I was going to use today’s column to ruminate on Scott Pinsker’s interesting essay over at PJ Media yesterday entitled, “Is MAGA a Political Movement or Is It a Revolution? Here’s Your Sneak Peak Into America’s Future,” but I decided there’s something bigger out there I should write on. Pinsker’s answer to his own question is that MAGA is a movement that needs to become a revolution, and I’m not saying he’s wrong about that. I think I would use different terminology, because what MAGA generally encompasses is a counterrevolution. The revolution already happened. Pinsker says that it happened as a response to Donald Trump winning the 2016 election. That isn’t quite right. The revolution was Barack Obama’s takeover of the Democrat Party and forcing its conversion from liberalism to outright neocommunism — Obamunism, if you will — and then doing the same to the country at large. And this was such a comprehensive redirection of the political marketplace that here we are, the better part of 20 years later, and it’s actually still very much possible that Kamala Harris — a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of Obama, lacking any perceptible political skill or insight, much less leadership qualities of any note — could be elected president. Harris is a cipher. She’s a puppet of a shadowy regime that has seized control of the institutions of power in this country. That regime is bipartisan — sort of. There are “Republicans” who used to call themselves conservatives who are now backing her — at my site The Hayride on Friday, I talked about the despicable swamp rat Charles Boustany, one of former House Speaker John Boehner’s little minions, who joined a letter crafted by his fellow establishment power pimps to support a candidate who favors (despite what lies she currently tells in an effort to cover her tracks) a ban on hydraulic fracturing, free sex-change operations for prison inmates and illegal aliens, a tax on unrealized capital gains, banning plastic straws, and banning deportation of criminals from other countries. It’s bizarre. More to the point, as I keep saying here in this space, it’s villainous. We’re increasingly beset by villains in our cultural and political life in America. Consider the unfurling story of one Ryan Routh, a sicko would-be assassin who laid in wait for Trump for some 12 hours near the fifth green at Trump International Gold Club in Palm Beach, and who missed the opportunity to take out the former president only because a Secret Service agent happened upon Routh’s rifle barrel as it stuck out from a chain-link fence. Nobody bothered to secure the perimeter of that golf course, a suspicious bit of incompetence that miraculously wasn’t fatal to Trump. Routh was perhaps an over-flamboyant version of the common modern Democrat, whose Trump Derangement Syndrome has broken the meter. In a manifesto/suicide letter that surfaced over the weekend and echoed most of the rhetoric of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over the last three years plus, Routh claimed the mantle of kindness and gentility in defending his intended murder of the GOP presidential candidate — something that is shockingly prevalent among outwardly respectable and upscale pretenders to cultural power. You can find his attitude quite often among shoppers at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, dog-walkers in nice blue-city neighborhoods, and on selective and expensive college campuses. And you can find it in government and media circles, too. Something else that showed up in Routh’s manifesto letter was a $150,000 bounty offered to anyone who could “complete the job” of slaughtering Trump. Now, it isn’t in evidence that Routh has the resources to make good on that figure, though there was apparently a GoFundMe someone was running on his behalf in order that he would succeed in recruiting mercenaries for the Ukraine war effort. But the amazing thing, as Donald Trump Jr. noted, was that the FBI released the letter with the bounty offer unredacted. And then the mainstream media ran with the story! So now there is a public price on Trump’s head for the next would-be assassin to seek. That the payoff of the bounty is specious at best is not particularly material; not long ago it would have been regarded as outrageous to circulate such dangerous information regarding a candidate in a presidential race. Now? It’s as par for the course as assassination attempts themselves. And when Elon Musk notes that, by contrast, nobody is pushing Harris’ assassination, he’s attacked by dunderheads like Keith Olbermann as stoking political violence. No sooner did Routh’s bounty letter make the news cycle that it was further revealed that he had a list of places Trump was scheduled to be for the next several weeks. And then his son was arrested for kiddie porn. Which is an awfully good way to ensure he doesn’t dish on his father, isn’t it? Or, going in the opposite direction, maybe somebody motivated Routh into serving as a would-be assassin with a threat of his son’s exposure. Though I’m sure Ryan Routh, international nut of mystery, was simply a well-informed lone wolf. That arrest of Oran Routh could be a nice segue into the Sean Combs story, on the eve of what are likely a set of revelations that expose a great deal of the entertainment industry as a massive sex-exploitation factory that makes Harvey Weinstein look like a wayward Presbyterian deacon out on the town. But I’ll hold off on that cancer, other than to note that the singer Pink sure did give an impassioned performance at the Democrats’ convention in Chicago just a few weeks before she had to trash the bulk of her social media posts as the Combs scandal burgeoned last week. Government shares the morals of Hollywood, you know; though not necessarily their good looks. We’re awash in sexual abuse of minors, just as we’re awash in sex trafficking as a whole. Nearly 300,000 migrant children are unaccounted for by the border authorities on the watch of Harris and the Biden administration and the cabal that pulls their strings; what percentage of those do you think were dragged into “sex work?” You know as well as I do that it isn’t a small fraction. In a decent country this would be a scandal so big we’d talk about little else. Instead, it gets meager coverage from a news media whose members every once and again will get pinched for their own contributions to the kiddie sex trade and child sex trafficking that is run away from by a Democrat Party (with Republican co-conspirators, to be sure) shot through with pedophiles (or at least the pedo-adjacent), including the current puppet in the White House. Villainy is a very good word to describe this horror. But when they’re not importing migrants to sex them up, the current crowd in charge are bringing them in to drive you down economically. J.D. Vance’s brilliant promotion of cat-eater memes was actually a light touch in bringing to light the societal problems caused by mass migration of Haitians, Venezuelans, and others among the global poor — as we saw in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, a little town being deluged with migrants to work in local food-processing factories and thus displacing Americans and depressing wages… And when ordinary Americans object, you get this sort of out-of-touch nonsense. Bloomberg: Bloomberg News analyzed immigration court data obtained by researchers at Syracuse University that show where the 1.8 million asylum seekers and refugees who landed in the US in 2023 have taken up residence… Migrants landing in swing states, and across the country, are gravitating to counties that voted for President Joe Biden in 2020. In the battleground states that will decide this November’s election, about 72% of migrants in 2023 went to Biden counties while less than a third went to Trump counties, the Bloomberg analysis found. Counties that voted for Biden four years ago are home to roughly 60% of the overall US population. Swing states received 12% of all migrants, with most going to blue counties like Philadelphia, home to Pennsylvania’s largest city, and Gwinnett, which is outside Atlanta. Much like in previous generations, migrants are headed to places with growing local economies, bolstering the labor force in places that are already thriving. In swing states, 85% of migrants settled in places that saw GDP growth from 2019 to 2022, according to the latest available data…. These newcomers are unlikely to become US citizens before the election, so they won’t be casting ballots of their own. Ace of Spades had the correct response to this… This is an especially sick thing to demand, when the town you’re talking about has had a collapse of local employment due to deindustrialization, that is, outsourcing manufacturing jobs to the third world. But let’s flood this already low-employment town with lots of illegals willing to work for dirt wages. That’ll really help the locals to thrive! How much more obvious could Bloomberg be that they are making a case for liberals getting what they want politically — a never-ending flood of third world “new voters” — so long as those dirty foreigners are penned up with Dirty White Working Class. We also find out that the Biden administration is busy fast-tracking George Soros’ takeover of the talk radio market, one more milepost along the road to a stifled national discussion. And once again a mismanaged supply chain lies exposed as dockworkers are ready to strike. Meanwhile, the Biden administration now wants to send troops to the Middle East that will somehow keep the Israel-Iran war (can we finally call it what it really is?) contained; there is no reason to believe that won’t backfire, and perhaps intentionally. All of these things fit a pattern, which is to create, through action and inaction, a demoralized and despairing society that is poorer, more ignorant, unhappier and more desperate than ever. And when the people driving that pattern then tell you “we can’t go back” to an America not under their thumb, with the not-so-implicit threat that any attempt to do so will be met with even more violence than that continuously threatened to Trump, you ought to be quite clear that they’re villains. And act accordingly to stop them. We hope to see you at the ballot box on or before Nov. 5. READ MORE: Further Examinations: From Hellmarsh With Love Ep. 3 Five Quick Things: The SAVE Act Mess The Spectacle Ep. 147: Netflix’s Rebel Ridge Calls Out the Injustice of Civil Asset Forfeiture The post Villains, Villains Everywhere appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Sean McNamara’s biopic about former President Ronald Reagan, now in movie theaters across the country, provides a timely occasion to reflect on some essential principles lost in today’s world, marked by the confrontation between left-wing wokeism and right-wing nationalism, two forms of collectivist interventionism. It would benefit the Republican Party to rediscover these principles, and benefit the country if it did. The film is one-dimensional, more impressionistic than thought-provoking, and would have been more effective if it had concentrated on certain defining moments, rather than sail through decades of personal and historical material. But it is stirringly timely. The traits of Reagan’s personality are largely absent from today’s political landscape — the old-fashioned gentlemanliness, the bonhomie, the humor, the ability to inspire through idealism instead of hatred, the appeal beyond party lines, and the tendency to define the enemy in terms of anecdotes, images, and ideas, rather than name-calling and epithets. Just as important, if not more, was Reagan’s devotion to principle. This did not come from his intellect, but from his intuition, which was, like his powers of communication, mighty effective. His convictions can be reduced to two overriding ideas: that communism was evil and that government should be limited. And herein lies the contradiction of Reagan’s presidency. Although there is a logical coherence between these two goals, they turned out to be incompatible; the administration sacrificed one in pursuit of the other. The fragility of the Soviet system was the ultimate cause of its demise, but Reagan administration pressure accelerated the process. In doing so, however, Reagan’s effort to reduce the size of government gradually lost impetus and was eventually nullified. Two factors contributed to this. First, the fact that Reagan had to contend with a split Congress in which the idea of undoing the big-government legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (to which, ironically, Reagan himself had adhered in the past) and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society enjoyed minimal support. Second, a school of thought known as “Lafferism” (after Arthur Laffer) gained traction in the administration and the GOP, according to which lower taxes would unleash an economic torrent that would produce so much new tax revenue that government deficits would become a thing of the past, reducing the federal debt as well. While tax revenues did increase significantly during Reagan’s years in office, from approximately $618 billion in fiscal year 1982 to $991 billion in fiscal 1989, government spending also took off. The result was a tripling of the deficit and the national debt (which increased from $995 billion to $2.9 trillion). By the time the Gipper left office, federal spending as a proportion of the GDP was not much different than it had been under Jimmy Carter, who in turn had failed to reverse the profligacy of the Richard Nixon–Gerald Ford years.  A significant part of the spending increase had to do with the primary objective of boosting U.S. defense capabilities. Raising military spending from almost $400 billion to $530 billion fueled a deficit that averaged 4 percent of GDP in the 12 years of the Reagan administration and his vice president and successor, George H. W. Bush. On the domestic front, there were achievements, including some years of economic growth once the recession of the early part of Reagan’s presidency passed. Part of it was unleashed, no doubt, by lowering taxes, but, as some critics contend, another part had to do with the government’s deficit spending, with its deceiving and temporary effect, and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s lax monetary policy. Regardless, some of the Reagan years were undoubtedly economically successful. But reducing the size of government, a major goal at the beginning of the Reagan presidency, was not part of the Gipper’s legacy. The force of principle and the power of ideas can be so effective in politics as to survive their advocates’ inability to live up to them and still maintain their relevance. That was the case of the ideas espoused by some of the slave-owning Founding Fathers who legated to future generations tools with which to combat that and other evils. In the case of Ronald Reagan, not fulfilling, and even abandoning, the stated goal of reducing the size of government did not detract from the inspiring effect his relentless defense of individual freedom from government intervention had on the nation and on millions across the world. Which is why some of the sobering statistics of his domestic legacy have paradoxically not diminished his standing as a symbol of limited government.          Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a Senior Fellow of the Independent Institute, Oakland, Calif. His latest book is Global Crossings: Immigration, Civilization and America. READ MORE: Yes, Ronald Reagan Did Win the Cold War My Response to the Reagan Critics and Haters Critics Be Damned: The Reagan Film Is Wonderful The post Revisiting Reagan: He Won the Cold War, But Lost the War Against Big Government appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

As progressives continue celebrating their victory last year that enshrined abortion into Ohio’s constitution, their latest efforts could turn Ohio’s congressional and legislative districts into a much bigger problem for conservatives. The group known as Citizens Not Politicians (CNP) has successfully secured ballot access for its proposed amendment, Issue One, to Ohio’s constitution, which the group claims will “end gerrymandering” once and for all in Ohio. Despite those claims, the backers and supporters of Issue One are not coming to this state to end gerrymandering; rather, they seek to exploit Ohio’s system to impose their radical progressive agenda further.  Ohio’s New Issue One Will Confuse Voters In a few weeks, Ohioans will vote on whether to approve Issue One (not to be confused with last year’s amendments seeking to increase the threshold for approving an amendment or enshrining the right to abortion into Ohio’s Constitution). Issue One, also called the Citizens Not Politicians Amendment by its advocates, seeks to create an “Independent” redistricting commission intending to make “fair and impartial” districts for the Ohio General Assembly as well as assist with the redistricting plans for Ohio’s congressional districts for the U.S. House of Representatives. On their webpage, the amendment’s advocates argue that the amendment would do the following: Create the 15-member Ohio Citizens Redistricting Commission made up of Democratic, Republican, and Independent citizens who broadly represent the different geographic areas and demographics of the state.  Ban current or former politicians, political party officials and lobbyists from sitting on the Commission. Require fair and impartial districts by making it unconstitutional to draw voting districts that discriminate against or favor any political party or individual politician. Require the commission to operate under an open and independent process. Despite optimism from the amendment’s proponents, the language approved by the Ohio Ballot Board in a 3-2 vote is now being challenged by the CNP for what the group argues are “misleading descriptions” of the amendment. A statement from Don McTigue, the lawyer representing CNP, states: “I’ve never seen ballot language this dishonest and so blatantly illegal… [i]t’s insulting to voters, and I’m embarrassed for the Secretary of State.” (READ MORE: Springfield, Ohio Is About More Than Cats and Dogs) Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, responded to the accusations saying, “It is what I genuinely believe to be our best effort to faithfully summarize, truthfully summarize, a very long amendment for the voters to consider.” On Sept. 17, the Ohio Supreme Court sided with LaRose and the Ohio Ballot Board, ordering that only minor changes were needed but that most of the language was accurate.  While proponents have claimed that such an amendment would “fix” Ohio’s voting districts, their arguments fall flat when looking at their prized example: The bordering state of Michigan. Michigan Passed a Similar Proposal. Gerrymandering Didn’t Go Away. In 2018, Michigan passed its own amendment (Proposal 2) by an overwhelming majority of Michigan voters. Voters Not Politicians (VNP), the group responsible for changing Michigan’s redistricting model, received major funding and endorsements from national far-left organizations, including many of the groups currently funding and supporting Issue One in Ohio. Left-wing organizations including Action Now Initiative, The Sixteen Thirty Fund, and the National Education Association were among the key endorsers and financial backers of VNP.  What became of Michigan in the following years? Unsurprisingly gerrymandering didn’t go away; instead, it was ramped up to a whole new level. Using the language of Proposal 2, progressives managed to use the independent commission to redraw the districts across Michigan in a way that enabled Democrats to secure both chambers of the state’s legislature in the 2022 midterms. Democrats didn’t hide the fact that the commission’s redistricting helped create the Democrats’ trifecta over Michigan’s government, allowing them to pass their extreme progressive agenda in Michigan. As if regular gerrymandering wasn’t enough, things got worse after Michigan’s commission was found making unconstitutional districts by engaging in racial gerrymandering. Michigan’s Independent Citizen’s Redistricting Commission (MICRC) and the Secretary of State of Michigan were sued in 2022 for applying race for redistricting purposes. The federal lawsuit (Agee v. Benson) was brought by 19 African American Detroiters to the United States District Court Western District of Michigan Southern Division, arguing that the efforts to reduce the black voting age from 80 percent to 50 percent in 13 districts violated both U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. The three federal judge panel sided with the plaintiffs in 2023, and affirmed that “All the districts were drawn in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.” Besides the ramped-up gerrymandering, the process itself has been a complete disaster. Accusations of bullying and inappropriate behavior amongst the members of the commission led to shouting matches, a failed effort to censure the commission’s chair, and a public apology. (READ MORE: Immigration Control Is Smart, Not Un-Christian) The tension within the MICRC got so bad that, in 2022, the commission’s top attorney resigned, which pushed the commission further into chaos. The commission’s inconsistent approach towards redistricting has led to numerous lawsuits and court orders to redraw their proposals. Nancy Wang, executive director and one of the founding members of VNP, admitted that Michigan’s model is far from perfect and still faces many unresolved problems. During a policy talk in 2022, Wang said that “This is not a perfect process. It’s not perfect maps. People have concerns and they’re very real.” Those Backing Ohio’s Issue One Are Hardly Bipartisan Those behind the initiative to pass Issue One in Ohio are not as bipartisan as they appear. No different from the backers and supporters of VNP in 2018, CNP has received major funding from many out-of-state left-wing organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Tides Foundation, and Our American Future Foundation. The Sixteen Thirty Fund, the top contributor to the VNP in 2018, is once again the top contributor to the CNP, giving over $6.6 million in total contributions.  Besides the clear partisan effort by progressives to take control over Ohio’s redistricting, the entire idea of simply “ending gerrymandering” is deeply flawed. The idea sounds great on paper, but it usually ends in complete catastrophe. Issue One sounds promising, after all, who doesn’t want to combat corruption with the hope of attaining a fairer system? But there lies the key problem of Issue One and Michigan’s model: It’s predicated on a notion of reform that dwells in the theoretical, without recognizing limits set forth by reality. The fact is that, regardless of who draws the districts, someone will be dissatisfied. The task of redrawing districts is purely one of trade-offs, and there will always be some who don’t believe that the trade-offs made were fair or advantageous to them. Groups like VNP and CNP ignore this reality and ultimately do nothing to stop gerrymandering. As Galen Druke pointed out: “If ending gerrymandering means creating maps that simultaneously enhance competition, don’t benefit either party, promote minority representation and keep cities, counties and communities whole, then it is impossible to end gerrymandering.” (READ MORE: It’s Not About the Cats. It’s About America.) Regardless of the rhetoric, the idea of creating an “independent” commission begs the question, who is the commission independent of? According to the VNP and CNP, the answer is politicians and lobbyists. But, according to the language of Issue One, the commission won’t be elected or chosen by the people, rather it will be created by unelected bureaucrats from the Department of Administration Services and a bipartisan panel of “four retired judges.” Despite the CNP’s claim that its amendment would put the people over politicians and lobbyists, the proposal itself makes it quite clear that the commission is not independent from “the politicians and lobbyists,” but the people. The harsh truth is that it’s impossible to remove politics from something that is inherently a political affair. As Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, notes, “You can’t take politics out of redistricting.” As a native Ohioan, hearing the words “Ohio is becoming more like Michigan” is beyond insulting. Unfortunately, that might just be the case. If Ohioans take the misfortunate step of approving Issue One, then there will be nothing stopping left-wing Democrats from gerrymandering Ohio and pushing forward their extreme progressive agenda. If progressives have their way and are successful in Michiganizing Ohio, it won’t be long until the entirety of the United States has been Michgianzied, and our voices silenced.  The post Progressives Are Trying to Make Ohio More Like Michigan appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

“The Case for Voting Prohibition!” It sounds like the proverbial “Slate pitch,” doesn’t it? But in this depressing era of American politics, shouldn’t more Americans have the chance to vote for an alternative “third party” like the Prohibition Party, which somehow is still around and has been putting up presidential candidates since 1872? Well, perhaps not the actual Prohibition Party itself. Its last and only political triumph came over a century ago — stopping the production and sale of alcohol in the United States (“Prohibition”) — although proto-feminist groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union probably played a larger role. (READ MORE: How Kamala Bested Newsom in Their Decades-Long Feud) The party fell victim to its own temporary success. In 1920, the year the 18th Amendment prohibiting “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” began to be enforced through the Volstead Act (drinking alcohol was still technically legal), the party garnered 189,000 votes for its presidential candidate. In 1924 the tally fell to 56,000.  Prohibition is now widely considered a counterproductive failure, leading to an increase in organized crime, and its 1933 repeal was greeted with near-universal relief.  Restrictive Ballot Access Rules Make it Hard for Third Parties Today the party is an aging husk of its former self. A 2016 Guardian interview with then-Prohibition presidential candidate Jim Hedges noted that “All the current members are over 50, many in their 70s and 80s, and many are ultra-conservative. It’s not exactly a path to growth.”  In 2012, Prohibition held its national convention at a Holiday Inn Express in Cullman, Alabama, without the success the chain’s goofy commercials promised; it won a mere 518 recorded votes nationwide that year, all in Louisiana, the only state in which the party qualified for the ballot.  Results improved slightly in the next two cycles, 2016 and 2020, in which Prohibition was on the ballot in three and four states, respectively. But in 2024 the party’s reach has again been reduced to a single Southern state, Arkansas, which has more than its share of “dry” counties.  But why is it so hard to cast a vote for an admittedly obscure and perhaps unpalatable political party? Blame restrictive ballot access rules. While the party gained the 1000 signatures necessary to qualify for the ballot in Arkansas for 2024, many states make it much harder, including big ones like California, Texas, and especially New York, where not even the Libertarian Party, the nation’s largest third-party, qualified for the ballot this cycle. The vast resources of the two major American political parties (who have automatic ballot access in some states) are another hindrance against third parties, as is the winner-take-all structure of the Electoral College itself. (READ MORE: RFK Jr.’s Fight for Principle) Yet a brief rundown of the platforms of the major (and some minor) parties suggests that on paper at least, the Prohibitionists aren’t really all that goofy and may actually be, relatively speaking, the party of reason. What this says about the current state of American politics is for you to decide, but it’s probably nothing good. The Democratic Party platform:  Length: 42,800 words, by far the longest platform analyzed.  Most “out-there” statement (besides the “land acknowledgment” preamble): “When a person can be married in the morning and thrown out of a restaurant for being gay in the afternoon, something is still wrong.” (Sounds like a busy day.) Mentions of ballot access: None; who needs the competition?  The Republican Party platform: Length: 5,300 words, including by far the most randomly capitalized letters of any platform.  Most “out-there” plank: “Begin Largest Deportation Program in American History” Mentions of ballot access: None; who needs the competition? The Libertarian Party platform:  Length: 3,350 words, the most declarative document.  Most “out-there” plank: “…we call for the repeal of the income tax, the abolishment of the Internal Revenue Service and all federal programs and services not required under the U.S. Constitution.”  Mentions of ballot access: “We oppose laws that effectively exclude alternative candidates and parties, deny ballot access, gerrymander districts, or deny the voters their right to consider all alternatives.”  The Green Party platform: Length: 10,200 words. Mood: Dour. Most “out-there” plank: “Abolish the U.S. Senate by constitutional amendment.” Mentions of ballot access: The Green platform has surprisingly little to say about eliminating “high filing fees and petition signature thresholds, and unreasonably short qualification periods.” Two more paragraphs call for establishing federal baseline standards for ballot access. The Prohibition Party platform:  Length: 2,200 words, featuring the most interesting mix of issues, as if purposefully hewing to a reasonable middle. Buried lead: The Prohibition Party is pro-choice?: “We believe that each woman should have the right to decide based on her own conscience.” The most “out-there” plank (not counting the alcohol policy): “We advocate free community colleges with 4-year degree programs, as well as for vocational education.” Mentions of ballot access: “In many states, overly burdensome ballot access laws make it difficult for minor parties and independent candidates to get on the ballot. In doing so they undermine the ability of voters to express their democratic will. States should move to establish fairer ballot access standards that provide minor parties and independent candidates a reasonable opportunity to get on the ballot.” The 2024 Prohibition platform samples shamelessly from the issue buffet, as if consciously toggling between the Left and Right before getting down to the main course at the very last page.  And its stance on alcohol is surprisingly mild. For one, the document lets actual drinkers off the hook morally, wagging the finger at Big Liquor instead. “The individual, and their right to drink if they wish, is not the cause — rather, the cause is the underlying organized liquor traffic and the subordination of uniformed Americans for profit.” The text sticks to statistics, not moralistic excoriations: “Alcohol is the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States.”  The Prohibition platform calls for a ban on alcohol advertising, “similar to the existing ban on tobacco advertising.” It also favors an increase in the alcohol tax while shrewdly suggesting alcohol is just one of a number of dangerous drugs. Neo-Prohibition? Is there an opening for a kinder, gentler prohibition in today’s United States? The anti-drinking stance doesn’t “code” as social conservative the way it used to. Today’s young adults are homebodies, socializing online, and not as eager to drive anywhere, including to bars. Alcohol use (and various other acts of risk-taking) is down among Generation Z, which is drinking 20 percent less alcohol than millennials did at the same age. The “French paradox” red-wine propaganda has been replaced by hectoring about “no safe dosage,” complete with the druggy connotations of the word “dosage.” “Dry January” is a thing, as are the new, supposedly improved adult nonalcoholic beverages. There’s also been a replacement effect among the young, with cannabis-related products (gummies and even beverages) taking the place of alcohol in fostering relaxation and convivial vibes. (READ MORE: Kamala Harris’ Bait and Switch on Positions and Values) But even if you wanted to support such policies, could you do it without resorting to a hopeless write-in vote?  Some liberals will never forgive Green Party candidate and consumer activist Ralph Nader for supposedly siphoning votes from Al Gore in Florida in 2000 and allowing George W. Bush to win the state and with it the presidency. This explains why the purported defenders of democracy are trying to keep two minor left-wing candidates off the ballot in Michigan and Wisconsin, while also trying to keep Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the ballot in those states even after Kennedy withdrew his campaign there — to eliminate any competition on Kamala Harris’s left.  Loosening ballot restrictions would be a cumbersome, state-by-state process, with both major parties presumably reluctant to give up their advantage. But it would inject competition and new ideas into presidential matchups depressing enough to drive voters to drink. The post Why You Might Want to Vote Prohibition (Although You Probably Can’t) appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

During the 1980 presidential election season, many Americans tuned in to ABC’s Nightline, where host Ted Koppel began each night’s program announcing “Day ____” of the Iranian hostage crisis. America was “held hostage.” On Nov. 4, 1979, Iranian “students” seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage until Jan. 20, 1981, inauguration day for the new American president Ronald Reagan. ABC, CBS, and NBC frequently led off their 6 p.m. news programs with updates on the hostage crisis. The Iranians held those Americans as hostages for 444 days, despite a feeble and unsuccessful attempt by the Carter administration to rescue them. The hostage crisis was one of several reasons why Ronald Reagan, who was not the media’s favorite candidate, won a landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.  Since Oct. 7, 2023, at least 120 hostages remain in Hamas captivity, including seven American citizens. The American Jewish Committee reports that 43 Americans were killed by Hamas in the initial days and weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks. Yet, there is no “hostage crisis” reported by the mainstream media on a daily basis, as in 1979–1980. In a few weeks, it will be “Day 365” of captivity for those Americans (and the many more Israelis), but ABC, CBS, and NBC are not calling this an “American hostage crisis,” and are not reporting on it daily as they did in the lead-up to the 1980 election. At most, if the networks use the word “crisis,” it is an “Israeli hostage crisis,” not an American one. This allows the media to criticize and undermine the Netanyahu government in Israel without doing any damage to the Biden–Harris administration. The mainstream media, it seems, has learned its lesson from 1979–1980. Then, they didn’t want Jimmy Carter to lose but their coverage of the hostage crisis contributed to his defeat. Now, they don’t want Donald Trump to win, so they refrain from reminding Americans that 43 of their fellow citizens were killed by Hamas and seven more have been held hostage for nearly a year. Media bias is not just how you report the “news,” but what you decide to report. Years after Iran released the 52 American embassy hostages, many in the media claimed that Reagan made a deal with Iran to postpone their release until he took office. Those claims were debunked by William Inboden and Joseph Ledford in a compelling essay in War on the Rocks. They were further debunked by the renowned strategist Edward Luttwak, a member of Reagan’s transition team, who revealed in an interview that Iran released the hostages because Iranian leaders “were told in a one-way communication” that when Reagan is inaugurated as president he will shortly thereafter “order the bombardment of an Iranian city,” and “there will be no negotiations” unless the hostages are immediately freed.  Middle East hostages, of course, became big news again in the mid-1980s during the so-called “Iran-Contra scandal,” which the media fueled on a daily basis in an attempt to bring down the Reagan administration for “illegally” trading arms for hostages. Democrats in Congress and their media allies tried a replay of Watergate, with special investigating committees and the appointment of independent counsel Lawrence Walsh who did his best to get Reagan, but failed. Walsh, to his everlasting discredit, did manage to indict former Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and released the indictment on the Friday before the 1992 presidential election, thereby helping to elect Democrat Bill Clinton. It was Walsh’s version of an “October surprise,” that may have swung the election to Clinton. So the mainstream media is once again playing politics with the lives of American hostages by putting no pressure on the Biden–Harris administration to get the hostages freed. They don’t want a repeat of 1980, where they unwittingly helped elect Ronald Reagan. The great threat to America, they believe, is not Iran or Hamas — it is Donald Trump. READ MORE: How Kamala Bested Newsom in Their Decades-Long Feud RFK Jr.’s Fight for Principle The post None Dare Call It a Hostage Crisis appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

I taught mathematics at the Universidad Simon Bolivar (USB) near Caracas from 1973 to 1975 and returned to teach summer classes in 2005 and again in 2008. My wife and I honeymooned in Venezuela in 1977. That doesn’t make me an expert on Venezuelan politics, but it does make me care about what is happening in Venezuela today.  In the mid-70s, Venezuela was an oil-rich country with the usual large gap between rich and poor. Our Lutheran church had an outreach facility in one of the poor hillside barrios surrounding Caracas which I visited frequently, so I am not unaware that, even then, there was poverty in Venezuela. But in the mid-70s, there was a large flow of Colombian immigrants moving to Venezuela where there were more jobs, and the economy was better. (READ MORE: A Sacred Peace: The Promise and Perils of Localism) I arrived in Venezuela three months before the election in 1973 which saw Carlos Andres Perez replace Rafael Caldera as president. Both were members of relatively moderate political parties (AD and COPEI), but there were numerous radical socialist parties also competing for votes. Naturally, they all promised to usher in a utopia by simply erasing the large gap between rich and poor in Venezuela. One of these radical socialist parties, led by Hugo Chavez, finally won the presidency in 1998. The Fruits of Socialism Are Always Poverty and Inflation I did not notice too much difference when I returned in 2005 except that almost all (but not quite all) of the media were controlled by the “Chavistas.” By 2008, many of the professors at USB had left Venezuela for Colombian universities, and there was already a net immigration flow toward Colombia. On one of these visits, I asked a German/Venezuelan friend, whether Chavez won reelection or if it was thanks to voter fraud. He replied, that most of the fraud happened before election day.  Hugo Chavez died in 2013, and his vice-president Nicolas Maduro took over and continued Chavez’ radical, repressive policies. In 2018, inflation was predicted to reach over one million percent per year. By contrast, I believe the Venezuelan “Bolivar” was valued at a constant rate of 4.3 per dollar for the entire two years I lived there in the 70s. By the time Maduro was “re-elected” in July 2024 (this time certainly with massive election-day fraud), it is estimated that one-fifth of the Venezuelan population had fled, many to the United States, but most to neighboring countries like Colombia. The professor who invited me to USB in 2008 has fled to a university in Spain. (RELATED: The Venezuela Template Against Democracy) I have not returned to Venezuela since 2008, but, the Atlas Society‘s article, “Venezuela’s Classic Socialist Path to Poverty and Dictatorship,” summarizes it well. Did Chavez Love the Poor? It Doesn’t Matter For Venezuela. The title of the article speaks of the “classic path” from socialism to poverty and dictatorship because such a trajectory is entirely predictable and inevitable. Where Venezuela has gone is where radical socialism always leads, because when a government’s main goal is equality it rewards unproductive activities and penalizes economically productive actions. Since radical socialist governments have to impose things like price controls, rent controls, and income redistribution — which can only be imposed by force because they won’t happen naturally —  it always requires more and more government repression. Inflation always accompanies socialism as the government prints and spends more and more money to help the poor (or at least to win their support). (RELATED: Maduro Moves Christmas to October by Imperial Decree) I spent the Fall 2019 semester at a university in Queretaro, Mexico, where foreign investments seem to be encouraged and multinational corporations (from Europe and Japan as well as the U.S. and Canada) are welcomed with open arms. The contrast could not be greater between Caracas and Queretaro: While Caracas is dying in every sense, Queretaro is growing rapidly and seems to be following the “classic path” of capitalism to greater wealth and freedom. (The “center-left” Mexican president from 2018 to 2024, Manuel Lopez Obrador, is sometimes called a socialist but I would say he is a socialist in name only, certainly not a radical socialist like Chavez or Maduro.)  Did Hugo Chavez care more about the poor in Venezuela than previous presidents, many of whom were at least as corrupt as he? I don’t know, but perhaps he really did believe that soaking the rich and redistributing the wealth would benefit the poor, and he did, in fact, do much for the poor in the early years of his presidency. But does it matter? His radical socialism led Venezuela down the classic path to extreme poverty and dictatorship, as it always does. The post Venezuela Follows the Classic Path of Radical Socialism appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The Biden administration proposed a ban Monday on Chinese software in vehicles, citing national security reasons. Despite the fact that Chinese technology is already in everyday use through smartphones and other technology, the administration hopes to use the ban to prevent potential future technological attacks on Americans. (READ MORE: We Can’t Depend on China for Our Economic Salvation) In this episode of The Spectator P.M. Podcast, hosts Ellie Gardey Holmes and Lyrah Margo discuss the ban’s implications and the U.S.’s reliance on Chinese goods. Ellie and Lyrah also discuss what this ban means for the upcoming presidential election. Tune in to hear their discussion! The post <i>The Spectator P.M.</i> Ep. 78: US Government Makes Move to Prevent China From Blowing Up Cars appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Alger Hiss was a prominent New Dealer who accompanied Franklin Roosevelt to Yalta and was later revealed to be a Soviet agent. He advised FDR to trust Stalin’s assurances that he would be a trustworthy partner for peace following World War II; the Soviet plan was to lull the U.S. and proceed with conquest in Asia (as we soon saw in Korea) and subversion in Europe (revolution led by Soviet-backed communist movements). The subversion of U.S. security under diplomatic cover, combined with the theft via other agents of nuclear secrets, rendered the post-war years anything but peaceful. They were perilous and costly in lives and treasure. Now the question is whether a comparable diplomatic failure in the Middle East imperils the U.S. and the Free World. It Would Be a Mistake to Trust Iran It would be a diplomatic failure to trust Iran’s Islamic Republic the way we once tried to trust the Soviet Union. The key error would be to go along with the idea that a “grand compromise” with Iran will bring about a peace in the Middle East in which Israel is secure and U.S. interests are respected. Under President Jimmy Carter and then again under President Obama, U.S. policy bought into this idea. The Trump administration, taking a realistic view of the Tehran regime, slammed on the brakes, but since January 2021 the policy priority again has been to appease and even assist our enemies. (READ MORE: Kamala Harris’ Bait and Switch on Positions and Values) The result of this wistful thinking can be seen in daily dispatches from the region: Israel is defending itself against terror organizations paid for and supplied by Iran that have proclaimed the extermination of the Jewish state as their goal. Another Iranian proxy force, the Yemeni Houthi militia, is waging a war against the U.S. Navy for control of the Red Sea, an essential waterway for global commerce. Conditions and contexts vary over time, of course, but comparisons of the geo-political situation today with Cold War era subversion in Western Europe and military aggression on the developing continents are valid, and indeed urgent. Like the Soviet Union, the Iranian regime threatens our security and that of others, and yet we are urged by some within our own camp to show them sympathy — even to help them get what they want. A Modern Alger Hiss? Robert Malley is not Alger Hiss, but his role (until recently) in the Biden-Harris administration may be compared to the one Hiss played in FDR’s. A Middle East adviser in the Clinton and Obama years, he was given the Iran brief early in the Biden administration by his friend Anthony Blinken. Malley’s assignment was to renegotiate the overall framework for peace achieved under Obama and rescinded under Trump. (READ MORE: Rediscovering Madam Secretary) In the course of doing his job, Malley, according to reports that remain to be clarified and substantiated, pretty much gave away the store. He jettisoned the sanctions the Trump administration placed on Iran (to blunt its mischief) and reached tentative agreements with them to let their nuclear program advance. When Malley came under suspicion of being under Iranian influence, and despite the removal of his security clearances, he took part in top policy councils. Forced to take a “leave” from his post, the details of his promotion of Iranian interests remain, a year and a half later, unexplained by the administration. (READ MORE: Is This the ‘History’ They’re Teaching at Yale?) Frankly, I am not much of a political type, and, indeed, foreign policy is rarely voters’ top concern during presidential campaigns. But it strikes me that a simple question — “Who hired Malley?” — ought to be raised. When a real and present danger is clearly and honestly explained, the American people have no trouble seeing who takes seriously the defense of the Republic, the first duty of the executive branch, and who does not. The post Are We About to Replay the Alger Hiss Affair? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Being President Is Not Similar to Playing 'Top Chef'

Kamala Harris' Never-Ending Border Dodge