Vaccines mandates are driving vaccine hesitancy. I’ve noticed a sharp shift upwards in the intensity of rhetoric in opposition to the anti-covid vaccines from the grassroots since the Biden administration has started advocating various forms of government mandates. 

People don’t like being pushed around, and some people respond to federal government mandates by doubling down on their vaccine hesitancy.

The case against mandates is different from any possible case against voluntary vaccine usage. Conservatism has always made a very strong distinction between the state and the society. The state is top-down coercive power; society is built upon many millions of individual and family decisions. 

I decided to get vaccinated—not because the government told me to. My research led me to this decision. But no one should be forcing conservatives into groupthink for—or against—voluntary vaccinations. 

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Normally, the fights over the debt ceiling are little more than partisan sniping. The party in control of government doesn’t want all the blame for deficit spending, and the opposition doesn’t want any of it. The fight is usually as specious as the debt ceiling itself, an unconstitutional credit limit granted to the executive in the absence of fiscal discipline in Congress.

This time, however, the argument against a new debt ceiling has substance. Democrats want Republicans to cooperate in suspending the debt ceiling rather than raising it to a specific amount. With Joe Biden demanding trillions of dollars in new spending, GOP leaders have refused to support a blank check for the rest of the president’s term. Instead, Republican leaders have rightly told Democrats to pass a debt ceiling hike themselves, or to curtail their spending demands.

The debt ceiling is an absurd structure on its face. Ideally, Congress should take responsibility for spending and eliminate the ceiling. In this case, however, Republicans should absolutely stand firm and make Democrats take responsibility for their profligacy.

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Ever since abandoning Americans in Afghanistan, Joe Biden has undergone a sharp reassessment by voters—and the results are not pretty. Prior to August 8, not one single national poll tracked by Real Clear Politics put Biden’s job approval in negative territory. Since the last week of August, a full 15 of the 21 polls they’ve tracked show a majority of voters disapproving of the president’s performance.

Gallup’s latest poll has Biden ten points underwater— disapproving 53 to 43. In June, 55 percent of independents supported the president. That number is now at 37 percent.

Voters may not be the only ones reassessing Biden as chief executive. After spending the summer ignoring the border crisis, the media has suddenly showered it with attention, Democrats in Congress—and even the NAACP  have lashed out at Biden.

The sudden focus on Biden’s incompetence suggests the administration has reached a tipping point. Let’s hope so. It’s long past time that the president is held accountable for his failures.

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“How much is a little girl’s life worth?” Simone Biles asked at a Senate hearing last week, after a scathing report on the FBI’s investigation into former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar.

The FBI initially ignored the allegations about Nassar. He was eventually sentenced to over 300 years in prison in 2018 for allegedly molesting more than 330 women and girls.

Even as the FBI delayed following up on the accusations, Nassar continued the assaults. When agents on the case were confronted with their lack of action on the Nassar matter, they lied.

Even worse, it turns out one of the agents had been discussing a job with the Olympics Committee with USA Gymnastics. Yet that agent has been allowed to retire with his federal pension intact.

It’s another verse in the same old song: Washington elites escape accountability for behavior that would be very costly for people outside the Beltway. It’s a corrupt status quo that cannot stand.

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We are at a great moment of disclosure within the American conservative movement. The catalyst for this moment is the law on abortion that recently went into effect in Texas. It’s a law that basically outlaws abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

The passing of this law has revealed things we had not seen so clearly before.

Key voices who have—over the years—claimed a conservative and pro-life identity now argue that the pro-life movement has gone too far in seeking to use the law to prevent an actual abortion.

The rest of us thought that was at least in part what the pro-life movement was actually about and willing to do.

Let me just say this bluntly: A person is not morally serious about something like the sanctity of human life until and unless they are willing to use the power of the law in order to preserve unborn human life.

The Texas law may be controversial. It may actually be inelegant. But that law is crucially important … especially for those of us who really believe the defense of human life is what is at stake.

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Our nation is going to have to own our complicity in Afghanistan.

Our precipitous exit and the mess we’ve left behind will haunt our conscience as a nation for a generation. Every horror story—and they will keep coming—is partly the result of our decision to bug out. 

President Biden’s arbitrary deadline and his false proclamations of a heroic airlift effort?—well they ought to garner the most shame. But our greatest sin is to have left without first overseeing an exodus to those who were desperate to run from a barbaric theocracy. 

We are a nation of some 330 million. We are large enough, our allies numerous enough, that we could have saved tens of thousands more. We simply chose not to do so. 

That shame is on us.

We cannot come to grips with what we have wrought by erasing those who were left behind. We cannot simply “move on” from our complicity.

We promised so much more. Afghans relied on so much more. Then we got tired and left. It is that simple.

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The New York Fed just announced that consumer fear of inflation is up yet again. For ten consecutive months now, consumers have expressed their growing concern and expectation of rising consumer prices. Inflation expectations are now at an all-time high of 5.2 percent. That’s about twice the rate that we’ve gotten used to. 

We all know who inflation hurts: the poor who spend a higher proportion of their income on necessities of life; retirees on a fixed income; savers who are getting almost zero on their savings accounts while price hikes cannibalize their purchasing power. But we seldom ask: “Who does inflation help?” 

Answer: the ruling class, the elites—both the government branch and the financial branch. Monetary expansion allows the government to continue spending and those who get the money first are the biggest winners. 

Inflation is bad for the country in general, but like other crony economics, somebody benefits, otherwise no one would be pushing for it. 

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The Biden administration—in its handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal—has made a mockery of any claim to be “pro-woman.” They embarrassed themselves by their unserious critique of the new Taliban-led government for its failure to include women.
 
No doubt Afghan women wish their biggest worry was being denied the chance to serve in government. The Taliban has already set one woman on fire for bad cooking; they beat another to death for refusing to cook for them.
 
And the last time the Taliban held power, women were denied basic rights—including leaving home without a male chaperone, education, and work. Women were beaten for attempting to study, whipped for showing even an inch of skin under their full-body burqas, and stoned to death for adultery.
 
The Biden administration’s virtue signaling about female representation in a Taliban government fools no one. They’ve abandoned the women of Afghanistan as completely as they did the Americans who remain trapped there.
 
Shame on them.

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President Biden has announced a sweeping COVID-19 vaccination mandate that will cover something close to 100 million Americans.

The announcement came late in the day on Thursday of last week, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of 9/11—and thus missing most of the week’s news cycle. That was intentional.

Now, let me be candid: I’ve received the Covid-19 vaccine. I’m generally pro-vaccine. But the question about the vaccine has to be separated from a vaccine mandate. 

A legal mandate—by definition—is a coercive act. 

You can count on the fact that the courts are going to be dealing with this and dealing with it very quickly. 

If this kind of mandate can be handed down on this kind of authority by a president under these conditions, under what other conditions could a president hand down mandates entering into the private lives of American citizens and the private organizations of American business and institutions? 

If the president can do this, what can the president not do?

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Vaccines mandates are driving vaccine hesitancy. I’ve noticed a sharp shift upwards in the intensity of rhetoric in opposition to the anti-covid vaccines from the grassroots since the Biden administration has started advocating various forms of government mandates.

People don’t like being pushed around, and some people respond to federal government mandates by doubling down on their vaccine hesitancy.

The case against mandates is different from any possible case against voluntary vaccine usage. Conservatism has always made a very strong distinction between the state and the society. The state is top-down coercive power; society is built upon many millions of individual and family decisions.

I decided to get vaccinated—not because the government told me to. My research led me to this decision. But no one should be forcing conservatives into groupthink for—or against—voluntary vaccinations.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.