SelwynDuke.com

Study: Gen Zers Want Safety Above All Else. Will They Trade Liberty for It?

By Selwyn Duke

Ah, those carefree days of youth, when kids feel so bulletproof that they may seem oblivious to their own mortality. Well, that’s the way it was, anyway. If a new study is to be believed, however, this has changed, with Gen Z young people being more mother hen than rowdy rooster.

In fact, a new “Teen Snapshot” study reveals that to these youngsters, safety is “Priority #1.”

While this finding may please Nervous Nellie moms coast to coast, it itself may be cause for worry. A famous saying from Benjamin Franklin illustrates why. “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety,” it goes, “deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

AI Researcher Quits; Says He’s “Pretty Terrified”

By Selwyn Duke

It’s easy to call warnings about artificial intelligence (AI) “sensationalism.” (So many things today are, after all.) In fact, when I told a “terrified” ex-AI researcher on X yesterday that I was writing a story about the alarm he sounded and had questions for him, another respondent — an author, it turns out — wrote of me, “Typical journo… If it bleeds, it leads.” Perhaps there’s no worse insult than “typical journo,” a status below used-car salesman and personal-injury lawyer and just above politician. (Maybe.) But I think my psyche will survive. Will we, however, survive the coming AI revolution?

Is THIS the Real Reason the Left Didn’t Steal the 2024 Presidential Election?

By Selwyn Duke

A 2023 poll found that almost 70 percent of Republicans/Republican leaners believed that Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory was illegitimate. Given this cynicism about the process, many Americans expected a replay of the fraud in 2024. Yet that didn’t materialize because, it’s often said, President Donald Trump’s November support made the election “too big to rig.” There is, however, no such thing, says one observer. Moreover, asserts this man, who has spent years studying electoral fraud, there’s a simple reason the Democrats didn’t rig the election:

They didn’t want to.

One BILLION Americans? When Do We End Immigration?

By Selwyn Duke

It’s funny, the discussions we never have, even when they involve that proverbial elephant in the room. Here’s one:

Since the U.S.’s population is only increasing because of immigration, when do we decide we have enough people and end it?

The Fakery That is the War on Fake News

By Selwyn Duke

Is it true that one man’s misinformation is another man’s salvation?

Or is it actually true that what man censors is sometimes God’s sublimity?

Author and university lecturer Nolan Higdon may not be pondering anything so ethereal. What he is sure of is that, as he wrote Sunday at Salon, the “war on fake news has backfired.” As to his meaning, his subtitle tells the tale and the Truth. To wit:

“Content moderation was never about eradicating fake news.”

Following the Science, Trump Moves to Pardon CO2

By Selwyn Duke

First there were the Biden family pardons; then there were the pardons of the J6 political prisoners. Joining the latter now, though, may be another case where the unjustly convicted would be absolved from guilt. It’s high time, too, as this condemned party has spent almost a generation in the pokey of public opinion and pseudo-science. His name?

Carbon dioxide — CO₂ for short.

The gas’ savior may be President Donald Trump, who has decided that CO₂’s case deserves another look. At issue is a 2009 “endangerment finding,” in which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Barack Obama, unilaterally decided the gas was a “pollutant.” (Never mind that it’s necessary for life’s existence.) But now Trump has ordered that this finding be revisited.

MUGA? To Make Universities Great Again, Stop the “Nonbinary Magical Realism”

By Selwyn Duke

Question: How do the following college courses grab you?

• “The Phallus”
• “Queer Musicology”
• “Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration”
• “Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism”
• “Native American Feminisms”
• “Sex Change City: Theorizing History in Genderqueer San Francisco”
• “Lesbian Pulp Fiction”

No, the preceding are not from the film PCU (Politically Correct U), which, having been released in 1994 and being art imitating life, illustrates for the young’uns how far back “wokeness” goes. Rather, they are from a 2006 essay titled “The Dirty Dozen: America’s Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses.”

Can We MAGA Without Making the Fed Bureaucracy SMALL Again?

By Selwyn Duke

Texan Michael Cargill had to endure what you might call, well, a bureaucratic colonoscopy. It was a Deep State experience he wouldn’t have had in, let’s say, 1971. That’s because his tormentor was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which didn’t exist till 1972. The issue?

They aimed to revoke his Federal Firearms License (FFL). The problem?

Trump May Kill “DEI” in Name, but It Will Live on Unless….

By Selwyn Duke

President Trump has made clear that he aims to trump Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) schemes. Democrats aim to trump him and keep them alive. And while the president will very likely win the current battle, in the federal political realm, what of the war? Is this just a matter of killing programs?

Or is it really, at bottom, a matter of killing a spirit— an idea?

Will the Red-hot California Fires Red-pill Americans?

By Selwyn Duke

When all is said and done, the wildfires raging in and around Los Angeles may be the worst natural disaster in American history in terms of scope and cost. But did it have to be this way? For sure, there are factors beyond man’s control, such as the fierce Santa Ana winds and Southern California’s dry environment. Then, however, there are the controllable factors: Having quota (DEI) hires in the Los Angeles Fire Department’s upper echelons, failure to be proactive (authorities did have advance warning of extreme fire danger), poor forest management, not maintaining water stocks, and vagrancy’s normalization. (Approximately 50 percent of all Los Angeles fires are set by vagrants, according to reporter Michael Shellenberger.) But then, though it’s the hardest of ways to learn a lesson, there may be one silver lining in this very tragic cloud: More Americans may be waking up to the wages of woke governance.