet.  In reality, he's done nothing but subject Americans to more crippling crises that prompt historic levels of disapproval.  In an unprecedented "level of sustained pessimism," 71 percent of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track.

Ten Righteous Men.  Typical of a Marxist regime, none of our valued institutions are functioning in a reliable way.  Our children are being abused by the very institutions designed to open the wonders of the world to them.  Our young men, who should be in the prime of their lives, are dropping dead in the midst of the games they love to play.  Our money is no longer worth much, we're finding it harder and harder to fuel our homes and automobiles, and we're seeing iconic businesses fold all around us.  What with Ukraine and woke ideology, the military we have proudly depended on to protect us is unprepared and poorly supplied.

Canadian Government Forces Dairy Farmer to Dump 30,000 Liters of Milk Because He Exceeded His Quota.  A dairy farmer from Southern Ontario, Canada has spoken out about how the Canadian government makes farms dump thousands of liters of fresh milk because they have gone over the quota.  In a video shared on TikTok by Travis Huigen and widely shared by Bushels Per Acre on Twitter, Canadian dairy farmer Jerry Human expresses his outrage at the Canadian government and the Dairy Farmers of Ontario (DFO) for wasting hundreds of liters of fresh milk despite inflation.  "Right now, during the winter months, you milk quite a bit more milk because the feed is very consistent.  And if you do a good job, you will produce quite a bit of milk.  But right now, we're over our quota, and it's regulated by the government, and [implemented] by the DFO," said Human.  "Look at this milk running away.  It's the end of the month [and] I dump 30,000 liters of milk and it breaks my heart.  This year Canadian milk is $7 a liter."

The disappearing law-enforcement presence in San Francisco.  Last month a group of business owners in Seattle gathered for a town hall to discuss persistent crime in the city.  All of the owners had experienced break-ins, often several of them in a year.  And the cost to repair broken windows and doors was often more than the value of whatever thieves had stolen.  Several of the owners had been dropped by their insurance because they'd made too many claims.  They wondered why the police never seemed to have time to walk around their neighborhood at night to keep the thieves at bay.  The situation doesn't seem to be much different in San Francisco.  When Joe Vernieri, the owner of the Black Magic Voodoo Lounge, reported his bar had been broken into it took police 15 hours to respond and even then they responded in the middle of the night when no one was around. [...] So as far as Vernieri is concerned there are no police in San Francisco.  None that will help him.

Democrats' Trojan horse is taking on a life of its own.  Biden was the Democrat left's version of the Trojan horse.  Get the 78-year-old inside the White House pretending to be a gift to the American people, and then let the real puppet masters emerge and change the nation's demographics, destroy the economy, and transform every social norm.  For two years, Biden did precisely what the Democrat socialists wanted him to do:  run to podiums, mumble, and then wander away.  Smile, wave, and lie.  And in the process, the southern border became an open floodgate for illegal aliens and deadly drugs.  Inflation halted the buying power of most Americans, and American streets became crime-infested homeless camps.  Uncle Joe:  the gift that kept on giving.

Who could not have predicted this?
Migrants turn NYC hotel into violent, drug-infested 'free-for-all': employee.  A once-trendy Manhattan hotel has become a wild "free-for-all" of sex, drugs and violence after the city began housing migrants there, an employee claimed Tuesday [1/31/2023].  Row NYC worker Felipe Rodriguez — who told The Post earlier this month that migrants were throwing away "tons" of prepared food at the hotel — said the facility has now descended into anarchy.  "Chaos, total chaos," Rodriguez told "Fox & Friends" when asked to describe conditions at the hotel. "There's no accountability.  There is no daily supervision to show these people that ... 'You don't destroy your hotel.  You are only there temporarily.  This is not your home.'

The root of our problems as a nation.  When a six-year-old brought a gun to school and shot his teacher, the first thought was that it was an accident.  When upon further review it was announced that it was intentional and deliberate, a sort of shock wave went through the population.  This was not just another incident, not just another step along the road to perdition.  Society is no longer slouching toward Gomorrah.  Like the expanding cosmos, the headlong race toward the edge of the cliff is actually accelerating.  This was a quantum leap, an order-of-magnitude increase.  When one observes the breathtaking increase in moral degeneracy, one is reminded of the biblical warning that the beast, knowing that his time is short, is seeking to devour whom he may. [...] Society is becoming more and more disoriented, less structured in terms of norms, and, as an inevitable result, more dysfunctional.  Indeed, the definition of what is "normal" has become so vague as to have lost all practical meaning.  If everything is normal, then nothing is.  If everything is a matter of personal opinion, then facts become irrelevant.  If your truth is not my truth, nor mine yours, then there can be no social contract.  Dysfunctional societies must eventually collapse.  Whether from internal strife or external invasion, they cannot survive.

Anarchy, American-Style.  The 1960s revolution was both anarchic and nihilist.  But it was waged against — not from — the establishment.  Hippies and the Left either attacked institutions or, in Timothy Leary fashion, chose to "turn on, tune in, drop out" from them.  The current revolution is much different — and far more dangerous — for at least three reasons.  The current Left has no intention of "dropping out."  Why would it?  It now controls the very institutions of America that it once mocked and attacked — corporate boardrooms, Wall Street, state and local prosecuting attorneys, most big-city governments, the media, the Pentagon, network and most of cable news, professional sports, Hollywood, music, television, K-12 education, and academia.  In other words, the greatest levers of influence and power — money, education, entertainment, government, the news, and popular culture — are in the hands of the Left.  They have transformed legitimate debate over gay marriage into a hate crime.  Transgenderism went from a modern manifestation of ancient transvestism or gender dysphoria to a veritable litmus test of whether one was good or evil.

Whoopi Goldberg asks if 'we need to see White people get beat up' to see change, then quickly clarifies.  "The View" co-host Whoopi Goldberg wondered on Monday if "we need to see White people get beat up" to see meaningful police reform before clarifying that she was "not suggesting that" following the death of Tyre Nichols.  "Do we need to see White people also get beat before anybody will do anything?  I'm not suggesting that.  So don't write us and tell me what a racist I am.  I'm just asking is that what people have to see in order to wake up and realize this affects us all?" Goldberg asked.  She also wondered when this brutality would "finally lead to some police reform from the ground up."

The Editor says...
There has already been "police reform from the ground up," which is why they only hire black officers, whether they are fit for service or not.

There Is Nothing Democrats Won't Destroy.  The left has changed the definition of words to help their division.  "Woman" has no meaning now, and men win the awards created expressly to celebrate them.  It has to be weird for the old feminists, most of whom look like men now, to know they've plowed the road for men to dominate as women.  Can't wait till Rachel Levine demands the return of Virginia Slims advertising so he can be on them under the banner, "You've come a long way, baby."  But few words have been bastardized more than "community."  It used to mean your neighborhood and the people in it; from the kids you grew up with to the old guy in the corner house everyone was slightly afraid of but who was secretly always nice.  Now it means people who share your skin tone or sexual proclivities.

Germans believe their country is going down the tubes [again].  Fewer and fewer Germans are satisfied with their state.  This is the result of a recent Allensbach survey.  Some 80 percent of all Germans are of the opinion that the state is inhibiting itself in its development through too much bureaucracy.  This also means that fewer and fewer believe in a good economic future.  Only 39 percent still think that Germany will still be one of the leaders in the world economy in 15 years.  In the past, this number used to be almost 60 percent.  Some 68 percent of all Germans are dissatisfied with so-called digital progress.  Only 14 percent of Germans believe that Germany has emerged stronger from the crises of recent years.  And half believe that many things are no longer working properly in their country.  This is not good for the German government, nor is it an optimistic assessment of the future.

Warning: The Anti-Police Movement Is Deadly.  In the Bay Area, criminal homicides increased from 295 in 2021 to 309 in 2022 — 50% higher than 2019.  Oakland had 120 homicides in 2022, a 60% increase over 2019.  And the share of murder victims who were black rose from 53% in 2019 to 58% in 2021.  In other words, in the two years after millions of Americans promised through their checkbooks, their lawn signs, and their social media updates to do everything in their power to protect black lives, the killing of African Americans skyrocketed.

This migrant mess is ruining NYC's Midtown.  Why is Mayor Eric Adams destroying Midtown?  The pulsing heart of the city, the theater, restaurant and tourism district, has not fully recovered from the COVID lockdown yet is already full of homeless hotels with their associated problems.  Now the mayor has announced he's going to turn yet another hotel into a shelter for illegal migrants in the middle of the Theater District.  The Paramount Hotel, a 600-room, Renaissance-style gem opposite the Richard Rodgers Theatre where "Hamilton" has been playing since 2015, is the fifth Midtown hotel converted to an "emergency" shelter in as many months.  Earlier this month, tourists were paying $330 a night to stay there and prices hit as high as $1,000 around New Year's Eve.

Another Day, Another Walgreens Getting Robbed.  No one blinked, they are so used to it because of California's crazy laws that benefit criminals and punish honest business owners.  [Video clip]

America's Future is Bleak When Only 27% of the Younger Generations are Proud to be American.  As recently as 2004, 91% of Americans were extremely or very proud to be American and the United States ranked first in the world in national pride.  However, in less than twenty years there has been a stunning reversal that portends a dire future for the United States as a precipitous erosion in national pride has undermined societal confidence, self-reliance, optimism, and cohesion.  A recent poll revealed that a record low of just 68% of the citizenry are extremely or very proud to be American.  However, underlying that overall dismal outcome is the reality that among the two youngest generations only 38% of Millennials and 16% of Gen Z are proud to be American despite being the beneficiaries of living in a unfathomably prosperous nation that has not known any profound national adversity since the Great Depression.  What we are seeing play out is the reality of demographic change in America as the younger mal-educated generations account for over half of the populace and are increasingly becoming culturally and politically influential.  Within these generations an overwhelming majority have been indoctrinated by socialist/Marxist ideologues to believe that a capitalist United States as founded is irredeemable and must be transformed.

You brought your problems upon yourself.
Eric Adams: 'Unfair' for Sanctuary Cities to Carry the Weight of the Border Crisis.  New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) once again took to the airwaves to say Democratic cities who declared themselves to be a sanctuary for illegal immigrants are being stretched thin due to the large number of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.  New York City has had to open a fifth shelter for recent arrivals from the southern border, which is in addition to using hotels and homeless shelters to house people coming from Latin America and even parts of Asia.  "Well, I believe that when I took the trip to El Paso, you can see firsthand the impact of how it not only harm the foundation of El Paso, but look at Chicago, Houston, Washington, New York City, this is just unfair for cities to carry the weight of a national problem," Adams told MSNBC on Wednesday.  "We're going to open for more hotels, emergency hotels...  This as a major financial impact on New York City and cities across this country that are receiving the brunt of it."  Adams said the Biden White House claims there is a person who is in charge of helping American cities with the immigration problem, but he does not who the person is.

Seattle Is Running Out of Morgue Space Due to the Fentanyl Crisis.  When you run a city on the values of (personal) truth, (social) justice, and the (anti) American way of life, there are bound to be consequences, no matter how hard you try to ignore them.  That may include the spike in violence in New York City, the crime and homelessness throughout California, or the general collapse of Portland, Ore., on every front.  For Seattle, it includes those things and a fentanyl crisis that is claiming lives at an alarming rate.  The rate is so high that the King County Coroner is running out of places to store the bodies.

The greenie left is coming for your coffee.  It wasn't enough that the greenie left came for our light bulbs, our flush toilets, our guns, our plastic straws, our gas stoves, or our hamburgers.  Now they're coming for our coffee. [...] What they want, of course, is to take away more stuff from us, the better to control us.  It wasn't enough to target our gas-powered cars and tell us to take the bus.  It wasn't enough to take away our electricity and natural gas in the name of 'going green' and tell consumers to freeze in winter.  It wasn't enough to howl for an end to jet travel while greenie leftists bought carbon indulgences and continued to jet about with their private planes.  It wasn't enough to take away our plastic bags, to ensure that we only use unsanitary bacteria-filled cloth recycle bags.  It wasn't enough to take away our meat and tell us to eat bugs.  All these are things they are — no, really — trying to take away.  In some cases, they have succeeded at such schemes, too, all for a phony and chimerical quest to stop global warming, which somehow never happens.

Black Lives Matter and the enduring legacy of 'defund the police'.  Over at the Free Press, author Leighton Woodhouse has an excellent article about the ongoing legacy of Black Lives Matter and the "defund the police" movement they helped usher in to cities across America.  Regular readers know this is a particular bugaboo of mine.  That's not just because it was a brutal issue for Democrats who jumped on the bandwagon in 2020.  It's mostly because it's such a shining example of how progressive enthusiasm for fundamental change can often result in complete disaster.  Committing to defunding the police without a plan to replace them with something better is one of the dumbest things the left has done in my lifetime and as such it should be used as an object lesson of what not to do for many years to come.

A Massive Effort at Moral Rebuilding Is Necessary.  I think it fair to say that political economy in our time does not take the home seriously, because it does not take virtue and vice seriously, as the political economists themselves are mainly content with the withering of religious life — they having been brought up in, and having accepted, the dissolution of sexual morals that is rendering America a nation of broken homes, amputated families, fatherless children, and dispirited lovelessness between young men and women, some of whom are condemned to loneliness because they do not sin, and others condemned to that and worse because they do. [...] In all our rush to define the essence of marriage out of our consciousness by extending the category to couples who by definition cannot perform the marital act, we have heard hardly a whisper about all the moral and social questions that bear upon marriage — no whisper at all about divorce, for example, and none at all about how you can possibly promote sexual continence, let alone chastity, while countenancing and blessing actions that presume incontinence and unchastity and that far surpass them in physical and moral harm.

Will Any of You Leftists Wake Up?  The policies being pursued by Democrats at every level of government are visiting wholesale destruction on our economy, our culture and our future.  Whether we're talking about Biden and the Democrats spending trillions of dollars, drawing us into hyperinflation and unsustainable debt, or the freakish efforts of the LGBTQ educrats to proselytize, indoctrinate and impose horrific sex change surgeries on our children that have led to an unprecedented level of child suicide, the devastation is incalculable.  I suppose the rationale for deifying the LGBTQ agenda is to curb population growth?  Have Gay, lesbian and transgender people become the modern heroes of the environment because they are not part of the contemptible "breeders" crowd?  Meanwhile, at the same time, you leftists promote open borders to bring millions into this country precisely because our dwindling population doesn't provide you with the goods and services you want at prices you want.  The rationalizations would be hilarious were they not so universally destructive.

Shocking!  Who could have predicted this?
After Seattle Defunded Its Police, Local Business Owners Say Crime Is Worse Than Ever.  Two years after Seattle slashed its police budget, local business owners say crime has skyrocketed, with police unable to deal with thefts, homelessness and open-air drug use that plague the city.  Seattle and broader King County had more than 13,000 homeless people within its boundaries in 2022, more than every other similar area except Los Angeles County and New York City, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, while the Seattle Police Department (SPD) lost more than 130 officers, KOMO News reported, as homicides, shootings and motor vehicle thefts increased.  Local business owners say law enforcement is failing to effectively deter the rampant drug use and theft disturbing their livelihoods[.]  Rohan Joseph, owner of Elliot Bay Community Fitness in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood, has been posting videos on Twitter for months of people doing drugs, trying to sleep or otherwise causing disturbances outside his business.

Does DC want to be the carjacking capital of the USA?  Washington, D.C.'s city council has just provided incontrovertible proof of the willful incompetence of the gun control movement.  The same people who want to outlaw the possession of firearms by law-abiding people passed legislation to reduce penalties for carjacking, home invasion, and similar violent crimes.  Use of a gun to commit a violent felony in the nation's capital can now be punished by no more than four years in prison.  This makes it clear that the D.C. city council has no real desire to keep firearms away from violent criminals who really shouldn't have them, and the legislation is so dysfunctional that Mayor Muriel Bowser, who is certainly no conservative, intends to veto it.  It also makes Washington, D.C. the ideal place for carjackers, robbers, home invaders, and gun felons to ply their trades because, in contrast to almost every other jurisdiction in the United States, they won't get much prison time.  If you want to stick a gun in somebody's face to demand money, then you should do it in D.C., where you can't get more than four years (unless U.S. attorneys step in, as discussed below).  If you want to force somebody out of a car at gunpoint, then D.C. is the place to do it.  If you do it in Florida, you can get up to life in prison.

First 2023 Murder in Seattle Carried Out by Thug Freed by Bail Fund.  Most people have stopped paying attention to bail funds aside from the time that Kamala Harris tweeted support for the Minnesota Freedom Fund during the BLM race riots.  While MFF's policy of bailing out arrested criminals has proven fatal, it's not the only bail fund with lethal consequences.  The Seattle and Portland bail funds have had their own death toll.  Including the first murder of 2023 in Seattle. [...] There have been a number of cases of bail funds freeing domestic abusers only for it to end in violence and even murder.  And, each time, the bail fund claims that it could never have seen this coming.

Republicans, Don't Botch the Hearings.  Here are the questions Americans have:
  What is causing inflation, and why are energy costs so high?
  Why is fentanyl killing tens of thousands of Americans?
  Why is our southern border wide open?
  Can we trust the FBI and DOJ?
  What is causing the spike in inner-city crime?
  Why are we letting China steal American data, patents, and military secrets?
  Where did COVID come from?  Do the vaccines work?  Are people really "dying suddenly"?
  Why is our education system failing our children?

Get Ready for 'Climate Change Death' Tracking.  Anyone following the regime's playbook already understands that when you disagree with it, you'll be accused of killing someone.  Don't take the vaccine, don't lock down, or don't wear a mask — you're killing grandma.  Question voting and balloting procedures, and your words will provoke a deadly insurrection.  Suggest that a man can't get pregnant, and you're guilty of stochastic terrorism.  The regime characterizes conservatives as killers for their opinions, yet its partisans celebrate abortion up to parturition.  It wants to let murderers out of jail, and is now moving to destigmatize the "dignified" culling of the elderly and infirm.  Climate change is the platform from which the regime seeks to achieve power by creating a rationale for laws and regulations that dictate where and how people can move, live, purchase, and work.  So it makes sense that climate change would re-emerge as a priority just as the world moves on from a pandemic, where the body count of those dying "from" or "with" Covid was used to justify repressive policies such as lockdowns, shutdowns, election process changes, and the prevention of the practice of your religious faith.

Like Paul Revere, a Massachusetts Republican Sends Warning.  The fact is that progressives have been actively working to take over the Democrat party — city by city, and state by state — for years.  Even though progressives are never the majority anywhere, they've gotten their grubby little mitts on all the levers of power, corrupting voting laws and elections, instituting destructive policies, and securing permanent rule for themselves.  Places like California, New York, Illinois -- and sadly, Massachusetts — might be past saving at this point.  No wonder so many are leaving.  Progressives have finally succeeded in taking over the Democrat party at the national level, too.  They've shoved aside all the normal, moderate Democrats, like the kind you used to see.  Can you think of a current Democrat politician who doesn't stick to the progressive narrative, even when it's obviously ridiculous?

The Scariest Developments to Watch Out For in 2023.  In just the past two years, our national government has spent roughly $13 trillion and authorized spending trillions more.  Politicians use words and phrases like "investments," "long-term savings," "reducing inflation," "protecting Ukraine's sovereignty," etc. to justify this.  Clearly, they are either lying or living in a fantasy world.  Most of the money is being used to pay off campaign contributors and special interest groups, such as the climate change lobby, or to make politicians look good.  Inflation spiked to nine percent in June 2022, so the Federal Open Market Committee began raising interest rates to fight it.  As interest rates rose, the stock market tanked.  In 2023, interest rates will likely increase further, possibly sparking a worldwide recession.  Neither is good news for investors.

Latest Inflation Report Shows How Insane Grocery Costs Have Gotten.  Even as fuel oil costs fell 16.6 percent in December, the cost for the necessary expense to keep homes warm through the winter is still 41.5 percent more expensive than it was one year ago.  Meanwhile, electricity costs for Americans advanced 14.3 percent over the last 12 months and piped utility gas bills increased 19.3 percent in 2022.  The more stable core CPI number — which excludes food and energy — increased 0.3 percent in December, an acceleration from November 2022's 0.2 percent increase, for an annual core inflation rate of 5.7 percent as most indexes continued to see prices rise.  Among the indexes that continue to spike is food, up 10.4 percent in the last 12 months.

What Caused the Political Hysteria?  The Left has gone mad over Donald J. Trump — past, present, and future.  The current Democratic Party and NeverTrump "conservatives" assumed that Trump was and remains so obviously toxic that they do not have to define exactly what his evil entails.  Accordingly, they believe that any means necessary are justified to stop him.  And furthermore, these zealots, when out of power, insist such extraordinary measures should not be emulated and institutionalized by their opponents, much less ever boomeranged back upon their creators.  In this context, the Republicans retaking control of the House of Representatives once again raises the question whether they should reply in kind.  Given the current investigation following the Mar-a-Lago raid, should there also be a mirror-image special prosecutor to examine President Biden's lost stash of classified documents in his insecure office following his vice presidency?  Can House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) ever be considered too inflammatory, given that his predecessor, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tore up the president's State of the Union address on national television?

In McCarthy Negotiations, GOP Landed On [the] 'Most Significant Win For Conservatives In A Decade'.  Life expectancy in the United States is at its lowest level since 1996.  Teen suicide rates spiked nearly 30 percent in the last decade.  Though drug overdose deaths declined from a record high in 2021, they remain 50 percent higher than just five years ago.  In the second quarter of 2022, the majority of workers lost a median 8.5 percent in real wages — a 25-year high.  Marriage and fertility rates are falling.  A heightened nuclear threat looms amidst the invasion of Ukraine.  In the last fiscal year, the government recorded 2.76 million illegal crossings at our southern border, as tens of thousands of desperate people stream into the country every month, trafficked by cartels.  American happiness is at a record low.  So is institutional trust.  It's in this dismal context that Kevin McCarthy's bid for the House speakership faltered over the course of four frenzied days last week.

A Rendezvous With Rwanda?  America is an increasingly multiracial society.  Despite its early history of slavery and racial segregation, and ongoing bias and tensions, the United States remains one of the few contemporary multiracial constitutional systems that have actually worked.  Yet recently few have appreciated that achievement.  Usually multiracial nations and empires — Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires — require some level of coercion incompatible with a democratic constitution to force calm.  Brazil, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Kenya may be currently multiracial democracies in theory, but in fact they are often sectarian and tribal cauldrons.  In most such places, pride, solidarity — and even safety — are only found through common religious, ethnic, and racial bonds that become all-encompassing.  The individual's primary allegiance to each particular warring group inevitably becomes incompatible with every other's overriding loyalties.  The United States is insidiously nearing that abyss.  It has all but renounced its old commitment to the melting-pot, and a "content-of-our-character" ideal of assimilation and integration within a common culture.  But as we obsess on race and accordingly separate, do we really know the final consequences of what the diversity/equity/inclusion tribalism actually entails?

Movie Attendance Collapses 48% over Four Very Woke Years.  Between 2018 and 2022, movie theater attendance dropped in half, and I do not want to hear any excuses about the pandemic.  People will go to the theater to see a movie that appeals to them.  Spider-Man: No Way Home proved this last year.  Top Gun: Maverick proved it this year.  Avatar: Way of the Water is proving it right now.  And those are just the blockbusters. [...] In other words, blaming streaming or the China Flu on the collapse of the movie business is anti-science, so please do shut up.

Nancy Pelosi calls House Democrats 'The greatest collection of intellect, integrity, and imagination assembled.  Just when one thinks one has heard everything, one is proven wrong.  Outgoing speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently wrote her last "Dear Colleague" letter to her Democrat co-conspirators/comrades.  In this missive, she stated, "During the 117th Congress, President Biden and Congressional Democrats have put forth a shining vision of justice for all.  Together, we have worked tirelessly to infuse this value into our legislative efforts.  We can all take immense pride in our achievements toward that goal, which is making a real difference in the lives of the American people."  Justice?  For all?  Tell that to all those still rotting in prison, without conviction or charge, for strolling through the People's House on January 6, 2021.  Tell that to those who were snatched from their homes in the wee hours of the morning by armed feds when a simple summons to appear would have sufficed.  Tell that to all those whose jobs were considered unessential.  Tell that to all those in the military who were discharged because they wouldn't accept an experimental substance into their bodies.  Tell that to all those who have lost loved ones to violent crime, rates of which skyrocketed in the past two years due to Democrat policies — or to those who have lost loved ones to fentanyl because Democrats absolutely refuse to police our southern border.  And tell it to America's rapidly dwindling middle class, beset by historic inflation, supply chain problems, and rising taxes.

Trump Hatred Is Not Cheap.  We have a close family friend who voted for Joe Biden. [...] We'll call her Pat.  She voted for gropey Joe even though she disagrees with almost all the radicalism that he and the Democrats are pushing.  Her reasoning is quite simple.  She refused to vote for Donald Trump because he is too personally offensive to her. [...] It didn't take long to realize that the Trump alternative — Joe Biden — came with some hidden costs of his own, that Pat didn't know about.  Now that we're two years into his presidency, we can actually quantify some of those costs.  Immediately upon assuming office Joe got with his pals in Congress and went on a spending binge.  We shouldn't be surprised.  That's what socialists do — spend other people's money.  Joe, San Fran Nan, and little Chucky Schumer had a grand time, spending almost five trillion bucks and driving the national debt up another three trillion dollars.  But Joe never considered the post-party hangover — a 40-year high inflation level.  That ear-popping inflation isn't going down either, unless there are some serious changes in fiscal behavior.  With the recently passed omnibus spending bill, there's no indication that anybody, in either party, intends to change behavior.  The Congressional Joint Economic Committee has found that inflation alone is costing American families an addition $635 per month.  That's the equivalent of a nice car payment to fund Joe's big spending, energy choking, regulation expanding, experiment with banana republicism.

The Coup We Never Knew.  Did someone or something seize control of the United States? [...] Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings?  How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas — furious over a court decision on abortion?  How could these mobs so easily throng our justices' homes, with placards declaring "[...]"?  Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth?  And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?  How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call?  Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television?  Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?

8 of the 10 Neediest Cities in America Have Something in Common.  A recent study showed that the 10 neediest cities in the U.S. have a few things in common.  The most glaring commonality of this list is that eight out of the top ten cities had a Democrat at the helm at the time the survey took place.  Wallethub.com released the tragic list showing which cities are starting 2023 with a thud.  They used 28 indicators including poverty, hunger, homelessness, etc.  There are not a lot of surprises in this list of 182 towns across the U.S.  Detroit comes in as the neediest town in America.  Motor City has been dying for decades.  Corruption and plunging car sales have gutted this once-beautiful town since the 1970s.  If you think getting a cab in Hockeytown is hard, try calling an ambulance.  Budget cuts reduced EMS crews to just 15 more than a decade ago.  Detroit also scored third place for "food insecurity" as well as "inadequate plumbing."

The War On Truckers, Refrigerators, And Your Well-Being.  In the same way our "superiors" think that their food comes from the grocery store rather than a farm or ranch, they must believe that those items magically appear on the shelves.  Otherwise, why would the ruling class, made up of and zealously backed by elites, go to war against trucks?  Just before Christmas, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule that it calls a "key step toward accelerating zero-emissions future," and part of "the historic Clean Truck Plan, which is moving America's highly polluting heavy-duty trucking fleet towards low-carbon and electric technologies."  Enforcement of course will mean fewer trucks on the road.  For many drivers, the cost of working under the new regime will be too high.  "Truckers and manufacturers warn that the rule is too stringent and costly, and that compliance could send higher prices through the economy that is already suffering from high energy costs and high inflation," says the Institute for Energy Research.

Rebellion Against the People.  It was not so long ago that competition was the breeding ground for excellence, now any mention of competition is hissed at with emotional tantrums by those who could not compete on any level and it's drawn the whole nation into an acceptance of failure.  One need look no further than the two institutions of importance, the schools and the military to see the end result.  The majority of our students cannot pass rudimentary tests in the critical studies, but they can emote.  Our military is so confused about its mission that it ranks success as acceptance of perversion rather than marksmanship.  The question thus arises, what is left to support?  What is there now that an American can devote oneself to that is not now decidedly un-American?

The Tyranny in America.  It never ceases to amaze me when I hear media talking heads plaintively ask, "Why won't Biden or Harris visit the border?"  They ask the question genuinely believing that if either the President or the Vice President saw the looming existential disaster, it would change their minds.  Such naiveté confirms Dr. King's idea that "nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."  Daily, we see the dictatorial moves by Biden and his administration.  We view the tears of those at the southern border who fear for their lives and property.  As the illegals surge into the country, sexual exploitation, human trafficking, crime, rampant drug use, violence, disease, death, and soul-searing fear continue to suffocate Americans. [...] Of course, illegal immigration will continue.  In the next two years of Biden's rule, another five million illegals will enter the country and thus an entrenched dictatorship will take hold.

Only an economic illiterate could say that Biden's policies are working well.  Here is a headline in Yahoo Finance on December 30th: "This week in Bidenomics: It was a pretty good year."  The author is Rick Newman, whose title is "Senior Columnist.  Newman admits that the S & P 500 was down 20% for the year, the Dow Jones was down 10%, and the Nasdaq was down 34%.  Nevertheless, he brags that gas prices are down from their high to $3.15 per gallon, never acknowledging that gas was $2.17 when Biden won the election.  Bragging about prices that are up 45% in two years does not show any ability to think cognitively.  Diesel prices are also down from their Biden-era high.  Still, their Biden-era "low" is $4.53, which is 90% higher than the $2.38 price for diesel when Biden was elected.  Crude oil is around $80 or up 100% from $40 when Biden was elected.  That is what happens when one of your major goals is to destroy industries that provide reasonably priced energy.

We Must Convince People That The Fascist Far Left Wants To Destroy The US.  Events are part of an overall plan that has a specific purpose that proves it's not just incompetence.  Leftists desperately had to suppress the Biden laptop scandal because it showed that they were under foreign influence.  We know now that if the people had been aware of this, history would have been changed.  That influence explains why we are diminishing our energy capabilities while giving the red Chinese a free pass.  The purpose is to weaken us compared to them.  That influence explains why we are diminishing our military capabilities by shoveling cash and weapons into Ukraine.  That influence explains why we are committing national suicide with an open border that not only weakens us to the point of a Cloward-Piven implosion but also provides all manner of military infiltration opportunities.  That open border also is giving leftists a great opportunity to take a page from the history of the Opium wars and destabilize the US with a flood of Fentanyl.

Under Wokeism, Animal Farm Comes to Life.  Have you read George Orwell's perennially popular and spookily prescient book Animal Farm?  Written in 1945, it is recognized as one of the most foundational books of the 20th century and the book's satire vs. the reality of today is striking. [...] It takes intellectual rigor to avoid making the same mistakes repeatedly.  It is challenging especially for the young and those who:
  a.   Did not acquire a good grounding in reason or academic discipline through education
  b.   Have never experienced real suffering or failure
  c.   Have been deprived of appropriate role models
Yet, warts and all, since our country was created, we've seen an unbroken string of generally successful adults, until recently. [...] One reason why we have so many developmental problems now is the pervasiveness of substance abuse such as the massive amount of fentanyl crossing our borders which has become proof of an undeclared war against us.  And so is the sedition, subversion, and treacherous behavior of those knowingly subverting our young and our institutions. [...] If you are over 40, remember how we used to live.  Put aside the mistakes we made but recall the successes, achievements, and good our country has been able to accomplish in the past: all that is now a quickly receding memory.  There is no easy way forward, but there is one legitimate way forward.  We must stop those hiding in our midst from continuing to destroy us under the guise of free speech.

Liz Warren's Disappearing Act.  It's been one lie after another from the Democrats in D.C., compounded with economic policies that could only make matters as bad as possible.  When President Trump left office in January 2021, the national average for gasoline was around $2.30/gallon.  Biden immediately signed a series of anti-energy executive orders restricting fracking, oil exploration, and fossil-fuel production.  He did this for two reasons:  1) To counter and negate anything that President Trump had done, simply out of infantile spite;  2) To curry approval and favorable publicity with the Green New Deal faction and their supporters.  Predictably, retail gasoline pricing spiked.  It was soon in the mid-$3.00 range, more than a dollar over where it was under President Trump.  This was well before Russia invaded Ukraine.  This was not "Putin's price increase."  This was all Biden.  As fuel went up, transportation/delivery costs increased and pricing for all goods started to go up.  This was an absolutely unnecessary tax on the American public, diluting consumer's buying power and sapping their confidence.  The Biden energy policy's effect on overall consumer pricing would have been bad enough if that's all that there was.  But it wasn't, not by a long shot.

Biden's Unopposed Imposition of Stalinism.  The majority of Americans are against open borders.  Once again, what we want doesn't seem to matter.  A steady wave of illegal immigration is what Biden wants and no one seems the least bit interested in putting an end to it.  Millions of unvetted migrants are streaming across the border and being shipped to secret destinations in direct violation of U.S. immigration law.  This is nothing short of treasonous.  The import of deadly drugs, violent criminals, terrorists, and COVID spreaders constitutes the worst public safety issue since World War II.  At a time when runaway inflation is driving millions of Americans into the poorhouse, we are being forced to provide public assistance to millions of freeloading non-citizens.  Local communities are being torn apart by the influx of refugees. [...] None of this is happening by accident.  "It is becoming harder not to conclude that the border crisis is intentional," said Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana. "Nobody is this incompetent."  Of course it is intentional.  Biden knows exactly what he is doing.  He gets his stooges, DHS Secretary Mayorkas and Press Secretary Jean-Pierre, to deny that the border is open, but we know they are lying through their teeth.

The Democrats' war on the family.  It wasn't that long ago when older men dressed as women twerking with children at city-sponsored parades or schools adopting unisex locker rooms or medical clinics exploiting gender dysphoria to pad their bottom line all would have been considered child abuse.  But today, Joe Biden, the Catholic who once stood by his religion, tweets, "Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.  There is no room for compromise..."  As they say, one thing leads to another.  This swift and headlong lurch into androgyny started a while ago when the revolutionaries realized before you can deconstruct the West you've got to deconstruct Western notions of the family.  The Human Rights Campaign's Welcoming Schools program celebrates transgender youth and normalizes gender fluidity in kindergarten.  Planned Parenthood, when they're not doing their best to eliminate families, says "no worries," we're sexual beings beginning at birth.

Life Expectancy Craters in Biden's America of Fentanyl ODs and COVID Jabs.  During the two years that President Joe Biden has occupied the White House, life expectancy in the United States has fallen to its lowest level since 1996 as official figures show that drug overdose deaths reached their highest levels in recorded history last year.  Data from the National Center for Health Statistics reveals that life expectancy in the US declined by more than a year between 2014 and 2020, from 78.9 years to 77.8 years, the Daily Mail reported.  Health authorities blamed a number of factors for the decline, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the isolation and lockdowns that followed as well as drug overdoses, suicide, chronic liver disease, cirrhosis and homicide.

Krasner's Philly: Win your freedom after 25 years on Death Row, get executed on the street.  It continually baffles me why these Democratic bastions go for the most mediocre — sometimes outright malevolent — hands down worst choices every single time.  City residents watch their world dissolve around them, solely through the actions of the very individuals they return to office time and time again, yet nothing but nothing will shake them free of their mindless devotion to their own destruction.  New York City's a terrific example of that mindset.  So is Philadelphia. [...] In January, the city is due to reassess whether their new community-based programs to reduce gun violence have produced results.  That will depend on what their definition of "results" is and how lucrative the community found the grants from the programs.

US life expectancy reaches 25-year low, according to CDC.  The life expectancy for the average U.S. citizen has hit a 25-year low, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  Life expectancy for people born in the U.S. during 2021 stands at 76.4 years, the lowest on record since 1996.  Life expectancy for those born in 2019 was 78.8 years — a drop of 2.4 years, according to CDC data.  This marks a dramatic reversal from the steady growth in expected longevity of U.S. citizens for the past two decades.  CDC officials blamed the drop on two factors — the COVID-19 pandemic and a rapidly growing epidemic of substance abuse and drug addiction.

The Editor says...
Allow me to translate, embellish or amplify the last sentence in the excerpt above:  [#1] Every illness under the sun was counted as Covid-19, if the patient was in a hospital with a financial incentive to blame Covid, and [#2] "a rapidly growing epidemic of substance abuse" refers to the tidal wave of fentanyl coming over the unenforced border.

The Swamp strikes back.  The U.S. is currently in the midst of myriad crises due to the Democrats.  The border is unguarded, causing millions to illegally enter the U.S. The Border Patrol says there have been over 5 million border crossing incidents that were tracked.  High inflation is draining savings and placing hardships on citizens while the crime wave has placed citizens in peril.  None of the Biden-backed initiatives such as the Inflation Reduction Act nor the infrastructure bill nor his climate initiative addresses the citizens' suffering.  Beyond their misgovernance, the tyrannical Democrats have displayed a propensity for totalitarianism.  The Democrats have branded citizens as domestic terrorists for being from another party.  Protests are a fundamental right in a democracy, but the Democrats have seized this right from their political opponents.

What Eddie Fisher Said.  [Scroll down]  Many of today's troubles, I believe, are due to malicious intentions by a powerful few.  Everything that is wrong in the world today is totally unnecessary because it has been engineered deliberately by malicious enemies of our nation.  Just four years ago, America was booming.  The stock market was in an unprecedented surge, wages were higher than ever for all, including minority groups, unemployment was historically low and natural resources were plentiful.  Peace was happening in the Middle East; our military forces were being restored to strength and expanding and we had worldwide respect once again.  At the helm of the administration was a leader despised by the elite GOP and the Left but responsible for all of the benefits mentioned.  So, what happened?

El Paso's migrant state of emergency is a taste of what nation faces as Biden shrugs at border crisis.  Oscar Leeser, the Democratic mayor of El Paso, has bent over backward not to "embarrass" the head of his party, President Joe Biden.  As migrants poured across the border, unmetered and unvetted, he quietly grappled with the strain on the city's resources.  He provided the shelter and food the federal government wouldn't.  Hestruck private deals with Mayor Eric Adams to alleviate the crush, busing some people to New York.  Even as the City Council begged him to point outwhat was happening, he refused.  He insisted he'd been told by the Biden administration that if he was patient, they would help.  This went on for months.  On Saturday, Leeser's patience finally broke.  He declared a state of emergency, admitting what had been obvious for nearly two years:  The border is out of control, and President Biden isn't doing anything about it.

10 Steps to Save America.  Most Americans know something has gone terribly wrong — and very abruptly — with the United States.  They are certain that our wounds are almost all self-inflicted.  The current pathologies are not a result of a natural disaster, an exhaustion of natural resources, plagues, or an existential war.  Crushing national debt and annual deficits, spiraling food and fuel costs amid "normal" seven-percent-plus annual inflation, bread-and-circuses entitlements, a nonexistent border, a resurgence of racial tribalism, pandemic violent criminality, and humiliation abroad — all these pathologies are easily cited as symptoms of a sick patient.  Our crises are not as the Left maintains — a nine-person Supreme Court, the Electoral College, or the filibuster — all distractions from existential problems the Left largely created.

Belgium's Energy Suicide?  Belgium's situation is dramatic.  While our neighbors have taken and are taking measures to cushion the energy crisis, maintain their budgetary health and guarantee their energy supply, Belgium is in a situation of clear and obvious failure on all three counts.  I will only deal here with the energy misery, which is entirely avoidable and caused by the anti-nuclear tendencies of two environmentalist political parties, Ecolo and The Greens.  Security of energy supply seems, for some officials, to be an abstract concept.  It is anything but.  In practice, when energy security is not guaranteed, it means load-shedding, blackouts and an explosion in energy costs, as well as, for many, having to choose between "heat or eat".

Condo prices in San Francisco plummet as drug abuse and crime soar.  Luxury condo prices in the heart of downtown San Francisco have plummeted as drug abuse and crime have spiraled out control — and as many techies continue to work remotely.  Data analyzed by Compass shows the Golden Gate city — once pegged as the hottest real estate market globally — has since fallen fast.  The median sale price of a two-bedroom condo, for example, has fallen 16.5% since 2021, while sale prices in surrounding areas have slipped only 7%, according to the market report.

The Commercial Impacts of COVID Will Last for Years.  Have you noticed that things have changed in our country over the last three years?  In 2019, my truck broke down.  I got it into the shop the next day to be fixed.  In 2022, I needed a mechanic to service the brakes on one of our cars.  It took three weeks to get the car into a garage.  We also had a fender-bender this year.  It took two months to get an appointment for an estimate — not even to get someone to actually fix the damage. [...] Those are minor annoyances.  Things get a bit more serious when we look at the medical industry. [...] Are you noticing a pattern?  Prior to COVID, everything worked.  After COVID, every industry is struggling to meet customer needs.

Our Parasitic Generation.  Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States?  We are $31 trillion in collective debt.  The new normal is $1.5 trillion budget deficits.  The military is politicized and short of recruits.  We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to confirm our enemies' cynical stereotypes.  Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections.  We practice segregation and racial discrimination and claim we do not because the right and good people support it and, anyway, the victims deserve it.  The country has seen defeat before but never abject, deliberate humiliation as in Kabul, when we fled and abandoned to the terrorist Taliban a $1 billion embassy, a huge, remodeled air base, thousands of friends, and tens of billions of dollars in military hardware — and hard-earned deterrence.  We are witnessing the breakdown of basic norms essential for civilized life, from affordable food and fuel to available key antibiotics and baby formula.  Old Cairo seems safer than an after-hours subway ride or stroll at dusk in many major American cities.  Medieval London's roadways were likely cleaner than Market Street in San Francisco.  Speech was freer in 1920s America than it is now.

The Crumbling States of America.  Our union is crumbling, our borders are smashed, and our respect has been obliterated.  No one fears America therefore evil runs wild.  And with corruption embedded so deeply into the ability of the people to elect the persons of their own choice (i.e.  Maricopa County, AZ allowing 294k plus votes to be counted that had no persons attached to the ballot) the outlook seems dire.  What the circumstance requires is a fighter, a builder, and someone who stands up to our enemies and for our way of life.  In other words the exact opposite of what incompetent buffoons currently in charge offer.

NYPD resignations shoot up by 30% as 1,225 officers ditch the US's biggest police force.  Thousands of New York City police officers have ditched the country's biggest police force and fled to other states for higher salaries.  Police department recruiters from other states, including Florida and Colorado have rushed to the Big Apple to persuade some of the city's 34,000 officers into relocating in exchange for higher pay and better work environments.  The retention rate among NYPD officers is rocky, especially since 1,225 officers have resigned through November before reaching five years at the police force, according to the New York Times.  About 3,200 total have left this year, including retirees.

The terrible consequences of stolen elections and government corruption.  [Scroll down] The results of their treachery?  A legitimately life-threatening energy crisis due to Biden's cancelling of pipelines and drilling which spread and intensified the inflation we are enduring.  The catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan gave the Bagram Air Base to China and billions of dollars' worth of high-tech U.S. military equipment to the Taliban.  Biden threw open the southern border; and well over two million migrants have entered the country.  Where are they now?  Who knows?  Many of the unaccompanied children are obviously being trafficked.  Biden is absolutely in business with the cartel sex-traffickers.  This administration's irresponsible spending has increased the national debt to $131 trillion, and yet they continue to throw billions we do not have to Ukraine to protect a border that is irrelevant to Americans; it's part of their scheme to take Putin down but the war has killed thousands of Ukranian civilians with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's complicity.  Where have the billions of dollars gone?  Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wants an audit; the Democrats say 'no.' [...] Biden wants to forgive billions in student loans; he wants working taxpayers who could not afford college to pay for those who did but are slackers.  He wants to continue to subsidize millions of illegal migrants he's ushered into the country.  Homeless Americans, nearly all of them mentally ill and/or drug-addicted, are abandoned onto the streets of Democrat-run cities like detritus but Biden ignores them.

The Experts Finally Discover Why 'LGBTQ Youth' Are Suicidal.  Liberal and tolerant Public Health experts seem to have finally sussed out, based on hard clinical research, the true sources of LGBTQ+++ youth suicidality. [...] It's obviously just a major coincidence that suicidality increases when pop culture floods children's corporate media programming to celebrate "Transgender Day of Visibility" and libbed-out parents encourage their four-year-old children to "explore their genders."  This is clearly not disorienting or confusing for children.

Are We Living in a 'Post-Truth' Society?  The online Cambridge dictionary defines "post-truth" to mean "relating to a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts." Given this definition, I personally believe much of the United States has transitioned to a "post-truth" society, and many of us will become casualties of this new paradigm before harsh reality steers our nation back to an "objective truth"-based decision-making. [...] What caused our society to reach this tipping point?  I believe that objective truth is dying from a thousand little cuts and these cuts are a purposeful strategy to destroy our society and groom a population so it can be manipulated through feelings.  I will mention a few below (I am sure the reader can come up with dozens more):
  •   Participation Trophies (avoid the trauma of losing and starve the intuition of how to win)
  •   Eliminate Traditional Roles (break down the nuclear family by eliminating mothers and fathers, the distinction between men and women)
  •   Changing Definitions of Words (causing words to have no objective meaning, crippling our ability to communicate with each other rationally)
  •   Toxic Masculinity (discourage boys from becoming men who know how to manage the risks needed to provide for and protect a family)
  •   Teach children how to avoid trauma with trigger warnings and safe spaces (teaches children to avoid facts and data that would promote rational thought leading to objective truth and an informed intuition)
  •   Censor Speech (so that "my truth" will not be confronted by "the truth")
All these assaults on the truth are carefully planned and promoted by those who want to tear down our country to replace it with a new paradigm.

Extreme Danger: "Boring" Election Issues.  Some of you may have heard that first New York City and now Washington D.C. passed a law allowing non-citizens to vote in city elections.  When I tell people in the real world about this, they don't understand what I mean at first because it sounds so outlandish because Americans are supposed to be electing American leaders — not people from the Dominican Republic, or Chinese nationals, and so forth.  We filed a lawsuit.  We've got four clients, and we're suing New York City. [...] Some people are trying to fundamentally transform how our elections are run, who is voting.  The reason they have allowed foreigners to vote in New York City elections, here is the important part, is that they are trying to normalize it.  They are trying to normalize foreigner voting in the United States.

2020: The Year the Ruling Class Took Control.  Is the world really a better place when a major league baseball and football team got rid of their names, a black woman wearing an apron was removed from bottles of maple syrup, and a squaw was removed from butter containers all in the name of social justice?  It's totally laughable, but these are all examples of the top-down cancel culture the country has been experiencing since 2020.  Every day there are numerous articles identifying the rotten woke establishment consolidating its control.

Hollowed Out.  Most military experts agree that the U.S. military is no longer capable of achieving its mission as mandated by national defense doctrines adopted by administrations of both parties.  President Biden is exacerbating the situation by focusing military strategy on progressive politics instead of military preparedness.  Even a Democratic controlled Congress overruled his proposed budget in order to increase spending and partially to fund programs required to reverse the decline.  While the U.S. military remains the world's most powerful military, it also has the broadest mission of any nation, with global security needs and commitments.  Those proud of U.S. capabilities fairly observe that no other nation could have evacuated 124,000 people in two weeks from Kabul.  Nonetheless, insufficient funding, slow modernization, and woke mandates are hollowing out the military's readiness and capacity to achieve its mission.

Democrats: Get your cities under control.  It cannot be said enough that if you are in a Democratic-run major American city right now, you should probably be making plans to get out as soon as possible: [...]

Biden Defends Multi-Trillion Dollar Scam: 'We Did So Much, Nobody Knows the Effects Yet'.  Oh, Joe, bless your clueless heart; you don't even see the irony. [...] Biden, on Tuesday [11/29/2022], defended his ill-fated "American Rescue Plan" for the zillionth time by arguing that the (at least) $1.9 trillion spending spree helped enable local governments to keep paying their employees (which does zero to help productivity).  He also boasted of his additional trillions in spending for government-subsidized health care, manufacturing, infrastructure, and so-called "green energy."  Biden's claim was not only nonsensical; it was a direct contradiction of Economics 101:  Injecting trillions of dollars into a struggling economy to chase a relatively limited supply of goods and services generally leads to an increase in inflation — not a decrease, as Team Biden disingenuously continues to claim.

Netherlands to forcefully shut down 3,000 farms.  The Great Reset is in full gear in the Netherlands as the country's government moves to shut down thousands of farms.  To comply with the European Union's radical climate laws, the Dutch government of World Economic Forum acolyte Mark Rutte will force up to 3,000 farms to shut down for good.  Farmers will be made an offer on their farms, which the government claims is "well over" market value.  According to nitrogen minister Christianne van der Wal, the government purchase will be compulsory.  "There is no better offer coming," claimed van der Wal.  Recent EU nature preservation rules require member states to reduce emissions across sectors of the economy.  As one of Europe's most prominent farming nations, half of the Netherlands' emissions come from agricultural activity.  Rutte has warned that those who refuse to comply could face government force.

Joe Biden caused the diesel supply crisis he is complaining about.  During recent public appearances, President Joe Biden has continued to complain about energy prices as well as the potentially catastrophic shortage of diesel that has been forecast to hit the United States soon, particularly in the northeast.  Of course, he never takes the blame for any of this himself.  He instead tries to blame the "greedy" energy companies or, of course, Vladimir Putin.  He has called for bans on oil and gas exports and even suggested a mandate that diesel stocks be maintained at a higher level.  But a new report from the Institute for Energy Research addresses the actual root of these problems.  What we're facing is a significant loss in refinery capacity in the United States and its various territories.  We've lost more than a million barrels per day in production capacity, but rather than working to rebuild that capacity, the White House is issuing new edicts that will result in diminishing it further.

Over 70 Percent of Children Aged 7-12 [are] Now Afraid of Climate Change — Survey.  More than 70 percent of children aged 7-12 are now afraid of climate change according to the results of a survey.  More than seven in ten children aged 7-12 are now worried about climate change, research conducted by a UK-based start-up has reportedly found.  It comes amid reports from various experts that children and teenagers of various demographics are experiencing high rates of mental health difficulties, with one school councillor earlier this year saying that anxiety rates have hit an all-time high post-lockdown.  According to a report by Euronews, the survey — which polled 1,000 children born between 2010 and 2015 on their views regarding the environment — found that a total of 71 percent of respondents were now worried about environmental changes, including the changing climate.

The Editor says...
What other "environmental changes" are going on, other than the constantly (but imperceptibly) changing climate?  Shouldn't the public schools teach kids not to be afraid of trivial things that are beyond their control?  Are they teaching kids to worship the Earth and fear it at the same time?

Biden's Crushing Inflation Spikes Household Credit Card Debt to New Heights.  The Biden administration has worked overtime to gaslight Americans into believing everything is totally fine when, in fact, everything is not fine.  As a matter of fact, it's getting worse by the day.  And by "it's," I mean everything is going south.  The latest indication of yet another looming economic crisis — and no, I'm not talking about the developing housing crisis, the diesel fuel crisis, the home heating oil crisis, the inflation crisis, or the illegal immigration crisis — was revealed in a startling report this week regarding total household credit card debt, which has now increased by the most in 20 years, rising a staggering 15% from last year.

What is behind the rise in girls questioning their gender identity?  Earlier this year, a team of NHS researchers was asked to investigate why there has been such a huge rise in the number of adolescent biological girls seeking referrals to gender clinics.  The figures alone do seem remarkable.  According to a study commissioned by NHS England, 10 years ago there were just under 250 referrals, most of them boys, to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust in London.  Last year, there were more than 5,000, which was twice the number in the previous year.  And the largest group, about two-thirds, now consisted of "birth-registered females first presenting in adolescence with gender-related distress", the report said.  The review team is looking into the causes behind "the considerable increase in the number of referrals" and the changing case mix, but is not expected to publish any findings until next year.

Americans Living under Communism.  Did you ever wonder what it would be like to live under communism?  Well, now you know.  The last two years have seen a parade of dumb and dumber policies, the kind you expect in totalitarian dictatorships.  The distinguishing traits are as follows: rulers show contempt for their serfs; policy wonks concoct endless stream of counterproductive ideas; and casual cruelty hurts everyone, day after day.  Here are a dozen examples.  Think back to Biden's decision to shut down the pipeline bringing petroleum from Canada.  Could anything be more irrational than shutting down a functioning pipeline, thus causing higher prices for everyone (and giving Putin the money he needed to invade a neighbor)?  Then we had the president wandering around foreign countries begging for their petroleum.  Millions of Americans knew for the first time what a totalitarian society feels like.  The top guy is nuts, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Are You Freer than You Were Two Years Ago?  Children in the 1950s recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, took part in schoolyard flag-raising, learned the evil of communism, respected their parents, were not exposed to inappropriate material in school or at home, attended church with their (two) parents, worked chores and odd jobs, and idolized their nation's Founders.  In sum, they grew up in an atmosphere of order and respect, and they were happier and healthier for it.  Freedom means the condition of acting and thinking on one's own, without restriction or regimentation, but if the polls are any indication, a large percentage of Americans now have little idea of what freedom entails.  Otherwise, they would not elect governors and representatives intent on expanding the size and power of government.

A Report on What Democrats Are Doing to [the] US Military.  At last a little light is shining on the social engineers who have been using wokeness to debilitate American armed forces.  Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) have issued a report finding that indoctrinating the US military with Critical Race Theory and LGBT ideology has significantly weakened it:  ["]The report finds that instructors at military academies use 'antiracist' approaches to education that direct soldiers to center their understanding of American society on an acknowledgment of its racist past and present, the report said.["]  "Antiracist" means "racist against America's core population."  ["]Kelisa Wing, the chief diversity equity and inclusivity officer at the Department of Defense, has tweeted she is 'exhausted with these White folx' and suggested Black people are incapable of racism.["]

Colorado Blues, and How to Get the State Back.  As of Nov 8, 2022, the Colorado GOP is effectively dead or at least on life support.  What was once a solid red state became purple, post-Watergate.  Today, Colorado is solid blue after the 2022 mid-terms and is the second consecutive election where Democrats control all state-wide offices. [...] Colorado's lurch left has not improved the lives of the average Coloradoan:  Colorado is ranked first in motor vehicle theft and second in property crimes.  From 2019-2022, robbery is up 15%, murder is up 30%, vandalism up 36%, arson up 56%, and auto theft up 111%.  Drug overdoses have doubled over the same period.  Colorado student proficiency test scores have been in steady decline for math and reading at the 4th and 8th grade since 2010.  Legalization of marijuana in 2012 didn't help either.  Colorado has one of the worst mental health rankings among states.  As Democrats have consolidated power, we are seeing the Californication of Colorado with new laws that allow for unrestricted abortions, expanded illegal immigration and taxpayer funded benefits, weak enforcement of gun laws, no cash bail, and significant restrictions on fracking and energy production.

The Worst Generation of Political Elites Ever.  In other words, in one generation America's finances have been ruined, at every level of government.  From a fiscal point of view, this is undoubtedly America's worst generation ever.  In our brief case study:  city spending went from $36.3 billion to $101.1 billion; the state from $79.7 billion to $222 billion; and the federal government from $2.0 trillion to $6.0 trillion — and the ultimate funding source, U.S. public debt, from $5.7 trillion to $30.6 trillion.  Among economists it was understood, and widely agreed upon, that public debt should never exceed 70% of GDP.  And yet here we are at 121%, higher than at the peak of WWII, rising rapidly, unsustainably, as far as the eye can see.  The Congressional Budget Office forecasts 2052 debt at 185% of GDP.  And make no mistake.  No amount of taxation can fix this problem, even leaving aside the ruinous impact of excess taxation on incentives, growth capital, innovation, personal freedom and prosperity.

The Voting Morons.  We now have two mentally damaged individuals in high office in this country, neither able to function as an independent adult.  How did they get there?  By being elected... with the addition of other means.  But it was the votes that created a situation where those "other means" could work.  In other words, the moron vote played a large role.  Tens of millions of voters who can't recognize a mentally crippled individual when they see one.  Who witness electoral cheating in front of their eyes as clearly as that of a three-card monte dealer but don't see it for what it is.  Who simply can't make the connection between the close of critical pipelines and gas costing six bucks at the pump.

Violent crime comes to previously peaceful and safe Martha's Vineyard.  And guess why.  Last Thursday, November 17, minutes after it opened for the day, a small bank in the island town of Vineyard Haven was invaded by three armed masked men.  They threatened, subdued and duct taped the employees and proceeded to make off in a stolen car with an undetermined amount of cash — after brandishing semiautomatic handguns to intimidate the bank personnel.  Nothing like this crime has ever been seen on Martha's Vineyard.  Previously, the crime rate on the small island off the southern coast of Massachusetts was almost non-existent, confined to things like DUIs and the occasional passing of a bad check.  But now, like many other blue communities that have declared themselves to be sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, things are changing. [...] This island-wide welcome mat has resulted in the presence of hundreds if not thousands of migrants who now seem to be close to outnumbering the American citizens — most of them working- or middle-class — who reside year-round on the island.  This radical and sudden demographic shift has been largely ignored by the island's news media.

Our dangerous diesel shortage [was] caused by anti-fossil-fuel politicians.  Diesel shortages could get worse in the coming months as European bans on Russian fuel kick in.  Because diesel is a global market this will likely mean even higher prices in the US and Europe, and severe shortages in poorer regions.  Because diesel is a global market there are many contributing causes to diesel shortages.  The fundamental global cause is the global anti-fossil-fuel movement, which has suppressed all the fundamentals of diesel supply:  oil investment, oil production, oil refining, oil transport. [...] Instead of unleashing our diesel potential, clueless anti-fossil-fuel politicians destroyed it by
  [#1]   Preventing us from importing Canadian oil well-suited to our refineries
  [#2]   `Preventing or shutting down diesel-producing capacity in the US
  [#3]   Threatening new diesel investments

As Shortages Persist Under Biden, It's Time To Ask: Is This On Purpose?  Did the United States suddenly become a socialist basket case?  It's hard not to come to that conclusion after reading about the endless shortages plaguing the nation.  Each of which President Joe Biden either seems clueless to resolve or determined to make worse.  Let's start with the biggest one: the shortage of diesel fuel.  While Biden was busy draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to tamp down gas prices before the midterm elections, the real worry was that supplies of diesel fuel have been running short.  Two years after the short-lived COVID lockdowns ended, diesel inventories continued to trend downward to their lowest levels since 2008.  The cost for a gallon of diesel fuel is 46% higher than it was a year ago, according to AAA, and now costs more than $5 a gallon.

Germany [is] cutting back meat production to fight global warming.  Germany is still caught up in the demands of the climate change lobby to reduce its carbon footprint drastically in the coming years.  One part of this initiative, similar to calls we've seen from activists in the United States, was a mandate to reduce all livestock on German farms by 50%.  Farmers have been protesting the decision in the same way they recently did in the Netherlands this summer, but the initiative is moving forward beginning this year.  Now, to the great surprise of nobody who has been paying attention, the German Meat Industry Association has reported that the country will be facing a severe meat shortage by the time spring arrives and consumers should expect prices to skyrocket, potentially doubling in some cases.  It would appear that some people in the German government have never heard of something called the law of supply and demand.  But at least they're going to defeat global warming, right?

Maybe denial is the driving factor in the 2022 election outcome.  Democrat voters are not a monolithic bloc.  Yes, some are hard-core ideologues who swooned over Bernie Sanders.  Some are recipients of public assistance and dependent on Democrat party largesse.  Some are students and recent graduates majoring in insurrection.  But they're not all community organizers, and they don't all hate America.  Most are normal, center-left people who habitually vote Democrat. [...] But consider for a moment what the habitual Democrat would have had to acknowledge to vote Republican on November 8th:
  [#1]   That the President of the United States is a doddering mediocrity.
  [#2]   That the person (or persons) responsible for the policies and decisions emanating from the White House is a matter of conjecture.
  [#3]   That the administration's policies are blatantly extremist and being implemented with ruinous effect.
  [#4]   That proper stewardship of the nation's fiscal and energy resources is utterly lacking — to the point of precipitating a foreseeable crisis.
  [#5]   That large numbers of inner-city youth, trapped in broken homes or broken schools, are not being taught respect, self-control, or the difference between right and wrong.
  [#6]   That the freedoms, values, and checks and balances on which this country was founded are being left grossly unprotected.
  [#7]   That despite mounting challenges we are not presently capable of deterring our adversaries or defeating them on the battlefield.
Perhaps it's all too much to contemplate.  The habitual Democrat voter prefers to remain incongruously oblivious.

Today's blacklisted American: Half of today's students support the death penalty for some speech.  This is no longer a land of the free:  According to a new poll, half of today's college students now believe that the death penalty is justified for some people should they dare express an opinion that offends.  Specifically, the students were asked if they agreed or disagreed with the statement:  ["]Violence in response to offensive speech is not a new phenomenon.  In some cultures, some types of offensive speech even merit the death penalty.  Some speech can be so offensive in certain cases that it merits such harsh punishment.["]  [A]cross the board, 43% to 55% of students from private and public schools, from all types of majors, from all levels of income, and from across the political spectrum, all agreed with this statement.  The results were remarkably consistent.  Tolerance was not their watchword, but oppression and dictatorship.  If you say something that offends, half of today's students feel justified in calling for your death.

The Editor says...
I wonder how many of the same "students" oppose the death penalty for murder or treason.

There Was No Cheating, Peasant!  The educated class said they cared about the workers.  But they let the workers price themselves out of the market with labor unions, and now the midwestern industrial heartland is a Rust Belt.  You did it, liberals.  The educated class said they cared about the Negroes.  But they swaddled them in welfare so that, by 2010, 72 percent of black babies were born out of wedlock vs. whites at 36 percent.  Eeevil Jim Crow segregationists couldn't have cooked up a better way to wreck black Americans.  You did it, liberals. [...] The educated class decided to help students pay for university education with student debt.  So universities hired a bunch of administrators and cranked up the tuition.  Now a whole generation of young people is drowning in debt.  You did it, liberals.

The 2022 Mid-Terms Exposed the Existence of Two Americas and the Overwhelming Importance of the 2024 Election.  The United States is currently plagued with uncontrolled inflation spiraling into a severe recession, crime is rampant in the nation's cities, the borders are open and uncontrolled, the standard of living is rapidly deteriorating, society is sinking into a morass of premeditated cultural decline, and an increasingly bleak future awaits the vast majority of Americans.  Yet fifty percent of 2022 voters chose to continue this state of affairs by opting to elect or re-elect the politicians that have created or abetted this ongoing national devastation.  Far too many, particularly the younger generations who voted overwhelmingly Democrat, dwell in mindless loyalty to a collectivist tribe, its leaders and its attendant ideology.  In their addled thinking this fidelity outweighs the well-being of themselves or the nation and its citizenry.

In 2022, the GOP had the most favorable political environment ever.
  •   80% of Americans say America is on the wrong track.
  •   58% do not support President Joe Biden.
  •   62% do not support Vice President Kamala Harris.
  •   Democrats have caused the highest inflation in 40 years.
  •   Americans said inflation was their number one issue in this election.
  •   Democrat policies have led to sky-high gas and fuel prices.
  •   Democrats persist in doubling down in their war on fossil fuels.
  •   Democrats continue their anti-police rhetoric.
  •   Democrat efforts to defund the police have contributed to rampant crime and murder in many major cities at epidemic levels.
  •   Democrat open border policies have led to 100,000+ fentanyl/illegal drug deaths in 2021, [...]
  •   Since Joe Biden became president, at least 5,000,000 illegal aliens have responded to his open border policy and invaded America.
  •   Democrats no longer try to hide the extremism of abortion on demand for any reason and up to the moment of birth.
  •   Democrats now require taxpayers to pay for these abortions.
  •   President Biden's abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan led to the worst foreign policy defeat in American history.
  •   Our enemies in Russia, Iraq, and China see that we have a weak, ineffective, and mentally challenged president.

Three Primary Factors Stopped That Red Wave.  The American public, having been fed a steady diet of leftism and dumbed-down curricula from nursery school through graduate school, no longer understands civics or economics, and sees our form of government as somehow inferior to European socialism.  European socialism is only made possible by the U.S. Defense umbrella in the form of NATO, but few understand that distinction.  As a result, Americans don't see the threat to our freedoms that vaccine and mask mandates and lockdowns were and are.  They also don't understand that someone must pay the bill for government handouts, either directly as confiscatory taxes or indirectly as rampant inflation or hyperinflation.  As a result, they tend to vote for the person who promises them something for nothing.

America's Death Wish.  Let's get real: The American people are electing the pols they deserve, demagogues who mirror the woke prejudices of an increasingly propagandized people.  According to the media, "threats to democracy" constituted one of the top concerns of the people.  How lame.  Large segments of the American public clearly swallowed Joe Biden's self-serving malarkey on that subject whole.  Never mind that Biden was clearly referring not to authentic threats to democracy but challenges to regnant liberalism.  Biden is not afraid for democracy but afraid of it.  He desires a one-party state.  The relative success of the Democrats on Tuesday is a measure not of the public's rationality but of its submission to wokeness.  Those in the 18 [to] 29 demographic voted for the Democrats overwhelmingly — a tribute not to their wisdom but to their lack of it.  These voters entered the booth after receiving a warped education at colleges and universities swimming in wokeness.  It is nearly impossible to impress upon this generation the dangers of liberalism.  They simply shrug at any description of them.

The Inflation Reduction Election.  Inflation is hands down the most important issue on the minds of Americans on the eve of the midterm elections.  An Economist/YouGov poll taken of 1,500 American adults in the first week of November found that 68 percent say that they will be thinking about inflation "a lot" when casting a vote in this year's election. [...] The Biden administration has struggled to present a palatable program for fighting inflation.  There was the infamous Inflation Reduction Act, which every reputable economist agreed would do little or nothing to reduce inflation.  According to the Economist/YouGov poll, just 32 percent of Americans say they approve of President Biden's handling of inflation.  Fifty-four percent say they disapprove of Biden on inflation, with 40 percent saying they strongly disapprove.

Biden yells 'There is no more drilling!' just months after claiming he never shut down energy production.  Is there any lie that's just too brazen for old Joe Biden?  Seems not. [...] Biden has blamed Vladimir Putin, OPEC's barons, Big Oil, global warming, Republicans, and all other things he could think of for high prices at the pump.  The one thing he won't do is consider what Americans can see with their own eyes: that before President Trump left office, gas prices were about $2 a gallon.  Now they are $5 and $6 a gallon in California, and well above $3 a gallon in the rest of America.  That's "lived experience."  The clearest reason for that is Biden's policies to halt drilling.  Back in January 2021, Biden signed off on an executive order dictating a ban of oil and gas drilling on federal lands.  Fox News has a string of other bans and hamperings he's done to stop energy production and drive pump prices sky-high.

Seriously, can anyone name a well-run Democratic city?  Can anybody in any Democratic-run city honestly say that their lives — and city — have improved over the last couple of years?  That's a slightly easier question.  As New Yorkers go to the polls it is also a slightly devastating one to ask.  Because it has a devastating answer.  I dare even the most die-hard, dyed-in-the-wool Democrat to say, "Oh, New York has never been better.  In fact, it's just getting better and better."  Does anyone really believe that?  Is there a single person out there who can really say that with a straight face?  As they survey the crime in our city, the homelessness, the waste and rats.  And I'm not even talking about the incumbents of City Hall.  Does anyone think that this great city has become greater in the last two years?  The stats in New York speak for themselves.  Ignore the nightmare year of 2020, and just look at the increase in crime during the last year.  Between July 2021 and July 2022 shooting incidents in New York increased by almost 14%.  The number of murders increased by almost 35%.

It isn't a "failed presidency" if all this destruction is intentional.
Biden is gaslighting Americans about his failed presidency.  The Biden Administration will be known to history for many things:  an open border and its deadly consequences, the abandonment of Afghanistan, weakness that led to catastrophe in Europe, skyrocketing inflation, and the use of federal law enforcement to target political opponents.  The catalog of infamy goes on.  Above all, though, this administration may be remembered for its duplicity — its continual, shameless "gaslighting" of the American people.  Biden, his team, and his sycophantic media supporters repeatedly tell us that "all is well" where it manifestly is not.  No matter how bad things become in the nation, no matter how many people suffer, reality has no purchase on the ideological bubble of this White House.  That is why, in these midterm elections, the American people must deliver to Joe Biden an unequivocal message:  that they refuse to be gaslit, that they are not buying what he is selling.

Gov. Hochul's funding, progressive drug policies transform East Harlem into Zombieland.  Progressive policies funded and foisted on the Big Apple by Gov. Hochul and her left-wing allies have caused a legion of drug-addicted zombies to descend on East Harlem and transform parts of the neighborhood into lawless, open-air shooting galleries, neighbors and critics told The [New York] Post.  The real-life horror show plays out daily in the neighborhood's gritty streets where The Post witnessed dozens of raving, hunched-over junkies commandeering East 126th Street — now the home of a controversial public-injection site — as drug dealers hovered nearby like vultures.  Others along Park Avenue down to East 114th Street have been spotted nodding out, splayed on the sidewalk, and injecting themselves in the neck or through jeans in broad daylight.

The Floyd Effect.  Democratic politicians have been flailing about looking for a way to get off the hook for the historic increase in murder and car crash mayhem ever since our respectable class' leaders declared "the racial reckoning" was at hand following the unfortunate expiration of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.  For example, New York's Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, suddenly finding herself in a tight race with Lee Zeldin largely over the crime surge, kvetched to Zeldin in a debate about crime, "I don't know why that's so important to you." [...] Before getting to the red state vs. blue state issue that everybody wants to talk about, let's look at the national murder trend, which has been jaw-dropping. [...] The argument I find most persuasive for why black-on-black shootings erupted during the anti-cop mania of 2020 is that when our society's leadership told police to not pull over blacks so often, they obeyed.  With reduced fear of being stopped and searched, blacks then started carrying illegal handguns more and driving worse.  Thus, the black car crash death rate also exploded in June 2020:  [Chart]

Why suburban women are flocking to the GOP: As simple as A,B,C.  To hear Democratic candidates, and the party's media cheerleaders, talk now, nobody ever supported defunding the police.  But, of course, Democrats across the board did just that, and GOP candidates, and honest media, have been replaying the video.  In a spasm of post-George Floyd mass hysteria, the political system, and in particular the governments of Democratic-run cities, made drastic cutbacks in police protection, installed revolving-door, no-bail arraignment systems and encouraged the proliferation of homeless encampments and open-air drug markets in many areas.  Unsurprisingly, the result was surging crime.  Around America, downtown businesses have closed, and people — especially women — have felt unsafe in their own neighborhoods.  Crime is now a major issue with the electorate, and even among black voters, the alleged beneficiaries of police defunding, only 17% support defunding the police, per a recent Grio/Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

Even Biden Thinks The Economy Is Going To Crash Next Year.  David Strom at Hot Air noticed something in the Democrats' campaign messaging as the midterm elections draw near.  Namely, the emergence of a talking point about how if Republicans win control of Congress they will "crash the economy."  There's only one reason to say this.  Democrats know they've set the economy on course to crash and they're hoping to blame Republicans when it does.

Democrats Declared War on Democracy Through COVID Tyranny.  Some of us were sounding the alarms on COVID tyranny when it was first starting.  Lockdown policies were never about saving lives but a test to see how many liberties and rights the government could take away without much pushback by the population.  Fear is the main path tyrants take in trying to strip freedom from their citizens.  Scare citizens enough and they will enslave themselves to whatever dictates the dear savior will come up with.  This is replaying itself as we approach the November 8 election.  Democrats destroyed entire families through their COVID lockdown policies which eliminated businesses, put stress on homes, and harmed the intellectual development of children.  Those are years that will be hard to recover, if at all.  COVID tyrants are hoping Americans forget their debacle in handling the pandemic and the tyranny that so many experienced because of it.  Families were unable to visit loved ones.  Churches were shut down, some never to reopen.  Businesses, once staples and pillars of the community, suddenly vanished and are now vacant and rotting with overgrown weeds and mold.

The Blue City Murder Problem.  Those on the Left know that their soft-on-crime policies have wreaked havoc in the cities where they have implemented those policies.  It is not hard to understand why "reforms" such as ending cash bail, defunding the police, refusing to prosecute entire categories of crimes, letting thousands of convicted felons out of prison early, significantly cutting the prison population, and other "progressive" ideas have led to massive spikes in crime — particularly violent crime, including murder — in the communities where those on the Left have implemented them.  Left-wing politicians and their backers recognize that rising crime rates and the lack of a general sense of safety that follows are a problem for them and their chances for reelection.  In fact, recent polls show that voters care a lot about rising crime — an issue that is second only to rising, rampant inflation and the lackluster economy.  So the Left is engaging in political traditions as old as time: obfuscation, finger pointing, and blame shifting.

Will Lucy Move the Football Again?  While the meme of "most important election in our lifetimes" is overused, just a brief review of the past 22 months since the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress and the White House would lead one to think that it might just be true of these mid-term elections:
  •   From energy independence (no longer relying on the Arabs who hate us) and even an exporter of energy, we're now experiencing gas prices two and three times the per gallon price at the end of 2020, plus the prospect of rolling electrical blackouts this winter and beyond, not to mention the higher costs of food and everything else due to higher gas prices.
  •   From the most booming economy in over 50 years, with inflation barely over 1%, we're now facing near-record high inflation of over 8%, while the Democrats (and many treacherous Republicans) voting to spend trillions we don't have, exacerbating the problem.
  •   From a relatively peaceful, safe society, in under two years we have devolved into a crime-ridden hellscape comparable to the horrors we've witnessed in Third World countries.  Democrat district attorneys who will not enforce the law, releasing violent felons without bail to again prey on innocent citizens, have given criminals free rein, knowing they won't be held accountable for their crimes.
  •   While the public schools in the U.S. have long been grievously underperforming, at least they weren't teaching our kids to hate us, to celebrate "gender diversity" and to believe that boys can be girls and girls can be boys.  Nor were they taught to distrust anyone who doesn't look like them, as Critical Race Theory is now doing. [...]
  •   Over five million illegal immigrants have crossed our southern border since Biden took office.  Most are receiving health care, housing, food allotments, etc., paid for by us, the taxpayers, because the Democrats want more voters to ensure they keep political power.
But all these things, and others, are well-documented and reported upon.  The question is, "What are the Republicans going to actually do about it if they regain control of the Congress?"

Don't Cry For Me, America.  We've seen this movie before.  The Democrats' populist giveaway plans can't possibly work, because government bankrupts everything it touches.  History teaches us that ObamaCare and the myriad of government's unfunded entitlement programs will be utter, complete disasters.  Today's Democrats are guilty of more than stupidity; they are enslaving future generations to poverty and misery.  And they will be long gone when it all implodes.  They will be as cold and dead as Juan Perón when the piper must ultimately be paid.  Throughout history, Democrats' Marxist templates for wealth redistribution have proven fatal for civilized societies.

America Is On The Cusp Of A Fundamental Transformation.  No matter how bad Obama's actions while in office, nothing he did compares to Joe Biden.  Since being installed as president, Biden has done an insane number of things that simply make no sense from a rational perspective.  Literally the first thing Biden did was reduce the amount of energy available to Americans. [...] Then, of course, there is the economy.  With the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act, Biden poured trillions of dollars into the economy and drove inflation to levels not seen in 40 years.  Everything, from energy to housing to food to clothing... virtually every single thing Americans use has gone up in price since Biden became president, often by giant leaps.  As a consequence, Americans are fighting to stay afloat financially, with 60% worse off than they were a year ago and a staggering 40% of businesses missing their rent payments in October.

Back to the Carter economy.  The latest edition of "Joe Biden: Bad Ideas" came yesterday when Biden stepped up his attacks on Big Oil and suggested that unless they lower prices he would push to implement a Windfall Profits Tax on the companies, essentially seizing their profits as a punishment for making money.  Such taxes are notoriously idiotic, and even the dimwits in the White House must know that.  It seems like Biden is trying to ruin the economy, and we have hit the point where we have to actually consider that to be a possibility.  Everything he has done to the economy has made things worse, and after a while you have to consider whether it is intentional.

The Cart Before the Horse.  We knew from the get go that freedom was the ticket, that government was the enemy, that God was the foundation on which this nation must be built.  A large portion of our citizenry, unfortunately, has forgotten these things, and the latest generations never learned them in the first place.  We've lost track of the paradoxical fact that you can't have freedom without law.  Not only that, but you can't have law without punishment.  We're seeing that right now as defunded police departments and lax district attorneys are allowing criminals to roam our streets with no fear of retribution.  Inner city dwellers are no longer free to leave their homes and run their businesses.

Every Day is Halloween Now.  Nobody wanted to live in a world in which there's no way to know what is real and what isn't.  But that's the world we live in now.  Costumes have become the norm and normalcy is the aberration.  Men dress up as women.  An NAACP president turned out to be a white woman who identifies as black.  New York State Senator Julia Salazar is an antisemite who identifies as Jewish.  And it's revealed that prominent Indian activist figures, Marlon Brando's Oscar night princess, a prominent academic, a poet, were just white people even though they took to dressing up as Indians all year round.  Identity politics values what people identify as more than who they are.  Magical thinking leads people to believe that life is just a costume that you can change when you want to.  In a world that is becoming increasingly unreal, it's easy to think of reality as endlessly malleable.

Have Democrats Lost Interest in the Working Man?  The Biden-Harris regime began — Day One — with a flurry of executive orders, cancelling the contracts in place for ongoing work on the Keystone XL pipeline.  Most were union construction jobs.  Thousands of workers were thrown out of work on the spot — no notice, no severance — just because the incoming regime's green agenda didn't square with the idea of a pipeline moving Canadian fuel southward.  In state after state along the route, materials were left sitting where they were, work unfinished, people fired and forced to move elsewhere to find new jobs. [...] Drilling, exploration, R&D, everything in the critical oil and gas sector that requires any federal permit, from drilling on federal lands, to drilling on private lands that require government access or government authorization of any kind, slowed to a crawl instantly.  For all intents and purposes, this development just isn't happening anymore.  And that's why gasoline has more than doubled in price.

America's energy crisis is mostly US Democrats' fault.  [Thread reader]  America is experiencing our worst energy crisis since the 1970s.  High oil prices are making driving expensive, while high natural gas prices are making heating and electricity far more expensive — above all in the Northeast, where some ratepayers might see prices >2X last winter's.  Here's a chart of residential natural gas prices over the last several winters from the US Energy Information Administration.  Notice the massive spike projected for this winter — meaning record heating bills for many.  [Chart]  Democrats are claiming there's nothing they could have done about today's oil and natural gas prices.  These prices, they say, are outside America's control because they are largely set by global markets.  In fact, had Ds been pro-oil/gas our prices would be much lower.

The Economic Disaster of the Pandemic Response.  The sick and well alike were quarantined through the use of stay-at-home orders, domestic capacity limits, and business, school, and church shutdowns.  This occurred not only in the U.S., but worldwide — with the notable exception of perhaps five nations and the state of South Dakota.  Needless to say, the consequences were profound.  Coercion can be used to turn off an economy.  But given the resulting trauma, turning an economy back on is not so easy.  That is why, 30 months later, we are experiencing the longest period of declining real income since the end of World War II, a health crisis, an education crisis, an exploding national debt, 40-year high inflation, continued and seemingly random shortages, dysfunction in labor markets, a breakdown of international trade, a dramatic collapse in consumer confidence, and a dangerous level of political division.

New York, New England Begin Rationing Heating Oil — Before Peak Winter Has Even Hit.  Biden's war on oil has consequences, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.  We've already gotten a taste of it nationwide with persistent, sky-high gas prices.  In California, we felt it this summer as our power grid was stretched to capacity by heat waves and we were subject to rolling brown-outs along with warnings not to use appliances or charge electric cars.  How very First World. [...] Bloomberg is reporting that the rationing of heating oil is already underway, despite it not even yet being November.  The reason:  stockpiles are at 30 percent of their normal levels. [...] The bottom line?  Americans will pay almost 30 percent more to heat their homes than last year — the most in 25 years.  Biden will continue to blame Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine for our oil woes, and scold Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for refusing to bend the knee and pump more oil, but it's Joe's own fault we're in this mess.

The Economy Will Never Prosper Under Biden: Here's Why.  The White House has also promised to use "every lever at its disposal — including regulatory action — to deliver on the president's priorities, including containing the pandemic, driving a durable economic recovery, advancing equity, and combating climate change."  We are already seeing the fruits of Biden's approach.  A recession in the first half of the year.  Sky-high inflation.  Widespread despair.  What the left can't seem to understand is that when government gets active, businesses get passive.  They become more risk averse.  Compliance costs weigh them down.  Long-term investments become problematic if you don't know what the rules will be down the road.  This is one big reason why energy production has never recovered after the pandemic — the oil and gas industry has no idea what lies ahead.  So, as Biden's regulators descend upon the land, the economy will — as it was throughout Barack Obama's eight years — be on a long and dreary slog.  Indeed, Biden's regulatory zeal will probably ramp up if Republicans win big in November, since his legislative agenda will be caput.

Misplaced Compassion Puts Lives in Jeopardy.  The shooter, Nestor Hernandez, was there to visit his girlfriend, who had just given birth to his child.  Hernandez is a 30-year-old lifelong criminal with a rap sheet going back to his teens.  He had been in and out of the Dallas criminal justice system for such charges as robbery and felony assault before he was twenty, and he earned his first serious jail time — an eight-year sentence — after a violent burglary in which he and his accomplice repeatedly beat up a woman to gain access to her apartment and car.  For that one, Nestor Hernandez pled guilty in September 2015 to "aggravated robbery," which could have won him anywhere from five to 99 years in jail.  They gave him eight.  Only they didn't.  If he'd served the full eight years, he'd still have been in jail.  He wouldn't have been free to acquire a girlfriend, get her pregnant, visit her at the hospital, beat her up, and kill two hospital employees.  So what happened?  The system decided to show "compassion" to this model prisoner with a violent history, a rap sheet going back to his childhood, and gang tattoos on his face and neck.  They didn't even make him stay the full eight years but let him out of jail on October 20, 2021, after just six years.  They installed an ankle bracelet and called it "parole."  It was this choice that enabled him to put this girlfriend in a position where he could visit her hospital room and start killing innocent bystanders on October 22, just a year after he was freed.

Phoenix, Atlanta, and Miami Metros See Fastest Inflation.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that the consumer price index rose 8.2% in September compared with the year before, but that national average hides the fact that prices are rising faster and higher in certain parts of the nation.  Breaking the country into the same subregions used by the Census Bureau, the rate of price increases that consumers pay for goods ranges from 7.2% in the Northeast to 9.6% in the Mountain States.  More local measures show an even greater range in price increases, from 5.7% in metropolitan San Francisco to 13% in metropolitan Phoenix.

Now Mired In Crime, The City That Kicked Off The 'Defund The Police' Movement Is Struggling To Recruit New Officers.  Minneapolis is having a tough time restaffing its police force amid a crime wave after officers left en masse following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd, according to The Associated Press.  Then-Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo said the department lost almost 300 officers by October 2021 to causes including retirement, resignation and disability leave for claimed post-traumatic stress disorder following Floyd's death and large-scale protests, according to Newsweek.  The department has reportedly seen applicant numbers drop from 292 in 2019 to 57 this year, with its September graduating recruiting class only featuring six people, according to the AP.  "In Minneapolis, with what we've been through for the last couple years, for you to be here and have an interest in law enforcement ... I'm impressed with every one of you that's here," training officer Matthew Hobbs told attendees at a March recruitment information session, the outlet reported.

America's crime epidemic keeps growing thanks to radical leftist prosecutors and their social experiments.  The United States has a crime epidemic, and it is being further fueled by certain prosecutors who are more interested in radical leftist ideologies than in enforcing the law.  These prosecutors are becoming disturbingly more common in many states and communities, and they have no reservations about sacrificing the safety and security of their residents to perform their deeply misguided and ridiculously dangerous social experiments.  In many jurisdictions around the United States, an increasing number of violent criminals are being released from custody as they await their trials — or given mere slaps on the wrists in plea deals that do nothing to rehabilitate them or to protect the community.  This is a recipe for disaster and anarchy, and cities across the country are paying a catastrophic price as a result.

Biden's Destroying the Economy.  Is It Intentional?  Here are seven Biden administration steps to undermine an economy and a society from within. [...]
  [#1]   Dismantle the nation's energy supply
  [#2]   Don't enforce the border
  [#3]   Devalue the nation's currency through inflation
  [#4]   Destroy the nation's finances by running up the debt by multiple trillions of dollars
  [#5]   Divide rather than unite the nation
  [#6]   Dumb down and indoctrinate our children with anti-American propaganda in the schools and media
  [#7]   Decriminalize a lot

Biden Is 'Buying Votes' Ahead of Midterm Elections With Policy Decisions: Rep. Lauren Boebert.  [Scroll down] In 2021, when green energy policies caused gasoline prices to soar, Biden directed the Department of Energy to release 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which amounts to about two and a half days' worth of the nation's consumption.  When gas prices continued to climb, Biden dipped into the reserves several more times.  By July 29, the SPR had reached its lowest level since 1985.  As of Oct. 14, the SPR had about 405 million barrels, down from 638 million barrels in January 2021 when Biden took office.  Congress created the SPR in 1975 to protect the United States from volatility in oil markets and to ensure an inventory of energy supplies in emergencies, such as war or natural disasters.  The United States just reached the end of peak hurricane season, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently threatened NATO forces with nuclear weapons.  Boebert said Biden and Democrat lawmakers are skirting legislative procedure to buy the votes they haven't earned over the past two years.

Biden's Next Crisis: Home Heating Oil Rationing Begins in Northeast, and It's Not Even Winter Yet.  It looks like President Joe Biden might get his winter of death after all, and it's not because of the unvaccinated.  If you live in the Northeast, you know that even in normal times, heating oil bills constitute a significant expense because winters are usually brutal.  Unfortunately, this year could be the worst year ever for residents of the region hoping to adequately heat their homes.  Not only are heating oil prices through the roof on anti-fossil fuel President Joe Biden's watch, but even for those who have the funds to stock up, it doesn't really matter:  heating oil rationing is already taking place.  Rationing.  Like toilet paper and baby formula rationing.  Why is all this rationing happening on Biden's watch?  For the record, we never once worried about rationing under former President Donald Trump.

The Democrats' Bizarro World.  [Scroll down] Is that not what the Democrat Party has created right here in America, transforming a once prosperous, strong, united, and safe nation into a debt-laden, militarily weak, socially divided, and increasingly dangerous society?  Here are some of the Bizarro policies and beliefs inflicted on us by the neo-socialist, globalist, anti-American Democrat Party over the past few decades:  Although leftists and atheists may deny it, the writings of the Founders make clear that the Classical Liberalism upon which this nation was founded stemmed from Judeo-Christian principles.  The self-discipline, respect for law and order, and Protestant work ethic that helped build the U.S. created the most prosperous and militarily mighty nation in history.  But the leftist Democrats can't have that, for Christian principles block their irresponsible and increasingly perverse demands, so God had to go, leading to the continual erosion of Judeo-Christian principles, plunging our nation into the current chaos.

Our Enemies Walk Among Us.  All the poverty you see around you, all the lack, the financial pain in the faces you pass, the lost businesses of the last three years, the titanic risk in the markets, the actual recession, all of it has been engineered.  We all, all of us, every single one of us, should be three times as wealthy, and three times as creative.  The most visible result of their malfeasance is homelessness.  Which has been engineered to shame you.  Entirely.  100%.  Every time you drive by some poor soul dying on the sidewalk, you are meant to feel
  1. Guilt
  2. Anger at the system (capitalism) and
  3. an urge to vote for the compassionate left who promise to work only for the dispossessed.
It's a psy-op.  It is why the homeless population is front and center in the richest, most beautiful city in the world:  San Francisco.  This fact is meant to shout that no matter how much money private enterprise generates, capitalism means losers, addicts, madmen and women, because our system is brutal and must be changed.  San Francisco's beauty and reputation mean that its homeless catastrophe is publicized all over the world.

In Ukraine, The Democrats Have Locked Us Into A Pointless, Dangerous War.  Our southern border is being overrun by cartels, drugs, and illegal aliens.  It is, from almost any perspective, an invasion.  Rampant crime is wreaking havoc on our cities.  Inflation is out of control, and the price of gasoline continues to rise.  Is it possible that there are bigger fish to fry than spending untold billions that we don't have to protect borders that are not ours?  How well have our past efforts at policing the world worked out for us?  Well, there was Vietnam.  We know how well that worked out.  Then there's Afghanistan.  That's still an open wound that will not heal anytime soon.  And who could forget Iraq and its WMDs?  It's not exactly a stellar list of accomplishments.  It is, however, the very definition of insanity that we would want to try this again with a country that controls the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. [...] Joe Biden says we will support Ukraine for "as long as it takes."  As long as it takes to do what?  What is the objective?

Why Everything Is a Mess and You're Paying For It.  There's a reason inflation and the economy are the most prominent issues in voters' minds:  For almost two years, the cost of every last thing you buy has been going up at a pace that considerably outstrips the (nominal) growth in wages.  What that means is simple: Your standard of living is going down.  And the electorate correctly senses that our real problems have only just begun.  The consensus is that because inflation is continuing at a high if not ruinous rate, the Fed will continue to have to raise interest rates to suppress business activity and consumer demand.  That means we're in for a recession.  The only realistic questions among those willing to face reality are how deep and for how long.  Among the MSM, of course, it's impolite to say "recession," so you don't hear it that much (and won't until after November 8).  The only things it's polite to say are "abortion" and "January 6."

Biden's Diesel Fuel Supply Crisis Could Soon Cripple America in Ways Never Before Seen.  Oil prices and President Joe Biden's continued draining of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) have dominated the headlines over the past few weeks, but analysts say a more impactful and serious crisis on the energy front looms:  a diesel fuel shortage.  Diesel doesn't get as much of the limelight as oil and gas, but it should because diesel fuel is the industrial lifeblood of the United States, and the price of diesel alone probably has a more significant impact on inflation and the prices you're paying at the grocery store over any other factor.  Without ample amounts of diesel, semi-trucks don't move, farms are shut down, and critical manufacturing sectors are crippled.

Top Democrat Admits 'All of Us Knew' Their Party's Policies Would Cause Inflation.  For many, many months, Joe Biden has blamed everyone else for inflation.  He once falsely claimed that "inflation started under Trump" and that inflation was was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.  More recently, he's tried to blame the Russia war in Ukraine for inflation, which Biden dubbed "Putin's price hike."  Back in June, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted that she and Biden were wrong about the impact inflation would have.  "Well, look, I think I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take.  As I mentioned, there have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy that have boosted energy and food prices and supply bottlenecks that have affected our economy badly that I didn't — at the time didn't fully understand," Yellen told CNN.  "But we recognize that now."

The Editor says...
If you don't "fully understand" what could happen before it does happen, you shouldn't be the Treasury Secretary.

Democrat Senate Incumbents Refuse Responsibility for Fueling Inflation, Gas Prices.  Four embattled Senate Democrat incumbents have set a pattern of refusing to take responsibility for soaring inflation and gas prices that have occurred in record-setting fashion under their leadership. [...] On Thursday, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), who is losing in the polls to Republican Adam Laxalt, claimed gas prices are spiking because oil companies are not producing enough oil.  "Instead of increasing supply, they're taking in profits," she tweeted.  Masto did not mention that gas prices have spiked since Democrats regained control of the executive branch, legislative branch, and administration state in 2021.  Nor did she mention President Joe Biden's campaign promise to reduce oil drilling.  In the last two years, the Biden administration has succeeded in driving up private and public financing costs of oil drilling, halting drilling on public lands, and canceling the Keystone pipeline.

Fists of furry.  A vigilant group of parents and kids in Jefferson County have been hounding school officials about the bizarre presence of "furries" in Colorado middle schools and high schools since February 2022.  This is not a "GOP talking point" or an election-season ploy.  This is not a joke or satire.  It's real, it's disruptive, and it's sick. [...] Back in February, a parent had informed JeffCo's "chief student success officer" Matt Palaoro about rabid furries at Wayne Carle Middle School who wore "cat/dog ears, tails, fur gloves, collars, and leashes" while threatening peers who objected.  The parent's son reported that the costumed students would "hiss, bark, scratch, and meow" at students who objected to the behavior.  Another child reported that the herd of furries would "walk on all 4s in the hallway" and "also eat with their face in their food."  Back in March, parents at Drake Middle School in Jeffco met with principal Melinda Feir to alert her of the classroom disruptions caused by the human pet parade.

CEO blasts San Francisco as 'city of chaos,' closes store over rampant crime.  The CEO of a popular clothing brand Cotopaxi is closing the company's only San Francisco store due to "organized theft rings" and a lack of safety in the city, he announced this week.  CEO Davis Smith announced the closure in a lengthy post on social media, saying the location faces regular attacks by thieves with virtually no response from law enforcement.  "We are closing the store due to rampant organized theft and lack of safety for our team.  Our store is hit by organized theft rings several times per week.  They brazenly enter the store and grab thousands of dollars of product and walk out," Smith wrote.  "We started keeping the door locked and opening it only for customers, but even then, they'll have a woman go to the door, and then hiding individuals rush into the store as soon as the door opens.  Our team is terrified.  They feel unsafe.  Security guards don't help because these theft rings know that security guards won't/can't stop them," he added.

Eight things that killed the Democrat Party.  [#8] Crime:  Because of the Democrat rule in blue cities, crime is not being prosecuted in the name of some weird kind of reparations.  What the Democrats don't get is that they hurt their own innocent population by allowing criminals a get-out-jail-free card, and by not prosecuting at all.  Their racist policies hurt the very people they claim to want to help.  Why are they doing this?  To deliberately create chaos in the execution of anti-white racism.  The one solution to the rising crime rate, the prosecution and incarceration of criminals, is the one thing blue cities under Democrat rule will not do.  Mayor Lightfoot makes weird and demonic home videos of herself dancing around in what appears to be a drugged stupor.  Rather than be a responsible mayor, she has totally ignored the death-by-violence rate in Chicago.  This is another very clear example of Democrats doing what they do best; destroying things.

New England facing natural gas shortages, rolling blackouts this winter.  Winter is on the way here in the northeast, as I was reminded when the local weatherman told me that it might snow here this week.  In the middle of October.  But the annoyance of potentially having to break out the snow shovels before Halloween has arrived is small potatoes compared to what may be coming in a couple of months.  Power grid operator ISO New England issued a warning to consumers this week about the effects that a particularly cold winter (as is being projected) could have on heating and electrical power consumption limits.  The northeast relies heavily on natural gas for home and business heating needs.  But many of the power plants in the region also run on natural gas.

The Editor says...
Which political party opposes drilling, fracking, pipelines, and methane emissions?  Which political party has been claiming for the last 30 years that the world is heating up at a dangerous rate?  Which political party opposes the use of petroleum and coal because of an irrational fear of carbon dioxide?  When you're freezing this winter, that's the political party you should blame.

Americans Make Huge Sacrifices As Bidenflation Rises To 12.8%.  The Consumer Price Index (CPI) released by the government last Thursday showed an 8.2% year-over-year price increase from September 2021 to September 2022.  The CPI has edged down steadily from a 40-year high of 9.1% in June to 8.2% in September.  The official CPI does not tell the whole story of price increases under President Biden.  Bidenflation, measured by the TIPP CPI using the same underlying data, stood at 12.8% in September.  It was 12.6% in August and July and 12.7% in June.  We developed the TIPP CPI, a metric that uses February 2021, the month after President Biden's inauguration, as its base.

How 'woke' policies turned Downtown San Francisco into an urban drug-den.  Earlier this month, old-fashioned Xeroxed copies of a newspaper article appeared across the Mid-Market neighborhood in Downtown San Francisco.  The article, from the San Francisco Chronicle, featured the headline: "S.F. D.A. Brooke Jenkins says she'll consider murder charges for fentanyl dealers."  The article was taped to walls on neighborhood corners regularly frequented by drug dealers.  At least one of those Xerox copies had the headline translated into Spanish — all the better for the dealers in question, most of whom are Honduran nationals, to get the message.  The photocopies were distributed by Matt Dorsey, Supervisor for the district that includes the Mid-Market area, which is adjacent to the Tenderloin (in San Francisco, which is both a county and a city, Supervisors are the equivalent of City Council members in other cities).  Dorsey's office had organized a neighborhood clean-up and the Supervisor had handed the article for volunteers to promote.  Dorsey is himself a recovering addict and prior to becoming Supervisor, he was the Communications Director for the San Francisco Police Department.  Ridding the neighborhood of drug dealers is his number one priority — a goal he shares with new District Attorney Jenkins.

The Democrats are responsible for the hardships faced by citizens.  Inflation is at a 40-year high making essential commodities expensive.  Even the price of candy reached its highest recorded mark which will impact Halloween celebrations.  The price of gasoline continues to rise.  The border is open causing over 4.9 million migrant to enter the US since Biden took over, and the smuggling of illicit narcotics is resulting in numerous drug overdose deaths.  The rate of violent crimes in the U.S. is rising while the murder rate spiked by 30%, the highest increase since record-keeping began in 1960.  Democrats are placing restrictions on firearms, which are the only affordable means of defense for citizens.  The Democrats were responsible for the lockdowns that infringe upon the right of movement and the right to earn a living.  The Democrats impose vaccine mandates that eliminate the right of choice.  The Democrats desperately want to change the topic.  Hence the focus on the 'insurrection'.  The goal of the January 6th committee was never to find facts, it was instead to persecute their main political opponent, Donald Trump.

Mother Horrified to Learn Son's Death Is Scheduled in Two Weeks After Skimming Through His Email.  A mother in Canada was horrified when she discovered that her son had made an appointment to kill himself with the help of a doctor.  The incident shines a light on how Canada's assisted suicide program has spun entirely out of control.  On Sept. 7, Toronto resident Margaret Marsilla logged in to her 23-year-old son's email account and discovered that he had applied for permission from the Canadian government to be killed.  A doctor had approved the request and scheduled the murder for Sept. 22, Common Sense reported.

Biden To Gig Workers: Drop Dead.  In essence, the White House wants to outlaw gig work in America.  No, it's not saying so outright.  The Biden Labor Department obscures that harsh reality with words meant to deceive.  Labor Secretary Marty Walsh says the department's proposal is needed to safeguard "our nation's most vulnerable workers," and ensure they are not deprived "of their federal labor protections."  Left out is the part that, should the proposal become policy, millions of Americans will be stripped of their jobs and income.  Under its rule, the Labor Department would be free to "determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor under the Fair Labor Standards Act."  And it will determine in every case that the worker in question must be a hired employee, no longer free to continue his or her job as an independent contractor.

America today vs. 1950 — what we are missing.  There was a time — and it wasn't that long ago — when kids would leave home on a summer morning and roam free," reports npr.org. [...] Today's children are not being taught any kind of survival skills," writes Traci Baker at grit.com.  "I know adults who can't count change, who can't write checks, some who can't even pump their own gas or find their way home without help.  We are setting ourselves up for disaster.  And no, using computers and cell phones are not considered survival or even basic skills!"  "There are many benefits to unsupervised outdoor play and experiences in nature, including a reduction in obesity and the symptoms of anxiety, depression and ADHD," reports theconversation.com.  "Research has shown that children learn self-control over their own actions and decisions in this time alone without their parents.  Without time unsupervised, children may not develop a sense of self-control or an ability to judge and manage risk on their own."

Wasn't Legalizing Pot Supposed To Reduce Crime?  [A]nyone pushing for legalized marijuana should look at what's going on in California before cheering this on.  That state, as have several others, legalized marijuana on the promise that it would reduce crime, improve public health, increase traffic safety, and stimulate the economy.  Instead of wasting time prosecuting people for possession or for selling pot, states could capture a new revenue source by taxing it.  Legalization would also mean that states could regulate it, presumably making the marijuana safer and free of adulterants.  So far, 19 states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana for nonmedical use, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

[The] Army [is] Scrambling to Explain [its] Massive Recruitment Failure.  The U.S. Army is scrambling after missing recruitment numbers in 2022 by wide margins.  "The Army plans to increase its investment in marketing and is expected to expand a new program for struggling recruits, but leaders on Monday offered few new details on how they'll fill the ranks after falling far short of recruiting goals this year," the Associated Press reports.  "Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told reporters that a new recruiting task force is coming up with ideas.  But any new plans would have to gel quickly in order to reverse the dramatically low enlistment numbers over the past year.  For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Army enlisted just 75% of its goal — falling 15,000 soldiers short of the 60,000 target.  It was the only service to miss its recruiting goal, but all of the others had to dig deep into their pools of delayed entry applicants, which will put them behind as they begin the next recruiting year on Saturday."

Ex-NYPD Chief Says Left-Wing DAs are Causing the Spike in Crime.  Left-wing district attorneys implementing policies such as bail reform bear significant responsibility for the nationwide spike in crime, former New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton argued Monday.  Many cities' district attorneys sympathetic to "criminal justice reform" are releasing criminals who should be in jail, Bratton told NewsNation's Chris Cuomo in an interview aired Monday.  Such cities have borne the brunt of the crime wave thanks to bail reforms and other criminal justice reforms, he said.  [Video clip]

How Different Would America Be Today if Trump was Still President?  Let's start with the obvious.  How did this happen?  The 2020 election was stolen.  That's how they removed Trump from office and installed a man who doesn't know who he is, where he is, or what he's doing.  A man who can't put 2 sentences together, and who can't attract more than 20 people in concentric circles to his speeches, yet they want us to suspend reality and believe he got 81 million votes — the most in history.  Bizarre.  And look what they did to us after rigging and stealing the election.  They quickly put a plan in place to disassemble America; overwhelm the economy, make America poor, destroy the middle class, make America unsafe, and to open the borders and make America foreign to Americans.  And as a bonus, they put in place a disastrous foreign policy of liberal weakness, wokeness and appeasement that has set the entire world on fire.

Yes, New York's Bail Reform Has Increased Crime.  Pre-trial detention in New York State is not supposed to be conditioned on whether a person is likely to reoffend.  Both before and after bail reform, judges must release offenders on "the least restrictive alternative and condition or conditions that will reasonably assure the principal's return to court" — that is, minimize his risk of failure to appear.  Manhattan Institute scholars have emphasized time and again that New York State is unique in prohibiting judges from giving any consideration to public safety risk in remand decisions.  But even given that reality, a shift toward less-restrictive pretrial detention conditions on average seems to have driven up the risk of rearrest following release.  Perhaps the increase in crime identified above will be offset by a reduction in future offending, given the long-run criminogenic effects of jail.  On the other hand, the most relevant study to New York finds that the incapacitating effect of jail pretrial slightly outweighs its criminogenic effect post-release, at least within the study period.  In any case, those effects are heterogenous.  Some detainees are career criminals, for whom the benefits of keeping them behind bars almost certainly outweigh criminogenic costs; others are not.

Biggest Food Stamp Hike Ever, Thanks to Bidenflation.  Food stamp benefits are increasing by 12.5 percent as families grapple with grocery prices that have skyrocketed under President Joe Biden.  Under the maximum benefit, a family of four on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will see their payments increase from $835 to $939 per month.

The Democrats Wrecked My Retirement.  Biden printed billions of dollars to spread around and bribe voters, calling it "COVID relief," and paid people to stay home and not work.  Now, under Biden, we have 8 [to] 9% inflation and a labor participation rate that is the lowest it's been since the 1970s.  Prices are out of sight.  The supply chain has collapsed, and shortages of household staples have become so commonplace that it's just an accepted way of life in 2022.  The administration puts forth an abomination deceitfully labeled the "Inflation Reduction Act," knowing there is not one single thing in that bill that is intended to reduce inflation.  Now the Fed is raising interest rates to try to calm inflation.  In order for that to work, it has to crush consumer demand so suppliers will reduce their pricing in order to entice a weak and shrinking pool of customers to buy something.  Nice going, Joe. [...] Retirement accounts are in a shambles.  Two short years ago, things looked great.  Now there's a financial/investment canyon that will likely take ten years to recover from.

Under Bidenomics, A 'Soft Landing' For Economy Is No Longer Possible.  The Democratic Party's faithful are whistling past the graveyard, hoping with all their might we'll avoid an economic slide.  As a matter of general economics, we're already in a recession.  And it looks like things will soon get worse, not better.  "We hope we can have what they say, 'a soft landing,' a transition to a place where we don't lose the gains that I ran to make in the first place for middle-class folks, being able to generate good-paying jobs and — expansion," President Joe Biden told CBS' 60 Minutes last month.  Good luck with that, Mr. President.  Even members of your own party think it's hogwash.  As economist Larry Summers, who advised both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, said last week, a soft landing is "really quite unlikely."  We agree, as do most economists of our acquaintance.

Dems in Disarray as 'Comeback' Narrative Completely Falls Apart.  [Scroll down] The problem for Democrats, however, is that most elections usually boil down to one thing:  the economy.  If people generally feel like they're doing well, the party of the person who occupies the Oval Office tends to do well at the ballot box.  If those same voters are feeling the pinch come election time, though, the outcome for the president's party typically is not good.  The latter has consistently been the case for President Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer going back for at least a year or so as inflation and a volatile job market along with the supply chain crisis, rising interest rates and rising food and gas prices hit middle-class Americans hard.

Coal power plant closure leaves schools underfunded, hundreds unemployed in NM.  The clamor of second graders breaking away from lessons to form lunch lines has gotten quieter in a rural New Mexico community, where families losing coal jobs have been forced to pack up and leave in search of work.  At Judy Nelson Elementary, 1 in 4 students have left in an exodus spurred by decisions made five years ago to shutter a coal-fired power plant and mine that sit just up the road from the school in a largely Navajo community.  The plant and mine had provided electricity to millions of people across the southwestern U.S. for nearly a half-century.  The San Juan Generating Station burned its last bit of coal Thursday.  The remaining workers will spend the coming weeks draining water from the plant, removing chemicals and preparing to tear down what has long been fixture on the high-desert horizon.

Why We Will Never Control Medical Costs.  The purposes of medicine are expanding rapidly beyond treating actual illnesses/injuries and promoting wellness, to also facilitating life fulfillment and making personal dreams come true.  Latest case in point:  A gay couple has filed a class-action complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against the City of New York, suing for unlawful workplace discrimination because they were denied coverage for fertility services.  If successful, health insurance nationally may eventually be required to pay for IVF/surrogacy services for male gay couples.

Stock Market Tanked 14 Percent Since Biden's Inflationary Boondoggle Passed.  The stock market continued its downward spiral on Thursday as the economy struggles to cope with Democrats' reckless spending adding fuel to runaway inflation.  All three benchmark indexes closed under their opening value with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 450 points.  The NASDAQ dropped nearly 3 percent Thursday and the S&P 500 fell by nearly 80 points.  The Dow's decline marks a continued trend since the signature passage of President Joe Biden's dubiously named "Inflation Reduction Act" on Aug. 16.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average has now fallen nearly 5,000 points, or more than 14 percent, in the aftermath of Biden's bill becoming law.

There's a major reason why the world in 2022 is like the world in 1939.  [Scroll down] At the very moment when a fragile peace could have been worked out and negotiators begun to solve the differences between Russia and Ukraine, Joe Biden steps in and does what he does best, mess things up.  The timeline here is interesting.  Even though, on March 10, the US promised Ukraine $13 billion and, on March 26, Biden told the world that Putin "cannot remain in power," the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators were still able to come to an agreement on a peace deal.  And staggeringly, Joe Biden scuttled it.  Here we are in September, and much of the world is in recession, prices for everything are up dramatically, the US has provided Ukraine with upwards of $60 billion in aid, and Europe is facing energy shortages and skyrocketing prices just as winter approaches.  And now nuclear war is in the air.  All of this because Joe Biden wants revenge on Russia for something it didn't even do.

Why some polls show a dead heat for a generic ballot.  The Afghanistan withdrawal was perhaps the most serious foreign policy mistake in U.S. history.  It left the Taliban billions of dollars of state-of-the-art military equipment and the Bagram air base which is in spitting distance from China.  Joe Biden's ill-conceived spending kicked off the inflation that is currently sullying the lives of millions of Americans.  Drunk with power, Biden gleefully imposed mask and vaccine mandates on millions of Americans — law enforcement, military, federal employees, etc.  Those who were wisely skeptical and refused the experimental jab lost their jobs.  As it turns out, they were the smart ones; the vaccines were ineffective and have caused countless deaths and vaccine injuries far more devastating than COVID.  The mortality rate among young people is up by forty percent.  Biden gleefully put an end to our energy independence that President Trump had won.  He cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada and ended drilling on most federal lands.  He has drained our strategic oil reserves at a most inopportune time.  This can only be a purposeful plan to destroy America as founded.

America is being attacked from within.  The United States' biggest threat isn't foreign nations, it is the systematic dismantling of the foundations of democracy, it's the woke philosophy of the left and methodical uncoupling of a nation that poses the biggest risks, according to Number 45.  "Where did my America go, seriously?  I mean this wholeheartedly folks," asked One America News Network host Dan Ball at the beginning of the September 26 segment featuring former President Donald Trump.  "Where did the America that I grew up in, the America that millions of people across this globe are trying to reach and become citizens each and every year?  That America.  The America that for decades the entire world looked to for freedom, for liberty, for security?  The America that used to value a hard day's work.  That protected our future, our children?"  Trump had a solid answer:  the Democrat Party broke that America and we are dangerously close to a point of no return.

Bidenomics: $9 trillion in private wealth [was] wiped out in stock plunge.  [Scroll down] Where does this stock downturn and its accompanying wealth loss come from?  It's brought on by Joe Biden's complete inability to resolve the energy crisis of his own making by removing his roadblocks to fossil fuel production, and his even worse ability to rein in government spending.  During his short, vacation-laden presidency, he's signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, the Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency Assistance Act, and the Emergency Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, both of which could be worth more than a trillion dollars, plus a bill to raise the national debt limit by an extra $2.5 trillion so he could have lots of extra room for cash to spend.  This year, he signed the badly misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act" of 2022, which tacked on another $732 billion.  As if that were not enough, his 530-and-counting executive orders have cost American taxpayers another $532 billion, with that number set to rise to about $800 billion if his student loan forgiveness scheme goes through.

Stocks Have Lost $7.6 Trillion in Value Since Biden Took Office.  Joe Biden destroys everything he touches. [...] The stock market has also taken a brutal beating since Joe Biden was installed.  Fox News is now reporting that the stock market is down $7.6 trillion since Joe Biden took office.  [Video clip]

When do we see President Biden wearing a sweater?  You think the price of everything is up?  Wait until the seasons change up north and your electricity bill shows up in the mailbox.  Talk about sticker shock.  Talk about people rediscovering their fireplaces to keep their homes warm, not just to share a glass of wine with their favorite person. [...] The Democrats may get lucky because most of these big bills will get mailed out after Thanksgiving.  Nevertheless, this is a great opportunity to remind the voters that our energy cost crisis was largely self-inflicted.  We have all the energy we need to keep our costs down.  We are not Europe, having to depend on Putin for energy.  We have our own and could flood the market with oil and natural gas to keep prices down.  We did it under President Trump.  Are you ready for a presidential speech about wearing a sweater and controlling your thermostat?

SPR Oil Level Hits 40-Year Low as Hurricane Season Fires Up.  Thanks, Brandon.  [A]lmost anytime even a moderate strength hurricane enters the Gulf of Mexico, oil production on the rigs at sea to the refineries that dot the southern U.S. Gulf Coast tends to shut down or is heavily restricted until the storm passes.  For especially ferocious storms that hit vulnerable areas in the Gulf and trigger longer work stoppages at the refineries or rigs, the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) usually makes the news headlines, as the U.S. government relies on the emergency supply of crude oil to keep the country running and to stave off high prices and panic.  That's what it's there for — emergencies.  The U.S. government has tapped the SPR after several hurricanes in the past, including Ida, Gustaf, and, of course, Katrina.  But under the current administration, the SPR is also routinely used as a political expediency tool.  President Joe Biden, in a desperate effort to bring gas prices down after they skyrocketed thanks mainly to his anti-American energy independence policies, has released and sold off hundreds of millions of barrels of oil from the SPR.

Trump's 2020 Warning About Biden Comes True.  A clip of former President Donald Trump arguing that the election of President Joe Biden would lead to a plummeting stock market circulated online on Friday after Wall Street saw a bloodbath.  The Federal Reserve increased targets for the federal funds rate by 0.75% on Wednesday afternoon, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which tracks 30 of the most prominent companies on American exchanges, tumbling more than 500 points.  After stagnating on Thursday, the index fell another 500 points by early Friday afternoon to 29,400.  On January 20, 2021, the day of Biden's inauguration, the Dow had closed slightly above 30,900.  "They said the stock market will boom if I am elected," Trump said during a 2020 presidential debate.  "If he's elected, the stock market will crash."

[New York] City kids seeking therapy after unending exposure to vagrants and addicts.  New York City school kids are losing their minds over the zonked-out drug addicts and raving vagrants they encounter every day — and are flocking to therapists to find ways to cope with the stress, The [New York] Post has learned.  In neighborhoods such as Hell's Kitchen "a lot" of kids are now in therapy, according to mom Katie Hamill, 43, whose 7-year-old daughter is being treated for anxiety.  "My daughter has seen [bad things], you name it, she has seen it. ... consistently and constantly.  She is in this constant state of panic," said Hamill, who works in real estate.  The little girl gets upset when she sees "the dying people" — the junkies who look dead whom she thinks no one is helping, the mom said.  And she sees far too much vile behavior from adults, including one addict trying to rip out his hair after getting high at a West 42nd Street playground.

Real estate sales drop 34% in Seattle as crime ravaged West Coast sees prices tumble.  Seattle's housing market is slowing faster than any in the country, a new study has revealed — as cash-strapped buyers increasingly shy away from home purchases.  The study, from real estate firm Redfin, ranked the nation's most populous hubs using metrics such as prices, price drops, and supply — and found that the real estate market is cooling fastest primarily along the West Coast.  Property prices along West Coast metropolitan areas are understood to be dipping because of a glut of properties on the market, amid a mass exodus of citizens deterred by rising mortgage rates, crime, and warnings of a looming recession.

Running the World into the Ground.  Who can claim to be better off under Biden?  The economy has tanked, inflation is at a 40-year high, people can't afford to heat their homes or fill up their cars with gas, crime statistics are off the charts, and confidence in America is at an all-time low.  Biden's open-border policy, which is opposed by a majority of American citizens, is leading to social unrest and economic chaos.  A country without a functioning border is not a country, yet that is where Biden has taken us.  America is marching toward totalitarianism as Biden empowers the DoJ and FBI to go after his political opponents, i.e., at least half of the population.  His worst offense, however, is following the climate dictates of the World Economic Forum.  Biden is torpedoing the robust U.S. economy in service of a totally false assumption — that human beings are able to change the planet's climate.  He is raising taxes so that billions of your dollars can be wasted on ridiculous anti-fossil fuel projects.  Biden has declared war on the energy industry in the name of global warming.  He wants us to believe that oil, gas, and coal are killing the planet.

The economic facts demand a Democratic midterm defeat.  President Joe Biden last week talked about record-low unemployment.  He explained that the headline inflation number rose only 0.1% month on month.  Biden conveniently ignored comments by Democratic-leaning Harvard University professor Jason Furman that the August consumer price index report actually suggested an acceleration in inflation.  Furman explained that the Cleveland Fed's median CPI, which excludes all the large changes in either direction and is better predicted by labor market slack, showed an annual rate of inflation of 9.2% in August, the single highest monthly print in their dataset (which starts in 1983).  Furman also suggested that there is a real possibility of stagflation, with an unemployment rate at or above 6% and sustained inflation of 4%-plus.

MAGA's Real Crime?  Spotlighting Government Failure.  The midterm elections are only weeks away.  The Democrats are in complete control of the House, Senate, and presidency.  Donald Trump's name appears nowhere near a November ballot.  Yet the only things Democrats talk about are the former president and his "Make America Great Again" voters.  It is as if Joe Biden's and Nancy Pelosi's political troops have no interest in touting their successes in opening the Southern border to endless illegal immigration, promoting divisive lockdowns and "vaccine" mandates, passing a Green New Deal spending extravaganza, encouraging transgender drag queen shows for elementary-schoolers, emptying prisons of criminals, eliminating cash bail for felony arrests, leveraging Americans' pain at the gas pump to push them into expensive electric vehicles, or presiding over the highest rates of inflation in over forty years.

Sorry Democrats, Abortion Won't Save You.  Contrary to Democratic hopes, November won't be about abortion vs. inflation.  The midterms will be a referendum on Biden's performance, particularly as it affects inflation.  This is almost always true for the first midterm of a president's tenure, but the Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling gave Democrats false hope that they could defy history.  This may have been possible if the Biden administration hadn't committed so many fiscal blunders.  As it is, polls conducted in September clearly indicate that Americans are deeply unhappy about the sorry state of the economy and that they know who to blame.  According to a PBS/NPR/Marist poll, for example, "Six in ten Americans think the nation's economy is in a recession ... and more than half think President Joe Biden has weakened the economy."  This would not be as lethal for the Democrats if it involved a less visible issue, but voters are being mugged daily by the grim reality of inflation.

Policing in Democrat cities: Don't say we didn't warn you.  America's big cities are almost exclusively run by Democrats and have been for decades.  America's big cities contain most of America's minority race population.  And America's big cities are suffering from soaring crime caused by failed Democrat social and economic policies.  It is a given that police in these cities will have to use force against a criminal who will be a member of a minority race.  When that happens, it is inevitable that riots, arson, looting, and such will occur.  Democrat leaders of these cities find it easier to throw police under the bus than to admit that the crisis was caused by their policies. [...] Why would anyone genuinely interested in the true mission of law enforcement go to work as a police officer in a Democrat-controlled city?

Food Prices Hit 40-Year High, Keep Breaking Records Every Month.  Food prices have increased every month of 2022, with each month since February breaking 40-year records, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).  The price of food at home increased 13.5% year-over-year in August, the highest it's been since May 1979, according to the BLS Consumer Price Index (CPI) report.  Since February, when the year-over-year cost of food at home increased by 8.6% — at the time the highest level since 1981 — grocery prices have increased every month, first breaking a 10% year-on-year increase in March, according to archived CPI reports by the BLS.  The rate of increase blows away the increases over the past two years, with food at home prices increasing 3.5% in 2020 and 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).  The increases are also well above the USDA's Aug. 25 estimate of a year-on-year food at home price increase between 10% and 11% in 2022.

'Defund the police' aftermath means fewer officers on job across US.  Police officers across the nation are leaving their jobs because of the "defund the police" policies in cities, leaving personnel shortages and longer response times.  A survey of several large cities shows a downsizing with fewer applications to fill the vacancies as crime is on the rise.  Los Angeles has even taken the step of offering a rental subsidy in exchange for taking a job at the Los Angeles Police Department.  Dennis Zine has spent 54 years working for the LAPD, currently as a reservist after retiring as a sergeant.  He is a former city councilman and an organizer for a campaign to recall District Attorney George Gascon.  "All these cities with a woke generation mentality like 'defund the police,' 'neuter the police,' 'we don't need the police' is affecting what we are seeing," Zine told the Washington Examiner.  "Black Lives Matter was instrumental in getting a lot of people out."  Law enforcement certainly don't do their jobs for the pay, so when police feel unappreciated, they leave, he said.

Mortgage Rates Jump Above Six Percent for First Time Since 2008.  Mortgage rates when President Joe Biden took office?  2.65 percent.  Today?  6.28 percent.  On Tuesday, Biden held a weird celebration of his "Inflation Reduction Act" on the lawn of the White House.  Why was it weird?  Because at the very same time as Democrats were applauding themselves, the U.S. Labor Department was releasing figures that showed an "unexpected" rise in inflation, with the cost of rent, food, and other basic necessities continuing to skyrocket.  Now we learn that mortgage rates have climbed above six percent for the first time since 2008.

The Bidenomics Sham Is Collapsing.  With red lights flashing nearly everywhere, the economy's prospects look grim.  Soaring inflation, crashing home sales, plunging GDP, falling real incomes.  No question, the economy is a mess.  So why is the Biden administration saying things are going better?  It's not just this week's "unexpected" 8.3% inflation jump.  Or the scary plunge in stock prices, destroying trillions of dollars in household wealth in just days.  It's that the ruling party, the Democratic Party, seems utterly oblivious to the damage it's done.  This week, President Joe Biden touted the "progress" made by his administration against inflation, just a day after the report that prices had risen 8.3% overall, and food prices by 11.4%, the fastest since 1979.

Progressives are the Cause for American Decline.  In the maelstrom of the chaos of 24/7 news, societal decay and violence, and media and political platitudes, it must be recognized that conservatives are not guilty of American decline.  Conservatives are the ones defending, and conserving, the symbols and story of American unity.  Progressives, on the other hand, have been demolishing these symbols and assaulting the traditional story and opting for a new one — one that is meant to destroy those symbols which had previously unified American life.  At least since the 1960s, American progressives have been taking a battering ram to the symbols of justice that served as the unifying force for American society.  The Declaration is considered a fraud and the revolution it inspired equally fraudulent.  The Constitution is belittled as "a piece of crap."  The American flag is said to be a force for evil and division.  American churches are now assailed as pillars of white supremacy and racism.

Numbers Really Do Matter.  I have always loved math and numbers.  I love them because of their certainty, their preciseness, and my confidence that 'truth is in the numbers.' [...] Here are a few to consider:  the day Donald Trump became president, the Dow Jones Average was at 19,827.  The day he left office, it was at 34,005, an increase of 71.5%.  Now two years into the Biden-Harris regime terrible, the market is at 31,216, a nearly 8% decline.  The price of gas on that wonderful January 20, 2017, was $1.97.  Today it sits at $3.75, a 90% increase which is actually down from a high of $5.01.  The national rate of inflation the day Donald Trump left office was 1.36%.  Today that rate sits at 8.3%.  Read those numbers again if you still don't see the obvious.  While shrinking daily, our ever-dwindling stock portfolios and savings are needed to help supplement our wages to provide necessities at an ever-higher cost.

A Time of Evil.  What we have seen the last two years, and especially the last few months can only be explained in one word.  Evil.  For this is a time of evil. [...] Why would Biden refuse to protect our southern border?  Why would Biden knowingly allow in fentanyl, human trafficking, cartels, and terrorists?  Why would Biden allow child predators and unaccompanied minors to cross our borders?  Why would Biden make it very clear to our enemies in China, Iran, and Russia that we will not fight for our borders and we are not a sovereign country?  Why would the occupier of the White House display our weaknesses to friend and foe?  Why would the placeholder of the White House purposely make America weaker militarily and economically?  Why would Biden's FBI and Department of Justice cover up obvious felony crimes on Hunter Biden's laptop, yet search the bedroom of President Trump's teenage son?  Why would the FBI and DoJ ignore the 4th and 5th Amendments in their illegal raid on President Trump's private home?  Why would the FBI/CIA/NSA disregard all precedents, all laws, all tradition, the Constitution, and all common sense in their illegal attacks on President Trump since he came down the golden escalators?  Why has the FBI/CIA/NSA abused and misused the Patriot Act in their attack on Biden's political enemies?  And why has the ACLU remained totally silent and mute as these Third Reich tactics have been used on the American people?  Why has Biden/FBI/Justice Department carried out Stasi police state raids on many of President Trump's closest supporters?

The highest inflation in 40 years is deeply embedded in the economy and spreading.  Today's CPI inflation report shocked Wall Street and the nation with a significantly higher than expected print.  Pollyannas everywhere are painfully learning that there's no magic cure.  There's no easy way out.  After several years of excessive federal spending, regulating, taxing and money-printing, the highest inflation in 40 years is deeply embedded in the economy and it is spreading.  The only significant decline came with gasoline prices.  Overall, the topline CPI came in at 8.3% for the year — food up 11.4%, even energy is still up 24%.  Electricity is up 16%; natural gas 33%; new cars 10%.  Even with the recent drop, gasoline is still 26% above a year ago.  Rent is up 6.5%.  Overall, services are up nearly 7%.  Core goods prices are up 7%.  Used cars are up nearly 8%.  The so-called core inflation rate, omitting food and energy, has risen 6.5% annually over just the past three months.

Tucker Carlson: Voters Must Make Democrats Pay For Out Of Control Crime.  FNC's Tucker Carlson reviews the record crime levels in Chicago and other inner cities, saying Democrats need to be held responsible for the collapse of law and order on city streets.  "You think [Chicago district attorney] Kim Foxx cares?" Tucker Carlson asked.  "But she is not the only person who did this, the federal government also played a role."  "Over the eight years of Barack Obama administration, the department of justice forced more than a dozen police departments across the country to enter into what is called a consent decree.  The Obama administration began an investigation into the Chicago police department and they got a consent decree.  They pronounced police departments guilty of racism if they disproportionately interact with African-Americans, regardless of whether those interactions were legally justified.  In other words, the law is entirely irrelevant to the consent decree."

El Paso looks like a 'third-world country' after Texas border city is overrun by migrants.  Shocking photos show President Biden's border crisis has hit a new peak in El Paso, Texas — where a historic flood of migrants has turned the city into what a local pol says resembles "a third-world country."  Regional Border Patrol Chief Gloria Chavez posted snapshots Monday night on Instagram that showed hordes of migrants dumped under an El Paso bridge over the weekend because the city has no more room to even process them.  "We've never seen anything like this," said outraged US Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), whose district covers part of the city, as El Paso began grappling with its highest daily influx ever last month.  "It's a scene that you would see in a third-world country, not in the streets of El Paso."  Gonzalez warned, "Everything that I've been told and every indication tells me that we haven't seen the worst yet.

Blame Democrats' massive spending spree for our economic crisis.  For two years, families have experienced the dire consequences of massive government spending at the gas pump , the grocery store, and elsewhere. [...] Democrats began spending as soon as they took the majority, and they have made it clear they don't intend to stop.  Their first major act was passing $1.9 trillion in COVID aid, which was much larger than most economists were saying was necessary and ultimately was the catalyst to the inflation crisis.  Even after months and months of record high inflation, Democrats refused to change course and continued to spend trillions of more dollars.  In fact, Democrats have added an astounding $2.7 trillion in federal spending over the past two years.  President Joe Biden hopes to add hundreds of billions of dollars more to that number with his student loan debt heist.

Would You Please Stop Being Stupid?  The country is on the verge of being completely taken over by the Communists.  Censorship is rampant.  Political indoctrination is taking place throughout every institution, state or private.  The major news outlets are propaganda outlets.  Formerly neutral government agencies are being oriented against dissenters.  The economy is being destroyed.  There is an invasion on the southern border.  And, of course, you have the (traditional) Democrat election fraud now and then.

If You're Going to San Francisco...  No, stop!  Don't even think about going to San Francisco.  The place is a disaster area, possibly as bad as Portland.  If you think that is impossible, check out this photo essay in the Daily Mail.  The story is about the city's new "soft touch" approach to drug addiction and homelessness.  "Nobody's going to jail," city officials say.  No, they're going straight to the morgue.  San Francisco has seen nearly 1,700 fatal fentanyl overdoses so far in 2022.  The text is depressing, but the message is really in the dozens of photographs that accompany it.  Addicts openly shooting up; homeless encampments on the streets; filth everywhere.

America Delira.  Travel abroad and or talk to pro-American foreigners here, and you will be surprised at what they say. [...] They seem staggered by the very ideas that now emanate from the United States:  that nonexistent borders are desirable; that once rarified institutions like the FBI or CIA now function like the Stasi of old; that the very idea of meritocracy is considered racist; that one incorrect word can destroy a life-long career; that there are three or more sexes, not two; that biological men with male genitalia and physiology can compete, and destroy decades of advances, in women's sports; that race is the sole mode of self-identification; and that half of America dislikes American customs, history — and the other 50 percent of the population — as much as do its enemies.  Onlookers no longer see American universities as free-wheeling bastions of unfettered research and expression.  Rather they watch dreary (and sometimes scary) places where conformity to the old Soviet-style is enforced — or else.

Obama [gets] smacked down for gaslighting about Americans being 'better off' under Joe Biden.  In comparison to Joe Biden, Barack Obama appears to be a picture of probity, wisdom, and dignity.  But in reality, he's just a more unflappable liar, and now that Democrats are on the rocks in the polls, he's cribbed a page from Ronald Reagan, a man he's always had a curious fascination for, claiming that "the country is better off than when you took office.  We should all be deeply grateful for that."  If Obama were ask that as a question, the way Reagan once did, the open-ended answer would not have been to his liking, so Obama supplied the answer, too.  He was all gaslighting.

We're 'Better Off' Under Biden?  Who Is Obama Kidding?  Let's review just how much "better off" we all are thanks to Biden and his fellow Democrats.
COVID deaths:  When Biden took office on the promise that he had a plan that would end COVID, the official death count was 424,318.  Today it is over 1.044 million.  In other words, there have been nearly 620,000 COVID deaths on Biden's watch.  And that's despite all the interventions Biden claimed would end the pandemic.  Are the families of those 620,000 people better off?
Inflation:  Despite the recent decline in pump prices, gasoline costs 91% more than it did on January 2021, according to the Consumer Price Index.  Food prices are up 14%.  Overall prices have climbed 13% in the time Biden has been president.  To put that last number in perspective, the overall increase in the CPI during President Donald Trump's entire four years in office was just 7%.
Real earnings:  How about workers, are they better off?  While wages have climbed, they haven't nearly kept pace with Bidenflation.  As a result, workers have seen their real wages decline by 5%, which works out to an effective average pay cut of $2,726 a year.  Does that, in Obama's mind, make them better off?

A World on Fire.  [Scroll down] Let's talk about life in a one-bedroom apartment in London.  The price of energy for heat has nearly doubled, seemingly overnight.  Truly, it took months but it has felt like one day to the next. [...] This is all running wildly ahead of consumer prices generally.  This is only through June.  We are already approaching 100% inflation in energy. [...] My friends in the UK are truly panicked.  They want to come to the U.S. just to get away.  But many of my friends are rebels and did not accept the vaccine because they are healthy and under the age of 80.  They rejected the jab.  Now they cannot come to the U.S. because the U.S. is still imposing rules that forbid travelers from foreign countries who are not vaccinated from getting across the borders.

Jackson Mississippi: This Is What The Water Looks Like When A Radical Communist Is In Power.  Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Democratic mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, promised to make the capital "the most radical city on the planet" during his 2017 campaign, but so far he's been unable to even solve even the city's basic infrastructure problems and the city's running water is now unsafe to drink.  He campaigned on plans to introduce universal basic income and alternatives to policing, to replace vacant lots with urban farms, and resolve chronic issues with the city's water and roads in order to break the "cycles of humiliation" he said black residents experienced in Jackson, the most heavily black large city in the U.S.  Instead, the city's water problems have worsened, and Republican Gov. Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency Tuesday because running water is not reliably available nor safe for consumption.

Great Reset: Switzerland Threatens to Jail People Who Heat Their Homes Too Much in the Winter.  People who heat their homes above a certain temperature in Switzerland during the Winter face fines and potentially up to three years in prison if energy rationing measures are put in place.  Under proposed legislation in the home of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Swiss lawmakers are preparing to set legal limits on the use of heating during the winter should the country face energy shortages.  Under the plans, gas-heated buildings would be capped at 19C (66.2F) and water heating up to 60C (140F).  Saunas and swimming pools would also be forced by government diktat to remain cold.

Biden took a booming economy without inflation and turned it into a high-inflation bust.  There's a growing view inside the mainstream media that Joe Biden's recent legislative victories and his recent speeches that MAGA Republicans are a threat to democracy and are "semi-fascists" are going to give the Democrats some midterm momentum and they're going to overtake the GOP by snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.  I'm not buying it and here's why you shouldn't either.  First of all, the new legislation is not popular.  By 36% to 12%, an Economist-YouGov poll shows that voters believe the IRA legislation will actually increase inflation.  As for the student loan cancellation, a poll from another network shows by 59% to 38% that voters believe that too will increase inflation.  By the way, the latest inflation report for July was 8.5% year-on-year and the inflation tracker from the Cleveland Fed predicts an 8.2% CPI for both August and September.

German Minister of Economics Under Fire as Energy Driven Reality of Economic Collapse Starts Sinking In.  German Minister of Economics Robert Habeck is under fire after his comments during an interview with an ARD broadcaster on Tuesday evening. [...] Mr. Habeck responded that businesses can stop operating, but that doesn't mean they will go insolvent.  Just because the business loses most or all of their revenue, doesn't mean they will go bankrupt.  That doesn't make sense, Minister Habeck was pressed to apply commonsense.  If businesses close to save money, workers are not employed.  If workers are not employed people do not earn income.  If people do not earn income, the economy worsens.  Habeck had no response other than an economically detached "Green Party" perspective that businesses will not go bankrupt just because they are not operating.  However, his facial expressions reflect that he knows what comes next, total economic collapse.  [Video clip]

Return of the Ice Age.  To Europe, anyway.  Years of horrible decisions by European leaders have come home to roost, as Europeans now worry about how to heat their homes this winter.  Reliance on a geopolitical enemy for much of their energy turned out to be a mistake, as Russia has now shut off gas supplies.  Who could have predicted it?  Other than anyone with a modicum of common sense?  Which Europe's governing class has lacked for many years.  The continent's leaders are panicking and preparing to ration energy: [...] European countries are voluntarily turning themselves into third-world nations.  Will any politicians pay the price for this disaster?  Don't bet on it.

When Must a Good Citizen Become a Dissident?  Is it when the FBI and other Deep State truth-twisters manufacture crises and manipulate elections?  Is it when free speech comes under attack under the guise of State-labeled "misinformation"?  Perhaps it is when the president-in-name-only reads carefully scripted messages (written by those who control his office from the shadows) attacking half the country's citizens as "fascists."  Or when government and media "elites" falsely frame political protest as "insurrection" in order to justify criminal persecution and imprisonment of opponents of the ruling regime.  Or maybe when the endless declaration of fake "emergencies" is used to justify the steady imposition of extraordinary State power over each citizen's livelihood.  Maybe it's when the Intelligence Community operates a massive domestic surveillance network targeting Americans who have committed no crimes.  Maybe it's when secretly collected information mined from supposedly independent social media conglomerates and too-big-to-fail private banks is used to track and trace unsuspecting citizens.  Maybe it's when the value of the U.S. dollar is intentionally chipped away by central bank authorities enabling tax-and-spend legislators to expand institutional power at current and future Americans' expense.  Perhaps it is when the same federal government that insists on fighting wars all over the world in defense of other nations' borders staunchly refuses to protect America's own borders from invasion.

I Feel the Earth Move Under my Feet.  We have a nation filled with at least two generations of people who have not been properly educated, who have no respect for the church, no respect for teachers, no respect for parents.  We have a nation saturated with drugs, many people addicted because of painkillers, many too young to make sensible decisions about substances they can procure with ease.  Things like the flailing economy can be corrected with the right policy decisions.  The border can be fixed with a wall.  The crime problem will settle down when we go back to punishing criminals.  Most of this isn't rocket science.  It just takes an honest look at human nature (Newsflash: we're not basically good.) and the application of common sense — and all that takes time.

Seven Practical Ways to Make America Great Again.  I am guilty, like many of my fellow conservatives, of complaining about everything that has gone wrong since COVID.  That includes massive inflation, the loss of small businesses because of a messed up COVID response; supply chain problems; gas prices; the border sieve; the swallowing up of the mainstream media by Great Resetters and [Democrats]; the Afghanistan defeat and weaponry giveaway; the billions and trillions spent on Ukraine; the paying of people not to work; the Luciferian malignancy of CRT, DEI, and ESG infecting our institutions, schools, and businesses; and the litany of other complaints MAGA Americans get so justifiably indignant about.  But what can the average American do to actually take down this behemoth of leftism that is strangling liberty, free speech, and prosperity?  It may take a while, but it is doable with small things to start with.

The West's Energy Disaster Worsens.  There is no excuse for advanced economies to experience a shortage of electricity, or of energy generally.  The world has more than ample supplies of fossil fuels.  And, if you buy the global warming hype, nuclear energy is the obvious alternative, although that implies universal use of electric vehicles that are devastating to the environment.  Nevertheless, an electricity crisis is upon us. [...] The current crisis in Western Europe is due in part to the threatened cutoff of Russian natural gas.  But countries like Britain and Germany are vulnerable to such a cutoff because they fecklessly failed to provide for their own energy self-sufficiency.

It's Too Late For Corrupt Media To Decide Political Violence Is Bad.  The 2020 election was nothing less than a hostage situation, and everyone who lives in a major city (all of them run by Democrats) knew it when they saw their shops, offices, and storefronts boarded up.  That wasn't in anticipation of a Biden victory.  It was in fear of a Trump victory.  The Left had shown all summer that year what it's capable of when things don't go their way.  They will fabricate a conspiracy to derail a president who was never given a chance.  They will hype up an airborne virus, laying every single death it causes at the feet of their political opponents.  They will perpetuate a lie about race and police to shut down highways, businesses, and government services.  The cost:  At least 25 deaths and up to $2 billion in property damage.  And that's just from the George Floyd riots of summer 2020.  There's also the retarded development of an entire generation kept out of school, countless livelihoods ended via shutdown orders, and the ever-lasting trauma that will be endured by those who were told they could not tell loved ones goodbye.

New Jersey banned plastic bags.  So, people are stealing grocery store shopping baskets.  Grocery store customers are walking off with those plastic hand baskets you find in the supermarket, an apparent consequence of New Jersey's plastic bag ban that went into effect this spring.  "They are just disappearing," said Louis Scaduto Jr., chief executive officer of Middletown-based Food Circus Super Markets, which owns four Super Foodtown stores in Monmouth County.  "I may actually have to just do away with them soon, can't afford to keep replacing them," Scaduto wrote in a text message.  It's not just happening at Super Foodtown.  Stop & Shop in Long Branch didn't have any hand baskets during a recent visit.  ShopRite in Freehold Township didn't have any either.

The True Cost of Student Loans.  The cancellation of student debt has echoes of two other unwise political decisions, one made by a Republican President, the other by a Democrat President. [...] The second one was the decision of the Clinton administration to allow people to have access to mortgages they had little chance of actually repaying.  Under Clinton's Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Andrew Cuomo, Community Reinvestment Act regulators gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in "credit-deprived" areas.  In short people with low and poor credit were still given massive loans for homes, despite the obvious risk to both borrowers and lenders.  The government made clear that it would take the hit for any mortgage default.  As a result, banks realized that the smart money was not in being careful with mortgages, but instead lay in getting as many people signed up as possible.  After all, Uncle Sam would bail you out.  This caused the 2008 economic collapse.

Total chaos as millions of student loan borrowers rush to get Joe Biden's $10,000 debt amnesty.  They blew out their own website based on the high volume of traffic from those seeking the $10,000 debt freebie.  Seems that Joe took the Obamacare rollout fiasco as a model, not a warning.  They never set up a special website for this matter at all before the debt forgiveness plan was announced, which might have saved the rest of their website, and still don't have any plans to do it.  Plan?  What plan?  They have no idea how many people will apply for the $10,000 freebie.  They have no idea what it will cost.

Germany to Implement Energy Rationing Amid Fears of Gas Riots.  As officials in the country express their fears about future gas riots this winter, the German government has announced a host of new energy rationing rules that will come into effect [...] next Thursday.  In what appears to be the latest attempt to avoid energy shortages this winter, the German government is to implement restrictions limiting the use of energy in the country.  Ministers appear to be hoping that the rationing efforts will help reduce the risk of energy shortages this coming winter, with a number of bigwigs now openly fearful of a future of public unrest and gas riots should people be left unable to adequately heat their homes.

President Macron Warns of Public Unrest in France as Energy Crisis Bites.  President Emmanuel Macron has warned that the French public may react poorly to what he calls the "end of abundance" in France and Europe, as multiple crises brought about largely by political management wreak havoc on the continent.  With a long line of political mismanagement finally coming to a head across the European continent, France's President Emmanuel Macron has now said that his country faces what he calls the "end of abundance", something he fears could disrupt the stability of his nation.  Macron's warning comes amid growing political panic in neighbouring Germany, where many political bigwigs are now fearing that the country faces a future of riots and public upheavals as people lose the ability to adequately heat their homes over the winter.

What's Going On in America.  When we see adults in leadership who have made it legal for minors, very young minors, to have permanent, life-altering sex changes, while it would be a crime to give these very same minors cigarettes, alcohol, or the car keys, we can't believe what's going on.  When China, Russia, and Iran no longer fear us, and Israel, Japan, and South Korea no longer trust us, we know that leadership is making purposeful mistakes.  When kindergarten students are still being forced to wear masks that do not work, and everyone knows they don't work, we wonder aloud why.  When J-6 political prisoners are still being held in D.C. gulags without charges being filed against them or bail being afforded to them, we know that this is just not American.  When there is practically no border at all on our southern flank, and we know that all sovereign nations do in fact have borders, we know that history shows us clearly that this is suicidal for a people.

Here's How Unlivable Blue Cities Have Gotten.  How bad have things gotten in Democrat-controlled cities like New Orleans, New York City, Detroit, San Francisco, and Chicago?  So bad that when you think of those cities, it's not the good things about them, from culture to industry, beautiful shopping districts to stunning city parks, that come to mind.  Rather, what almost every American thinks of when such blue cities as those are brought up is of the bloodshed, crime, and heartbreak within them, the streams of blood flowing down their streets thanks to crime that would rival the French Revolution in terms of both volume of blood shed and the pointlessness of it all.  While many might avert their eyes and avoid criticizing such places and the little being done to combat crime within them out of fear of being called "racist," or something, Fox News Channel's Tucker Carlson went full steam ahead in criticizing the bloodshed of inner-cities and the violence present in Democrat-controlled areas.  In fact, Tucker even went so far as to say that the horror of those cities shows that our "civilization is falling apart."

Democrats Evade Accountability to Avoid Political Fallout.  Gasoline now costs on average more than $4 per gallon.  Two years ago, it was less than $2.  Americans are suffering the worst inflation in more than 40 years:  9.1 percent in July 2022.  Inflation is a hidden and highly regressive tax.  It hurts lower income families more than high earners.  Who is accountable for inflation?  The Biden administration never admits its policies are responsible for inflation, such as suppression of domestic oil and gas production and spending several trillion dollars.  Biden claims the following are to blame:  greedy meatpackers, venal oil companies, mercenary physicians, Donald Trump, Putin's war in Ukraine, amongst others.  Never, ever blame his Day One executive orders!  Federal politicians, bureaucrats, and their complicit media avoid paying for their egregious acts by dispersing accountability and thus avoiding feedback.

Wind Turbines Are Destroying the Planet.  New York, along with other states, is moving forward with massive wind turbine projects.  The push for "9,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy" comes at a high price, not only for families who are left dependent on expensive and unreliable energy, but for the planet.  Wind turbines require massive amounts of rare earths for their generators and motors.  A single wind turbine eats up tons of rare earth metals.  Rare earth mining carried out in China is horrifyingly destructive to people and the environment.  One story described radioactive lakes, high cancer rates and villagers whose "teeth began to fall out" and "hair turned white at unusually young ages".  "Children were born with soft bones and cancer rates rocketed."

The Predatory Male Behavior Of So-Called Transgender Women.  How do you know so-called transgender women aren't real women?  Because they act just like predatory men who, rather than having sympathy for women concerned when physically intact men invade their territory, revel in the ability to impose their will on these women. [...] Women are generally smaller and physically weaker than most men, so savvy women learn to be careful.  Women also rely on the traditional social contract ensuring single-sex privacy in places in which they may be naked or exposed, such as dressing rooms, bathrooms, or locker rooms.  She expects that, in these spaces, she'll be in the company of women and free from voyeurs or exhibitionists.  Sadly, this social contract has been broken because mixed-up or opportunistic men claiming to be women are allowed to invade these private spaces.  These men's insensitivity to women's fear and discomfort is additional proof that they are not women.

'Defund the police' advocate Ilhan Omar's city experiences sharp increase in majority of crimes, data shows.  "Defund the police" supporter Rep. Ilhan Omar's city is experiencing a sharp increase in most crimes, data shows.  The spike comes just one year after she backed a failed campaign to dismantle and replace the Minneapolis Police Department.  Omar represents Minnesota's 5th Congressional District, which encompasses the city of Minneapolis.  So far this year, citywide crimes have spiked in nine of 14 categories over the same time period last year, according to a Fox News Digital review of crime statistics.

Democrats are not learning from their defund-the-police failures.  Last week, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) just barely won renomination in her Democratic primary.  Democratic leaders had failed to see it coming — that such a prominent member of the left-wing "Squad" could come within just 2 percentage points of losing to an opponent whom she had outspent nearly 3 to 1.  Don Samuels, a former city councilman, nearly defeated Omar in the very district where George Floyd was killed in 2020.  Having campaigned previously against disbanding the Minneapolis police, Samuels ran a law-and-order, anti-crime congressional campaign.  It was nearly enough to win a majority of Democratic primary voters in one of the most liberal cities in America.  One would hope that Omar's near-death experience leads Democrats to be a bit more skeptical about the defund-the-police movement in which she has played such a large role.  Alas, nothing else up to that point, not even the national crime wave resulting from their folly in so many of the nation's major cities, had convinced them to give it up.

IRS: Gestapo in the Making.  Inflation is skyrocketing.  Gas prices, despite Old Joe Biden's crowing about minor reductions, are still substantially higher than they were before his presidency was inflicted upon us.  America's global standing is drastically diminished by Biden's handlers' catastrophically botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, due to the lack of preparedness of a politicized military distracted by wokeism.  The Southern border is essentially nonexistent, and due to that as well as to the arrival of tens of thousands of unvetted Afghan migrants, there is an unknowable number of criminals and terrorists in the country who would have been kept out by remotely sane immigration policies. [...] The people who run Joe Biden looked around at their dumpster fire of an administration, and the smoking ruin they have wrought, and decided that what America really needs are tens of thousands of new employees for the IRS.

Time to Give the Conspiracy Theorists a Break?  How many times have you heard, "That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me"? Was it because you asked if the virus was released from a lab in China?  Or did you question the safety and effectiveness of the "vaccines"?  Did you ask why doctors and nurses are not free to treat their patients according to their best judgment instead of government protocols?  Or maybe you asked about the decrease in energy, selling our oil to China, the problems with supply chains, government deficit spending, censorship on social media, inflation, food shortages, the rise in racism, the burning of our cities, our unprotected border, and the release of criminals.  Did you wonder why everything is getting worse?  Is there is a plan to destroy Western civilization?

Why We Lost Trust in the Expert Class.  For years, European policymakers had assured the world that the relatively rapid "transition" to "green" energy was the world's preordained future — regardless of the costs.  Accordingly, many European Union governments followed the advice of green experts.  They eagerly shut down coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants to transition immediately to "renewable energy."  Most citizens were afraid to object that in cloudy, cold Germany solar panels were not viable methods of electrical generation — especially in comparison to the country's vast coal deposits and its large, model nuclear power industry.  As a result, German government officials warn that this winter, in 19th-century fashion, families will have to burn wood — the dirtiest of modern fuels — to endure the cold.  And there is further talk of "warm rooms," where like pre-civilizational tribal people, the elderly will bunch together within a designated heated room to keep alive.

The Point of No Return.  This is an election year.  But the issues this year are not about Democrats and Republicans.  The big issue is whether this nation has degenerated to a point of no return — a point where we risk destroying ourselves, before our enemies can destroy us.  If there is one moment that symbolized our degeneration, it was when an enraged mob gathered in front of the Supreme Court and a leader of the United States Senate shouted threats against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, saying "You won't know what hit you!"  There have always been irresponsible demagogues.  But there was once a time when anyone who shouted threats to a Supreme Court Justice would see the end of his own political career, and could not show his face in decent society again.  You either believe in laws or you believe in mob rule.  It doesn't matter whether you agree with the law or agree with the mob on some particular issue.  If threats of violence against judges — and publishing where a judge's children go to school — is the way to settle issues, then there is not much point in having elections or laws.

Everything Is Worse and You Are Just Supposed to Take It.  You are asking for too much, you terrible person.  You want cheap gas and a functioning supply chain, air conditioning and not to eat bugs.  But most of all, you expect the elite to actually do its job, and for that, you are terrible.  And racist.  Bums litter our streets figuratively and — in ghastly form — literally.  Criminals run rampant unmolested by the gendarmes, who have been told — expressly and impliedly — to let the crooks be.  Our economy is sensational, groovy, glorious — except for the inflation and the hollowing out of your 401K.  Try to buy a house instead of renting — just try.  The globalist elite has failed in doing what we want, but it seems to be doing what it wants.  It is gathering power and payoffs unto itself, and that is precisely the goal.

Denver — a 'hellhole' of drugs.  Once a cosmopolitan utopia of clean, safe, family-friendly neighborhoods and parks, Denver now looks and feels like a drug orgy.  The stench of marijuana wafts through neighborhoods where a small percentage of family dwellings have transitioned into pot farms.  Walking through much of Denver and other Colorado cities, one becomes accustomed to stepping over and around growing numbers of full-time drug users living on sidewalks, parks, medians, and lawns.  The broad-based degradation started when voters approved Amendment 64 in 2012, which established the civilized world's most lenient marijuana law.  Critics argue legalization, problematic on its own, became a "gateway policy" that lowers political resistance to other illicit drugs.  Indeed, in 2019, the Colorado Legislature and Democratic Gov. Jared Polis essentially decriminalized all schedule 1 and 2 drugs — including fentanyl, the nation's leading killer of people ages 18-45.

Air Force Includes Drag Show In Woke 'Diversity' Festival At Langley.  The U.S. military is hosting a drag show at a family-friendly festival at Joint Base Langley-Eustis (JBLE) at the end of July.  JBLE is hosting its first ever "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Summer Festival" on July 30, featuring a series of performances and speeches, including a poem on "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" and a drag show by Joshua Kelley, who performs under the moniker Harpy Daniels.

Chicago Mom Forbidden To See Teen Daughter After Refusing To Pretend She's The Opposite Sex.  Jeanette Cooper, a mom in Chicago, has missed her daughter's 13th, 14th, and 15th birthdays.  She doesn't get to be there as her daughter is learning to drive.  In fact, she has only seen Sophia for eight and a half hours in the last three years.  That's because Cooper lost custody of her daughter after refusing to go along with Sophia's belief that she is transgender.  When Sophia was 12, Cooper went to pick her up from a custodial visit at her father's house, but her daughter refused to come home.  Cooper learned that Sophia, whom the mother said had always come across as more feminine than Cooper, now identified as transgender and felt "unsafe" around her mom.

Recidivism rates for NYC criminals are off the charts.  More than two years ago, the new bail reform law in New York went into effect and the results have been obvious to pretty much everyone who lives in the Big Apple.  The law was ostensibly designed to "combat racism" and focus on "rehabilitation over incarceration."  The law's proponents claimed that most criminals are simply misunderstood and lacking in opportunities.  Given the proper motivation and a chance at a fresh start, most of them would happily take up nine-to-five jobs and turn their backs on gang activity and lives of crime.  But the latest NYPD crime statistics report shows us how that actually worked out.  The law basically alerted criminals that the door to the candy store was unlocked and they were free to ramp up their criminal business model with abandon.  Recidivism rates in Gotham are as much as three times greater for some categories of crime than they were before the law took effect.

The last major media holdout still shilling for Joe Biden.  By all accounts — by every economic indicator, every political poll, every overseas interaction, every lie at the presidential podium — Joe Biden is a miserable failure as president.  Inflation brought on by government spending has now tipped the economy into recession and there is no end in sight.  The border lies open, with the Border Patrol converted into a de facto valet and escort service for literally millions of unvetted illegal border crossers.  Crime is out of control.  America is a laughingstock abroad, with Biden's name on the most humiliating military pullout in U.S. history.  He's a man utterly unfit for the office, a man whose very placement in office demonstrates the horrific consequences of electoral fraud.

The Trans Fiasco:  Will There Be Accounting?  The "trans" fad has devastated the lives of many people, especially children.  Will there ever be an accounting?  In the U.K., there are signs of one: the National Health Service's Tavistock gender identity clinic for children is being shut down. [...] Basically, Tavistock was run according to a "trans" activist ideology, and therefore destroyed many lives.  So there is at least the glimmer of accountability in the U.K. How about here in America?  Hans Bader sums up where we stand in a long post at Liberty Unyielding.

FDA warns of brain swelling and permanent vision loss in kids taking puberty blockers.  The FDA recently added a warning to the puberty blockers used by transgender children, reports The Post-Millennial.  The warning was added after the FDA identified "a serious potential side effect" that can "cause cause a dangerous surge of spinal fluid pressure in the brain," as well as "headaches, nausea, double vision, and even permanent vision loss."  "The FDA identified 6 cases in females ages 5-12 years old who were diagnosed with pseudotumor cerebri" after receiving puberty blockers.  Pseudotumor cerebri "means 'false brain tumor' because the signs and symptoms in affected patients are similar to those of a large brain tumor."  "The agency considered the cases clinically serious... this potential serious risk associated with GnRH agonists justifies inclusion in product labeling," an FDA spokesperson explained.  As the Post-Millennial observes, puberty blockers are used for gender transitions (formerly known as sex changes) by children.

New Los Angeles bridge opens, then quickly closes amid chaos.  The newest bridge in Los Angeles, a $588-million architectural marvel with views of the downtown skyline, opened to great fanfare on July 10.  It has already been closed, to great dismay, several times since then amid chaos and collisions.  The 6th Street Viaduct — which soars over the concrete-lined Los Angeles River to connect downtown to the historic Eastside — quickly became a hotspot for street racing, graffiti and illegal takeovers that draw hundreds of spectators to watch drivers perform dangerous stunts in their vehicles.

The Editor says...
This is exactly the behavior one should expect in a state that's all crime and no punishment.

Military Recruiting Numbers Lowest Since the Vietnam War.  Recruiting among the nation's military branches is at historically low numbers as COVID, woke leaders and an anti-military culture are keeping young people away. [...] RedState has reported on the services' desperate efforts to encourage more volunteers to join, with the Minnesota National Guard placing a $77,000 ad buy in an LGBTQ magazine, and the Army toying with the idea of dropping its requirement that enlistees have a high school diploma or GED, but then realizing what a stupid idea that was and backtracking.  Military.com went to press Tuesday with the story of how the Army is giving recruits who fail to meet initial body fat and academic standards a second chance by launching two pilot programs to help them lose weight and/or improve their aptitude test scores.  We've also covered how the woke silliness currently being peddled by military leaders isn't sitting well with soldiers and potential soldiers.  Alex Parker reported on how the Army will reportedly force female soldiers to shower with biological males who identify as females, while the Navy will allegedly allow sailors to use whichever locker room suits their gender identity.  There's also a huge emphasis on race:  [Tweet]

As Crime Skyrockets And Democrats Deny Blame, Remember What They Said About Police.  There is perhaps no better example of gaslighting by today's Democratic Party than when it comes to the issue of "Defund the Police."  In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in the spring of 2020, the mantra was all the rage in leftwing, Democratic circles.  Their media, their spokespeople, their elected officials — all of them — were singing the same song:  Police are evil, the system is racist, and we need to put our tax dollars to use doing something else.  The movement never made any sense.  Anyone who is old enough to remember the days of high-crime cities or who has watched movies like Taxi Driver and French Connection understand that a lack of law enforcement yields lawlessness.  And lawlessness yields more lawlessness.  Such a strategy will inevitably result in spiraling crime, and much of that crime will likely be of the "violent" variety.  Now, two years later, that highly predictable outcome has indeed come to fruition.  Since 2020 and their verbal attacks against police, Biden Administration officials have repeatedly tried to walk back their undeniable support for decimating our police departments.

The Demise of American Citizenship.  American citizenship and its one-of-a-kind written contract with the central government, the Constitution with its Bill of Rights, is under relentless assault by the nation's governing establishment and teetering on the edge of meaninglessness.  No nation can maintain its status as a nation without secure and identifiable borders.  Citizenship means nothing if untold millions of illegal immigrants openly defy the laws without consequence.  It is estimated that 22 million illegals resided in the United States as of 2018.  Responding to an explicit invitation from the Biden administration, another 2+ million have walked unchallenged across the border in the past 18 months.  These so-called undocumented immigrants are becoming legally indistinguishable from citizens as they openly reside in 500 sanctuary jurisdictions, receive welfare, education and medical care, are granted drivers licenses, and given tuition breaks at public universities as they, not legal immigrants or American citizens, are exempt from federal immigration, health and travel laws.

How Did Democrats Become So Out of Touch With the American People?  The republic is not in good shape.  Unforced foreign policy blunders, such as the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, embarrass America on the world stage.  Our homeland territorial integrity has never been more undermined, as a wide-open southern border permits an unprecedented flow of smugglers, traffickers and other miscreants.  Homicide and other violent crime, which skyrocketed in the 2020 "summer of love" riots, continue to spike; the New York City subway is unsafe, and Chicago is a veritable war zone.  Mobocracy runs amok; a sitting Supreme Court justice just faced a near-assassination attempt.  Inflation, now over 9% and smacking those lower on the economic ladder, is at a four-decade high; the national average for gasoline is well over $4 per gallon.

France to turn lights off at night.  French President Emmanuel Macron [...] is telling French citizens to engage in energy "sobriety" and to prepare for even higher food prices.  Macron added, "From now on, I will ask public bodies, and all companies that can, to consume less.  We will create a program and try to use lighting less in the evenings.  We are launching a load reduction and sobriety program.  We have to prepare for a scenario in which we have to give up Russian gas completely." [...] And France is by no means alone.  California, the erstwhile Golden State, the Land of Milk and Honey — and Hollywood — says it expects periodic blackouts this summer as the power runs low.  In fact, California has struggled to keep the power on the past two summers, due to progressive policies that range from the nonsensical to the insane.  France is not engaged in war with Russia but is using the war as an excuse to demand energy "sobriety" from her citizens.  California is not fighting Russia either.

State conservation bill from '19 could be to blame for increased shark presence.  Great whites and other sharks have been coming close to Long Island beaches this year to feast on a particular kind of bait fish that has been flourishing in New York waters ever since the state legislature voted unanimously to preserve it three years ago.  With the population of Atlantic menhaden booming, sharks are swimming into shore like tourists bellying up to a buffet, and in the process, they are coming close to bathers — with disastrous results, experts told The [New York] Post.  "The reason why people are interacting with sharks more often this year and more than last year is because of conservation efforts over the years [that] has protected a food source known as the Atlantic menhaden," Frank Quevedo, executive director of the South Fork Natural History Museum Shark Research and Education Program, told The Post.

How Did Democrats Become So Out of Touch With the American People?  The president of the United States, equal parts senescent and feckless, garners record-shattering low approval ratings seemingly each week. [...] It is not difficult to figure out why.  The republic is not in good shape.  Unforced foreign policy blunders, such as the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, embarrass America on the world stage.  Our homeland territorial integrity has never been more undermined, as a wide-open southern border permits an unprecedented flow of smugglers, traffickers and other miscreants.  Homicide and other violent crime, which skyrocketed in the 2020 "summer of love" riots, continue to spike; the New York City subway is unsafe, and Chicago is a veritable war zone.  Mobocracy runs amok; a sitting Supreme Court justice just faced a near-assassination attempt.  Inflation, now over 9% and smacking those lower on the economic ladder, is at a four-decade high; the national average for gasoline is well over $4 per gallon.

The Left Should Be Happy with Biden.  The Left should be ecstatic that Joe Biden has given them everything they wanted.  The Left likes inflation.  It reduces the value of old money by printing lots of new money.  Those richer who have it, lose the value of their money; those poorer who don't have any money, suddenly do.  When combined with low interest rates, inflation roars even louder.  Not since Jimmy Carter has a Democrat been so insistent on inflating the money supply.

Why Is Conservative Media Calling a Male Rapist by Feminine Pronouns?  It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry when leftists insist that "men get pregnant" or refer to mothers as "birthing people" and otherwise ignore the material reality of biological sex.  While we've generally understood that this is the latest cause célèbre of the radical left, we don't really expect conservative media to follow suit.  Yet the recent case of a male inmate at a New Jersey women's prison who impregnated two inmates has shown that conservative media has also been successfully pressured to kowtow to the transgender cult, the Media Research Center has found.

The Long March to Nowhere.  [Scroll down]  Americans harbor a healthy skepticism of intrusive government and an intolerance for useless, broken institutions.  An institution is a tool with which to address a social need.  Schools should teach.  Companies should turn a profit.  Government agencies should be primarily concerned with the activity stated in their name (Commerce, Health, Defense, etc...).  And so on.  The Left has a nasty habit of tool abuse.  Any organization that progressives infest is inevitably subverted to advance their agenda, to the detriment of its official purpose.  And so, schools preach.  Companies insult their customers.  The Commerce Department destroys industries.  The CDC actively makes people sick.  The Department of Defense punishes soldiers who don't bow to the ideological flavor of the month.  Which lately involves cross-dressing. [...] Americans, being practical people, will sooner or later question the wisdom of supporting or retaining useless tools, or institutions.  Some we will abandon and replace.  Disney and the Democratic Party are two that come to mind.

Biden and The Destruction of Wisdom.  There used to be an agreed-on body of wisdom, which both Left and Right, Republicans and Democrats, generally accepted.  Heated arguments and invective centered on implementations and methods of solving problems, which at least both sides agreed were problems.  Both ideologies accepted a common core of wisdom, despite their radical differences in interpreting it.  Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and especially Biden's strange cabinet of loud Jacobin amateurs, reject the very hallowed knowledge upon which civilization is based.  In that sense the public has begun to recognize them as nihilist and anarchist.  Nearly two out of three Americans in some polls hold unfavorable views of the Biden Administration.  They fear that it is decoupled from both the past and reality, and quite capable of destroying their lives as they have known them.

Transgender woman who impregnated 2 inmates removed from N.J.'s female prison.  A transgender inmate who impregnated two women while incarcerated at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women has been moved to a new facility, according to the Department of Corrections.  Demi Minor, 27, was transferred to Garden State Youth Correctional Facility, a prison for young adult offenders in Burlington County, last month, Dan Sperrazza, a Department of Corrections spokesman, said.  He said the DOC moved Minor to the vulnerable unit at the facility and that she is currently the only woman prisoner on the site.  Sperrazza said he could not comment on the DOC's specific housing actions in Minor's case because of policies around privacy.

After 18 Months of Biden, Have We Hit Bottom Yet?  The latest data confirm the destruction that he and his fellow Democrats have wrought:
  •   Inflation stood at 1.4%, year over year, in January 2021.  By June 2022, that figure was 9.1%, the worst such increase in the Consumer Price Index since November 1981.
  •   Gross domestic product grew 6.4% in 2021's first quarter.  In the first quarter of 2022, GDP shrank 1.6%.
  •   The Dow Jones Industrial Average was 31,188 on Jan. 20, 2021.  The Dow closed Wednesday at 30,722.  Pension savings, 401(k) plans, and other investment portfolios have shriveled under Biden.
  •   The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index measures short-term expectations for income, business, and labor markets.  That metric has slid from 92.5 in January 2021 to 66.4 last month -- its lowest level since March 2013.
  •   The National Federation of Independent Business' Small Business Optimism Index has retreated on Biden's watch from 95.0 to 89.5 -- its weakest showing since January 2013 under the Obama-Biden administration. [...]
  •   West Texas Intermediate crude oil traded for $53.24 per barrel as Biden took over.  It sold Wednesday [7/13/2022] for $96.87 -- up 82%.  A gallon of regular gasoline cost $2.39 as Biden arrived.  It hit $5.01 before easing to $4.63 on Wednesday -- up 93.7% since Trump jetted off to Mar-a-Lago.
  •   Border Patrol agents apprehended 754,538 illegal aliens during Trump's final 16 months in office (Oct. 1, 2019, through Jan. 31, 2021 -- including Biden's first 11 days).  In Biden's first full 16 months in power (Feb. 1, 2021, through May 31), Border Patrol confronted a stunning 2,975,135 illegal aliens -- up a staggering 394%.

The U.S. Misery Index Worsens as Unchecked Bidenflation Grows.  The U.S. government announced Wednesday that June's federal inflation numbers increased to a staggering 9.06% — a 40-year high.  According to the official Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) news release, inflation is being felt keenly and across the board: [...] From the updated BLS data, economists quantify the economic health of the country.  To do so, they add the current U.S. unemployment rate, which is a stagnant 3.6%, to the current rate of U.S. inflation, which is a jarring 9.06%, to produce a snapshot of the country's economy.  The result is known as the U.S. Misery Index.

Producer Price Index Hits Peak 11.3 Percent Inflation Driven by Biden Energy Policy — Service Prices Now Indicate Recession.  The "Producer Price Index" (PPI) is essentially the tracking of wholesale prices at three stages:  Origination (commodity), Intermediate (processing), and then Final (to wholesale).  Today, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) released June price data showing another 11.3% increase year-over-year in Final Demand products at the wholesale level.  Overall, the wholesale inflation rate is being driven by energy prices.  The June calculation shows exactly that problem with energy prices embedded in goods driving 10% of the price increase.

The Editor says...
Yes, gas and grocery prices have gone up rapidly in the last year or so, but have you bought 9-volt batteries lately?  They used to be 69 cents apiece, and they're now over five dollars each.

Glenn Beck Asks Five Important Questions About The Tragic Story Of The Ten-Year-Old Ohioan.  One of the biggest stories in national media right now has been, in one form or another, about how a ten-year-old-girl was raped, got impregnated, and due to her residency in the state of Ohio was forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion.  The story took off after Joe Biden referenced it in the immediate aftermath of leftist outrage over Roe's overturning at the Supreme Court.  Mind you, abortion was not made illegal with that ruling; it was simply returned to the states to decide on a course of action.  After all, nothing in the Constitution lays out a legal framework for federalizing infanticide.  It shouldn't even be an issue, and it certainly shouldn't have been decided in 1973 that rights were magically found in penumbras, but that's judicial activism for you.  Because the corrupt leftist media is in bed with the even more corrupt Biden Occupation, the story conveniently left out the fact that the alleged victim was raped by a monstruous illegal alien and pretended that the real problem was that she couldn't attain an abortion in her home state.  They said nothing of the act of rape itself or the fact that it was perpetrated by one of countless illegals welcomed into the country by the party of open borders.

Eva Vlaardingerbroek Summarizes all the Merging Food, Energy and Farming Issues with Stark Advice to Americans.  Eva Vlaardingerbroek is a GB News correspondent and conservative voice from Holland.  In this interview segment with NTDNews Ms. Vlaardingerbroek outlines what is happening in the Netherlands with the Dutch farm protests and how it connects to the larger Agenda 2030 goals.  In the last 20 seconds of the segment, Vlaardingerbroek has some solid advice for Americans.  [Video clip]

Cataloguing Biden's Ineptitude On Inflation.  The public would do well to ignore anything Biden says about inflation, given his horrible track record when it comes to this topic.  Since prices started their upward climb in March 2021, Biden has by turns claimed that it was the result of a booming economy, that it was temporary, that it was the result of supply chain bottlenecks, and most recently that Vladimir Putin is to blame[.]  When not making fact-free claims like those, Biden simply lies.  Take his oft-repeated claim that Europeans have it far worse on inflation.  Even Newsweek magazine felt obliged to conclude in its fact check "that Biden's statement that U.S. inflation is the 'lowest of almost every major nation' is largely inaccurate."  We don't expect readers to simply take our word for it that Biden has been out to lunch on inflation.  So we assembled a handy chart showing the annualized rate of inflation each month since January 2020.  It matches up that record with statements Biden made about inflation.

How to Cure Inflation.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics released two reports Wednesday morning [7/13/2022] that confirm the fiscal incompetence of the Biden administration and its confederates on Capitol Hill.  The BLS reported that the Consumer Price Index rose yet again in June:  "Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 9.1 percent before seasonal adjustment."  The BLS also released its Real Earnings Summary:  "Real average hourly earnings decreased 3.6 percent, seasonally adjusted, from June 2021 to June 2022."  In May, President Joe Biden announced, "I want every American to know that I'm taking inflation very seriously and it's my top domestic priority."  Other than blame-shifting and bluster, however, his plan to fix it has been all but invisible.  Consequently, a number of polls indicate that a majority of Americans believe Biden and the Democrats bear the responsibility for inflation.

Inflation Hits 9.1 Percent in June, New 40-Year High.  The U.S. annual inflation rate climbed to 9.1 percent in June, reaching its highest level since November 1981 and topping the market estimate of 8.8 percent and May's annual rate of 8.6 percent.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the consumer price index (CPI) rose by 1.3 percent month-over-month.  The monthly inflation also was higher than economists' expectations of 1.1 percent.  While the core inflation rate, which removes the volatile food and energy sectors, eased to 5.9 percent, that was higher than the forecast of 5.7 percent.  On a monthly basis, core inflation rose at a higher-than-expected pace of 0.7 percent.  Food prices soared by 10.4 percent, while the energy index advanced by 41.6 percent.

The Rise of Black Girly Men.  I've noticed that when media represent so-called "transgender" men and highly effeminate males, they are often black.  Perhaps far too many people are desensitized to the pollution in our mass media to notice the disproportionate number of high-profile effeminate black men showcased in high rotation in all mass communication media.  These "gender-fluid" celebrities all display a common exaggerated and dramatically "flaming" exhibitionistic effeminate behavior.  It is my simple observation that whenever the secular humanist liberal class desires to impose non-traditional values into the public square, they often employ compromised black individuals or assume "black causes" to advance their self-serving agenda.  These elites care nothing for blacks or America, just their own pursuits.  The elites use blacks as human shields, as window dressing to manipulate, deflect, suppress, and silence any debate, dissent, or opposition from the majority of Americans who fear airing ideas or opinions that would result in being labeled as racists, homophobic, fascists, or all three.

Inflation jumps to 9.1%, highest in four decades.  Inflation accelerated to an explosive 9.1% for the 12 months ending in June, according to the consumer price index, the highest level in four decades.  The much-anticipated numbers reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday revealed that inflation is still soaring, despite the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes, and is near the worst it has been since the Great Inflation that helped bring President Ronald Reagan to office.

How Angela Merkel's Green Agenda Caused the Economic Collapse of Germany.  Remember how the world, especially the American media, fawned over former German Chancellor Angela Merkel?  The adoration was so over the top that in 2015 Time magazine named Merkel its "Person of the Year."  It described her as the "Chancellor of the Free World."  Time owes whatever readers it has left a solemn apology.  Today, Germans are suffering the bitter fruits of nearly every major economic and geopolitical decision Merkel made as chancellor.  Start with the German economy that she attempted to reset for the 21st century, which is reminiscent of how President Joe Biden explains to inflation-weary voters that we are going through "an incredible transition."  But Merkel's Germany was ahead of us in its "transition."  Today, the German economy is in tatters.

Biden's Twin Dumpster Fires:  Raging Inflation and Open Borders.  Faced with several serious domestic and foreign policy problems all at once, the Biden administration's reaction has been so catastrophically incoherent, it's hard to know whether to blame leftist ideology or just plain incompetence.  Inflation hits all of us right now. [...] Meanwhile, the effects of rampant illegal immigration are felt insidiously by most of us in crowded schools, the flow of illegal drugs, more expensive health care, and numerous other social costs, but they are hitting especially fast and hard in border communities.  After 17 months of record illegal immigration, the leaders of several Texas border counties have reached their limit in responding to the catastrophe.  They have just declared that they are under invasion, in an effort to get Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to enforce immigration law and protect them from an unprecedented, unchecked flood of illegal entrants — more than 1.5 million apprehended at the border just since October.

When Governments Do Truly STUPID Things.  They tend to collapse spectacularly and the "powers that be" almost-never survive politically — and frequently physically.  Sri Lanka is the latest example; they are literally bankrupt, having bought into the "green" thing and then... oops.  The root causes were many, but chief among them were overspending and a commitment to "green" farming practices, which decimated crop yields, spiked prices and then of course here comes higher oil costs.  The combination proved fatal to the economy.  "The rich" are being literally chased down and slaughtered, with "rich" being defined as "has something, when we have nothing."  The President fled the nation and, at least report, the Presidential home has been stormed by protestors.

Dear Democrats, THIS Is What Your Oppressive Global Initiatives Lead To.  After suffering from weeks of brutal food and fuel shortages, as well as crippling inflation, Sri Lankans have had enough.  Riots have broken out throughout the impoverished country.  Police have used tear gas and water cannons but to little effect.  Shortly after thousands of angry citizens stormed the presidential palace, even going so far as to swim in his pool, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa declared that he will step down.  Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe agreed to resign as well after his home was torched.  [Tweets with video clips]

'Complete Collapse': Here's How ESG Destroyed One Nation's Economy.  Sri Lanka is in a last-ditch effort to stave off economic collapse after an allegedly climate-friendly ban on artificial fertilizers devastated one of the country's largest industries, according to experts.  Sri Lanka has been wracked with poverty, inflation and fuel shortages on a massive scale, with the Prime Minister declaring Tuesday that the country has gone "bankrupt," according to Business Insider.  A ban on chemical fertilizers, implemented April 2021 in an effort to promote organic farming, proved the final straw after a string of missteps, decimating Sri Lanka's primary source of income and forcing it into bankruptcy, experts told The Daily Caller News Foundation.  "Our economy has faced a complete collapse," Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said on June 23, according to CNN.  The government lifted the fertilizer ban in November 2021, but the damage had already been done, Peter Earle, a former financial markets trader and economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, told The DCNF.

Protesters Storm Presidential Palace in Sri Lanka After Climate Hysteria Destroys the Nation.  Sri Lanka is in the middle of a full-scale collapse after the president announced the nation is "bankrupt," having run out of both money and energy.  Hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets, and things have devolved into a dystopian nightmare.  In the last several hours, the presidential palace was taken over by a sea of people, angry at the government for putting them in such a precarious position.  And as I'll explain, Sri Lanka's woes were not only avoidable but were purposely brought on to please climate change fanatics in faraway lands.  [Tweet]  Sri Lanka's government has been implementing ESG policies (environment, social, and governance) for years, following the lead of the World Economic Forum.  That includes banning agrochemicals such as fertilizers in an effort to lower nitrogen emissions.  Flowery tales of "organic" farming and saving the planet have now been replaced with horror, as the island nation's top exports have been laid to waste.  People are starving, they can't get gas or electricity, and none of the globalists who used Sri Lanka as a testbed for their green fantasies are coming to help.

Where Science Ends and Morality Begins.  Under the Biden administration, we are getting a foretaste of a green future.  The high costs of gasoline, heating oil, and electricity; the consequent high prices of everything else; the food shortages; and economic recessions will all be permanent features of a green America.  Tried flying lately?  Consider the phase-out of air travel to be already underway.  Supply chain problems causing empty shelves at the store?  Not to worry; when "buy local" is your only choice, you won't have to worry about supply chains.  Don't like arbitrary government mandates?  Don't like what the COVID lockdowns did to your constitutional rights?  Don't like seeing the rule of law abandoned before your eyes — from our open southern border to the homes of our Supreme Court justices?  Consider all this your introduction to socialist governance.

Army Training Says Soldiers Must Shower with Transgender Persons of Opposite Sex.  An Army training slide obtained by Breitbart News instructs soldiers to shower with transgender members of the opposite sex even if they have not undergone a surgical transition.  The training slide offers a "vignette" instructing soldiers on what to do if they encounter a female soldier who identifies as male according to the Department of Defense's personnel tracking system known as Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS), but has not surgically transitioned and still has "female genitalia."

The Disappearing American?  During the nearly two-year-long COVID-19 shutdown and economic downturn, firms cut costs by laying off millions of employees.  As a result, some in their early- or mid-60s simply retired early and never came back to work.  Feder