By Selwyn Duke
He wants the police defunded, a full rent freeze, city-owned grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, funding for illegals, millions for “gender-affirming” care — and more. Some people call him a Marxist; he calls himself a “democratic socialist.” But there’s something different still that New York City’s Zohran Mamdani may be called next January according to a new poll.
Mayor.
Continue reading "New Poll Shows NYC May Have First Marxist-Muslim Mayor" »
It’s a shame, and a sign of the times, that we mostly hear the term “virtue” via that misbegotten newer term “virtue-signaling.” Oh, the critique the latter denotes is absolutely valid, but packaging matters. (Thus do I use “value-signaling” instead.) Illustrating why was a reader reaction to one of my articles years ago, in which I mentioned virtue.
“No, no,” the man essentially said (I’m paraphrasing), “talking about that is how you end up with virtue-signaling!”
Clearly and sadly, the fellow’s only acquaintance with “virtue” was through that guilt-by-association pejorative. He apparently had no idea that it references, to define it properly, that “set of objectively good moral habits.” He’d perhaps no inkling that the virtues began being discovered millennia ago and that Greek philosopher Aristotle started systematizing them. He’d perhaps no clue that the Founding Fathers emphasized virtue, warning that it was a prerequisite for liberty. And he certainly hadn’t the foggiest notion that no nation can truly be civilized without virtue imbuing its people.
Bringing this all-important issue to the fore is the recent death of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, author of 1981’s After Virtue. Most people haven’t heard of him, and that’s a shame. Because, as one writer put it a week ago, MacIntyre “has died, but his philosophy of virtue should be resurrected.”
Continue reading "To MAGA, We Don’t Need “Virtue-signaling,” but Pure Virtue Itself" »
Affirmative-action holidays, encouraged by value-signaling white liberals, are quite something. A Zambian friend of mine once remarked that in Africa he’d never even heard of “Kwanzaa,” a supposedly African holiday coinciding with Christmas. Of course not. It was made up out of whole cloth in 1966 by black American activist and criminal “Maulana Karenga.” (Birth name: Ronald McKinley Everett.) This said, at least Kwanzaa is not a federal holiday. Yet this isn’t the case with “Juneteenth,” the June 19 observance ostensibly commemorating slavery’s final extinction in the United States. It was declared a federal holiday on June 17, 2021 in the emotionally charged wake of the George Floyd riots.
Now, “Juneteenth” references the notion that slavery actually ended on June 19, 1865 — even though it didn’t. But, whatever. AOC told us in 2019 that being “factually” correct is overrated.
Whatever those facts, though, here’s another: President Donald Trump believes there are too many federal holidays. And some leftists, such as comedian Jimmy Kimmel, are none too happy that he chose yesterday, Juneteenth, to say so.
Continue reading "Trump vs. Leftists on Juneteenth: Is It Just a DEI Holiday?" »
Call them 18-wheeler and dealers — or just call them criminal and dangerous. But if you’re wondering why some semi-truck drivers today don’t seem very skilled and may not even speak English, wonder no more. Because, it has been revealed, some Florida officials were giving illegal aliens commercial driver’s licenses in exchange for bribes. This means, of course, that these migrants were circumventing the testing process and have no proven qualifications.
What’s more, the uncovered scheme centered around just one Sunshine State county. Similar scams are presumably operative in additional counties and other states — especially “blue” states with high illegal-alien populations.
Continue reading "Florida Officials Gave Commercial Driver’s Licenses to Illegals; Arrests Made" »
By Selwyn Duke
Social norms are funny things, hardly set in stone. There was a time when vulgarity was unheard in our films; now its ubiquitous in them — and the wider society. In the 1950s, boys might take rifles on NYC’s subways because they had shooting clubs at their government schools. Now these institutions may have cops and metal detectors and a gun is cause for a lockdown. Of course, violence is also more prevalent in the wider society, political violence included. A good example is the recent assassination of a Minnesota politician and her husband and the wounding of another officeholder and his wife by 57-year-old Vance Boelter. And each of “both (political) sides” wants to claim that Boelter is a member of the other, too. Yet something appears for certain.
Only one side has with a wink and a nod, and sometimes more, been consistently encouraging violence.
And that side, says one observer, is the Democrats.
Continue reading "Minnesota Political Assassinations: The Fruits of Democratic Words and Deeds" »
Many years ago now, I encountered a man wearing a T-shirt stating “Everybody lies, nobody cares.” I thankfully never saw that shirt again. But I did think to myself at the time, “Well, I don’t lie — and I do care.”
We all should. No one had to explain why, either, to John Birch Society founder Robert Welch. He addressed the importance of honesty in 1970, writing:
If all men (and women too, of course), from diplomats to drunken bums, would simply resolve tomorrow always to be truthful, about everything — to the best of their knowledge and understanding — and would then abide by that resolution, I believe that fully half of all the troubles and grief of the human race would disappear within six months.
While one could quibble about what percentage of problems would disappear and how fast, the basic principle is unarguable. It’s as with a computer: garbage in, garbage out. If the input is incorrect, so will the output be. But if the data fed into the system is correct — is Truth — the output will also be correct.
Continue reading "Why Honesty Is the Key to MAGA — and the Good Life" »
By Selwyn Duke
Here’s a thought exercise: Imagine a substantial number of Europeans are being moved into some indigenous South Americans’ territory. Now imagine a percentage of them are “illegals” and, what’s more, that they’re given government-funded housing locals often can’t afford. Imagine, too, that this drives up rent further, making the housing even more inaccessible to the indigenous. Also imagine that “hate speech” laws ensure that if the locals complain about the injustice, they can be arrested. And then there’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back:
A few of these illegals sexually assault an indigenous girl.
Would it be surprising if this sparked a spasm of violence? (Note: This is not synonymous with asking, “Would such violence be moral?”)
If you say the above four “imagines” strain the imagination, perhaps they should. But you actually don’t have to imagine.
Continue reading "Immigration Tyranny and Violence: What’s Really Happening in Northern Ireland?" »
By Selwyn Duke
Be careful about the beasts you create, the beasts you nurture, the beasts you feed. Liberal pundit Juan Williams learned this (or did he?) the hard way in 2010, when NPR fired him after a confession that seeing people in Muslim garb on airplanes made him nervous. (Apparently, you can’t be liberal and human.) Now CNN anchor Jake Tapper has gotten a bit of the “Leon Trotsky” treatment, over his 15-year-old son’s police ambitions. And, no, Tapper won’t be fired. But he is fired up over what he views as an attack on his lad — and over Democrats’ woke-joke status.
Continue reading "Jake Tapper Gets Taste of How the Revolution He Enabled Eats Its Own" »
By Selwyn Duke
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them,” noted legendary author George Orwell. What might be an example? Try this on for size:
You’re a college professor who flees your country, claiming you fear loss of Academic Freedom™. This is even though it’s a place where you can’t be arrested for expressing opinions. And your solution?
You move to a country where you can be arrested for expressing opinions.
If you don’t quite get the logic, well, sorry, I guess you’re just not an “intellectual.” Suck it up.
Regardless, this is precisely what has been happening in the United States this year, the media claim. College professors have been leaving for Europe.
By Selwyn Duke
It was in 2020 that CNN made itself a laughingstock by running the chyron, “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests….” Now CNN, and the rest of the corporate media, is at it again, this time trivializing Los Angeles-riot violence. They have once more sunk to comical depths, too.
The rioting began Friday in the wake of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in the city. Apparently, the protesters are upset that interlopers who’ve invaded our country may suffer the indignity of having to return home.
As to the rioting, an estimated 1,000 miscreants caused mayhem the evening of June 6. This prompted President Donald Trump to deploy the National Guard to L.A. on Saturday. If you listened to the corporate media, however, you might not be able to imagine why he’d do such a thing. (Unlike ex-Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, he didn’t, as she put it in 2015, give “those who wished to destroy, space to do that.”)
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