Category: Government

  • By Selwyn Duke “A man’s home is his castle.” Or, that’s how it’s supposed to be, anyway. Is it really the case, though, when government can breach the castle walls with property-appraisal increases anytime it pleases? Whose castle is it when you’re essentially paying rent to the government? Whose is it when, if you can’t…

  • By Selwyn Duke “All animals are equally cool,” famously wrote George Orwell, “but some animals are more equally cool than others.” OK, he didn’t quite say that. But updating his line for the 2020s may be appropriate given the newly heating up air-conditioning wars. That is, first we had a French leader blaming American AC…

  • By Selwyn Duke Here’s an interesting fact: Yearly, more people die from heat-related causes in Europe than from gunshots in the U.S. (The firearms data include suicides, too.) And this reality is on full display currently, with a recent heatwave having claimed 1,300 lives across Europe. This includes 1,000 excess deaths in France alone. Moreover,…

  • By Selwyn Duke For decades, there would be much talk among politicians about United States budget deficits (and the national debt). Yet this faded sometime after 2010, at the latest, after which our debt achieved elephant-in-the-room status. It’s perhaps just too scary or inconvenient — when you want or are promising free stuff — to discuss.…

  • By Selwyn Duke “Government is not the solution to our problem,” late GOP president Ronald Reagan famously said in 1981 — “government is the problem.” We don’t hear this much from today’s Republicans, however. On the other hand, then-Democratic President Bill Clinton proclaimed in January 1996, “The era of big government is over.” And we…

  • By Selwyn Duke “My skin literally crawled,” said the shocked New York City Council member in early January. What so shook Vickie Paladino, a rare Republican in the Big Apple Legislature, was a comment Mayor Zohran Mamdani made in his inaugural address. It was so eyebrow-raising, in fact, that an editor of mine at first…

  • By Selwyn Duke “Suppression is necessary because the bourgeoisie [middle class] will always furiously resist being expropriated.” So wrote Russian Revolution author Vladimir Lenin in 1918. Fast-forward exactly a century and this spirit not only lives on, but with a racial (and racist) spin. Just consider New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “tenant advocate” appointee…

  • By Selwyn Duke Here’s an interesting question for those claiming that anti-white bias, and anti-white-male bias in particular, is imaginary. Why do, as a 2021 study found, more than a third of white students claim racial-minority status on college applications? Is contagious masochism sweeping white America? The Donald Trump administration knows the answer, and its Equal Employment Opportunity…

  • By Selwyn Duke If you’ve watched the 1990 film Goodfellas, you may remember the segment where mob boss Paulie becomes a partner in a restaurant, then purposely bankrupts the place and torches it to collect insurance money. But the true story is far darker still. In reality, Paulie surreptitiously orchestrated the restaurateur’s difficulties in the first…

  • By Selwyn Duke “I know what the law is, but I think…” This statement, which an ex-litigator actually heard from a judge, epitomized a phenomenon she observed repeatedly. That is, she saw, as she puts it, “left-leaning judges make up the law as they went along.” As a litigator in the hard-left San Francisco Bay…