Tag: AMericA

Commentary: Secure Law and Order in America

Virginia Star Staff

Over July Fourth weekend, according to CNN, at least 233 people were killed and 618 others were injured in more than 500 shootings across the country. Unbelievably, those tragic statistics actually represent a 26 percent decrease from July Fourth weekend in 2020. But overall, violent crime in 2021 across the nation—and especially in major urban corridors—has only increased over 2020’s horrific baseline. Nationwide murder rates in 2021 to date show a roughly 25 percent annual increase over 2020, and that number spikes to roughly 30 percent in our large cities. In New York City, there has been a 32 percent year-to-date increase in rape and a 42 percent increase in grand larceny.

Increasingly, Americans do not need to look very far to experience the horrific violence in an up-close and personal manner. Last week, for instance, a 22-year-old University of Chicago student was senselessly killed by what appeared to be a stray bullet while riding the subway system near the university’s Hyde Park campus. As a University of Chicago alum and former Hyde Park resident, that could have very easily been me. But such heartbreaks are not limited to the city of Chicago, America’s murder capital. All across the nation, “could have easily been me” is becoming commonplace, as Americans survey the carnage and destruction all around them.

The extended escalation in violent crime in America began in earnest in the aftermath of George Floyd’s unfortunate death. Black Lives Matter, an avowedly Marxist organization despite its anodyne-sounding name, immediately latched onto the post-Floyd national racial reckoning and instrumentalized it for its own agenda. Together with Antifa and various left-wing anarchist groups, BLM helped orchestrate a summer of riotous mayhem and bloodshed like the country had not seen in decades. Major cities were hit the worst, but even distant suburbs such as Kenosha, Wisconsin, were not spared the BLM-antifa warpath.

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15 Governors Oppose Biden Plan to ‘Conserve’ 30 Percent of All US Land and Water by 2030

The Center Square
Scenery of the mountains and waterways in Asheville, North Carolina

Governors from 15 states are sounding the alarm over an executive order issued by President Joe Biden tasking his administration to “conserve” 30% of all land and water in the U.S. by 2030.

Known as the “30 x 30 plan,” the directive is part of a United Nations Agenda 2030 land and sustainable development goal, which directs nations to conserve land and water to combat climate change.

Biden refers to the policy as part of the United State’s acceptance of rejoining the Paris Agreement, a deal former President Donald Trump pulled out of.

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Commentary: What Americans Lost When We Abandoned the Secret Ballot

RealClearWire
Person putting mail-in ballot in ballot return box

My father likes to say that the secret ballot means that he doesn’t have to listen when I tell him how I voted. This joke conceals a serious point: Ballot secrecy is not just a right of the individual but also a guarantee to all that my vote was not wrung from me by bribery or intimidation.

Out of a desire to make voting “easier” and perhaps exaggerated fears of public gatherings during the pandemic, most U.S. jurisdictions permitted unrestricted mail-in balloting in 2020. What did Americans lose when ballot secrecy was attenuated or vanished altogether?

Make no mistake, ballot secrecy is incompatible with secure mail-in balloting. At the polls, we each go into a little booth and make our choices in private. By contrast, no one knows where a mail-in ballot was filled out, or if a party or union activist hovered over the voter or even filled in the circles. Nobody knows what inducements, whether cash or threats, were offered to ensure that the person voted “correctly.” And if the ballot was “harvested” – turned in to the vote-counters by activists instead of by voters themselves – our suspicions deepen.

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Commentary: A Warning About Joe Biden’s Power Plan

RealClearWire
Joe Biden

With President Biden pressing on with attacks against America’s oil and natural gas workers to push his environmental agenda, it’s past time to shed a little light on the failure he’s promoting. He may claim that his proposal to produce 80% of America’s electricity through non-carbon sources is a bold new idea, it’s actually a green failure that he’s trying to recycle…and we’ve got the receipts from two states to prove it.

Let me introduce you to California and Arizona, two neighboring states where one has embraced the Biden Green Plan for years while the other rejected it. Rest assured, Biden, John Kerry, and their army of eco warriors are hoping you ignore the following inconvenient truths.
In November 2018, Arizona voters soundly defeated Prop 127 by a margin of more than 2 to 1. The ballot measure was heavily pushed by former presidential candidate current extreme eco-leftist billionaire Tom Steyer. Similar to Biden’s plan, Prop 127 required Arizona to get 50 percent of its power from “renewable” sources by 2030. Keep in mind, these are the same voters that would elect a Democrat to the US Senate and give its electoral votes to Biden just two years later, tipping the presidential race toward the left. In other words, Prop 127, less restrictive than the Biden plan, proved to be too extreme for down-the-middle voters.

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Over 100 Countries Agree to Back Global Minimum Corporate Tax

Virginia Star Staff
A view of the North entrance of the U.S. Treasury Building in Washington D.C.

A total of 130 nations representing more than 90 percent of global GDP have agreed to a global minimum corporate tax, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced Thursday.

The tax, proposed by Yellen and the Biden administration during the G7 conference, would establish a minimum corporate tax rate across all participating countries to prevent corporations from avoiding taxes by incorporating offshore, according to Barron’s. The plan is also intended to prevent countries from competitively lowering their tax rates to attract investment, according to a Treasury Department statement.

“For decades, the United States has participated in a self-defeating international tax competition, lowering our corporate tax rates only to watch other nations lower theirs in response,” Yellen said in the statement.

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Commentary: Researchers Urge Americans to Focus on Loneliness Epidemic

RealClearWire
Woman sitting in a chair, looking out the window, alone

As the pandemic recedes and Americans re-enter public life, the surgeon general and other public health experts are urging the country to focus on another national crisis, one that has lingered for decades and worsened in recent years: loneliness.

For many, pandemic-related lockdowns, social distancing, and physical isolation resulted in their most severe experiences of loneliness. Studies have shown that an uptick in loneliness and other mental health issues coincided with the pandemic, and that lockdown requirements almost certainly exacerbated pre-existing mental conditions. But for researchers who have studied loneliness, the recent increase is only one notable event in an extensive history.

Loneliness is not just a crisis in America, but also in Europe, Canada, Japan, China, Australia and, increasingly, South America and Africa. Loneliness also occurs regardless of race, class, culture, and religion. Even before the lockdowns, tens of millions of people throughout the world felt isolated.

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Commentary: The U.S. Needs Measured Confrontation with China

Virginia Star Staff
Policeman holding a rifle - in uniform

With the election of Joe Biden, there is increasing pressure for the United States to accommodate the global ambitions of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Such a policy will weaken the strategic position of the United States and embolden the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which seeks to transform the rules of international politics, and has demonstrated its willingness to employ coercive measures, including threats and open conflict, to achieve its aims. 

As it has done for decades, and does so now with the Biden Administration, the CCP makes appeals for accommodation while emphasizing the need to turn away from more confrontational policies, like those most recently advanced by the Trump Administration. And as always, China’s words must be seen as tactical measures it deploys in pursuit of its objectives. Thus, it is only a matter of time before attempts to cooperate with China fail. However tempting, accommodation will not succeed for the stark reason that China does not want it. 

Party Chairman Xi Jinping has made clear that what China seeks is world hegemony. And it is upon the pursuit of this hegemony that his power in the regime depends. 

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Workers’ Coronavirus Fears Hit Pandemic Low

Virginia Star Staff

U.S. workers’ fear of contracting coronavirus while on the job has hit a pandemic low as the economy continues its steady recovery.

The number of Americans not working due to their fear of getting the virus while at their job dipped to 3.05 million by the end of June, according to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey released Wednesday. The figure hit its peak in July 2020 when 6.24 million unemployed Americans reported not looking for a job due to coronavirus fears, Axios reported.

“People are feeling safer about returning to work, which should help businesses staff-up to meet the tremendous demand we’re seeing right now,” Wells Fargo senior economist Sarah House told Axios.

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Newt Gingrich Commentary: Reclaiming the Spirit of Independence Day

Virginia Star Staff
Planes in the sky letting off red, white and blue smoke

On Independence Day we reflect together as a nation on a remarkable moment in history 244 years ago, when 56 men from 13 colonies gathered in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence. There, our founders declared with one voice: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This act of political and moral courage changed the world forever. Since 1776, the values and ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution have been exported to democracies around the globe and have lifted millions of people out of tyranny, poverty, and oppression.

Unfortunately, some in America seek to diminish America’s founding, rewrite our history, and invalidate the spirit of independence which led our founders to create the greatest, freest, and most prosperous nation on Earth.

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Judge Michael Warren Commentary: Celebrate Your Right to the American Dream as Written in the Declaration on Independence

Virginia Star Staff
American flag in the grass

The toxic cultural and political environment in which we live continues to slowly unravel our once shared belief in the American Dream. Many people on this Independence Day will undoubtedly go through the empty gestures of fireworks, barbecues, and family gatherings. Hardly any will reflect on the magnificent Declaration of Independence and how, despite its many flaws, it is a shining, monumental change for all of mankind. Let’s look at four such reasons:

First, it is the first major document in world history that dedicates the creation of a country to key founding First Principles:  the rule of law, unalienable rights, limited government, the Social Compact, equality, and the right to alter or abolish an oppressive government. Governments and countries before then were forged by blood, conquest, ethnic group, religion, and similar circumstances. In America, we committed ourselves to groundbreaking ideals. It has been those ideals that have motivated massive changes within our society for a more just and free government.

Second, the document is dedicated to freedom. Certainly many of the Founding Fathers were hypocrites when they proclaimed liberty and held slaves. Such Founding Fathers were flawed and blind men like the near entirety of human history before them. But with the Declaration, they did something earth shattering. They opened the entire world’s eyes to a new vision – one based on liberty, in which free people would rule themselves. The promise of the vision continues to reverberate today.

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Commentary: Military Potentially Losing Middle America

Virginia Star Staff
United States military troops

Traditionalist and conservative America once was the U.S. military’s greatest defender.  

Bipartisan conservatives in Congress ensured generous Pentagon budgets. Statistics of those killed in action, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, reveal that white males, especially those of the rural and middle classes, were demographically “overrepresented” in offering the ultimate sacrifice to their country.  

When generals, active and retired, have become controversial, usually conservative America could be counted on to stick with them.  

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Commentary: The West Needs to Treat China as a Serious Threat

Virginia Star Staff
Xi Jinping

There can be little doubt the United States is now in a contest with China over which will be the most important country in the world. In important respects, we are replicating the German challenge to the United Kingdom prior to World War I and the renewed German challenge of the 1930s, or the Soviet challenge for 45 years after World War II. As China grows stronger and bolder, and especially as the United States fumbles its way through periods of great distraction and internal political strife, the Chinese—like Hitler—become more brazen and provoking. 

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Commentary: When the Olympics Stole the Great Americans’ Gold

Virginia Star Staff
Olympic gold medal

Despite his team’s loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, Kevin Durant of the Brooklyn Nets is being hailed as the greatest basketball player in the world. The title of greatest player will always be a matter of debate, like the question of the greatest basketball play of all time. 

Candidates could include LeBron James’ block on Andre Iguodala in the 2015 NBA finals, Larry Bird’s steal and pass to Dennis Johnson in the 1987 playoffs, or any number of plays by Michael Jordan. When considering the greatest-play prospects, along with the greatest-ever sports rip-offs, however, Americans should not overlook the 1972 Olympics in Munich. 

Mike Bantam, Jim Brewer, Tom Burleson, Doug Collins, Kenny Davis, James Forbes, Tom Henderson, Bobby Jones, Dwight Jones, Kevin Joyce, Tom McMillen, and Ed Ratleff formed the youngest team the United States had ever fielded. This pickup squad of collegians faced a more experienced Soviet squad—for all practical purposes, a professional team. 

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Commentary: The Tragic Truth of Organ Harvesting in China

Virginia Star Staff

For nearly two decades, allegations of organ harvesting in communist China have emerged.  Today, China’s organ transplant trade is estimated to be a $1 billion industry, reportedly fueled by the exploitation of “prisoners of conscience.”

After conducting an investigation, a seven-member international and independent China Tribunal issued a judgement in December 2018.  The judgment concluded, “The Tribunal’s members are certain – unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt – that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.”

China’s organ transplant industry began to increase dramatically in 2000.  Hundreds of hospitals offered transplants, thousands of transplant surgeons were trained, transplant research was conducted by the military, and the immunosuppressant industry was subsidized by the state.  

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Commentary: Biden’s Reversal of Border COVID Rules Is an Act of Sabotage

Virginia Star Staff
Joe Biden

Since the Biden Administration assumed power in January, many Americans could be forgiven for feeling like they’re being held hostage, tied up in the trunk of a car, and driven to a place they do not want to go. Nowhere is this more evident than on the immigration problem, where Biden has reversed numerous policies that kept American safe, and it seems he has done so for no other reason than because Donald Trump is the one who put them in place.

Because he is beholden to the radical Left for his ascension to the White House, Biden predictably has adopted the usual anti-borders agenda including catch-and-release, demoralizing ICE, and defunding border wall construction. His expected next move, the reversal of Trump-era rules to prevent the spread of COVID-19 into the United States, is nothing short of political sabotage.

While COVID-19 may be on the decline in the United States, thanks in large part to the Trump Administration’s work on Operation Warp Speed, the same cannot be said for many of the poverty-stricken, underdeveloped countries from which those who most often show up at our doorstep originate. Just as our nation is turning the corner on a deadly global pandemic, it makes absolutely no sense at this moment to ease up on health restrictions on foreign nationals seeking entry. Only someone with Machiavellian political motives would propose such lunacy.

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Commentary: The Systemic Con Behind Wokeism

Virginia Star Staff
Group protesting; "no justice no peace" sign

There are lots of reasons why wokeism spread like wildfire once America lost its collective mind during the pandemic, quarantine, self-induced recession, and rioting of 2020. 

Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them. 

So should we laugh or cry that Black Lives Matter’s self-described Marxist co-founder turns out to be a corporate grifter? Patrisse Cullors has accumulated several upscale homes and is under investigation by the IRS for allegations of the misuse of funds from one of her foundations.

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Commentary: China’s COVID Coup

Virginia Star Staff
Xi Jinping

It is time for Americans to contemplate the possibility that the United States may be surpassed as the world’s most influential country. The Chinese have just won the greatest strategic victory in the last 30 years since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. However it originated, the novel coronavirus was repressed within China by recourse to draconian measures but was deliberately permitted to infect the rest of the world, enabling China to exploit the blunderbuss Western lockdowns and make a giant leap towards economic preeminence in the world. 

This push toward Chinese economic preeminence was something widely predicted prior to the Trump era but clearly was not happening in the first three years of the Trump presidency, as unemployment nearly vanished in the United States, illegal immigration was almost completely stopped, and American economic growth soared, generated by an increasing workforce and sharp gains among the lowest 20 percent of income earners. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic almost 16 months ago, however, the United States and the West generally have suffered a severe economic slowdown, vast increases in the money supply, and an epochal spike in unemployment.

Assuming the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped accidentally, China must be credited for a remarkable coup of strategic improvisation in translating a public health crisis into a large economical and geopolitical advance at the expense of the West. The American indulgence in an entire summer of white-hating, statue-toppling, rioting, and denigration of American history, freedom, and values astonished the world. Moreover, it helped China propagate its message that democracy leads to chaos and waste and that the United States is an unreliable and unstable country. This argument is assisted by what appears to be the practice of the Biden regime of declaring American moral shortcomings to the world as Secretary of State Antony Blinken did in his unfortunate encounter with the Chinese foreign minister at Anchorage three months ago. 

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Commentary: Only National Conservatism Can Unite the West and Contain China

Virginia Star Staff
Person waving flag outside of window

“Europe will be your revenge,” are the purported words of West German Chancellor Conrad Adenauer to French Prime Minister Guy Mollet in 1956. The quip was related to America’s siding with Egypt and the USSR during the Suez Canal Crisis against Great Britain, France and Israel. Regardless of Adenauer’s precise intention, the quote underscores the fact that the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) has always suffered fissures, even if it held together long enough to win the Cold War and longer still, for NATO and the EU to expand into Central and Eastern Europe.

Whether the Suez Crisis in the 50s, Charles de Gaulle’s unilateral withdrawal of France from NATO’s high command structure in the 60s, Willy Brandt’s overtures to the East via Ostpolitik in the 70s, or Reagan’s placement of strategic intermediate range nuclear warheads in West Germany in the 80s against the wishes of the German left, European-American rivalries and conflicts of interest have always been part and parcel of the Atlantic Alliance. And yet the alliance remains important, because North America and Europe share indissoluble bonds that cut across religious, political and cultural history. Modern democracy — despite its relativization and ‘deconstruction’ by progressive historians — was incubated in the West. For this reason alone the alliance is of value: because Western nations share a common heritage. Commonality breeds loyalty and fosters cohesion, both of which are necessary for the preservation of norms and traditions. Europe and North America have a lot in common with one another, and therefore they share a collective interest in preserving what makes them unique within the vast panoply of human political arrangements.

During Trump’s presidency, left wing media wisdom dictated that Trump had sullied America’s relationship with the EU and NATO by calling the former out as a trade rival and the latter —Germany in particular — as a freeloader on American security guarantees. But as European political columnist Jorge Gallarza pointed out in Newsweek, the prospect of a Biden Presidency — and with it, Biden’s wisdom and appreciation of the true importance of the American relationship with Europe — does not appear to have tipped the geopolitical scales towards Anglo-European rapport. In January, the EU signed a trade deal with China that could have just as easily been postponed until Biden took office to allow for the president’s feedback. Likewise, well after Biden won the election, President Macron of France pontificated — in typical multilateral idealism fashion — about Europe’s future role in world affairs as one of “strategic autonomy.” The writing was on the wall: in a world in which China is on the rise and America appears to be sputtering, Europe will be largely neutral.

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Newt Gingrich Commentary: American Businesses, Celebrities Need to Stop Kowtowing to China

Virginia Star Staff
China Tiananmen

This past week marked the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.

On June 4, 1989, pro-democracy protesters gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing for peaceful demonstrations. Led by students, the demonstrators denounced China’s ruling Communist Party and sought greater freedoms for the Chinese people.

In response, the Communist Party sent the military to crush the protests. The Chinese government has never released any figures, but we know the People’s Liberation Army massacred anywhere from several hundred to several thousand people.

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Commentary: Critical Race Theory Has Radically Transformed America’s Corporations and Public Schools

Virginia Star Staff
People in the streets protesting

Just four weeks ago, I wrote about the rising resistance to the woke craze and critical race theory, and much has transpired since then.

Here in California, even Disneyland has not been spared the wrath of the crazies. On May 7, the incomparable Christopher Rufo reported that “The Wokest Place on Earth” now includes employee trainings on systemic racism, white privilege, white fragility, and white saviors, and also launched racially segregated “affinity groups” at the company’s headquarters.

But just five days later, Rufo disclosed that Disney “has removed its entire antiracism program from the company’s internal portal, effectively scrubbing it out of existence.” Rufo added, “This is a major victory in the war against ‘woke capital,’” and noted that a “significant backlash from the public” was responsible for the shift. While some skeptics suggested that the policy was being “tweaked or rebranded, not scrubbed,” Rufo responded, “Possibly, but small victories start to add up. We’ve set the precedent—and forced a $329 billion company to back down.”

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Commentary: New York and New Jersey Are Among the Top 10 States Where Residents Pay the Highest Lifetime Taxes

Virginia Star Staff
Tax withholding forms

In the mood for a depressing statistic? A new report from the financial services firm Self concludes that the average American will pay an astounding $525,037 in taxes over their lifetime—roughly 34 percent of their lifetime earnings. 

But the numbers aren’t uniform across the country; they vary wildly from state to state. Based on taxes on earnings, spending, property, and cars, here are the 10 states where residents pay the highest taxes over a lifetime.

1. New Jersey

Topping the list is New Jersey, where residents will, on average, owe an astounding $932,000 in taxes over their lifetime. That’s nearly 50 percent of their typical lifetime earnings!

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Commentary: Military, Science, and the Law Are Losing the Trust of Middle America

Virginia Star Staff
two individuals holding an American flag on a bridge to honor Sun Prairie’s fallen firefighter as the procession passed underneath.

Americans mostly have given up on familiar institutions for entertainment, guidance, or reassurance. What now do Hollywood, network news, the media in general, Silicon Valley, the NBA, NFL, MLB, or higher education all have in common? 

A propensity to lecture Americans on their moral inferiorities, a general ethical decline in their own disciplines, and a strange obsession to acquire great wealth while living in contrast to what they advocate for others. Add also incompetence. Movies are mostly bad now. The network news is blow-dried groupthink. There is no “paper of record” anywhere. Twitter and Facebook no longer even try to hide their politicized contortions of warped rules and twisted protocols. 

Professional athletes are now reminders of why no one ever wants to be “enlightened” by multimillionaire quarter-educated narcissists. The public a half-century ago lost faith in academia. It wasn’t just that most new bad ideas could be traced to the campus or that hothouse professors increasingly seemed both ignorant and arrogant, but rather their product—educating students—was defective. No one believes anymore a BA is synonymous with knowledge. More likely, it is a euphemism for incurring $100,000 in debt. 

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Commentary: The Future We Are Leaving for Millions of Americans

Virginia Star Staff
Man working outside with hard hat on

It’s a joyous time of the year for millions of young Americans as they graduate high school and move on to another phase of their lives. 

But as the crisis at our southern border intensifies—thousands of illegal immigrants are flowing into the country each and every day—we need to ask ourselves what this onslaught will mean to average U.S. citizens for generations to come.

Every year about 4 million American youngsters move on from high school. On average just over 80 percent of them graduate and the others, around 760,000 each and every year, just move on. Unfortunately, the economic futures of those who don’t obtain a high school diploma are rather bleak. They are made bleaker in that this cohort of individuals will, in all likelihood, be competing for jobs against millions of illegal immigrants who are willing to work for far below market wages. 

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Commentary: Upholding the Constitution Regardless of the Oligarchy in Charge

Virginia Star Staff
Person running with American flag behind person riding bike with American flag as cape

The attempt of America’s ruling class to convict 455 persons of “armed insurrection”—i.e. of waging war against the United States, a species of treason—for protesting insufficient scrutiny of the 2020 election on January 6 in the Capitol, while at the same time it excuses and even cheers the burning and looting of courthouses, police stations, and downtowns all over America, is not the exercise of a “double standard.” 

The people in and out of government who do this are not corrupt. Instead, acting as part of the regime—the oligarchy—they are replacing the American republic and waging war to crush its remains.

The sooner Americans realize that we are being governed by people at war with our Constitution and contemptuous of ourselves, the sooner those people may be treated as the enemies they are.

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Commentary: Stop Calling It a ‘Labor Shortage.’ It’s an Incentive Shortage

Virginia Star Staff
Worker using a sledgehammer on railroad

It’s no secret that US businesses are struggling to find workers. Recent surveys have shown that small businesses are reporting record job openings.

Many have described the phenomenon as a labor shortage.

“Walk outside: labor shortage is the pervasive phenomenon,” economist Lawrence Summers recently observed at a conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

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Commentary: Remote Work’s Impending Transformation of Middle America

Virginia Star Staff
Computer with video chat on screen and mug next to laptop

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed a great deal about America and Americans. Most have acquiesced to anything and everything government bureaucrats asked for in the name of public safety. Masks have been donned, churches have been shuttered, and many of us stayed at home for months, working remotely.

This last item may end up being the largest and most permanent transformation of the United States. The mobility that comes with remote work may end up transforming middle America as left-coast technologists migrate inward. Freed from the work-based ties that bind them to Silicon Valley and New York City, they can now easily take their jobs and their left-wing politics to the heartland, ushering in a transformative moment in American politics.

Thomas Edsall, writing for The New York Times, discusses how many from densely populated urban areas on the coasts are finding that remote work enables them to have big city paychecks while living in suburban or rural areas with lower costs of living. 

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Commentary: A Critical Tool for Advancing and Defending International Religious Freedom

Virginia Star Staff
American flag in front of large crowd of people

The United States recognizes religious freedom as an unalienable right and is committed to its advancement and protection for all.

As the world’s leading defender of the right to worship freely, the United States strongly condemns and holds accountable those nations and non-state actors who reject and violate this fundamental freedom.

In support of this mission, on May 12, 2021, the United States Department of State released the 23rd annual Report on International Religious Freedom as required by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA).  This report describes the status of religious freedom in every country, government policies violating religious beliefs and practices, and U.S. policies to promote religious freedom around the world.  Each year, the report is presented to the U.S. Congress. 

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Commentary: The U.S. Military Is Just Another Woke Institution

Virginia Star Staff
The backsides of American soldiers in uniform

Tucker Carlson spurred a much-needed reexamination of the military in March. His monologue criticizing the military’s political correctness drew a more furious response from top brass than any foreign threat is likely to do. The generals’ response only affirmed Tucker’s points about the degraded state of our armed forces. Why do generals—both current and retired—feel the need to condemn civilians who question the wisdom of putting women in combat?

The answer is that the military, along with the entire national security establishment, is at one with the Democrat-Media complex. The image we have of generals and senior officers as defenders of tradition is wildly out of step with reality.

This fact is underscored by its contrast with a letter issued in France last week. The letter—signed by 20 retired generals, 80 officers, and 1,000 lower-ranking soldiers—was stridently right-wing. “The hour is late, France is in peril, threatened by several mortal dangers,” the letter states. Though retired, we remain soldiers of France, and cannot, under the present circumstances, remain indifferent to the fate of our beautiful country.”

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Commentary: One Way to Fix Plummeting Birthrates Is to Stop Bashing America

Virginia Star Staff
Mothers hand holding infants hand

The National Center for Health Statistics, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention subagency, reported this week that America’s fertility rate dropped for the sixth consecutive year. Total births declined by 4 percent in 2020, down to 1,637.5 children per 1,000 women. The statistical replacement rate for the U.S. population, by contrast, is roughly 2,100 births per 1,000 women. Overall, the 3,605,201 births last year in the United States represented the lowest number since Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

It is perhaps too early to tell whether yet another annual incremental birthrate decline is anomalous, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, or flows naturally from existing demographic trendlines. Sociologists and demographers will pore over the data, but it is difficult to ignore the broader trend and place the blame squarely—or even predominantly—on the virus and the myriad draconian lifestyle restrictions the virus engendered.

On the contrary, many had speculated before this week’s report that the extended COVID lockdowns might lead to a one-time annual increase in the birthrate as couples sheltered in place together for months on end.

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Commentary: America’s Managerial Class Runs the Country, Not You

Virginia Star Staff
Corporate Meeting

Ralph Nader made the chief executive officers of America’s largest corporations a proposition in 1996. Considering they had built their fortunes on generous tax benefits and subsidies—valued at an estimated $65 billion a year back then and footed by everyday Americans—would they consider opening their annual stockholder meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance? America had “bred them, built them, subsidized them, and defended them,” as Nader wrote, and as Obama would later more directly say: “You didn’t build that.” 

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Commentary: Soviet-Style Equal Opportunity in America

Virginia Star Staff

It’s not every day that the subject of Soviet anti-Semitism—something my family experienced firsthand—is broached in the American media. When it does happen, however, unpleasant comparisons to certain trends in the United States are tough to avoid. 

In a fascinating piece for Tablet Magazine, Julia Schulman and Michael Hsieh profiled several prominent Jewish scientists and mathematicians who encountered racial bias in admission to leading institutes in the old USSR. The subjects of their investigation defied the long odds, eventually rising to the top of their fields despite official policies excluding Jews from Soviet universities.

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Commentary: The Fund for American Studies

RealClearWire

“We take seriously the idea that a republic cannot long survive without a virtuous citizenry,” says Brenda Hafera of The Fund for American Studies.

TFAS’s mission is to “win over each new generation to the ideas of liberty, limited government, and free markets” by offering educational programs for students and young journalists around the world.

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Commentary: Tribalism Turns Toxic in the Social Media Age

Virginia Star Staff

Man is by nature a tribal creature. For many thousands of years, human existence was defined by family connections, with ties of blood and marriage providing the social network that ensured cooperation and support necessary to sustaining life. Loyalty to one’s kinship group — the tribe or clan — was vital to this system of cooperation, and from the deeply rooted tribal nature of human life emerges the sense of national identity that inspires what we call patriotism.

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Commentary: How ‘Flatten the Curve’ Became Flatten America

Virginia Star Staff

Joe Biden’s prediction of a dark winter is upon us as many Americans struggle under oppressive Covid lockdowns with no end in sight. How did we go from a common-sense plan to “flatten the curve” to the White House calling for continued restrictions even after Americans are vaccinated? In a word: politics. From the moment the virus arrived on our shores, Democrats used it to their political advantage. They have shown by word and deed that they care less about public safety, and more about control.

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Commentary: How to Restore Faith in the Constitution

Virginia Star Staff

In one of the most extraordinary passages of his most extraordinary book, C.S. Lewis, the 20th century’s greatest Christian apologist, wrote of Jesus Christ, that he was either the son of God, as he claimed, or a madman. In the Christmas season, believers take comfort in their faith and joyfully embrace the first alternative. 

The United States has a tradition of separating church and state, but there is a competing tradition, equally venerable, that our government is only fit for a religious people, one that understands there is a divine order to which humankind ought to conform, and that, as Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett once explained, it is our task to contribute to the building of the Kingdom of God.  

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Commentary: Five Big Ways the Chinese Communist Party Infiltrates America

Virginia Star Staff

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is seeking to dominate America, not only militarily and economically, but by undermining our cultural institutions.  The CCP meddling has gone undetected, in many cases, for years. But a new digital news site is aggressively shining a spotlight on the CCP’s infiltration campaign in the United States. Since relaunching in 2020, the National Pulse  has been dishing up a steady stream of exclusive stories exposing China’s nefarious infiltration program.

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Commentary: The Federalist Papers and ‘The Violence of Faction’

Virginia Star Staff
Founding Fathers

It has been said that the oldest word in American politics is “new.” Even the United States Constitution, by far the oldest written constitution in the world, was once new, and had to be defended against charges that it was an unnecessary and unrepublican innovation. The Federalist was keenly aware of the novelty of the Constitution’s enterprise—the attempt to establish “good government from reflection and choice”—but boldly turned it to account. 

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Commentary: A Republic, But Can We Keep It?

Virginia Star Staff
silhouette of Statue of Liberty

We fight because we must fight. Because if our elections are so tainted that they would make a third world dictator the blush, the consent of the governed is thwarted and the very legitimacy of our government is questionable. That is why we fight until Inauguration Day. Because to do anything else, would be to give up on the American experiment

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Commentary: Will We Be Citizens or Subjects?

Virginia Star Staff

A decisive moment comes and passes, a fleeting chance for action. People rise to the occasion or not, their measure taken and place in history assigned.

We, the citizens of the United States, have reached such a moment. For those who still remember the old republic, the questions it poses are self-evident. Do we make a stand or nervelessly surrender our rights? Do we affirm ourselves citizens—an historically rare and noble title—or do we accept becoming subjects, the fate of most humankind? 

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Commentary: The Truth About Tolerance in America

Virginia Star Staff

A bigoted America fueled by its hate for those who are not white, heterosexual males. A country so irredeemably racist that discrimination is woven into every institution. A nation inundated with sexism and patriarchal oppression so prominent that glass ceilings cover every aspect of American life. These characterizations of the land of opportunity have become a dogmatic mantra for progressives, and every single one is a lie.

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Commentary: Citizenship and the Nation-State

Virginia Star Staff

A prominent immigration scholar, David Jacobson, writes that “[t]ransnational migration is steadily eroding the traditional basis of nation-state membership, namely citizenship. As rights have come to be predicated on residency, not citizen status, the distinction between ‘citizen’ and ‘alien’ has eroded. The devaluation of citizenship has contributed to the increasing importance of international human rights codes, with its premise of universal ‘personhood’.” 

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Commentary: An Unserious Movement for an Unserious People

Virginia Star Staff

We all should probably acknowledge that we Americans, in many ways, have become an unserious people. No serious civilization and society would allow a fraction of what is taking place here—from the absurdity of our education system to the dominance of big tech monopolies to our current form of elections. A list of our nation’s follies demonstrating our unseriousness would fill pages. But it’s not just about the American people as a whole: conservatism is an unserious movement (if one can even call what exists a movement), and Republicans are deeply, deeply unserious as a political party. 

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Commentary: The Battle for California Is the Battle for America

Virginia Star Staff

By now, this is a familiar story. California is a failed state. Thanks to years of progressive mismanagement and neglect, the cities are lawless and the forests are burning. Residents pay the highest prices in America for unreliable electricity. Water is rationed. Homes are unaffordable. The public schools are a joke. Freeways are congested and crumbling. And if they’re not still on lockdown or otherwise already destroyed by it, business owners contend with the most hostile regulatory climate in American history.

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Commentary: Decisive Political Victory is the Only Way to End This Cold Civil War

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Tennessee Star

by Ryan Williams   As even NeverTrump Republicans are coming around – grudgingly, and with caveats, of course – to recognizing the stakes in our ongoing domestic political fights, it is perhaps impolite to note: Some of us drew these conclusions quite a long time ago. The last two weeks of psychodrama in the…

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The Double Standard of Justice in the U.S. Is Risking the Collapse of the Entire System

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Lady Justice

by Printus LeBlanc   The political world is waiting with bated breath for the outcome of Paul Manafort’s trial. The former one-time Trump campaign chairman is being prosecuted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for various tax and bank fraud crimes, most of which occurred over a decade ago. Manafort is also…

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Commentary: Trump Steamrolls DC Ruling Class on the Road to American Rebrand

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Donald Trump

by Jeffery Rendall   If we’ve learned anything about Donald Trump in the three years he’s been a full-time politician it’s he’s concerned with restoring and bolstering the American “brand.” It goes without saying that the reputation of the red, white and blue took a beating during Barack Obama’s eight…

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