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Latest Articles: Opinions/Editorials
Ominous Parallels Reconsidered
Post Date: 2023-02-03 15:17:58 by Charles_Byrd
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Forty years ago, I reviewed Leonard Peikoff’s Ominous Parallels very negatively, and with one exception, of which the less said, the better, this proved to be the most controversial review I have ever written. Perhaps it is time for a second look. In what follows, I’ll discuss some of the book’s main points and then offer a few critical remarks. The philosopher Leonard Peikoff was a member of Ayn Rand’s inner circle, and she considered him her intellectual heir. He has been the guiding light of the “official” Objectivist organization, the Ayn Rand Institute, since its inception. His aim in Ominous Parallels is to interpret Nazism from the standpoint of ...
Our System Has a Trust Deficit (And For Good Reason)
Post Date: 2023-02-02 23:21:53 by Charles_Byrd
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Trust is apparently an extremely elusive concept to implement. If you read The New York Times or Washington Post, you are told not to trust Fox News nor Newsmax nor OANN. If you listen to Fox News you are told not to trust the NYT nor WaPo nor CNN nor MSNBC. And they all seem to have derisive terminology they label each other while asserting that their label is the factual one. And that, you can trust. Democrats tell you to distrust Republicans. Republicans tell you to distrust Democrats. Republicans tell you to not trust any judge or bureaucrat nominated by Democrats nor RINOs. Democrats tell you not to trust anyone who is not ideologically aligned with them. Click for Full Text!
Inconsistency: The Most Consistent Thing About Politics
Post Date: 2023-02-02 23:08:32 by Charles_Byrd
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Since Grover Cleveland was president, no one has accused the average politician of being principled or even consistent. Year after year, Republicans claim to care about fiscal prudence but, when in power, spend like Democrats. In their turn, Democrats insist that they want to engineer a transition to a green-energy economy, but their actions contradict this goal. Of course, you would miss these contradictions if you looked only at the effort Democrats pour into distributing green-energy subsidies. The infrastructure bill of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act adopted last year included enormous subsidies for green energy. Then Congress doubled down by enacting the $1.7 trillion omnibus ...
The Continuous and Terminal Political Gaslighting of the American Masses
Post Date: 2023-02-01 16:39:36 by Charles_Byrd
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The term “gaslighting” is a relatively modern term, although it was the title of a 1944 movie of the same name, but has actually only been in vogue for a short period of time. The current purposeful use of the word gaslighting in all circles of the mainstream and many alternative sources, is in fact a form of gaslighting itself. If this is confusing, it is because it was put into the general everyday language intentionally, a smoke and mirrors technique, so as to cause a particular reaction. A little known term has now become mainstream, and this happened almost overnight. In the context of this essay, I am using the term in the sense of large scale political manipulation, not ...
First, They Lied About the Range . . .
Post Date: 2023-01-30 22:30:11 by Charles_Byrd
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There is a creepy consanguinity between the marketing and selling of the “masks” and then “vaccines” – and the marketing and selling of electric vehicles. It makes you wonder whether there might be a relationship . . . They arose as the “solution” to supposedly dire problems that – we were told – required immediate, right now amelioration. No time to wait and see – or even think before we’re obliged to act. The rush-rush tactics of the time-share selling fraudster, in other words. The “virus” is going to kill tens of millions – maybe more! – unless everyone “masks,” right now (and forever more). Stays home ...
Poverty a 'death sentence'? Not in America!
Post Date: 2023-01-30 22:22:35 by Charles_Byrd
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January is National Poverty in America Awareness Month. Click for Full Text!
What killed the housing supply? Government, no question
Post Date: 2023-01-30 22:15:34 by Charles_Byrd
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To find a time when the U.S. economy was as bad as it is today, one must time travel back to 1932 and the Great Depression. Last year gross domestic product grew a meager 2.9%, but disposal income plummeted by more than $1 trillion. While food and utility prices harass everyone on a daily basis, it is important to take a big-picture look. What people will discover is the American dream of home ownership, the most important investment of time and money to low- and middle-income people, is dead. Without home ownership, the path to the middle class is obliterated. Click for Full Text!
Social Contract Theory Idiocy: What Contract?
Post Date: 2023-01-30 21:56:24 by Charles_Byrd
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The very idea of any ‘social contract’ for any large group of individuals is asinine on its face. It is an impossibility to be sure if freedom is considered, and that is why constitutions, (‘social contracts’) which supposedly require individual explicit or ‘tacit’ consent, neither of which are valid in this context, are completely worthless, and only deceit by the state. Social contracts require that some or most freedoms be relinquished, and submission to the false authority of a ruler or ruling class be accepted for the ‘common good.’ This is usually based on only a majority ‘decision,’ or not, due to the corrupt and evil nature of ...
The taxman cometh
Post Date: 2023-01-30 21:34:45 by Charles_Byrd
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Make no mistake about it, the federal and state governments have a voracious appetite for the American people’s money. In fact, I don’t doubt for a moment there are Democrats who would love to tax 100% of an individual’s or a family’s income above a half a million dollars? A million dollars? Who knows? I would love to see a pollster do a survey of congressional members perspective on our progressive income tax. The results would be enlightening. Click for Full Text!
Is Secession the Right Thing to Do?
Post Date: 2023-01-29 19:59:18 by Charles_Byrd
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National Review of all places recently published an interesting piece on secession, penned by Hillsdale College Professor Miles Smith. I like Professor Smith. He has interesting things to say about the South on social media, and he is genuinely interested in the Southern tradition, not as a specimen to be studied under a microscope, but as a real place with real people and a vibrant culture. Click for Full Text!
Raise the Social Security Age to (At Least) 75
Post Date: 2023-01-27 01:26:01 by Charles_Byrd
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On January 10, the French government announced plans to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. The change would mean that after 2027, workers in France would have to work 43 years to qualify for a government pension, instead of 42 years. French workers promptly took to the street in protest decrying even this very small reduction government welfare. Like many countries in Western Europe and North America, France faces a major demographic problem in that its population is aging and demanding ever larger amounts of public pension funds. Meanwhile, the younger working-age population is shrinking as birth rates continue to fall. So, the French state is looking for ways to stay relatively ...
Aiming at Ordered Liberty
Post Date: 2023-01-25 18:11:59 by Charles_Byrd
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The telos, or final cause of the American regime, according to the prophets of the Common Good, descends like a vision from God, telling us precisely how our society ought to be ordered. They invoke telos to justify transformative arguments about the American Constitution, using broad language in the Preamble to interpret and circumscribe the document. Telos’s power, they argue, derives not just from words, but from intellectual tradition. Telos is important for Aristotle and Aquinas; a classical provenance for “classical lawyers.” When scrutinizing arguments about telos, we find something missing: a definition. Thinkers throw the term around casually, as if it were self- ...
Winning the all-out war against America's children
Post Date: 2023-01-24 18:19:13 by Charles_Byrd
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Of all the shared values Americans have held sacred over the centuries, one of the most important has been the conviction that our children are precious, innocent, literally a gift from God, to be cherished and protected – at all costs. Why then, in today’s America, are so many adults destroying children in a dizzying variety of ways – from aborting them right up to the very moment of birth, to killing them after they’re born, to sexualizing them virtually from birth (Harvard now teaches a course on infants who are “LGBTQIA+,” “queer” or “asexual”), to injecting them with an experimental “vaccine” PROVEN to be both ineffective and ...
Letting Kids Play Outside Is Not Neglect
Post Date: 2023-01-24 18:07:15 by Charles_Byrd
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Each year, the nonprofit I helm, Let Grow, works with local advocacy groups, parents and sometimes even kids to get states to pass the “Reasonable Childhood Independence” law. This law says that “child neglect” is when you put your kid in serious, obvious and likely danger — not anytime you take your eyes off them. Want your kids to play outside, walk to the store, come home with a latchkey? Parents don’t have to second-guess themselves in the four states where this bill has passed, always with bipartisan sponsorship. In fact, it sailed through red state Utah and blue state Colorado unanimously. Click for Full Text!
The Power to Regulate Is the Power to Control
Post Date: 2023-01-23 16:48:31 by Charles_Byrd
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In his 1819 opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland, US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall famously stated what everyone already knew, “the power to tax is the power to destroy.” Americans also knew that the power to regulate imposes costs too, so it is akin to the power to tax. And they are now relearning a lesson they should have never forgotten, that the power to tax or to regulate is also the power to control, not just in the supposed “public interest” but in the interest of the regulators themselves, or specific politicians, or the government more generally. Once, companies could fight government mandates and win. Perhaps most infamously, during World War II, the ...
Our Naked Society
Post Date: 2023-01-23 16:36:04 by Charles_Byrd
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In his 1964 book The Naked Society, Vance Packard challenged the ever increasing loss of privacy as technology and large institutions began wide spread surveillance that today has become acceptable. At the time, computer power, hidden cameras, and concealed microphones were crude gadgets compared to the technology currently in use. The intrusion into a person’s life then was nothing compared to what is acceptable today. With each generation we become comfortable and more obliging to the fact that we no longer are allowed privacy. We have all been stripped naked. A subcommittee in the U.S. Congress to study the invasion of privacy was created due to the publishing of The Naked Society ...
Truth Is More Than Propositional
Post Date: 2023-01-23 16:27:42 by Charles_Byrd
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Navigating a world riddled with attacks on gender, goodness, and morality, I’m always encouraged by people who cling to truth. Still, even as we hold to rightly ordered propositions, we have to recognize exactly what truth encompasses because it has profound impacts on our systems of belief and how we communicate. Click for Full Text!
The Best Video On Climate Change That You Will Ever See
Post Date: 2023-01-22 23:48:42 by Charles_Byrd
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It’s less than seven minutes long. Play it. Play the video then think about the lead chart and the path of China and India while noting the whole continent of Africa is not even on the scale. Click for Full Text!
Pro-Family Conservatives Must First Be Pro-Men
Post Date: 2023-01-22 23:46:39 by Charles_Byrd
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Those conservatives who want to shape the nascent pro-family movement emerging on the right must be willing to embrace a controversial — and countercultural — reality: Healthy families require strong, stable, and secure men. That means Republicans interested in crafting pro-family policy must focus on the well-being of America’s boys and men. Democrats have spent decades supporting policies that make men and fathers economically and socially obsolete. They’ve promoted the notion that families and societies flourish when women are empowered, even to the detriment of men. For instance, they see the fact that women outnumber men in the college-educated labor force as a win ...
Two Cultures
Post Date: 2023-01-21 06:46:20 by Charles_Byrd
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I am occasionally reminded (some would say warned), by people whom I respect, that the Chronicles’ polemical tone carries a seed of zealotry. This may result, say those who remind me, in unreflective rejections. If this is the case, I must have misguided my messages, as narrow partisanship was never my ambition. I do not want to become a cause of showdowns, in either word or deed. But I do want to stir intellectual emotions. We all feel that the divisions of the last two decades must be defined in ideological categories. The liberal/conservative dichotomy befits those categories. These days, a liberal is one who has no qualms in accepting that everything around him is deteriorating ...
Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A.
Post Date: 2023-01-21 06:42:13 by Charles_Byrd
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On the morning of September 22, 1993, a law-abiding citizen named B.W. Sanders was driving his car down the street in Raleigh, North Carolina, when all of a sudden he found himself flagged down by a policeman and presented with a ticket for $25. Mr. Sanders, it turned out, had not been wearing his seat belt, and under a new state law, that crime carries the penalty he received. But in this case it was not just a traffic cop who flagged down Mr. Sanders. It was a force of some six dozen police officers as well as the governor of North Carolina himself, James B. Hunt. The governor was searching for a photo-op with which to advertise both the new seat belt law and his own personal devotion to ...
To See the World and Man
Post Date: 2023-01-21 06:35:45 by Charles_Byrd
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I want to begin with a word of thanks to the sponsors of this award, the trustees of the Ingersoll Foundation. It is an honor to be honored in such a fashion, and in the company of such a distinguished man of letters as Jorge Luis Borges. As you maybe aware, I have not, in any formal sense, put pen to paper for a period of time. But, clearly, the occasion calls for a few words. Click for Full Text!
Is the Weaponization of the Government a Partisan Issue?
Post Date: 2023-01-21 06:34:10 by Charles_Byrd
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If the Republicans in Congress do their job, Democrat corruption will be on full display in several House committees. This doesn’t mean the Republicans aren’t corrupt. They all are. But the Democrats, most of whom hail from Yankee dominated parts of the Union, have been running around with their treasury of virtue labeling anyone who opposed them traitors, deplorables, and insurrectionists. Click for Full Text!
How Cultivating An Internal Locus of Control Can Help You Succeed
Post Date: 2023-01-21 06:29:42 by Charles_Byrd
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In the United States today, it’s fashionable to see ourselves as victims. Commentators on the far left will tell you that skin color traps people in poverty and that people cannot determine their own fate. Commentators on the far right will tell you that immigrants are stealing jobs and that there’s nothing we can do about it. Both sets of voices tell us we’re helpless victims. But cultivating a victim complex is lethal to our ability to achieve our goals and build the life we desire. Fortunately, there’s a better way: cultivating an internal locus of control. What is an internal locus of control? Put simply, it’s the idea that you always have a choice about how ...
God’ll Cut You Down: Johnny Cash, Cato, and Triumphant Good
Post Date: 2023-01-21 06:28:15 by Charles_Byrd
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In Johnny Cash’s version of the gospel song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” the opening chorus goes this way: “You can run on for a long time Run on for a long time Run on for a long time Sooner or later, God’ll cut you down Sooner or later, God’ll cut you down” Click for Full Text!
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