Commentary: President Joe Biden Has Put America in a Mess

Joe Biden

The State of the Union speech is on March 7, and with it comes a chance for Republicans to start setting the 2024 presidential campaign agenda. What should the Republican who replies to Biden’s speech say?

Probably the central point to keep in mind is that Biden may not be the candidate by the time the election rolls around, which means criticism of the last four years should be aimed at the Democrat Party itself at least as much as at Biden.

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Commentary: Obama’s CIA Asked Foreign Intel Agencies to Spy on Trump Campaign

Obama CIA

The revelation that the U.S. intelligence community, under the Obama administration, sought the assistance of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to surveil Donald Trump’s associates before the 2016 election is a chilling reminder of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to protect its interests and challenge its adversaries. (The Five Eyes countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) This bombshell, reported by a team of independent journalists, exposes a dark chapter in American political history, where foreign intelligence services were reportedly mobilized against a presidential candidate.

The alleged operation against Trump and his associates, which predates the official start of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, is a stark example of political weaponization of intelligence. The involvement of foreign allies in surveilling American citizens under the pretext of national security raises serious questions about the integrity of our democratic processes and the autonomy of our nation’s intelligence operations.

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Commentary: The Pipe Bombs Before January 6 Is a Capital Mystery That Doesn’t Add Up

The newly disclosed video shows a dark SUV pulling up to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., at 9:44 a.m. on Jan. 6, 2021. It sits for several minutes until a uniformed man with a bomb-sniffing dog enters from the right and steps up to the vehicle. The driver complies with his command, the dog sniffs inside and outside the car which is soon allowed to enter the parking garage. The man and his dog exit back to the right.

This scene is unremarkable except for one detail: The uniformed man and his trained canine came within a few feet of where a plainclothes Capitol Police officer would soon discover a pipe bomb that had been planted there the night before. The bomb, which the FBI has described as viable and capable of inflicting serious injury, along with a similar one found at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, would appear to be the most overt act of violence perpetrated on Jan. 6.

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Commentary: The Way Another Newsom Recall Effort Helps America

Gavin Newsom Meeting

California isn’t as bad as millions of people outside the state have been led to believe. No, not every downtown street is awash in homeless drug addicts, schizophrenics, and predators. No, not every retail shopping district has crumbled under the onslaught of brazen shoplifters and smash-and-grab gangs. And despite almost every major “news” network in the nation pretending that an allegedly unprecedented onslaught of bomb cyclones is literally washing the entire state into the Pacific Ocean, overall California still has the best weather in the world.

Nonetheless, California is broken. Even if you aren’t one of the millions of Californians who doesn’t have to step over syringes and feces day after day merely to walk your children to school or get to work and back, and even if you aren’t one of the hundreds of thousands of business owners who no longer has a business or one of their employees who no longer has a job, California is broken.

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Commentary: Biden’s Half-Hearted Border Control Pitch

Joe Biden

There are rumors—likely trial balloons—that Joe Biden is about to get serious about controlling the border. Along with inflation and our country’s repeated humiliations on the global stage, the border debacle is one of the major sources of Biden’s persistent unpopularity.

He tried to use the border situation as leverage in negotiations with congressional Republicans over Ukraine funding by pretending he could not close the border until the funding bill passed. This is false, as this authority was the basis of Trump’s “Muslim Ban,” which was upheld by the Supreme Court.

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Commentary: For Electricity, Americans Deserve More Choices

Electric Grid

Amid a polarizing presidential election, areas of common ground are rare, especially around energy. President Joe Biden has labeled climate change as “the only existential threat humanity faces,” and outlined an agenda to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Meanwhile, his would-be Republican challengers have pledged a different course, with the frontrunning campaign of former President Donald Trump pledging to “maximize fossil fuel production” and roll back funding for Biden’s landmark 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. 

A step back from the daily partisan back-and-forth reveals an idea with something for everyone to support: increasing choice when it comes to where consumers get their energy. A commitment to freedom and creating our own destinies is quintessentially American. Yet most of our citizens have zero control over their power provider and the cost of their energy, and very few politicians on either side of the aisle say anything about it. 

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Commentary: Starship Troopers is Not a Satire

Starship Troopers / Sony Pictures

The militaristic, quasi-authoritarian society portrayed in the 1997 science fiction film Starship Troopers is obviously superior to our contemporary gay liberal “democracy.” For this reason, the film fails as satire. The film’s supposed attempt to lampoon the audience’s instinctual gravitation towards strength, beauty, and nobility backfires.

Two and a half decades later, Starship Troopers continues to reveal how moralistic, stupid, and tasteless the modern left really is. Liberals cannot make good liberal art. In fact, such a thing does not exist. All liberal art, at its core, is ham-handed propaganda. When leftists do make good art, it is in spite of their ideological commitments, not because of them.

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Commentary: ‘Russia Forever’ Is an Anatomy of a Left-Wing Obsession

The more candidate Trump in 2016 trolled the Clinton campaign (e.g., “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press”), the more the irate left bought into hysterical conspiracy theories.

Finally, the left became completely unhinged after the 2016 victory. An Obama-era Pentagon lawyer published an essay exploring the chance for a military coup. Retired lieutenant colonels called for a Pentagon intervention. Retired four-stars could not decide whether he was Hitler-like, Mussolini, or the architect of Auschwitz. Celebrities competed to find the most savage image of eliminating Trump—whether by combustion, incineration, decapitation, lethal shooting, or stabbing.

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Commentary: President Trump, NATO, and ‘Swamp Talk’

Donald Trump in South Carolina

The hysteria in response to President Trump’s comment about NATO offers a great insight into Swamp Talk™. It’s how swamp creatures use their media dominance to gaslight Americans into voting for Democrats in spite of always disastrous results. They frighten voters into opposing candidates like President Trump, who want to make America stronger, safer, more prosperous, and free.

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Commentary: The Cancelled Black Harvard Professor Who Found No Racial Bias in Police Shootings

Roland Fryer Junior

Unless you have lived under a rock for the last four years, you will be very familiar with the claim that black Americans are disproportionately victims of police shootings compared with their white counterparts.

But a nearly eight-year-old study challenging this narrative is enjoying renewed attention thanks to a recent high-profile interview of the study’s author, African American economist Roland Fryer, by journalist Bari Weiss of The Free Press.

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Commentary: Foreign Cash Could Be the Culprit Turning Our Kids into Terrorist Sympathizers

Texas A&M

Shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, a Harvard CAPS-Harris X poll found that 48 percent of Americans ages 18-24 supported Hamas over Israel. This is in direct contrast to 95 percent of Americans 65 years of age and older who sided with Israel. This stark difference begs the question: why do half of young Americans support a group that has been designated by the State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization since October 1997? Our ongoing fight for transparency suggests at least some of the answers lie in Qatar’s pocketbooks.

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Commentary: Solving the Literacy Crisis

Reading

Learning to read is trending. The most fundamental of K-12 subjects is fueling YouTube videos and feature stories in People magazine and is now the subject of a report from Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Let’s hope the renewed interest spreads, because a shocking proportion of American children cannot read, and the data have profound implications for these children’s futures—and the entire criminal justice system.

Oliver James is the former convict who announced on social media that he taught himself to read as an adult, which sparked media coverage on how learning to read changed his life. As a student, James had been passed along from grade to grade without learning this basic skill.

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Commentary: Illegal Immigration Creates a New Slave Caste

Farm Workers

Belatedly, the southern border crisis is getting the attention it deserves.

There’s wall-to-wall coverage in the legacy and conservative press, independent documentaries proliferating on the subject, a Tucker Carlson interview with Bret Weinstein attracting over 15 million views on X, and President Joe Biden blaming Trump for a failed bill that involved the border crisis.

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Commentary: Endless Lawfare Against Trump is Driven by Marxism and Fear

Donald Trump

The latest in Democrat lawfare against President Trump is nothing more than a disgusting sham. The “ruling” in the New York civil trial, where a leftist judge, who has allegedly donated exclusively to Democrats, told Trump, at the behest of a state Attorney General whose sole purpose is to be a “real pain in the ass,” that he must pay $355 million and not do business in the state for three years as punishment for a made-up “crime,” is nothing short of totalitarian.

It has been argued by many as to why the case is meritless, namely because there was no crime committed and no damaged entity, as the banks who loaned Trump money did it happily on their own and were paid back. They assessed Trump’s net worth independently, which is apparently standard practice in the New York State real estate market.

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Commentary: States Must Act Now to Save Rural Lives from Fentanyl Crisis

Heidi Heitkamp

Across rural America, the expanding crisis of fentanyl-fueled overdoses is ravaging a generation. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fentanyl deaths in the U.S. have tripled since 2016, and initial data from 2022 indicates that synthetic opioids cause about 90% of all opioid overdose deaths – which translates to nearly 75,000 Americans killed in that year alone. Rural communities, where hundreds of hospitals have already closed and more are on the chopping block, are bearing the additional weight of overdoses. We need states to do more to protect Americans and ensure access to all overdose reversal agents that have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Hidden in counterfeit prescription pharmaceuticals like Adderall, Xanax, and Oxycontin, it’s so lethal that just two milligrams, the size of a pencil tip, can kill. 

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Commentary: Liberals Want Americans to House Illegal Immigrants

Illegal Immigrants

The Office of Global Michigan is encouraging “everyday Americans” to volunteer to house illegal immigrants and “make a difference by welcoming refugees from around the world.”

“Volunteers [are] needed” to “support refugee resettlement efforts in Michigan,” says the office’s website, which was recently launched by the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Development.

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Commentary: Voters Want China Out of American Farmland

China Farmland

Americans firmly reject the Chinese agenda of acquiring U.S. assets, especially vital strategic ones like American farmland. Battleground polling reveals that this issue provides an opportunity for patriotic populist candidates to protect the heartland, provide a stark contrast vs. the leftist big business globalists, and reap substantial political benefits in November’s elections.

Of course, Chinese companies and nationals buy substantial real estate across the board in America, not just farmland. According to National Association of Realtors data, China remains by far the largest source of foreign purchases of U.S. homes. Last year, the Chinese bought $13.6 billion in American homes, more than double the $6.1 billion they spent the year before.

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Commentary: The Pandemic Treaty That Won’t Prevent a Pandemic

World Health Organization

If a “pandemic treaty” fails to account for the dismal international response to COVID-19 and isn’t focused on preventing future pandemics, is it really a “pandemic treaty”? Yet that’s the current state of the draft “pandemic treaty” being negotiated under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO).

The failures of the international health system’s response to COVID are well-established. The People’s Republic of China failed to inform the international community of the outbreak in a timely manner as required by the International Health Regulations – a provision established because of Beijing’s cover-up of the 2002 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). China mischaracterized COVID-19 saying that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission—a deadly lie that the WHO parroted unquestioningly.

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Commentary: Non-Citizens Have Been Voting Since 2008

Why would a president running for reelection refuse to meet with the Speaker of the House to discuss a national crisis that most voters blame on the president himself? This would be regarded as bizarre behavior under any circumstances, but it’s particularly perverse considering that the crisis in question is illegal immigration — the signature issue of Biden’s probable challenger in November. Moreover, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, 63 percent of the voters disapprove of the way he has handled immigration. Yet Biden refuses to discuss the problem. It’s almost as if he thinks it somehow works to his advantage.

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Julie Kelly Commentary: Navalny’s Death Demonstrates Selective Outrage over Political Prisoners

Joe Biden wasted no time before shuffling to a White House podium last Friday to denounce the sudden death of Alexey Navalny, the celebrated anti-Kremlin activist.

According to Russian officials, Navalny, 47, lost consciousness after taking a walk at the Arctic penal colony where he had been serving a 19-year prison sentence for allegedly inciting “extremist” activities and other offenses. An outspoken foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Navalny won fans around the world including Hollywood celebrities and government leaders of all political persuasions.

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Commentary: Chronically Absent Students Need an Alternative

Empty Chairs

It’s no secret that chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed since the pandemic. As The 74s Linda Jacobson writes, a new analysis of federal data released in late 2023 shows the problem may be even worse than previously understood.

The report from Johns Hopkins University shows that two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme chronic absenteeism rates during the 2021-22 school year—more than double the rate in 2017-18. (Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.)

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Commentary: The Democrats’ Coming ‘September Switcheroo’ to Bench Biden and Nominate Michelle

Michelle Obama

President Biden’s poll numbers seem set in quicksand. Now the special counsel’s justification for not recommending charges against Biden for having “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” is damning: Biden’s memory has such “significant limitations” that the special counsel believed he could not convince a jury that Biden has a “mental state of willfulness” that a serious felony (or, presumably, serving as president) requires. Cue the campaign commercials.

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Commentary: Progressives’ Cunning Blueprint to Possess the Levers of State Power

by Joshua Bandoch   Illinois public-sector unions are perfecting and promulgating a model for subjugating Americans to union interests. Their model has three steps: control the kids, control politicians and control the law. It’s highly effective, and toxic to the future of any state that embraces it. Kids are at the heart of Illinois unions’ domination strategy. After all, in Animal Farm, Napoleon the pig (representing Josef Stalin) says, “education of the young was more important than anything that could be done for those who were already grown up.” Illinois strives to be avant-garde in controlling kids through forced consumption of pro-union propaganda in schools. Behold House Bill 4417, in many ways the logical consequence of years of union domination. This bill, which is currently working its way through Illinois’ House of Representatives, would force all public high schools to “designate and observe ‘Workplace Readiness Week.’” This innocuous-sounding bill is sinister. Rather than preparing high school students to communicate professionally or interview successfully, students would be forced to consume information on the right to organize a union. Schools can even spread this propaganda “during special events after regular school hours.” Perhaps the next step will be testing students on their ability to regurgitate…

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The Soros Empire Expands Its Reach into Media with Latest Radio Acquisition

Radio Studio

Earlier this month, the investment firm founded by George Soros acquired over $400 million worth of debt owed by the nation’s second-largest radio network in a ploy to gain a stake in the media conglomerate, the latest in a series of media-related moves made by organizations tied to Soros.

Soros Fund Management has acquired over $400 million worth of debt owed by Audacy, the nation’s second-largest network of radio stations, bankruptcy filings show. Soros and entities linked to him have previously poured money into local news operations, funded the acquisition of newspapers, purchased other radio stations and bankrolled pro-Democrat news websites.

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Commentary: The Pandemic Years Accelerated Gen Z’s Departure from the Institutional Left

Young Conservatives

The pandemic years have all but disappeared from mainstream political discourse, which has now hinged onto the nebulous goal of “preserving democracy”.

Despite representing one of the most pivotal Black Swan events in modern history – maybe even in human history – the pandemic and its impact on culture has been relegated to an occasional footnote in modern politics.

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Commentary: More Cows Needed to Reverse Climate Change, Experts Say

Cows

In a little-noticed presentation on Dec. 9, 2023, at COP28 in Dubai, a panel of soil experts presented the case for cows as climate allies, not gas-spewing destroyers. The event, titled “Conscious Livestock Rearing and Soil Health,” discussed “animal rearing’s impact on soil health, and its place as a part of the climate solution.” Contrary to the anti-cow cacophony of the climate crisis crowd, these experts explained the vital role ruminants like cows play in nourishing and rebuilding precious soils. It turns out, grazing cows sequester massive amounts of carbon.

On the panel of experts was Seth J. Itzkan, co-founder of SOIL4Climate, Inc., a nonprofit that “promotes soil restoration as a climate solution,” and a man akin to a Lorax for the cows.

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Commentary: Increasing Security Along the Southern Border to Illegal Immigration Is Top Priority to Americans

Illegal Immigrants

With a tidal wave of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border under President Biden daily and Congress locked in a battle over border security, zealots pushing open borders are becoming increasingly out of touch with the American people.

Under Biden’s reckless Open Borders agenda, nine million illegals have entered the country through the southern border, including 1.8+ million who escaped Border Patrol and are presumably living in the U.S. without documentation.

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Commentary: Homeschooling Isn’t What I Expected It to Be

Homeschooling Child

I’ve heard it said, “I was a great parent before I had kids.” The same can be said of being a homeschooling parent.

Homeschooling circles are full of idealistic moms and dads who often have very high standards for themselves and their children. Certainly, having strong ideals can work as a guide and benchmark for navigating what can be a very challenging endeavor. However, these high standards can also backfire and leave even the best of us feeling like failures.

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Commentary: Progressive Policies are Designed for Civilizational Suicide

Biden UN

We all understand, in the timeless words of the poet Robert Burns, that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Most Americans are accustomed to assessing the various failed initiatives of our country’s leaders as well-intended actions that turned out badly. The Vietnam, Afghan, and Iraq wars, the 2008 financial meltdown, and the COVID pandemic overreaction, all in hindsight, can be viewed as simply the unfolding of human stupidity in the contingency of time.

In accordance, it is understandable that many are inclined to believe that our country’s current serious problems are, once again, merely the failed result of well-intentioned policies. But what if, we ask, seemingly fumbled programs were intended to be the initial throes of civilizational suicide? What if apparent missteps were actually directed at the purposeful destruction of a prosperous, free, safe, and secure society?

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Commentary: Congress Must Fight Modern Day Slavery

Sad Person

On February 13, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act with a vote of 414-11. The bipartisan legislation, authored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), will reauthorize the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 – which expired in 2021 – and provide approximately $1 billion in funding over five years for programs that combat the scourge of human trafficking.

Among the measures included in the comprehensive legislation are educational grants to provide situational awareness training and prevention for elementary and secondary students; funding reauthorization for the International Megan’s Law and Angel Watch programs; and authorization for programs that support survivors’ employment, housing, and education.

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Commentary: Biden Gaslights America on the Economy

Biden Speaking

Joe Biden is gaslighting America on the economy. His administration is trying to oversell what has underperformed for several reasons: First, the economy is the one issue that affects most Americans most significantly. Second, Biden is doing worse on virtually every other issue. Finally, time is short: the economy is about to get worse, and the election is close. The administration’s strategy is to get Americans to believe what they hear and doubt what they see.

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Commentary: Biden Staffer Who Mishandled China, Iran Secrets Retains High-Security Pentagon Job

While Special Counsel Robert K. Hur has raised the issue of mental deterioration in explaining why he declined to prosecute 81-year-old Joe Biden for illegal retention and sharing of classified documents, the president chose another rationale to declare himself not culpable: He shifted the blame to the staffers who boxed up his records as he left the vice president’s office in 2017.

At a press conference hastily assembled after the report’s release, Biden said he assumed his aides had shipped “all” the documents to the National Archives in College Park, Md. “I wish I had paid more attention to how the documents were being moved and where,” he said. “I thought they were being moved to the Archives. I thought all of it was being moved [there].”

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Commentary: Democrats are Hitting the Panic Button over Biden’s Mental Fitness

Joe Biden

In 1979, when President Jimmy Carter delivered his infamous “malaise” speech in which he laid out all the daunting challenges facing our nation, the president said that America was suffering from a “crisis of confidence.”

Fast-forward 45 years and our country is once again facing a crisis of confidence, this time under the failed leadership of President Joe Biden.

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Commentary: The Establishment Still Doesn’t Get Trump

Trump Speaking

A few weeks ago, a “Morning Joe” panel concluded that if Donald Trump were to become the Republican nominee (spoiler alert: he will), Republicans will lose in the fall. This is by no means a unique sentiment – former House Speaker Paul Ryan expressing this idea here, journalist Bernard Goldberg wondering if Trump is trying to lose here, and so forth.

As I read these analyses, I wonder if I’ve somehow been transported back to 2016, when such takes were de rigueur. Here in 2024, we know that Donald Trump won in 2016 and came close to winning in 2020. He carried Republican senators across the finish line in both years, and the GOP gained House seats in 2020, much to the surprise of most election analysts. And, at a comparable time in the campaign cycle when he trailed Hillary Clinton by 4.5 points in the RCP Average and Joe Biden by 5.6 points, Trump actually leads Biden by 1.9 points in national polling.

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Commentary: Medicine Now Diagnoses the Non-White ‘Oppressed’ with an Oppressive Case of ‘Weathering’

Doctor Patient

In 1986, an upstart public health researcher named Arline Geronimus challenged the conventional wisdom that condemned the alarming rise of inner-city teen pregnancies. While activist minister Jesse Jackson and health care leaders were decrying the crisis of “babies having babies” as a ghetto pathology, Geronimus contended that teenage pregnancy was a rational response to urban poverty where low-income black people have fewer healthy years before the onset of heart problems, diabetes, and other chronic conditions.

Although Geronimus’ claims gained little traction at the time, the concept she pioneered – “weathering” – eventually became a foundation for the social justice ideology that is now upending medicine and social policy. She has stated in interviews and in her writings that the term “weathering” was intended to evoke the idea of erosion and resilience.

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Commentary: The Meaning of Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is—oddly perhaps—a day I have long associated with bushfires, better known in the American hemisphere as wildfires.

I come from the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, where on Ash Wednesday in 1983, catastrophic bushfires, driven by 70-mph winds and fueled by years of drought-ravaged eucalyptus forest, tragically claimed 28 lives. In the neighboring state of Victoria, even more lives were lost under similar conditions. In total, 75 Australians perished and 3,000 homes were destroyed in what were the nation’s deadliest bushfires up to that point.

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Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: Do Leftists Now Believe Leftism Doesn’t Work?

It is hard to destroy a naturally beautiful city like San Francisco, with ideal weather and stunning infrastructure inherited from far better earlier generations.

Yet San Francisco continues its much-publicized and self-inflicted doom loop. The productive classes still flee the increasingly crime-ridden city and its self-induced pathologies. The city is eroding not because of the doomsayers and not because of what people say about San Francisco, but because of what San Franciscans have done to San Francisco.

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Commentary: Free Market Approach Will Protect Our Healthcare System

doc nurse senior patient

As a campus ambassador at the University of Tennessee for two prominent non-profit conservative political organizations, the Leadership Institute and Turning Point USA, I’ve come to understand the complexities of health care, both as a public policy issue and as an industry. One critical aspect of health care policy that demands our attention nationwide is the protection of pharmacy benefits, a lifeline for many Americans when it comes to accessing essential prescription medications. As a student, I want to ensure we are preserving free market principles in our health care system for years to come.

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Commentary: Alternatives to Wind and Solar Energy

Power plant

If the delusional but dead serious demands coming out of the international climate crisis community are to be believed, and as documented in the earlier two segments of this report, achieving universal energy security in the world will require wind energy capacity to increase by a factor of 60, while solar capacity increases by a factor of 100. The mix between wind and solar can vary, of course, but the required overall increase is indisputable. As noted in Part One of this report, that would be a very best-case scenario, where extraordinary improvements in energy efficiency meant that total energy production worldwide would only have to increase to 1,000 exajoules per year, from an estimated 600 exajoules in 2022.

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