Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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It ought to be possible to operate a retail store in one of America’s largest and most iconic cities, but this most basic commercial proposition is in doubt in San Francisco. The erstwhile Golden City is beset by an ongoing tide of theft that is closing down retail locations and demonstrating again the city’s unwillingness to govern itself. Cities around the country dub themselves “the capital” of this or that signature product: artichokes in Castroville, Calif.; earmuffs in Farmington, Maine; spinach in Alma, Ark.; fried chicken in Barberton,...
How does a stupid and ridiculous lie come to be embraced and promulgated by top officials of the United States government? Well, as it turns out, it’s easy. You start with an easily misinterpreted news photo that seemingly confirms the assumptions of progressive opponents of immigration enforcement that the agents policing our Southern border are cruel racists. Then, you work up a Twitter mob saying that the photo has captured a tableau of hideous abuse. You add open-borders advocacy organizations and civil rights groups denouncing the s...
Not too long ago, supporters imagined Joe Biden might be the next LBJ, and perhaps they were right — just not how they thought. Biden bears no resemblance to the Lyndon B. Johnson who entered office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 with a 75% approval rating and over the next couple of years passed a raft of historic legislation. No, if there’s any comparison it is to the LBJ who by 1967 had seen his approval rating dip underwater in a deeply riven country. After a lot of happy talk over the past half year, the real Biden pres...
A trillion dollars used to be a lot of money, even in Washington. Now, a trillion-dollar spending bill is a trifle barely worth arguing over and the stuff of bipartisan consensus. Oscar Wilde famously said that nothing succeeds like excess, but even he might blanch at the shameless profligacy that is America’s new normal. In their wisdom, Senate Republicans decided to help President Joe Biden pass a portion of his blow-out fiscal agenda, a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that is a prelude to an even bigger, vastly more consequential $3.5 tril...
Teddy Roosevelt fervently believed that the president of the United States should be at the center of the political universe, constantly attracting attention to himself. But he’d never met Joe Biden. Biden is the most powerful man in the world and yet makes almost no impression. No one, besides political and media professionals, wonders what Biden is going to say about something or considers him a figure of fascination. In fact, he barely rates. His recent CNN town hall was a fizzle, averaging only 1.5 million viewers. Fox News easily beat i...
No one is trying to topple the Alamo quite yet, but a new revisionist book on the foundational event of Texas history partakes of the iconoclastic spirit of our time. The book, titled “Forget the Alamo,” is a harsh call for Texans, and Americans, to get over a battle deeply etched in our popular memory. According to the authors, the Texans (then the Texians) were foolish to try to defend the indefensible. Some of the defenders tried to make a run for it. Santa Anna, the Mexican general central to the story, wasn’t so bad. And given the impor...
It’s not easy to run a hideous dictatorship and still have fans and defenders in fashionable quarters, but the Castro regime has managed it for decades. The mass, spontaneous protests that broke out all over the country early this month are yet another sign that the Cuban government lacks legitimacy. In Cuba, it is the government versus the people, and lo, all these years, Castro’s apologists have been with the government. They have romanticized Fidel Castro, the founder father of Cuba’s junta. They have swallowed its propaganda. They have...
It’s been a hard time for the American Revolution. It’s been smeared by The New York Times 1619 project as a fight to preserve slavery. Juneteenth, a worthy event in its own right, is considered by some as a candidate to replace July 4, marking a supposedly more palatable and less flawed Independence Day. Statues of leaders of the Revolution have been vandalized and torn down. This is wrongheaded, ungrateful and destructive. Ours is the greatest revolution the world has ever known. It succeeded where so many others have failed, delivered a sev...
WANTED: Trained security professionals to deal with elevated levels of crime and mayhem at risk to their own life and limb, while getting called racist oppressors and potentially thrown under the bus by elected officials. This has become the de facto employment notice for police around the country, and, unsurprisingly, cops and prospective cops don’t find it particularly enticing. Why would they? America’s cities are feeling the effects of a yearslong experiment in what would happen if nearly everyone celebrated a movement based on the ide...
Joe Biden isn’t known for his austerity, except when it comes to the nation’s defense. As part of his welcome emphasis on competition with China, the president cajoled reluctant European countries at the G-7 summit into releasing a statement critical of China, on top of the announcement of an infrastructure program meant to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. That’s all fine as far as it goes, but a glaring omission from Biden’s campaign is a defense budget that reflects the growing challenge from Beijing. Indeed, Biden justifies...
The Democratic opposition to legislative minorities using whatever leverage they have to block legislation is highly situational. In Washington, D.C., where Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress, the Senate filibuster is portrayed as a Jim Crow relic that is profoundly undemocratic. In Austin, Texas, where Republicans control the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the Legislature, House Democrats walking out to prevent the passage of a bill with majority support is portrayed as a heroic act preserving our d...
There was a “scientific consensus,” they told us. According to the media and assorted experts, there couldn’t be any questioning of the idea that the coronavirus (or SARS-CoV-2) emerged naturally, and anyone suspecting it might have come from a Chinese lab was an ignoramus, conspiracy theorist or hater. These enforcers believed in the power of the words “scientific” and “consensus,” when conjoined and used as a weapon, to shun dissenters and stifle debate. During much of the pandemic, they were proven right. But the rigid conventional...
Sometime in 2023, Donald Trump will presumably make the most momentous decision by a single person affecting the fate of the Republican Party in decades. He will decide whether to run for president again, and that will determine who’s the frontrunner (Trump, if he’s a go) and the contours of the race. If Trump runs, he will, one assumes, blot out the sun. Everything will be about him — his record, his pronouncements, his animosities. Much of the conservative mass media will get on board, while the mainstream media — inadvertently aiding...
There’s believing your own press releases. And then, there’s believing your own delusions of grandeur. Joe Biden should look at the mirror every day and see a president elected on the basis of the unpopularity of his predecessor at a time when the country was slammed by a once-in-100-years pandemic. Instead, by every account, he sees a transformative leader with a mandate to change America as rapidly and irreversibly as possible. As the news site Axios noted, Biden wants his next 100 days to be “more audacious” than his first 100, as he seek...
If Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ever sets up a presidential exploratory committee, it should have to disclose an enormous in-kind contribution from CBS News. The recent “60 Minutes” segment alleging DeSantis distributed the COVID-19 vaccine through pharmacies at the Publix grocery store chain as part of a quid pro quo was so outlandishly wrong that even Democratic officials in the state have objected. It’s not clear that the “60 Minutes” piece can even be called “journalistic malpractice,” since it barely qualifies as journalism. The downside...
So far, the defining word of the Biden era is “trillion.” The Joe Biden who portrayed himself as a moderate, old school, bipartisan dealmaker during the presidential campaign is now a distant memory. He’s been replaced by the Joe Biden who is dazzling progressives with his willingness to “go big” — in other words, spend jaw-dropping amounts that would have been unimaginable prior to the pandemic and are still shocking even now. Why has Biden embarked on a historic spending splurge with nary a whisper of bipartisan support? Well, Democrats t...
Well, the principled stand Democrats took against Congress trying to overturn duly certified elections lasted all of a month or two. After rightly excoriating their Republican colleagues for challenging on Jan. 6 presidential results certified by the states, House Democrats immediately turned to doing, in effect, the exact same thing in an Iowa congressional district their candidate lost by six votes. Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks won Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District by the narrowest of margins over Democrat Rita Hart. After a r...
Joe Biden has signed what may well end up being the biggest accomplishment of his presidency, an enormous $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill. With his other priorities likely to molder in the Senate, the spending will probably stand as a signature statement of Biden’s approach to governance — and it should be a damning one. The legislation is a misnomer; it is neither a COVID nor a relief bill. Only a tiny portion of the spending in the bill goes toward vaccinations and other priories directly related to the pandemic. Much of the rest of the spe...
A crisis is a terrible thing to create. This, nonetheless, is what President Joe Biden has done at the southern border. His rhetoric during the campaign suggesting an openhanded approach to migrants coming to the U.S., and his early moves to undo Donald Trump’s border policies are creating a migrant surge that risks running out of control. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas says the situation isn’t a crisis, but “a challenge” — an “acute” and “stressful” challenge with some “urgency,” but merely a challenge all the same. Conside...
It was only a matter of time before Cicero got canceled. The New York Times the other day profiled Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who wants to destroy the study of classics as a blow for racial justice. The critique of classics as stultifying and privileged isn’t new, but in the woke era this attack is more potent than ever and has a better chance of demolishing a foundation of Western education. At a time when Abraham Lincoln doesn’t pass muster in the progressive precincts of America, poor benighted Homer, whose chief subject wa...
Donald Trump was the president of Twitter. What radio was to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and TV was to Ronald Reagan, communicating 280 characters at a time on a social media platform that is a watchword for hyperactive inanity was to President Trump. It is symbolically appropriate that the effective end of his power after the siege of the U.S. Capitol has coincided with the suspension of his Twitter account. He was impeached a second time on Wednesday, but the punishment that really stings is Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey deciding after sitting down w...
Former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s famous axiom is that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. It’s an even worse thing to manufacture. Although President-elect Joe Biden obviously disagrees. Creating an unwarranted sense of drama and urgency around climate change is central to his approach, in order to catalyze action unsupported by the facts or common sense. In announcing his climate and energy team the other day, Biden declared climate change a crisis requiring a “unified national response.” Going even further, he called it “an exi...
We live in a time of heedless iconoclasm, and so one of the country’s oldest traditions is under assault. Thanksgiving is increasingly portrayed as, at best, based on falsehoods and, at worst, a whitewash of genocide against Native Americans. The New York Times ran a piece the other day titled, “The Thanksgiving Myth Gets a Deeper Look This Year,” bristling with hostility toward the day of gratitude and noting that “the holiday arrives in the midst of a national struggle over racial justice.” (The paper is admirably consistent — a couple of y...
Joe Biden wants to take one of the great American success stories of the past several decades and drive it into the ground. He would turn his back on the stupendous wealth represented by proven reserves of oil and gas in this country. Rather than focusing on producing cheap, abundant energy — a key ingredient to human progress through all of human history — he’d embark on the fool’s errand of trying to adjust the world’s thermostat 80 years from now. After a 50-year effort to diminish our reliance on Middle Eastern oil, which has miraculou...
“If you want to make God laugh,” Woody Allen once famously said, paraphrasing a Yiddish proverb, “tell him about your plans.” That’s not an issue for President Donald Trump, at least not on healthcare. He’s been promising a healthcare plan since he started running for president, often with superlative adjectives attached, and yet never produced one. His lack of a proposal was a stumbling block in Tuesday’s debate and plays into a broader, long-standing Republican vulnerability on healthcare. Polling tends to show that, far and away, the thr...