Category: Commentary

Commentary: U.S. Military-Sanctioned Diversity Initiatives Are Out of Control

RealClearWire

As those who have ever served in the military know, the United States Armed Forces is one of the most culturally and socioeconomically diverse institutions in America. It is full of patriotic Americans from all walks of life who come together to serve their country, fight for it, and ultimately die for it if called to. To have served in the military in any form is to be a member of an exclusive club in this country. Although there are some barriers to entry, race is not among them.

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Commentary: RFK Jr. as Independent Would Propel Trump to Deliver Crushing Blow

Virginia Star Staff

by Roger Kimball   So it looks as if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is just about to turn up the volume. It was bad enough for the Democratic establishment when he announced he was going to run for President on the Democratic ticket. Didn’t he know that The Committee already…

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Commentary: Yes, Jamaal Bowman Deserves the January 6 Treatment

Julie Kelly

Congressional Democrats are coming to the defense of their demonstrably unhinged colleague, Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York. Bowman, last seen attempting to assault Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.), pulled a fire alarm in the Cannon House office building as debate over a continuing resolution to fund the federal government intensified Saturday afternoon.

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Commentary: The New Right Cares About More than Taxes

Virginia Star Staff

New research is challenging assumptions about the Republican Party’s core values, showing the GOP of the 2020s is an entirely different animal from the GOP of the 2010s. The research captures an increasing shift toward populism and America First priorities that has been growing since Former President Trump’s election in 2016.

The study by American Compass divides Republicans into two camps, the Old Right and the New Right, based on their economic priorities and approach to cultural issues.

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Commentary: Pope Francis Creates 21 New Cardinals

Virginia Star Staff

On September 30, in advance of the Synod of Bishops on Synodality, Pope Francis created 21 new cardinals in St. Peter’s Square. The ceremony to install them, called a consistory, was the ninth during Pope Francis’s pontificate.

Cardinals play an important role in the Catholic Church and serve as principal advisors to the Pope, chief officials of the Roman Curia, and archbishops of major dioceses around the world. Additionally, cardinals under the age of 80 serve as cardinal electors in conclaves. 

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Commentary: Public Spaces Are in Decline

Virginia Star Staff

Former Trump official William Wolfe recently lamented the neglect steadily encroaching his local grocery store. “Let me tell you: I’ve never seen stores in such bad shape as they are now,” he wrote. “No one staffing the main check out lines, massive line for the self check outs, stores messy, items unstocked. … It’s like watching a country decline in real time.”

Wolfe’s tweet resonated with many Americans, garnering interactions from nearly 1 million people. Here were two of the responses: “I said nearly those exact words today to my husband when I came home from my local Kroger market” and “The fall of an empire happens gradually, and then all at once.”

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Andy Biggs Commentary: Congress Can’t Continue the Budget Insanity

Virginia Star Staff

In the current atmosphere of acrimony surrounding the failure of Congress to produce a balanced budget, or even an unbalanced budget, it is important to review the facts. The facts are important because the Uniparty, the Swamp, the Establishment, and many media propagandists are engaged in a parade of fearmongering.

Because House Republicans did not timely produce a budget as required by law, “they,” the leaders of the Uniparty, began championing their preferred budget mechanism, the “Continuing Resolution (CR).” We know it is their preferred option because they use it every year.

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Commentary: Stand Up to Left’s Use of COVID to Shut Down America

Virginia Star Staff

The Democrat Leftists and oligarchical elites are very capable people; it brings pain to admit it, but it’s true. In the midst of seeking the demise the 45th President and his legal team from 2020, they have managed to continue the fear factor that ushered in mail-in ballots and multiple week voting ensuring a myriad of unexplained discrepancies, ballots without a chain-of-custody, and the White House.

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Commentary: The Answer to American Electric Grid Reliability Is Fuel Cells

RealClearWire

In 1932, Americans were doggedly trudging through year three of the Great Depression when a candidate for president spoke of “the human importance of electric power in our present social order … It lights our homes, our places of work and our streets. It turns the wheels of most of our transportation and our factories. In our homes it serves not only for light, but it can become the willing servant of the family in countless ways … Electricity is no longer a luxury,” he declared. “It is a definite necessity.”

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Commentary: Biden’s Margin of Error Is Gone

Virginia Star Staff

Comparing current polling to 2020’s results, President Joe Biden cannot win reelection in 2024. To win in 2020, Biden had to roll up a big popular-vote margin to squeak to victory in the Electoral College. If current polls are correct, or even close, Biden’s needed popular support is nonexistent. And looking at the economy, it is hard to see from where it will come.

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Commentary: The Implications of Joe Biden’s Pending Political Demise

Virginia Star Staff

I’ve been saying, at The Spectacle podcast and elsewhere, that I refuse to make any assumptions about the 2024 presidential cycle. And let me offer the further caveat that Republican voters and conservative activists, not to mention current and prospective officeholders who wear that “R” next to their political names, had better pay a whole lot more attention to the structure of next year’s political cycle than to the personalities and candidates involved.

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Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: Is the Left Happy That They Got Their Wish?

Virginia Star Staff

by Victor Davis Hanson   America has been in a veritable cultural revolution since the 1960s. Nearly all our major institutions finally became woke — the administrative state, traditional and social media, universities, K-12, the corporate boardroom, entertainment, professional sports, and the foundations. So the Obama and the Biden administrations…

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Commentary: We Know Exactly What ‘De-Development’ Means

Virginia Star Staff

by Roger Kimball   “The climate crisis,” said Al Gore at the U.N. a couple of days ago, “is a fossil fuel crisis.” “What climate crisis?” you might be asking, and you would be right to do so. Yes, it is impossible to turn anywhere in our enlightened, environmentally conscious world without…

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Commentary: The Year in Teacher Union Double Dealing

Virginia Star Staff

This has been an egregious year for the country’s teachers unions. Okay, you may be thinking, so what else is new? But 2023 has exposed them as hypocrites par excellence.

The National Education Association convention in July provides myriad examples. While one might think a gathering of teachers would be concerned with the lack of literacy in public school students, he would be dead wrong. This year’s NEA convention in Florida was strictly political, and sex- and gender-obsessed ideas were front and center.

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Commentary: Democratic-Run States Are Losing Population, Power, and Congressional Seats

Virginia Star Staff

For years, Americans who believe in limited government and putting the American people first have had to watch as states like California, New York, and Illinois have turned their cities into dystopian hellscapes and sent unhinged politicians to Washington DC to inflict their policies on the rest of the nation.

But something very interesting has been happening over the past decade and this trend is only accelerating – the most left-wing states are slowly losing power as their populations decrease and residents move elsewhere. California, New York, Illinois, and others are losing population as residents move to friendlier and freer states. What this translates into is a mathematical solution to leftism and centralized government control.     

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Commentary: The Continuing Cultural Revolution

Virginia Star Staff

Christopher F. Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution is a landmark study of America’s radicalization since the 1960s. It is a carefully constructed work full of insights, which confirmed for me the conclusions that I had reached while studying some of the same topics. Rufo shows convincingly that certain radical thinkers, most of whom were American born, affected deeply and perhaps irreversibly American institutions starting in the 1960s. This study clearly avoids an interpretive perspective that I have repeatedly mocked, exemplified by those who pretend that American culture and politics were generally sound up until quite recently, perhaps until the point when LGBT enthusiasts turned from gay marriage to gender transitioning.

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Commentary: The Importance of Making Mistakes

Virginia Star Staff

A couple of years ago, I received a post-semester email from a student’s father. He was upset about his child’s final grade in my class, which had landed somewhere between a high B and a low A.

The grade was clearly not very low, but the student’s father wanted me to reconsider. Apparently, a specific assignment’s less-than-perfect score had kept his son from making the honor roll.

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Commentary: The Justice System Is Now a Weapon in Progressives’ Arsenal Against Political Enemies

Virginia Star Staff

Attorney General Merrick Garland gave his best Captain Renault impression on Capitol Hill in denying a double standard in how the Justice Department investigated (or didn’t) Hunter Biden (and his father) versus how they pursue his political rival. Shocked, shocked, indeed.

Those experiencing the less pleasant side of judicial double standards see rather clearly the woke hall pass.

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Commentary: Fact-Checking Merrick Garland’s ‘Fair’ DOJ

Julie Kelly

It might go down as the whopper of the year.

During his opening statement to the House Judiciary committee on Wednesday morning, Attorney General Merrick Garland attempted to head off expected criticism from Republicans by insisting his Department of Justice is blind to politics. “[We] apply the same laws to everyone. There is not one set of laws for the powerful and one for the powerless. One for the rich and another for the poor. One for Democrats and another one for Republicans. The law will treat each of us alike.”

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Commentary: More Evidence That U.S. Intelligence Analysis Is Broken and Politicized

Virginia Star Staff
Wuhan Institute of Virology

Last week, American Greatness reporter Debra Heine reported a bombshell story that a “highly credible” CIA whistleblower has told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that the CIA “bribed” six of its analysts with significant financial incentives to change their initial conclusion that the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a biolab leak in Wuhan, China and to instead conclude that the virus emerged naturally.

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Commentary: Our Self-Induced Catastrophe at the Border

Virginia Star Staff

Since early 2021 we have witnessed somewhere between 7 and 8 million illegal entries across the now nonexistent U.S. southern border.

The more the border vanished, the more federal immigration law was rendered inert, and the more Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas spun fantasies that the “border is secure.” He is now written off as a veritable “Baghdad Bob” propagandist.

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Commentary: The Left’s FISA Reform Trap

RealClearWire

Republicans have had a crash course since 2016 in the ways the power of the intelligence community can be abused. To take a few examples, four consecutive judges operating under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act approved wiretaps of a Trump adviser, Carter Page, relying without question on the partisan fictions of the Steele dossier. Michael Flynn was ousted after he was the target of an unprecedented leak of another FISA intercept. And 51 former intelligence officers intervened in the 2020 election to dismiss without evidence the Hunter Biden laptop contents as likely Russian disinformation.

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Commentary: American Public Says Biden Is Not the Leader America Needs to Fix the Country

Virginia Star Staff

A giant new poll delving deep into the public’s views on President Biden, Former President Trump, the U.S. economy and their own economic situation reveals a people deeply unhappy with the direction of the country under President Biden. 

First, the latest CBS News/YouGov poll shows Trump beating Biden by one point 50% to 49%. While that’s well within the margin of error, other recent polls have shown Trump beating Biden by as many as six percentage points in the past three weeks. Whatever the metric, Trump is polling significantly better now than he was at any time in 2020, and that has Democrats worried.   

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Paul Sperry Commentary: Did Hunter Biden Lie to His Own Memoir?

RealClearWire

In a raft of glowing reviews, Hunter Biden’s 2019 memoir “Beautiful Things” was celebrated as an “unflinchingly honest” (Entertainment Weekly), “confession and an act of contrition” (Guardian), that was “candid” and “doesn’t hold back details” (New York Times) of his substance abuse and broken relationships.  

While describing the book as an “unvarnished confessional,” the Washington Post exalted it as a “harrowing, relentless and a determined exercise in trying to seize his own narrative from the clutches of the Republicans and the press. 

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Commentary: Voter Registration ‘Charities’ Are a Massive, Overlooked Scandal

RealClearWire

“Nonprofit voter registration” doesn’t sound interesting. Yet nonprofit voter registration, or the use of tax-exempt charitable organizations to conduct and fund voter registration drives, is one of the most important and underreported political scandals of our time.

Nonprofit voter registration, and the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) activities that usually accompany it, have become the heart of a billion-dollar industry in America. According to Candid’s Foundation Funding for U.S. Democracy database, since 2011 nearly 60,000 grants have been made for “Voter Education, Registration, and Turnout” and “Civic Participation,” benefitting 15,000 different organizations to the tune of $5.9 billion dollars.

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Commentary: Alzheimer’s Disease Is Partly Genetic − Studying the Genes That Delay Decline in Some May Lead to Treatments for All

Virginia Star Staff

Diseases that run in families usually have genetic causes. Some are genetic mutations that directly cause the disease if inherited. Others are risk genes that affect the body in a way that increases the chance someone will develop the disease. In Alzheimer’s disease, genetic mutations in any of three specific genes can cause the disease, and other risk genes either increase or decrease the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

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Commentary: Jack Smith’s Real-Life Bogeyman

Julie Kelly
Special Counsel Jack Smith

One must wonder if Special Counsel Jack Smith checks under his bed every night to make sure a large man wearing an oversized blue suit, long red tie, and MAGA hat isn’t there.

Smith, the public has been assured, is a nerves-of-steel prosecutor who has taken on some of the world’s most dangerous criminals during his time at the U.S. Department of Justice and The Hague. Following Smith’s appointment in November 2022, one former colleague swooned to the New York Times how Smith “has a way about him of projecting calm” and that “people look to him for steady guidance.”

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Commentary: The Migrant Surge is Coming to the Classroom

Virginia Star Staff

Democratic politicians and the liberal media made the first day of school all about welcoming migrant children. That’s sheer propaganda. Parents deserve the truth. The migrant surge is a disaster for their kids.

The surge will worsen our education system’s twin failures: plunging math and reading scores, and the failure to ensure newly arriving kids learn English so they can succeed, too.

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Commentary: 20 Historical Hobbies for $20 or Less

Virginia Star Staff

New hobbies can seem intimidating and—worse—expensive. The internet offers complicated lists and costly supplies for even the most basic of skills. We might feel that we can’t invest too much into a hobby—who knows if we’ll be good at it anyway?

In reality, many hobbies—particularly those that rely more on building a skill than on collecting items—begin with very few supplies. In fact, there’s a wealth of historical skills we can practice for entertainment, self-improvement, and practicality!

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Commentary: Bidenomics Is Hurting Families

Virginia Star Staff

It is no mystery that the core demographics for the Democratic Party include single women, blacks and Hispanics. In 2020, Biden won unmarried women 63 percent to 36 percent over former President Donald Trump, blacks 87 percent to 12 percent and Latinos 65 percent to 32 percent, according to the CNN exit poll.

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Commentary: A Mother’s COVID Regret

Virginia Star Staff

One of the most alarming aspects of the new COVID-centric regime is how people have been deprived of the truth regarding potential harms of the COVID-19 vaccines and how citizens have been forced to get the vaccine due to bullying from medical authorities, the government, or an employer.

When the medical decision to get the jab, whether well-informed or not, is that of a parent making the choice for a child, such a potentially life-altering move might devastate two people, not just one patient. Good parents always want to do the best for their children, and making a medical decision for your child that might have terrible consequences is scary to consider.

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Commentary: Another Whitmer Fednapping Case Goes Boom

Julie Kelly

In another blow to the FBI’s concocted plot to kidnap and assassinate Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, a jury in Antrim County today acquitted three men indicted on state charges for their alleged role in the scheme.

Michael and William Null, twin brothers, and Eric Molitor were found not guilty of providing material support for an act of terrorism and unlawful possession of firearms. Jurors began deliberations Thursday afternoon following a 14-day trial before Judge Charles Hamlyn.

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Commentary: The Reason Most College Professors Lean Left

Virginia Star Staff

Studies have consistently shown a pronounced left-leaning political inclination among college professors. For example, a Harvard University survey last year revealed that of the 476 faculty members who responded, around 80 percent identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Meanwhile, 16.8 percent considered themselves “moderate,” a mere 1.46 percent identified as “conservative,” and none claimed to be “very conservative.”

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Commentary: Rent Control Is the Wrong Solution for Housing Affordability

RealClearWire

My family moved to the United States from the Caribbean in 1985. About eight years later, my parents saved enough to purchase a two-family home in the quiet outskirts of Boston far away from our crime-ridden neighborhood. As landlords, my parents charged modest rents—enough to “help with the mortgage”—and ensured that the first-floor apartment was always well maintained for our tenants.

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Commentary: Trump Taught Republicans How to Win

Virginia Star Staff
President Donald Trump

As House Republicans have settled back into Washington, D.C. this week fresh off a month-long hiatus, all eyes will turn to whether the party in control of the lower chamber can muster any resistance against the current regime running roughshod over the nation and blatantly interfering with the upcoming presidential election.

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Commentary: The Insatiable, Unaccountable, and Unsatisfied Bloodlust of the DOJ

Julie Kelly

Nejourde Thomas “Jord” Meacham was the sort of person the elites in Washington despise.

One of ten children in what appears to be a tight-knit family, Jord lived in rural Utah near the Nevada border working on his family’s ranch; he enjoyed fishing, hunting, and riding horses. “He was a big history buff. Listening to music was a big part of his life and young kids were drawn to him,” his obituary read. Jord is survived by his parents, siblings, grandparents, and “many aunts, uncles, and cousins.”

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Commentary: Ken Buck Is Wrong About the J6 Defendants

Virginia Star Staff

U.S. Representative Ken Buck’s big wet sloppy kiss to Attorney General Merrick Garland last week could not have come at worse time for the Colorado Republican.

Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the federal court in Washington, D.C. was in the process of ordering prison time typically applied to murderers, drug traffickers, and serial child pornographers for five members of the Proud Boys convicted of no serious crime related to January 6. A well-known gun storage company faced backlash for assisting the FBI in yet another armed raid against a January 6 trespasser. And a young man from Utah took his own life just weeks after his arrest on four misdemeanors for his participation in January 6, at least the fourth known suicide of a Capitol protester.

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