I knew Tom Farr when we were undergraduates at Hillsdale College in the mid-1970s, then young conservatives in Washington in the mid-1980s. He is a fine man without a prejudiced bone in his body. It’s so unfair he’s being publicly trashed for being a “racist” after he was appointed to be a district judge in the Eastern District of North Carolina and received the highest recommendation from the American Bar Association.
People like to give names to periods. During the span from 1968 to 2018, numerous events happened: the end of the Cold War, the rise of the computers and so on. But one thing now stands out: demographic collapse in almost every country. So I’m calling it the Paul Ehrlich Half-Century because 1968 was the year his book “The Population Bomb” was published by the Sierra Club and Ballantine Books, whose publicists had a flair for marketing. The paperbook version included a lit bomb on the cover, along with the subheadings: “Population Control or Race to Oblivion?” And, in shouting...
The Kavanaugh ordeal showed the Left no longer supports even the minimal assurance of due process; meaning they have jettisoned the Fifth Amendment. You are guilty until hauled off to jail to await a show trial, if that.
If you want to see the state of the typical graduate of today’s K-12 schools and universities, consider Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, soon to be a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. She told a town hall in Queens, “So, when we talk about existential threats – the last time we had a really major existential threat to this country was around World War II. And so we’ve been here before, and we have a blueprint of doing this before.
One of President Trump’s tactics is to use popular issues against Democrats. The latest is Medicare. For years, conservatives and libertarians have put forth plans to “privatize” Social Security and Medicare, commonly from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. There have been two results: 1. No reform. 2. Defeated Republicans, as anyone who brought up reform faced a Democratic scream, “Don’t let them take away our Social Security and Medicare!”
I wish the controversy over confirming Judge Brett Kavanaugh had been about his court decisions on executive power, which I believe grant the chief executive too much authority. Instead, Democrats emphasized their prevailing issue, abortion. Of course, they say it’s about the unsubstantiated allegations against what he did when he was 17, or a bar fight in college. But if you listen to them, it’s really about abortion.
By now you might know who supposedly wrote the fake op-ed, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” Subhead: “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” My guess it’s a couple of mid-level, semi-literate staffers. I’ve written a couple thousand op-eds, and edited many thousands more, and it just doesn’t read right. Consider the first sentence: “President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.” Worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or Reagan facing...
I look differently on the Tech Left’s “deplatforming” of Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes and others. It’s not a show of strength, but a symptom of weakness. The whole point of the Internet is it’s dispersed. It’s not true it was created to survive a nuclear war, although it was created by the Defense Department in the late 1960s as a dispersed system, “The idea being that defence projects being carried out at universities and research labs could communicate with each other, without worrying about the unreliable network links of the late 1960s.” Those earlier links depended on central areas that...
I laughed when I read ex-CIA Czar John Brennan’s gripe that taking away his security clearance was “part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump to suppress freedom of speech & punish critics.” I once had a security clearance. Although not as high as his, it was pretty high, Top Secret-Special Intelligence. When I was training to be a Russian linguist and radio intercept operator, 1978-89, the FBI talked to everybody in my background, asking such questions as: Did you ever vote for the Communist Party-USA? They talked to my next door neighbor, and receive a glowing report. “He’s been...
In American political parlance, an October Surprise is something launched to affect an election just before voters go to the polls, this year on November 6. There also are run-ups to the October Surprises, such as Vyshinsky’s – I mean Mueller’s – witch hunts against President Trump’s associates, which have had nothing to do with Mueller’s portfolio to look into non-existent Russian rigging of the 2016 election.
