Justice Thomas addresses the progressive attack on America’s freedom

April 21, 2026

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was appointed by President George H.W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1990. And, on July 1, 1991, Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court of the United States, and he was confirmed by the Senate on October 15, 1991.

Prior to that he earned his Juris Doctor degree in 1974 from Yale Law School. He was an assistant attorney general in Missouri, served as legislative assistant to U.S. Senator John Danforth, was Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, and was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

He is the longest-serving justice since Anthony Kennedy's retirement in 2018. And, since the death of former Justice Antonin Scalia, he is the Court's foremost originalist.

Originalist’s sensible approach is that the laws and the U.S. Constitution must be understood in terms of what they meant when they were enacted, not some modern interpretation that ignores their original meaning and purpose, and instead is interpreted as if the law or Constitution was just enacted.

Thomas, therefore, is a “judicial conservative,” which is not a political conservative, but one who adheres to the original meaning of laws and the Constitution, rather than applying liberal thinking to the process, which means a law or the Constitution can mean different things at different times.

Speaking last week at the University of Texas Austin School of Law, Thomas addressed what he identified as a critique of modern political trends. He said that America’s founding principles are under attack from ideological shifts in academia and government.

The values that are enshrined in the Declaration of Independence have “fallen out of favor,” and are under assault by progressives. "Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government," Thomas told the audience. This movement rejects the idea that rights come from God and instead places complete authority in government institutions, Thomas said.

Our founding documents assert the concept that all people are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. The definition of unalienable (or inalienable) is that rights are fundamental, inherent entitlements that cannot be taken away, sold, or transferred, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

And, Thomas noted that the Constitution was designed to limit government power, and to acknowledge and protect our liberties.

These documents protected Americans from centralized government authority and the majority controlling the minority. He cited principles — such as separation of powers and federalism — as safeguards against centralized authority and majority overreach, which are characteristics of many less-free nations.

History, he said, offers many lessons on the dangers of abandoning natural rights, where strong governments have suppressed those rights. Again, he noted that our system was intentionally designed to prevent this by restraining the government and empowering the citizenry.

But progressivism prefers the government to control everything, even the individual freedoms that the Constitution guarantees us, destroying those freedoms.

And history, Thomas said, is rife with examples of powerful governments suppressing individual freedoms, and the terrible results that followed.

He traces the roots of progressivism back about a hundred years, to early 20th-century, where figures such as President Woodrow Wilson advocated for a larger and more powerful federal government, drawing his inspiration from what had occurred in European nations.

Wilson also said that the Constitution should be read in light of changing conditions. But that is wrong. The Constitution must be read and understood as when it was first created. If changes are deserved, then they can be made through the established process, not simply by current justices who don’t like them, or don’t understand them, simply pretending they don’t exist.

And that also holds true for fundamental principles. Those principles cannot simply be ignored. They have been firmly established through due process. If there is good reason and ample support for changing them, then go through the established process to change them.

During this troubled time of the worst political division in decades, Thomas asked all Americans to rediscover the courage and conviction that our Founders possessed. "In my view, we must find in ourselves that same level of courage that the signers of the Declaration had so that we can do for our future what they did for theirs," he said.

That future has lasted in pretty stable form for nearly 250 years. But it has serious problems today, presented by those who do not understand our system, or who do not appreciate it.

It is interesting that as a unique system of government that has proven its worth for two and a half centuries, so many of those who live in this country and benefit from it, want to change it to something that has been proven to be a failed system over those same 250 years.

If the progressives are successful in their effort to subvert our constitutional republic, they may not live long enough to suffer the consequences of that subversion, as it will take some time to totally ruin the country. But their children and grandchildren most certainly will.

Progressive policies create disasters for the American people

December 9, 2025

Back in May the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted an article that addressed “Americans Killed by Illegal Aliens Driving Under the Influence.”

It named 14 Americans who are now dead, which it described as “just a handful of Americans whose lives were taken too soon at the hands of illegal aliens driving under the influence.”

Of those 14, eight were less than 20 years-old, three were 10 years-old or less, two were in their 40s and one was 70. Most of the drunk drivers were from Honduras, with others from Venezuela, and Mexico. 

Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin commented that “Far too many American lives have been lost because of illegal aliens driving drunk.”  “These Americans killed by drunk-driving illegal aliens should still be with us today, and we feel their absence in our schools and offices, at our dinner tables, and throughout our communities. President Trump and Secretary Noem have reopened the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office to serve all victims of illegal alien crime and their families.”

The VOICE office was opened in 2017 by the Trump administration. It is a resource for those who have been victimized by crime that is related to immigration, the article said. However, the Biden/Harris administration closed the office, leaving victims of crimes by illegal aliens without access to many support services and resources.

Worse, yet, are the number of Americans who have been murdered, with illegal aliens having been charged with the crime.

Among those victims are: 

* Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was murdered on the University of Georgia campus, allegedly by Jose Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, in February 2024. 

* A 12-year-old girl named Jocelyn Nungaray killed in Houston, Texas. She was found murdered in a creek in June 2024. Two Venezuelan nationals, Johan Jose Rangel Martinez and Franklin Jose Pena Ramos, who had recently entered the U.S. illegally, have been charged with capital murder.

* Rachel Morin, who was the mother of five, was found murdered in August 2023 in Maryland. Another illegal alien, a Salvadoran national who was in the country illegally, was later arrested and charged in connection with her death.

* A Missouri police officer, 44-year-old David Lee, was killed in 2024 by Honduran Ramon A. Chavez-Rodriguez, an illegal alien. 

These are only a few of the victims. Even one death at the hands of an illegal alien is too many.

There are two problems in the horrors these Americans and their families and friends have experienced at the hands of illegal aliens in the country. First is them being here at all. Second is the ridiculous frequency with which some of these illegals have been treated with kid gloves instead of getting the punishment they so well deserve.

Going easy on criminals is an insult to their victims, and a disgusting failure of prosecutors and judges.

One example is the case of the death of 22-year-old Logan Frederico, who was brutally murdered by a criminal during a break-in at the home where she was visiting friends. Her killer had a record of 39 arrests and 25 felonies. Despite this record, and the accumulated felonies, he had spent less than 2 years in jail.

The state attorney general had assigned an accomplished death penalty litigator to this case, but the progressive district attorney called this “premature” and “reckless.”

Then there is the murder of Iryna Zaruska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who was tragically murdered in an unprovoked stabbing attack while riding a light-rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina last August. A video showing the attack was aired soon afterward.

Decarlos Brown Jr., a 34-year-old homeless man with 14 prior arrests for various offenses, including armed robbery, has been charged with first-degree murder.

Yet, despite his criminal history dating back over a decade, known mental health issues, and having forfeited bond on three occasions, a soft-on-crime judge released him back onto the streets following his most recent arrest last January, and he was able to murder an innocent woman.

Some in law enforcement positions, like prosecutors and judges, charged with prosecuting crimes and punishing criminals to protect the public, seem to think rehabilitation is a superior path to jail time.   

Over the last few years we have seen such “solutions” to crime and police work as “reimagining policing,” diverting 911 calls away from the police department, finding alternatives to arrest, prioritizing “restorative justice,” “deemphasizing” some felonies, and eliminating cash bail. 

GovFacts.com explains the sensible, traditional idea of dealing with criminals. It tells us that “punishment and retribution form the core mission. Society demands consequences when someone breaks the law. A proportional punishment acknowledges the moral weight of criminal acts and provides victims with a sense that justice has been served.”

The idea is for punishment to be so unpleasant that the perpetrator regrets his/her actions, and not do it again, and to discourage others from committing crimes.

But the progressive idea is to merely tell the criminal, “don’t do that anymore” and that will be all that is really needed. As with all “woke” ideas, these sound good, but don’t work, and in reality, are just stupid.

We need harsh punishment. Lawbreakers must pay a real price.

The meaning of laws or the Constitution should not be changed on a whim

June 4, 2024

Why is it that those on the left — liberals, socialists, Marxists, “progressives” — think that the ideas expressed in our laws and the Constitution are just suggestions, and their interpretation by judges and others in positions of authority can vary with the wind?

Do they really believe that words mean whatever anyone wants them to mean at any given time as political fervor and social preferences dictate? 

Well, yes, many of them believe that whatever their political motivation is at any moment is enough to justify changing the meaning of a law or a feature of our Constitution that was written years, decades, or even centuries ago.

Those written words were just ideas of the moment, they suggest, and everyone knows that ideas and circumstances change as time progresses. Therefore, the meaning of laws and the Constitution must be flexible enough to be understood as they want to understand them at any point in time.

And they want to get rid of anyone in any position who believes the contrary: that laws and the Constitution mean what they meant when they were created, and will continue to hold that meaning until they are properly changed by the appropriate processes.

In order to get the world organized to their liking, the leftists want to remove anyone from their official position that doesn’t follow the popular ideological line. Supreme Court Justices, for example, who follow the law and Constitution as written. They are “originalists,” or “judicial conservatives.”

Like umpires and referees, judges, justices, magistrates, etc., must not take sides in their work. They must not change the rules of the game during the game. They have the duty to apply the laws and terms of the Constitution as they were intended when created, without applying political or ideological bias. 

That point is frequently missed by some observers who instead want their personal beliefs to prevail in such matters, despite what the intent of the measure in question may be.

But the interpretations of our Constitution and existing law must be based upon the circumstances that prevailed at the time they were created, and that those circumstances were why these laws and Constitutional provisions were created to begin with.

If the original circumstances that were the basis of a law or a feature of the Constitution no longer exist, if things have changed substantially, then the law can be repealed, or the Constitution can be amended as needed. But until those actions take place, the laws and Constitution must be followed as written, and as intended. The leftists prefer to consider the U.S. Constitution a “living document,” the meanings of which ebb and flow with the tide of time.

This concept was dealt with in an article by United States Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch titled, “Why Originalism Is the Best Approach to the Constitution.” 

In this article, he addresses some specific instances. However, we will focus on the primary meaning: “Originalism teaches only that the Constitution’s original meaning is fixed; meanwhile, of course, new applications of that meaning will arise with new developments and new technologies.”

“Whether it’s the Constitution’s prohibition on torture, its protection of speech, or its restrictions on searches, the meaning remains constant even as new applications arise.”

And then, the crux of the debate: “Living constitutionalists often complain we can’t know the original understanding because the document’s too old and cryptic. Hardly. We figure out the original meaning of old and difficult texts all the time. Just ask any English professor who teaches Shakespeare or Beowulf.”

And he then describes the leftists’ preferred solution to the disagreement: “For when it comes to the social and political questions of the day they care most about, many living constitutionalists would prefer to have philosopher-king judges swoop down from their marble palace to ordain answers rather than allow the people and their representatives to discuss, debate, and resolve them. You could even say the real complaint here is with our democracy.”

In common parlance, they want the documents to say whatever they prefer them to say at any given moment. And those meanings can change with a new breath.

“Suppose originalism does lead to a result you happen to dislike in this or that case. So what,” Gorsuch asks? “The ‘judicial Power’ of Article III of the Constitution isn’t a promise of all good things. Letting dangerous and obviously guilty criminals who have gravely injured their victims go free just because an officer forgot to secure a warrant or because the prosecutor neglected to bring a witness to trial for confrontation seems like a bad idea to plenty of people.

“But do you really want judges to revise the Constitution to avoid those ‘bad’ results? Or do you believe that judges should enforce the law’s protections equally for everyone, regardless of how inefficient or unpopular or old the law might be? Regardless of who benefits today — the criminal or the police; the business or the employee; immigrants or ICE?”

Originalism focuses on process, not substance. The originalist concept protects the country from renegade “jurists” who will do whatever improves their political/ideological position. This is not what America is about.

America’s future is in doubt. It is under attack from within.

In past weeks this column has addressed the increasing weaknesses, outright failures, and attacks on once-stable components of our culture and our nation.

The deteriorating education system, particularly at the college level, but increasingly at the K-12 levels, has resulted in millions who have not learned about their country and its history. Lots of them have instead been, and are being, indoctrinated with distinctly un-American political ideology. And some professors and teachers willingly abandon their professional integrity to do this.

The latest big push is to fight what some call the “systemic racism” of the United States by seeking to convince members of one race that they are inherently evil, and members of the other races that they are perpetual victims.

News journalism is becoming more and more agenda driven. Relevant and important stories are often not presented by many news sources. Some who play the part of journalists will pass items off as news that are manipulated to benefit a political agenda. Some items presented are misinformation and are not researched for accuracy, because they advance the political agenda, as written. 

In the political sphere, where dishonesty exists, loyalty to partisan agendas has replaced forthright service to the American people for many office holders. The “progressives” are working hard to change things so that they will be in power forever.

The broad benefits to our culture of the two-parent family, and its educational and stabilizing effects on children, have been seeping away over recent decades. In 1960, 87.7 percent of children under 18 lived with two parents. In 2020, was 70.4 percent, almost 20 percent lower.

Concerns for protecting people’s oversensitive feelings have replaced responsible behavior as the guidepost for living a good and productive life. Efforts to make everyone equal in terms of outcomes — equity — to protect feelings, defy nature. Some people are simply stronger than others, faster than others, smarter than others, etc. It’s part of being an adult to accept our strengths and deal with our weaknesses.

The rise in violent crime in many American cities reflects the lack of appreciation for life, and the failure of families and schools to teach basic humanity and life lessons to millions of young people. Lots of these under-educated people are now adults.

An example of what results when families and schools fail is this: An adult male recently brought a pregnant 12-year-old girl to a hospital in Tulsa, OK because she was in labor. He told the people there that he was the father of the baby-to-be. He had no apparent recognition that impregnating a child of 12 is a crime, not to mention its immorality. 

This situation of improperly trained youth has been made worse by enacting truly foolish ideas. The idea of defunding the police is responsible for much if not most of this new pandemic of criminality, as police officers retire, quit, or back off of doing their job because they no longer have the backing of the local government.

And soft-headed “progressive” prosecutors who do not prosecute the accused, and the equally silly idea of no bail and immediate release of persons arrested for serious crimes, invite those criminals to hit the streets and commit more crimes. Every day criminals released or not prosecuted are availing themselves of this foolishly provided opportunity.

The rising acceptance of socialist, communist, and Marxist ideals results from the failure of families, and the education system, which is increasingly shoving un-American ideals down the throats of the young people it is intended to help learn important subject matter, like English, math, science, geography, the arts, and real history.

Today, many without a solid background in American history say they prefer socialism, because they apparently don not understand how it has failed every time it has been tried, with Venezuela and Cuba as current shining examples.

The southern border crisis is dramatic evidence of what happens when goofy “progressive” ideals replace the sensible and successful design of our federal government. Each day tens of thousands of people enter the country illegally, with the permission and assistance of the government, and not just from Cuba or the Northern Triangle countries, but also from Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, Haiti, Colombia, Turkey, Russia, and China.

As the government continues to strongly encourage vaccinations to fight Covid, and hint at renewed restrictions, thousands of illegal immigrants are ushered across the border and transported around the country with no concern about how many of them are infected with the virus.

A friend sent an email of a Facebook post, which read, in part: “I was born in 1942, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century – the American century. America’s prestige and influence were never greater. 

“Thanks to the ‘Greatest Generation,’ we won a World War fought throughout most of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed. It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity. We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia and fought international terrorism.”

Today, America is a mere shadow of that great nation. And many of its people are working hard to change it further.

Opportunism is alive and thriving among Democrat politicians

“Some things never change” is a comment we hear when something negative occurs, yet again. The onset of the coronavirus has turned the country upside down, put millions in jeopardy of one sort or another, and created a situation where national, state and local officials felt the need to enforce behavioral restrictions on citizens.

With that tumult, perhaps that phrase was brought to mind from the fact Congressional Democrats remain undeterred by the pandemic, and are dutifully pursuing their regressive goal of “progressivism.”

Senate Democrats on Thursday stalled the passage of a $250 billion relief package designed to aid small businesses. Trying to speed up the passage of the needed funding, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, called for a vote by unanimous consent.

But rather than pass a measure nearly all senators supported, Democrats requested protections for minority-owned businesses and additional aid to local health care providers, blocking the measure that was intended as an addition to the $350 billion Paycheck Protection Program, which gives forgivable loans to small businesses.

McConnell had said to the Senate Thursday morning, “Do not block emergency aid you do not oppose just because you want something more.” His words fell on deaf ears.

Following the failed vote, McConnell said he did not oppose the Democrats’ requests on principle, but that the Paycheck Protection Program needed urgent relief.

This effort to foul up the legislative process was not the first time Democrats had tried to force unrelated measures into a time-sensitive coronavirus support bill.

On Sunday, March 22, as the bipartisan agreement between the Democrat-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate reached over the weekend was about to come to a vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, showed up with a wish list of “progressive” goodies, among which were:

1. Union Giveaways:

• Nullifies the White House executive orders on federal collective bargaining and codifies taxpayer-funded union official time.

• Requires a labor union representative on every airline’s board of directors.

• Multiemployer pension bailout lacking needed reforms.

• Permanently raises the minimum wage to $15 for any business that receives federal aid for COVID-19.

• Cancels all debt owed by the U.S. Postal Service to the Treasury.

2. Green New Deal priorities:

• Requires all airlines that receive assistance to offset carbon emissions for domestic flights by 2025.

• Includes a $1 billion “cash for clunkers” airplane program where the Transportation Department buys fuel-inefficient planes from airlines in exchange for agreeing to buy new ones.

• Includes expansive new tax-credit for solar and wind energy.

3. Student Loan Forgiveness:

• $10,000 blanket loan forgiveness.

4. Federalizing Elections:

• Mandates how states must run elections, including the nationalization of ballot harvesting, requiring early voting, same day registration, and no-excuse vote by mail.

• Puts states at risk of costly litigation if they are unable to implement these stringent mandates ahead of the 2020 election.

Fearing they might again lose an election to Donald Trump, presented with the opportunity provided by the coronavirus crisis, and bringing back the elements that didn’t get through in the stimulus bill to change the existing election process, House Democrats have created a measure mis-labeled as the “Take Responsibility Act.”

This recipe for Democrat victory calls for legislative changes to remove the ability of states to manage the “Times, Places, and Manner” of elections as called for in the Constitution’s Article I provisions.

Changes include:

• states must allow 15 consecutive days of early voting

• makes absentee voting universal

• prohibits “requiring identification to obtain an absentee ballot”

• allows “another person” to drop off absentee ballots and removes limits on how many can be delivered by one person

• ensures provisional ballots are always counted (rendering them no longer “provisional”) and provides “blank” (no printed name) absentee ballots to citizens and service members overseas 

Anyone see opportunities for fraud here?

In signing gun control bills into law last week, Virginia’s Democrat Governor Ralph Northam said, “We lose too many Virginians to gun violence.” Notice he didn’t say we lose too many Virginians to “guns,” he said, we lose too many Virginians to gun “violence.”

It is violence that costs too many Virginians their lives, so instead of laws against guns, why doesn’t the General Assembly pass, and the governor sign, laws against violence?

Oh, that’s right. We already have laws against violence, but those laws don’t encroach on citizens’ Second Amendment rights. But the new laws do. And anything Virginia Democrats can do to interfere with the Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms, they will do.

And to make the fairy tale complete, still seeking the dreamt of, and so-far elusive coup de grace: yet another investigation into Trump.

Pelosi made it official last week: House Democrats are opening yet another inquisition against Trump. The last dismal failure actually did accomplish something, however. It distracted the Congress and administration from the developing crisis of the Wuhan virus, which they then could — and did — twist into the charge that Trump did not act swiftly enough to protect the country, and now by golly, that needs to be investigated.

You have to admire the Democrats’ devotion to bring Trump down, so strong as to eclipse any other consideration, like the welfare of the country and their constituents.

Important bedrock fundamentals of the American culture are dying

Liberals/progressives may be celebrating the results of a new Gallup poll. The culture upon which America was founded and which allowed it to thrive for nearly 200 years has been seriously weakened over the last few decades. Social strictures are falling by the wayside, as responsible behavior takes a back seat to personal pleasure and convenience in some important areas.

When asked to describe themselves on social issues, the Gallup poll of more than a thousand participants reflected the following:
** 5 percent are very conservative
** 26 percent are conservative in general
** 33 percent are moderate
** 21 percent are liberal
** 10 percent are very liberal
** 4 percent can’t decide

Conservatives, moderates and liberals are virtually equally represented, and that is the first time since 1999 that conservatives have not outnumbered liberals.

The growth of Americans who self-describe themselves as social liberals parallels the transformation from a society where nearly every child was born into a family with a mother and a father into a formless mess where millions of children have a mother and a male biological parent, but no father in the home, where men commonly have multiple past and present sexual partners and offspring, but no wives or children.

The poll showed that a majority increasingly cares little for preserving the stability of the nuclear family, or of marriage before parenthood, with 61 percent saying having a baby outside of marriage is acceptable, up from 45 percent in 2002 and 54 percent in 2012.

Gallup says, “Nearly every major demographic or attitudinal subgroup has shown a significant increase since 2004 in their belief that out-of-wedlock births are morally acceptable.” The exception is Americans whose views on social issues are conservative. Their views on out-of-wedlock births “have changed little over the past 14 years. Between 2002 and 2004, an average of 35 percent of social conservatives said having a baby outside of marriage was morally acceptable. Currently, 38 percent hold this view.”

This development has a substantial negative impact, Gallup says, because “babies born to unmarried parents are much more likely to grow up in poverty than those born to married parents.” The report goes on to say “a growing body of research indicates that … children in two-parent households tend to have better academic and emotional outcomes later in life than those born in single-parent households.”

Gallup also reports the following changes from 2001 to 2015:

** The rate of approval of sex between unmarried men and women rose from 53 percent to 68 percent, while approval of divorce rose from 59 percent to 71 percent.
** The proportion of people approving abortion rose to 50 percent for the first time, with pro-lifers constituting only 44 percent. At the same time, those approving of the death penalty for the most vicious criminals dropped from 63 percent to 60 percent.
** One fairly positive finding is that while there are high levels of approval for out-of-wedlock sex and divorce, only a relative few approve of married people having affairs, although the number did rise from 7 percent to 8 percent.

Accompanying the discarding of past culturally stabilizing standards of behavior is the rise of acute hypersensitivity, a condition where the most important activity is that of searching diligently to find something to be offended by.

A metal sculpture on a university campus is the subject of much wailing and gnashing of teeth among feminists after a woman visiting the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio saw the sculpture and snapped a photo of it. The sculpture outraged the woman and her female friend, and the friend tweeted the photo, setting loose pandemonium across the land.

The offending sculpture, titled “Friends,” shows a female student sitting on one end of a bench with a book on her lap, and looking up at a male student standing at the other end of the bench with one foot resting on the seat of the bench.

While normal folks see this as an inoffensive rendering of common friendly student interaction on campus, these two women saw something sinister and deserving of outrage. What was really going on, you see, was “mansplaining,” an offense rivaling murder, to them.

“Mansplaining” is when a man explains something to a woman in a condescending or patronizing manner. It is apparently never appropriate for a man to speak to a woman when she is sitting and he is standing. Either they both must be sitting or standing, or the man may be sitting while the woman stands, thereby eliminating the male superior position.

Being offended is a natural part of life, not a reason to get special treatment. This hypersensitivity takes our attention off really important matters, like the slowest recovery in a century and the 93 million Americans forced out of the workforce, the growing number of Americans driven to poverty by liberal policies, a foreign policy that has weakened the nation in the eyes of the world, and illegals entering the country by the millions, creating a substantial threat to the nation’s stability and security.

The left wants to shut down opposition, rather than debate issues

Not everyone on the left is intolerant of contrary ideas, or afraid of open debate of ideas, or so convinced of their own superiority that they deem civil and informed debate unnecessary, but many of them are.

Back in 2010, thirty liberal organizations, including the Center for Media Justice, the Rainbow Push Coalition, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, and Common Cause, among others, supported an effort to have the Federal Communications Commission clamp down on so-called “hate speech” on talk radio, the internet, and the cable television news networks. The imagined “hate speech” resulted from support by those media outlets for Arizona’s illegal immigration bill, which those trying to limit the debate characterized as “one of the harshest pieces of anti-Latino legislation in this country’s history.”

The law, SB 1070, passed in 2010 by the Arizona legislature and signed into law by the governor, created state penalties relating to immigration law enforcement, and included trespassing, harboring and transporting illegal immigrants, alien registration documents, employer sanctions, and human smuggling among the things Arizona declared to be state issues.

Given the negligence of the federal government to provide border security, and the harm to residents of border states like Arizona from drug dealers and other thugs and hoodlums who easily move back and forth across the border, passing laws to protect residents against the harm that often results from illegal immigration might be the right thing to do. 

Unless you are one of the intolerant liberals. They basically said that if you support that law, you are a hater and a racist, and being unwilling or unable to discuss the issue in a civil manner, they resorted to: “we say we are right, and that’s the end of the story.”

And then there is Robert Kennedy, Jr. who wants organizations that disagree with the idea that human activities are responsible for global warming or climate change to lose their business charter.

As Mr. Kennedy wrote for The Huffington Post last October, “corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty. This can be accomplished through an existing legal proceeding known as ‘charter revocation.’ State Attorneys General can invoke this remedy whenever corporations put their profit-making before the ‘public welfare.’"

He wants to intimidate those organizations – which include both corporations and think tanks – to discourage them from acting in their own best interest or advocating policies they think are beneficial, and/or opposing those policies that would harm them or that they believe are harmful. But not all organizations; just the ones that support or oppose the “wrong things.” 

Coal mining companies would be punished for pointing out the fraud committed by global warming activists, like some of the International Panelon Climate Change scientists, and for challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s water quality standards that are so severe that Evian bottled water and apple juice would be ruled unsafe, but organizations that followed the politically correct line would be left alone. 

Mr. Kennedy is one of the many who is willing to punish Americans who disagree with his ideological mania, so long as it helps him further his narrow ideological goals, and nothing must stand in the way. 

He has forgotten, or perhaps never learned, that freedom of speech is guaranteed to enable Americans to say things that may be unpopular with some or many, and specifically to protect political dissent. But disagreement, debate and discussion of political issues, whether by individuals or by organizations like corporations and think tanks, form the path to informing the public, thus yielding a greater possibility for sensible policymaking and better government.

Mr. Kennedy, like many leftists, is more than happy to force his ideas on the rest of us, and it matters not whether the truth is on his side, or whether a majority agrees with him.

It isn’t difficult to picture him regaling himself in the court of some tin-pot dictator, like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, gleefully ordering “off with their heads” for those who have the temerity to indulge in independent thought.

Steven F. Hayward, inaugural scholar in conservative thought and philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, says of the left’s tendency to shut down dissent, “These inclinations to rule certain issues out of bounds by denouncing dissenters with moral calumny rather than argument is not a sign of health in liberalism.  It is a sign of ideological senescence.”

Perhaps liberalism is old and tired, which would explain why its adherents gave up that term in favor of “progressivism.” But whatever they call their ideology, the left cannot persuade others to their way of thinking through the power and logic of their ideas, and is why they have to resort to shutting down and shutting up their opponents. 

We see today in America a situation where groups that advocate some idea or action have employed exaggeration, deception and other nefarious means to gain far more influence than their causes warrant. This is wrong on several levels, but more than just wrong, it is a threat to our liberty.

An item from the “truth is much stranger than fiction” department

Mobile, Alabama’s hometown TV station WALA FOX10 reports the following story, which contains comments that will leave most people scratching their head in disbelief.

An unidentified man who was shopping at the local Family Dollar store in Mobile saw a masked man pointing a gun at an employee and leading the employee toward the front of the store.

When he moved closer to investigate, he found the following: “He had the gun to his head. He had him on his knees,” said the man. “I drew my gun on him and I said 'Hey, don't move.' At that point he swung around and before he had a chance to aim the gun at me, I fired. I didn’t want to shoot him,” he said.

The gunman, 18-year-old Adric White, was not killed, and was transported to a local hospital where he was treated and is now recuperating in police custody at the hospital. A second young man, 19-year-old Tavoris Moss has been arrested as an accomplice to the Family Dollar robbery, although the FOX10 story did not explain the role he is accused of playing in the incident.

Court records show that Adric White was out on bond for robbing The Original Oyster House at gunpoint a little more than a month before the Family Dollar robbery, and records show the Baldwin County District Attorney's Office has now filed to have the bond in that case revoked.

Summarizing this incident, a young man out on bond for armed robbery was holding an employee of a retail establishment at gunpoint, and was challenged by a Good Samaritan with a gun, who then shot the young man when the Good Samaritan thought he was about to be shot.

Where this story gets really strange is in the reaction of Adric White’s family. The relatives of this young man who had already been charged in one armed robbery and was wounded in a second attempt to rob a store at gunpoint might reasonably condemn the young man’s behavior and be thankful that this wayward son is still alive and in relatively good condition, and therefore might be subject to rehabilitation. But that is not how at least some of his relatives reacted.

A female family member who did not want to be identified said the 18-year-old should have never been shot to begin with.

“If his (the customer’s) life was not in danger, if no one had a gun up to him, if no one pointed a gun at him - what gives him the right to think that it's okay to just shoot someone?” said the relative. “You should have just left the store and went wherever you had to go in your car or whatever,” FOX10 reported the relative as saying.

Apparently, judging from this relative’s comments she believes the victim in this scenario is the robber holding the employee at gunpoint, not the employee being held at gunpoint. And, the person who has done wrong is not the guy holding an employee at gunpoint during a robbery, but the Good Samaritan who thwarts a robbery and saves the employee from possible harm or death at the hands of the robber.

Where does such upside-down thinking develop? Is it a feature of only a relative few troubled minds, or is it far more widespread? Is it born in a soul convinced that he/she is entitled and therefore can do no wrong, or somehow is not subject to the laws governing our behavior? Is it a product of a failing culture that has not imparted basic American and human values to more recent generations?

Interestingly, FOX10 had interviewed Adric White’s parents, but the station reports that they later called the station and demanded the video not be aired. We are left to wonder whether they share the screwy morality of the relative whose sentiments were reported above.

For the record, the police emphasize that the Good Samaritan – whose name was not released, perhaps for his own protection – who shot the alleged robber was justified and broke no laws.

“[Criminals] tend to think that they are the only ones with guns," the Good Samaritan told FOX10. "I’ve been legally carrying my firearm for a little over four years now, and thank God I’ve never had to use it until, of course, last night. It just goes to show it's good to have a concealed carry [permit]. You never know when you’re going to need it.”

This story is sure to contribute to the fierce debate over gun control. It is a point in favor of the idea held by many of those who defend the constitutional right of Americans to keep and bear arms that the best way to combat a bad guy with a gun is the presence of a good guy with a gun. It shows that there may be positive results when law-abiding citizens are armed.

Whichever side of that argument you are on, we can all acknowledge that because of the behavior of this man legally carrying a gun, a robbery was thwarted and the perpetrator did not harm anyone.

Happy New Year!

NIPCC report disputes the conventional wisdom about climate change

The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is a panel of scientists organized in 2003 by Dr. S. Fred Singer and the Science & Environmental Policy Project. Unlike the better-known Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is a government-sponsored and politically motivated group with a man-causes-global-warming bias, the NIPCC receives no funding from government and does not share the IPCC’s predisposition that climate change is man-made and therefore requires a United Nations solution.

Hence, Dr. Singer’s group, which consists of some 50 independent scientists from universities and private institutions around the world (the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Norway, Canada, Italy, the UK, France, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Spain) who disagree with the IPCC’s theory, “seeks to objectively analyze and interpret data and facts without conforming to any specific agenda,” according to a summary of the 1,200-page report “Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science” that was released in September of this year.

Most of what we read, see and hear from the media is the opinion held and promoted by the United Nations’ IPCC. No matter what your opinion about whether or not human activities have a significant effect, or any effect, on the Earth’s climate, it certainly cannot hurt to have available the analysis of a group of scientists – the NIPCC – that believes the data show a different reality than that promoted by the IPCC.

Among the group’s findings are:

•    Atmospheric CO2 is a mild greenhouse gas that exerts a diminishing warming effect as its concentration increases.

•    Earth has not warmed significantly for the past 16 years despite an 8 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 emissions, which represents 34 percent of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.

•    The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.

•    The overall warming since about 1860 corresponds to a recovery from the Little Ice Age modulated by natural multidecadal cycles driven by ocean-atmosphere oscillations, or by solar variations at the de Vries (~208 year) and Gleissberg (~80 year) and shorter periodicities.

•    CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere “greens” the planet and helps feed the growing human population.

•    No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related CO2 emissions. The parallelism of temperature and CO2 increase between about 1980 and 2000 AD could be due to chance and does not necessarily indicate causation.

•    The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.

The summary also presents key facts about surface temperature that argue against the UN IPCC’s position, a few of which follow:

•    Whether today’s global surface temperature is seen to be part of a warming trend depends upon the time period considered.

•    Over (climatic) time scales of many thousand years, temperature is cooling; over the historical (meteorological) time scale of the past century temperature has warmed. Over the past 16 years, there has been no net warming despite an increase in atmospheric CO2 of 8 percent. (See second bullet above.)

•    There was nothing unusual about either the magnitude or rate of the late twentieth century warming pulses represented on the HadCRUT record, both falling well within the envelope of known, previous natural variations.

•    No empirical evidence exists to support the assertion that a planetary warming of 2 degrees Centigrade would be net ecologically or economically damaging.

These findings by this group of international scientists that contradict the positions of the IPCC gain strength from the evidence of fraud among scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia, many associated with the IPCC. Emails exchanged between these scientists obtained in 2009 demonstrated fraud, dishonesty and errors in the arguments supporting the theory of man-made global warming.

As reported in Human Events online edition, some of the emails revealed contempt for disagreeable scientific data and a “slavish devotion to the climate change political agenda pushed by the politicians and government bureaucrats funding their research.”

In the report’s Conclusion the authors say: “Few scientists deny that human activities can have an effect on local climate or that the sum of such local effects could hypothetically rise to the level of an observable global signal. The key questions to be answered, however, are whether the human global signal is large enough to be measured and if it is, does it represent, or is it likely to become, a dangerous change outside the range of natural variability?”

The Conclusion includes a quote by British biologist Conrad Waddington from 1941: “It is … important that scientists must be ready for their pet theories to turn out to be wrong. Science as a whole certainly cannot allow its judgment about facts to be distorted by ideas of what ought to the true, or what one may hope to be true.”

Those scientists who believe that man’s activities harm the planet should take this good advice to heart.

Obama and taxing the rich, and another deadly school shooting

Running for reelection in 2012, President Barack Obama claimed, “The rich are not paying their fair share of income taxes.” Playing to the baser instincts of voters is a tried and true technique, and if Mr. Obama does nothing else very well, he is a master at dividing people from one another and creating class discord.

However, so much of what the president says just ain’t so, as we have seen so dramatically and with such terrible consequences with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Mr. Obama’s signature legislative initiative. He is so closely related to this fiasco and has invested so much political capital in it that the ACA is now routinely called by his name.

However, Mr. Obama’s effort to tar and feather the rich as being stingy taxpayers falls on its face in a new study released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

The CBO study “The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2010” shows that the top 40 percent of households, as determined by pre-tax income, paid 106.2 percent of the nation’s income tax in 2010.

How can any group of Americans, or even all Americans together, pay more than all of the income taxes received? Read on.

The study also showed that the lowest 40 percent of households paid “negative income tax,” meaning that they paid no federal income tax, but instead received on average $18,950 in government transfer payments. Within this group the CBO said that the lowest fifth of income earners paid an individual income tax rate of minus 9.2 percent, and the second lowest group paid minus 2.3 percent.

Presumably, Mr. Obama would like the “rich” to pay not just “all of the income taxes,” and not just “more than all the income taxes,” but still more than that.

The study shows that the redistribution of wealth that Mr. Obama and his progressive cronies so strongly favor is well underway. But, of course, it still isn’t enough, and won’t be enough until everyone shares equally in the misery, because in their quest for the unachievable goal of financial equality, the progressives will have made it impossible for hard working Americans to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and will dampen the enthusiasm for earning, causing a collapse of the system.

In other news, as the nation observed the passage of one year since the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings that resulted in the death of 20 children and six adults, another school was in the news over an incident involving another young person determined to hurt innocent people.

Upset with the debate team sponsor and librarian at Arapahoe High School in a Denver, Colorado suburb who had disciplined him recently, the high school senior wearing a backpack with three Molotov cocktails inside it, a bandolier and carrying a pump-action shotgun entered the school and headed for the library.

The librarian got a warning and left the building. In this rampage the shooter fired five shots, two randomly down hallways that hit no one, and one more random shot that claimed no victims, but two other shots that each injured one student, one of them critically. He also set off one of the Molotov cocktails in the library that fortunately injured no one. And then he killed himself.

The rampage might have resulted in many more casualties had it not been for the quick response of a deputy sheriff who was working as a school resource officer, Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson told CNN. He praised the deputy’s response as “a critical element to the shooter’s decision” to kill himself, and lauded his response to hearing gunshots. “He went to the thunder,” he said. “He heard the noise of gunshot and, when many would run away from it, he ran toward it to make other people safe.”

A student who had a class with the alleged shooter told The Denver Post that, "He had very strong beliefs about gun laws and stuff." The classmate added that she had heard that he was bullied a lot.

The alleged shooter described himself on Facebook as "Keynesian,” one advocating government monetary and fiscal programs, and also attacked Republicans: "You republicans are so cute," he wrote, and posted an image that read: "The Republican Party: Health Care: Let 'em Die, Climate Change: Let 'em Die, Gun Violence: Let 'em Die, Women's Rights: Let 'em Die, More War: Let 'em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?"

Two other students told The Post, “He had political views that were ‘outside the mainstream.’”

We must not ignore the message from Sheriff Robinson that he clearly believes the presence of an armed and trained individual at Arapahoe High School, and the shooter’s knowledge of that person’s presence had a positive influence on this situation.

Making schools and other public buildings “gun-free zones” means no opposing force will be there when a criminal carrying a weapon shows up.

As we have seen at Sandy Hook and other places, this is a prescription for carnage and pain, whereas at Arapahoe High School, the county sheriff thinks the presence of an armed resource person prevented even more death, pain and suffering.

How many of America’s “poor” are like this lady and her husband?

The way that many welfare recipients think was revealed in a call to a radio talk show on KLBJ-AM in Austin, Texas. Lucy, a 32 year-old married mother of three, whose parents also had been on welfare, said this about her situation:

“I just wanted to say while workers out there and people like you that are preaching morality at people like me that are living on welfare, can you really blame us?  I mean, I get to sit home, I get to go visit my friends all day, I even get to smoke weed, and people that I know that are illegal immigrants, that don’t contribute to society, we still going to get paid. Our check’s going to come in the mail every month and it’s going to be on time. And we get subsidized housing, we even get presents delivered for our kids at Christmas. Why should I work?”

“So you know what? You all get the benefit of saying, ‘Oh, look at me. I’m a better person,’ because you all are going to work. We’re the ones getting paid. So can you really blame us?”

Asked if her husband works, she said he does sometimes, but “he doesn’t really see the need for it.” Has she ever worked? “A couple of times.” Does she ever feel guilty about gaming the system and taking money other people have earned? “But you know, if someone offers you a million dollars, would you walk away from it? It’s easy to preach morality, and that’s the only reason why I called. It’s easy to say, ‘Well, yeah, you know, you’re making your living off of other people’s backs.’ But, you know, if somebody gave you a million dollars, and said that, here, you don’t got to work for it, no strings attached. Here, just take it, you can do whatever you want to do with it. You would take it, too.”

The host asked if she was calling in on an “Obamaphone” (a cell phone provided by the federal government) and she answered that she was. Then, when asked how much she received each month, she said she only pays $50 a month for rent that should be $600, so that’s $550, $425 in food stamps, $150 for her electric bill, and $100 on her water bill from the City of Austin. That comes to $1,225 a month, $14,700 a year, just less than the current federal minimum wage. Plus the cell phone.

She also said that when you are in government programs, “they are always coming to you and offering more programs,” and will even pay you to go to find out about where you can get more money. “They encourage you to stay on the programs.”

Asked if her money was cut off, would she get up every day and go to work, she said, “yes, I’d have to.”

This situation makes perfect sense to people like Lucy and her husband, who never learned the lesson that mature, responsible human beings make their own way in life, and who now live a relatively comfortable life without having to do anything to help themselves. They are a product of the failed War on Poverty for which we can thank President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), the namesake of the radio station Lucy called. They are among a large and growing number of Americans being taught that the government will take care of them, and they don’t have to do well in school, or learn a trade, or look for a job, or do much more than draw breath.

Last year the Census Bureau reported that 46 million Americans were in “poverty.”  But how many of those are really poor and need some help, and how many are like Lucy and her hubby; playing a system that allows those eager for a free ride to get one?

Census Bureau data reveals the following about people classified as “poor”: eighty percent of poor households enjoy air conditioning; nearly three-fourths own a car or truck, and 31 percent own two or more cars or trucks, nearly two-thirds subscribe to cable or satellite television, 50 percent own a personal computer, and one in seven owns two or more computers; 43 percent subscribe to Internet access; one-third own a wide-screen plasma or LCD television; one-fourth own a digital video recorder system, such as a TiVo; more than half of poor families with children own a video game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation.

Poverty ain’t what it used to be.

It isn’t government’s job to help individuals who are down on their luck, and as the War on Poverty has demonstrated, it does a lousy job of it. And it surely isn’t government’s job to give taxpayer’s money to people who don’t really need it, or to actively recruit people who don’t need welfare onto welfare roles. That is the epitome of government disservice, and elected official’s self-service.

George Bernard Shaw’s famous quote has been used a lot recently, but it has never been truer than today: “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”