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September was Suicide Prevention Month. This year we should’ve all been aware of that fact. Were we? More than 50,000 Americans died by suicide last year—more than any year on record. The year before…

Sometime in the middle of August, just as the weather has become sweltering, the sound of crickets has become deafening, and the aroma of cut grass has become incessant, my mind starts drifting to sweater…

According to President Joe Biden’s Justice Department, it is now a federal crime to prevent illegal ballots in presidential elections.  Barely 30 days before the 2024 election, the Justice Department…

Culture Sweltering Sweater Weather Autumn is a wonderful sartorial season. Credit: image via Shutterstock Sometime in the middle of August, just as the weather has become sweltering, the sound of crickets has become deafening, and the aroma of cut grass has become incessant, my mind starts drifting to sweater weather. I have written before in this space of my earnest objection to commemorating seasons or holidays prior to their imminent arrival—for example, the marketing, display, and consumption of Halloween-themed candy around the Fourth of July—but in this case, I plead guilty: At a time of the year when most people are sensibly dressed in T-shirts and shorts, I am quietly plotting the return of autumn and, with it, the wide array of sweaters, sport coats, raincoats, overcoats, parkas, and other outerwear that will again be at my disposal. To open a sweater drawer or coat closet that has sat closed and tomblike since the early spring is, for me, something like ripping open packages on Christmas morning: Since these garments are, by definition, not worn year-round, many of them look new. Since my supply of such items will have generally been replenished the previous Christmas, some of them are practically new in the sense that they are either gently used, barely used, or altogether unworn.  To regard admiringly a folded stack of J. Press Shaggy Dog sweaters during the dog days of summer must make for a strange sight, but perhaps it is at just such a time, when the heat and humidity have become interminably intolerable, that it is most defensible to look ahead to cooler temperatures. Perhaps, in imagining a gray, windy October afternoon when I can get away with wearing my father’s London Fog maincoat (“Weatherware of Distinction” reads the old tag), or a chilly November evening when I can sport my William Lockie lambswool sweater, I am willing the leaves to start turning and the temperatures to start falling.   That is not to say that my anticipatory attitude about autumn stops with taking stock of the current contents of my closet. Alas, I have increasingly found myself susceptible to the temptation of adding fall-like items to my wardrobe at the end of August or the very beginning of September. I realize this makes me a participant in the marketing strategies of my favorite stores: When I receive an email from Brooks Brothers announcing fall arrivals, I invariably click on it, and when I receive the annual Autumn-Winter catalogue from J. Press, I cannot help but flip through it and look for ways to use the coupon (or coupons) conspicuously placed on the back page.  These stores evidently speak my language: Yes, school may have barely started, and yes, people are still grilling and swimming, but J. Press knows that my mind is on shawl collar cardigan sweaters. This year, I impulsively purchased a Harris Tweed sack sport coat from Brooks Brothers in the middle of an early September heat wave. The timing turned out to be fortuitous, though: The sleeves needed shortening anyway, and it takes some time to find a good tailor these days.  Sometimes historical circumstances intervene to hasten my autumn wardrobe additions. Two years ago, after the death of Queen Elizabeth II in early September, I was among the millions of international viewers who again made note of the impeccable sartorial taste of Prince Charles. This ultimately led to my acquiring a camel hair polo coat from Brooks Brothers, but during the actual weeks-long commemoration of the late monarch, I ordered the next best thing: a camel duffle coat from Gloverall. Again, this being early September, I had to wait some time to actually wear it, but that only added to the sense of anticipation.  Clearly, as was once said of me by a suit salesman who knew my father, I am a natural-born clotheshorse. Beyond that, I think what appeals to me about quality fall and winter attire is the way that it provides a bulwark against a threatening world. Where I live, extreme weather usually translates to snow, ice, and the occasional subzero temperature. Isn’t it wise to dress well and sensibly given the vagaries of the weather? Speaking for myself, a Shaggy Dog sweater has never failed to insulate me from the elements. Once upon a time, I would not have needed to preach this sermon. When I look at pictures or clips of JFK’s inauguration on an ungovernably cold day in January 1961, I am filled with admiration for the smart sartorial choices made by the assembled dignitaries. You might call me silly for taking out my duffle coat, scarves, and leather gloves when people are still barbequing. Rubbish, I say: I am simply well prepared.  Now that the weather has finally turned, I look forward to many months of dressing accordingly. The post Sweltering Sweater Weather appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture The Suicide Epidemic Demands Fresh Solutions Deaths of despair are downstream from the deterioration of national unity. Credit: image via Shutterstock September was Suicide Prevention Month. This year we should’ve all been aware of that fact. Were we? More than 50,000 Americans died by suicide last year—more than any year on record. The year before that, the number had reached its highest point in more than 80 years. Our schoolmates, friends, co-workers, and even our family members have been just some of the individuals behind the metric. If we don’t all know someone, we all at least know of someone. As much as we have grown accustomed to this, it’s not normal, and it demands reflection.  Yet as these numbers climb, not much has changed in the discourse surrounding how to battle this epidemic. We’ve seen lots of policy. The 2024 Child Suicide Prevention and Lethal Means Safety Act, the 2023 Suicide Prevention Act, the 2022 Resilience of Our Nation’s Great Veterans Act, the 1995 Gay and Lesbian Youth Suicide Prevention Act, and hundreds of virtually identical bills have been introduced—and often passed—in Congress. Who would vote against suicide prevention? We have million dollar grants, trained healthcare workers, awareness initiatives, hotlines, databases—all of it. And, well, that’s great. With our government spending our taxes on so much stupidity, who would even consider verbalizing opposition to any of this?  But, while throwing money at more and more prevention programs may intuitively seem like an appropriate response, only a fool can expect the same results without radical change. “Desperate times [do indeed] call for desperate measures,” as some attribute to the more gracious Hippocrates. We are in desperate times. The CDC’s July 2024 report showed that the suicide rate per 100,000 people in 2022 was 14.2. For context, the rate was 15 in 1941—the year that Japan staged a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Back then, the United States faced the Great Depression (fittingly named), and the poverty rate was three times higher than what it is in 2022.  The sheer number of people taking their own lives made sense in 1941. After all, the world was at war and the nation in crisis. In an era of better economic conditions, reduced social stigma and plenty of wholesome government-funded programs, though, what straightforward indicators exist to explain the trend?  It’s a complicated question. This summer, at an American Enterprise Institute event, I asked the chairman of Harvard’s economics department, Edward Glaeser, if there was a more effective way policymakers could direct resources. “I’m sure the government can do better,” Glaeser told me, before telling me that despite having written on teen suicide for 20 years, “things related to mental health are very, very important and very hard to get right.”  “It’s hard for me to be against suicide prevention hotlines, of course, but I really don’t know enough about how to fix this,” he said. Understanding that the question is complicated, I contacted Roberto Rigobon, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology applied economics professor, known for his research on social wellbeing. Rigobon said that he “thinks the idea of addressing the issue with hot cloths [a Spanish idiom for patching over a problem without truly fixing it] is a good topic.” “The problem of mental health and suicide is very complex and reflects a social system that leaves many people abandoned,” he said. He emphasized that research (and policy for that matter) should focus on answering questions like “How important is the role of social media in suicides?” and “How important are family and social support?”  Regarding the second question, he pointed at a paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton called “Death by Despair,” “which states that those affected by suicides and illnesses related to depression are primarily white Americans, around 50 years old, and without a college education.” “Latinos in the same group (50 and no college) do not face these problems, suggesting that family and social support might be important,” Rigobon explained.  Other questions he put forward included: “How important are the types of jobs they have? Or the conditions of their housing? Or their financial conditions?” One thing we know for a fact is that poverty alone isn’t one of those prescient indicators. Although there is a case to be made for how the decrease in manufacturing jobs in the Midwest accentuated the problem in the region, the broader national trend is one that economics alone can’t easily explain. Poverty has been cut in half since the late 1950s.  Furthermore, Americans are seeking therapy more than ever before. Thus, the argument that the problem originates from not talking about mental health enough is faulty. Are Americans ending their lives because folks are meaner? Less accepting? Racist? Homophobic? We call this presentism.  The reality is that suicide prevention programs have only become better financed over time, with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding authorized by Republicans and Democrats alike. In September 2022, for instance, the Department of Health and Human Services awarded more than $200 million in “grants for suicide prevention and behavioral health care for at-risk communities.” And regarding reserving special spots in the calendar, last year, President Joe Biden announced that the tenth of that month is now also “World Suicide Prevention Day.” None of these steps is bad; maybe they are no-brainers. But when the numbers consistently increase, doing something different should be leaders’ obligation.  No scarcity in spiritual reasoning exists to explain the trend. Much has been said about how there is an inverse relationship between a country’s religiosity levels and its suicide rates, which is one of the theories often cited in the rapidly secularizing West. A Christian revival isn’t the safest bet, however, so let’s consider some of the other less theological theories (while not forgetting Cardinal Henry Edward Manning’s maxim, “All human conflict is ultimately theological”). Social critics in the 1970s like Tom Wolfe and Christopher Lasch warned about the destructive effects of cultures of therapeutics and narcissism. In short, defenders of their frameworks argue that the nation’s once-prevailing healthy individualism has been morphing into destructive self-adulation. These arguments pair well with a reading of Robert Putnam’s famous Bowling Alone, which dives into the many ways social interaction has declined in the last decades. It’s best to think about isolation, narcissism and social dysfunction as interdependent. It doesn’t take a PhD to decipher that spending a lot of time inside your own head makes you more self-absorbed, more antisocial.  The works of these thinkers, paired with the data (increases in narcissism diagnoses, increases in loneliness, etc), help explain how and why people are replacing human interaction, even intimacy, with their own pitiful selves. In effect, we are attempting to treat a cultural illness characterized with mere advocacy and modern medicine while ignoring the effects of declining community and social cohesion. Fast forward, and iterations of these culture-centric explanations have influenced how some of us think about the rise of depression and self-harm. In part, the logic that leads us today to decry the addictiveness of social media, as well as how it accelerates harmful interpersonal comparisons and leads to kids skip family dinners, is the same as the logic once advanced by the social critics of the Silent Generation. What has changed is that following an era of pronounced hyperindividualism, millions have sought to fill the void with weaker forms of “community.” And this is not just about how people are spending more time on the chats and less time at the parks. In college campuses and in the workplace, sense of community is increasingly built around immutable characteristics. Meanwhile, the most inclusive versions of “us”—from nationhood to locality—decline. It is no surprise that in the social causes of the day, you see more “my” than “our”—more my bodies, my peoples, my rights. This alone is worthy of a book. Title it: “How Inclusivity Excluded Us.”  Compounded with the effects of social media, the country faces a loneliness epidemic in which even those who find some company often find it in communities that are in themselves isolating. True togetherness has become the sacrificial lamb in the advancement of so many modern, vacuous causes.  Last year, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy made headlines when he compared the effects of isolation with smoking 15 cigarettes daily. “Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately half of U.S. adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness,” one of his press releases read.  It shouldn’t be just him saying this and the headlines should be seen more often. Some activist journalism, in fact, doesn’t sound bad here. If anything has become more evident in the last ten years, it is that it is ill-reasoned to believe that intolerance, inadequate education, or aversion to therapy are to blame for self-harm’s rise. We can exhaust all of those, and to some degree we have.  Our leaders should be talking about the ills we face and about what we can do publicly and frequently. As cheesy as it may sound, it is true: America desperately needs leaders that inspire communal reflection—talk therapy for the nation, one could call it.  It is not lack of liberty, falling stocks, inequality, insufficient diversity or any of the usual suspects. Instead, it is a lack of community that is literally killing our country. It is not kumbaya to acknowledge this. It is reality. We must take the deterioration of community seriously, as if it deserved policy change. Some groups, like the Coalition to End Social Isolation & Loneliness, founded in 2018, have been stepping in the right direction. But more is needed. Policies that inspire national unity are only rational—and freaking out about how this sounds North Korean is simply ludicrous.  Thinking about policies that incentivize community service (through public schooling, maybe) sound like good ideas too. Building parks for recreation, mandating that local governments run more gatherings, and gearing awareness programs toward fighting isolation concretely and not fixating on its successor are all parts of the same equation. Maybe, it’s time to calm down with the “Stop Bullying” campaigns and start some “Loneliness Kills” ones. No one says that it’ll be easy, but the day our leaders start talking about it as much as they talk about immigration and abortion will be the day things get better. If we continue on the same path, we will be sticking band-aids on injuries that require intensive care. The post The Suicide Epidemic Demands Fresh Solutions appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Democrats’ Three-Decade War on Honest Voting When did preventing election fraud become a violation of the Voting Rights Act? Credit: Felipe Sanchez According to President Joe Biden’s Justice Department, it is now a federal crime to prevent illegal ballots in presidential elections.  Barely 30 days before the 2024 election, the Justice Department sued the state of Virginia to prohibit its removal of the names of noncitizens from voting rolls. Gov. Glenn Youngkin was enforcing a 2006 Virginia law, but the Biden administration portrayed that action as an attack on “the cornerstone of our democracy.” Youngkin denounced the federal lawsuit as “a desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections” in Virginia. The Virginia lawsuit is simply the latest in Democrats’ long war against honest voting, which began with the Clinton administration’s Motor Voter Act. That 1993 law mandated voter registration in every welfare and food-stamp office in the nation. Brent Thompson, executive director of the Fair Government Foundation, observed in 1996, “The Motor Voter law did away with a panoply of anti-fraud mechanisms long relied on by the states to police and deter fraudulent voting.” In 2015, the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton condemned voter identification requirements as part of a “sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people.” A Washington Post headline aptly summarized her message: “Hillary Clinton Declares War on Voter ID.” Verifying identification was unnecessary because, as long as enough ballots showed up with a check by Hillary’s name, she would be irrevocably entitled to all the power she could seize in the following four years.  Lax voting procedures in some states were insufficient to enable Hillary to capture the White House. But the panic induced by Covid-19 enabled politicians to radically loosen the rules for the next presidential election. Many states made it easier—if not automatic—to vote by mail, even though a 2012 New York Times analysis concluded that “fraud in voting by mail is… vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention.” Some states abandoned any effort to verify mail ballots, dropping requirements for matching signatures, return addresses, or having a witness verify the person and the vote. Civil Rights Commissioner J. Christian Adams noted that “Democrats succeeded in tossing out state laws related to absentee ballot verification, deadlines and a whole range of laws all in the name of Covid.” Neither the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution (rules for federal elections “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof”) nor state law stopped the rigging of the 2020 vote. Michigan sent “unsolicited absentee-voter ballot applications by mail to all 7.7 million registered Michigan voters…without signature verification as expressly required” by state law. The Wisconsin Elections Commission approved setting up to 500 unmanned ballot drop boxes in major Democratic cities in violation of Wisconsin law. That commission  and local election officials encouraged all Wisconsin “voters to unlawfully declare themselves ‘indefinitely confined’—which under Wisconsin law allows the voter to avoid security measures like signature verification and photo ID requirements,” as the Texas Attorney General noted in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that election officials acted illegally, but that did nothing to nullify the hundreds of thousands of votes that came in via illicit loopholes. Biden carried Wisconsin by 20,000 votes. To stifle controversy over electoral rule changes, Biden’s media allies created a fairy tale. A week after Election Day, the New York Times ran a banner headline across the top of the front page: “Election Officials Nationwide Find No Fraud.” How did the Times know? Their reporters basically called election officials in each state and asked, “Did y’all have any fraud?” A total lack of fraud in an election with more than 100 million voters would have required divine intervention to achieve. Biden’s 2020 victory became the election equivalent of the Immaculate Conception. A Washington Post headline scoffed that anyone who doubted Biden’s victory was an “Election Denier”—placing them in the same odious category as Holocaust deniers. An ABC News analysis portrayed distrust of the election results as a form of mental illness. Most of the American media pretended that voter fraud was so rare that the mere suggestion of its occurrence was a heresy against democracy. But a few weeks after Biden was sworn in as president, a federal investigation revealed that the U.S. government bankrolled some of the most brazenly corrupt elections in modern times. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), issued a report titled, “Elections: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan,” that should have received far more attention in Washington and beyond. SIGAR revealed that the net result of 15 years of U.S. pro-democracy assistance was that Afghanistan’s 2019 presidential election was “the most corrupt the country had ever held.” U.S. tax dollars poured into the coffers of Afghanistan’s Electoral Complaints Commission to safeguard voting, but that agency was a prime source of the most shameless vote stealing. U.S. aid enabled the Afghan government to purchase sophisticated electronic voting systems. But SIGAR’s report warned that “because governments often control electoral commissions and the procurement of election technology, they are well placed to use it to commit fraud.” SIGAR ruefully noted, “The true purpose of adopting election technologies may not be to actually reduce fraud, but to create the illusion of doing so.” A U.S. Army colonel who deployed several times to Afghanistan told SIGAR that as early as 2006, the Afghan government had “self-organized into a kleptocracy.” Officials who were stealing everything else never hesitated to steal votes. The collapse of democratic legitimacy paved the way for the collapse of the U.S. puppet regime in Kabul in August 2021.  The Biden administration sought to exploit Covid-era precedents to turn America into a Drop Box Democracy where minimal efforts by voters automatically sanctify maximum power for politicians. In 2021, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1, the For the People Act, to force all states to adopt the most unreliable electoral procedures used during the pandemic. The bill, which failed in the Senate, would have compelled all future federal elections to permit paid ballot-harvesting and universal mail-in voting, prohibit checking voter identification, and require states to count ballots that arrive ten days after an election. Many of the same Democrats who championed Covid vaccine passports, which disproportionately barred blacks from restaurants and gyms, also insist that requiring voters to show identification is Jim Crow at its worst. Histrionics and shenanigans continue to be the Democrats’ preferred substitute for election integrity:  Kamala Harris objected to voter identification requirements because she bizarrely claimed it was “almost impossible” for rural voters to photocopy their identification papers.  The city of Detroit responded to a Republican National Party Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for ballot drop box surveillance footage by claiming that the footage had been deleted—after the FOIA request was received. Detroit was notorious for shrouding its vote counting on Election Night 2020, blocking poll watchers from witnessing Biden’s miraculous comeback. In Georgia, Judge Thomas Cox on Wednesday struck down the Georgia State Election Board’s new rules to require video surveillance of ballot drop boxes and to regulate ballot-harvesting.  Lawsuits are proceeding regarding lax standards for absentee mail-in ballots in North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, and elsewhere.  Preventing bogus ballots should not be treated like a moral or theological issue. When did verifying votes become a crime against democracy? Why is the Justice Department crusading to turn voting into an entitlement program for non-citizens? Do Democrats seek to make the actual voting as fraud-ridden as politicians’ campaign promises?  Elections need rigorous safeguards against fraud because, as Thomas Paine warned long ago, “the trade of governing has always been monopolized by… the most rascally individuals of mankind.” Four presidential elections since 2000 have been heavily tainted by allegations of foul play. American democracy has zero legitimacy to spare at this point. The post The Democrats’ Three-Decade War on Honest Voting appeared first on The American Conservative.

The problem I see is that most Christians think the Jews are God's chosen people and are afraid to do anything against them. They don't know the truth and the truth is to be a seed of Abraham, one must believe Jesus Christ....