Thirty-five years in politics has taught me something: the binary choice which dominates the headlines at a given moment is often not the real issue at all.

Often the real danger comes less from which side of the argument we choose — but that we accept the argument as someone else has framed it in the first place.

America and its democratic allies cannot be conquered by external armies, as the Soviets learned the hard way during the Cold War. They concluded that our greatest vulnerability was not military but internal — our capacity to turn on one another. Their answer was to inflame division from within.

Today, Russia, China, and Iran have taken that strategy to a new level. Social media has given them a powerful new weapon: direct access to the American people. Propaganda now bypasses traditional media entirely, landing in our feeds in real time. And too often, it’s working. Algorithms are carefully designed to amplify outrage and extremism, foreign troll farms stoke our worst divisions, and too many of our fellow citizens retreat deeper into polarized camps.

The central question is whether we will wake up to this in time — or… Read More

The murder of Ukranian refugee Iryna Zarutska and President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of security in Washington DC are highlighting why today’s urban, cosmopolitan Democratic Party is failing to connect with the voters it once relied on for victory.

The Democratic Party of Bill Clinton understood that winning the support of middle class and blue collar voters was essential to the party’s success. This is why Clinton ultimately signed the 1994 crime bill, and welfare reform in 1996.

Yet the party’s reaction to the brutal slaying of a Ukranian refugee on a Charlotte metro train highlights just how far the party has lost touch with its former self.

Rather than hold the criminal to account, Democrat Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles issued a lengthy statement blaming anyone and everyone other than the man who stands accused of plunging the knife into Ms. Zarutska’s neck.

While Clinton signed a tough crime bill into law and famously gave his “sister Souljah” speech calling out the rapper for giving a green light to violence, Ms. Lyles rambled on about the “unhoused,” “access to mental health care,” and failures… Read More

The left’s response to the unprovoked stabbing and murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte Metro train is a case study in how the activist left reframes issues to increase state control and diminish individual responsibility.

Their success in recasting the discussion of crime, homelessness and mental illness has created the unsafe and rapidly deteriorating conditions throughout America’s cities.

Today’s left-wing activists and politicians seek to control the outcome of public policy debates through two primary methods: defining what is considered the acceptable vocabulary for the discussion, and constraining the argument.

Their defining the vocabulary gives us words like “unhoused” instead of homeless, “system-impacted person” in the place of criminal, “substance use disorder patient” instead of drug addict, and so on.

These terms are not used as part of an effort to be more precise, but rather to shift responsibility. “Unhoused” shifts focus toward a lack of housing, rather than the decisions which can lead to homelessness. “Justice-impacted person” recasts the criminal as victim… Read More

The Democrats are beside themselves over the fact that President Trump has started to take over their municipal domains due to excessive crime and wants to spread the federal government’s municipal policing to other locations. There is a way for the Dems to win this battle. It would take a “mea culpa” and some manipulation, but it could be done. We need to start with an understanding. There are many things residents of these big cities look to their local governments for, but there is one primary thing they want government to do: provide physical security for them and their family and protect their hard-earned assets like their homes and vehicles. This is where the Dems have gone off the deep end. They have enacted what have been perceived as “dangerous policies” like cashless bail, ridiculously high minimums for what used to be grand larceny and is now a petty crime, and then not even enforce those laws. The leadership of these communities have called off the cops and elected prosecutors many of whom are the definition of a “misnomer.” Not only has this caused petty crime to soar to the point that residents walk into a drug store to find… Read More

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California families are struggling with skyrocketing prescription drug prices. Since 2017, prescription drug spending in our state-regulated health plans has increased by at least 56%—an increase of at least $5 billion. Depending on how you crunch the numbers, the real increase could be even higher. In 2022 alone, spending was $12.1 billion, up 12.3% from the year before. And it’s everyday Californians and their employers who are stuck footing the bill.

Instead of tackling the root problem, Sacramento has produced Senate Bill 41, written by Senator Scott Wiener and coauthored by fellow progressives in the Legislature. The bill is being pitched to voters as consumer protection, but in reality, it is a handout to the drug companies that dismantles cost-control tools and leaves patients paying the price.

The most telling endorsement isn’t coming from patients or small businesses. It’s coming from PhRMA, the D.C. lobbying arm of Big Pharma. If the very industry responsible for high drug prices is supporting your… Read More

Leftists Running a Supermarket Is Like Me Doing Ballet I always wanted to be a ballet dancer. Anybody who has ever met me takes one look at me and says, “give it up dude”. In the same regard I am telling the Left to give up their thoughts of running a supermarket. You don’t have a chance. The idea is being brought up in some cities for two reasons. There are in some areas of cities what have begun to be called food deserts. That means because of conditions created in the city by the people who operate the city, an area where all supermarkets have closed because the regional or national operators cannot make a go of it due to crime, danger to employees and city driven costs. The second reason is because of political rhetoric about the costs of things at a grocery store. Who isn’t devastated by the costs after four years of Biden driven inflation making prices on the shelf jump to extraordinary levels. I can think of three businesses of scale that take extraordinary skill to operate on a major scale. The first is an airline. The orchestration it takes to run a major airline is immense. To coordinate routes, airplanes, and personnel… Read More

The Democrats like to speak only of immigrants and never want to preface the word with “illegal” referring to those people who entered our country improperly. They like to brand Republicans as “immigrant haters“ because of their distaste for those who come improperly into the country, especially during the Biden Administration that flooded the country with people who had no legal right to be here. Recently, I was reminded of why we love immigrants who are here through the legal process. You may not know the name Leonard Chess. You certainly don’t know his given name Lejzor Szmuel Czyż. He came here with his family in 1928 and particularly with his brother, Phil, from Poland. As I said, you may not know them but believe me you do know them. They brought to the world some of the most famous names in music that led to the creation of a large portion of the music you listen to every day. The Chess brothers lived in Chicago and were supporting black artists when their music was still known as “race music.” They booked these artists at their club, the Macomba Lounge. They decided to invest in a small record label known as Aristocrat Records.… Read More

Act in haste, Repent at leisure.

Article XXI is the only provision of the California Constitution that addresses redistricting, and it clearly allows only one redistricting per decade. That has been in the California Constitution for over 100 years. It also has a number of substantive requirements that the recent Democrat initiative does not meet.

Yet despite this clear language, the Legislature and the Governor, when they enacted the redistricting scam this last month, did not suspend Art. XXI. ACA 8, the constitutional amendment that will be on the ballot, states “notwithstanding any other provision of this Constitution…” or state law, their maps take effect. They suspended every other provision of the Constitution by their amendment, but they did not suspend Art. XXI, the only provision of the Constitution that addresses redistricting. If I had been their lawyer, I would have written “notwithstanding any section of this article or provision of this Constitution to the contrary…” to make it clear that Art. XXI was suspended. They didn’t, and they left a hole in their amendment a court could drive a truck… Read More