Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.
George MacDonald, from “Life” in Unspoken Sermons Series II (1886).
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George MacDonald
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El Libertador
On May 23, 1813, South American independence leader Simón Bolívar entered Mérida, where he was proclaimed El Libertador (“The Liberator”), leading the invasion of Venezuela.
Other May 23 events include:
1788: South Carolina became the eighth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
1900: Sergeant William Harvey Carney became the first African American to be awarded the Medal of Honor, for his heroism in a Civil War battle fought 37 years prior, in 1863.
1958: Birthday of American comedian and game show host Drew Carey.
Who wouldn’t want the media behind them — air-brushing the public images of their candidates; telling stories to dramatize the political agenda items they’re running on?
Back in November 2015, I agreed with then-Senator and presidential candidate (now Secretary of State) Marco Rubio’s characterization of the national news media as a “SuperPAC” for national Democrats.
How to even place a monetary value on the relentlessly one-sidedly progressive news coverage on network TV and in print outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post?
But is there a downside? Could this Super-est of all SuperPACs possibly be, on balance, less than helpful?
Let me posit that (a) the Washington press corps is ideologically to the left of the Democratic Party and, accordingly, (b) the national news media lures liberal Dems to far-out leftist positions that they’d otherwise never dare entertain — all because there exists this massive supportive left-wing echo chamber.
Then, on Election Day, national Democrats discover quite abruptly that, unlike DC’s editors and reporters, regular folks don’t like high gas prices or men winning women’s sporting events or releasing violent illegal migrants to commit more crimes. And, doggone it, they cast a lot more votes than the Beltway’s fifth column, er, Fourth Estate.
Take, for example, the current controversy regarding former President Biden’s cognitive abilities; consider, also, the decisions made by Mr. Biden and auto-pen possessing handlers.
Would a Republican president and his White House advisors ever think for a second that they could get away with keeping the press away from the commander-in-chief of the Free World, holding only heavily staged public events? For months? Forever?
I don’t think so. The mainstream media would — rightly! — question, berate, harangue and bloviate until the cognitive functionality of the POTUS had been popularly established.
But the Washington media did not hold a Democrat president to that (any?) standard.
Thus enabled, Biden kept going.
Costing Democrats!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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George Orwell
National Socialism is a form of Socialism, is emphatically revolutionary, does crush the property owner as surely as it crushes the worker. The two regimes, having started from opposite ends, are rapidly evolving towards the same system — a form of oligarchical collectivism. . . . It is Germany that is moving towards Russia, rather than the other way about. It is therefore nonsense to talk about Germany ‘going Bolshevik’ if Hitler falls. Germany is going Bolshevik because of Hitler and not in spite of him.
George Orwell, review of The Totalitarian Enemy by F. Borkenau, Time and Tide (May 4, 1940).
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Aaron Burr Indicted
On May 22, 1807, a grand jury indicted former Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr on a charge of treason.
At issue in the trial was Burr’s dealings in Louisiana, including leasing 40,000 acres and forming “an army.” President Thomas Jefferson issued an order for Burr’s arrest, and, after a chase, Burr was captured and charged with treason, though the case was always shaky. His defense lawyers included Edmund Randolph, John Wickham, Luther Martin, and Benjamin Gaines Botts. Jefferson’s distant cousin, Chief Justice John Marshall — who hated Jefferson — presided over the trial, which began on August 3. Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution requires that treason either be admitted in open court or proven by an overt act witnessed by two people. No witnesses came forward; Burr was acquitted on the first of September. He was ten immediately tried on a misdemeanor charge and was again acquitted.
Other May 22 events include:
- 1848: Slavery was abolished in Martinique.
- 1856: South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks savagely beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in the halls of Congress as tensions rise over the expansion of slavery. Sumner did not return to the Senate for the three years of his recovery period.
- 1995: In U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Arkansas’s congressional term limits law, 5-4, overturning the congressional term limits then the law in 23 states: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
Partisan contest! You may start with principles, but — if you are careless — end up fighting, instead, for the things your opponent only thinks you stand for. You become the strawman your enemies put up as the dumbed-down version of your position.
This happens a lot: Democrats have long denied being socialists, but have accepted leadership from socialists; Republicans have long denied being authoritarian, but routinely act like authoritarians.
Case in point: the deportation of “criminal illegal aliens.”
This is not an authoritarian position as such; right or wrong, it can be done in a legally sane way.
But Donald Trump and Republicans have embraced an extremely authoritarian manner of deportation.
How? By denying the principle I defended in April: due process. Writing about the Abrego Garcia case, I made this simple point: “whether a dangerous criminal or an innocent, hard-working family man, Garcia’s status is hardly the issue. This is about whether our government must follow its written Constitution.”
Now we are learning a lot more about who has been sent to El Salvadoran dungeons: the innocent.
According to an informative Cato article, “of the 90 cases where the method of crossing is known, 50 men report that they came legally to the United States, with advanced US government permission, at an official border crossing point.”
This is important: “Dozens of legal immigrants were stripped of their status and imprisoned in El Salvador.”
We are, today, shocked to read of how the ancient Athenian democracy would expel citizens from the polis. But Trump’s deportations are much worse: they’re being done without constitutionally required due process . . . without any chance for the accused to defend themselves.
And the innocents are being sent to a hell-hole prison, not merely banished.
Trump and his willing government functionaries are conforming not to their principles, but the ones imputed to them by Democrats.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Cenk Uygur
You got the MAGA bubble, you got this bubble, that bubble — but the thickest bubble of all is inside Washington. . . . Challenging power is heresy inside Washington.
Cenk Uygur, “Top Biden Aide Breaks Silence on Mental Decline,” The Young Turks (May 18, 2025).
On May 21, 1851, the Colombian Congress passed a law to free the country’s slaves as of January 1, 1852, compensating slave masters with bonds. The decree itself was insufficient to abolish the practice, however, with masters refusing, in many locales, to let the slaves go in a peaceful way. This led to the Civil War of 1851, which began with an insurrection in Cauca and Pasto headed by Manuel Ibáñez and Julio Arboleda — with the support of the Ecuadorian government. In Antioquia the rebellion broke out led by Eusebio Berrero. The war would end in four months with a liberal victory and the final liberation of the slaves.
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A Nothing in Michigan
It’s May in Michigan and Democrats have just “introduced their first pieces of legislation to respond to what they consider overly aggressive Republican proposals to improve election security,” Hayley Harding reports for VoteBeat.
Yes, the problem is those darn Republicans wanting too much election security too fast, doncha know.
“Michigan Democrats’ election proposals sidestep the noncitizen-voting issue for now,” was how the Michigan Advance headlined the article, in which Harding explains that “the package of bills under the Michigan Election Security Act won’t close the voter registration loopholes that may have allowed at least one noncitizen to cast a ballot that counted last year.”
Oops! That one University of Michigan student, Haoxiang Gao, is a Chinese national, who didn’t show up for court; whereabouts currently unknown.
Since that bombshell, another 15 cases have surfaced of noncitizens voting illegally last November. Nonetheless, Harding informs us that “the bills omit the measures Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson suggested in February as a way to prevent noncitizens from casting ballots in Michigan’s elections.”
Back then Benson “didn’t provide details of her proposal,” noted Harding, but mentioned “policies that enable us to track and retrieve” those votes “cast by voters who registered the same day as the election.”
“It could be provisional ballots, it could be additional verification or residency requirements in that moment,” the Secretary of State, now a candidate for governor (whose recent campaign announcement on state government property violated state law) offered reporters.
Sure, her proposal could have been a lot of things.
Now we see, however, that it is nothing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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George Orwell
Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon (April 1946).