From February 2022 to December 2023, Congress appropriated about three times as much money for the conflict in Ukraine as the federal government spent on Customs and Border Protection. Congress approved approximately $113.4 billion in spending related to the Ukraine conflict during this period, while the government spent only $37.82 billion on Customs and Border Protection.

To the editor: This is an open letter to our town manager. Dear Mr.

Russian political activist and dissident Alexei Navalny died Feb. 16 in a Siberian prison camp, where he was serving a 30 year sentence for what most observers agree were specious, purely politically motivated convictions. Navalny had been an opponent of Vladimir Putin, the country’s president, and one of Putin’s most vehement critics. Young and charismatic, Navalny had repeatedly tried to run for elected office in Russia, but the government attacked him at every turn, accusing him of being a political “extremist”; charging him with various crimes, including “organizing illegal demonstrations,” corruption, embezzlement, fraud and contempt of court; placing him under house arrest; censoring his access to the internet and social media; imposing huge fines on him (and his family members) and liquidating his assets.

It is impossible to understand what is happening to America -- and to the rest of the West -- without understanding the most dynamic ideology of the last hundred years: leftism. We need to begin with the understanding that leftism (or “progressivism”) and liberalism are not only NOT the same ideologies, they are in fact opposed to each other on virtually every major issue.

On the one hand, Donald Trump, the former and perhaps future president of the United States, seems uniquely hapless. He lost an election unlike any other -- one in which insecure mail-in balloting proliferated, many states made constitutionally dubious changes to their voting procedures, and Big Tech put a decisive and perhaps outcome-altering thumb on the scale. Even worse, Trump last year became the first former president to be criminally indicted -- four separate times.

American journalist Tucker Carlson was interviewed as part of the World Government Summit in Dubai last week, and if people were outraged by his recent interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin, they were likely apoplectic after his remarks in Dubai about America’s cities: “[W]hat was radicalizing, very shocking and very disturbing for me was the city of Moscow ... the biggest city in Europe, 13 million people. And ... it is so much cleaner and safer ... than any city in the United States. ... How did that happen? ... If you can’t use your subway, for example, as many people are afraid to in New York City because it’s too dangerous, you have to sort of wonder, isn’t that the ultimate measure of leadership? ... [I]t’s radicalizing for an American to go to Moscow ... to Singapore, to Tokyo, to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, because these cities, no matter how we’re told they’re run and on what principles they’re run, are wonderful places to live that don’t have rampant inflation where you’re not going to get raped.”

Everywhere we turn, the country looks like it is falling apart. Crime is out of control. Millions of illegal immigrants are pouring across our borders. Our schools are more interested in cultivating gender dysphoria and a proclivity for porn than in educating our children. The press routinely censors the truth at the behest of the government, which also increasingly prosecutes (or opts not to) based on political party affiliation. In sport after sport, biological males who have decided to “identify” as female are taking awards away from actual biological women, and we’re told we must indulge their delusions. Most, if not all, the major societal problems we are confronting today are a direct result of abandoning the principles that are the underpinnings of American culture. In fact, we have been guilt-tripped into abandoning them, and we are reaping the consequences.

On Sunday, at the most widely viewed sporting event in America -- the Super Bowl -- the National Football League featured the singing of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the song first known as the “Negro national anthem” and now known as the “black national anthem.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Josh Hammer is off this week. We hope readers will enjoy the following guest column by Ben Shapiro.

In 2021, United Airlines released the following statement: “Our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people on board our planes every day. That’s why we plan for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.”