No federal legislation prior to 1812 placed any restriction on the right of suffrage in consequence of the color of the citizen. From 1789 to 1812 Congress passed ten separate laws establishing new Territories. In all these, freedom, and not color, was the basis of suffrage.
James Abram Garfield, speech at Ravenna, Ohio (July 4, 1865).
On July 13, 1973, the minority (Republican) counsel on the Senate Watergate investigative committee, Donald Sanders, asked Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield if he knew of any recordings made in the Nixon White House, and Butterfield responded, “everything was taped” at least while Nixon was in attendance, and that “there was not so much as a hint that something should not be taped.”
This revelation of the Nixon Tapes transformed the Watergate scandal into a major legal as well as political event; with the court-forced disclosure of the tapes, it proved to be one of the most striking examples of “government transparency” in modern times.
“Bud Light’s business has collapsed since April,” explains sports commentator Clay Travis in a recent column for Fox News, “plummeting 30% in consumption, the result of the company putting a trans influencer on a can to celebrate the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament.”
Travis calls it “the most crushing boycott of a large consumer product brand in modern history,” adding that Bud Light “might be finished as a popular beer.”
However, Travis also rebutted “many in the media” for “proclaiming Bud Light as a unicorn, the first of its kind conservative boycott that has obliterated decades of goodwill for a company.”
Not true, he argues: “The most consequential consumer boycott of the 21st century didn’t come from drinkers’ rejection of a beer, it came from sports, in particular the NBA, which has destroyed its brand with a large percentage of the American sporting public by embracing woke, political, far-left-wing messaging in its games.”
Travis informs that, since the 1998 NBA Finals, when superstar Michael Jordan sank a late jumper to win, there has been a 75 percent drop in viewership of the National Basketball Association’s championship. “Indeed,” he offers, “four of the five lowest-rated NBA Finals of the past 30 years have occurred in the past four years.”
Count me as one data point: I watched that great 1998 NBA Final and yet, today, I do not tune in. Why? I disagree with the NBA’s political bent and its repellent propaganda.
“More people were interested in watching” the Women’s NCAA Basketball Championship “in 2023,” reports Travis, “than the NBA Finals in 2020 and 2021.” (I saw that women’s championship game and declined both NBA Finals.)
But . . . why has the NBA’s nosedive in popularity not been news until now?
Mr. Travis says it’s because “the media loves the NBA embracing woke politics” and, therefore, “refused to share the data right in front of their eyes.”
Another case of so-called journalists deciding they like their readers and viewers less informed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It’s sad that governments are chiefed by the double-tongues.
“Ten Bears” in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), as performed by Will Sampson and written by Phil Kaufman and Sonia Chernus, based on the novel The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales by Forest Carter.
On July 12, 1817, American poet, abolitionist, businessman, and Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born. He is perhaps best known, today, for his book of meditations on the simple life, Walden, and his influential essay on civil disobedience.
We are not talking about borderline cases of one or two Chinese soldiers a year. The U.S. Border Patrol now acknowledges 347 encounters with Chinese nationals in 2021; 1,987 in 2022; and a whopping 12,533 encounters so far this year!
In a piece for Gatestone Institute, Gordon Chang reports that although some Chinese migrants entering through the southern border are simply “seeking a better life for themselves and their children,” many “are coming to commit acts of sabotage.” These are PLA soldiers.
They can first go to a country like Ecuador, which permits entry without a visa. They can then make their way through jungle before catching a bus to the border. They are often then simply released into the U.S.
Representative Mark Greenn (R-Tenn.) says that he was told by a Border Patrol sector chief that some of the people coming across have “known ties to the PLA.”
Chang quotes war correspondent Michael Yon: “At the Darien Gap, I have seen countless packs of Chinese males of military age, unattached to family groups, and pretending not to understand English. They were all headed to the American border.”
This is consistent with the pattern of Chinese aggression.
So maybe we — and maybe the government whose job is to protect us — should pay attention to this.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost.
Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1848), p. 21.
A few hundred years ago, not far from Deas’ Point near Weehawken, New Jersey, was a ledge eleven paces wide and 20 paces long, situated 20 feet above the Hudson on the Palisades. This ledge, long gone, was the site of 18 documented duels and probably many unrecorded ones in the years 1798–1845. The most famous is the duel between General Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, and Colonel Aaron Burr, third (and sitting) Vice President of the United States, which took place on July 11, 1804.
Hamilton died the next day of complications from a bullet wound at less than 50 years of age; Burr died on September 14, 32 years later at age 80.
One clue: officials like Jennifer Psaki, White House press secretary from 2021 to 2022, forbiddingly and publicly demanded that social-media firms do more to suppress disapproved speech.
Even so, many left-wingers stressed that once allegedly open public forums like YouTube, Facebook, pre-Musk Twitter et al. were private entities with every darn right to set standards for posting.
Just market decisions, that’s all that was happening here!
Now that litigation has delivered so much evidence that government agencies have been colluding to censor, directly and chronically “working with” social-media firms to suppress dissent, many on the left are not even pretending to favor protection of First Amendment rights to express speech they disagree with.
Jonathan Turley notes that according to The New York Times, a recent ruling temporarily enjoining the Biden Administration from colluding to censor would, by fostering open discourse, lamentably “curtail efforts to combat disinformation.”
Washington Post editors and others on the left “no longer deny censoring,” agrees Jeffrey Tucker. “Now they defend censorship as a policy in the national interest. . . . They don’t even pretend to have respect for the First Amendment that gave rise to the national media in the first place. They now seek a monopoly of opinion and interpretation.”
Yes. Cat’s out of the bag.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
John Morley (1838–1923), On Compromise (1877).