Commentary

Citing the need for more electricity to continue growing the artificial intelligence (AI) sector and keep the U.S. tech industry ahead of China, former President Donald Trump on Sept. 5 vowed in a second term to issue a “national emergency declaration to achieve a massive increase in domestic energy supply.”

Candidate questionnaires have long been a part of American politics, locking in politicians to certain policies, pledges and positions. But it has been decades since one has threatened to roil a presidential race, or undercut a major party nominee’s carefully crafted image.

On Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, I anticipated a busy but relatively calm day at the White House. I was the special assistant to the president for management and administration, and President George W. Bush was in Sarasota, Florida, promoting the No Child Left Behind legislation. The senior official in the White House was Vice President Dick Cheney. First lady Laura Bush was scheduled to travel to Capitol Hill to brief senators on early childhood education. On the South Lawn, tables were being set up for that evening’s congressional barbecue.

During Vivek Ramaswamy’s recent event at the Cato Institute, protestors derailed his presentation by getting on stage and chanting “climate con-man,” among other similar allegations. But it’s not just rabbles of unknown activists accusing Ramaswamy of climate falsehoods. Last year, Ramaswamy said, “The reality is, more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will soon meet in a high stakes nationally televised debate, perhaps the only one of this campaign. In previous elections – 1960, 1976, 1980, 2000, and 2020 come immediately to mind – the election contests were heavily influenced by such encounters. This year, for sure, it is “high risk, high reward.” With an election so close, we believe this debate will be important – maybe even decisive – in determining the winner.

For the latest example of why “local control” is no kind of governing principle, I present readers with the example of Proposition 33 — a rent-control measure that Californians will consider on the November ballot. Its supporters — a who’s who of left-wing activist groups and mainstream progressive organizations such as the California Democratic Party — claim that the measure merely allows local governments to impose rent controls tailored to local conditions. Indeed, the so-called Justice for Renters Act features this simple text: “The state may not limit the right of any city, county, or city and county to maintain, enact or expand residential rent control.” If voters approve the initiative, it would repeal the Costa-Hawkins Rental Control Act. That 1995 law responded to concerns by landlords at the growing movement by local governments to impose some of the strictest rent-setting laws in the nation.

As the 2024 presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump begins to enter to closing stretch, all eyes are now turned to the Sept. 10 debate between the two candidates, as national polls still show the race to be closely contested both nationally and in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada.

Have the political parties always held the positions they do today? Has the right moved further right, or the left further left? The Republican Party of 2024 is far more liberal than the Democrat Party of the 1990s. With few exceptions, Republicans have consistently supported deficit spending, corporate welfare, and social welfare for decades now. This leaves many true conservatives looking like outliers.

Last Thursday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. withdrew (kind of) from the 2024 presidential race.  He didn’t have to, and in the case of 40 out of 50 states, he actually didn’t.  But, he also didn’t have to endorse Donald J. Trump, and yet he did.  As I waited for his press conference, I wondered: What could drive a lion of Democratic party royalty to side with Trump?  The answer turned out to be a trio of existential crises.  As RFK Jr. explained, he and Trump are aligned on three critical issues, and they are of such existential importance that he was willing to set aside their differences to work together. Beyond being a refreshing break from the mind-numbing drumbeat of Trump’s opposition, RFK Jr.’s remarks were a stark reminder of why two-thirds of Americans believe the country is moving down the wrong track. He first took aim at the military-industrial complex’s perpetual provoking of foreign wars and followed up with the alarming assault on free speech.  These were, however, just the warmup acts for his primary grievance: the moral and legal corruption of the food and pharmaceutical industries, assisted by their captured agencies, e.g., the FDA and USDA.

Since 2020, the nation's military has undergone one of the most humiliating periods in its history. The disgraceful rout at Hamid Karzai International airport during the Afghanistan withdrawal. Soon after, the decrepit state of naval maintenance and shipbuilding is the worst since the Navy’s founding. Further compounding the humiliation, the Marine Corps has been castrated into a regional force whose legendary force in readiness is being replaced by a combination of colonial light infantry and coastal defense artillery.

Democrats understand that once you’re atop a tiger, you can’t get off. They understand that because they’re living it via their prolonged lawfare campaign against Trump. By pulling out all the stops to stop him, they have raised November’s stakes — and the possibility that their misuse of government offices for political purposes will be investigated — beyond those of a normal presidential election. How worried Democrats are about losing this November’s presidential election is clear from the unprecedented actions they have taken to win. Going back to last year, they unleashed four legal cases against Donald Trump in separate states. When these did not derail him with the public (his support grew), they turned against their candidate and forced their duly elected nominee out of the race against his will.

I wrote an article this past year detailing my experience of wearing exclusively dresses and skirts, due to symptoms of my third pregnancy. I am now on the other side of this experience—I delivered my third son and am healing very well postpartum. To my own surprise, I find I have not gone back to wearing my old favorite jeans! (Teenage me would gasp in shock.) I continue to wear traditional clothes most of the time, to the point that I own mostly dresses now. I find myself looking back on the surprising discoveries this time has taught me. I used to have a myriad of reasons why I didn’t want to wear skirts, of course. Most women do. But now, I have experienced firsthand how inconsequential these arguments actually are. There are far fewer practical objections to traditional dressing than many of us think. Let’s go through three common reasons women cite as to why they don’t want to wear dresses, and why in reality, this type of wardrobe is still perfectly accessible.

In light of recent events and discussions attempting to rehabilitate the historical reputation of Germany’s Nazis, it might be worthwhile to re-examine the foundations of the ideology that underpinned National Socialism and its close cousin fascism. Those who embrace the revisionism that excuses the Nazis’ crimes appear to believe that by doing so, they are defending themselves and their ideological brethren from unfair and ahistorical attacks by the broader left. They think—or at least seem to think—that because fascism is considered a “right-wing” ideology that was specifically pitted against both Communism and Western liberalism, it can hardly be as awful as has been assumed and that its association with unvarnished evil is mere propaganda. They are wrong. Indeed, the very foundations of their sentiments are mistaken and result from the radical mischaracterization of history and the evolution of ideas in the two centuries after the Enlightenment.

Friday’s jobs report reveals accelerating weakness in the American economy. Only 142,000 jobs were created last month, below expectations. Half of new positions were created in the unproductive government or quasi-government healthcare and social services sectors. A record 8.2 million Americans have second jobs. So far this year, the number of unemployed Americans has increased by one million.

As a mother, I’m horrified by the notion that a child could be placed on a school bus and never come back home. Losing a child is a parent’s worst nightmare, and I’ve had too many friends who’ve walked through that darkness. As a member of a school board, I’m burdened that the decisions I make with my one vote of eleven could impact the safety of 64,000 children. I take those decisions very seriously, but I fear the root causes of this violence that are beyond my control. The physical structures of schools are more secure than they have ever been. There are now school resource officers (SROs), stricter requirements on who can enter schools, and locked doors to keep the bad guys out. Students are encouraged to speak up: “If you see something, say something.” Yet I don’t believe anything school board members or administrators do can guarantee the safety of children without addressing the underlying cause of these senseless acts of violence—our country’s moral decay.