“Democrats and their media enablers are trying to make sense of last Tuesday’s election – the biggest shift to the right since Ronald Reagan became president in 1980 – searching for where they went wrong. The good news for the GOP is that they haven’t got a clue. The main disconnect is that they fail to acknowledge that tens of millions of Americans actually like Donald Trump; many even love him. Democrats are so blinded by hatred (there’s a reason that Republicans have coined the TDS label) they literally cannot fathom that Trump is personally popular.” (11/12/24)
“When the Biden administration withdrew U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021, many people saw a watershed moment. After two decades of war, American leaders had finally concluded that there was no hope of transforming the Greater Middle East using military force. ‘We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build,’ President Joe Biden said. ‘And it’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.’ This humility proved short lived. Over the past year, the United States has found itself drawn into a nation-building fervor once more, this time of a more vicarious sort.” (11/12/24)
“The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history. Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is Scientologist. The United States is >99% Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo-Scientology that thinks L Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet. This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity.” (11/12/24)
Source: Law & Liberty
by Ryan Silverstein & Garion Frankel
“The Free Exercise Clause prohibits our federal government from enacting laws stopping Americans from practicing religion, and the Establishment Clause prohibits it from establishing a religion. The goal of these dual clauses within the First Amendment is to promote religious pluralism. This principled pluralism has enabled America to become the beacon of liberty and hope for refugees around the world, drawing a diverse crop of individuals seeking freedom to practice their religious beliefs without fear of state prosecution. Should St. Isidore School prevail in its lawsuit, however, the Establishment Clause would lose some of its power and be relegated to the status of a mere ‘truism’ in constitutional law similar to the Tenth Amendment. Rather than freeing parents to pursue whatever religious education they please, St. Isidore is effectively asking the Court to allow Oklahoma to pick and choose which religious schools receive state sponsorship.” (11/12/24)
“One of the least productive Congresses in history will wrap up starting today, with unified Republican government likely looming on the other side. Since Republicans will perceive any bill proposed now as inferior to the better deal they can get later, expect the same level of inactivity in these final weeks. That’s not to say there is nothing to do, or that could be done, if Democrats, particularly in the Senate, had the stomach for it. That doesn’t look to be the case. … The defense authorization bill has a reputation of always passing at the end of every year, so something is likely to happen there, with both parties angling to attach their favored pieces to it.” (11/12/24)
“There is a Big Lie pushed by centrist types that is almost as pernicious as the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. It is that inequality was driven by technology, an autonomous force in the world, not policy choices made by politicians. This lie permeates just about all political discussions in major news outlets, not only in the New York Times, but also the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and just about every other elite media outlet. It matters because this Big Lie means that we shouldn’t point fingers at the people in power who made policy decisions in the last four decades, the rise in inequality was due to forces of nature, like floods and hurricanes.” (11/12/24)
“Throughout Joe Biden’s presidency, I would pop in to the Beach White House to see how the people who know him best, people who stand to profit off his existence, thought about the president of the United States. Honestly, no one in Rehoboth Beach really cared. Sure, his so-called ‘main’ residence was in Wilmington, but the president barely ever went there. It was always seaside in Rehoboth, maybe because there are so many ice cream shops there. Whatever the case, whatever the draw … Joe was seemingly always there.” (11/12/24)
