Category: ideological culture

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defense & war ideological culture international affairs state terrorism too much government

The Nerve of Some People

China, Falun Gong, Taiwan, Hong Kong, cemetary, tiananmen square, tiananmen crackdown, June 4

“Police warn families of Tiananmen crackdown dead not to visit graves on 37th anniversary,” reads the headline of yesterday’s story in New York’s Newsday.

How rude of those families! 

How dare they show such utter disregard for the right of the Chinese Communist Party to “grind you up and crush your bones”! Or to have your “heads bashed bloody,” as CCP top Pooh Bear Xi Jinping has more recently been fond of saying.

Especially after all the trouble Xi and Chinese authorities have gone to easing all this unnecessary tension by facilitating a thoughtful and therapeutic four-decade “campaign to erase what happened from public memory.”

For 30 years, they allowed the thousands of teary-eyed Tiananmen Mothers to visit the gravesites, but come on, stop monopolizing the cemetery. I mean, there are millions of Uyghurs waiting to mourn, for heaven’s sake. And don’t forget the Falun Gong religious genocide. Organ harvesting political prisoners sure does quickly fill a cemetery.

Be a team player for the CCP. 

Sans sarcasm, I note that at The Gate of Heavenly Peace no one really knows how many died on June 4, 1989. The Chinese students and workers killed by soldiers who shot into crowds and rolled over them with tanks have never, even to this day, been accounted for by the Chinese government. 

It has only lied about the massacre, continuing to cover the horrors up — the government now even bullying grieving parents away from visiting their loved ones’ graves.

To think that President Bush, père, was so ready to usher in trade for the big boys of business that he sold out, 37 years ago, the protesters on Tiananmen Square!

Having snuffed out freedom in Hong Kong, inserted their hands into virtually everything we consume, and built up the world’s second largest military, what will be next for the Butchers of Beijing? Small cases of Chinese aggression — water cannons, ships sunk, a couple soldiers injured, even killed — have not halted. Asia is under threat.

Americans are not invulnerable. 

We have a serious problem. 

Which I’ll keep talking about in Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

NOTE: We take comments, too!

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ideological culture partisanship political challengers

A Perfect Fit?

Graham Platner, Democrat, Maine, The View, democracy

“These are character flaws that I’m tired of hearing about,” offered Whoopi Goldberg, Monday, on The View. 

She was speaking about Graham Platner, the leading Democratic Party candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in Maine currently held by Republican Sen. Susan Collins . . . and of his litany of scandals — the latest to garner attention being his sending of sexually explicit texts to as many as a dozen women during his marriage . . . while having been married for only two and a half years.

“Platner has faced criticism for a series of inflammatory Reddit posts and, more recently, for a Nazi symbol tattooed to his chest,” The Free Beacon reported last year. Mr. Platner says he was unaware that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol but, according to the Beacon, “Two Platner associates have contradicted his claim of ignorance.”

The Reddit posts included calling himself an “antifa supersoldier” and a “communist,” while also using anti-gay slurs and belittling veterans, police, rural white people, and African Americans.

After counting all his various scandals, The View regular Sunny Hostin concluded, “So he’s a liar, a racist, an antisemite,” then added, “He’s a homophobe.”

Nonetheless, Hostin said she is “conflicted.” Meaning she might still want him to be Maine’s next senator?

Now making a play for the Senate, Platner has kindly covered up the tattoo and deleted those deeply offensive Reddit posts. 

The 41-year-old presents himself as a working-class guy, though he comes from a wealthy family that placed him in a $75,000 a year prep school. He is an oyster farmer, but most of his income derives from disability payments. He told reporters that he bought his home with a VA loan, but his father loaned him the money.

“You’ve shown me who you are,” The View’s Sara Haines said of Platner, “and I heard you.” She declared, “This man should be nowhere near Congress.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist, begs to differ: “We desperately need somebody like him here in the U.S. Senate.”

Graham Platner should fit right in.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture political challengers

Post-Conflagration L.A.

Spencer Pratt, Karen Bass, Los Angeles, mayor, election, AI

Though Angelinos started voting early in the mayoral race, today is L.A.’s election day. It’s a race watched with varying degrees of enthusiasm and alarm across the country. Polls show no candidate close to a majority, which means the top two will likely face-off in a November runoff.* 

Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star, has run a study-worthy campaign and could finish close to the top.  He’s a former Palisades homeowner. He now lives in a trailer on his property, upon which he cannot yet re-build after the fires that swept through the area in January 2025. And he’s built his campaign around the government’s absolute failure on every level to assist — or just get out of the way — of a recovery.

His video ads — and satirical contributions by fans — have been magnificent.

Erstwhile Castro-loving incumbent Mayor Karen Bass — who was celebrating in Ghana during the conflagration, basking in the glory of the continent’s first woman president — is in no small part responsible for the city’s worse-than-inept response to the fires. And candidate Pratt isn’t letting anyone forget it. 

A month ago, Mayor Bass blasted Pratt for “exploiting the grief of people in the Palisades,” calling it “reprehensible.” A weird twist of the reality of Pratt’s righteously indignant stance. What she did and didn’t do during and after the Palisade Fires are better described as “reprehensible.” 

The other major candidate is Councilwoman Nithya Raman, an outspoken homeless advocate who didn’t like it at all that homeless started camping outside her home.

Yesterday, the race was described as “neck-and-neck” by KTLA-5, with Hollywood actors Jane Fonda and Samuel L. Jackson cited as “supporting Mayor Bass, while Chelsea Handler and Mindy Kaling are backing Councilwoman Raman.”

In most other cities these endorsements would likely fizzle.

But in L.A. . . . ?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The latest UC Berkeley/LA Times poll shows Mayor Bass with 26%, Councilwomen Raman with 25% and Pratt with 22% support. Los Angeles does not use the same Top Two system that California uses statewide, whereby the top two vote getters move on to the General Election. In L.A., if a candidate garners a majority, the race is over. 

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general freedom ideological culture

Welcome the Revolutionaries?

Declaration of Independence, freedom, communism, leftism, universities, education, schools, anti-Americanism

Attending his son’s commencement ceremony at the University of Michigan, Judge Michael Warren came away . . . concerned. 

“In stark contrast to several speakers who dutifully acknowledged that the campus sits on land ceded by the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi Nations by the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs (or Treaty of the Foot of the Rapids),” the judge lamented in The Detroit News on Monday, “not a single speaker dared to acknowledge the birthday of our own nation.”

The ceremonies, writes Judge Warren, “could have occurred in any country without missing a beat.” 

Warren, a U of Malumnus, sadly notes how thoroughly “in thrall” to the “well-documented anti-West, anti-American sentiments” his old school has become. He also highlights how very different they were from the ceremonies, a half century ago, during the Bicentennial, when the keynote speech was entitled “Welcome to the Revolution.”

Nowadays, any Revolution extolled on campus might best be symbolized not by fife and drum or quill on parchment, but by a raised red fist.

Or hammer and sickle — perhaps painted in rainbows.

Lost on the university class? Any charm to the “near magical words” of the Declaration of Independence. Before the Declaration, Warren explains, all governments “were unequivocally opposed to recognizing that the people had the right to reform or start government anew.”

Today’s university folk, expressing the typical pieties of the center-left, in fact mimic our familiar American model to justify their own, much less impressive and far more dangerous notions of never-ending revolution.

In April, Republic Book Publishers came out with The Revolutionary Words that Forged America: The Definitive Guide to the Declaration of Independence by this very same Judge Michael Warren. I bought a copy. It looks great. 

For he takes the founders’ seriously good ideas seriously.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

NOTE: Judge Warren also happens to be a very serious candidate for the Michigan Supreme Court. And, in full disclosure, my friend.

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ideological culture media and media people

Trying Souls

Jack T. Chick, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, tracts

“Could this be the Antichrist?” 

 So wondered out loud today’s most popular conservative voice . . . about President Donald J. Trump.  

That commentator, Tucker Carlson, then answered himself: “Well, who knows?”

 Later, speaking to Lulu Garcia-Navarro with The New York Times, Mr. Carlson denied (thrice) ever verbalizing that eschatological question. 

Of course, as Scott Jennings points out, Tucker contextualized the matter by asserting that the president was “more of a hostage” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in deciding to go to war against Iran. “Seems to me it has to be one or the other,” offered Jennings. “Are you a supernatural evil being or are you some weak hostage or slave to other people?”

 “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Tom Paine once wrote; today, it’s more “fry their sensibilities.”

 Consider the recent NewsGuard/YouGov survey that found 36 percent of Democrats believe the recent shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was staged, while a whopping 42 percent of Democrats fancy the failed Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt against then-candidate Trump a false flag operation. Eerily, this dovetails with Hal Lindsey’s speculations, in his 1970 bestseller, The Late, Great Planet Earth, that the Antichrist would make his play for power after appearing to survive a mortal wound.

 “There’s really not a lot of evidence that these social media users are citing or relying on,” explains Sofia Rubinson, NewsGuard’s senior editor. “It’s really just this belief and this distrust that the government is acting honestly and is giving us accurate information.”

 Has distrust of our leaders and the media, both well earned, metastasized into a widespread belief that the End Times are here?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture

Why Walgreens Gives Up

Walgreens, Chicago, crime, police, corporations

Walgreens closes another store in another crime-ridden Chicago neighborhood, so of course folks get mad at Walgreens.

The defeated Chatham store, closing its doors on June 4, suffered a million dollars in losses last year, citing theft rates “far above company average” — according to one astute observer on X.

“Mayor Brandon Johnson is facing outrage,” explains our twitterer, “particularly on the South Side.” 

One is tempted to ask the obvious question: How do these politicians get elected if Chicagoans are so readily up in arms over their neighborhood-destroying priorities?

While Chicago residents — that is, some Chicago residents — relate causes to effects and are angry with Johnson because of his policies and nonpolicies, other residents direct all their ire towards the drug store chain, instead: “With Another South Side Walgreens Set To Close, Neighbors Protest ‘Corporate Abandonment.’”

Local leaders “and residents” are rallying “to demand” that the chain either keep this particular store open or give money to healthcare organizations in the area. Hey, I’d like Walgreens to give me money to help me with stuff too. I wouldn’t think of demanding it though. Or demanding that Walgreens stores operate at a loss.

Anyway, I get it now. I get why Chicago is like this. Instead of blaming their politicians for being soft on crime, instead of blaming their neighborhood criminals, instead of blaming themselves for letting the politicians and the criminals destroy their city and civilization, too many very vocal citizens focus blame on the least guilty party in this whole sorry mess.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture political economy too much government

Super Under-Blown

Seattle, socialism, democratic socialism

Just 60 years ago, we were talking the end of ideology. Thirty years ago, we were talking about the end of socialism — and of history itself! — as capitalist democracies seemed triumphant after the fall of the USSR.

But here it’s A.D. 2026 and we have socialist mayors in New York and Seattle and . . . we don’t need to argue about definitions. They call themselves socialist.

While New York’s Mamdani has grabbed much of national attention, let’s not forget the Evergreen State’s Emerald City. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson showed her defiance of economic common-sense in her defenses of many anti-business, anti-rich tax and regulation policies by her city and the state.

“I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are,” she asserted, “like, super overblown.”

Her notion being that, since Washington State has a sales-tax-dominated “regressive tax system,” adding a progressive layer wouldn’t matter. New high-income-focused taxes would only make things better!

Not to those targeted by the tax, though. Not with socialists in charge. After all, she’s showing her true colors, taking photos with antifa terrorists, pooh-poohing welfare fraud (and refusing to investigate), expressing solidarity with Somali immigrants accused of fraud in Washington, and pushing for non-citizen voting.

Mayor Wilson’s response to those who have exited the soviet of Washington has been a chuckle, a wave, and a cheerful “bye.”

But then a major Democratic funder in the state, Nick Hannauer, wrote a think-piece for GeekWire suggesting that both the city, Seattle, and the state, Washington, were going too far. “Making the total tax burden here 5–10 times the alternatives isn’t progressivism; it’s stupidity.” The Daddy Warbucks, who’d promoted capital gains taxes and opposed Tim Eyman’s tax limitation measures, wants to put the brakes on Evergreen State spoliation — plundering— noting that “virtually every wealthy friend I have has either left or is planning to.”

Seattlites and Washingtonians sure seem stuck with “the usual Socialist disease — they’ve run out of other people’s money.” For the “other people” are fleeing fast.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

NOTE (first paragraph references): Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (1960), Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), and Robert Heilbroner, “The Triumph of Capitalism,”The New Yorker (January 23, 1989). Concluding allusion: Maggie Thatcher on socialism.

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general freedom ideological culture public opinion

Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!

may day, communism, socialism, capitalism

Long time ago, May Day was about celebrating Spring — for which rejoicing is appropriate. Over the last century, it has become International Workers’ Day. 

“In 1889, an international federation of socialist groups and trade unions designated May 1 as pro-workers day,” informs the Wikidates.org website, “on the anniversary of the Haymarket Riots in Chicago (1886).”

Five years later, clearly opposed to cavorting with socialists, the U.S. established Labor Day on September 1, an alternative date to honor workers.

Today, political rallies and protests are expected in major cities across the country.  “On May 1, 2026, workers, students, and families rally, march, and take action across the country to demand a nation that puts workers over billionaires, with many refusing business as usual through No School. No Work. No Shopping,” says May Day Strong, the umbrella group organizing events.

These are the revolutionary slogans of a General Strike, intended to shut down society. Or perhaps, since the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) are big supporters, just provide teachers a day off. 

And considering Cato Institute’s graph of student performance in public education charted against tax outlays to the cause, any teachers’ union suggestion of skinflintery on the part of Mr. Moneybags The Taxpayer is obscene. 

“Workers over billionaires” is the sort of un-American class-warfare slogan that is not only divisive but also badly misguided: billionaires create jobs, without which being a worker really loses its luster. Plus, it’s ineffective: Demonizing the rich never made a society any richer.

Apter for the day? The international distress call: Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency ideological culture national politics & policies

Die, DEI, Die!

DEI, Texas, discrimination, quota, race, racism, sexism

Banning DEI doesn’t necessarily end DEI. 

So-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies mandate guilt-inducing collectivist indoctrination about race and sex and/or impose race and sex quotas. The Texas legislature rightly concluded that DEI indoctrination is pernicious and required that it be removed from public universities in the state.

Suspecting that the law would not be obeyed with perfect grace, the organization Accuracy in Media (AIM) has been doing undercover work to gather evidence on whether university staffers formerly determined to propagandize for DEI and impose DEI-based requirements are now backing off.

Many are not.

Two of the renegades recently caught on video:

“Rest assured, the work that we do is still the same. It’s just classified differently,” bragged Melissa Cruz, an academic recruiter at the University of Texas at Arlington at the time the AIM investigator talked to her. “The intention is still the same. The research is still the same. The practice is still the same. It’s just called something different now. Our job is to push back and to cause some good trouble and all of those things.”

At the University of North Texas, Paige Falco, gave the same explanation. “Our class might be titled something a little different to just not specifically have DEI as the class name,” she told the AIM investigator. “But it’s still an element that’s taught. It’s definitely still a focus.”

These two have been fired. 

Thankfully.

But while these two were caught in the sting, many more no doubt exist, breaking the law of the state that employs them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture too much government

Unhealthy Kid Stuff

AOC, healthcare, Milton Friedman, education

Julian Shapiro-Barnum is the host and creator of Recess Therapy, where he regularly records conversations with kids. Recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) joined his program to discuss healthcare policy. 

“The children agreed with AOC,” a Washington Post editorial noted, “and brought the same level of sophistication to political and economic questions that Americans have come to expect from the four-term congresswoman.”

AOC and the youngsters shown think healthcare should be free, which The Post used as a jumping off point to have an adult conversation about government-run healthcare, specifically the National Health Service in the United Kingdom.

“Despite the government funding and running a universal health care system, private hospital admissions in the United Kingdom reached their highest level ever in 2024,” readers were informed. 

“The number of people opting to buy private health insurance rose to 6.5 million in 2024, the highest number in a quarter-century, according to the Association of British Insurers.”

The Brits “have learned the hard way that the promise of ‘free’ care is only as good as their ability to get an appointment,” wrote the editors. 

The editorial further explained that “government systems can only stay afloat when they are rationed, often with backlogs that can leave people waiting months for serious procedures.”

“America’s health system is a mess,” The Post concluded, “but the belief that a full government takeover would lead to better outcomes is just childish.”

One of the nation’s largest newspapers appears to be growing up. 

AOC? 

Not so much. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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