Category: Commentary

Commentary: Students and Teachers Are Ditching Public Schools in Droves

Virginia Star Staff

In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released a report titled, “A Nation at Risk,” which was an important point in the history of American education. The document used dire language, asserting that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

The report also stated: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

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Commentary: Interest Rates Are Soaring, Raising the Alarm for a Painful Reckoning for America

Virginia Star Staff

Someone with a million dollars of credit card debt probably wouldn’t celebrate if his interest rate skyrocketed. Yet some analysts are touting rising interest rates on America’s trillions of dollars of long-term debt as a good sign for the U.S. economy.

Are they right? Are rising long-term interest rates a good thing? Certainly not for anyone looking to secure a 30-year mortgage at two-decade-high rates. And certainly not for the federal budget. Not when America is sitting on $32.7 trillion in debt.

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Commentary: American Self-Government Is Falling Apart

Virginia Star Staff

The American system does not require unanimity. In fact, its design presumes deep disagreement on matters of morality and policy.

This is why questions like religion are left to individual conscience, and why most policy is left to states or even smaller units, where the law’s touch will not be felt as harshly, because it reflects the more similar values of a smaller group. Finally, regardless of who has the reins of the federal government, the Constitution renders a great deal of substantive activity off limits, as exemplified by the Bill of Rights.

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Commentary: Compulsory Schooling Laws Have Got to Go

Virginia Star Staff

When Massachusetts passed the nation’s first compulsory school attendance law in 1852, parents were mandated to send their children to school under a legal threat of force. Today, that threat remains stronger than ever.

Prior to that law, and those that followed in all other US states over the subsequent decades, cities and towns were compelled to provide schooling for those who wanted it, but parents were under no obligation to use those schools. Many didn’t, choosing instead to send their children to private schools, church or charity schools, “dame schools” in their neighbor’s kitchen, apprenticeships for older children and teens, or to homeschool.

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Commentary: Everyone Can Agree on Election Integrity

Virginia Star Staff

At first glance, some Americans could mistakenly conclude that election integrity safeguards are deeply unpopular. After all, liberal politicians and the mainstream media regularly denounce commonsense measures like photo ID laws and routine voter roll cleanups.

No matter what they claim or how loudly they claim it, these voices do not speak for the majority of Americans. As recent polling conducted by Honest Elections Project Action shows beyond all doubt, an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Americans embrace commonsense voting laws that make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

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Commentary: The Left Uses Barriers to Advance Their Agenda

Virginia Star Staff

The subject of barriers came up in an unintentionally comical way a few weeks ago, during former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Paula Scanlon’s testimony before Congress.

As Campus Reform reported, Scanlon testified that she and her teammates were “forced to undress in the presence of a 6-4 biological male with fully intact male genitalia 18 times a week”—a reference, of course, to Will “Lia” Thomas.

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Commentary: Uniparty’s Plan to ‘Save Our Democracy’ Unfolds

Virginia Star Staff

The fish are plentiful today. There’s Hunter Biden and his various lies: about the sources of his prodigious income, his payment (that is, non-payment) of taxes, drugs, guns, child support, laptops and prostitutes. There’s Joe Biden and his lies, the sources of his prodigious income, and—the latest—his use of pseudonymous email accounts when writing to Hunter and Hunter’s business partners to discuss the weather—or was it the whether and how to siphon 20 million of the crispest into virtually untraceable bank accounts?

There’s the seemingly endless series of indictments directed at Donald Trump. The latest new there, if I am up to date, is that he told people to watch election returns on One America News Network. Clearly part of a RICO conspiracy. Someone whose math is sharper than mine calculated that President Trump is potentially on the hook for 450 years in the slammer for . . . well, his torts are mostly in the eye of the beholder.

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Commentary: Country Music Speaks for Everyday Americans

Virginia Star Staff

Taylor Swift may be the hottest ticket this summer, but her listeners don’t share her country roots. That space has been captured by a series of anthems singing the blue-collar blues, songs that are a lot closer to—and a lot more correct—about what is bugging everyday Americans.

American music has always been an echo chamber for popular culture. The Jazz Age was a rebellious response to the high-brow Victorian Gilded Age. Rock ’n’ roll was the rallying cry of baby boomers.

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Commentary: Drug and Crime Issues at Border Could Make Immigration a Central Issue in 2024

Virginia Star Staff

Despite voters being focused on economic issues like lowering inflation and raising wages, the public’s concern over immigration could make border security as big of an issue in 2024 as it was just before Former President Trump was first elected.     

New Gallup polling from July shows the share of Americans who say immigration is a “good thing” is at its lowest point since 2014. The last time enthusiasm for immigration was this low, the public elected a staunchly law and order president who spent much of his campaign illuminating the drug and crime crisis in the United States due to unchecked immigration.

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Commentary: Presbyterianism Lost Its Clout When It Embraced Modernism

Virginia Star Staff

Rev. Dr. Rebecca Todd Peters, an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church-USA (PC-USA), recently treated a Unitarian Universalist congregation to a fiery sermon. Was it about heaven, hell, salvation, and the need to repent and believe the Gospel — messages that one would think members of a non-Christian group such as the latter would need from a Christian minister? No. Instead, she thundered from the pulpit that abortion, all abortion, anytime up through birth, is essentially good, including her own two abortions, for which, she assured everyone, she “felt no guilt, no shame, no sin.”

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Commentary: A Case for the Lost Art of Memorization

Virginia Star Staff

Memorization and recitation became part of my life through a club I was part of in middle and high school. With the club, I had the opportunity to recite patriotic speeches and poems along with chapters from the Bible in front of an audience of veterans, law enforcement officers, and first responders just about every month. I loved seeing how the words recited touched the people listening.

Almost without fail, after we spoke, adults would come over to thank us, amazed by the fact that we could remember so much and recite it with such confidence. Often, people said something along the lines of “I never thought kids could do that” or “That’s more than I would ever be able to do.”

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Commentary: President Trump Can Use Political Pressure to Defeat the Biden Witch Hunt

Virginia Star Staff

President Trump, as well as his base of tens of millions of supporters, need to prepare themselves for chaos in 2024. The witch hunt directed against President Trump and his supporters is a sign of the insanity and hysteria infecting the Democratic Party. No matter how the 2024 election turns out, it will be destabilizing for the country. 

More importantly, Trump simply cannot trust the courts in any Democrat controlled state or the Biden regime’s Department of Injustice to treat him fairly. President Trump’s legal problems require political solutions. 

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Commentary: The Danger of Driver Equity Laws in Pennsylvania

RealClearWire

In the early morning hours of March 30, 2022, an innocent victim was suddenly attacked while he was putting the trash out at his place of work in Bensalem, along Street Road. The victim ran for his life but was eventually caught by his attacker. He was viciously stabbed over fifty times as he tried to resist. The assailant fled as the victim struggled to stay alive in the parking lot. He then returned in a vehicle, ran the victim over twice, abducted him, and drove off.  

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Commentary: Conservative Christian Education Is Being Born Again Post-Pandemic

RealClearWire

Conservative Christian education is being born again.  

Arcadia Christian Academy, which opened in Arizona on Aug. 8, is one of dozens of Christian micro-schools popping up across the country, offering a hybrid in-class and at-home education to keep costs down and the odds of survival up in an increasingly competitive K-12 sector. What’s more, many long-established Christian schools are growing their enrollment after years of stagnation. 

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Commentary: Unions Have Betrayed America

Virginia Star Staff

Anyone suggesting there is no role for unions in America today might first consider a fact of history: more than a century ago, when oligarchs and the companies they owned had treated workers as if they were livestock, reduced to living in squalid pens with rationed food and water, it was unions that organized these workers to resist. It was unions who gave these workers back their humanity, and negotiated collective bargaining agreements and laws that eliminated child labor, enforced workplace safety, established an 8-hour work day, paid overtime, health benefits, and retirement pensions.

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Commentary: California’s China Syndrome Exposed

Virginia Star Staff

In 2021, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1276, popularly known as “Skip the Stuff,” restricting plastic straws, utensils, and condiment packs in restaurants. This year, Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta are skipping “stuff” much more dangerous than plastic straws.

Last December in Reedley, a city of 25,000 near Fresno, city inspectors noticed a garden hose attached to an abandoned warehouse. Inside they found a secret, illegal biolab harboring, as the Mid Valley Times reported, hundreds of allegedly genetically engineered mice, “potentially infectious” bacteria, and viral agents, including chlamydia, E. Coli, streptococcus pneumonia, hepatitis B and C, herpes 1 and 5, rubella, and malaria.

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Commentary: Keeping Trump Off the Ballot in 2024 Will Hurt the GOP

Virginia Star Staff

Now there are four separate trials against former President Donald Trump, the latest in Fulton County, Ga., arising from Trump challenging the results of the 2020 election, coming atop trials in New York City over supposed federal campaign finance violations, Miami, Fla. over his receipt of classified documents while he was president and retention when he left office and Washington, D.C. again over his challenge of the 2020 election.

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Commentary: The Bill Comes Due for Blue Sanctuary Cities

Virginia Star Staff

The seemingly low-cost virtue signaling of declaring your non-border city or state a “sanctuary” for illegal immigrants has now revealed its hefty price tag.

“If we don’t get the support we need, New Yorkers could be left with a $12 billion bill,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said last week of the now crisis-level illegal immigrants who continue to flow into the Big Apple.

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Commentary: Joe Biden’s Race Against the Truth

Virginia Star Staff
Joe Biden at desk, looking over documents

Joe Biden has about 17 months left as an elected politician — if he is lucky. That projection guides most of the inexplicable and shameless behavior of the Department of Justice and Biden himself. View Biden as in a race against the truth. Will he be physically and mentally able to complete his term and head to retirement before his decades-long crimes of corruption catch up to him?

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Alan Dershowitz Commentary: No; The 14th Amendment Can’t Disqualify Trump

Virginia Star Staff

Several academics — including members of the conservative Federalist Society — are now arguing that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment prohibits Donald Trump from becoming president. They focus on the language that prohibits anyone who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion…or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” from holding “any office.” The amendment provides no mechanism for determining whether a candidate falls within this disqualification, though it says that “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.” Significantly, the text does not authorize Congress — or any other body or individual — to impose the disqualification in the first place.

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Commentary: Forget ‘Contempt of Court,’ What About ‘Contempt of Public’?

Virginia Star Staff

We have all heard about contempt of court and contempt of Congress. They are offenses for which one may be fined or jailed. But what about contempt of public? What’s the penalty for that?

I don’t know that you will find contempt of public in the statute books. If not I offer up the phrase free and for nothing to the bureaucrats who look after such things. I think it should be added to our vocabulary if not to our code of laws. It names a grievous assault on the community. By making a travesty of the rules and institutions that undergird our social life, contempt of public threatens to undermine that essential if often hard-to-define societal lubricant: trust.

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Commentary: Seven Ways Schools Are Creating ‘Empty’ Children

Virginia Star Staff

In the early 1990s, New York Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, threw in the towel on teaching with his famous I Quit, I Think  letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Gatto’s reason for quitting was simple. He could no longer justify teaching “a curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency.” Such a system, Gatto opined, was turning our children into mindless robots.

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Commentary: A Generation Alone

Virginia Star Staff

The following is a condensed version of “One Generation Passeth Away, and Another Cometh” by Sam Negus, published at Law & Liberty.

Three millennia ago, King Solomon wrote that “folly is bound up in the heart of a child.” It has ever been thus: the rueful old lament the apparent decadence of the young. In her new book Generations, social scientist Jean Twenge suggests an obvious explanation for this ageless trend: “It might be because they [are] always right. With technology making life progressively less physically taxing, each generation is softer…”

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Commentary: The FBI HQ Relocation Proposal Is a Fraud

Virginia Star Staff

As of now, House Republicans have removed funds from the FY 2024 budget for the controversial $3.5 billion proposed relocation of the FBI’s Washington, D.C. headquarters to a new complex at one of three locations in the D.C. suburbs of Virginia or Maryland.

Some House Republicans want to keep the FBI headquarters at its current location and view the relocation proposal as unwise and wasteful. Others want to downsize, defund or eliminate the Bureau – and not to reward it with a sprawling new headquarters complex – because they believe it has been weaponized against conservatives.

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Commentary: The Left’s Relentless, Unjustified Assaults on the Supreme Court’s Legitimacy

Virginia Star Staff

In recent years, the Supreme Court has been the target of a relentless and strategic campaign aimed at undermining its credibility and impartiality.

Left-wing publications such as ProPublica, Slate, and The Guardian have led an orchestrated assault against the high court’s Republican-appointed justices, and their message has been amplified by Senate Democrats.

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Commentary: NATO Without Limits Would Lead to Endless Wars

RealClearWire

Jessica Berlin, a policy analyst writing in the Center for European Policy Analysis’ online journal, has proposed a NATO without limits–an expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to all democratic nations. “The 21st-century threat landscape,” she contends, “calls for a global alliance capable of mutual defense.” “NATO must open its doors,” she writes, “to new members beyond Europe and North America.” Her proposal is breathtaking in scope: an attack on any democracy is an attack on all democracies. It is a recipe for endless wars on all continents and a reckless extension of America’s nuclear guarantee to all the world’s democracies. It turns John Quincy Adams’ prudent counsel on its head: America goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy and is the champion and vindicator of the freedom and independence of all democracies.

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Commentary: The Political Divide Among High Schoolers

Virginia Star Staff

It is popularly held that the younger generations are becoming increasingly liberal while conservatives dominate the older demographics. While this tends to be true, a recent survey conducted on seniors in high school demonstrates nuances.

The University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey found that young girls are driving the youthful push toward liberalism, while boys are increasingly becoming far more likely to identify as conservative.

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Commentary: The Emerging ‘Cold Tech War’ Between the U.S and China

RealClearWire

The Sino-U.S. “cold tech war” is reaching new heights—or rather depths—as tensions are building under the sea. First it was semiconductors. Now it’s submarine cables.

Undersea cables, unseen and often ignored, are essential to daily life and critical to U.S. national security. Over 97 percent of global data traffic travels through a network of cables that sit atop the seabed of the world’s oceans. Those same cables transmit upwards of $10 trillion in financial transactions every day and are a central component of the American military’s network-centric warfare operations.

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Commentary: Red China’s Electric Vehicle Invasion of America

Virginia Star Staff

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) electric vehicles (EVs) manufactured in Red China are now for sale in the U.S. They are Buick’s Envision and Sweden’s Polestar 2, with Lincoln Nautilus soon to follow. Many more Red Chinese EV brands are coming. Waiting in the wings to begin export to the U.S. are BYD Co., Li Auto, Xpeng Motors, Nio Inc., and Geely.

And, as the U.S. dismantles its combustion engine industry and all the ancillary industries to make way for EVs that Americans aren’t buying, American workers are losing jobs and suffering wage decreases. People working in repair shops, garages, gas stations, parts manufacturers, and distributors are just a few of those who will suffer.

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Commentary: For Washington Post’s Feared ‘Pinocchio’ Fact Checker, Forthrightness Dies in ‘Updates’ to Biden-Burisma Story

RealClearWire

For the second time in three years, the Washington Post has quietly “updated” one of the most consequential fact checks in the history of American politics – its October 2020 article undercutting reports that Hunter Biden arranged a dinner meeting between one of his foreign business clients and his father, who was then vice president of the United States.

The original article by the Washington Post’s chief fact checker, Glenn Kessler, was published the same day as the New York Post’s pre-election scoop revealing that Joe Biden had attended a 2015 dinner with a top executive of a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, which was paying his son $83,000 per month. Kessler’s fact-check involved interviews with a host of Biden aides who vehemently disputed the vice president’s attendance at the dinner and advanced the theory that the source of the information – a laptop Hunter had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop – was untrustworthy and possibly a Russian plant. 

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Commentary: Trump Indictment Is a Mockery of Common Sense

Virginia Star Staff

At the end of the classic independent film Reservoir Dogs, the characters end up in a Mexican standoff. The criminal gang’s ringleader, Joe, insists that Mr. Orange is working with the police, even though he is dying on the floor, having been shot during a failed jewelry store heist. Mr. White – the crooks use aliases – insists that Joe is wrong. Guns get drawn. Mr. White demands some proof for Joe’s claim about Mr. Orange. Joe angrily responds, “You don’t need proof when you have instinct!” You can watch the (admittedly brutal) scene here.

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Commentary: Suit Against Tech Giant Shines Light on U.S. Complicity in Chinese Torture

RealClearWire

The wheels of justice often turn slowly, but when it comes to U.S. corporate complicity in China’s record of religious persecution, human rights activists say they are finally picking up speed and moving in the right direction.

Top reformers in Washington, D.C., are heralding a recent twist in a 12-year legal battle that could have far-reaching implications for all U.S. companies that have sold surveillance or tracking technology to China.  

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Commentary: Don’t Let a Movie Be Your Only Involvement in the Fight to End Modern-Day Slavery

Virginia Star Staff

The Sound of Freedom is a wonderful and eye-opening movie. We’ve constantly urged people to see the movie and if you haven’t yet, go grab your tickets to see it right now.

For many, it has become similar to the Sinner’s Prayer moment in the life of a Christian.

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Commentary: Could the Baby Boomer Retirement Wave and Labor Shortages Absorb the Recession?

Virginia Star Staff

The national unemployment rate dipped to 3.5 percent in July, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, once again hitting more than 50-year lows.

It’s still peak employment as far as the eye can see. Even with the past two years’ high inflation dropping dramatically and disinflation usually correlating with higher unemployment and a recession, that simply has not occurred yet, despite all the warning signs typically associated with an economic slowdown or downturn.

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Commentary: The Biden Admin Has a Bad Regulation for Every Room in Your House

Admin

This year began with federal regulators targeting gas stoves, but we have since seen a host of other proposals going after washing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers, ceiling fans, water heaters, and others. They are all part of the Biden administration’s prioritization of the climate change agenda over the interests of consumers. Each runs the risk of boosting appliance prices, limiting choice, and compromising performance. And cumulatively, they add up to substantial headaches for homeowners that will only grow in the years ahead.

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Commentary: A Second Trump Term Can Walk Us Back from the Brink of War

Virginia Star Staff

Voters should remember that a President’s role is primarily foreign affairs, which includes trade and border security. In 2016, and today, President Trump is the only candidate that has consistently focused on what the actual job of the president is, rather than what those with outsized influence want it to be.

President Trump is the first president to start no new wars since Jimmy Carter. Like Carter, he also affected a Middle East peace deal with Israel – not just one of them, but four. Arguably the first realist president since Richard Nixon, Trump’s combination of unpredictability enforced by blunt and brutal talk, credible military deterrence reinforced through a more robust military that was less used and overstretched, and a genuine and authentic desire to be a peace-maker created a moment in time for cooperation and peace through strength. Unfortunately, under Biden, the promise of peace has become a Shakespearean tragedy when considering our present dilemma in Europe and East Asia.

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Commentary: ‘Vivek on Track to Eclipse DeSantis,’ Donor Memo Admits

RealClearWire

An internal memo circulated by the Vivek Ramaswamy campaign, and obtained by RealClearPolitics, outlines his pitch to donors ahead of the first GOP primary debate: The 37-year-old first-time candidate is surging as others stumble, going farther with fewer resources, and will soon “eclipse DeSantis.”

Until recently, those claims could be dismissed as so much bravado from an overeager, unknown biotech investor without any political experience whatsoever.

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Commentary: Democrats’ ‘Freedom to Vote Act’ Is the Death of Free Elections

Virginia Star Staff

Last month, House Democrats reintroduced the “Freedom to Vote Act,” signaling the Left’s latest assault on American elections with activist support. Far from restoring their integrity, the bill – like the “For the People Act” and “John Lewis Voting Rights Act” before it – is a cynical measure designed to federalize elections and cement Democrat power for generations.

It’s raw, naked tyranny – and Republicans must defeat it.

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Commentary: Slaughter of Nigerian Christians Warrants International Attention

Virginia Star Staff

“If we keep quiet, we are going to go extinct,” says Catholic Bishop Chipa Wilfred Anagbe of the Diocese of Makurdi in Benue state, Nigeria.

In June, the Congressional Values Action Team caucus met with Anagbe and the Rev. Remigius Ihyula who shared their testimonies of atrocities committed against Christians in Nigeria by Islamic extremists and about the complacency of the Nigerian government.

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Commentary: Bidenomics Is Pouring Cold Water on the Labor Market

Virginia Star Staff

Friday’s jobs numbers show the labor market is softening due to Bidenomics and Bidenflation. Only 187,000 jobs were created last month. That’s below expectations, 40% less than the 12-month average, and the lowest level since the pandemic. Previous months’ employment growth was also revised down significantly, taking the sheen off recent jobs reports.

Average wages grew slower than core inflation, meaning Americans’ real wages and living standards remain stagnant. Friday’s numbers come on the heels of this week’s JOLTS report showing the fewest number of job openings and the fewest number of Americans quitting their jobs since the pandemic.

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Commentary: BlackRock and Its ESG ‘Voting Choice’ Ruse

RealClearWire

Amid growing criticism of its environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment  practices, BlackRock has announced that it will offer retail investors in its largest exchange-traded fund (ETF) the opportunity to participate in its “Voting Choice” program. Open to institutional clients since January 2022, this program allows investors to choose from a limited set of options to guide BlackRock in voting their shares. While perhaps an effective PR tool, Voting Choice is little more than a ruse that neither empowers investors nor diminishes BlackRock’s power to impose its ESG goals on American businesses. 

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Commentary: Former President Donald Trump Had a Right to Challenge the Results of the 2020 Election

Virginia Star Staff

Former President Donald Trump, who is running for president again in 2024 for the Republican nomination, has once again been indicted on Aug. 1 by Special Counsel Jack Smith, this time for challenging the results of the 2020 election, alleging Trump “spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.”

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