March Still Needed

Penna Dexter
As evidenced by the crowd at last weeks’ March for Life on the National Mall in Washington DC, the pro-life movement is alive and well. In a post-Roe world, it’s still needed.
Vice President J.D. Vance joined the marchers, thanking them for showing up in such large numbers on “this especially frigid January.”  He made it clear he’s one of them, and  described their cause as “our movement.”
In a video message, President Trump pledged that in his second term, he will “protect the historic gains” made in his previous administration and will block the “push for a federal right to unlimited abortion on demand.”
Both the president and vice president made clear that targeting of “Americans of faith” and pro-lifers by the U.S. Justice Department will end.
President Trump told the marchers, “I am releasing the Christians and pro-life activists who were persecuted by the Biden regime for praying and living out their faith…”
Vice President Vance referred to failures by our nation to foster a culture of life, stating “our country has not stepped up in the way you have.”
Sadly, his statement aptly describes a recent action by the United States Senate.
Every January, before the March for Life, Congress considers an important piece of pro-life legislation. This year’s bill was the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, introduced by Senators James Lankford (R-OK) and Jim Banks (R-IN).
 On January 9th, the new Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, (R-SD) held a vote on it.
The bill does nothing to limit access to abortion. It simply requires that babies who are born alive—having survived an attempted abortion—will receive appropriate medical care. It’s a simple argument: Leaving this baby to die would be infanticide.
The motion for cloture failed 52-47, with every Democrat voting against moving the bill forward.
This extremism helped give us a Vice President who marched for life, carrying a sign that reads, “I Am the Pro-life Generation.”

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Young Men

Kerby Anderson
Here is a social statistic that should concern all Americans, and deserves attention from leaders in government, pastors in churches, and parents in the home. Young men are falling further behind. That is the title of a Wall Street Journal article by Rachel Wolfe.
“More women ages 25 to 34 have entered the workforce in recent years than ever. The share of young men in the labor market, meanwhile, hasn’t grown in a decade.” Place her statistics with another that I cited just a few months ago. America has 7 million young men (ages 25-54) who are not working and not looking for work.
One reason is attitude. Richard Reeves (president of American Institute for Boys and Men) explains, “The sense a lot of young men have is not being sure that they are needed or that they are going to be needed by their families, by their communities, by society.”
This leads to the phenomenon known as a failure to launch. “In Spanish, parents call it encaminado: making sure your children are on the path to an independent adulthood.” One in three young adults live with their parents. And young men are more likely to live with their parents than young women. Former Senator Ben Sasse wrote about this in his book, The Vanishing Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance.
Steven Malanga argues in his essay Unemployable that “a growing number of Americans aren’t simply out of a job. There are no longer fit for work.” Many young men do not have a good work ethic and haven’t been prepared by the schools for the labor market.
The crisis of young men in America deserves our attention. Government leaders and church leaders need to take note.

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Federal Spending

Kerby Anderson
Senator Rand Paul was on a TV interview with Larry Kudlow to talk about government spending. They began by acknowledging that we have a national debt of $36 trillion and a fiscal budget that needs to be brought under control.
Senator Paul believes the best benchmark is to only spend what comes into the federal treasury, but that hasn’t happened in decades. But he suggested that the first place to start would be to cut the hundreds of thousands of dollars allocated to study whether lonely rats use more cocaine than well-adjusted socialized rats. Or Senator Paul suggested we might cut the money allocated to study whether Japanese quail on cocaine are more sexually promiscuous. With a bit of sarcasm, he suggested there are a “few things we might be able to cut.”
Of course, these aren’t large cuts, which is why Larry Kudlow wanted to know if it were possible to save the money by not spending funds allocated but never used for COVID, or the Inflation Reduction Act, or even the CHIPS bill.
Senator Paul responded that there is a way to do this. It’s called recission. It was tried once in the Trump administration to send back $15 billion in unspent funds, but there were two Republicans who did not vote for it. He is convinced that perhaps now you could get 50 Republicans to vote for recission and cut $500 billion.
The other idea they discussed was impounding funds, but the Supreme Court ruled against President Nixon doing that. This current court might be willing to consider that process of impounding funds since it was done for more than a hundred years until the court ruled against Nixon in 1975.
There are ways to cut federal spending.

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Oligarchs

Kerby Anderson
In his last two presidential addresses, Joe Biden warned of the rise of oligarchs and the development of a tech-industrial complex. He reminded the nation of the farewell address of President Eisenhower, who spoke of a military industrial complex.
Noah Rothman observed that Democrats invented this “new bogeyman” only when some billionaires and Big Tech titans started to “support Republican politicians and their policy preferences.” He reminds us that Democrat leaders weren’t “all that vexed by ‘misinformation and disinformation’ when they were the ones improperly wielding the coercive power of the state.”
Victor Davis Hanson concluded that Biden’s attempt to copycat the warnings of Eisenhower failed because “to paraphrase a famous quip from 1988 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, ‘President Biden, you’re no Dwight Eisenhower.’”
He also reminds us that “until November 2024, Biden had no problems with oligarchs. In fact, he courted and used them. And they, in turn, eagerly donated lavishly to his agenda.” Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did the bidding of the Biden campaign team in 2020 by pouring millions “into Biden-related PACs and voting groups to change voting laws.” In one of his last acts as president, Biden awarded George Soros with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Only now are these oligarchs dangerous because some voted for Trump, and a few will be working with the new administration. Big Tech has been guilty of censoring speech and promoting disinformation, but the former president and his party only noticed the problem when they were no longer in charge.

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Porn Sites

Kerby Anderson
Pornography and porn sites were the topic of the Supreme Court earlier this month. The key question was whether requiring age verification on a porn site violates the First Amendment.
Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is the case currently before the high court. Texas passed a law requiring porn purveyors to start using “reasonable age verification methods.” Other states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Virginia, Utah) have passed similar porn site age laws.
The Texas brief explains that the law “does not prevent adults from viewing pornography.” Instead, the law “requires online pornographers to take commercially reasonable steps to ensure that their customers are not children.”
The lead challenger in the case is the Free Speech Coalition. It is described as an “adult entertainment” industry group that argued that age verification is too great a burden on First Amendment rights. They also raised concerns about privacy and security risks.
Having a 21st century Supreme Court ruling on pornography is important. The court’s ruling in pornography and obscenity in Miller v. California came in 1973. Texas cites the case Ginsberg v. New York that dealt with selling magazines to minors, but that decision came down in 1968.
Technology has changed the world in the last two decades. Young people have access to pornography through computers and smartphones. The most recent survey found that a clear majority of children have a smartphone by age 11.
Here are two points I believe the justices should consider. First, children should be protected from the scourge of pornography. We know the dangers. Second, digital age verification is becoming common place. It places no significant burden on First Amendment rights.

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Tipping Point

Kerby Anderson
Charles Cooke recently asked, “Are Californians Near the Tipping Point?” He asked that question because of the reaction from many in Southern California to how politicians handled the devastating wildfires.
He begins by saying that he loves California and explains that he isn’t just saying that because he is about to criticize many of the political leaders in California. He devotes many sentences to list the many positives about the state and its citizens.
He then focuses on how California is badly run. He also says that isn’t just because he disagrees politically with California politicians. He explains that he doesn’t agree with the politics of Massachusetts, but he acknowledges that Massachusetts is “pretty solidly governed.”
With those two disclaimers out of the way, he concentrates on what California does poorly. The state “is run by people who are incompetent at the tasks of taxing and spending, passing and enforcing laws, representing their constituents, and dealing with emergencies.”
Put another way, “its politicians have forgotten how to do the basics. One can get away with a great deal of ideology, wastefulness, and self-indulgence if the schools are good, the roads are smooth, the police are allowed to do their jobs, the housing is affordable, and the natural disasters are addressed swiftly and sanely.”
Charles Cooke isn’t the only person wondering if California voters are at a tipping point. Of course, it is too early to tell if a disaster in 2025 will affect an election in 2026 or 2028. But we have seen how a poor performance in a presidential debate last year changed everything in the 2024 elections.
I predict that a big issue in future elections will be competence. Voters might be willing to get rid of incompetent politicians.

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Biden’s Zombie Era

Penna Dexter
In one of his final lawless acts, just three days before leaving office, President Biden proclaimed that the Equal Rights Amendment is “the law of the land.” Congress passed this amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1972 and gave it seven years to achieve ratification by three fourths of the states.
Proponents claimed the ERA would protect women’s rights by prohibiting discrimination based on sex.
Thirty-five states ratified. In a constitutionally questionable move, Congress extended the deadline three more years. Still the amendment failed to garner the necessary support of 38 states. Five states rescinded their ratifications. The ERA expired. It’s dead.
The ERA would not protect women’s rights. Over a decade of consideration, it became clear it would severely undermine many commonsense protections for women and could be used to end even modest restrictions on abortion.
According to Kristin Waggoner, President of Alliance Defending Freedom, the ERA is worse today than it was in the 70’s. She points out: “the word ‘woman’ never appears in the ERA.” Instead,” she writes, “the amendment focuses on ‘sex’ — a word increasingly in danger of becoming meaningless as ideologues push to disassociate the term from biology and replace it with ‘gender identity’.”
Under state and local ERA-type policies, women and girls are already seeing their physical privacy, their athletic opportunities, even their physical safety compromised.
In a misguided attempt to revive the ERA, Nevada and Illinois passed bills to “ratify” the amendment. Virginia did so in 2020. Supporters claimed victory. But, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council, twice, declared the ERA “expired.” So did the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Archivist of the United States would be the person responsible for the amendment’s publication. Dr. Colleen Shogan and her deputy declared, just last month, that the ERA “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions.”
Someone must kill the Zombie ERA.

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Retirement

Kerby Anderson
Although Congress needs to reevaluate various programs like Social Security, it is unlikely it will do so for two reasons. First, it would be politically unwise to even modify any of the so-called “entitlement programs.” It is the third rail of American politics. Touch it and you die.
But the other reason isn’t political; it’s cultural. Americans have an expectation of retiring at age 65. Morgan Housel has a chart in his book The Psychology of Money that illustrates this. The labor force participation rate for men age 65+ was 78 percent in 1880 and only dropped to 58 percent by 1930. But Social Security changed all that. Today the labor force participation for men 65+ is 27 percent.
Social Security wasn’t intended to provide a pension for retirement. When Ida May Fuller cashed in the first Social Security check in 1940, it was for $22.54 (that would be $416 when adjusted for inflation).
Even before Social Security was implemented, many in the Western world began to believe retirement begins at age 65. Germany was the first nation to adopt an old-age insurance program. This was 70 years before President Roosevelt proposed the Social Security system we have today.
Some brave politicians have suggested we might at least raise the age of retirement. As Morgan Housel reminds us that “It was not until the 1980s that the idea that everyone deserves, and should have, a dignified retirement took hold.” But also reminds us that the 401(k) didn’t exist until 1978, and the Roth IRA was not implemented until 1998.
Congress needs to address the financial concerns about the future of Social Security, but politics and cultural expectations make it hard to do so.

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Remaking the World – Part Two

Kerby Anderson
Yesterday, I talked about some of the transformations in 1776 that Andrew Wilson discussed in his book, Remaking the World. They are identified by the acronym WEIRDER. W stands for “western” and globalization while E stands for “educated” and the Enlightenment.
I stands for “industrialized” and focuses on the industrial revolution. One event was James Watt’s invention of the steam engine. Western society no longer depended upon muscle power or horsepower.
R stands for “rich” and focuses on the “great enrichment.” Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations in 1776. The industrial revolution and capitalism led to a significant increase in life expectancy and the rise of social development.
D stands for “democratic” and focuses on the American Revolution. Of course, the Declaration of Independence was ratified in 1776, and the Constitution starts with “We the people.” This Spirit of 76 has spread throughout the world.
E stands for “ex-Christian” and focuses on the rejection of Christianity. During this time, we see the rise of deism, agnosticism, and atheism. Although some believed the Bible, many others rejected the biblical view of God and the authority of the Bible.
R stands for “romantic” and focuses on the romantic revolution. This is when Rousseau developed the concept of self and expressive individualism. And the seeds of the sexual revolution in the 20th century were first sown in 1776.
Andrew Wilson catalogues these transformations but also believes there are many opportunities for Christians and the church in what is becoming a post-secular world. We need to speak truth into this post-Christian culture.

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Remaking the World – Part One

Kerby Anderson
The year 1776 changed the western world in significant ways. That is the conclusion of Andrew Wilson (pastor at King’s Church in London) in his book, Remaking the World. He was on my radio program to discuss his book.
He explains, “The big idea of this book is that 1776, more than any other year in the last millennium, is the year that made us who we are.” He describes it as “a year that witnessed seven transformations taking place—globalization, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Enrichment, the American Revolution, the rise of post-Christianity, and the dawn of Romanticism.”
He describes this society as one that, “relative to others past and present, is WEIRDER. Each letter is an acronym (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic). He concludes that “The vast majority of people in human history have not shared our views of work, family, government, religion, sex, identity, or morality.”
W stands for “western” and focuses on the issue of globalization. One key event is the voyage of Captain James Cook. His travels generated certain questions like: Why were some natives more advanced than others? Western society began to get to the deep roots of culture and wondered why Western society developed before other cultures.
E stands for “educated” and focuses on the impact of the Enlightenment. Obviously, the Enlightenment started nearly a century before, but one high point was 1776. That was the year that Immanuel Kant drafted his Critique of Pure Reason and the year that Edward Gibbon published his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Tomorrow we will look at other events in 1776 that led to the remaking our of world.

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Dollar and Inflation

Kerby Anderson
Yesterday I talked about apples and inflation. There is another way to think about the inflation that has been part of our economy for the past 100 years.
The supply of U.S. dollars has been expanding on average about 7 percent each year for the last century. That means the value of dollars is cut in half about every 10 years. Just use the “rule of 72.” Divide 7 percent into 72. That means the half-life of the US dollar has been about 10 years.
We may not notice the decreasing value of dollars until we get even higher inflation. But think of what a 10-year-half-life for the dollar means to you. For me, it means that money I put into a Wells Fargo savings account when I was in grade school has been cut in half six times.
The U.S. dollar is still the reserve currency of the world. And yet this is what happens with the best fiat currency in the world. If you hold your savings in cash, you are losing value every year. If you hold some of your savings in assets, the value of the asset usually goes up simply because it takes more dollars to purchase it. But for it to appreciate, your asset has to be both scarce and desirable.
Now, imagine if you lived in Venezuela or Argentina or Lebanon or Turkey. If your country increases the currency each year by 18 percent, your currency’s half-life is 4 years. If your country increases the currency by 30 percent, it has a 2.5-year-half-life. That is why citizens in these countries can never get ahead.
When I hear people tell me that financially they are just “treading water,” I am tempted to tell them that they are really sinking. Printing more U.S. dollars makes everyone poorer unless they have assets appreciating faster than the money printer.

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Apples and Inflation

Kerby Anderson
Today the U.S. is getting a new president. Soon, Canada will be getting a new prime minister. The new prime minister may be Pierre Poilievre. He was recently asked what steps he would take to fix the damages done from inflation. Here is his answer:
“First and foremost, stop the overspending. Inflation, high taxes, deficits, high interest rates, are all symptoms. The disease is overspending. When governments spend too much money there’s only three ways to get it. One is to raise your taxes. The other is to borrow, which means that they’ll tax you more later on. And the third way is to print money. Now printing money seems like a painless way to pay for things.”
He then explained, “If you have 10 apples and $10 in the economy, it’s a buck an apple. If you double the number of dollars in the economy to 20, you still only have 10 apples, You’re not twice as rich. It’s just that each apple costs twice as much. And that is a tax on the working people because it chews up the purchasing power of your paycheck only to pay for government’s excessive government spending. And it balloons the asset values of the billionaires so it’s a real transfer from the have-nots to those who have yachts. Inflation is the worst and most immoral tax. It always results from government creating cash.”
His answer was both clear and correct. When government spends more than it takes in, the usual answer is to print more money. It really isn’t that complicated. We just need more people in leadership like him.
We need more politicians who understand why we have inflation and can explain the problem to the citizens. I must applaud his clear explanation and common-sense solution. We need more Canadian and American leaders like him.

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LA Burning

Penna Dexter
I love living in Texas but, by birth and upbringing, I’m an LA girl — born in Pasadena, raised in a beach town, and educated at a university near downtown.
I’m mourning the massive damage and destruction to life, homes, businesses, and landmarks in places I’ve loved.
I remember dreading the Santa Ana winds, which sweep down from the deserts. They come every year and, because California is dry, they bring fires.
The LA Fire Department has over a hundred years’ experience fighting these fires. Each year, when the Devil Winds came, they’d be on it. Lately, the job is taking much longer.
What’s making things harder? Neglect, leftist environmental policy, and poor leadership.
Decaying power lines have been a huge problem — now (supposedly) being addressed. California promised to do better at keeping forest floors “cleaned” of burnable fuel. But “green” pushback prioritizes the “ecosystem” over humans. Voters have demanded new reservoirs. None have been built since 1979. Construction on a new one won’t begin until 2032.
Fire hydrants started running out of water during the first day of this year’s firefighting. Years of bad water policy means there’s insufficient water to fill the reservoirs they have.
In 2008, California began diverting 100 billion gallons of water per year away from Southern California and into the Pacific Ocean to “save” a fish, the Delta smelt. Governor Gavin Newsome has refused to restore the flow of excess rainwater and snow melt from the north to Southern California.
LA Mayor Karen Bass knew of the huge fire risk. Recently, she cut department funding.
And Kristin Crowley, LA’s first female and LGBTQ Fire Chief has wide experience in firefighting. But “promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity” is her stated priority. LA’s three top fire officials are lesbian women. Few males are hired as firemen.
There’s another sad reality: Insurers have been cutting coverage in at-risk areas.
California needs a political reckoning – and our prayers.
Follow this link to an interactive map: https://bit.ly/CALFIRE3Dmap

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Fertility Rates

Kerby Anderson
When I first started writing this commentary nearly two decades ago, the average woman in the United States had 2.1 children in her lifetime. This is what many demographers called “the golden number.” To sustain a population in any country, women on average need to produce 2.1 children. If that number is higher, the population increases. If that number is lower, the population decreases.
Years later, Lou Dobbs devoted an entire chapter in his book, Upheaval, to the subject of “Demographics and Destiny Disturbed.” He was on my radio program back then and talked about the fact that the fertility rate in America had now declined to about 1.7. He also lamented the abortions of over 60 million unborn.
But if you think America is facing a problem, consider Japan with a fertility rate of 1.39. It is imploding. By the end of this century, Japan’s population will be less than half of its current population. Japanese consumers are buying more adult diapers than baby diapers.
Other countries also face incredible challenges because of declining fertility rates. Greece has a fertility rate (1.4) equal to Japan’s fertility rate. Spain’s fertility rate is 1.12. The fertility rate of South Korea and of China is also 1.12.
China’s “one-child policy” meant “that as many as 400 million Chinese children were not born.” By the end of the century, the country will likely have about one-third of the population that it has now. It moved from a one-child policy in 2015 to a three-child policy in 2021. But the birth rate continues to fall.
Declining fertility rates illustrate once again that demography is destiny.

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China and Rubio

Kerby Anderson
How will the new administration deal with the China challenge? We can get some perspective from Senator Marco Rubio’s book, Decades of Decadence. He will soon be confirmed as Secretary of State. He exposes China’s attacks on four key elements of American strength: good local jobs, stable families, geographical communities, and a sovereign nation that serves as a beacon of freedom and prosperity.
He explained in his book that the U.S. and other Western countries made the false assumption that nation states would be more focused on economic interests and therefore would not go to war with each other. Politicians started making decisions that benefited this system and stopped making decisions about what was good for America. This empowered China, and now we are heavily dependent upon them for all sorts of essential goods.
We assumed countries would be doing what was good for the global economy and international order. Senator Rubio explained in my radio interview that “China didn’t get that memo, and Russia didn’t get that memo, and Iran didn’t get that memo, and North Korea didn’t get that memo.” Many countries have been operating in their national interest. Bringing China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) didn’t change China. It changed America.
We also need to address the myth that Chinese aggression is due to tensions between China and America that were created by U.S. foreign policy. It was convenient to blame Donald Trump for Chinese aggression. That argument no longer works. For the last four years we have seen the feckless Biden foreign policy. China has become more aggressive, not less. Trump wasn’t the problem. Chinese global intentions are the reason for its actions.
Donald Trump and Marco Rubio seem ready to face the daunting challenge of an overly aggressive China. They need your prayers.

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China’s Military

Kerby Anderson
The recent Department of Defense report should concern all Americans. The authors conclude that China is engaged in the largest military build-up since Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Colonel Grant Newsham once served as the Marine liaison officer to Japan and is also a Senior Fellow with the Center for Security Policy. His book, When China Attacks: A Warning to America, documents Communist China’s ongoing covert war against the United States and its allies. He gave a sobering interview with WorldNetDaily about China’s military intentions.
He explained that “China’s military build-up has been going on for over 30 years – regardless of who has been in the White House – Democrat or Republican.” It is true that the Chinese Communist Party has been emboldened by American weakness and perceived decline. And he added that “the Chinese communists certainly did not fear the Biden administration.”
On the other hand, Newsham argued, “The first Trump administration was the first one in my lifetime that actually frightened Beijing.” But that did not slow down the Chinese military build-up.” He warns, “Beijing will not let up in its quest to be able to dominate – and defeat, if possible – the U.S. and the U.S. military.”
He is not the only person warning Americans about China. Gordon Chang, in his book, Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America, warns that “China has a plan to destroy America. Does America have a plan to defend itself?” Even leftists, like Martin Jacques, write about When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order.
The Trump administration must be ready to face the formidable China challenge.

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Economic Misperception

Kerby Anderson
Throughout the 2024 campaign, President Biden and his administration argued that the economy was doing well. Many voters did not agree with their assessment. And even in the waning days of his administration, President Biden has argued that he is “handing the Trump administration a robust labor market.”
E.J. Antoni (Heritage Foundation) replies, “I’m sorry, I think that the Biden Administration’s own data contradicts that narrative.” He explains that the post-pandemic economic recovery wasn’t as robust as Biden argues. “There are actually fewer native-born Americans working today than there were before the pandemic in 2019.” Instead, the net job growth has gone to foreign-born workers.
Douglas Carr provides another example of economic misperception by posting numerous charts illustrating the impact of Bidenomics. For example, his first chart illustrates that many more American families were worse off now than a year ago, and this was worst for young adults.
Of even greater concern was his chart that documents the financial well-being of high-school educated Americans versus college-degree holders. His chart shows that the financial situation for Americans with just a high school degree has fallen to its lowest point in a half century.
Inflation over the last few years dropped average earnings for most Americans. He also quotes a study from the Brookings Institute that the “effects of rising prices have been even more pronounced for poorer families, and especially families of color.”
President Biden and his administration may believe the economy was good. But Americans were feeling pain at the pump, in the grocery store, and in their wallets.

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Biden Statistics

Kerby Anderson
A week from now, Donald Trump will take office and the Biden presidency will end. Jeff Crouere put together a few statistics that puts some of the Biden presidency in perspective.
His legacy will last longer than his presidency since 235 federal judges have been confirmed while he was president. His total surpasses the total number of judicial confirmations during President Trump’s administration.
Congress also passed a bill that would have added additional judgeships to relieve some of the backlog in federal cases. Although the bill was passed by both houses of Congress, President Biden vetoed the bill, perhaps because Trump will now be in office and could nominate judges for those positions.
The totals on the economic front should concern all Americans. The Biden administration and Congress added an additional $8.5 trillion to the national debt. It now stands at $36.3 trillion, or over $323,000 per American taxpayer.
“Inflation and interest rates outpaced wage growth and families fell deeper into debt.” The average home is valued as 7.64 times “greater than median household income.”
According to a recent report from the House Committee on Homeland Security, 10.8 million illegal migrants entered this country from Fiscal Year 2021 through Fiscal Year 2024. And that number does not count the approximately 2 million who entered without encountering customs and border protection (the so-called “gotaways”).
This is the situation Donald Trump will inherit next week. I think it is fair to say that is not what the American people voted for four years ago and some of the reasons why they voted differently in 2024.

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Undo Gender Blending

Penna Dexter
Whenever there’s a new session of Congress, the House of Representatives adopts a new set of rules to govern the way it conducts business. Four years ago, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced, and the House passed, a resolution aimed at making all House rules “gender inclusive.”
The resolution expunged sex-specific words from House rules.
So where the terms “father” and “mother” had previously appeared in the House Code of Official Conduct, they were replaced with “parent.”  “Husband” and “wife” became “spouse.” ”Son” and “daughter” became “child.” And “brother” and “sister”: ”sibling.”
It really gets awkward: “Aunt” and “uncle” were replaced with “parent’s sibling” and “cousin” became “sibling’s child.” For in-laws, the terms are “parent-in-law”, “child-in-law” and “sibling-in-law.” The absurd list goes on. There’s even a section that eliminates all gendered terms.
To be clear, these changes only affected the rules document and do not prevent the House members from using gendered language in floor speeches or legislation. But this hat tip to the far Left’s desire to eliminate every distinction between the sexes is silly and just makes it harder to communicate clearly.
This ridiculous action by the 117th Congress should have been reversed two years ago by the 118th Congress, But, with extended wrangling over who would be speaker, this crucial task was skipped
The Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed by Washington attorney Eileen O’Connor calling on members to now complete what she calls “The House’s Unfinished Gender Business,” and restore the “pre-117th Congress’s language.”
That language, Ms. O’Connor argues, is the opposite of gender inclusive. “It denies the existence of the sexes and the words used to describe their relationships to each other.”
She writes, “When even elected officials can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the basic facts of life, it is no wonder the rest of society loses its nerve as well.”  The House should restore clarity to its rules and eschew all gender-blending nonsense.

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Ending Censorship

Kerby Anderson
We have learned over the last few years how the government and various media outlets have engaged in systematic censorship. It is one thing to talk about the problem of censorship. It is quite another to do something about it. A recent commentary by Katelynn Richardson provides a glimpse into what the incoming Trump administration plans to do about censorship.
Andrew Ferguson has been nominated by Trump as the new Federal Trade Commission chair. He said in a recent interview that Trump can cut off some censorship outright by prohibiting officials from participating with platforms and by cutting off funding for entitles that suppress speech.
Brennan Carr will head the FCC and has addressed concerns about censorship. In one of his interviews, he explained that one of his top priorities would be to “smash this censorship cartel.”
Harmeet Dhillon has been nominated to run the DOJ’s civil rights division. She worked with her firm on a case challenging the California Secretary of State’s Office coordination with Twitter to suppress speech.
Even Trump appointees who aren’t working directly on free speech will likely have an impact. Trump’s nominee for NIH is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration that challenged COVID-19 lockdowns and responses. And HHS nominee Robert F. Kennedy filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration for alleged First Amendment violations.
Of course, much of the fight against censorship will come from Donald Trump himself. In one campaign video he promised to “shatter the left-wing censorship regime.” He will likely sign an executive order banning agencies from collaborating with social media to suppress speech.
This is good news for free speech in America.

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