People of Lampasas County, your strong opposition to the TxDOT “bypass” is a welcome sight! Such “bypass” will heavily damage, if not destroy, the bustling, thriving Lampasas community. TxDOT won’t admit it, but that is part of a nationwide plan begun by Democrats and well-meaning but sucker-punched Republicans to turn small towns all across rural America into nothing more than a “supersized” way station/ convenience store.

It has become something of a trope for political actors and thought leaders to seek the engagement of young people. Thus do we see it heralded when the youth are out in force clamoring for gun control, sexual libertinism, abortion rights, defunding the police, environmental restrictions in the name of “climate change,” free college tuition and socialism or other types of collectivist policies. The popular narrative is that if young people are involved, the cause must be worthy, and listening to the “voices of our future” is a path to progress. History says otherwise. Take the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, for example. The Khmer Rouge communists took power after a civil war and collapse of the government. They were responsible for the deaths of between 1.5 million and 3 million Cambodians, either through imprisonment, torture and execution or starvation in forced labor camps that became the infamous “killing fields.” According to a 2011 article in the Phnom Penh Post, the average age of the Khmer Rouge soldiers was 17.

My field of study in graduate school was communism. As a fellow at the Russian Institute of Columbia’s School of International Affairs, I was, if I remember correctly, one of seven students in the entire university to major in what was known at the time as “Communist Affairs.”

John Bolton has been in the news, commenting on the indictment against former President Donald Trump. Bolton, former ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush and former U.S. national security adviser to Trump, said on CNN that the charges set forth in the indictment brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, were “even weaker” than he feared they would be.

The Roman historian Suetonius described Julius Caesar as timid and noncommittal as he initially approached the Rubicon River -- a shallow and narrow waterway that, at the time, demarcated the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper -- in January 49 B.C. In fact, the historian ultimately attributed Caesar’s decision to cross the waterway, precipitating a fouryear civil war and ultimate Caesarian dictatorship, to the supernatural. Prior to crossing, again according to Suetonius, Caesar uttered the now-infamous phrase: “The die has been cast.”

With yet another deranged lunatic having decided that the best way to get attention is to shoot up a school and murder people, it’s time to look at the role played by the increasingly heated rhetoric that characterizes political, cultural and social debate in this country.

If you Google “what is conservatism?” this is the definition you will receive: “Commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation.” This is but one more illustration of the lack of objectivity wherever the Left is in control.

It was midday a week ago Saturday when Daryus Clarke was doing his job as a clerk at the Plug Smoke Shop in Queens, New York. Three individuals dressed entirely in black walked into the store. One had a gun.

A uthor and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis once wrote: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own consciences.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ written statement to Tucker Carlson heard around the world last week on the Russia-Ukraine war has caused nothing short of a fullscale meltdown from the arrogant, consistently wrong-thinking military-industrial complex band of bipartisan dunderheads who collectively comprise the American ruling class’ foreign policy “blob.” The reality is that the governor, also a likely 2024 presidential candidate, should wear the blob’s dripping scorn as a badge of honor. These “blobsters,” oftentimes think tank and punditry Boomers or Gen Xers who came of political age during the Cold War, typically suffer from a first principles-level delusion about whether America’s post-Cold War unipolar moment still exists (it does not). Accordingly, blobsters know one modus operandi only: more intervention and more escalation.