It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920).
On the third of January in 1777, American General George Washington defeats British General Lord Cornwallis’s forces in the Battle of Princeton.
On January 3, 1933, Minnie D. Craig (pictured above) became the first woman elected as Speaker of the North Dakota House of Representatives, the first female to hold a Speaker position anywhere in the United States.
On the same date in 1977, Apple Computer was incorporated.
January 3rd birthdays include that of Cicero (106 BC), Roman philosopher and theorist of republicanism, and J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 AD), English philologist and author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Both authors were deeply concerned about the problem of absolute power.
Mr. Carlson is not wrong, at least about Republican leaders aiding Democrats in spying on conservatives and others who sometimes vote GOP.
Yes, the federal government’s surveillance and criminal “justice” apparatus has been directed by Democrats — the Biden Administration specifically, and whoever runs that — to target, as The Enemy, conservatives and others associated with (or merely adjacent to) the Republican Party.
This cannot be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Democratic thought leaders pushed this new anti-terrorism paradigm from the first moments of the Biden Administration, in public.
Or at least on MSNBC, where John Brennan clearly reconceived opposition to his Democratic Party as a movement looking “very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas.”
“Even libertarians,” he said, constituted “an insidious threat” to, not the Democratic Party, but “our Democracy.”
This perspectival shift, of seeing policy and political opposition as “insurgency,” is key to the new anti-democratic mindset.
And very real. It could end our small-r republican experiment.
Which brings us back to Republican politicians and their willingness to let Democrats institute a permanent pogrom against all who oppose Democrats’ big government programs.
Why do this? Out of hatred? Disdain? Fear?
Let’s not ignore the age-old impulse of politicians to squelch the speech of opponents. The longer in office, the more these careerists tend to view their own constituents as threats. After all, anyone might freely offer a complaint that emboldens or comforts the opposition. This is a bipartisan principle.
Better an enforced silence about the dictates of Washington, sadly, if you are a Washingtonian delivering dictates.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, Volume II: Reason in Society (1905), Chapter VII, “Free Society.”
On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.
On the second day of 1819, the Panic of 1819, the first major peacetime financial crisis in the United States, began. The classic historical treatment of this crisis remains Murray Rothbard’s dissertation.
We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946).
On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was banned.
Just tell the truth, and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor.
Charles Willeford, personal motto, quoted in Marshall Jon Fisher, “The Unlikely Father of Miami Crime Fiction,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 2000.
On December 31, 1695, Englanders received a new tax, a window tax. One of the main responses to this was the bricking up of many British windows.
This last day of the year in 1991 marked the complete cessation of all institutions of the Soviet Union.
New Year’s Eve 1992 saw the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This has been dubbed the “Velvet Divorce.”
The new rulers of Cambodia call 1975 “Year Zero,” the dawn of an age in which there will be no families, no sentiment, no expressions of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music, no song, no post, no money — only work and death.
John Pilger, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979).