“How holy and beloved, how pleasing and lowly, how peaceful, delightful, lovable and desirable above all things it is to have a Brother like this, who laid down his life for his sheep.”

–St. Francis of Assisi.

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The Epistle for today is taken from S. Paul’s letter to the Church at Ephesus. Traditionally, S. Paul is understood to have written this letter while imprisoned in Rome, probably around A.D. 62, during the imprisonment described at the conclusion of the Acts of the Apostles. During this same period he also wrote the Epistle to the Colossians.

These two epistles share several important themes, particularly the nature and purpose of the Church. Christ is the Head of the Church, and the Church is His Body. Through that Body, the life of the incarnate, crucified, risen, and ascended Christ continues to be manifested in the world, as God brings His saving purpose for the whole creation toward its fulfillment. Both epistles therefore emphasize the unity that necessarily follows from our being “in Christ.”

This unity has its source and pattern in the Blessed Trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are three divine Persons, yet one God, possessing one divine nature and one divine will. The Persons are distinct, but never divided in their action.

For this reason, replacing the revealed names of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost with titles such as Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier does not adequately express the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. These words describe works of God rather than the divine Persons. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost act inseparably. In creation, redemption, and sanctification, it is always the one God who acts—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

And something analogous ought to characterize the Church. Though the members of Christ’s Body are wonderfully diverse, they are called to unity of faith, purpose, and above all worship. This makes the divisions among Christians particularly grievous. We confess one Lord and one Baptism, yet because of our divisions we cannot gather around one altar and partake together of the one Eucharistic Bread. The very sacrament which manifests most perfectly the unity of Christ’s Body also reveals, painfully, how far our visible unity has been broken.

A second purpose of the Church is to make us holy—to make us fit for communion with God. If we are to fulfill the purpose for which we were created in the image and likeness of God, then that image must increasingly be restored within us. Like the guests invited to the wedding feast, we must be clothed with the wedding garment.

We are to be clothed with mercy and almsgiving, with the corporal works of mercy, and with the heavenly virtues, putting away those passions and vices which so easily beset us. Above all, we must be clothed with Christ Himself—with that righteousness and new life which He communicates to us through the sacramental life of His Church.

A third purpose of the Church is that we might grow together in love. It might seem relatively easy to practice the virtuous life in isolation. The real test comes when we live cheek by jowl with people who irritate us, disappoint us, misunderstand us, or simply rub us the wrong way. It is precisely there that the claims of our Christianity are tested.

S. Paul writes in this Sunday’s Epistle: I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love.

Notice that S. Paul does not merely tell us to tolerate one another. He tells us to forbear one another in love. Lowliness, meekness, longsuffering, and patience are not optional refinements of the Christian life. They belong to our vocation as members of Christ’s Body. Our vocation is to become what we have already been made sacramentally: the Body of Christ. We are to grow into His likeness through the Holy Ghost who has been given to us.

We can hear those words—the Body of Christ—so frequently that we cease to consider what they actually mean. To belong to Christ’s Body is to place ourselves beneath His headship. It means learning to desire what He desires, conforming our wills to His will, and forsaking those habits of self-indulgence which keep us centered upon ourselves.

The Christian life therefore requires discipline. But discipline itself requires desire: the desire to become, by the grace of God, something greater than what we presently are. And perhaps here we come to one of our greatest spiritual difficulties. We so often remain as we are because we do not really desire to become what God created us to be. Or perhaps we cannot yet imagine that such transformation is actually possible.

This brings us back to the first great vocation of the Church: worship. When we enter deeply into the Holy Mass, our vision begins to be purified. We begin to see God more clearly; but in seeing God, we also begin to see ourselves more clearly. And in beholding Him, we are changed.

As S. Paul writes to the Corinthians: But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. This is the purpose of the Christian life: to be changed into His image, from glory to glory.

And where is that desire for transformation most powerfully awakened? At the altar, in the great mystery of divine love, the Holy Eucharist. Here Christ does not merely command us to become like Him. He gives Himself to us. We receive the very life into which we are being transformed.

Perhaps we do not yet possess the desire for God that we ought to have. Perhaps we do not even possess the desire to come to Mass as faithfully as we ought. Then we can at least begin here: Ask God for the desire.

And if we discover that we do not even desire strongly enough to ask for it, then ask Him for the desire to desire Him.

For even that small turning of the heart toward God is already the beginning of repentance—and the beginning of our transformation, from glory to glory, into the image of Christ.

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Time to Change the License Plate

BY:          Tom Klocek

For I don’t know how long, Virginia has touted itself as being for lovers. When you come into the state you are greeted with a big sign with a red heart on it declaring, “Virginia is for Lovers.” The implication is that it is a fitting home for loving couples.

Unless you opt for something different, that’s the “motto” you get on your license plate (mine says, “In God We Trust”). But there’s a problem. Loving couples build families; they don’t kill their children, especially children in the womb. Virginia is on the verge of being an advocate of the most egregious example of self-love (which equates to hatred of everything that is not self): abortion on demand for the entire term of pregnancy.

Many people like to call Trump and his followers, including pro-lifers, “Nazis.”

However, when everything that is not you is what is wrong with the world, then you are the Nazi. If you are your own god, then the only thing you recognize as demonic (and which you might consider bad) is that which runs counter to your wants and desires. This the basic argument as to why true Christians cannot be pro-abortion. In fact, it’s not even a Christian issue, it’s a humanity issue.

From the Christian perspective, to be Christian is to die to oneself. If you are not willing to sacrifice for the baby in your womb, you are killing that child for your own pleasure, comfort, desire, etc. You love yourself to the hatred of another life. Jesus told us to love one another and specifically pointed to the children. “Jesus said, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’” (Matthew 19:14) In the Old Testament we regularly hear about civilizations and even Jewish leaders who were condemned because they sacrificed their children to other gods. That is what abortion is, sacrificing one’s child to the god of self. The First Commandment says, “I am the LORD your God, … You shall not have other gods beside me.” And yet we regularly hear of people professing to be Christian and even trying to justify abortion with Sacred Scripture.

The whole foundation favoring abortion is built on lies. And this proposed amendment to the Virginia constitution continues that strategy. The wording of it sounds very vanilla but it is wording that one could drive an eighteen-wheeler through. While it claims to protect a woman’s “reproductive rights” it actually subjects women, including teenagers, to possibilities of abuse, trafficking, loss of medical protections, while at the same time eliminates parental involvement or informed consent. It opens the door for non-medical personnel to perform abortions, without consequences. It ignores all of the facts we have learned about the misuse and misinformation about chemical abortions. And it basically denies the harm done to women both physically and psychologically for killing their babies, including increased attempts at suicide.

There’s a reason they don’t collect these statistics or try to hide them. If people really knew the facts, they might opt against abortion and that hurts many people’s bottom line, including the politicians that get financial support from abortion providers. That’s also why they attack pregnancy resource centers which focus on telling the truth about abortion, including alternative options. If you don’t believe this look at the affidavits filed in recent cases against reduced restrictions on the abortion pill or go to websites like ramahinternational.org.

Even the term “reproductive freedom” is a lie. The truth is, if they haven’t already reproduced, then there is no need for an abortion. Once a woman has become pregnant, reproduction has already occurred. The truth of science is that life begins at conception.

Another lie is that abortion empowers women. What really empowers women is their ability to say “NO!” Instead, women have been sold on the idea that they have to offer up their bodies to men in order to have any sort of relationship. It’s no wonder that liberal women find conservative men attractive, as those men believe in true relationships. But, similarly, conservative men don’t want to have anything to do with them because those women would never understand the mutual relationship and sacrifice that goes into building a family. There’s a large amount of selflessness that goes into a marriage and a family. Selfishness, on the other hand, is destructive.

Selfishness is contrary to the common good and a successful marriage; and so is abortion. Selfishness is contrary to the common good and a successful marriage; and so is abortion. Selfishness is self-love to the exclusion of others, which equates to hate of everything that is not self. Don’t believe they are hateful? Look at how they react to people who pray for them or try to express the truth on campuses, at abortion centers, or other public forums.

Pope St. John Paul II noted, “It is impossible to further the common good without acknowledging and defending the right to life, upon which all inalienable rights are founded and from which they develop.” (Evangelium Vitae, 101)

He also said, “A nation that kills its own children is a nation without hope.”

Consider these in light of the fact that the American reproductive rate has fallen to 1.57 (the rate necessary just for population maintenance is 2.1). If our children is our future, we are killing it.

If you are in Virginia, vote NO! on this ballot measure.

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Thank You letter

BY:          Monica Chuda

“Thank You letter,

To my Lord!”

Thank You for my life my Lord.

For spirit You breathed into me at my beginning.

For the Love I was conceived in.

For the Light You surrounded me with.

Thank You for mercy You created me in and from.

Thank You Lord that You’re watching over me with Your all seeing Eye.

Thank You that You let me see Your Eye watching over me from the sky when I was four or five.

I never forgot that vision if I can call it that.

That’s when my journey with you began.

That was the day I met you in my heart for very first time even though I wasn’t fully aware of it yet.

Just as the years passed and life became harder and more complicated I remembered.

Everything is as it should be though,everything is fine and happening as You will.

Now is the time when I have to give witness how you cared for me and love me from the time when I came to be.

The time to thank You is overdue.

Thanksgiving to my loving Lord and witness to His care is overdue.

Praising You all day and every day is overdue.

My love for You is long overdue.That true love which would make me to lay down my own life for You on the altar to sacrifice my comfort,my selfishness,my laziness.

To do more every day,to witness, to evangelize,to be your apostle because you called me.

You call all of us.

Good Shepherd, Your love for us is unmatched,eternal.

Thank you Lord,my King, my Brother that you thought of me from the beginning and gave me chance.

Your ungrateful, trying to be grateful, daughter

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On Yom Kippur, America needs atonement

Our conduct as a nation has become shameful

BY:         Don Feder, The Washington Times (September 20, 2026).

Yom Kippur, which began at sundown Sunday, is Judaism’s holiest day. It is a time for prayer, repentance, reflection and renewal.

This year, there is much on which to reflect. The 25th anniversary of 9/11 fell on the first day of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, when God passes judgment on people and nations.

A 9/11 ceremony in New York honored those who died and celebrated the heroism of those who gave their lives so others might live.

The left and radical Islam say we had it coming. They charge that the World Trade Center attack was our punishment for being involved in the Middle East. Our involvement consisted of defending our allies and preventing the crazies from getting weapons of mass destruction.

With rare exceptions, the Middle East is a hot mess, the haunt of religious fanatics and terrorists.

This pattern preceded the creation of the modern state of Israel, America’s involvement in the region and European colonialism. It goes back to a seventh-century warlord who fancied himself a prophet and declared holy war on all who refused to follow him. His followers still kill in his name.

Yet, in a way, we do share responsibility for the 9/11 atrocities. The Bible says that if we behave a certain way, we will receive blessings; if we behave another way, curses.

Deuteronomy promised that if the Israelites kept their covenant with God, they would be blessed with rain in its season, abundant crops and victory over their enemies. If they violated the covenant, they would suffer disease, drought, famine and death at the hand of their enemies and eventual exile from the land God had given them.

Our conduct as a nation shames me — abortion up to the moment of birth; turning mothers who murder their children into celebrities; the mutilation of adolescents in the name of our latest idol, transgenderism; pornography pushed to schoolchildren; the streets of our cities turned into open sewers; recreational drugs; and accusing a nation of Holocaust survivors of genocide.

What kind of shining city on a hill is this?

Our Founding Fathers believed that, like ancient Israel, America was a covenantal nation. In the Mayflower Compact and Declaration of Independence, we proclaimed God’s sovereignty. We acknowledged that, as long as we kept his laws, we would receive his blessings.

It worked for the better part of two centuries. We started as 13 Colonies clinging to the Eastern Seaboard, then spread across the continent in less than 100 years. We became rich and powerful like no other nation in history.

We settled the land, ended slavery here and confronted and defeated some of history’s worst tyrannies.

Then we forgot what made us great: a commitment to faith, family and freedom. Our greatness was eroded by waves of militant secularism, radical individualism, welfarism and rights without responsibilities.

The consequences are all around us. Besides 9/11, not a year has gone by without a terrorist attack against Americans: the 1983 Beirut Marine Corps Barracks bombing, the 2009 Fort Hood shootings, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shootings, the 2021 Abbey Gate attack and the 2025 New Orleans pickup truck attack. That just hits the highlights.

Terrorism is only the most visible of our punishments. We have seen the simultaneous rise of Islamism and socialism.

Since 9/11, the number of mosques in America has more than doubled, many of them preaching jihad. Despite being labeled a terrorist organization by some, such as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the Council on American-Islamic Relations is growing in influence.

The Democratic Party considers Muslims one of its most important constituencies. The number of Muslims in Congress (none in 2001) is set to double in this election. New York City, America’s financial hub, has a Marxist Muslim mayor.

The Democratic Socialists of America now controls the Democratic Party. Its platform can be summed up in two words: Abolish America.

The hour grows late.

On Rosh Hashana, a judgment is written in the Book of Life, for good or ill. At the end of the last service on Yom Kippur, the book is sealed and the judgment becomes final.

According to Jewish tradition, during the 10 days of penitence between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, three things can avert the harsh decree: prayer, repentance and acts of righteousness.

It is time for America as a nation to repent. May our country be sealed in the Book of Life for a good year and a bright future.

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James Talarico should be saying “Thank God for the Bible”

He should not be apologizing for Scripture

BY:          Everett Piper, The Washington Times (September 20, 2026).

In a recent interview with the Center for American Progress, James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate seat from Texas and Presbyterian seminarian, said that including Bible stories in the school curriculum for young children is akin to “indoctrination” and that it is “deeply immoral.”

Now, you might think such a statement would be met with near-universal condemnation from the broader Christian community, but you would be wrong.

Here are a few examples of prominent Christian-led organizations that immediately went on record agreeing with Mr. Talarico.

The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty stated that it staunchly opposed including any biblical material in public schools, arguing that doing so risks distorting the Christian faith and the U.S. Constitution.

The Texas Faith Network, made up of hundreds of Texas pastors, priests and other faith leaders, immediately urged the Texas State Board of Education to reject all Bible-based curriculum, saying such material overemphasizes Christianity and is too one-sided.

Then we have the Interfaith Alliance. This is a group heavily represented by progressive clergy such as Mr. Talarico, which argues that including Christian narratives in our public spaces violates the core Christian tenet of “loving thy neighbor.”

Now, the curious thing is that this is all being said while prominent atheists and agnostics such as Richard Dawkins and Elon Musk are saying the exact opposite. Yes, that’s right; while people who fancy themselves as leaders of Christ’s church are telling us that teaching the virtues of Christianity is culturally insensitive, atheists are calling for a return to cultural Christianity.

Matthew Parris, a former member of the British Parliament who was born in South Africa, is the quintessential example: “As an atheist,” says Mr. Parris, “I truly believe Africa needs God. … The continent of Africa, had it not been for Christian evangelism, would have suffered the fate of the machete, genocide, or the worship of Nike. … Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa’s biggest problem — the crushing passivity of the people’s mindset … [their] crushing tribal groupthink.”

A “crushing tribal groupthink” — that sounds a lot like what we are witnessing in the daily news, does it not?

From the blind ideological agreement that is so rampant on our college campuses to the demands for goose-stepping compliance we see in the rise of Islam across the American landscape, a “crushing tribal groupthink” is undeniable to anyone who still has eyes to see and ears to hear.

The sad thing is that while the Richard Dawkinses, Elon Musks and Matthew Parrises of the world are crying out, “We need Christianity in the public square,” apostates such as James Talarico and his tribe of acolytes are calling for its removal.

This is cultural suicide, and it is, quite candidly, just stupid and historically ignorant.

The evidence of Christianity’s positive contribution to Western civilization is irrefutable: As the historian W.E.H. Lecky once said, “The three short years of the life of Jesus have done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.”

Rodney Stark, author of “The Victory of Reason,” added, “Christian theology is the very font of reason: While the world’s other great belief systems emphasized mystery, obedience, or introspection, Christianity alone embraced logic and reason as the path toward enlightenment, freedom, and progress. That is what made all the difference” in the advancement of Western civilization.

Tom Holland, who wrote “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World,” concluded: “To live in a Western country is to be caught up in a story: One that is specifically Christian.”

Here is the take-home: Instead of trying to expunge any mention of the Bible from our culture, Mr. Talarico should be extolling its virtues and proclaiming its truth. He should be saying, “Thank God for the Bible,” not apologizing for it.

The biblical narrative and corresponding message of Christian exceptionalism that Mr. Talarico bemoans as propaganda has done more to bring freedom, wisdom and human flourishing to the world than any other worldview. Even those who do not personally embrace it acknowledge it as being essential for the formation and sustainability of a civilized people.

As historians Stark, Holland and Lecky (and a host of others) make clear, the Bible has been a bulwark against evil in the world, as well as the wellspring of much of what is true, noble and good throughout history.

Without the Bible and Christianity, the world would be a much darker place.

The opposite of what James Talarcio says is true. Our culture — every culture — needs the Bible. It is time for the church to ignore progressive charlatans like this man and boldly enter the public square with the salt and light of biblical truth.

Even the atheists of the world are begging us to do so.

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Are angels, demons and miracles real? Americans’ shocking beliefs

BY:          Billy Hallowell, The Washington Times (September 18, 2026).

Are angels, demons, heaven and hell real? Do miracles still unfold today? And what do Americans believe about the supernatural? 

These essential questions have generally received little attention in modern research circles. It’s remarkable that such important conversations happening inside churches and culture at large have been widely ignored by social research firms — until now.

Sure, it’s true some polling firms have sporadically asked about the occult and supernatural themes, but the consistency and fervency of such inquiries are far from robust. But the American Bible Society recently released data focused on a number of important questions surrounding angels, demons, hell, miracles and more. 

Though these topics are often treated as though they’re outside the mainstream, the American Bible Society found in recent research that “belief in and experiences with the supernatural are common.”

In many ways, this is unsurprising. I’ve spent the past 10 years covering stories about miracles, evil, and related phenomena, and what I’ve observed has challenged and deepened my faith in profound ways. 

I’ve traveled the nation since 2023 to host and co-produce “Investigating the Supernatural: Miracles” and “Investigating the Supernatural: Angels and Demons,” two documentaries that dive deep into fascinating arenas. I traveled America with director Jarrod Anderson asking tough questions about modern-day stories that, on paper, seemed implausible, yet the evidence said otherwise. 

While it’s true that culture wants to pretend miracles, demons and related sentiments are figments of the human imagination, the new ABS data paints a fascinating picture — one affirming that the “mainstream” perspective is actually on the side of the supernatural. 

“Even though America is often presented as a secular, postmodern nation, belief in spiritual realities is still very much alive,” a description of the ABS data reads. “Nearly two-thirds of Americans (64%) believe in spiritual beings that exist beyond the natural world.” 

What’s most remarkable is that even one in three of the “nones” — those unaffiliated with religion, atheist or agnostic — report believing in spiritual beings. 

Thus, these beliefs are far deeper and more profound than some might imagine, and they’re not just relegated to people who believe in God or engage in religious practices. 

Miracles are probably one of the most intriguing areas of this research, as there’s profound debate over how to handle seemingly inexplicable healings that unfold all too often. 

The Bible often attributes these moments to God, and we see plenty of examples of Jesus and his followers supernaturally expelling illnesses and evil. These stories are some of the most vivid and intriguing moments in the New Testament narrative.

But are they real — and do such healings still happen today? Ultimately, the ABS data proves many Americans are at least willing to entertain such prospects. It turns out, nearly half (48%) report “they have received a miraculous answer to prayer.” 

It gets even more intriguing when we consider that 35% also report that “they have witnessed or experienced a divine healing.” One measure is more about the belief that a prayer has been answered in some divine way, but the other — which nearly 4 in 10 Americans embrace — is about seeing or personally experiencing a healing through inexplicable means. 

And that’s truly notable.

Keep in mind these statistics were observed by ABS among all Americans, not just religiously motivated citizens. But the religious individuals surveyed certainly hold a much higher propensity for expressing that they’ve seen or experienced miracles. 

Among practicing Christians, these proportions soared to 90% reporting miraculous answers to prayer. Meanwhile, 69% said they had seen or experienced a divine healing. 

Belief in other supernatural sentiments was also strong. But, despite majorities expressing an embrace of a variety of elements, Americans were more likely to accept the existence of God, heaven and angels than they were to accept Satan, demons and hell. 

Thus, the “positive” elements of faith are more widely clung to, as 68% of Americans believe in God, 62% embrace heaven and 64% hold a belief in angels. On the flip side, evil is a tougher pill to swallow for many Americans, as the statistics show a lesser percentage of Americans believe in concepts such as Satan (55%), hell (53%) and demons (51%).

There are some important takeaways from these findings. First and foremost, regardless of how strange or counter-cultural the supernatural might feel, it turns out the majority of Americans believe it exists — and that’s likely due to personal experience and natural intrigue.

With so many people claiming to see or experience miracles, one would be forced to assume nearly half of the nation is crazy, making it up or experiencing some sort of delusion. Statistically, that seems implausible. 

Skeptics, at the least, must contend with why so many Americans embrace biblical elements and refuse to kowtow to the obsessive naturalistic claims that miracles and the supernatural are fraudulent. 

GFK

“Lord, King of heaven and earth, we give you thanks for yourself.  Of your own holy will you created all things spiritual and physical, made us in your own image and likeness, and gave us a place in paradise, through your only Son, in the Holy Spirit.”

–St. Francis of Assisi.

Today I provide commentaries on the proper role of government. Enjoy.

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Frederic Bastiat on the Purpose of Law

BY:          Mark Lewis (September 6, 2026).

I don’t know who Krzysztof Szczawinski is, and couldn’t pronounce his name if my life depended upon it. I only know he seems to be a pretty smart Polish fellow who calls himself a “fan of reason, liberty, and Western Civilization.” He has recently written, on “X,” an excellent summary of Frédéric Bastiat’s views on “law,” and I’d like to share his summary here and put it into an American context. But Mr. Szczawinski deserves the credit for the good things here, not me. Any mistakes are mine. I want that clear.

For those who might need a little introduction, Frédéric Bastiat was an early 19th-century French economist and philosopher, a strong believer in free trade and limited government.

In other words, much in line with the thinking of Adam Smith, our Founding Fathers, the Austrian school of economics, Friedman, Sowell, Williams, and other champions of free market economics. His philosophy is highly regarded by those who prize free economic principles. If you’ve never heard of him, it’s because the Left hates his guts and doesn’t want you to know what he taught. And since the big government Left has dominated the American education system for generations now, Bastiat is not as well known as he should be. I think you will see why in the synopsis below.

Here is Mr. Szczawinski’s summary of Bastiat, with some (mostly unnecessary) comments from me afterwards.

“1. Every person has a natural right to defend their life, liberty, and property. Law is simply that individual right organized collectively – nothing more, nothing less.”

The whole purpose of law should be to protect people’s God-given rights to life, liberty, and property. As Bastiat (and our Founding Fathers) said, every human has an individual right to life, liberty, and property and to protect such. This is one reason for the 2nd Amendment.

“Government” and “society” are the collective ways individuals organize themselves to protect those rights. That is, as our Founders taught us (or tried to), the purpose of government.

“2. The moment law goes beyond that — taking from some to give to others — it has stopped being law and become legal plunder.”

This is, of course, where most governments go, and have gone, wrong. Law is for protecting virtuous citizens; it is not a club against them to be used by politicians to buy votes and forcefully redistribute resources.

“3.  Legal plunder isn’t exceptional. It’s the normal operating mode of most governments most of the time: subsidies, redistribution, bailouts – each one a faction using state force to extract what it couldn’t get by voluntary agreement.”

Bastiat knew, as our Founders did, what governments in the past had done, i.e., used their citizen-given power to plunder those citizens for the benefit of the government. It was as evident to Bastiat in 1850 as it was to America’s Founders in 1776. Our Founders wrote a Constitution specifically designed to prevent this, but sadly, they failed.

“4. The test is simple: if the same act performed by a private individual would be called theft, it’s theft when the state does it, too. The badge doesn’t change the nature of the act.”

That is exactly the truth, and needs no comment from me.

“5. Two wrong responses to legal plunder: give everyone the right to plunder (socialism), or let the current plunderers keep going (cronyism). The only legitimate answer is to strip law back to its actual function.”

“Cronyism” has not been unknown in American history, and indeed, was what our government did for much of its history — give benefits to those whom the party in power favored. It often leads to civil war in history, and it led to one in America. The Democrats today, of course, are not only practicing cronyism, but also want to introduce socialism. That would give the government even more power, which is exactly what they want.

As Bastiat said, the only answer to this is to return law to its legitimate function; in America, to return to the Constitution the way it was written and intended. But that isn’t going to happen.

“6. Once people see law as a machine for taking rather than protecting, everyone floods politics to control it – because whoever runs the machine can point it at their enemies. This is why Bastiat defined the state as “that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” Lobbying and corruption aren’t aberrations. They’re the logical conclusion of a law that plunders.”

Power corrupts, and government has power. Evil, selfish people want to control the government for their own benefit. The last statement about lobbying and corruption (waste and fraud) is especially perceptive.

“7. Bastiat isn’t describing what the law is. He’s describing what it’s supposed to be – and showing, relentlessly, how far the thing calling itself law has drifted from that. Real law protects, not takes. Everything else wearing the name “law” is organized force, plunder, and theft in disguise.”

Frédéric Bastiat was exactly right. Our Founding Fathers knew it before he did, and they told us the same thing, in various ways and writings. And again, they wrote a Constitution designed especially to prevent government from practicing “legal plunder.” Thomas Jefferson put it this way: “The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.” This is exactly what Frédéric Bastiat was talking about.

All law, all of our rights, ultimately come from God, our “Creator.” They must do so, for only He is perfectly just and wise. If we look at legal systems created without His wisdom and guidance, we see the utter chaos such has produced. America has, for a generation now, left God out of our laws, and we are not better, or freer, because of it.

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Will We See Western Capitals Fall?

Governments that cause more problems than they fix do not deserve to survive.

BY:          J.B. Shurk, The American Thinker (September 21, 2026).

Consider these recent news headlines: (1) “NYC Turns Back to Gas Buses After Finding Out the Hard Way That the Electric Versions Have Big Problems,” (2) “As a Former Head of MI6 it’s Clear That Britain’s Climate Policy is Leaving Us Dangerously Exposed to Our Enemies,” and (3) “Spain: 74% of sex-crime suspects are foreigners in Basque Country.”  

They come from three different Western nations and involve three dissimilar subjects — public transportation, national security, and violent crime — yet each news story exposes the real-world consequences of government failure:  

(1) In order to pursue “Net Zero” carbon goals, New York dumped a ton of money into electric buses that are too expensive and entirely unreliable for the city’s needs.  (2) Britain’s former top spy is finally ready to admit publicly that his country’s delusional obsession with “climate change” has devastated the United Kingdom’s capacity for industrial and energy self-sufficiency, rendering the former superpower dependent on foreign adversaries for future survival.  (3) Even though foreigners make up only 10% of the Basque region’s population, they account for 74% of rape arrests, 73% of homicide arrests, 95% of drunk-driving arrests, 80% of theft arrests, and 78% of violent robberies.

What’s so striking about these news stories is their “well, duh!” factor.  An ordinary, rational person would have no problem predicting the failures of a citywide electric bus fleet, the offshoring of a nation’s critical industries, or open border policies that invite foreign invasion.  Yet mayors, governors, and prime ministers have pursued these catastrophic programs anyway, while heads of espionage agencies and millions of government bureaucrats either support their harmful decisions or shamefully stay silent.  

The middle article links to the transcript of a speech that Sir Richard Dearlove delivered to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London last week.  It was a good speech concerning an important subject, and Dearlove deserves some credit for articulating a point of view that goes against the powerful flow of “politically correct” Western orthodoxy.  But he gave this speech from the comfortable perch of quasi-retirement with little to lose aside from a few honorary board positions.  Where was his voice when he was in a position to actually do something about the U.K.’s suicidal energy policies?  

In his speech, Dearlove explained how his Cold War experiences taught him “that the country’s war-fighting potential resided in its industry, that our most vulnerable link was the fuel chain…and that our industrial base could be rebuilt and repaired.”  Now, however, there is “very little industry left to protect, and we cannot rebuild non-existent industries which lie in foreign jurisdictions beyond our reach.”  Dearlove concluded that the U.K. must “rebuild the strategic industries we require to ensure that we can defend our island fortress and be a reliable ally to friendly democracies around the world.”  

These are absolutely true statements.  Blue-collar workers throughout the West have been making these arguments for fifty years.  Had an ordinary Brit with few credentials been in charge of MI6, that person would have been screaming profanities and ringing alarm bells long before the U.K. closed its last coal mines and steel factories.  Shouldn’t that embarrass Britain’s “ruling elites”?  And if it doesn’t, shouldn’t “ruling elites” be considered a danger to the public’s prosperity and security?

Long-overdue, post-career wake-up calls bring to my mind President Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address during which he warned Americans against the growing dangers from an emerging “military-industrial complex.”  Although his turn of phrase continues to be used sixty-five years later, it would have been nice if the former Supreme Allied Commander and five-star general had used his two terms as president of the United States to tackle that problem before it got completely out of hand.  Eisenhower certainly had the expertise to see its destructive potential more clearly than most, but he chose to outline the threat on his way out the door and leave it for others to solve.  Some historians believe that parts of the MIC had a hand in President Kennedy’s assassination, and if that is true, then Eisenhower’s failure to promptly act had extraordinarily far-reaching consequences that included the death of his successor.  

The generations of Americans who were born after Eisenhower’s tenure have given him much credit for recognizing that the symbiotic relationship between Big Government and Big Business was evolving into an unconstitutional and anti-American oligarchy that we know today as the “permanent bureaucracy,” the “ruling class,” or the “Deep State.”  Perhaps if the American general-turned-president had neutralized the Deep State in the first decade after WWII, we would not have endured some of the worst chapters in recent American history, including the Vietnam War, the debasement of the U.S. dollar, the FBI’s soft coup d’état against President Nixon, fifty years of “global warming” con games, sixty years of mass immigration from third-world nations, NAFTA’s industry-killing bloodbath, China’s entry into the WTO, the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks, the Global War on Terrorism, Obamacare’s government takeover of medicine, the Russia Collusion Hoax, the COVID information war against the Bill of Rights, numerous rigged elections decided by unlawful voters and mail-in-ballot fraud, multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, leftist-inspired violence against conservatives, and the Democrats’ manufactured AI fearmongering going on today.  Diagnosing problems without taking concrete steps to solve those problems produces a perverse phenomenon:

The worse unsolved problems become, the more prescient the person warning about them appears.

Toward the end of Dearlove’s speech, Britain’s former top spy argued that the government of which he was an integral part had monumentally failed: “The first responsibility of government is the safety of the nation.  However, successive governments have forgotten this, and Britain is now caught in an energy trap of its own making.  As with rebuilding our armed forces, it will take a significant national effort to extract us and bring us back to a position of safety.  The task is urgent.”  

This is certainly true.  The question is why so many successive governments in the U.K. and across the West have betrayed their own citizens and made their nations much less safe.  Because normal citizens would never have offshored their own industrial and manufacturing jobs to adversarial nations such as communist China.  Normal citizens would not have conspired with transnational human trafficking gangs to import tens of millions of unassimilable illegal aliens.  Normal citizens would not have imposed “green energy” regulations that make it harder for farmers to grow food and for businesses to pay their bills.  Normal citizens would not mandate that unreliable electric vehicles replace internal combustion engines while power grids crash due to insufficient supplies of wind and solar energies.  These kinds of policies are so obviously foolish and suicidal that only our credentialed “ruling class” could justify them.

Does that tell us that our bureaucrats are too stupid to keep our nations safe, as Dearlove rightly recognizes as the first responsibility of government?  Or are these self-destructive national policies proof that Western bureaucracies are waging war against Western citizens?  Certainly Western governments are guilty of failing their peoples.  The only question remaining is whether their failures stem from a combination of incompetence and hubris or treason and malice.  

As Western citizens ponder that question, they are quickly taking matters into their own hands.  Spaniards in Ceuta are destroying government shelters built for foreign invaders.  A British village has voted to secede from the U.K. after the government announced plans to house an army of foreign immigrants next door.  The price of government betrayal might soon be the fall of a Western capital.

Recognizing problems is not good enough.  Governments that cause more problems than they fix do not deserve to survive.

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There Are No Solutions

Thomas Sowell’s Tragic Vision and the Illusions of the Anointed.

BY:          Lars Moller, The American Thinker (September 22, 2026).

At 96 years of age, Thomas Sowell is one of the most formidable minds in contemporary American thought. Without any desire to bask in the media spotlight, he personifies integrity as a scholar, a luminary whose body of work combines empirical rigor, historical breadth, and an unyielding commitment to human dignity irrespective of race. His insistence on true meritocracy—judging individuals by their capacities and achievements rather than by collective grievances or engineered outcomes—marks him as a rational defender of the individual against the sentimental collectivism that has come to dominate elite discourse.

Sowell’s philosophy rests on what he terms the Tragic (or “constrained”) Vision of human nature, a perspective that confronts the permanent limitations of mankind and rejects the utopian—and revolutionary—fantasy of perfectibility. This vision, elaborated most systematically in A Conflict of Visions (1987), supplies the intellectual architecture for his entire oeuvre and explains both his enduring influence among serious readers and the studied neglect he has received from much of the academic left.

Sowell defines a vision not as a formal ideology but as a pre-theoretical sense of how the world operates and what human beings can realistically achieve. The Tragic Vision holds that human nature is fixed, flawed, and inherently limited. Men and women are driven by self-interest; their moral and intellectual capacities cannot be fundamentally remade by education, environment, or social engineering. Consequently, social life must be organized around systemic processes—markets, the rule of law, inherited institutions—that channel imperfect motives towards tolerable results.

The Utopian (or “unconstrained”) Vision, by contrast, treats human nature as malleable and perfectible. It places its faith in the deliberate intervention of enlightened elites who will guide the benighted masses towards a final state of justice and harmony. Where the Tragic Vision seeks “trade-offs” that minimize suffering within the bounds of reality, the Utopian Vision demands “solutions” that eliminate social ills altogether.

Sowell’s anti-utopianism flows directly from this analysis. Utopians regard every persistent problem—poverty, crime, inequality—as evidence of insufficient will or the malicious obstruction of reactionaries. Because they believe human nature can be re-engineered, failure is never accepted as structural; it is always moral. This mindset produces the familiar division between the Anointed, those who claim superior insight into the common good, and the Benighted, the ordinary population that must be managed. It also produces a systematic disregard for accumulated experience. Centuries of trial and error, tradition, and historical data are subordinated to abstract ideals. The result is a pattern of unintended consequences: policies designed to abolish hardship frequently generate new and more intractable forms of hardship because they ignore incentives and the stubborn facts of scarcity and self-regard.

The practical corollary is Sowell’s most frequently cited observation: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Every policy choice exacts a cost. In criminal justice, the utopian seeks to eradicate crime by curing its supposed root causes—poverty, trauma, social exclusion—while the tragic realist accepts that some measure of predation is endemic and therefore concentrates on deterrence, knowing that deterrence itself restricts freedom and consumes resources. In economics, the utopian demands equal outcomes; the tragic realist recognizes scarcity and therefore defends competitive markets as the least destructive mechanism for generating abundance. The search for a final equilibrium of perfect justice, Sowell warns, is an illusion that historically justifies the concentration of power necessary to force imperfect human beings into an idealized mold.

This intellectual stance has earned Sowell the quiet hostility of many left-leaning reviewers. Supporters have long noted that his major works are more often ignored than refuted in mainstream academic journals. The empirical challenges he poses to progressive orthodoxy on race, culture, and economic mobility appear to trigger a defensive withdrawal rather than open engagement. The fear of being labeled politically incorrect or worse discourages serious debate. Critics, for their part, insist that the issue is methodological rather than political: they charge selective use of data and an attachment to outdated libertarian models.

Yet the pattern of non-engagement remains striking. Books that dismantle the central premises of the anointed class receive far less scrutiny than their intellectual weight warrants. The result is a form of soft marginalization that leaves Sowell’s arguments circulating largely outside the institutions that claim a monopoly on sophisticated social analysis.

Sowell’s own prose embodies a related contempt for intellectual dishonesty. He has little patience for the esoteric and verbose constructions that cloak weak reasoning in the language of hidden power structures and systemic forces. His style is the philosophical counterpart of Ernest Hemingway’s: direct, concrete, and stripped of ornamental complexity. Where much contemporary academic writing multiplies abstractions to evade accountability, Sowell insists on clarity that exposes the actual claims being advanced.

The preference for plain speech is itself a moral stance. It treats the reader as a rational agent capable of following evidence rather than as a subject to be managed through rhetorical fog. In an age when anti-Western ideology often traffics in sentimental narratives of perpetual victimhood and colonial original sin, Sowell’s rationalism recalls the deeper foundations of Western civilization itself—the insistence that argument, evidence, and institutional constraints matter more than feeling or ancestral grievance. 

The same tragic sensibility links Sowell to his longtime friend and Hoover Institution colleague Victor Davis Hanson. Hanson approaches the identical human limitations through the lens of classical history and military experience. Where Sowell draws on economics and social statistics, Hanson draws on Thucydides and the record of Mediterranean warfare. Both reject the unconstrained premise that administrative elites can perfect society. Both treat cultural patterns—habits of work, property rights, free speech, and the capacity for self-government—as decisive over centuries rather than as epiphenomena of recent power relations. Hanson’s praise of Sowell’s cultural trilogy—Race and Culture (1994), Migrations and Culture (1996), Conquests and Cultures (1999)—underscores the point: these volumes reframe questions of inequality and achievement within a global historical frame that refuses to treat the American experience as unique or uniquely pathological.

The two scholars share a methodological insistence on concrete metrics and narrative clarity over post-modern jargon. They also share a late-career critique of the contemporary university, which they see as increasingly devoted to the insulation of the Anointed from the consequences of their own theories.

What emerges from this body of thought is a sober assessment of the human condition. Western civilization has rested, more than any other, on the rational acknowledgment of limits—on the construction of institutions that channel self-interest rather than pretend to abolish it. The sentimentalism of much anti-Western ideology, by contrast, treats those same institutions as the original source of injustice and therefore as candidates for radical dismantling. Sowell’s work stands as a sustained rebuttal to that sentimentality. It does not promise the end of hardship or the arrival of perfect equity. It offers instead the hard discipline of trade-offs, the empirical study of what actually works across cultures and centuries, and the defense of individual dignity against both racial essentialism and the soft despotism of experts.

In an intellectual climate increasingly hostile to such realism, Sowell’s independence and clarity remain rare and necessary. The cost of ignoring them is not merely academic. It is the continued substitution of utopian aspiration for the imperfect but hard-won arrangements that have, against considerable odds, produced the freest and most prosperous societies in human history.

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Democrats bet on AI apocalypse politics for the midterms

Voters still care more about prices, public safety and the economy

BY:          Robert Knight, The Washington Times (September 20, 2026).

A whiff of the apocalypse is in the air.

It is similar to that of climate change hysteria, when we were told by Al Gore and Greta Thunberg that we faced an unspeakable fate unless we gave up fossil fuels.

Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, warned six years ago that Earth faced “irreparable damage” in six or seven years. By God’s grace, Americans took it with a grain of salt.

Most people rejected giving up the cheap, reliable energy and free markets that enabled America’s prosperity and lifted billions worldwide out of poverty.

Now, we are being told daily that artificial intelligence will destroy humankind in the next 10 years. The panic was magnified when an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned and posted to X on Sept. 8 that AI developers were “gambling with our lives.”

The post somehow instantly went viral, with up to 170 million views, and Mr. Coxon got celebrity treatment from the media.

Former President Barack Obama, who knows a thing or two about effective demagoguery, has told Democratic leaders to put opposition to AI and data centers at the center of their campaigns, so expect more scare stories.

Never mind that communist China, which steals our technology and hacks our systems, is helping fund the opposition. China’s state media and Russia’s RT network are churning out propaganda to slow down America’s AI industry, according to two reports by the Bitcoin Policy Institute.

Radical groups in the U.S. have received millions of dollars from Neville Roy Singham, a billionaire communist who lives in Shanghai and is married to CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans.

Mr. Singham is one of the main funders of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which “has been an influential organizer in a national campaign against AI and data centers, including 21 fights across 14 states, that produced moratoria, zoning rejections, and cancelled projects worth billions,” the report said.

It is not all “astroturf.” Who wants a data center in their backyard? The report acknowledges that “much American opposition to data centers is indisputably authentic. But two things can be true at once: 1) There is a foreign influence campaign against American AI; and 2) Americans have genuine concerns about data center buildout that need to be heard.”

We are also being fed a narrative that we have flat-out lost the war with Iran. The subtext, with a sniff of antisemitism, is that Israel put us up to it.

Those Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities that President Trump took out with airstrikes in 2025? Ancient history. Who cares if he denied the bomb to murderous Islamists?

Meanwhile, gas prices are above $4.25 a gallon, with diesel at a record high of more than $6, fueling more fears of inflation.

Americans will eventually benefit from Mr. Trump’s deal with Venezuela to tap into a reserve of 65 billion barrels of oil, and America’s oil production is increasing. Iran’s regime may be on borrowed time, but the news mantra is all bad news, all the time.

In about seven weeks, American voters will decide whether to keep the Trump train rolling or hand control of Congress to the Democrats, who are preparing nonstop investigations to cripple him — again.

Love him or hate him, Mr. Trump, backed by a Republican Congress, has managed to secure America’s borders and deport thousands of illegal immigrants. His administration has taken aim at sex experiments on children and at men competing in women’s sports, forced NATO to fund more of its own defense, reignited America’s manufacturing base and greatly reduced the nation’s crime rate.

A president can do a lot with his pen and phone, as Mr. Obama said, but real change comes from legislation.

Consider the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act and the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The first was a massive pinata for the climate lobby, with a $1.2 trillion price tag over 10 years. The second gave tax breaks to seniors, overtime workers, those who work for tips and those with car loans. It also made the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent.

Democrats are banking on high gas prices, the AI panic, Trump hatred and the media’s cover-up of the party’s embrace of open borders, socialism and Islam.

Mr. Trump would do well to curb his penchant for firing off intemperate texts at the slightest provocation. What was refreshingly candid in 2016 could be a turn-off in 2026.

Republicans must bring down gas prices, remind Americans that the Republican Party is the party of law and order and that the Democrats — who favor abortion up until birth — have gone over the cliffs of perversity.

On Sept. 14, the Republican National Committee posted footage of Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico being asked to name his “favorite drag queen in Texas.” Grinning girlishly, he exclaimed, “Oh gosh, it’s got to be Alyssa Edwards!”

Republicans are using the clip in Texas for the campaign of Senate candidate Ken Paxton. They must ask Democrats everywhere about Mr. Talarico.

Amid the manufactured apocalyptic atmosphere, “normal versus crazy,” plus the prayers and engagement of millions of God-fearing Americans, may just keep Congress under Republican leadership.

GFK

“We should make a dwelling-place within ourselves where he can stay, he who is the Lord God almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

–St. Francis of Assisi.

How are things in the United States under President Trump 2.0? Consider the following:

• One million new private sector jobs
• The highest number of employed Americans in American history
• The lowest poverty rate in American history
• Record low African American and Hispanic poverty rates
• Record high household income rates
• Massive tax cuts
• Massive overseas investments in America
• A soaring stock market
• Zero illegal aliens admitted into the U.S. in 16 months
• Largest recorded drop in violent crime
• Lowest murder rate in America since 1900

Did you see any of these accomplishments on CNN? MS NOW? CBS? ABC? NBC? Of course not! Everything sucks in this country. Just ask a Leftist!

The Trump Administration removed 760,000 Obamacare enrollees, citing fraud. The move will save the taxpayers more than $2.2 billion.

“For fifty one years, the fanatical Iranian regime has ruled by bloodshed and mass murder, spreading death and carnage and chaos across the entire Middle East and beyond.  They were the bully of the Middle East, but they are the bully no more.  From the first day I entered the political arena, I’ve been unwavering.  I will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

–President Trump, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly.

President Carter enabled the overthrow of the Shah, and the installation of the radical mullah run Iranian government that exists to this day. President Reagan had his hands full defeating the Soviet Union and winning The Cold War, and so never fully engaged with Iran. President George H.W. Bush acted decisively against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait, but gave Iran a free pass. So did Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush give Iran a free pass. President Obama coddled Iran, giving it massive funding for its State sponsored terrorism, and entering into a deal that would guarantee Iran a nuclear weapon. President Trump withdrew from that bad deal–a deal so bad that it never passed the United States as a treaty. President China Joe coddled Iran, and wanted to reenter President Obama’s deal, which Iran laughed at to his face (figuratively). And now President Trump, in league with Israel, has taken decisive action to stop Iran’s terrorism and nuclear ambitions. That his courage and decisive action is met with derision by Democrats and a large sector of the American populace is a disgrace.

Do I enjoy the high price of diesel fuel and gasoline? No. But it is a small, short term sacrifice to ensure the safety of Israel, Europe, and the United States. It is a very small short term sacrifice to ensure that my daughter never has to witness a tragedy that would dwarf the horror of September 11, 2001.

To sum up; grow up America. Quit whining about mere inconveniences and start supporting a solution. Thank you.

Governor Abigail Spanberger (D. Va.) wants the federal government to regulate Artificial Intelligence. Of course she does!

Senator John Cornyn (R. Tx.) and former President George W. Bush held a fundraiser for 6 GOP Senate candidates in Dallas, Texas. U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton (R. Tx.) was not one of them. Because John Cornyn is a huge a$$hole. And George W. Bush is not much better.

The Wisconsin atheists–the Freedom From Religion Foundation–are threatening White House Heritage High School in Robertson County, Tennessee with court action because the school’s football coach leads the team in The Lord’s Prayer before and after games. So much to say, so much to write. First, when I played football, our team said The Lord’s Prayer before and after the games. No one was scarred by the practice. Second, the United States Supreme Court has ruled that it does not violate the First Amendment to pray before and after public school football games. Third, there is no “freedom from religion”. Not a thing. Fourth, and finally, maybe the atheists should worry more about problems in Wisconsin, and leave the God fearing folks in Tennessee alone.

“An attack on DEI, to recognize diversity, equity and inclusion, is an attack by definition on maternal care, including the need to protect black women in connection with their pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum care.”

–Commiela, speaking while campaigning with U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D. Mi.).

What in the world is she saying?  Does anyone know?  Does she know?

In that same event, Commiela also blasted Republicans for preventing Democrats from cheating in elections. Seriously.

Minnesota Governor Tampon Tim (D.) admitted it was his fault that billions of dollars were stolen due to fraud in social programs on his watch, but insisted that he should not be blamed for it. Huh? Governor Tampon Tim also claimed–falsely–that the Minnesota fraud was less than the cost of the proposed White House Ballroom being built with private donations. Again, what he is saying? Sigh. He was the perfect running mate for Commiela.

Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue in Greenfield, Massachusetts is a lesbian bar, which for some reason, requires patrons to wear KN-95 face masks. Recently management decided to relax the requirement, and made Saturday nights “mask optional”. Patrons became outraged, condemning the bar, and labeling it as “ableist”, showing a lack of concern for immunocompromised population. The outcry was so loud and large, that the bar issued a written statement apologizing for its decision and that was even more loudly condemned. Because potential blind patrons could not read the apology. Sigh.

For more than 100 years, Laughing Cow cheese has featured a smiling cow as its signature trademark. But for some unexplained reason, the company has changed its cow logo to feature a frowning cow. I. Just. Do. Not. Understand.

After 59 years, the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, California is closing. Sigh. Another place I will never visit again.

McDonald’s restaurants is bringing back its always popular Monopoly game. But to play, you have to get the McDonald’s app, register, and then use the app to purchase select “eligible” items. Way too much trouble for me, even if I liked McDonald’s. Which I do not.

Iran’s President addressed the United Nations General Assembly, and claimed that Iran was a victim of terrorism. Oh, wow! The world’s largest State sponsor of terrorism is claiming to be the victim of terrorism. You cannot make this stuff up.

“That’s to say, it has become a useless organization whose only purpose is to sustain a caste of fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.”

–Argentina President Javier Milei, criticizing the United Nations as a feckless body.

GFK

“We must hate our lower nature with its vices and sins; by living a worldly life, it would deprive us of the love of our Lord Jesus Christ and of eternal life.”

–St. Francis of Assisi.

I have arrived in Chatmoss, after a long day in Northern Virginia. It is nice to be here, but gosh I am tired.

Today I am sharing a couple of articles on passing events of the day. The first one is from a personal favorite, the irreplaceable Victor Davis Hanson. Mr. Hanson breaks down the trade rift between Canada and the United States. Unsurprisingly, he demonstrates that the fault does not lie with Donald Trump, but rather with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

The other articles relate to the gradual, yet steady decline of the United States due to the forces of socialism since President Lyndon Johnson. I will state unequivocally that the problems we face today are the direct result of our leaders ignoring the Constitutional restraints upon the federal government, and our population’s willingness to overlook these failures. As so eloquently stated by Walt Kelly’s immortal character Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Please enjoy.

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The Fantasy House of Mark Carney

BY:          Victor Davis Hanson (September 17, 2026).

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now believes he is more than just the Western foil to President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement — he is the global one.

Accordingly, he seems determined to demonstrate to the world how to stand up to Trump, to force Trump to lose the midterms, and to hurt the U.S. economy to such a degree that Trump will never again bully other nations.

So, at the 11th hour, Carney stormed out of an apparently completed tariff deal with the United States that would have privileged Canada over almost all of America’s other trading partners. Canada, we recall, has enjoyed a $50 billion goods trade surplus with the U.S. for years in a supposedly free and equitable North American trade zone.

Carney claimed that American proposals stripped away Canadian sovereignty and quashed Canadian culture, particularly French-Canadian culture. Yet he has not released the documents detailing the bilateral offers he rejected. Nor has he allowed his representatives to explain to the media why Canada blew up the negotiations at the last minute. Carney’s ever-changing excuses, explanations, and invectives about what happened are incoherent and contradictory.

That said, analysts on both sides of the border now concede that American digital-media companies do not customarily pay special taxes, as Carney demands, to promote local, regional, and ethnic culture while operating in Canada — any more than Canadian companies would be taxed for those purposes in the U.S.

Canada and the U.S. both agree that China dumps cheap steel and aluminum into Canada, allowing Canadian manufacturers to use that cost advantage to export assembled vehicles to the vast U.S. market at prices below those of American vehicles. In that way, Canada’s new partnership with China circumvents America’s tariffs on Beijing. China will also send nearly 50,000 electric cars and trucks into Canada under a meager tariff, ensuring that the Canadian EV market is increasingly dominated by Chinese vehicles.

But Carney’s ploy goes beyond helping the communist Chinese dictatorship gain trade leverage over his own NATO neighbor. He has eagerly concluded a comprehensive Chinese-Canadian pact involving travel, visas, food safety, energy, and public security. Carney has grandly described these new agreements with Beijing as part of a new paradigm in which “middle powers” like Canada play China against the U.S. (Canada’s annual nominal GDP is roughly the size of New York State’s).

How ironic that Carney attacks his neighbor, the U.S., for trade unfairness while warming to the communist dictatorship in China. Communist China, after all, is history’s greatest violator of trade protocols — guilty of manipulating its currency, dumping products to secure market share, violating copyright and patent laws, and imprisoning a million Uyghurs.

Has Carney learned anything from Panama’s misadventures after naively inviting in a Chinese omnipresence at the American-built Panama Canal? Does Carney recall that the American Monroe Doctrine originally was aimed at foreign intrusion into the North American West?

Canada’s new partner is a totalitarian police state that infected the world with its manufactured gain-of-function COVID-19 virus, which killed more than 1.5 million North Americans. China stonewalled inquiries and never offered details about the pandemic’s origins in its Wuhan lab. It has promised to conquer Taiwan and so terrified its democratic neighbors — Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea — that they have joined a defensive alliance with the U.S.

So what drives Carney’s hubristic fantasies? Has Canada’s natural wealth in oil, gas, timber, and minerals made it a military and economic dynamo, as it once was?

Hardly.

Canada’s population is 11.8 percent of America’s. Its economy is barely one-thirteenth the size of America’s. Canadian GDP per capita is only 60 percent of America’s.

Canada quietly relies on the U.S. military to deter foreign powers from North America, whether by fending off challenges to Canada’s extensive Arctic claims — including its dubious claim of absolute sovereignty over the Northwest Passage — or by keeping Canadian skies free of foreign combat aircraft and missiles.

Canada’s navy — once one of the world’s preeminent surface fleets — has been reduced to fewer than 30 ships. Its 89 American-made jets are more than 40 years old.

Paradoxically, Carney’s dreams derive not from confidence and strength but from insecurity and defensiveness. Carney and former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau nearly ruined the Canadian economy despite the country’s treasure trove of natural resources. Canada has only half the GDP of California — a state currently decaying under neo-socialist governance — despite having roughly the same population.

Nearly 45 percent of Canadians are either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents. These often-impoverished immigrants impose gargantuan social-welfare costs that Canada’s European-style socialist economy simply cannot support. While Carney lectures on “Canadian values,” Canada’s fertility rate of 1.25 is among the lowest in the Western world, while euthanasia accounts for 5 percent of all deaths, the highest rate in the West.

Nevertheless, Carney now claims, in passive-aggressive fashion, that the U.S. bullies Canada — even as Canada runs trade surpluses with America, relies on the American economy for 72 percent of its exports, and depends on the American military for its safety. That asymmetry indirectly subsidizes Canada’s disastrous energy, immigration, defense, regulatory, and tax policies.

The Canadian energy industry depends on U.S. purchases of much of its tar sands oil, specialized U.S. refineries, and American pipelines. For over a decade, globalist Canada refused to meet its NATO commitment to invest 2 percent of GDP in defense, relying instead on American magnanimity to protect North America from foreign aggression.

No matter. Carney has melodramatically characterized his tiff with the U.S. as a “fight” and even a “war.” Yet, oddly for such an anti-American Canadian hyper-nationalist, Carney is a globalist banker who, until he became prime minister, held citizenship in three nations.

Yet the Canadian prime minister who urges Canada’s vulnerable working classes to decouple from America is himself — like thousands of Canadian grandees — deeply entwined with the United States. Some 91 percent of Carney’s investments are in U.S.-based companies, and two of his four children, like their father, attended college in the United States. Both now reside in America, along with nearly one million other Canadians.

Apparently, Carney is so eager for a veritable economic, cultural, and political war with the United States that 91 percent of his holdings remain invested in the homeland of his enemy.

But why, from a position of such hypocrisy and vulnerability, has Carney blown up the trade agreement, ginned up anti-American Canadian nationalism — and done so now?

Only in this way, Carney believes, can he stop autonomy referenda in Alberta and Quebec. And only in this way can he openly interfere in the U.S. midterm elections by targeting new tariffs at red and purple border states while working directly with left-wing Democratic politicians to help Democrats regain control of Congress and restore the prior status quo.

His anti-American screeds have certainly worked at home. Canadians now boo at the mere sound of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They brag of a new “elbows up” policy to stop U.S. “aggression.” Their social media is flooded with braggadocio about new ways to hurt Americans. Some three-quarters of the country has bought into Carney’s fantasies. Hating America is the new Canadian pastime.

But, sadly, this will not end well for Canada, for at least five reasons.

First, America certainly is not the cause of Canada’s maladies, other than by subsidizing its suicidal domestic choices for years. Canada’s self-destructive socialist and globalist policies are its government’s doing alone.

The United States did not force Canada to adopt European-style socialist policies of mass unvetted immigration, subsidized green energy, near-disarmament, and unsustainable social-welfare spending. America did not urge Canadians to stop having children or enlist their government to help them kill themselves.

In truth, America prefers a militarily and economically strong Canadian partner, not a weak one lashing out from insecurity.

Second, the American public has so far been mostly indifferent to the spat. But now that the North American media has begun revealing the extent of Canada’s anti-American venom, along with Carney’s brinkmanship and disingenuous rhetoric, anger is rising at his cheap politicking and the animus he has fanned.

In sum, Carney has no idea that he is reframing the dispute not as a conflict with Trump but as an affront to the American people themselves — who have long memories.

Third, for all his globalist background and internationalist performance-art stunts, Carney is alone on the world stage. Europe may applaud his defiance, but it has no desire to join his anti-American campaign. When the United States finally insisted on symmetrical trade, only communist China and Canada — the latter enjoying the most generous entree into the American economy of any country in the world — slapped counter-tariffs on the United States. Apparently, other nations did not agree that Carney’s perennial $50 billion surplus was his birthright.

Fourth, Canada is far more vulnerable than the United States if Carney’s “war” continues. Canada relies on the United States for 72 percent of its exports, while America relies on Canada for only 15 percent of its own exports. Last month, even before the full effect of the new tariffs was felt, Canada lost 42,000 jobs while the United States gained 160,000. The damage will only grow, ever more asymmetrically, as tariffs mount on Canadian businesses.

Nearly a million Canadians reside in the United States, but only 350,000 Americans live in Canada. And it is easier for a Canadian to obtain an expedited U.S. work visa than for an American to do the same in Canada. Indeed, Canadians do not appreciate that they are nearly the only visitors in the world granted six months of residence in the United States without a visa.

Fifth, since Carney walked out at the last minute, it will be incumbent upon him to resume talks — especially as the damage he has done to Canadian workers and small businesses worsens. But should Carney seek to renew negotiations immediately after the Canadian provincial elections and the U.S. midterms, he will be exposed as a disingenuous politico who ginned up the fight to manipulate both Canadian and American balloting to benefit himself and his party.

If that happens, he may learn that the American friendship train has left the station. He will also discover that China treats obsequious outreach from Western “middle powers” as weakness to exploit, not magnanimity to reciprocate.

Carney’s political disingenuousness will eventually earn the animus of Canadians and Americans alike — who may ironically unite in their distaste for Carney and his fantasy house.

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LBJ: 60 Years Of The Not-So Great Society

Lyndon Johnson was not a ‘tragic’ president. He was a bungler and a megalomaniac.

BY:          Jeffrey Folks, The American Thinker (September 18, 2026).

Many people believe that Lyndon Johnson was a tragic figure: an essentially good man and potentially great president who was misled by his advisers (“the wise men,” as they were called at the time) into escalating a war he could not win but who was otherwise well-meaning and effective.

That view is totally wrong.  Johnson was not a good man who made one serious mistake.

Those who speak of the “tragedy” of LBJ have no conception of the meaning of the word: a tragic figure, in the Greek sense, is a great man who is brought down by a fatal flaw of character, not an accidental event.  Johnson was neither a great man nor one who suffered from one fatal flaw.  He was a man of average intelligence who suffered from megalomania and a host of other forms of confusion leading to the belief that he might be the greatest president.  His “failing” included a pathological need to be admired and loved, but he did not just have one fatal flaw: his entire life was a fanatical pursuit of the impossible without reflecting on the costs or consequences, and as a result, nearly everything Johnson did as president was destructive.

Johnson was obsessed with “doing more” during his first years in office because he knew that presidencies tend to get bogged down near the end.  He was obsessed with the quantity of legislation he could get passed, not the quality.  And most of this legislation was designed to bring him adoration from those who were essentially made dependent on government, which is to say on himself.

He signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Right Act in 1965 and expected that blacks (whom he regularly called “Negroes” and occasionally something worse) would worship him.  He was deeply wounded when more youthful and militant groups took over from Martin Luther King and American cities began burning in 1965.  He thought he had done more for black equality than any president since Lincoln, and now he was rewarded with betrayal.  His initial response to the Black Power movement was disgust, but then he shifted his own position in response to the demands of black radicals.  Like today’s progressives, he was willing to bend to any position to gain votes.

It was Johnson who was the origin of “woke” policies, not more recent presidents like Carter or Obama.  Johnson believed in an equality of outcomes, and since that equality did not exist, he was going to force it to exist with massive government spending.  He started everything from the War on Poverty to Head Start to the Jobs Program, each prone to inefficiency and corruption. Johnson was deferential to Black Power and radical Hispanic movements even when their leaders sought more than equality under the law — when they sought superiority over whites and what amounted to reparations.  Johnson was the source of much of the mistaken thinking today about the meaning of equality because of his one-dimensional emphasis on equal outcomes.

Everywhere he looked, he thought that he could win by spending more, especially so in Vietnam, which became the most costly war in nominal terms in American history.  He personally oversaw the targeting of bombing that took most of the two million lives lost in the war, and for a time he considered using nuclear weapons against North Vietnam.  His “plan” for winning the war was simply “more,” without reflecting on the consequences.  And that was the nature of LBJ: a large and thoughtless man.

The overhang of LBJ’s enormous spending on the Vietnam War and on social problems was the lost decade of the 1970s, when America suffered an unprecedented period of persistent stagflation, and when inflation rose to nearly 15 percent in 1974 and continued high until Fed chair Paul Volcker drove inflation down with what was known as the Volcker Shock of high Fed interest rates peaking under President Reagan.

The overhang was not merely economic.  One can argue that America “lost its innocence” the day JFK was assassinated and that it has not been the same since.  The 1960s was the time of the Sexual Revolution, which caused untold harm by upsetting traditional values of marriage and sex roles.  It was also the time when pornography became rampant and social relations overall began to deteriorate into more crude and blatant forms of behavior and when religious faith, nearly universal in the 1950s, came into question.  Although LBJ was not personally responsible for any of these, he conveyed a deeply cynical and materialistic attitude that influenced public affairs.

Birth control pills — often called simply “the pill” — became commercially available in mid-1960 but was not widely used until the Johnson presidency.  What accompanied the pill was widespread promiscuity, especially among young people on college campuses.  By the end of LBJ’s term in office, sexual mores in America had been transformed, and not for the better.

The 1960s was also the beginning of radical environmentalism and a broader rejection of American optimism.  Following the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, a series of doomsday books and films was released including Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.  Each of these books, and the films made from them, contributed to a generalized sense of alienation and disenchantment.

Again, it was LBJ who presided over this cultural shift with no idea of where the country was going.  LBJ and his mentor FDR were willing to abase themselves to any interest group or form of behavior in return for political support, and in this way, they were not very different from today’s progressives and Democratic Socialists, who refuse to speak forcefully about transgender issues and antisemitism for fear of losing votes.

LBJ was not a “good man” who was the “victim” of the War in Vietnam.  The escalation of the war was a perfect reflection of Johnson’s personality and political values, as were the expensive War on Poverty and other social initiatives.  Johnson’s presidency and the era over which he presided are the origin of most of the problems with government spending and moral decline we have experienced since.  LBJ offered the electorate a compact with the devil, and they took it, but at immense long-range cost.  It has taken Presidents Reagan and Trump almost fifty years to begin to reverse the damage that LBJ wrought on America, and that reversal is still in doubt, what with socialism gaining strength in the midterm elections.

Americans need to understand the harm that LBJ did to our country and work to reverse it by returning to traditional values, small government, and fiscal balance.  That is a tall order, but just as progressives transformed our nation in the 1960s into their vision of leftist utopia, it is possible within a decade or two to restore America to the conservative vision of the Founding Fathers.  President Trump is playing a crucial role in this restoration, and we can elect a successor to continue the struggle.

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Civilizational Decline is a Choice

We have so much worth defending.

BY:          J.B. Shurk, The American Thinker (September 10, 2026).

When pundits say that the United States — or the West, more generally — is “in decline,” what do they mean?  

Are they talking about Western nations’ rising and unsustainable sovereign debts, including a U.S. national debt of over forty trillion dollars?  Are they acknowledging that forty-plus years of “free trade deals” have hollowed out once-bustling manufacturing and industrial towns and left tens of millions of blue-collar workers unemployed and dependent upon government welfare?  Are they admitting that a century-long public policy campaign designed to arrest population growth by discouraging marriage and families and encouraging promiscuity and abortions has created a highly sexualized, self-indulgent, and lonely world?  Are they recognizing that open borders and Western governments’ traitorous betrayals of their own citizens have transformed relatively peaceful countries united by common cultures into battlegrounds where warring tribes from around the world attack Western nations’ histories, churches, traditions, tranquility, security, identities, and beliefs?

These are all symptoms of decline.  There are many more.  But none of these sizable problems is a death sentence for Western civilization.  

After all, we live in a world where fifty million people live as slaves today.  Nearly twenty million of those slaves toil in India and China.  However, when political pundits describe the U.S. and the West as “in decline,” they usually describe the future as belonging to the planet’s two largest slaveholding nations.  From the point of view of Christians and other enslaved minorities, India and China are Hell, while the West is the Promised Land. 

Similarly, communist China runs the most sophisticated domestic surveillance system of any nation in the world.  News flows are strictly regulated.  Social media accounts are monitored.  Purchases are tracked.  Citizens’ “social credit scores” are adjusted to reward “correct” behavior and punish “incorrect” thoughts.  While Western governments are shamelessly copying these forms of soft oppression and constructing their own surveillance states, the degree of totalitarianism that already defines life in communist China is not yet prevalent in the West.  

Even more importantly, Western citizens have not yet yielded to totalitarianism as an inevitability.  The United Kingdom uses as many surveillance cameras to spy on its citizens as communist China, but rebellious Brits vandalize these cameras much more frequently than their Chinese counterparts.  Likewise, Americans have begun to target and destroy Flock Safety cameras that record license plates and track citizens’ movements.  As Western governments scheme to construct surveillance infrastructure that is repressive in nature, Western citizens in growing numbers are fighting back against totalitarianism and in defense of personal freedom.  

The governments of Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, and New Zealand censor online communication and criminalize public dissent; there is no question that free speech is under attack throughout the West.  But Western citizens are constantly finding workarounds to communicate with each other and to spread their messages far and wide.  While the European Commission and the British and Canadian governments are working to build digital “Iron Curtains” to keep “unwanted” thoughts and expressions from reaching their citizens’ minds, freedom-lovers are waging quiet wars against State propaganda and other systems of public control.  Western governments are finding it difficult to erect modern “Berlin Walls” that separate free-speaking Westerners from thought-policed Westerners because Westerners on both sides of these social media walls are exchanging government-labeled “disinformation” in defiance of their regimes’ authoritarian mandates.

Furthermore, the fastest growing political parties across most of the West are so-called “populist” movements demanding an end to mass immigration and a return to secure borders.  There is a belated recognition that Western civilization has been under attack for quite some time and that Western governments have been the primary villains doing the attacking.  There is increasing public awareness that Western governments have been replacing Western citizens with foreigners as part of a long-term, malevolent effort to repudiate Western values and traditions and to instigate sufficient domestic strife to distract citizens from the economy-killing effects of “green energy” delusions that have no effect on the weather but do transfer wealth from the poorest to the richest members of society.  

For too many years, government-sponsored paramilitary forces such as Antifa have been the only shock troops causing mayhem on the streets and terrorizing Western citizens.  Now Western citizens are mobilizing huge public movements of their own in an effort to demonstrate to Western governments that they will no longer be silenced.  For days, large numbers of citizens have been fanning out across Great Britain and Spain to protest their governments’ open borders policies that have flooded both countries with dangerous foreign nationals.  They fight for free speech, secure borders, and the preservation of their way of life.  Western governments continue to demonstrate how afraid they are of their own citizens by expanding online speech controls, criminalizing public opinion as “hate speech,” undermining the electoral will of voters, outright canceling elections, and designating popular political parties as “domestic terror” groups.  

These protests, opposition movements, and forms of civil disobedience may appear chaotic or even scare people, but they are hardly signs of “decline.”  On the contrary, they are unmistakable indications of life coming from Western societies that have appeared comatose for entirely too long.  Energizing long-inert electorates takes time, but once the event horizon for political change is crossed, there is no going back.  A mere decade before the American War for Independence, colonials were overwhelmingly loyal to the British Crown.  The threshold separating status quo from revolution is often thin.  

That is why the German political Establishment is losing its collective mind right now after the “Alternative for Deutschland” party won a historic victory in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt state elections on Sunday.  Despite the German Deep State’s attempts to criminalize AfD as a domestic terror group because of its opposition to open borders and the European Union and support for German culture and cheap energy, German citizens (including young voters) rallied behind the rebellious party.  There hasn’t been this much raw energy and excitement in Germany since the wall came down.

This political effervescence popping up in different parts of the West is intoxicating.  There is electricity in the air.  It’s as if volatile elements are being shaken together, and Western citizens are waiting for the explosive chemical reaction.  These are not signs of “decline.”  These are the winds of change.

If decline is not inevitable, then, why have so many political prognosticators already written obituaries for the United States and the West?  Perhaps pessimistic political pundits are a big part of the problem.  They view Western “decline” as predetermined because they lack the sense of civilizational pride necessary to accomplish audacious things.  

Our American ancestors embraced the spirit of “Manifest Destiny,” the belief that settlers would tame the frontier and expand the American way of life across the continent.  They were not deterred by the lack of roads or the multitudinous dangers.  They did not expect government agents to “save” them; they knew that they were on their own.  Yet they did the hard things anyway.  They crossed rivers and mountains.  They carved new trails through the wilderness.  With callused hands, they plowed the fields and farmed the land.  They built the country one settlement at a time until America’s destiny lay manifest from coast to coast.

Our problems — no matter how gargantuan they seem — are not evidence of American or Western decline.  Decline comes when people refuse to confront what threatens them.  It spreads like poison gas slowly suffocating a nation.  It disorients entire countries, one lost soul at a time.  But decline is a choice.  Every day, you either give in or fight.  In America and across the West, we have so much worth defending.  Our enemies wish for us to submit and die.  We shall rebel and live.

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WARNING! Democratic Socialism is communism

No “Democratic Socialist” is being completely honest about what they will do if actually elected.

BY:          M.B. Mathews, The American Thinker (September 7, 2026).

“Democratic socialists” running for office are quick to deny any connections between themselves and “real” socialism and communism. But in America, classic distinction lines among these ideologies vanish. No “Democratic Socialist” is being completely honest about what they will do if actually elected.

Picture this: You have a house and a family. Your kids go to private school so they don’t get brainwashed about sex, trans, atheism, and OrangeManBad. Or you homeschool. One day, a “democratic socialist” gets elected to be your governor (or congressman). Suddenly, you have to send your kids to public school. No more homeschooling. It’s disallowed. Your kids now come home singing songs about how the governor gives you everything: food, clothing, electricity, water, shelter, etc. Remember, “Barack Hussein Obama, Mmm Mmm Mmm!”?

Then, your bank tells you that you have too much money, so they allot you only a pittance every day to feed your family even though the money is yours. Suddenly your house starts to warm up on summer days, and you discover that your electric company has instituted mandatory limits on how long you can run your AC and at what temperature. In winter, it’s the reverse — break out the blankets because you’re not permitted to set your thermostat higher than 50 degrees F.

Next, your supermarket runs out of fish and meat, potatoes, veggies and most frozen foods. You discover that farms, meat processing, fishing and food transport trucks have now been regulated under new limits; some limits are to save gasoline because of “climate change”, others are simply arbitrarily set to limit your food intake. You now must buy ration tickets for most foods.

If that were not enough, your doctor has to shut his/her doors so that a government medical team can take “care” of you and your family once every six months, if that. Emergencies will have to wait to get to the hospital because ambulance drivers are now under the federal umbrella, and your emergency has to wait its turn, preferably until you die.

You won’t be able to worship in church or synagogue anymore. The state religion is atheism. Any violations will be subject to fines, jail, and the destruction of your house of worship.

Social media, podcasts, and news, except programming that comes from your new “democratic socialist”/commie guv will be outlawed. Free speech will be a thing of the past. An NBA announcer was just fired for saying, “All lives matter” on air.

The media will be totally under communist control, so what you see is only that which they want you to see and all of what they want you to see is theater — made up, using actors to tell everyone the joys of “democratic socialism,” which is really communism.

If you like your freedom, your private property, your guns, food, AC, vacations, your life, kiss it all goodbye because, under “democratic socialism,” it all belongs to the government.

Think this is far-fetched? Think again.

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Feminism is rot, even when it’s ‘conservative’ feminism

If we want to restore American greatness, it has to be done with a radically anti-feminist approach, and we’re going to have to upset not just the leftist women, but the “conservative” ones too.

BY:          Olivia Murray, The American Thinker (September 7, 2026).

It’s been a season of being reminded that even conservatives are very feminist—which doesn’t bode well for restoring American greatness.

Last week, when I wrote on “Miserable Judy,” I acknowledged I’ve been on a bit of an “anti-woman” kick, which is continuing today—and the broken record keeps on looping!

Now, I often describe myself as a “slow processor,” but as an AT friend refuted a few months back, maybe it’s not so much being “slow” but “deliberate,” “deliberative,” and intentionally thoughtful, all of which require me to remove myself from my personal emotions on a subject so I can analyze as objectively as possible. (I seem to be distinct from too many women in this regard—as you’ll see.) I conceded that point to him, though that “deliberative” thought process still often manifests in a “slow” response when I’m confronted with new information.

In the same vein, maybe anti-woman isn’t exactly an accurate description either; perhaps I should be clearer and say it’s an anti-feminism bent in my character, even when those feminists are political “conservatives.”

First off, consider the Lindsay Clancy proceedings. It’s just been reported that the judge has finally declared a mistrial, after seven days of deliberations. Sure, we don’t “know” who the heroic holdout is, but we know. I’m calling it now: one brave man… against two simps and nine feminist women. This presumed man was the dam, the only person holding on to justice for little Cora, Dawson, and Callan.

We all know the leftard nutjobs love Clancy, because they love what is evil and hate what is good. That’s old news. But I’ve seen countless politically conservative women also jump to her defense and make the most asinine feminist cases for why she’s not actually guilty of murder—before they then meander off into leftist socialist B.S. for future policy. Example?

One woman recently lectured me about how we’ve got a mental health crisis in this country, and told a heartbreaking story of her own friend who committed suicide as she struggled with postpartum mental illness. She then told me she had another friend who had some postpartum issues, but was able to afford a $10,000 treatment that worked for her. She said this needs to be made available to all mothers. Well-meaning, but completely idiotic; an emotional and unreasoned position. Who’s going to pay for that? Is postpartum mental health treatment now a “human right” too, one to be funded by “government”? God help us. This person of whom I speak would say she’s a conservative, she’d say she’s pro-life, she’d say she’s for fiscal responsibility, low taxes, and self-reliance, but then, without even recognizing it, she’s stumping for socialism. And she votes. God help us again

“I’m not saying she didn’t do it, but….”

But nothing. Clancy did it, by her own admission. “Empathy is the Christian response, Olivia…” Yes, but what a twisting of what is true. Oddly, her empathy is directed first and foremost to a mother who walked her three little trusting babies down to the basement and wrapped exercise bands around their necks until she choked the life out of them. I can pity Lindsay and hate her sin, but to pity her more than the children? I just can’t relate—but feminists can, even the “conservative” ones!

Let’s just be honest, everything we love about our great nation is a product of uncompromising masculinity. This isn’t to say whatsoever that women didn’t have a role in our history—quite the contrary. As I was talking with someone the other day, he noted that men build and innovate… for women. He admitted that if it were all just a bunch of men sitting around, they’d make do with the bare minimum, noting that women inspire men to get creative and do great things. Men bring function, but women, by virtue of their femininity, compel that function to be made beautiful.

But… women’s opinions and ideas aren’t what made this country the greatest one that’s ever existed in human history.

George Washington didn’t ask Martha for her “Christian” opinions on empathy, then make decisions based on female rationales; he went out and got really violent on the battlefield and won us a war and a new nation.

Thomas Jefferson didn’t ask the local ladies what they thought about guns before he drafted the language of the Second Amendment; he understood the God-given right to self-defense, and enshrined it into government law.

These men didn’t even give women the privilege of voting, because they knew women shouldn’t have any serious influence in matters of great civic importance.

If we want to restore any of that, it has to be done with a radically anti-feminist approach, and we’re going to have to upset not just the leftist women, but the “conservative” ones too.

GFK

“How holy and beloved, how pleasing and lowly, how peaceful, delightful, lovable and desirable above all things it is to have a Brother like this, who laid down his life for his sheep.”

–St. Francis of Assisi.

And now we have “Trump TV”. Go figure.

There is a new helipad on the South Lawn of The White House. It is a round concrete structure, with the Presidential seal imprinted upon it. Very nice.

The United States Department of Interior has approved the expansion of North Dakota’s Falkirk mine that is expected to yield an additional 1.74 million tons of coal. WINNING!

The United States Coast Guard intercepted a smuggling boat off the coast of Key Largo, Florida. The boat contained 13 Chinese nationals who were attempting to enter the country.

The United States Navy sank another smuggling boat in the Caribbean which was loaded with drugs destined for the United States. Four (4) drug smugglers were killed in the attack.

“Those are the two things I think Americans are going through right now.  They don’t feel powerful at all, and they feel lonely.  And so, government should build a set of rules in which people feel more powerful — that’s why the minimum wage is so important — and people feel so more connected.  That’s why, you know, rebuilding healthy institutions in your town should be a project that government is involved in.

That’s why regulating the internet so that you’re spending less time alone on Instagram should be an important government project.  And if people are feeling more powerful and less lonely, then they are going to be less likely to fall for a bullsh*t demagogue like Donald Trump.  And what I say in the book is that if you really think about the things that make you more connected and make you more powerful, they’re not actually super partisan.”

–Senator Chris Murphy (D. Ct.).

Really? The federal government should regulate the internet, for content? Senator Murphy, ever hear of the First Amendment? Sigh. Probably not.

For all their flowery rhetoric about free speech and tolerance, Democrats do not believe in free speech. And they will not tolerate anything that contradicts their world view.

Recent polls reveal something interesting about the Left.  About 25 percent of Democrats would view the president’s assassination positively; 43 percent would view a military coup — the literal end of our federal republic — removing Trump positively; 45 percent would view Trump dying in his sleep positively; and 75 percent would greet headlines that Trump had been removed via the 25^th Amendment with glee.  That’s the Left, folks — people who we told we need to share this country with. 

To the surprise of absolutely no one, a Chinese American family with close ties to Red Chinese spy Fang Fang, contributed millions of dollars to California Democrats, including Governor Hair Gel and Commiela. Readers will recall that Fang Fang was once the lover of former Representative Eric Swalwell (D. Ca.), who fled the United States just ahead of the FBI arresting her.

And now would be a great time to remind everyone that the late Senator Dianne Feinstein (D. Ca.) employed a Red Chinese spy as her personal driver for over 20 years. The Red Chinese just love California Democrats.

Readers will remember that Arkansas U.S. Senate candidate Hallie Shoffner (D.) told reporters that she would trade 5 Americans for 1 illegal alien, because illegal aliens were such good workers. You would think that Hallie Shoffner would want that statement to be quickly forgotten. And you would be wrong. When the comment was again brought up, Hallie Shoffner doubled down, claiming she always says what she means, and that she values illegal aliens. Apparently much more than she does American citizens.

Hallie Shoffner is the perfect embodiment of today’s American Democrat Party.

Haotian Bao, a United States Army veteran, runs a surrogacy business. He recruits American female citizens to be surrogates for wealthy Chinese couples, so that their children will be born U.S. citizens. Haotian Bao is the worst person in the world.

9News Denver reporter:               “What do you say to folks who believe that that criminal conviction is disqualifying for somebody who wants to serve as mayor because it involved public monies?”

Shontel Lewis (D.) candidate for Denver Mayor: “I actually think that experience is what actually qualifies me.  Twenty years ago, I was young.  I was a young mom.  I was grieving.  I did something really silly and I paid my restitution.  I did my time and I took care of what I needed to do while also navigating all the ills of poverty.”

See?  She was entitled to steal public monies.  And that qualifies her to be Mayor where she can steal even more public monies.

The Left hates private schools. But even more, the Left hates homeschooling. And they will act to ban homeschooling (and eventually, private schools), given the chance. And Nebraska, of all places, is showing the Left the way. Take the case of volunteer fireman Andrew Coates. Andrew Coates is highly decorated, having rushed into burning buildings to rescue people from certain death. He is also a trained and certified Emergency Medical Technician. Understandably, Andrew made the decision to become a professional firefighter and make it his career. One problem. Andrew cannot get hired as a professional firefighter, because Nebraska will not permit any but those holding high school diplomas to be hired. Andrew Coates was homeschooled. He is clearly qualified, but because he does not have a high school diploma, he will never be paid to be a firefighter in his home State. He can still work for free, but not for money. And that, dear readers, is how the Left punishes those who do not follow their dictates.

Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate David Crowley (D.) wants to expand government provided healthcare in order to provide medical services to illegal aliens. Because for Democrats, the most important people in the United States are those who are not supposed to be in the United States.

Paramount Studios has apparently reached a settlement with the State of California over the lawsuit brought to block its merger with Warner Brothers. The settlement will clear the way for the merger, and Paramount will remain in California.

Dominoes is now offering a Detroit style pizza, which is nothing like Detroit style pizza. Save your money, spare your taste buds.

The Trump Administration is preparing sanctions on the International Criminal Court, cutting that institution off from access to the dollar. WINNING!

“I do believe that that is something that should be honored, because what we want to see, and we’ve been talking about this today, is a faith in our politics, a faith in accountability.  If the International Criminal Court deems someone worthy of an arrest because of a violation of those laws, then who are we to say that anyone should be above that?  And I think very clearly that everyone should be held accountable to it.”

–Comrade Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D. N.Y.), on the eve of the opening of the United Nations General Assembly.

Uh, the United States and Israel are not accountable to the International Criminal Court.  No matter how much Comrade Mayor wishes it were different.

“I am coming to the UN. I’m going to tell the truth about our heroic soldiers . . . and I’m going to tell the truth about you.”

–Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It is a fact.  Hamas is a terrorist organization, which brutally attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, murdering, raping, and kidnapping innocent Israeli citizens.  Comrade Mayor Mamdani, and many others on the Left side with the terrorists.  Real Americans side with Israel.

GFK

“We must hate our lower nature with its vices and sins; by living a worldly life, it would deprive us of the love of our Lord Jesus Christ and of eternal life.”

–St. Francis Of Assisi.

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“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
― Albert Camus

“The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.”
― Henry Beston

“And all at once, summer collapsed into fall.”
― Oscar Wilde

Today, September 22, is the 1^st day of Fall.  The air will turn crisp, and the rains cold.  The leaves will explode into bright hues of red, yellow, and orange, dotting the countryside until the encroachment of Winter begins.  Enjoy the season while you can.  Drink some warm apple cider, eat some fresh roasted corn, cheer for your favorite football team, and wear a comfortable sweater.

There is a crisis in the United States that so far has escaped press attention. It is a bigger threat to domestic tranquility than anything else on the front pages of newspapers, or emanating from the loud mouths of cable news networks’ talking heads. And that crisis is the disappearance of tamales from the menus of America’s Mexican restaurants. Tamale offerings have dropped 8% over the last 5 years.

A tamale is a true Mexican delicacy. Tender shredded pork, chicken, or beef is spiced to perfection, and folded into soft Masa cornmeal, wrapped by a corn husk. The assembled tamales are steamed, and then served with a savory gravy. Accompanied by an ice cold beer, it is Nirvana on a plate.

Restaurant industry experts explain the tamales’ labor intensive requirements, as well as the lack of trained tamale cooks. It is so much easier to make tacos. Yes, I am sure it is. It would also be easier to throw some iceberg lettuce, sliced onions, tomatoes, and ground beef into a bowl, serve it with a side of Doritos, and call it a taco salad. So what?

A tamale is a Mexican staple. It is a warm culinary hug. Losing tamales from Mexican restaurants’ menus is akin to going to Biscuitville for breakfast and receiving a Lender’s Frozen Bagel as opposed to a biscuit. Or going to the Martinsville Speedway, ordering a hot dog, and getting a Ball Park brand dog, instead of a Jesse Jones or Carolina Packer red hot dog. It is just so wrong.

If you cannot find a tamale on your local Mexican restaurant’s menu, ask for it. And then go online, and order tamales from either the Texas Tamale Company, or The Tamale Store. I heartily recommend both. Eat More Tamales!

The median household income in the United States stands at $87,460–the highest ever! WINNING!

Over the weekend, a man drove his automobile onto the sidewalk at 16th and H Streets, NW, in Washington, D.C., got out of his car, and demanded that the Secret Service bring him to President Trump, as he had something to say to the President. For his troubles, the man was given an all expenses paid stay at the D.C. Jail. Oh, my!

“I’m trying to think what would have happened if I had said, you know what, Fox News, you’re out of here!  It’s unimaginable!”

–former President Barack Obama, commenting on President Trump banishing CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from The White House.

Actually, it is very imaginable what would happen if President Obama had banned FOX News. Nothing. Because President Obama did ban FOX News, and no one raised hell. President Obama spied on journalist James Rosen and his family. Yawn! President Obama’s minions rejected more Freedom of Information Act requests than any other administration, and no one did a damn thing about it. President Obama’s Justice Department seized Associated Press reporters’ telephone records. President Obama banned news organizations from Air Force One. Again, the reaction was . . . nothing.

But let’s not forget China Joe. His Administration changed the longstanding rules for journalists’ access to The White House, so as to penalize independent journalists less likely to give him fawning coverage. More than 442 reporters lost their White House access. Does anyone remember the mainstream media melting down over this?

Let us be clear, President Trump is the most accessible President ever. He will talk to the press all night. But the Constitution’s First Amendment does not grant journalists access to The White House.

Furthermore, these “journalists” lie. They make stuff up. Their mission is not to report the news, their mission is to damage and destroy the President. Why should he not kick them out?

The Observations is not endorsing the President’s actions. Arguably, he should just let things lie. But it is his call, and he did not make that choice. But it is not a constitutional crisis. And I do not care.

A Democrat operative filed an ethics complaint against Representative Lauren Boebert (R. Co.), alleging that she maintained sexual affairs with 3 of her staffers. Representative Boebert denies the allegations, as do each of the staffers. The Democrat operative offered no evidence, or even any particular factual allegations supporting the complaint. It is clearly a false, smear job. But no matter. The mainstream media ran with the story as if it were the gospel truth. Because the point is not to report the truth. The point is to push the socialist Democrat Party.

Washington Post columnist George Will is promoting the election of the Democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina. Years ago, George Will was considered to be an influential “conservative” columnist, even though he was always like Peggy Noonan, without the testosterone. But today? George Will is an embittered old man, that few people even knew was still alive.

Axios reporter Alex Thompson: “You once said that America is the top dog in terrorism.  Do you think America then is worse than al-Qaeda?”

Democrat Party influencer Hasan Piker: “Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes, we’ve caused tremendous terror all around the world.  I think that that is not only terror that we are waging on regular civilians in nations in the periphery, but it’s also having consequences on ourselves.  It’s having dramatic consequences on the home front.” 

On July 3, a shooting occurred at a mall in Dearborn, Michigan. Cameron Watkins first shot a man with whom he was arguing, and then began firing his gun wildly and randomly at others within the mall. Mr. Martinez Long pulled out his gun which he had been carrying concealed, shot and killed Cameron Watkins, saving himself and others from injury and/or death.

For his heroics, prosecutors charged Martinez Long with carrying a gun without the required permit. Ultimately, Martinez Long was convicted, and sentenced to probation. But it was the lecture from the presiding judge which seemed most detached from reality:

“Fortunately, you weren’t injured, but nonetheless, you had a gun there in the first place, which was poor judgment.  And what do you need a gun for protection in a mall, in the first place?”

Uh, to prevent his death, and the deaths of others? Martinez Long deserves thanks and gratitude, not a criminal conviction and a lecture from a clueless judge.

“It is awful that this horror has come to our doorstep.  And as the mayor said, unfortunately, it is not a surprise.  Just a few weeks ago, as we saw the ICE surge come to Austin, especially at north-central Austin.  I and others said that ICE needed to leave before someone was shot like in Minneapolis, or like in Corpus Christi, or like in Chicago.  And that day is here.  And so I think the message remains that for Austin to be safe, ICE should end its surge here in our community.”

–Representative Greg Casar (D. Tx.), calling for the end of enforcing our country’s immigration laws.

There was a riot in Austin, Texas by anti-ICE agitators. The crowd was inflamed by the fact that a Venezuelan illegal alien, subject to a deportation order, violently resisted arrest by ICE, and suffered non-threatening injuries. The crowd blocked traffic, waved Mexican flags, and shouted obscene slogans, including “Death to ICE Agents”.

Democrats will not be happy until America is overrun with illegal aliens from sh*thole countries are the majority, and most American citizens have fled to some other country. That is their plan for this “stolen land”.

Former California Supreme Court Justice Joyce Kennard has died at age 85. R. I. P.

GFK

“Remember the words of our Lord, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.”

–St. Francis of Assisi.

In the 1970s, we had warnings of “global cooling”. We were all going to freeze to death. In the 1980s, we had warnings of “nuclear winter”, where that evil President Ronald Reagan was going to trigger a nuclear war. Then in the 1990s, our computers were going to kill us, as Y2k loomed, and the world was destined to end. In the 2000s, Al Gore led the charge of “global warming”, which morphed into “climate change” every time it snowed. The world was supposed to end in 2010, 2018, and 2030. So far we’re still here. But for how long? Because now we have the spectre of Artificial Intelligence. Once again, our computers will either enslave or kill us, or both.

The source of all these doomsday warnings was the Democrat Left. They work overtime to ensure that the populace has something to focus on and to fear. It is one of the ways that they acquire power. The Observations wonders; what will be the next apocalyptic prediction? What are we all going to die from next?

A few Republicans and Independents are vowing to either not vote, or to vote for a Democrat in the midterm elections. How *#&&^ stupid can you be?

The Observations does not believe that Republicans are grand. Republicans are stupid. BUT THE ALTERNATIVE–the Democrat Party–is evil. Our country can survive stupid. We cannot survive evil.

But, but, but . . . gas prices are high! Yes they are. Because we are in a war for civilization’s very survival against a radical, apocalyptic regime in Tehran, which would not hesitate to use a nuclear weapon against Israel, Europe, or the U.S. Low gas prices are of no use to dead people.

But, but, but . . . grocery prices are high. Yes they are. Do you want to put the same folks in charge who caused the prices to rise in the 1st place?

But, but, but . . . Trump is a dictator, literally Hitler, who wants to knock down The Kennedy Center, build a White House ballroom, and alienates our allies. Is that all you got? Would you be happier if Commiela was sitting in the Oval Office today?

But, but, but . . . [fill in the blank] is a moderate Democrat. He wants common sense solutions! No, he does not. He is lying to you. And you are lying to yourself. There is no such thing as a “moderate” Democrat. Remember China Joe? Abigail Spanberger? Lies, lies, and more lies.

For those who are uninspired by the State of the Union, I would encourage you to focus on the very good things that are happening. Indeed, there is a lot of positive things to focus on such as the growing economy, rising wages, progress against the Iranian regime, and the spread of U.S. influence in South America. Do you really care about the ballroom? Are you planning on attending the opera at The Kennedy Center? Do you care if the French look down their snooty noses at us? Be honest, be real. You do not. Get off your collective asses, go to the polls, and vote for the least possible harm. Vote for The Stupid Party. Defeating Evil is important.

President Trump banned CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from The White House. Ha, ha, ha! Cue the righteous Leftist indignation! Camera, lawsuits, action!

The United States Department of Justice has determined that the federal laws against selling handguns to anyone between the ages of 18 and 21 are unconstitutional. Correct.

A D.C. federal judge–an Obama appointee–has ruled that there can be no demolition or dismantling of The Kennedy Center without his permission. Huh. Did Democrats ask permission before destroying and removing Confederate and Founding Fathers statues in 2020? Why, no. No they did not.

“I actually think there are a lot of Republicans on the Hill who will be happy not to have the burden of having to pass legislation.  They’re almost going to be relieved for a little while, at least, to be in the minority.”

–FOX News’s Laura Ingraham, predicting that many Congressional Republicans are hoping their party loses the midterm elections.

Gee who was she thinking of? Senators John Thune (R. S.D.), James Lankford (D. Ok.), Lisa Murkowski (R. Ak.), Representatives Maria Salazar (R. Fl.), Tom Cole (R. Ok.), and Representative Mike Lawler (R. N.Y.)? Maybe. The Stupid Party Lives!

Mariana Alexandra Dewey, a Peruvian national, was taken into custody by federal immigration authorities and has since been indicted on charges stemming from allegations that she falsely represented herself as a U.S. citizen in order to register and cast a ballot. Whoa! Wait just a minute. Democrats have assured us that this NEVER HAPPENS! Free Mariana Dewey!

“There is a reason the Democrats and their socialist big-tent allies want to destroy this nation, and it’s precisely because we’re exceptional.  We are a nation where our rights are enshrined in the Constitution, given by God and not the government.

But the Left hates that.  They hate that we are, bluntly, better than the rest of the world.  They can only see the world through the simplistic lens of oppressed vs. oppressor, and America is always the latter. Because we’re wealthier, freer, and stronger than other nations.  That’s why the Smithsonian and others push the narrative that certain civil behaviors are racist white supremacy, including working hard and being on time.  That’s why the Cherry Creek School District in Colorado says disruptive classroom behavior is “culturally appropriate” if done by black students.

And it’s why they imported millions of illegal aliens from every Third World hellhole they could during the Biden years.  They want to turn us into a nation where, like South Africa, the streets are full of violence (usually targeting their political opponents), the government enacts “justice, equality, and accountability for historic privilege” (again targeting their political opponents), and where everyone’s standard of living is knocked down a peg or two or ten.”

–Amy Curtis.

U.S. Senate candidate Hallie Shoffner (D. Ak.) said that she would trade 5 illegal aliens for 1 American, because illegal aliens are such hard workers. The Observations is confident that Hallie Shoffner is not going to be elected to the Senate.

Commiela is going to Michigan to campaign with U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D. Mi.). YAY!

“Racism continues to flummox our capacity as a society to invest in collective public goods [and remains] more powerful than the self-interest of . . . lower income white folks . . .  in legacy Confederacy States. Because in this country we have a privatized, partitioned health insurance system, the value of providing care, the reimbursement of providing care to different people’s bodies, differs based on how much money they make.  And how much money they make because of structural racism differs based on the color of their skin.  [Opposition to Medicare for All is driven by] Reagan-esque trope[s].  They’ll use examples of, you know, people who . . . are undocumented immigrants to this country, and they’ll say, well, you know, your health care monies are going to pay for those undocumented folks — which will be a deliberate, racist attack.”

–Abdul El-Sayed.

Do you hear that? All you dumb, racist, slave-owning Southerners are preventing a communist takeover of our nation’s healthcare system! GOOD JOB! I sure appreciate it.

“215 years ago, Mexicans fought an empire that demanded our land and our labor. And we won.  I’ll carry that fight with me to Congress as New York’s first Mexican American representative.  And I’m strengthened not just by Mexico’s history but its present.  Last month I met comrades in Morena who are standing up to the empires and corporations that have always taken from us – and building a government for the working class.  ¡Viva la Independencia, Viva México!”

–U.S. House of Representatives candidate Claire Valdez (D. N.Y.).

“[O]ur”? “[U]s”? Is Claire Valdez running for Congress, or Congreso de la Union?

Governor Abigail Spanberger (D. Va.) issued an executive order to make it harder for data centers to locate in the Commonwealth. She also created an “AI Task Force”, whatever that is. Governor Spanberger is determined to stop the future from occuring.

Governor Spanberger also withdrew a pending regulation, begun under former Governor Glenn Youngkin (R. Va.) that would have prohibited boys from playing in girls sports, and from utilizing girls locker rooms and restrooms. She did it without fanfare, hoping no one would notice. We did. “Moderate” Democrat my Aunt Mae!

Make Abigail Go Away!

Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones has created a special unit within his office to investigate and prosecute Virginia’s new gun laws. That is, the very same guns laws that courts are finding to be unconstitutional.

In Norfolk, Virginia, an elderly couple were shopping in the Walmart store, when a teenage employee rushed by, clipping the wife with a shopping cart. The husband too exception, and chastised the employee. Which the teenager did not take well. The employee pulled out his phone, and called his parents, who then came to the store in short order. The parents hunted down the elderly couple, with the help of their employee son, and the father then beat the elderly husband. To death. Right in one of the store’s aisles.

Singer Ed Sheeran cannot get past the Macklemore fiasco. When he took the stage in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the singer broke down in tears, apologizing for getting rid of Macklemore, and denouncing Israel, praising Hamas, and offering support for Gaza. Ed Sheeran bent his knee to the radical Left. And in so doing, he destroyed his career.

Paramount Studios announced it would leave California. A rational business decision.

Amy’s Kitchen, a $1 billion in annual sales organic frozen food processor, is shutting down its California operations. It is shifting its operations to Oregon and Idaho. Another rational business decision.

The Sheetz convenience store chain expanded into Tidewater Virginia, opening a store in Suffolk, Virginia. English is thrilled.

Warren Buffett has stepped down as Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. He has more than earned a rest.

Krispy Kreme has brought back its Original Glazed Blueberry Donut. For a limited time only.

After 10 years, New York City’s Carnegie Deli has reopened in midtown Manhattan. Rumour has it that the food is better than ever. If there is a better corned beef sandwich, I cannot imagine it. So good!

Now that Canada is becoming a member of The European Union, does Prime Minister Carney realize that he has married his country to a dead and dying group of nations? What a dumb idea.

The United States struck a deal with Denmark and Greenland, giving the United States a permanent military presence in Greenland, and allowing it to expand its military presence as the U.S. deems necessary. It also forbids China, Russia, or any non-NATO country from establishing a presence in the country. WINNING!

Did not the Democrats (and some Republicans) blast President Trump for his demands on Greenland? Did not the Democrats (and some Republicans) accuse President Trump of alienating our allies? Did not the Democrats (and some Republicans) predict that Denmark would never accede to the President’s demands? Hmmmm. Why, yes! Yes they did!

The Atlanta Braves–AMERICA’S TEAM!–won the National League East Division, after sweeping the Houston Astros. WOO HOO!

Miami beat Wake Forest. SMU lost to Louisville. Virginia lost to West Virginia. Clemson beat UNC. Georgia Tech finally won a game, kind of, since they played Mercer. N.C. State lost in the most undignified fashion, fumbling in their own end zone on the last play of the game, and giving Vanderbilt a touchdown and the win. VPI finally played a real team and won, topping Maryland in College Park.

 “We certainly appreciate the hell out of the American military.  And if you’re not the United States of America and you hear that sound, your ass better run.”

–Pat McAfee, commenting about the military flyover prior to the Ole Miss-LSU football game.

The Left lost their minds over Pat McAfee’s comments. How dare he show respect for our military! Does he not know that we [and Israel] are the bad guys?!?!?

Texas Tech edged Houston. BYU beat Colorado State. Utah beat Utah State. Kansas State beat Tulane. Iowa State, Arizona State, Cincinnati, and Baylor won.

Oregon beat Portland State 84-0. What a disgrace to play a team so obviously inferior. Is that what it takes to get over the humiliation of losing to Oklahoma State?

USC got by Rutgers. UCLA humiliated Purdue. Indiana, Penn State, and Ohio State won.

“What does a $54 million buyout for the old coach, a $91 million contract for the new coach, and a $50 million roster get you?  An ass whipping in Oxford, Mississippi!”

–Governor Tate Reeves (R. Ms.).

Ole Miss beat LSU. Florida got by Auburn. Mississippi State beat South Carolina. Kentucky upset Texas A&M. Texas, Alabama, and Tennessee won. Georgia pounded Arkansas in an empty stadium in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Embarrassing!

Washington & Lee lost Salisbury State. Sigh. Nothing has been the same since coeducation.

Martinsville High School beat Dan River. Both teams might be competitive with VPI.

Pop artist Peter Max has died at age 88. R. I. P.

Singer/songwriter Duncan Sheik has died at age 56. R. I. P.

Former U.S. Senator Jon Kyl (R. Az.) has died at age 84. R. I. P.

GFK

“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

–St. Francis of Assisi.

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The Epistle for today is taken from S. Paul’s letter to the Christians at Ephesus. Admittedly, some scholars, going back to Erasmus, argue that Ephesians is not an authentic Pauline epistle. This is based upon stylistic differences between Ephesians and other so-called “authentic” Pauline epistles. However, stylistic differences can also be explained by the differences in readership. Having ministered extensively throughout Asia Minor, S. Paul would know how to address specifically the culture of Christians in Ephesus and elsewhere in the Oriental world of the New Testament. 

The reasons for the specific epistles vary widely as well. The overarching theme of his Epistle to the Ephesians is the “mystery” of Christ – the divine purpose once hidden but now revealed in Him and made manifest through the Church. Ephesians is primarily a catechesis on the person of Christ for the newly baptized. S. Paul addresses the themes of Our Lord’s Resurrection, Ascension and Enthronement on the right hand of the Father, and the gathering together of all things in Him. These are not merely events belonging to the past. Through Baptism, the Christian has been joined to Christ and made a participant in His risen and glorified life.

In the portion of Ephesians appointed for this Sunday, S. Paul turns from teaching to prayer. Having spoken of the mystery of Christ now being revealed through the Church, he writes: For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you…and here he proceeds to ask God to supply specific graces to the Christians at Ephesus, “according to the riches of his glory.”

He prays that they might be strengthened with might by his Spirit; that Christ might dwell in your hearts; that being rooted and grounded in love, they may be able to comprehend the immeasurable love of Christ; and finally, that they might be “filled with all the fulness of God.” This is nothing less than a description of the Christian life itself.

Christianity is not simply the forgiveness of past offenses, nor merely the promise that we shall go somewhere better when we die. It is our incorporation into Christ and, through Him, our restoration to communion with the Father in the Holy Ghost. Having been made members of Christ’s Body in Holy Baptism, we are given the Spirit so that the life of Christ may increasingly become our life.

Thus S. Paul’s prayer is profoundly Trinitarian. He bows his knees before the Father; he asks that we be strengthened by the Spirit; so that Christ may dwell within us. The whole Christian life is a movement into the communion of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

This also explains S. Paul’s remarkable expression, “of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.” God is the Father and source of every true fatherhood and every order of created being, visible and invisible. Heaven and earth are not two unrelated worlds. In Christ they are being brought together into one household, one family, one creation under its true Head.

And we have been brought into that household for a purpose. God did not create us merely that we might remain what we presently are. As S. Peter says, we are called to become “partakers of the divine nature.” S. Paul expresses the same mystery here when he prays that we might be “filled with all the fulness of God.”

We do not cease to be creatures and we do not become God by nature, but through grace we participate increasingly in the divine life. But this does not make us passive; grace calls us to cooperate, to ask in faith, to repent, to fight against those passions that so easily derail us.

When times of difficulty arise, and we feel as though we are being tested beyond our abilities, S. Paul assures us that God is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think. God desires to exceed our expectations, but we must first ask in faith and also work to remove the hindrances that come from sin.

Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.

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Hunter Biden, Clancy jurors, Piker and Talarico: The ethics of shamelessness

From crypto stunts to courtroom excuses, conscience keeps losing ground

BY:          Robert Knight, The Washington Times (September 13, 2026).

If you have no capacity for shame, you have no conscience.

In Jeremiah 8:12, the prophet describes hypocrites who sin openly and yet still expect to be blessed: “Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush.”

Hunter Biden has come out with his own cryptocurrency meme coin that he dubbed (wait for it) $LAPTOP.

Here is a quick refresher on that story. The laptop was full of shocking evidence about Hunter’s escapades with drugs, prostitutes and shady business deals, and it could have affected his father, President Biden.

The FBI under Christopher Wray had the laptop for months before the New York Post broke the story. America’s Democratic-controlled legacy media and social media buried the story a month before the 2020 election.

Surveys indicate that if the laptop’s contents had been widely known, it could have changed the presidential race’s outcome.

Anyone with a scintilla of conscience who did the things on the laptop would want it buried forever. Not Hunter. He thought he would name his crypto coin $LAPTOP as a big, obscene gesture to law-abiding Americans.

Why not? With a presidential pardon in hand and the fact that Democrats hardly ever pay a price for criminality, it seemed like a good idea. He believed America’s culture had become so debased that he could cash in on the moral depravity.

Here is a silver lining if you like poetic justice: The coin debuted at $200 to $300 and lost more than 95% of its value within 24 hours. As of Thursday, it was at about 60 cents.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, jurors cited postpartum blues as the reason they resisted finding Lindsay Clancy guilty of strangling her three children. Some of the female jurors trashed the one juror who thought the facts outweighed reasonable doubt. His holding out led to a mistrial.

The women even trashed the prosecutors for trying Ms. Clancy and praised her defense attorney, who should be disbarred for trying to dox the holdout juror.

Jim Treacher, political comedy writer of the razor-sharp daily podcast “Cue the Crickets,” said: “I guess it makes sense that crazy people think a crazy person should get away with murder.”

Hordes of women in pink rallied to support Ms. Clancy and raised $1 million for her defense. The case may or may not be retried.

As Mr. Treacher said: “Now the tough part’s going to be finding 12 jurors in Massachusetts who aren’t insane. That state is infamous for witch hunts, and now they’re giving us a witch hunt in reverse. Instead of coercing people into condemning an innocent woman, they’re trying to free a guilty one.”

Postpartum depression is no small thing, and women who suffer from it deserve our sympathy and support. Yet turning a child killer into a heroine is shameful.

While we are on the topic of shame, news broke that socialist and Islamist podcaster Hasan Piker again parsed his remarks from 2019 about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

He famously said that America “deserved” 9/11. Later, he said he could have phrased it better. Recently, he denied ever saying that he hated America, even as video surfaced. In one clip, he declares, “I say I hate America all the time.” In another, he says, “People will be like ‘Hasan, you hate America.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I do. I do hate America.’”

Mr. Piker has campaigned with Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other Democrats.

Last month, during his live podcast tour, Mr. Piker told an audience, “America does not deserve 9/11. That’s my new thing now.” (Translation: “I’ve got to say stuff like this so I won’t hurt the Democrats, but take it with a grain of salt.”)

The crowd erupted into booing and jeers. Like their idol, they really do hate this country and cheer for our enemies.

Whenever you see these frauds interviewed, they launch into virtue signaling to show their superiority. Democratic Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico excels at this. A self-professed Christian, he mangles Scripture and portrays Jesus as a rainbow-sporting free love guru from Portlandia.

The Apostle Paul warned us about people like Mr. Talarico in 1 Timothy 4:1-2: “The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.”

Voters must resoundingly end Mr. Talarico’s political career in November.

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Gloria Steinem’s war on marriage, family started at home

Changing the world for the worse

BY:          Don Feder, The Washington Times (September 13, 2026).

Gloria Steinem, who died on Sept. 2 at age 92, did not liberate women. The Industrial Revolution did that. Think of all those labor-saving devices. Still, she did a number on marriage and the family.

It always struck me as odd that a group calling itself feminist rejects the essence of femininity — the ability to give life and nurture.

As much as anyone of my era, “little Gloria” changed the world for the worse. Broken marriages, broken families and the loneliness of men and women unable to connect can all be laid on the altar of this feminist icon and her minions.

Steinem helped shape a worldview that held men are the oppressors, that a woman without a career is tragically unfulfilled, that a housewife is a domestic slave and that abortion is reproductive freedom and should be celebrated.

She helped popularize the feminist motto “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Yet fish and bicycles do not marry and have children or hold each other in bed at night. They do not care for each other at the end of life’s journey. They do not assure the survival of humanity by producing the next generation.

Steinem had an abortion in 1957, when it was still illegal, and spent the rest of her life trying to justify it. She once told an interviewer that “abortion gave me my life” and “I wouldn’t have been able to live my life otherwise.”

In other words, her journey to self-fulfillment started with the death of her child. Did the child get a say in this? Like other totalitarian “isms” — communism and fascism — the starting point of feminism is death.

She also helped advance Islamism, another death cult, by supporting “inclusive immigration laws.” She probably considered female genital mutilation, child brides and honor killings just quaint customs.

She never spoke out against societies where women are flogged for appearing in public bareheaded. Did she understand that a Methodist was probably less likely than an Islamist to fly a plane into a building?

When the twin towers came down, she was probably leading a march for equal pay.

The 1970s cute chick with aviator glasses always had to be in with the “in” crowd. Her ideas on transgenderism necessarily changed with the times.

In 1977, she questioned some aspects of surgical transitioning/mutilation. By 2013, she had apologized for her earlier “transphobic” remarks. “I believe that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives,” Steinem wrote.

Sure they are — about as real and authentic as women who deny their nature and make abortion the starting point of their quest for authenticity.

Steinem ended up throwing women under the bus by supporting the entire transgender agenda, including biological men on women’s sports teams and in women’s spaces.

She and her sisters shaped the society we live in. They taught young women that men are the enemy, ogres who would use and abuse them if given half a chance.

It worked.

In a 2025 Survey Center poll, 66% of Democratic women ages 18 to 29 said the problems women face are largely because of men. Only 18% of Republican women in the same age group had a similarly warped perspective.

The triumph of feminism is reflected in the dramatic decline of marriage and childbearing.

Since 1970, the marriage rate has dropped by nearly 60%. According to the Census Bureau, in 1949, married couples made up 79% of U.S. households. Today, that number is 46%.

Our fertility rate — the number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime — is at an all-time low of 1.6, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Soon, our population will begin shrinking with no end in sight.

Humanity is going out of business. Feminists are hanging the “closed” sign on the door.

Has all this made liberated women happier? The National Institute of Mental Health reports that the percentage of adult women experiencing a “major depressive episode” is approximately twice that of adult males.

Gloria Steinem grew up in a world without men. She had a sister but no brothers. Her parents divorced when she was 10. Her mother, who suffered from acute mental illness, never remarried.

She was raised in a world without masculine role models. Perhaps that was why she thought of men as creatures from another galaxy and taught other women to see them the same way.

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A story of James Talarico and Thomas Paine

A cautionary tale (and perhaps prophetic one)

BY:          Everett Piper, The Washington Times (September 13, 2026).

“I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity. … [I am against] religion in neutral and public spaces. … The Bible is all over the place [on marriage and morality]. … I trust women [and men] to make their own decisions.”

These are just a few quotes from Democratic candidate James Talarico, who is running (and leading in the polls) against Ken Paxton to replace John Cornyn as senator from Texas.

If you have a sense of deja vu — that you heard this all somewhere before — you are right. In fact, one of America’s most influential historical leaders said something similar more than 200 years ago. Consider the following:

“Whenever we read the obscene stories … with which more than half the bible is filled, it would seem more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. … I do not believe in the creed professed by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”

These are quotes from Thomas Paine’s “Age of Reason.”

Now, some who fancy themselves to be more progressive in their thinking may say, “Well, there you have it! We’ve been trying to tell you that America was founded as a secular nation, not on religious dogma. These quotes are the proof that James Talarico is more in line with our founding ideals than you conservative Christians.”

Not so fast. Before we jump to such conclusions, maybe we should consider what the other Founding Fathers actually said about Thomas Paine’s work. In other words, did the preponderance of America’s patriarchs agree or disagree with him?

Here is just a sampling of responses from the likes of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and others.

Adams was quite blunt in his opprobrium for Paine’s “Age of Reason”: “The Christian religion is, above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity and humanity; let the Blackguard Paine say what he will.”

Franklin, likewise, pulled no punches: “I would advise you,” he wrote to Paine, “not to attempt unchaining the tiger, but to burn this piece before any other person sees it; whereby you will save yourself a great deal of trouble, and your enemies a great deal of triumph.”

Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, called Paine’s writing “absurd and impious.”

Charles Carroll, another Declaration signer, described Paine’s work as “blasphemous writings against the Christian religion.”

John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) and another signer, said Paine was “ignorant of human nature as well as an enemy to the Christian faith.”

Sam Adams, whom some called the firebrand of the American Revolution, delivered a stiff rebuke to Paine: “When I heard you had turned your mind to a defense of infidelity, I felt myself much astonished.”

He urged Paine to reconsider writing what Adams considered a betrayal of the very moral foundations that made the Revolution possible.

Elias Boudinot, president of the Continental Congress, did not just criticize Paine; he also wrote a full-length rebuttal titled “The Age of Revelation.” In it, Boudinot systematically dismantled Paine’s arguments and showed that Christianity, not secularism, was the true foundation of human flourishing and the American experiment.

Paine, though hugely influential in the first days of the American Revolution (he is the one who wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” after all), died a pariah. His enthronement of himself as the final authority over all morality led nearly all his fellow Founders to condemn him as a menace rather than a hero of freedom.

Paine set reason against revelation as if they were enemies and became more a champion of the French Revolution than of America’s.

Thomas Paine died on June 8, 1809, in New York City. Only six people attended his funeral. He was buried in a cow pasture in an unmarked grave. The man who had helped birth a nation was laid in the ground and forgotten.

Why was he so ostracized and shunned? As one writer puts it, “A man cannot build a house and then burn down its foundation and expect to keep living in it.”

Let this be a cautionary tale (and perhaps a prophetic one) for the likes of James Talarico and all those who align with such a broken and arrogant worldview. Elevating your feelings above facts and your reason above God’s revelation never ends well.

We should all pray that in November, Texas voters will remember the wisdom of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin: Let the Blackguard Talarico say what he will. His words are ignorant of human nature as well as an enemy to the Christian faith and freedom.

GFK

“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved, as to love.”

–St. Francis Of Assisi.

Today I find myself back in Northern Virginia for the first time in about 2 weeks. I missed English, Dudley, and my house. I missed my tiny little community in Northern Clarke County. But I cannot say that I missed Northern Virginia. Because once you wander even a little bit out of Berryville, all of that which makes Washington, D.C. comes crashing down upon you.

Today I am sharing some commentary on the State of the Union, socialism, and things that Americans used to know, but nowadays, . . not so much. Enjoy!

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At 250, America faces the signs of civilizational decline

Debt, dependency and decadence now threaten the nation from within

BY:          Don Feder, The Washington Times (September 6, 2026).

Americans are justly proud as we celebrate our 250th birthday.

Yet what is this milestone compared with history’s great civilizations? The Egyptian empire lasted for three millennia. In the east and west, the Roman empire endured for 1,500 years. The Portuguese and Ottoman empires enjoyed their moment in the sun for 584 and 623 years, respectively.

Some historians believe civilizations go through predictable stages. First, there is the Age of Pioneers (explorers and settlers), followed by an Age of Commerce and Affluence, which leads to an Age of Prosperity, then to an Age of Entitlement and finally to an Age of Cynicism and Decadence.

In the final stage, religious observance declines precipitously, marriage is rare, people stop having enough children to maintain the population, debt soars and intellectuals are devoted to attacking the civilization that spawned them.

Historian Will Durant, in his monumental “The Story of Civilization,” warned, “A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within.” We are working on it.

Historian and British army officer John Bagot Glubb observed: “The life expectation of a great civilization, it appears, commences with a violent and usually unforeseen outburst of energy and ends in a lowering of moral standards, cynicism, pessimism and frivolity.”

All the signs indicate that our civilization is terminal.

The homeless population of the United States is more than three-quarters of a million. Most are too addicted to do much more than lie about in a stupor. They clutter the streets with used needles and feces and start fires.

From January to mid-December 2025, the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to 16,982 fires at or near homeless encampments.

Because of misplaced compassion, we lavish resources on this human contagion and then berate ourselves for not doing more for them.

The same suicidal empathy led to open borders under President Autopen with as many as 20 million entering the country illegally — just the sorts of people you want to destroy a culture. We traded the safety of our citizens for political advantage for the ruling party.

The national debt is now $40 trillion, almost half of it accumulated in the past seven years. In 2001, the national debt was 31.5% of gross domestic product. Today, it is 124% of GDP and climbing. When it comes crashing down, we could be buried in the rubble.

Interest on the debt is now the second-largest item in the federal budget, behind only Social Security. We spend more to service the debt than on national defense. Most of the debt is a result of welfare spending. Today, 53% of Americans derive at least a quarter of their income from government assistance programs.

The Roman empire had a massive welfare state too. During the reign of Emperor Claudius, it is estimated that 1 in 3 Romans was on the dole.

The decline of religion is yet another indication of a civilization teetering on the brink.

According to Gallup, the percentage of U.S. adults who say religion plays an important part in their daily lives fell 17 points — from 66% to 49% — from 2015 to 2025.

Durant observed: “Even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for religion, since he sees it functioning, and seemingly indispensable, in every land and age. … The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.”

Adding to our woes, we have our own Huns and Visigoths prowling on the perimeters. The Democratic Socialists of America would destroy everything that makes our nation unique.

The DSA is for abolishing borders, making the president and Supreme Court subordinate to Congress and eliminating police and prisons. That Fidel Castro is its hero should come as no surprise. Instead of incarcerating criminals, it would lock up dissidents.

We have abandoned reality for fantasy (that a man can become a woman) and truth for blind adherence to dogma (that the rich are a drag on society). We revile the pioneers who settled this country. For many, the 9/11 attacks are seen as a punishment for our sins.

Never have a nation’s opinion leaders been more fiercely devoted to its annihilation.

Our civilization is akin to one of those airplane disaster movies where someone says, “We’ve passed the point of no return,” just before one of the engines conks out, the fuel gauge is on empty and the pilot starts shouting, “Allahu Akbar.”

Will someone please notify the control tower?

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The Affordability Crisis Can Be Blamed on One Thing and One Thing Only — Government Intervention

BY:          Kyle Becker.

So, the Democrat Party has finally discovered the Affordability Crisis.

Just in time for the 2026 midterm elections, as fate would have it.

But the Democrats’ penchant for blowing trillions of dollars on waste, fraud, and abuse got us to this point. And their solution for the big government intervention that caused the problem?

More government intervention. This is the definition of madness, and it doesn’t take Albert Einstein to see where this is all heading.

Bernie Sanders is at the forefront of this socialist bait-and-switch. He recently proposed that Americans can “solve” the high cost of healthcare if they turn over all control of it to the government.

“An Uber driver shared with a staff member of mine how after Trump’s healthcare cuts, his monthly premiums increased 400%,” he claimed. “His copay went from $1 to up to $90 for each of his medicines. It’s not just this Uber driver. It’s happening all over America. We need Medicare for All.”

. . . Whenever the government intervenes in a sector of the economy, the price of everything skyrockets.

That’s not your imagination. It’s a real phenomenon. And it is why you can make a powerful argument that so much of what is becoming more expensive in America can be traced to a handful of toxic institutions that have been wreaking havoc throughout the so-called “progressive era.”

Look at what has happened to prices over the last quarter-century. From 2000 through 2025, hospital services rose about 281 percent. College tuition and fees increased 197 percent. Childcare climbed 159 percent. Medical-care services increased 147 percent. Housing rose 111 percent.

Meanwhile, televisions fell roughly 98 percent. Toys fell 74 percent. Computer software dropped 73 percent. Cellphone service declined 44 percent.

What distinguishes these groups? It certainly isn’t capitalism. They’re all part of a capitalist economy. The difference is that many of the things becoming brutally expensive are concentrated in sectors that government has spent decades trying to make “affordable.”

Compare that with American healthcare, higher education, and housing. Those sectors are swimming in subsidies, federally backed financing, regulations, mandates, licensing requirements, and restrictions on supply. Government and insurance companies stand between patients and medical providers, while Washington has spent decades flooding higher education with federally backed student loans. 

The federal government subsidizes mortgages even as state and local governments often make it extraordinarily difficult to build more homes. And we’re surprised prices went up?

Let’s take a look at what the Democrat Party disingenuously deems “Medicare for All.”

It’s like a doctor prescribing a poisoned patient more of the poison that got him sick in the first place.

Never mind that Obamacare was supposed to fix this problem. That has already been memory-holed, because every thinking adult knows it was sold on false promises.

The entire point was to get to Single-Payer, aka taxpayer-financed, socialist medicine.

You might recall that viral clip of Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) speaking to a Chicago healthcare rally in 2009.   She boasted that a public option “will put the private insurance industry out of business and lead to single-payer.”

Barack Obama himself wasn’t bashful about his true objective: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program… A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.”

But perhaps the pithiest synopsis came from former Sen. Barney Frank (D-MA), who said, “If we get a good public option, it could lead to single payer, and that’s the best way to reach single payer.”

Thus, we would be fools to believe that the Democrat Party actually wants the healthcare market to succeed through lowering costs and offering patients choice.

The socialist Democrats’ damage to the market isn’t limited to the healthcare sector, however. 

This is where Austrian economics provides a useful explanation. Economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek understood that prices are information. They communicate scarcity, demand, and production costs across millions of people who could never coordinate their decisions directly.

Hayek’s famous critique of the “pretense of knowledge” was aimed at the conceit that central planners can possess enough information to rationally manage something as complicated as an economy. A bureaucrat may have statistics and models, but he cannot possess the constantly changing knowledge distributed among hundreds of millions of consumers, workers and businesses.

Government nevertheless keeps pretending that it does. Washington subsidizes demand, guarantees loans, restricts supply, regulates prices and mandates benefits. The Federal Reserve manipulates perhaps the most important price in the economy: the price of money itself.

People then respond rationally to distorted information. This can produce what Austrian economists describe as a cluster of errors. Individual mistakes occur constantly in markets. But when government or a central bank systematically distorts a signal used across an entire economy, millions of people can make similar mistakes simultaneously because they’re responding to the same artificial incentives.

Housing is an obvious example. Make mortgages artificially cheap, subsidize borrowing, and pump credit into the economy while local governments restrict construction through zoning and permitting. More money chases a constrained number of houses, and prices rise. Washington then declares a housing affordability crisis and proposes building more Section 8 housing.

Over time, the entire economy gets dragged down, and urban areas start to resemble Soviet-era Eastern Europe.

Higher education is another example. Washington wanted to make college affordable, so it expanded grants and federally supported student lending. Universities discovered that their customers could borrow increasingly large amounts of government-backed money, and tuition marched upward.

The deeper historical problem goes back more than a century. Woodrow Wilson’s era gave America both the Federal Reserve and the modern federal income tax. Those institutions supplied the monetary and fiscal machinery that allowed the federal government to grow far beyond anything previous generations had experienced.

The dollar has since lost roughly 97 percent of its purchasing power. Americans have become so accustomed to permanent inflation that the Federal Reserve describes prices rising approximately 2 percent every year as “price stability.”

This monetary degradation sits beneath the entire affordability debate. Americans earn, save, and retire on dollars whose purchasing power continually declines, while artificially cheap credit can inflate assets such as housing.

The New Deal and Great Society then accelerated the growth of the administrative state, creating another problem: Bureaucracies have their own incentives.

A private business that continually fails its customers can disappear. A government agency that fails can use the persistence of the problem as an argument for a larger budget. If homelessness gets worse, the homelessness bureaucracy needs more funding. If education deteriorates, education agencies need more resources. If health-care costs increase, government health programs need to expand.

There is a perverse incentive built into this arrangement: Actually solving a problem can weaken the institutional justification for the people being paid to solve it. Over time, government programs also develop their own constituencies — bureaucrats, contractors, advocacy groups and beneficiaries — with a vested interest in keeping the machinery running.

That is the vicious cycle now sitting at the center of the Democrat Party’s affordability agenda. Eventually, nobody remembers what the market looked like before Washington began “fixing” it.

This is why the Democratic response to the affordability crisis is so fundamentally wrong. They are presenting government intervention as the antidote to a problem that has become most severe in some of the most heavily manipulated sectors of the economy.

When government intervention produces a disaster, the answer is invariably another intervention designed to fix the consequences of the first one. And when that intervention produces another set of distortions, Washington discovers yet another crisis requiring another government solution.

That isn’t a way out of the affordability crisis. It is the mechanism by which the cycle perpetuates itself.

Washington has been trying to “help” make Americans’ lives more affordable for generations.

Judging by the bill, it might be time to ask Washington to “stop helping.”

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‘It Can’t Happen Here’? Are You Sure?

Why do young people love communism so much nowadays?

BY:          John F. Gaski, The American Thinker (August 27, 2026).

Much of the American commentariat remains somewhat mystified at the number of young countrymen who can be so dissatisfied with their personal economic circumstances that they turn to discredited socialism.  Lately, understanding of this phenomenon is making some inroads, but there remains a need to pull the diverse causal pieces together into a coherent gestalt. 

First, is it not exasperating to hear the disaffected masses claim that the U.S. economy is not working, at least not for them?  Such narcissism by the “entitlement” culture!  The appropriate rhetorical rebuttal question to that posture is, then why is it working just fine for so many others?

In fact, the U.S. economy is presently very strong, per the standard metrics.  We are at full employment, formally defined as about 4 percent unemployed.  Macroeconomic growth is enduring and stable.  Taxes are lower, especially for those dependent on tips, overtime, or Social Security.  Real incomes, which declined under Biden, are rising (as they also did in Trump’s first term).

The main negative for the consumer is that inflation is still too high, but it is truly amusing to hear Democrats and their socialist fellow travelers complain about “affordability.”  Most of the abnormal surge in consumer prices in recent years is attributable to the 22-percent cumulative increase during the Biden years.  Imagine how much lower retail prices would be if we could subtract out that 22 percent and the 49-percent rise that occurred during Jimmy Carter’s term!  (Inflation has actually been relatively tame during Trump’s 5.5 years in office, as it was under Obama, Clinton, and G.W. Bush.  As Casey Stengel once said, “you can look it up.”)

So, a fair conclusion from the preceding is that the economic losers may largely have themselves to blame.  The problem is not the overall U.S. economy.  Data recently publicized by pollster Nate Silver reveals the diagnosis that those losers are mostly dim-witted liberal Democrat-socialists who chose college majors with little market value, leading to their own low incomes. 

To further reinforce where fault lies, demographic statistics confirm how remarkably easy it is to avoid poverty in this country.  You need to do only three things — finish high school (even a bad one), avoid having a criminal record, and avoid becoming addicted to drugs or alcohol — and your chances of living in poverty in the U.S. are close to zero.  (There are other sets of three sufficient conditions, including factors such as “come from a two-parent household.”)  Apparently, many American youths cannot surmount the low hurdles.  Corollary blame in this regard, nevertheless, lies with the liberal Democrats who (1) destroyed the quality of American public schools, (2) have been soft on crime, and (3) have glorified substance abuse.  Coincidence? 

The role of liberal Democrat ideology and policy in creating an economically illiterate cohort should not be overlooked.  Reflect again on the terrible public schools tolerated in the blue cities and states, co-mismanaged by the leftist-politicized teachers’ unions.  The propagandized content of leftist ideology has also surely contributed to the proliferation of decrepit college majors such as gender studies, fine arts, and even sociology that hamstring their grads in the job market. 

Moreover, as well as the U.S. economy is performing now, it could be operating even closer to the optimum if not for misguided and incompetent macroeconomic interference by the left-liberal-Dem-socialist camp whenever they have held dominant power, which has produced over-regulation; excessive inflation; and massive federal debt, inducing high interest rates.  (Readers will be aware that Republicans and conservatives are not economically pure, only less guilty based on the objective record.  Do not believe the misleading claim that U.S. economic growth is stronger when Democrats are in the White House.  See Gaski, City Journal, May 30, 2016.)  Again, the present difficult straits of some of our citizens are not the fault of American capitalism.  They are instead the result of individuals themselves combined with the left’s sabotage. 

The extant state is almost as if it has gone according to plan.  A deconstruction of the American left’s playbook, circa 1970 at the beginning of its subversion campaign:

First, take over the universities for indoctrination and, in turn, to undermine our disciples’ economic prospects.  Then we infiltrate elementary and high schools to lower academic standards and dumb down the populace more generally, to its economic detriment.  At the same time, we dispense relentless radical propaganda to brainwash America’s youth.  Still, we need to dumb them down enough to render them pliable to the message — and we do need widespread economic failure to make the victims amenable to persuasion by a failed system such as socialism.  In short, we ruin people’s economic lives and reinforce the effect through false propaganda to keep them on track for failure.  Dumb them down enough, and they won’t even recognize that socialism is communism because the latter is socialism’s ultimate aim.  Onward the revolution!

(Even leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America have been publicly exposed for ignorance of what socialism is!) 

An implausible conspiracy theory?  Actually, Cloward, Piven, and Alinsky had already said this quiet part out loud contemporaneously, and a concrete manifestation is readily identifiable: By destroying the quality of inner-city schools (all run by liberal Democrats) in particular, along with glorifying the crime and drug culture while incentivizing single-parent households, the American leftist–Dem-socialist side has undermined black opportunity enough to create a permanently frustrated and Democrat-loyal underclass.  The cause-and-effect relation is so transparent that it could hardly have been unintentional! 

Now they transfer the sinister methodology to the broader population.  The lib-Dem left undercuts economic advancement for a large subset of the U.S. population while subjecting them to socialist propaganda, which is absorbed only because the left had first handicapped the audience cognitively.  This answers the prevailing question of how so many Americans can succumb to the phony lure of the failed ideology of socialism.  Simply, they were manipulated into that dead-end position by the Dems’ multi-pronged attack.  Yes, the immediate cause is indeed abject ignorance by a segment of the public, but the ignorant have received a devious negative assist through the crippling influence of leftist ideology at the micro and macro levels.  The left’s program: Wreck their schools, brainwash them, and subvert their economic environment; then we’ve got them where we want them. 

Finally, to those who are falsely confident that “it can’t happen here” — i.e., that the socialists or communists cannot take over America — be aware that we now have a growing socialist-amenable voting bloc that is too dumbed-down to (1) see through the shallow deceptions of the lib-Dem-socialist scheme; (2) recognize that their problems are not the result of capitalism, but rather due to their own leftist politics excessively imposed on that system; or (3) rightfully blame the real politico-economic perps who caused their problems.  As a result, (4) they will likely vote the guilty, destructive parties into power. 

Can’t happen here?  Note also that the Dems can count on an absolute floor of about 48 percent of the popular vote in national elections.  Even Kamala Harris got 48.3 percent, so how many (or how few) more votes does today’s socialist-controlled Democrat party need to guarantee a win?  Another way of looking at it: Suppose the floor for the current socialist-Democrat amalgam is considerably lower — say, 40 percent.  Add in millions of illegal votes from non-citizens and other creative Dem vote-counting, and this country truly could be on the verge of a Dem-socialist (therefore communist) takeover.  (Unfortunately, the best scientific estimate of non-citizens voting in our national elections is about 3 million — as of 2008–10!  See Richman et al., Electoral Studies, 2014.)  Consider also that the Dems now proclaim that they will do anything to win. 

Be afraid; be very afraid.  Sorry to break the news this way.  Pleasant dreams, comrades. 

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Shall we be a socialist paradise like France?

Let’s take a look at what France is actually like.

BY:          Burton Abrams, The American Thinker (September 14, 2026).

The Democrat party and its members from the Democratic Socialists of America propose a wide range of policies alleged to make America more affordable.  Based on an August 2026 Reuters/Ipsos poll, the Democrats are gaining traction, as a slight majority of those polled believe that Democrats have a better economic program than the Republican party. 

If adopted, would Democrat policies succeed?  Fortunately, we have France, a particularly good country to study, as it checks almost all the Democrats’ boxes.  Studying France can give us a clearer picture of what the Democrat party is trying to sell us and the inconsistency between their goals and likely outcomes.

France has everything Democrats want: a Green New Deal, essentially free public universities (trivial amounts of tuition) through Master’s degrees, free health care for all citizens, open borders per E.U. arrangements, a higher national minimum wage.

France owns — or at least holds controlling interest or minority stakes in — many domestic enterprises: electricity/nuclear, rail, urban transit, airlines, defense contractors, among others.  France taxes the rich more (49 percent is its top income tax bracket versus 37 percent in the U.S.), but this isn’t enough for the government’s spending appetite.  France imposes a Value Added Tax that amounts to a national sales tax.  It varies by categories but reaches a high of 20 percent.

Despite all the taxes, France still has a major budget deficit.

How does France’s economy compare to that of the U.S.?  Is it more affordable there?  If you believe that the government knows better than you on how to spend your money, you’ll like France.  The French government spends 57 percent of its nation’s income.  In the U.S., the number is 34 percent as of December 2025.

How does the American Dream of home ownership play in France?  Households owning primary residences are 57.6 percent in France, 65 percent in the U.S. Average square footage of houses in the U.S. is 2,296; in France, it is 1,206.  So Americans are more likely to own a residence, and a much larger one — about 90 percent larger.

France’s socialist policies have contributed to its national output per capita being substantially lower than in the U.S.  Giving away free things tends to do that.  U.S. GDP per capita in 2025 was $90,026, whereas France’s was $48,986.  France’s unemployment rate is hovering above 8 percent, whereas the U.S. unemployment rate is approximately 4.1 percent.  And if you are in favor of the Green New Deal and public ownership or control of the energy sector, note that the gasoline price is running above $9 per gallon in France.  Electricity rates are higher as well, and air-conditioning is much rarer. 

Think poverty is absent in France?  Think again.  Using France’s own definition of poverty, less than 60 percent of the national median income, it reports an overall poverty rate of 16.3 percent.  The percentage of immigrants in poverty is 32.8, and for immigrants born in Africa, it is 39.7 percent.

This century, the U.S. annual real GDP growth rate has been 2.2 percent; France’s has been 1.36 percent.  Since 2000, the U.S. real GDP has grown 76 percent.  France has grown 41 percent.  Small differences in growth rates add up to big differences in outcomes over time. 

Any objective economist would end this by noting that the choice of an economic system is still ultimately an individual value judgment.  But following socialist France in lowering U.S. national income, lowering economic growth, raising unemployment, making the American Dream harder to achieve, and giving a substantially greater share of our income to government to spend without the benefit of good French bread is for me a no-brainer.  Non, merci!

GFK

“The deeds you do may be the only sermon some persons will hear today.”

–St. Francis Of Assisi.

Are public schools unconstitutional? A provocative question, to be sure. But the thought that public schools might well be unconstitutional should not be summarily dismissed.

“Education consists mostly in speech, and parents have a right under the First Amendment to exercise authority over what their children hear.”

–Columbia University School of Law professor Philip Hamburger.

Professor Hamburger argues that the U.S. public school system violates the Constitution’s First Amendment.  Forcing families to accept government messaging — or pay a steep price to escape it — amounts to unconstitutional pressure.

In Virginia, for example, the State enforces a compulsory mandate of education, but only funds public schools.  This is viewpoint discrimination, not a neutral funding decision. Virginia mandates educational speech, then funds only the government’s perspective and withholds support from any other.  That arrangement fails strict scrutiny.  The State has no compelling interest in government-run education specifically, as opposed to education generally, and less-restrictive alternatives exist.  The government could still fund education with taxpayer dollars, for example, while allowing the money to follow the child to the school or program that aligns with the family’s values.

Universal school choice resolves the constitutional problem while preserving public support for education. States can keep their compulsory-education laws and continue to provide education with taxpayer funding.  The difference is that families, not the State, would direct that money to the schools or programs that best align with their values — public, private, religious or home-based.  Funding would follow the child rather than force every family to be indoctrinated in a single government viewpoint.

This approach respects free speech.  Parents who prefer the public system’s messaging can remain there.  Parents who do not can exit without financial penalty.  Every child still receives an education funded by the public, and no family is compelled to underwrite or accept speech it rejects for its own children.  Force gives way to freedom.

GFK