The Hatred is Numbing: The vitriol, on both sides, is tearing our country apart. There is plenty of blame to go around, but the left won’t stop, even after they won. The right is frustrated, not just with the policy but the hypocrisy and “woke” culture. And the cycle continues…
Democrats and Republicans have to start talking again. We have to respectfully disagree and fight the fight on policy issues, not personalities. Don’t make everything personal. Don’t lose your friends and family over politics.
It doesn’t mean you can’t stand up for the things you agree with…or oppose. But don’t make it personal. Try to understand the other side.
I think the impeachment is nothing more than political theater. The Executives Orders and dismissal of everything Trump is juvenile. And then there are the real policy differences on taxes, immigration, jobs, deregulation, minimal wage, schools of choice, balanced budget and more that get lost in the noise.
Move on…this election is over. Try to address your grievances in a positive way, with reforms and hope for our future. Violence MUST be condemned, at every level. What makes this country different than virtually every other country in the world, is our respect for the rule of law and fundamental agreement that we are all created equal.
This won’t’ be easy, but it is simple. Let’s start talking to each other instead of yelling at each other.
Trump Impeachment was a Joke: The facts:
- EVERY Republican in the House and the Senate condemned to riots and breaches of the Capitol on January 6th.
- The Republican Party and every Republican activist I know condemned the riots and violence.
- The FBI, Capitol Police, DC Police and other intelligence agencies warned in ADVANCE of January 6th that there as an increasing threat on the Capitol.
- The FBI has arrested several individuals, from different groups, that confirmed the attacks were planned in advance.
- The riots and breach of the Capitol grounds started BEFORE the rally had ended.
- Most importantly, President Trump encouraged the crowd to ”peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”.
By definition and knowing the facts of the incident, the President did NOT incite the riots, violence and breach of the Capitol that day. It’s hard to imagine after hearing the closing arguments from the President’s Defense Team how anyone could vote to convict him given the facts and the House Democrats “creative editing” of the facts.
What a colossal waste of taxpayer’s time and money while the country is in crisis.
EVERY Republican I know and heard from, condemned the acts of those who did. Any and all rioters, looters, vandals and violent protestors who harm anyone should be prosecuted to fullest extent of the law. That means in DC as well as Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, or Portland.
We the Republican Party, liked the lower taxes, the millions of jobs created, no wars, the Middle East peace agreements, the cutting of red tape, the reshaping of the judiciary, and the solidification of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court under Trump. The left and Democrats need to understand that.
And now the party and the country moves on…and hopefully the Democrats will stop the political gamesmanship, divisive rhetoric and hypocritical outrage. America deserves better.
Biden’s Absurd COVID Rules: A “legal” airline traveler can’t fly into the USA without showing negative test for the COVID virus but President Biden will let people who illegally walked across the border do so and migrate throughout our country without testing.
Democrats’ Hypocrisy on Political Violence Runs Deep: I can’t say it any better than former Congressman Thaddeus McCotter did in his article below. Please read the full version in the links of articles.
“President Jimmy Carter (who also granted clemency to draft dodgers) pardoned the four Puerto Rican nationalists who had wounded five U.S. Representatives in the House chamber. It was a precedent for pardoning domestic terrorists that was followed by both of his Democratic successors—Bill Clinton, who commuted the sentence for explosives and weapons of Susan Rosenberg; and Barack Obama, who commuted the sentence for seditious conspiracy, attempted robbery, explosives, and vehicle theft of Oscar Lopez Rivera.
This was a critical step in the Democratic Party’s capitulation to the radical Left’s support—excusing, condoning, and ultimately rewarding political violence and domestic terrorism.
Today, Democrats have shredded the bipartisan agreement against political violence, armed insurrection, and domestic terrorism.
Democrats have not only excused extremist left-wing political violence, armed insurrection, and domestic terrorism, they’ve also encouraged and abetted it.”
Balance Budget Amendment: With Congress and the White House in the hands of progressive liberals, now more than ever we have to complete the effort to call for an Article 5 Constitutional Convention to pass a Balance Budget Amendment.
Join the effort at with the BBA Task Force which explains: The U.S. national debt ($24.7 trillion) is now 7 times federal revenue ($3.6 trillion), a serious imbalance that will cost us over $600 billion (16.5% of federal revenue) in 2020. We’ve already seen a $1 trillion spike in the 2020 deficit in just the last month as the Corona-virus stimulus starts to add up. It is hard to calculate where we will be at the end of the year, but the one thing we can say for certain is that it will be on for the record books.
The root cause of the problem was best explained by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee when it concluded, “the many statutory constraints enacted over the years to control spending failed because no Congress can bind a succeeding Congress by simple statute.” Therefore, only a balanced budget amendment (BBA) will do. Given Congress’ 75-year failure to propose a BBA, the states must do so by calling an Article V convention.
Join this fight to get a Balance Budget Amendment and it will be much less important as to what political party controls Congress.
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
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60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
Entertainment legend Pat Boone urges seniors to get vaccinated, the left’s incitement to violence comes back to haunt them, and Biden exposed as a COVID hypocrite!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
Trump: Hero or Heel?
I have been asked more times than I can count, what was/is the appeal of Trump to all your misguided Republican friends. The refusal to just outright condemn Trump or throw him under the bus in this “woke” environment is baffling to the left and elitists. I read the condescending and arrogant commentary of so many “reporters”, just indignant that anyone can’t see the obvious?!? My Republican “anti-Trump” friends say, “you can’t have it both ways…not despise him – while supporting many of his policies and seeing the damage he has done”. A friend, Darrin Moore, shared this on his Facebook page and I thought it was the best explanation I’ve seen…so I share it with you. Food for thought.
Trump: Hero or Heel? What some people on both sides of the aisle who hate Trump will probably never understand is something I too struggled to grasp. I couldn’t figure out why anyone with a solid foundation of morals and the habits of virtue could support a man who so obviously violated those same principles.
What became very clear to me is that his supporters don’t focus on what he does wrong, although many of them do acknowledge it, but rather they focus on what he does right and are invigorated by it. For many of them, politics these past decades has been a barren dessert of disaster, with one republican after another promising an oasis but proving to be a mirage. Trump came along and delivered the water just as we thought we were dying of thirst. That the water is contaminated by his poisonous personality doesn’t matter to them; It revitalizes nonetheless. A starving man will eat nourishing food even if it is burnt around the edges. After a while, one even develops a taste for it.
So Trump succeeded where others failed, and on top of that he was ruthlessly attacked from all sides like we’ve never seen before and he kept fighting back, right up to the final bell. His constant combativeness was off-putting to some but was endearing to those who saw him as a David confronting the Goliath that is the bureaucratic swamp in D.C..
We all know people who are overcome by Trump derangement syndrome to varying degrees, and whose emotional reaction to Trump trumps their reason. Their passion corrupts their reason (just as the most ravenous Trump supporters’ passion corrupts theirs) and soon everything he does can be rationalized into a reason for hating him more to the point where solid republicans become blind to his accomplishments.
However, you can have all the best policies and still fail to connect with the voters, or worse, repulse most of them to the point that they will vote for your opponent even if he is a senile, would-be commie.
Trump had achieved world peace, the greatest economy we’d ever known, and a long list of other tremendous accomplishments. He should have won by larger margins than Reagan, but because he was so unlikeable, he not only lost the swing vote, he motivated them to vote against him. Never forget politics is the art of the possible. If you don’t win hearts and minds, getting elected is impossible. If you’re not elected, it’s practically impossible to enact your policies. Laying Trump’s failings at the feet of his opponents is projection, and is actually an affirmation of their concerns.
My list of beefs with Trump is long and well-reasoned and I am willing to consider this case against him even though I persuaded this is merely vindictive vengeance masquerading as political theater with no legal substance to stand on combined with the desire to continue to punish him in the years ahead, but I am not moving the goalposts or lowering the bar of guilt because of my beefs or because I am angry that he couldn’t beat the worst candidate we’ve ever faced.
What is most important to realize–whether you like Trump or not–is that what he represented to the second-largest voting bloc of Americans ever is the fierce resistance to the arrogant ruling elite that wishes to fundamentally transform America from the free country our Founders intended into a vast bureaucratic state with a tangle of dictates, regulations, and orders that stifles vitality, and a government-controlled economy which picks winners and losers, and subsidizes bad behavior at the expense of the truly productive.
What is equally important to realize is that the largest voting block of Americans ever (although I highly doubt Biden actually received all the votes that were counted for him) cannot abide a leader who is so coarse, abrasive, and bombastic. Much of America has different aims entirely, and when you combine that bloc with the bloc of swing voters who do generally share our aims but who will disregard his accomplishments if they cannot stand the man, we don’t have the votes to win elections, much less have a mandate to broadly enact our reforms. We must deal with the country we have, not the one we wish it were. We have a hard fight ahead of us. The longer we rehash the road behind us, the more we are going to get steamrolled on the road ahead.
Biden wants to ‘Make America California Again?’
The left’s California dream is a nightmare.
In the latest example of the disconnect between the elite left and real Americans, a January headline in the Los Angeles Times read: “Make America California Again? That’s Biden’s Plan.”
According to the newspaper, “California is emerging as the de facto policy think tank of the Biden-Harris administration and of a congress soon to be under Democratic control.”
The influence that California has on the elite left in Washington is profound. As the Los Angeles Times wrote, “There is no place the incoming administration is leaning on more heavily for inspiration in setting a progressive policy agenda.”
It is nothing short of delusional to look to California as a model for the United States. How could the California model of progressive, big-government, high-tax politics work for America, when it is not even working for Californians?
While the elite Los Angeles Times celebrates that new administration “is embracing some of California’s most pioneering initiatives,” there is a massive effort underway throughout the state to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom. Organizers and groups such as Rescue California have collected more than 1.5 million signatures — the number needed to trigger a recall election. These signatures need to be verified, so the organizers aim to collect at least 1.8 million by the mid-March deadline.
Democrats’ Hypocrisy on Political Violence Runs Deep
There is a reason Republicans don’t wear t-shirts emblazoned with the image of Augusto Pinochet, but Democrats do wear shirts emblazoned with the image of Che Guevara.
After the Civil War, the Democratic Party (with the notable exception of the Ku Klux Klan) had renounced employing domestic terrorism, armed insurrection, and political violence as tools for advancing their agenda. This nearly unanimous bipartisan consensus between Republicans and Democrats prevailed for around 100 years, throughout syndicalists and anarchists bombings and assassinations, including of President William McKinley. It prevailed up through the Puerto Rican nationalists’ 1950 assassination attempt on President Harry Truman, which claimed the life of White House Police Officer Leslie Coffelt; and the 1954 attack in the U.S. House Chamber, which wounded five representatives, including the Hon. Alvin Barkley (R-Mich.).
In each instance, the overwhelming majority of the country supported the convictions under law of these terrorists. And, of course, the same was true with regard to the perpetrators of the political violence that took the lives of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Kennedy brothers.
But as the Baby Boomers came of age and the Vietnam War raged, the consensus regarding political violence, armed insurrection, and domestic terrorism began to change. While the overwhelming majority of anti-war protestors were non-violent, there emerged a group of leftist domestic terrorists and violent insurrectionists—many of them the privileged spawn of well-to-do parents—bent upon the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, which they deemed a fascistic, imperialistic empire.
Inured with a sense of entitlement and purblind by the false “revelations” of their communistic ideology, they used the war as justification for pursuing their political goals by any means they considered expedient—including armed robbery, bombings, and murder. Many of the members of left-wing domestic terrorist organizations—like the Weather Underground (which bombed a police station, the Pentagon, and the Capitol) and the May 19th communist organization (which also bombed the Capitol)—were arrested and convicted; others beat the rap due to the authorities violating laws protecting defendants’ rights, which are not usually found in fascistic, imperialistic empires.
Excusing, Condoning, Rewarding
In the aftermath of America’s involvement in Vietnam, the public soul-searching over issues related to the unpopular conflict, such as war crimes, the status of draft dodgers, and the rectitude of deferments, resulted in a collective moral lassitude. America wanted to move on from the Vietnam War, and the personal, familial, and national conflicts it created. And few had more reasons to want the past forgotten or rewritten than America’s domestic terrorists, armed insurrectionists, and other practitioners of political violence.
The Democratic Party Is Radicalizing against the Constitution
I’m for the rule of law — as it actually exists, not how I would like it to exist.
Republicans are “radicalizing against democracy” because they rely on our constitutional process when governing. This is the essence of Chris Hayes’s recent Atlantic piece contending that the GOP is descending into authoritarianism.
The MSNBC host notes, without any suggestion of self-awareness, that “the Constitution puts a wind at the backs of Republicans and makes them more competitive than they would be otherwise.” What does “otherwise” mean here, exactly? A return to the British Empire? Or does it mean functioning as the centralized direct democracy that progressives covet, but that’s never existed in this country? There is no “otherwise.”
The idea that the Constitution allows “minoritarian control” might be popular in certain quarters, but it remains a faulty way of looking at our system. The American republic is democratic, yes; but it also protects the rights of the individual, the power of the states, and the dignity of the minority, and it does so openly and deliberately. Federalism, far from representing a modern plot, has existed from the start as a means by which to diffuse power and prevent the subordination of smaller states — read: communities — by bigger ones. There is nothing preventing California from passing whatever laws it wishes at the state level. There are provisions making it hard for California to pass whatever laws it wishes in West Virginia. That’s not a bug, it’s the point.
The World Goes On While America Sleeps
Debt is soaring, jobs are ending, cancel culture is spreading like a virus, and China is laughing.
Debt is soaring, jobs are ending, cancel culture is spreading like a virus, and China is laughing.
The Democratically controlled Senate spends thousands of collective hours conducting an impeachment trial against a president who is no longer president.
The acquittal is predetermined, as in the first impeachment effort a year ago — and known to be so to the Democratic prosecutors.
The constitutionally mandated presiding judge — the chief justice of the Supreme Court — refused to show up. Chief Justice John Roberts apparently believes that an impeachment trial of a private citizen is either a waste of time or unconstitutional — or both.
The Democratically controlled House of Representatives is busy ferreting out purportedly extremist Republican House members. For the first time in memory, one party now removes committee members of the other party.
Yet for each Republican outlier, there is a corresponding Democratic firebrand member who has either called for violence or voiced anti-Semitic slurs — and yet will not be removed from House committees.
So the asymmetrical tit-for-tat continues.
The subtext to this madness is that the Democratic Congress, the new administration, the administrative state, and the political Left are obsessed with dismembering the presidential corpse of now-citizen Donald Trump.
Don’t Let the Capitol Riot Become an Excuse for Expanding Government Power
The federal government should prosecute those people who committed acts of vandalism or violence. However, we should be leery about giving the feds additional powers.
Many of my fellow libertarians were rightly in a tizzy after former CIA director John Brennan, commenting on the right-wing insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, noted that the Biden administration is “now moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas.”
In particular, they were dismayed by his description of an “unholy alliance…of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists—even libertarians.” Brennan’s former deputy chief of staff clarified the “even libertarians” comments to Politifact—noting that, “many self-identified libertarians acknowledged their participation in the disgraceful events of 6 January.”
The big concern isn’t the cheap swipe at libertarians, some of whom probably deserve it. Instead, the fear is that Brennan’s words provide a template for the “mission creep” that accompanies every government effort to battle some growing threat.
Let’s dispense with the obvious. The attack on the Capitol was an outrage. The federal government should prosecute those people who committed acts of vandalism or violence. Congress and voters have every right to inflict a political price on elected officials who fanned the flames of the insurgents. Homegrown radicalism is indeed a serious problem.
However, we should be leery about giving the feds additional powers. “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels,” wrote Baltimore’s famed journalist H.L. Mencken. “For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
Judge rules Virginia’s late election law changes for mail-in ballots were illegal
A Virginia Circuit Court judge ruled that the state’s last-minute changes to election law allowing mail-in ballots to arrive late without a postmark were illegal.
“This is a big win for the Rule of Law,” said Public Interest Legal Foundation President J. Christian Adams, who represented Frederick County electoral board member Thomas Reed in the case. “This consent decree gives Mr. Reed everything he requested — a permanent ban on accepting ballots without postmarks after Election Day and is a loss for the Virginia bureaucrats who said ballots could come in without these protections.”
The case was over a Virginia Board of Elections rule issued in August that allowed mail-in ballots without a postmark to be received up to three days after the November election.
The new Virginia Board of Elections rule notified county election boards that any ballots “received by the general registrar’s office by noon on the third day after the election … but does not have a postmark, or the postmark is missing or illegible” should not be rendered invalid. The elections board decided a week later that those ballots should be counted.
The PILF filed a lawsuit against the board of elections in October on behalf of Reed, who said that he could not enforce the new rules because they were a violation of state law.
Virginia law states that “any absentee ballot returned to the general registrar after the closing of the polls on election day but before noon on the third day after the election and postmarked on or before the date of the election shall be counted.”
Analysis | Republicans came within 90,000 votes of controlling all of Washington
The 2020 election was bad for Republicans, full stop. For the first time since 1932, a president came into office with both chambers of Congress under his party’s control, and lost both of them and reelection. Democrats also have unified control of all three levers of power for the first time in a decade.
That said, post-election analysis often overstates just how dire the situation is for a political party. And that’s certainly the case for Republicans and 2020, as they confront their post-Trump reality.
The reality, though, is far from that. In fact, Republicans came, at most, 43,000 votes from winning each of the three levers of power. And that will surely temper any move toward drastic corrective action vis-a-vis former president Donald Trump.
We got the final results from the last outstanding House race on Monday, with former congresswoman Claudia Tenney (R) returning to Congress after defeating Rep. Anthony Brindisi (D) in New York by 109 votes. The result means the House stands at 222 to 213 in favor of the Democrats. (These numbers include three vacancies for which the seats are very unlikely to change hands.)
Our Animal Farm
George Orwell published Animal Farm in August 1945, in the closing weeks of the Pacific War. Even then, most naïve supporters of the wartime Soviet-British-American alliance were no longer in denial about the contours of Moscow’s impending postwar communist aggression.
The short, allegorical novel’s human-like farm animals replay the transition of supposedly 1917 revolutionary Bolsheviks into cynical 1930s Stalinists. Thereby, they remind us that leftist totalitarianism inevitably becomes far worse than the supposed parasitical capitalists they once toppled.
Orwell saw that the desire for power stamps out all ideological pretenses. It creates an untouchable ruling clique central to all totalitarian movements. Beware, he warns, of the powerful who claim to help the helpless.
Something so far less violent, but no less bizarre and disturbing, now characterizes the American New New Left. It is completing its final Animal Farm metamorphosis as it finishes its long march through our cultural, economic, and social institutions. Leftists may talk of revolutionary transformation, but their agenda is to help friends, punish enemies, and to keep and expand power.
First, remember the 1960s and 1970s agendas of the once impotent, young, and supposedly idealistic leftist revolutionaries.
We were lectured 60 years ago that “free speech” preserves were needed on university campuses to be immune from all reactionary administrative censorship. Transparency and “truth” were the revolution’s brands.
How the Progressives Conquered Corporate America
n 1924, King Camp Gillette—the inventor of the disposable razor blade—coauthored a book with Upton Sinclair, the progressive journalist famous for triggering the pure foods movement after publishing The Jungle, a muckraking account of the meat-packing industry. Sinclair was lending his writing talents to Gillette in the hopes of offering a more persuasive case for an idea that Gillette had been advocating since his first book, The Human Drift, published thirty years prior.
Gillette’s idea, which he formulated long before he founded his razor blade company, was to bring about a socialist utopia by means of a giant corporation. Their corporation would vertically integrate to control the production process from the point of extracting the raw materials to the distribution of the product to consumers, while ensuring equality of wealth and working conditions among its members. Essentially, the idea was that economies could more easily be centrally planned through the use of enormous corporations enjoying grants of monopoly privilege.
Murray Rothbard, however, disputed this idea in two ways. First, large corporations have the same problems as states when it comes to economic calculation. So corporations do not solve the problem of central planning. Rothbard also disputed Gillette’s vision of the corporation itself. Gillette employed a theory of the corporation—a theory later described more fully by Walter Lippmann in The Good Society—that corporations were government grants of privilege to enterprises that produced a public good. But Rothbard contended corporations were merely “free associations of individuals pooling their capital.”1 The divide between Lippmann and Rothbard, in fact, reflects the two prevailing theories of the corporation that guided nineteenth-century jurisprudence.
The legal realities of corporations have changed significantly over time. The apparent plausibility of Rothbard’s theory and Lippmann’s theory has changed over time as well.
The Corporation as an Agent of Government
After the American Revolution, individual states began chartering corporations at an historically unprecedented rate. The bulk of these charters were granted to transportation and finance companies (turnpikes, canals, banks, insurance, and eventually railroads). Over the first half of the nineteenth century, though, manufacturing and mining businesses also enjoyed wider access to the corporate form of organization. At this time, the prevailing theory of the corporation was Lippmann’s theory. The traditional idea was that to provide a public service, corporations need significant capital, and a grant of monopoly privilege ensures profit so that these corporations can attract the necessary investors. This is the “grant” theory of the corporation, reflecting the protectionist view of mercantilist economics.
At this time, corporations were seen as agents of the government. They were regulated through their charters, which legislatures had to approve through the same process used to pass legislation, and the charter could be revoked at any time. When John Marshall wrote the majority opinion for Dartmouth College v. Woodward in 1819, after the state tried to revoke the college’s original charter, which had been granted by George III, he ruled that corporate charters were contracts that, once granted, could not be altered or rescinded. Although he chipped away at the regulatory authority legislatures had over corporations chartered in their states, Marshall’s opinion gave a formal legal expression to the grant theory of the corporation.
Shortly after this ruling, a wave of democratic populism led to the expansion of suffrage. Voting rights were no longer tied to property ownership.
The death of the Republican right has been greatly exaggerated
Predictions of GOP doom have a long history of being wrong.
As Donald Trump goes on trial in the Senate, the Republican party faces the possibility of a crack-up. Trump will almost certainly be acquitted, but the vote will be the third time in two weeks that GOP disunity is in the spotlight. Last week the attempt to oust Liz Cheney from her leadership role in the House saw the pro-Trump wing of the party come up short. Then 11 Republicans voted with the Democrats to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga / Q-Anon) of her committee assignments. Now it’s the Senate GOP’s turn to showcase its divisions.
Cheney’s survival showed that the Trump faction isn’t strong enough — in Congress anyway — to purge the anti-Trump faction. Trump’s acquittal will mean his enemies inside the party can’t get rid of him, either. The two factions are seemingly stuck with each other. Or are they? The Republican civil war just might lead to secession, not from the United States (not yet, anyway) but from the GOP. Will Trump bolt the party and build a new one of his own, the Patriot party?
Democrats hope so, assuming that it will be the death of the GOP. But then, the Republican party has defied the most confident predictions of its demise before. The Republicans have supposedly been on the brink of extinction some four or five times in the last five decades. They were doomed after Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964. The party’s only hope, according to a notably liberal media even then, was to move to the left. Instead, the party moved to the cultural right with Richard Nixon and won the next two presidential contests, including a 49-state blowout victory in 1972 that eclipsed Lyndon B. Johnson’s drubbing of Goldwater.
But then the GOP was doomed again, according to the same sorts who predicted the party’s annihilation after 1964. This time, Watergate would be the end of the party. And sure enough, even Nixon’s resignation couldn’t save the congressional GOP from slaughter in the 1974 midterms. But the GOP just wouldn’t stay dead, and after narrowly losing the 1976 presidential contest, the party went on to win the next three in a row.
The Conservative Identity Crisis
A great divide has the movement at war with itself.
Conservatism is having an identity crisis.
When a movement’s flagship publication features a “This We Believe” statement on its cover, as National Review recently did, you know there’s a problem. But the problem itself is not new.
Last summer, The American Conservative published a special edition devoted to the question, “What Is American Conservatism?” The issue drew on essays by dozens of self-identified conservatives, each attempting to define the movement. Reading through them, one might get the impression that conservatism is not one point of view but a whole slew of them. Yet in truth, there is only one important intellectual schism on the right worthy of attention: that between those who embrace the legacy of the European Enlightenment and those who reject it.
The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, was the revolution against the institutions of statism and superstition that freed human minds and human relationships in the 16th and 17th centuries. As Steven Pinker has aptly noted, the free minds and free markets that resulted from this revolution are the reason for the relative prosperity and security we enjoy today.
US goes one year without a combat death in Afghanistan as Taliban warn against reneging on peace deal
KABUL, Afghanistan — No U.S. troops have died in combat in Afghanistan for a year as of Monday, but the Taliban have threatened to target them again if Washington opts to keep international forces in the country after a May withdrawal deadline.
Army Sgts. 1st Class Javier Gutierrez and Antonio Rodriguez were the last Americans to die in battle in Afghanistan on Feb. 8, 2020. Two other service members — Army Staff Sgt. Ian McLaughlin and Army Pfc. Miguel Villalon — were killed in combat there in January last year.
Weeks after their deaths, the U.S. and Taliban signed a deal under which Washington pledged to fully withdraw U.S.-led international forces from the country by May 1 of this year provided the Taliban held up its end of the agreement, including stopping attacks on foreign troops, and barring terrorist groups such as al-Qaida from using Afghanistan as a springboard to attack the U.S. or its allies.
Several military officials and lawmakers have said the Taliban also agreed verbally to reduce violence in the country, although that is not included in the text of the agreement made public last year.
Despite the February deal, which was brokered by the Trump administration, violence surged last year and United Nations’ officials have said al-Qaida remains “heavily embedded” with the Taliban.
Rand Paul: Why We Need to End the Forever Wars Now
I have continuously led the fight to reassess our foreign policy, to end our “forever war,” and bring our fighting forces home.
After almost twenty years, we have lost over 7,000 killed, suffered over 50,000 wounded, and spent over $5.4 trillion, in Iraq and Afghanistan alone. And that doesn’t even account for our total human and monetary costs in the greater Middle East over the same period of time. More so, there is no way to begin to count the impact of lives shattered, relationships destroyed, and continued loss of life through suicides.
Some would say this is the cost of war. Perhaps. But in a war, loss should have an objective.
That objective must be to deliver a better state of peace. It should have a theory of victory to make that happen. We teach this to our strategists and future general officers at our war colleges. Under our Constitution, war should have the approval of Congress, and thereby consent of the people, to achieve those war aims.
But yet, after almost twenty years of war we don’t have any of this in a coherent fashion. We are still no closer to victory nor do we even really have a realistic idea of what victory looks like. We haven’t been honest on the conduct of the war. We have continuously shifted our war aims. We have paid staggering opportunity costs, immeasurable amounts of treasure, and most importantly, an unimaginable number of lives—again over 7,000 dead and over 50,000 wounded. After all of this, we owe it to those in uniform, some of who weren’t even born on 9/11, to be brave enough to ask, “When will it be enough?”
Thomas Sowell’s Legacy Is ‘Following Facts Where They Lead’
On this episode of “The Federalist Radio Hour,” the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss his new documentary and book highlighting the life of economist, social theorist, and acclaimed intellectual Thomas Sowell and how his work affects American culture today.
“He’s marked the shift from pushing for equal opportunity to pushing for special privileges,” Riley said, noting that Sowell started his work early in the civil rights movement. “He said this is wrong and that they are barking up the wrong tree here. This is not the road that they should be going down and this is where they eventually, of course, did go down that road in terms of affirmative action and other special privileges.”
Sowell, Riley said, “follows facts where they lead” and isn’t afraid to be politically incorrect in his views on race, culture, and social theory. Many progressives, Riley said, find this worldview threatening and counter to their own narratives.
“The focus for Tom has always been on building human capital, on developing a group, developing skills and habits and attitudes, and he doesn’t see culture as something set in stone,” Riley explained. “There are different groups that have excelled in the past and then progressed, and then excelled again, and he says you have to look and learn from these different groups of people and what they’ve tried, what they’ve done, what they haven’t done, and how things have worked out.”
Read the column the New York Times didn’t want you to read
Last weekend, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a piece criticizing the rationale behind the forced ouster of Times reporter Donald J. McNeil, but it was never published. Stephens told colleagues the column was killed by publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Since then, the piece has circulated among Times staffers and others — and it was from one of them, not Stephens himself, that The Post obtained it. We publish his spiked column here in full.
Every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention.
It is the difference between murder and manslaughter. It is an aggravating or extenuating factor in judicial settings. It is a cardinal consideration in pardons (or at least it was until Donald Trump got in on the act). It’s an elementary aspect of parenting, friendship, courtship and marriage.
A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention. Most of what is cruel, intolerant, stupid and misjudged in life stems from that indifference. Read accounts about life in repressive societies — I’d recommend Vaclav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” and Nien Cheng’s “Life and Death in Shanghai” — and what strikes you first is how deeply the regimes care about outward conformity, and how little for personal intention.
