Happy Halloween! Trick or Treat? Watch people act like dogs for a treat. By Mark Dice #shorts Copyright © 2024 by Mark Dice. All Rights Reserved.

In a CNN panel discussing the rhetoric of Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, Ryan Girdusky was fired from CNN following an offensive remark he made toward panelist Mehdi Hassan. (READ MORE: In Defense of Tony Hinchcliffe)  In this episode of The Spectacle Podcast, hosts Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay discuss Trump’s rally and the Left’s meltdown over the Puerto Rico joke by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. Melissa and Scott discuss the Left’s disconnect with the American people, as exemplified in Michelle Obama’s comments telling men they are racist and sexist unless they vote for Harris. Tune in to hear their discussion!  Listen to The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Spotify. Watch The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Rumble.  The post <i>The Spectacle</i> Ep. 163: The Left Can’t Take a Joke: Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

America’s population decline is decently bad, but it isn’t so bad that you’d notice anything drastically different in our society. We’re all still groaning with impatience when full school buses make our morning commute a good 20 minutes longer, our playgrounds are still used, and, depending on where you live, it’s not all that rare to see moms at the grocery store with kids in tow.  In short, it doesn’t yet feel like we live in a childless dystopian world. That’s not at all the case in Japan.  Japan has a bit of a population problem. Not only is its fertility rate incredibly low (at 1.37 births per woman) but last year government data revealed that for every one person born in Japan, two people died. Those kinds of numbers are a problem for social flourishing, and it’s starting to show. The New York Post reported that in Ichinono, a rural town near Nachikatsuura, the remaining residents (numbering less than 60 in total) have taken to setting up life-sized stuffed mannequins to create the illusion of a bustling society. One resident told AFP that “we’re probably outnumbered by puppets.”  Part of the problem seems to be that parents encouraged their children to pursue colleges in bigger cities, and their children never moved back. That, compounded by the population problem, has created a dystopian atmosphere where mannequins remind elderly civilians of what could have been. It’s not all bad news though. Ichinono has one child remaining, a 2-year-old boy with, one imagines, a lot of doting grandparents.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the East China Sea, Xi Jinping’s Communist government is doing its best to avoid the fate of Ichinono after years of advocating for its famous one-child policy. China’s fertility rate is just barely better than Japan’s, coming in at 1.44, its kindergartens are rapidly shrinking, and its population is continuing to age.  So, to avoid the ticking population time bomb, the Chinese government is doing the only thing it knows how to do when it wants something from its citizens. It’s harassing them. In one social media post, a Chinese woman with two children complained that a government employee had called her to ask when she planned on conceiving a third child and suggested that her mother-in-law or her mother could step in to help with childcare.  Another woman interviewed by the New York Times shared that she had been given free prenatal vitamins when she and her husband registered their marriage. Government officials later called to check if she had taken them, and called yet again once she had gotten pregnant to check up on her. She drew the line when they showed up at her house to take a picture of her newborn child for their files.  “We’re not like people born in the 1970s or ’80s. Everyone knows that people born after the ’90s generally don’t want kids,” Yang told the New York Times. “Whether you want to have children is a very private issue.” Lest you think this is only an issue on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it’s worth noting that fertility rates in the United States have been falling for a while now (last year was a record low for us). We aren’t feeling it quite yet because our population hasn’t really started to decline. That hasn’t stopped the White House from releasing a document pointing out the obvious: a declining birth rate will ultimately hurt the American economy and our standard of living.  The root cause of the issue seems to be universal. Chinese, Japanese, European, and American women are interested in advancing their careers, something that is difficult to do when you’re having kids. Our global culture is afflicted, in the words of Pope Francis back in May, with an attitude of “selfishness, consumerism and individualism, which make people satiated, lonely and unhappy.” That’s an attitude we’ll need to fix if we’re going to avoid Ichinono’s fate. The post More Dolls Than People: This is What Population Decline Looks Like appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Every four years, we hear a refrain that the presidential election before us is the “most important election of our lifetimes.” This line is reflexively repeated by pundits, talkers, and thinkers on both sides of the American political divide, and that repetition always engenders a great deal of backlash. We are reliably informed that our elaborate Constitution, with its intricate checks and balances and federalist system of dual spheres of sovereignty, can withstand any particular president (and Congress). Bills are very hard to pass out of Congress, you see, and rogue presidents can be reined in by the Supreme Court. Didn’t you know that gridlock in Washington is a feature, not a bug? Don’t you remember watching “Schoolhouse Rock!”? Come on! I dissent from this blithe dismissal of very real concern. Tuesday’s presidential contest, between former President Donald Trump and sitting Vice President Kamala Harris, is the most important election of our lifetimes. There are two reasons for this: one structural and one contextual. They are both important. First, structure. There is a concept in traditional Jewish thought called yeridat hadorot, or “the decline of the generations.” The basic idea is that, because each successive generation is necessarily further away than the generations that preceded it from God’s Revelation to Moses at Mount Sinai, each new generation is less reliable than its predecessors when it comes to Torah knowledge, divine inspiration, and perhaps general wisdom. We can draw an easy analogy here to the American republic. With the exception of some truly epochal figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, subsequent generations of American leadership that are further removed from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 have been less reliable when it comes to safeguarding core American values. We see this clearly, for instance, in the early 20th-century rise of the modern administrative state. From this perspective, every new presidential election is the most important one of our lifetimes. By definition, we are always getting further and further away from the American founding, and closer and closer to the point of no return (if we have not already crossed it). This Tuesday’s particular presidential election is also the most important election of our lifetimes for a simple additional reason: Harris is the most ideologically left-wing, intellectually deficient, and wildly unprepared presidential candidate in the nation’s history. An America under (God forbid) President Harris is an America besieged with so many illegal alien criminals and foreign terrorists so as to make the last four already-horrific years look positively paradisical. An America under (God forbid) President Harris is one where American manufacturing continues to deteriorate, stifling electrical vehicle mandates destroy the American auto industry, oil and natural gas restrictions lead to skyrocketing energy prices, and mass spending once again brings crippling inflation. An America under (God forbid) President Harris is one where the Supreme Court is packed, the lower courts are stacked with radical Constitution-hating progressives, and the Department of Justice is weaponized like never before against Democrats’ political enemies. An America under (God forbid) President Harris is one where Iran gets the bomb, jihadism is emboldened both at home and abroad, China invades Taiwan and makes ever-greater inroads in our own hemisphere, and Israel is as diplomatically and militarily isolated as it has ever been. Are you paying attention yet? This is not your grandfather’s Democratic Party. Once upon a time, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court, his fellow Democrats who dominated the Senate Judiciary Committee had the common sense and decency to rise up en masse and say, “No.” But today, a President Harris would have supine leftist zealots, such as Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), eager to do the bidding of their dear White House leader. Once upon a time, Democratic former President Bill Clinton signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and vowed that abortion would be “safe, legal and rare.” Today, Harris says she will brook no compromise on religious exemptions for the fundamental “right” of snuffing out an unborn life in the womb, and she promises to codify that “right” from conception right up until birth nationwide. I repeat: Are you paying attention yet? Ultimately, the 2024 election presents us with the opportunity to pick a definitive side in America’s roiling cold civil war, which this column has often phrased as that between the forces of civilizational sanity and the forces of civilizational arson. Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) represent the former: They are the ticket, above all, of normalcy. Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), by contrast, embody the latter: They are the ticket, above all, of decadence. It is not an exaggeration to say that our constitutional structure, biblical inheritance, and middle-class economy are all on the ballot this Tuesday. Here’s hoping team sanity prevails over the arsonists. To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE: Voters Prefer Warts-and-All Trump to Photoshopped Harris Netflix Films to Skip and Stream This Halloween The Garbage Election The post The Final Choice: Civilizational Arson Versus Civilizational Sanity appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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