Don’t get me wrong: I was happy working hard with my two feet planted firmly on the land. In a better world I and people like Scott Chang-Fleeman would have kept getting our hands dirty, making an honest, if modest, living providing good and wholesome food in synch with the rhythms of the planet.

But to borrow a word from the world of ecology, being a young farmer in today’s economy is “unsustainable.” The numbers don’t work economically and, eventually, any mind trying to square this un-squarable circle is going to break. The economic, physical and mental challenges are all interconnected.

It’s hard to find an American, Republican or Democrat, red or blue state resident that doesn’t want more young hands on the land. We all rightly see agriculture as a pathway to personal fulfillment and a way to make our food supply healthier and more secure. But words and intentions can only do so much. We must answer these very real problems with very real subsidy.

The fellow in the photo above looks like a distinguished figure -- a bank president, perhaps, or a judge, a governor, maybe a college professor. He is a figure of great dignity and gravitas, indeed.

Well, he was a college professor and a governor (of Maine), in fact, but that’s the least of his story. The old fellow here is Brevet Major General Lawrence Joshua Chamberlain, hero of Gettysburg, one of America’s premier military heroes, a man who may have single-handedly saved the Union on a fateful day in 1863.

Reports from Israeli media indicate that U.S. State Department officials have confirmed that it is preparing to sanction the Israeli Defense Forces' Netzah Yehuda battalion, marking the first time the U.S. government has targeted an IDF unit directly and sparking immediate opposition from Israeli political leaders, including Netanyahu.

The Netzah Yehuda battalion, part of the Kfir brigade, was established in 1999 to accommodate recruits from ultra-Orthodox and national religious communities, including those from reportedly "extremist settlements." It has historically been primarily deployed in the West Bank. //

DonttreaDonme
4 hours ago
send 10s of billions of dollars to the worlds leading sponsor of terrorism, a nation that specifically targets civilian men, women and children, kidnaps, rapes, tortures and murders it's victims at will, then sanctions the nation they perpetrate these humans rights violation upon, the country they're threatening to wipe off the map. Understood.

As you may have noticed, I’m a fan of history. So, I’ll close with a piece of historical trivia:

Only one man has ever been both president (1909-1913) and then on the Supreme Court, weighing 320 pounds at 5-foot-11. That was Ohioan William Howard Taft, who liked steaks so much he would at times have one at every daily meal.

Taft was a friendly man, the first president to own a car, and the last to keep a cow at the White House for fresh milk. He also began the presidential tradition of throwing out the first baseball of a new season.

Taft lost reelection in 1912 to Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. In 1921, President Warren Harding named him Chief Justice.

Taft took retirement in February 1930. It was brief. He died one month later.

Take a trip down memory lane with our video, "20 Things From The 1960s, Kids Today Will Never Understand!" Explore the charming and amusing aspects of 1960s America that are sure to bring a smile to your face. From classic toys to iconic TV shows, join us as we reminisce about a simpler time that kids today may find puzzling yet endearing.

In Federalist 83, Alexander Hamilton wrote that the plan of the Constitution is that the powers granted to Congress

“shall extend to certain enumerated cases. This specification of particulars evidently excludes all pretension to a general legislative authority, because an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd as well as useless if a general authority was intended.”

This sounds so good. But it appears that he lied to us.

Perhaps Hamilton meant what he wrote at that time. But, once he became Secretary of the Treasury under President Washington, he did everything in his power to violate his own maxim. His scheme for the Bank of the United States is just one example. Where, o’ where does the Constitution provide Congress with the power to create a bank, or for that matter, any business corporation? Naturally, my question is rhetorical. //

And yet Hamilton, once he tasted power, quickly turned to “loose constructionism.” Indeed, his story is that of nearly every person in history who has exercised significant power. Man turns towards evil, and evil men (and women) love power. Many of us are familiar with Lord Acton’s “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” dictum. However, I think Erick von Kuehnelt-Leddin said it best: “A good man will not be corrupted by power, and a bad man will be corrupted with no power at all.” (Leftism Revisited, 317)

Hamilton’s problem is ours today in spades. Nearly all of us having fallen for the trap of loose constructionism, especially those who exercise power over us. We daily practice it- in the way we read our laws and the way we read things like the Bible. In fact, the proliferation of laws and regulations demands that we become loose constructionists, for if we tried to abide by the 4,000 plus new regulations our federal government promulgates each year, we couldn’t even live life. In this manner, the entire culture has been corrupted.

There are many today who support such things as a Convention of the States to redress the train wreck we are about to witness.

But unless we have a revival of strict constructionism, especially regarding higher law in our Constitutions and Scripture, we will merely change cars on the same doomed train.

By Frank Hawkins

Young Bill Ayers
America has undergone enormous change during the nearly eight decades of my life. Today, America is a bitterly divided, poorly educated and morally fragile society with so-called mainstream politicians pushing cynical identity politics, socialism and open borders. The president of the United States is threatened with impeachment because the other side doesn’t like him. The once reasonably unbiased American media has evolved into a hysterical left wing mob. How could the stable and reasonably cohesive America of the 1950s have reached this point in just one lifetime? Who are the main culprits? Here’s my list of the 10 most destructive Americans of the last 80 years.

Bill Whittle’s newest season of ‘What We Saw’ on Daily Wire Plus dips its toe in the oceans of blood Russia’s Communist revolution released.

The true crime genre is not big enough for what Communists and socialists did in Russia in the 20th century. It demands a new genre — perhaps call it true horror.

Bill Whittle’s newest season of “What We Saw” on Daily Wire Plus dips its toe in the oceans of blood Russia’s Communist revolution released. It’s grisly and difficult to take in. Whittle attempts to quantify the myriad forms of mass killings by comparing their death tolls to the erasure of several U.S. cities, yet still the numbers are numbing.

What’s not numbing is the question he includes in the season’s trailer comparing the Nazi Holocaust with the Soviet mass murder of an estimated 20 million: “Why are we encouraged to never forget one, and then intentionally taught to forget the other?” //

While it’s difficult to probe such manifestations of supernatural evil, doing so should be required of every human being. That’s because we need to look at evils like these and attempt to understand how they happen and what they say about human nature and history. Such knowledge is a fortification against it happening again — creating, for example, common knowledge that evil and corrupt governments often baselessly accuse their opponents of terrorism.

Here are four other things one can learn from studying Soviet history, as horrifying as that exercise can be.

1. Misery Is Normal in Human History

It’s hard to believe that when you’re an American and all you’ve ever known is clean and hot water coming out of the tap at a turn. But it’s also important to keep in mind. For one thing, it produces appropriate gratitude. For another, it should discipline hasty desires to “tear it all down,” and cultivate contempt for people who use the same lying words and policies as Communists.

2. People Are Not Innately Good

A heck of a lot of people somehow believe that humans are innately good. //

Soviet Russia is a tire iron to the back of that idea’s head. There can be no excuses for what the Communists did. No amount of bad potty training or poverty can excuse the mass murder of 20 million people and the enslavement of countless tens of millions more in gulag concentration camps. //

3. Socialists, Nazis, and Communists All Make the Same Hell on Earth

The truth is, socialists, Nazis, and Communists engage in furious infighting, but they’re all ultimately on the same side. They fight with each other, not because they disagree about collectivism, but because they all want to be on top of the dogpile of bodies their sister collectivist ideologies cause. Communists are Nazis are socialists are communists.

Socialist true believers will seek their collectivist ends “by any means necessary,” including government-sponsored terror, killing fields, and concentration camps. Anyone who proclaims himself a socialist in the face of historical facts about the hell on Earth socialism has always produced is a fool and fellow traveler, if not a covert supporter of mass terror.

4. We’d Better Keep America From Full Socialism

Let’s be honest: The United States is already partly socialist. We’re a pension plan with an army, as Andy Biggs noted, and every few years some other collectivist program that ratchets up the socialism is increased or enhanced, like Obamacare.

James Madison’s list of achievements did not happen by accident. We have much to learn from him.

The following is adapted from the book Lessons in Liberty: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans.

Happy 273rd birthday to James Madison, the most egregiously underappreciated, sadly uncelebrated, and unfairly unsung American in the history of the United States.

Consider the list of his towering achievements: Father of the American Constitution, formulator of American federalism, collaborator of The Federalist Papers, de facto doula of the Bill of Rights, and the fourth president of the United States.

Yet there is no significant monument in Washington, D.C., celebrating Madison’s titanic contributions to the American self-government experiment. No American temple featuring quotes chiseled in marble, no miniaturized version of his home, no statue strategically placed on the National Mall, no allusion to membership in the American Mount Olympus. //

1. Be the Most Prepared Person in the Room

2. Be Willing to Change Your Mind

3. Be Generous — Don’t Worry About Who Gets the Credit

But nowhere is Madison’s propensity for stepping aside or working behind the scenes more pronounced than in his friendship with Jefferson. While Jefferson is perhaps the most celebrated American to have ever lived, behind much of this success is the genius of Madison. They drafted the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions together in opposition to John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts. Most significantly, Madison worked steadily behind the scenes to help forge the new Democratic-Republican Party. When the party successfully defeated Adams in 1800, the first president representing the new party was Jefferson, not Madison.

Madison’s significance in our history and the lessons his life provides to Americans today should be both loud and large. In an era of potent political turmoil and personal strife, we ignore them to our and the nation’s detriment.

A lady asked Dr. Franklin, “Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

But on reflection, one of the more striking things to emerge from this was something that happened on my morning and evening Uber rides between my Arlington hotel and the CPAC venue.

Why? Here's why, and I'm going to tell you:

Cameroon. Chad. Uganda. Nigeria. Ethiopia. Those were some of the locations my Uber drivers were from. They all have several things in common, and those things they have in common speak eloquently to what America has been, what it still is, and what it hopefully will remain. //

Of all the speechifying I heard at CPAC, after all the great discussions I had with great people, these conversations were one of the most edifying experiences I have had on this excursion. Living as I do out in the Alaskan woods, I'm not often exposed to hard-working, legal immigrants like these folks; I was pleased and, yes, honored to talk to them, and my parting statement to all of them was, "Thanks for talking to me, and welcome to America; I'm glad you're here." //

The United States is still the greatest country in the world. We have our issues, and we have our enemies — some of whom are from within — but the potential of America remains. These people came to America because they saw that potential. Now, they are here and working to make their dreams happen.

To be perfectly frank, plenty of young Americans could learn a thing or two from their example.

Wade Miller
@WadeMiller_USMC
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Here @MSNBC helpfully makes it clear their disdain for Christians in America.

She says that if you believe that your rights come from God, you aren’t a Christian, you are a Christian nationalist.

Somehow they seem to not mention that our own founding documents make this… Show more

1:08 PM · Feb 23, 2024 //

According to the Founding Fathers, our rights came from God.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Per The Rights of the Colonists:

These [rights] may be best understood by reading and carefully studying the institutes of the great Law Giver and Head of the Christian Church, which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament.

Lastly, per John Quincy Adams:

[T]he Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon earth. …[and] laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity.

They float the term "Christian nationalist" to scare the public from those who believe their Lord and Savior is Jesus Christ, and that, yes, our rights do come from God. The majority, if not the overwhelming majority of Christians believe that, whether they identify as nationalists or not. //

If Christianity ever becomes the minority in America, you will never hear about the religion from left-wing networks again because they will have achieved their goal.

I’m back in that mood. Today’s AT&T cellular network meltdown was a reminder. It’s going down when we least expect it. //

tweet from Marco Rubio:

I don’t know the cause of the AT&T outage

But I do know it will be 100 times worse when #China launches a cyber attack on America on the eve of a #Taiwan invasion

And it won’t be just cell service they hit, it will be your power, your water and your bank. //

My prepping really hasn’t been for the “worst case scenario” – it’s been for the most likely bad scenario, mostly focused on energy grids on which we depend, and food. (I know, readers always tell me to focus on home defense, but that’s not something we talk about.) //

. it’s obvious that if we ever get in a hot cyber war with China they are taking down our electric grid as the first shot, and that will start everything spiraling downward. Of course our civilian infrastruture will be a prime target, and if this administration is too stupid to see that, we are in worse shape than I thought.

We've had all kinds of men as president, but only one of them started a world war, prevented a military coup against the government of the United States, and used either a sword or pistol to convince a deputy sheriff that he had urgent business back at the office; that was George Washington, the original American badass.

The story of the Comanches and the Red River War, whose 150th anniversary we mark this year, shows the absurdity of the ‘noble savage’ narrative. //

The Comanche were just as much imperialists as the Europeans ever were. Though Europeans could certainly be violently cruel, their culture at least censured violence against civilians — indeed, when stories of federal troops massacring defenseless Indians traveled east, the American people were horrified. The same cannot be said of the Comanche, whose brutality was an indelible component of their cultural identity.

It’s true as much today as it was 150 years ago that the West can learn from indigenous peoples such as the Comanche, who were not only tremendous horsemen and students of the natural world, but incredibly resourceful in finding a use for practically every part of the buffalo, which, with the horse, served as the cornerstone of their society. But that doesn’t mean we should embrace a simplistic, starry-eyed conception of native peoples, or a benighted, self-hating understanding of our own civilization.

In a historic move, the United States has officially expanded its geographical territory by one million square kilometers — an area nearly 60 percent the size of Alaska. The catalyst for this territory expansion lies in the redefinition of the U.S. continental shelf boundaries.

By invoking international law, the State Department has outlined new areas under the sea where the continental shelf, a seabed area surrounding large landmasses with relatively shallow waters, extends further than previously recognized.

This monumental addition is spread across seven distinct ocean regions, with over half of the new territory located in the Arctic.

“Hungarians told me over and over, ‘the rhetoric coming out of the United States reminds us of our Soviet era,’” Bradley-Farrell recalled. “And the more I dug into that, the more that I realized that the things that we’re dealing with here and the so-called progressive agenda, the woke agenda, the Biden administration, they’re directly out of the playbook of communism,” she says.

As a deeply religious and freedom-loving nation, Hungary—which came out from under Soviet oppression in 1991—has long looked to America as a “light on a … hill,” Bradley-Farrell says. But Hungary is not a model for America because “America and our Constitution, our founding, is the model for the world,” she says.

However, “our Hungarian friends, the people that care about us, are saying, ‘Hey, your rhetoric is communist. You guys need to wake up, because you’re about to lose what we loved about you.’”

In her new book, “Last Warning to the West: Hungary’s Triumph Over Communism and the Woke Agenda,” Bradley-Farrell outlines a road map for how America can change course and learn from our friends in Hungary at this moment in history.

Direct democracy not only represents a threat to freedom, but it is a political order that rejects hierarchies both natural and spiritual. //

“American democracy is cracking,” warns Washington Post Chief Correspondent Dan Balz in a recent column that presents some ideas to repair it. His suggestions include, among other things, proportional representation, diminishing the power of the Senate, and eliminating the Electoral College. What these three suggestions have in common is a desire to remove any intermediary institutions between the will of the people and government action — otherwise known as “direct” democracy. //

The framers of our Constitution felt quite strongly that direct democracy was something to avoid. In Federalist 10, for example, the Father of the Constitution James Madison warned of “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority” on a government, or what has come to be called the “tyranny of the majority,” in which a majority of the population exerts great coercive power over minority factions. //

A generation after that founding generation, visiting French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville authored an extended survey of American politics and culture, Democracy in America. Tocqueville perceived that the American political system was created to resist the tyranny of the majority, “which bases its claim to rule upon numbers, not upon rightness or excellence.” //

Yet such a deliberative process of testing is slow and uneven. And we Americans are often eager for speedy solutions. Political theorists, journalists, and ordinary citizens throughout American history have been frustrated by the Constitution’s manifold methods of distributing power to deter the tyranny of the majority. If a majority of the nation’s populace wants something, they posit, why shouldn’t they be able to get it? After all, as the journalist H.L. Mencken wryly commented, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Such demands especially increase at times of heightened political gridlock in which the country obviously has a particular problem or set of problems but constitutionally mandated laws and procedures thwart attempts to resolve them. When we are all vexed with our politicians for failing to act in what we believe to be the interests of the nation (and its voters), it’s easy to be sympathetic to that line of thinking.

Yet we must beware of this temptation, which reflects what conservative political theorist Russell Kirk calls a manifestation of vox populi, vox dei — the voice of the people is the voice of God. In other words, as long as they constitute a majority, whatever the people want becomes the law of the land. //

As that great French observer of American politics Alexis de Tocqueville observed: “If ever freedom is lost in America, that will be due to the … majority driving minorities to desperation…”

Let’s do everything we can to avoid that scenario.

There is much we can learn by studing Rome’s descent into oblivion. //

The addictive tendencies of indolence and ceaseless entertainment discouraged the once-fecund Romans from family life, and birth rates plummeted. By the beginning of the second century A.D., to have even three children was quite exceptional. //

Whether or not America is Rome, the imperium is as much a cautionary tale as it is an ancient marvel. Concurrent with some of its most remarkable achievements, Rome was already steadily decaying within. Even while it continued accumulating territories, its citizens were growing ever weaker and incapable of self-government. The armies it used to expand and defend its borders became less Roman and, as a result, less allegiant to the citizens they swore to defend. It was, after all, a Roman mercenary army that sacked the eternal city in 410 A.D.

“States have always shown themselves completely incapable of restoring their moral foundations once they have allowed them to weaken,” Daniel-Rops opined. If so, it would be good to reflect on Rome, but perhaps less so for her glories than for what lessons we may learn from her descent into oblivion.

Most everyone, other than the liberal arts faculty in most major universities and a disturbing number of high school history teachers, is familiar with Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on the night of December 25-26, 1776, and the stunning surprise victory that ensued in the streets of Trenton, New Jersey.

What is often lost in the telling of the narrative is the tactical sophistication that George Washington was developing by the winter of 1776-77 and a little-known battle, one which I think shows Washington at his finest, that took place on January 2, 1777.