(no title)

Better Than Drudge

about

November 8, 2025

Equality, That Bold Lie? Or Inequality, That Beautiful Default?

By Selwyn Duke

“Equality is unfair!” proclaimed TV curmudgeon Archie Bunker in a 1974 All in the Family episode. “What’s the point of a man working hard all of his life trying to get someplace,” he bellowed, gesticulating wildly, “if all he’s going to do is wind up equal?!”

It was a hilarious scene and line and, as always, Archie’s argumentation left something to be desired. Ironically, though, his understanding of equality still might’ve surpassed that of our radical egalitarians.

After all, the latter act as if “equality,” per se, is a somehow meaningful measure. But imagine this:

You bring your child to a doctor for a check-up. Upon its conclusion you ask, “How is he?”

“Oh, good news,” replies the physician. “Your boy’s health is equal to that of all the other kids I treated today.”

Would you be reassured by this answer? I mean, the doc might’ve spent that morning working in a pediatric cancer ward.

Seem ridiculous? Well, consider that so much commentary today presupposes that achieving a state of outcome equality would somehow be beneficial.
(more…)
November 7, 2025

In Power, Will Mamdani Be Socialist — or Sly?

By Selwyn Duke

Escape from New York is the name of a 1981 film. Now it’s also, many fear, going to be a reality with Mayor-elect Zohran Kwame Mamdani’s impending socialist makeover of NYC. Why, commentator Bill O’Reilly has predicted that his ascendancy will spark an exodus of 765,000-one million Big Apple residents. This, of course, would involve the loss of significant capital.

Yet this is all predicated on the idea that Mamdani’s promises reflect principles more than positions of convenience. And while he is a radical, he’s also a power seeker who surely aspires to higher office. So questions arise:

Will Mamdani go the full socialist monty and risk crashing NYC?

Or will he, being the consummate politician he was on the campaign trail, practice some Machiavellian moderation?
(more…)
November 6, 2025

Stopping the Bleeding: Time for a Moratorium on Immigration?

By Selwyn Duke

“The definition of insanity,” the apocryphal saying goes, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Is there an exception to this rule? Or does it apply to everything, including immigration?

Writing at Fox News, Nate Morris has his answer: There must be a moratorium on immigration, he insists — stat.

Furthermore, he essentially states, yesterday’s election results help illustrate why.

Unfortunately for Morris, however, he’s walking up the down staircase of immigrationism. Immigrationism, do note, is this:

the doctrine that immigration is always good, always necessary, must never be questioned, and must be the one constant in an ever-changing universe of policy.

It’s also a fashions-forged mind chain that shackles thinking.
(more…)
November 5, 2025

Migrant-Youth Crime Exploding in Various European Countries (Yet Some Won’t Prosecute Under-15s)

By Selwyn Duke

After evaluating 45,000 youths, an interesting study out of Germany found that with increasing religiosity, Christian teens became less violent. The research also found, however, that with increasing religiosity, Muslim teens became more violent. That was back in 2010. Now, 15 years later, another study in Germany finds that violence among migrant children is exploding. Meanwhile, native German youth are actually becoming more peaceful.

(If the Morlocks and Eloi come to mind for you here, you’re not alone. You’re also probably over 45 [if you’d make that association].)

Of course, none of this means the German kinder are “Christian,” except in name (secularism reigns in today’s Western Europe). Nor does it mean all the criminal migrant youths are Muslim, though an inordinate percentage would be. Germany isn’t alone, either, as some other nations are also experiencing this fruit of diversity. Why, some migrant children are “waging war” in Norway, with two 13-year-olds having hurled grenades at a storefront in September. The kicker:
(more…)
November 5, 2025

Almost a Republican Sweep Last Night—if Only Men Voted

By Selwyn Duke

It’s called the “gender gap” (should be “sex gap,” really) in voting, and, boy, did it ever manifest itself last night. In fact, Tuesday, November 4 was a great day for the GOP.

That is, in an alternate universe in which only men vote.

Let’s go down the list. In Virginia there were three major races, and men broke Republican in all of them. They went for Winsome Earle-Sears for governor (all figures represent percentages), 53-47; John Reid for lieutenant governor, 55-44; and Jason Miyares for attorney general, 57-42.

Meanwhile, in the upside-down, women broke Democrat in all three races by even wider margins. They supported Abigail Spanberger for governor, 64-36; Ghazala Hashmi for lieutenant governor, 62-38; and mad texter Jay Jones for attorney general 58-41.
(more…)
November 4, 2025

Beyond the Cotton Field: How “Racist” Was Pre-Civil-Rights-Era America, Really?

By Selwyn Duke

The story of George Franklin Grant, a dentist, academic and recreational golfer, is interesting. This isn’t just because he, a Harvard professor, invented a wood-composite golf tee in 1899. It’s that under many Americans’ conception of history, he shouldn’t even have existed. You see, Grant was a successful black man in the U.S. almost 100 years before the civil-rights era or affirmative action’s birth.

Yes, you read that right. Grant was admitted to Harvard Dental School in 1868 and then became Harvard University’s first black faculty member in 1871.

Grant wasn’t alone, either (except in his golf-invention exploits). By 1920, there were 3,560 black physicians in America, a figure including 65 black women. While this didn’t represent “proportionality” — blacks were 10 percent of the U.S. at the time — it did constitute 2.5 percent of the total number of American physicians. Not bad in a country supposedly so “white supremacist” that blacks were surely relegated at the time to cotton-fields toil. (Black youths may want to ponder this, too, when believing they “just can’t make it” in 2025 because the “man” is keeping them down.)

Many wouldn’t guess black Americans enjoyed such success a century or more ago, indoctrinated as they are with Howard Zinn-esque revisionist history. In fact, while I was hardly a politically correct youth (we didn’t use the word “woke” back then), I myself was surprised when getting a glimpse into actual American history.
(more…)
November 2, 2025

That Delicate Thing, the Rule of Law, Is Dying. Who Is Killing It?

By Selwyn Duke

As with representative government, the “rule of law” has been an anomaly on the world scene, historically speaking. The Romans had it; in fact, they essentially gave us the concept of the rule of law. It is the norm today, too, in the lands they most influenced, those of the modern West. But with the default for man being the rule of men, there’s ever the threat of regression to the mean or “behavioral relapse.”

Enter 21st-century America, where the rule of law has been eroding notably.
(more…)
November 1, 2025

Etiology of an Ideology: An Examination of Trump Hatred

By Selwyn Duke

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” This paraphrase of G.K. Chesterton could come to mind when pondering now notorious TDS — Trump Derangement Syndrome. A bizarre phenomenon affecting millions, it yields an irrational hatred for the president that dwarfs hostility other politicians have faced. Why, Democratic officials themselves are so overcome with it (by appearances) that they rarely express love for what’s behind them. That is, they almost never articulate policy ideas now. It’s just attacking one man, Donald J. Trump, viciously and unrelentingly, assassinating his character while sometimes hoping to assassinate him.

Oh, it’s not that spewing hate is new for the Left. Liberals despised President Ronald Reagan, calling him “Ronald Ray-gun.” (Now they may co-opt his memory, claiming “Reagan would neeever approve of today’s Republicans!”) Likewise it was with George W. Bush, who was sometimes portrayed as a monkey. And both men were labeled stupid. Then there were the vicious attacks on anti-communist crusader Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.), impugned as a lying, drunken, unstable man. Yet if these were conventional attacks, with Trump the Left has gone nuclear. What explains this unprecedented rage?
(more…)
October 31, 2025

Radical Atheists (and Others) Sue Over Religious Statues — in State Founded by Puritans

By Selwyn Duke

“Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion,” observed G.K. Chesterton in 1935. “In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.”

This could come to mind hearing about yet another “separation of church and state” lawsuit. This time the issue involves Catholic statues being erected in Quincy, a Massachusetts city. Far from the Bay State’s Puritan roots, too, the plaintiffs aren’t Calvinist Protestants objecting to Catholic imagery in particular. Rather, involved are the usual suspects: anti-theists and others who, Chesterton might say, too often believe that hardly anybody is allowed to mention religion at all.
(more…)
October 30, 2025

Professor: SCOTUS Saying “Bye-bye, Living Constitution; Hello, Originalism”

By Selwyn Duke

It has essentially been said that you can have a living Constitution or a surviving Republic.

But you can’t have both.

And, a University of Tennessee civics expert states in so many words, today’s Supreme Court will increasingly choose civilizational survival.

This means that a majority of the Court rejects the “living document” notion. (Generally marketed via the euphemistic label “pragmatism.”) This holds that the Constitution can be interpreted based on “what’s best for society” — according to judges, of course.

Related and unsaid: People will speak of the various legal-philosophy “isms.” Thus may we hear of jurists who are constructionists, structuralists, legal realists, consequentialists, purposivists, and pragmatists, among other things. In reality, though, there are only two kinds of judges: good judges and bad judges.
(more…)