While Intelligent Design (ID) is a term which is becoming more familiar in our culture it is safe to say most people still misunderstand it.  Since critics often misrepresent ID, and paint ID advocates as a fanatical fringe group, it is important to understand what intelligent design is, and what it is not. Contrary to popular belief, to be an ID proponent you do not have to believe that all species were created simultaneously a few thousand years ago. Until Charles Darwin, almost everyone everywhere believed in some form of intelligent design (the majority still do): not just Christians, Jews and Muslims, but almost every tribesman in every remote corner of the world drew the obvious conclusion from observing animals and plants that there must have been a mind behind the creation of living things. Darwin thought he could explain all of this apparent design through natural selection of random variations. In spite of the fact that there is no evidence that natural selection can explain anything other than very minor adaptations, his theory has gained widespread popularity in the scientific world, simply because no one can come up with a more plausible theory to explain the development of life, other than intelligent design, which is dismissed by most scientists as “unscientific.” But, in recent years, as scientific research has continually revealed the astonishing dimensions of the complexity of life, especially at the microscopic level, support for Darwin’s theory has continued to weaken, and since the publication in 1996 of Darwin’s Black Box by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, a growing minority of scientists have concluded, with Behe, that there is no possible explanation for the complexity of life without intelligent design.  If scientists can spend time and money developing tools and algorithms to detect dubious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence in weak signals from outer space, why are they required to ignore the evidence in living cells where design practically leaps out at you? What Intelligent Design Scientists Believe But what exactly, do these “ID scientists” believe? There is no general agreement among advocates of intelligent design as to exactly where, when, or how design was manifested in the history of life. Most, but not quite all, accept the standard timeline for the beginning of the universe, of life, and of the major animal groups. Some accept common descent, although most recognize that this “descent” was not really gradual. (In fact, most of the animal phyla appear quite suddenly in the fossil record about 500 million years ago in the “Cambrian explosion,” as documented in Steven Meyer’s 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt.)  Probably all reject natural selection as an adequate explanation for the development of life, but so do many other scientists who are not ID proponents. So what exactly do you have to believe to be an ID proponent? Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to state clearly what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design. Peter Urone, in his 2001 physics text College Physics writes, “One of the most remarkable simplifications in physics is that only four distinct forces account for all known phenomena.” The prevailing view in science today is that physics explains all of chemistry, chemistry explains all of biology, and biology completely explains the human mind; thus, physics alone explains the human mind and all it does. This is what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design, that the origin and evolution of life, and the evolution of human consciousness and intelligence, are due entirely to a few unintelligent forces of physics.  The new video A Mathematician’s View of Evolution dramatizes this through reductio ad absurdum, pointing out that if you don’t believe there was intelligence involved in the origin or evolution of life, or in the origin of human intelligence, you essentially believe that a few unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics on Earth into computers and science texts and jet airplanes. Contrary to popular belief, to be an ID proponent you do not have to believe that all species were created simultaneously a few thousand years ago, or that humans are unrelated to earlier primates, or that natural selection cannot cause bacteria to develop a resistance to antibiotics. If you believe that a few fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the basic particles of physics into Apple iPhones, you are probably not an ID proponent, even if you believe in God. But if you believe there must have been more than unintelligent forces at work somewhere, somehow, in the origin of life and the development of intelligent humans: congratulations, you are one of us after all! Furthermore, the evidence uncovered in the last half century have forced many scientists who insist that unintelligent laws of nature explain everything to accept that design is required to explain the spectacular fine-tuning for life, and even of the laws and constants of physics themselves. These scientists are sometimes considered to be intelligent design supporters as well.  One of the three discoveries discussed in Stephen Meyer’s 2021 best seller Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe  is this well-documented fine-tuning.  Notice the long list of distinguished scientists who have formally endorsed the book, including physics Nobel prize winner Brian Josephson who writes, “This book makes it clear that far from being an unscientific claim, intelligent design is valid science.” READ MORE from Granville Sewell: Venezuela Follows the Classic Path of Radical Socialism Route 60: The Biblical Highway: More Than a Road Map The post What is the Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Since the election we have been regaled with articles detailing the steps angry progressives intend to take against anyone not expressing performative outrage at the reelection of Donald Trump. Tik Tok is full of head shaving, sex strikes, and of course the old faithful, threats to hector relatives at holiday meals. So be polite to your young prog, ask interested questions, nod appreciatively, and thank them for explaining things. Sympathetic media outlets have offered their Harris-supporting readers tips for dealing with their MAGA cousins and uncles, mostly deriving from the tired false consciousness trope. Apparently only graduates of elite Ivy League schools can identify the true interests of small business owners and blue collar workers.  Some leftie stalwarts recommend a boycott of benighted families altogether, but their less-exalted acolytes are unlikely to pass on an opportunity for a thrilling bout of rage over the roast turkey. Which leaves those of us who prefer to protect the bonds of familial affection from the corrosive influence of partisan politics in a bit of a bind as the holidays approach.  Our love for our families is not contingent on a series of political tests. We can still adore our nieces and nephews as they try out various astonishing ideologies, and hope that they may mature into sturdy tax-paying bourgeoisie. We can appreciate their intellectual experiments, and tolerate the emotional riptides that course through the arguments animating them. Youthful passion can be a lovely thing even when applied to tawdry politics. Familial love can help prevent this passion from curdling into hate, the heroin of emotions: euphoric, destructive, and highly addictive. There is nothing more hypnotic for young zealots than righteous hatred. Your political opponents aren’t just wrong, they are in fact evil and every fiber of your moral being can be devoted to smiting them down.  Which explains the growing penchant for violence among the extreme left. If we are to save our family members from this dire addiction, we must engage with them even when they prefer spiky rhetoric to civil discourse. Unfortunately, our major media outlets offer little advice to those likely to endure explosions of progressive rage over the holiday table. We are presumably meant to enjoy a dollop of leftist reeducation with our pumpkin pie.  Prior generations could employ the “Bless your heart” tactic, which was the presiding grandmother’s way of saying “please shut up now,” but the white-hot rage animating young progressives these days is unlikely to defer to traditional politesse. Quiet forbearance may only create further unpleasantness as the angry young progressive senses apostasy and seeks to expose the infidel. Once the witch hunt begins, it will be impossible to restore the good humor needed to turn to less fraught topics, such as whether Alabama deserves a spot in the college football playoffs. The first step to restoring family comity and perhaps forestall an incipient addiction to partisan hatred is to understand the sources of progressive rage since the election. Much has been made of the quasi-religious aspects of contemporary progressivism: the original sin of Western capitalism, doomed to be punished by the angry secular deity of climate change. A creed offering sin without grace can unleash the inner Cotton Mather in young students insulated from base material considerations like supporting a family amid high inflation. Yet this doesn’t exactly explain the explosion of rage after either the 2016 or 2024 presidential elections. After all, further evidence of America’s fallen state should be a source of calm satisfaction and smug superiority to adherents of a progressive religion. The key to understanding our young progressives is to grasp that what animates them is not ersatz religion, but something much more toxic: thwarted consumer vanity. Young Americans are the most ferocious consumers the world has ever seen. Before they commit to any purchase, they can instantly compare prices and product reviews online, trawl the recommendations of favored influencers, and check Instagram for the preferences of their social superiors. Value for money is less important than the status capital imparted by the clothes they wear, the music they prefer, the cars they drive. Thanks to the internet and smartphones, we have created Veblen’s nightmare: a generation of sovereign consumers who accept no constraint on their ambition to adorn themselves with the most socially flattering goods and preferences. For these self-regarding young consumers, political opinions are just another product category. High status influencers, the ultimate cool kids table, are more important than boring policy analysis. Our young progs may never enjoy a dinner party with Taylor Swift or John Stewart, but social media offers them the chance to break bread virtually with their idols. Any attempt to test the merits of their political claims becomes alarming iconoclasm, and actual disagreement becomes a mortal threat to their carefully curated identity.  You could view the politics of many young progs not as a set of coherent policy prescriptions but rather as a personal marketing campaign designed to win a place in the virtual constellation of high status media figures or failing that, maybe a freelance gig at Slate. Seen from this perspective, the deranged reactions to the election make more sense. Young progressives were outraged by the country’s refusal to endorse their consumer preferences and harbor a creeping fear that their personal marketing campaigns have gone awry. They bought the Kamala Harris brand because it flattered their social aspirations, in the same way that they embraced Obama as the cool black friend of every young liberal’s dreams. All the best people working in journalism and entertainment assured our young progs that only the retrogrades doing manual labor out there in the provinces would vote Trump. The mandate of the great and good or at least the stinking rich in New York and LA would sweep Kamala to victory. When the country rejected Harris in both the electoral college and the popular vote, it threatened them with the worst rebuke possible in their rarefied consumer world: your favorite product is for losers. How can we show affection for our angry young relatives determined to wreak havoc on our holiday gatherings? Consider this analogy: suppose your young nephew fresh out of college shows up at Thanksgiving driving a new BMX X6. You suspect he can’t afford the payments, much less the repair bills. You may agree with experts (me) that this car with its Nostrils of Doom is an ugly, overpriced dog. Yet you also know that he is very proud of the thing, that he is committed to the image of himself this purchase is meant to enhance. So what do you do? You nod politely, and ask questions about horsepower and features.  You might even sit in it and make positive noises.  Your relationship with your nephew is much more important than his choice in automobiles.  In much the same way, your relationship with the young progs in the family is more important than any damn fool opinions they may have. So be polite to your young prog, ask interested questions, nod appreciatively, and thank them for explaining things.  No ugly car and no opinion short of endorsing cannibalism is worth ruining your family. You are not going to save the world by engaging in heated debate over the oyster casserole, so don’t.  Show them your love, and rely on life itself to administer the necessary rebukes to their unfortunate consumer preferences. READ MORE from Karl Pfefferkorn: For the Democrats, It’s the Keffiyehs vs. the Tote Bags Failure Is for Other People The post Making Nice With the Young Progs at Your Table appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The recent death of Sandra M. Gilbert at the age of 87 sent my mind reeling back decades to the first time I came across her name. With Susan Gubar (who still lives), Gilbert wrote The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, which is now regarded as a pathbreaking text of feminist criticism and which came out the same year, 1979, that I began graduate study in English literature.  They took the study of literature … and turned it into a crude, cheap means of slamming men.  Madwoman was one of the first shots in a revolution in literary studies that has, in one form or another, been underway ever since. It’s hard to imagine it now, but there were actually professors in our English department who opposed the proposition to add a feminist critic to the faculty — not because they opposed women’s rights, but because they viewed feminist criticism as a political project rather than one of aesthetic inquiry. And they were right. But they lost that battle, and for those old-timers who fiercely opposed the politicization of literary studies, it was the beginning of the end.  In a 2021 interview, Gilbert and Gubar recounted how their classic had come into being. Together they’d taught a course in women’s writing, and for both of them it was “an experience of consciousness-raising,” “a revelation,” “an apocalypse.” Why? Gilbert: “Suddenly we were reading only female writers, all together in the classroom, and finding incredible connections. I would go home every night just gasping in amazement.” Never before, the women explained, had either of them ever studied female writers.  Really? They were professors of English literature and had never studied Jane Austen, the Bröntes, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, or Virginia Woolf? All I know is that I studied them, and it didn’t take a feminist professor to lead me to them. But then again, I didn’t read them to discover apocalyptic feminist messages between the lines. I read them because they were great literature — a concept that people like Gilbert and Gubar have done a great deal to wipe off the academic map. (Incidentally, my favorite novel was by a woman, Mary Renault — about whom I knew enough to recognize that she’d have been as put off by Gilbert and Gubar’s narrow enterprise as I was.) (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Dana Gioia on the Opera, From Tosca to Sweeney Todd) Anyway, Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist criticism won the day. It swept through America’s English departments like a tornado. In 1985, W.W. Norton published a massive volume, edited by Gilbert and Gubar, entitled The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. New editions followed in 1990, 1996, and 2007.  The fact that the latest edition of their anthology came out almost two decades ago points to an uncomfortable (for them) fact: Gilbert and Gubar’s victory was short-lived. Indeed, the brand of feminist criticism that they championed in the late 70s and 80s looks almost quaint now. Gilbert and Gubar’s Privileged ‘White’ Feminism For theirs was a middle- and upper-middle-class feminism, a white feminism. It was a feminism that took its cues from Virginia Woolf, a rich and privileged woman who belonged to an elite circle of highly cultured Londoners and who was waited on by servants day and night, but who nonetheless saw herself as cruelly oppressed. (Gilbert and Gubar, by the way, weren’t too badly off either: Gilbert went to Cornell, NYU, and Columbia, and taught at places like Stanford and Princeton; Gubar went to CCNY, Michigan, and Iowa, and spent her career — she’s now retired — teaching at Indiana.)  No, Gilbert and Gubar were only the start. After they kicked it off, Women’s Studies developed in much the same way as the Reign of Terror in France, with each new wave of rebels being replaced and slaughtered — in this case only metaphorically — by the next. Soon enough, for example, black women came along and insisted that they were far more oppressed than their well-off white sisters and therefore deserved to run the movement. (They even came up with their own word, womanism, as a means of distinguishing their own battle against both male sexism and white racism from white women’s war on the patriarchy.)  Latina women, too, demanded a slice of the cake. So did lesbians and, later, those women who chose to identify themselves, more broadly and meaninglessly, as queer. Finally the trans women marched in and cowed all the others into submission, thereby bringing the whole thing full circle, with biological women once again being put in their place by biological men. Somewhere along the way the movement embraced the concept of intersectionality, which views sexism as only one ingredient in an elaborate gumbo of oppression, along with racism, classism, and so on.  At the same time, the blatantly political preoccupations of Gilbert and Gubar were largely supplanted by postmodern theory, which distances itself from reality — and which, of course, includes gender ideology, a preposterous phenomenon that wasn’t even on Gilbert and Gubar’s radar when they started out. Still another new twist was that Women’s Studies, which had originally stood up for oppressed women in the Third World, now taught that white women had no right to criticize men of color, no matter how much they abused their wives and daughters; to do so was to become tools of Western hegemony.  In the midst of this maelstrom, Gilbert and Gubar and other second-wave feminists, as they’re called (if you’re counting, the movement is now on its fourth wave), had to do their best to keep up, to stay relevant, to try not to be given the heave-ho by their successors. This required them to continually adjust their own most deeply held beliefs, their own politics, and their own rhetoric to the movement’s latest priorities. It wasn’t easy. At one point Gubar found herself being told by newer arrivals to Women’s Studies that she was a “trogolodyte,” insufficiently devoted to theory and promoting female writing that was deficient in its representation of lesbians and women of color. But they gave it the old college try. In their 2021 interview, after gushing over the Woman’s March that took place on the day after Trump’s 2017 inauguration, mourning “the terrible downfall of Hillary Clinton,” and expressing “admiration for Dr. Jill Biden” and “for Kamala Harris,” they pretended to be grateful to the inane Queer Studies doyennes Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick for having “contributed enormously to the conversation that led to queer theory and that also resulted in trans studies.” Yeah — you can take it to the bank that Gilbert and Gubar felt precisely the same way about the advent of Butler and Sedgwick as Hillary Clinton felt when Barack Obama came out of the woodwork and stole the Democratic presidential nomination from her.  Still Raging The occasion of Gilbert and Gubar’s 2021 interview, by the way, was the publication of their book Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination. In it, they explained that they’d decided to write it “because we are still mad.” That, they explained, is what feminism’s all about: never-ending rage at the “patriarchal structures that have proven to be shockingly obdurate.” It was those structures that, in their view, had made possible the election of Trump, who they described as “boorish,” “utterly unqualified,” “misogynistic,” “rabble-rousing,” and “nearly psychotic” — as opposed, naturally, to the “educated and experienced” Hillary Clinton, who, they asserted, would, if elected, “surely not govern by tweet, not deny or evade the existence of a major medical threat, not foment rebellion among the citizens of her land or counsel people to ingest Lysol or enlist the military against civil rights protesters.”  (READ MORE: Revolution at the LA Times) Lies, lies, lies. But then again Gilbert and Gubar’s entire project was founded on lies. These were, after all, a couple of incredibly privileged women posing as downtrodden — an insult to every one of the hundreds of millions of truly downtrodden people on earth — and posturing as warriors even as they luxuriated in cozy homes in college towns that would’ve made most people around the world weep with envy. They took the study of literature — which, properly understood, is an exercise in subtly and delicately teasing out the truth, beauty, and moral content in works of the human imagination — and turned it into a crude, cheap means of slamming men.  Well, in one sense, they won: the increasing toxicity of man-hatred in the academy, which began with professors like Gilbert and Gubar, has led more and more young men to give up entirely on the idea of higher education. But in another sense they lost — for the revolution they initiated has reached a point of utter self-parody and sparked a magnificent backlash, the result of which is that the most venerable universities, like the most established media, are headed, along with the reality-defying ideologies that have captured them, for the chopping block. In the end, alas, that’s the unenviable legacy of Sandra M. Gilbert and her sisters in arms. The post Sandra Gilbert and Feminism’s Endless Rage appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-leaders of President-elect Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), have announced ambitious goals for cutting unnecessary government regulations, an effort in “retrospective review” that is long-overdue.   Our current federal governmental structure is devoted almost exclusively to so-called administrative “experts” developing and promulgating new rules and regulations. But the government never goes back to assess systematically whether existing regulations are actually needed or achieving their stated goals.  This uncontrolled expansion of federal regulation is exactly what was foreseen in 1973 in a perceptive but obscure book, The Institutional Imperative, by an experienced Washington lawyer, Robert Kharasch.  There is even a chance that some sensible Democrats might cross party lines to support a freeze on enforcement of … unnecessary federal regulations. Kharasch argues that the real goal for people in government is not to solve problems, but to maintain the institution and assure the public and the Congress — and I would add, themselves — that the work they are doing is important and worthy of expanded funding. In other words, our current governmental structure does not include any mechanism to declare victory and go home, a situation that predictably leads to uncontrolled growth called “hypertrophy.”  As the 19th century polymath, Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it, “Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that will itself need reforming.” This critique rings true to my experience as a former General Counsel of one of the worst offenders, the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as practicing and teaching environmental and administrative law at Yale for almost fifty years.  As I outlined in a 2012 article in The Atlantic, “The Case for Trimming the EPA,” as the environment had gotten much cleaner over the decades since 1970, EPA has only gotten bigger and its regulations more expensive, complex, and intrusive. The agency has consistently found new and often fewer and less significant problems to justify its existence and expand its funding.  (READ MORE from E. Donald Elliott: Are the American People Smart Enough to See Through the Political Theater?) A good example are the recent draconian regulations I have criticized in these pages that will cost trillions to “clean-up” PFAS, a chemical that hasn’t been proven to cause any substantial harm at low levels.  (Note: any chemical with letters for a name is scary to the public.). However, enter “the resistance” to much needed change.  A recent article in The Washington Post quotes George Washington University administrative law professor Richard Pierce arguing that DOGE is a fools’ errand because it will take two to three years plus extensive litigation to get rid of even one existing regulation. To paraphrase Lloyd Benson’s famous rejoinder to Dan Quayle during their vice-presidential debate, “I know Dick Pierce, Dick Pierce is a friend of mine.”  Professor Pierce has a valid point but there is a way around it. The conventional way to get rid of administrative regulations is to revoke them.  The Reagan Administration tried to do that with a rule requiring all new cars to have air bags or automatic seatbelts that strapped in their occupants whether they wanted to fasten them or not.  The Supreme Court slapped down that previous de-regulatory effort in an (in)famous case taught in every administrative law class, Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Ass’n v. State Farm Mut. Auto Ins. Co., 463 U.S. 29 (1983).   That case held, more or less as an unjustified ipse dixit, that in order to get rid of a regulation, an agency had to go through the same process of notice and comment rulemaking and benefit-cost analysis plus judicial review that was used to create it in the first place.  That’s what Professor Pierce is referring to when he is quoted as saying that Musk and Ramaswamy are “‘utterly ignorant’ of the realities of federal law, which mandates strict procedures for repealing existing regulations.”   Starve Regulations of Funding However, a much faster way exists: appropriations riders that forbid agencies and the Department of Justice from enforcing antiquated or unnecessary regulations.   As I point out in a forthcoming article in The Harvard Journal of Public Policy, a draft of which is available here, appropriations riders are one of the few tools left to the Congress and the President to reel in the administrative state.  As a result of the Republicans’ “trifecta” in the recent elections, they now control not only the White House but also both houses on Congress, although by narrow majorities.  As a result, they can probably enact appropriations riders, but even if they cannot, in my experience, agencies typically respect even report language from a single house, which is much easier to obtain that a law passed by both house and signed by the president. What DOGE should do is solicit nominations from the public concerning existing rules that are unduly burdensome and/or unnecessary.  Then, after looking into the claims, DOGE should provide the White House, the Congress and the public a list of those it thinks should be paused immediately. Congressional committees should then hold hearings and enact riders in appropriations bills that prohibit the government spending any more money to enforce those rules while the government decides whether to revoke those rules permanently or simply leave them on the books as “dead letters.”  (Admittedly, this may not always be a perfect solution, because a few federal laws, particularly environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act, provide for lawsuits by states and/or private parties to enforce existing rules.) Ample precedent exists for de-funding as a strategy.  For example, in 1972, the Congress in its wisdom — or in this case, lack thereof —enacted the Noise Control Act of 1972, which gave EPA broad powers to regulate noise from all products “distributed in commerce,” which essentially means everything.  However, a decade later, in 1982 under the Reagan Administration, Congress de-funded EPA from using any federal funds to enforce that statute in order to return control of noise back to the states, a prohibition that lasts to this day.  Thus, while the Noise Control Act technically still remains on the books, it is a dead letter in practice. (READ MORE: Are the Criminal Cases Against Trump Unconstitutional?) Congress should use one of the few legal devices left to rein in the administrative state, its power of the purse.  There is even a chance that some sensible Democrats might cross party lines to support a freeze on enforcement of particularly burdensome or unnecessary federal regulations. The post How DOGE Can Suspend Unneeded Regulations appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The defeat that the Democratic Party has just sustained is being blamed by its more fanatical adherents on racism, misogyny, reaction against ‘lawfare,’ the stubbornness of Biden, the inarticulateness of Harris, the rubbishing of the Catholic church, open borders, potential involvement in foreign wars, the effects of COVID and inflation, and the focus on Trump’s personality. Yet American elites resisted the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, twice vetoed by President Clinton before he ultimately signed. But the sweep of Republican victories and near-victories suggest larger causes at work. Harris under-performed Mrs. Clinton and Obama as well as Biden and did so nearly everywhere. The Republican disaster in 1964 was a vote to sustain social security and the welfare state, such as it was. This year’s vote was a vote against seventy years of leveling down of standards of behavior. Americans do not like sumptuary legislation, particularly federal sumptuary legislation. The extension of prohibitions against state-imposed racial discrimination first to private discrimination and then to ‘disparate impacts’ and ‘hostile environments’ has taken its toll. The devaluation of marriage with the invalidation of sodomy laws, abortion on demand, the compulsory validation of ‘gay marriage,’ the legitimization of male homosexuality in all its aspects, and the validation of transgenderism even to the point of public financial support and insulation from parental authority convinced large portions of the electorate, particularly those charged with the up-bringing of adolescents, that the federal government was their enemy, not their friend. The Clinton administration discarded the reports of two national commissions concerned with people at the bottom of society: the Dunlop commission recommending building-level labor organizations and the Barbara Jordan commission recommending skills-based immigration reform. (READ MORE from George Liebmann: Democrats Want to Lower the Voting Age) Even the Bolsheviks reacted against sexual libertarianism, pressed to its limits. The 1918 Soviet family law with its instant divorce and free abortion was stiffened in 1926 in reaction to the depredations of fatherless youths. The Democratic family agenda or lack thereof has been sustained by concealment of inconvenient facts. The proportion of births to unwed mothers increased from 4 percent to more than 40 percent from 1970 to 2020, among blacks from 30 percent to 70 percent, and among black high school dropouts to more than 90 percent. More than half of fatherless black men were involved with the criminal justice system by the age of 40. The likelihood of venereal disease infection is ten times as great for unprotected anal sex as for unprotected vaginal sex. Although there are thankfully drugs that allow AIDS sufferers a normal life span, until recently the cost to the government of these drugs approximated a million dollars a person over a lifetime, and the federal AIDS budget exceeded $40 billion per year. The incidence of suicide among the beneficiaries of transgender treatments is about six times that in the general population. The effects of well-intentioned affirmative action programs are self-segregation, enhanced racial tension, and grade inflation leading to a reduction in studying, as a quest for meaningless grades is forsworn in favor of extra-curricular activities. “Disparate impact” ideology has prevented any serious effort through drug testing to curtail the consumption of both licit and illicit drugs by student populations, to the point where 20 percent of male youth are disqualified from either the military or labor market, with macro-economic costs. As long ago as 1927, Bertrand Russell wrote about the purposeless lives of young men whose consorts had “married the state” through provision of child care, food, medical care, and housing. Fifty years ago, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed that the problems of blacks in large cities were the typical problems of urban proletariats the world over, which would not yield to the moralistic fault-finding of black ministers ascribing social ills to Confederate mores. America’s northern liberals still have not taken on board these lessons, seeking to inculcate among blacks an ideology of self-pity forsworn by all other ethnic groups. Both Isaiah Berlin and George Kennan have analogized them to the well-born late 19th century Russian narodniki, who pitied peasants but did not understand them, and who paved the way for Bolshevism. The gains that should have resulted from the civil rights movement have been largely negated by the effects of the welfare rights movement, the sexual revolution, and the drug war. Yet American elites resisted the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, twice vetoed by President Clinton before he ultimately signed; the Dobbs decision backing away from free love; and the beginnings of drug decriminalization, on which Democratic governors and the Biden administration have dragged their feet. In 1947, Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma, lamenting the downtrodden state of American blacks, The dietary deficiencies and outdoor privies he deplored have since yielded to government programs, but the crime, family breakdown, and venereal disease statistics have grown markedly worse. (READ MORE: Firearms Control: It’s Time for a Common-Sense Bargain) Perhaps a change will be wrought by November 5. Donald Trump is the opposite of a moral exemplar. His social conscience is well concealed, but he appears to possess at least a semi-efficient bull**it detector. Dislike of Trump does not justify disregard of the ordinary folk who brought him to power, and who want to think that the national government is not educating the young in false values. The writer, who expresses his individual views, is President of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar and author of works on law and history, most recently The Tafts (Twelve Tables Press, 2023). The post The American Electorate Revolted Against False Values appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

by Mac Slavo, SHTF Plan: An elderly member of the Rothschild banking cartel dynasty is believed to have been killed in a house fire in Los Angeles. The blaze at a property on Lookout Mountain Avenue in the Hollywood Hills broke out on Wednesday, with 45 firefighters requiring just over half an hour to extinguish the flames, […]

by Amy Furr, Breitbart: Data shows that the Biden-Harris administration has been targeting faith-based colleges, a study found. According to the American Principles Project (APP), actions by the Department of Education have “unfairly” targeted Christian colleges and universities while ignoring Ivy League schools, the organization reported on November 18. TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/ The report said almost […]

from SGT Report: The house of Rothschild is on fire, kinda literally – at least one one of them. And the crimes against humanity committed by the houses of Rockefeller and Rothschild are being exposed like never before, and NOTHING can stop it. Meanwhile Donald Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet and many conservative […]

from ZeeeMedia: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Ronan Manly, BullionStar: Have you ever thought about what pennies are made of? At first glance, it may seem like a minor coin, almost negligible in value. However, the cost to produce each penny actually exceeds its face value, which has led to debates about whether keeping the penny in circulation is worth it. […]