By Selwyn Duke

Perhaps he could have known the word would be seized upon. After all, with the term’s opposite, “diversity,” being treated by so many today as a theological principle bestowed from on high, it’s not surprising that using the concept of “conformity” to defend an action would invite scorn. But perhaps this raises the question:

Which term has now has taken on the flavor of a false religion and heresy?

The case at issue involves Texas official Greg Poole, the Barbers Hill Independent School District (BHISD) superintendent, and a black teen who the district says is violating its hairstyle policy.

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By Selwyn Duke

“The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote. “The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” In this sense, a school board in Pennsylvania has ceased being conservative — and delivered a blow against progressivism — by reinstating its district’s Indian mascot a mere month after five new members were elected to the board by campaigning on that very issue.

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By Selwyn Duke

When legendary wrestler Andre the Giant played in movies, he never complained about being limited to portraying, well, giants (he got to play Sasquatch, too). When you’re 7’2” and 500 pounds, after all, you’re not going to be cast as the jockey in Seabiscuit. Today, though, in a time in which identity is fancied reality, it’s increasingly common to hear that the obviously disabled shouldn’t be limited in the roles they play.

This perspective was heard just Sunday, in fact, from British actor Adam Pearson, who stars in a new movie and Sundance Film Festival hit titled A Different Man. Pearson, who’s 39 and suffers from a rare, sometimes severely disfiguring genetic condition called neurofibromatosis, made his comments while speaking to Variety.

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By Selwyn Duke

“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians,” wrote Professor Thomas Sowell in 1986, “who must be civilized before it is too late.” This civilization process’ absence is most obvious where the family has most broken down: the black community. The schools are only exacerbating this problem, too, warns an ex-government-school history teacher and whistleblower.

In fact, says Frank McCormick in a viral X post, schools are creating “walking powder kegs.”

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By Selwyn Duke

Are we truly a nation of, by, and for the people, as Lincoln put it, if our elected representatives aren’t the ones actually making the decisions affecting our lives? For a long time they haven’t been making many of those decisions, too, having essentially “outsourced” them to judges and bureaucrats. But two cases currently before the Supreme Court could help remedy this problem and force Congress to do its job — and could restore power to the people.

The two cases are Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Commerce. And what instigated them well illustrates the perils of letting unelected officials, whose unelected status places them beyond the people’s corrective reach, issue life-altering regulations.

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By Selwyn Duke

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” philosopher C.S. Lewis famously wrote. “It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”

Our busybodies are neither omnipotent nor moral, though they crave to be the former and fancy themselves the latter. But they sure do want to control us — for our own good, of course.

Though this phenomenon is confined to the West, it is West-wide because, as the Africans might say, at issue are “First World problems.” And the latest example is a story out of Britain titled “An alcohol ban is beginning to look inevitable.”

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By Selwyn Duke

The men who crafted the First Amendment, the giants who birthed the Establishment Clause, opened the very first U.S. Congress in 1789 with exclusively Christian prayers. This practice continues to this day, too — and the prayers are still mainly Christian. So clearly, the Constitution does not dictate that A, “religion must be kept out of government”; or B, if it is there, that “all ‘religions’ must be given equal time.”

This hasn’t stopped local governments, however, from supposing that public-sphere religious displays/expression must sometimes make room for “Festivus,” the “Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster,” and other conceptions of “religion” — including satanism. An example of rolling out a red carpet for the Devil just occurred earlier this week, too, in Nevada. And the fact that some government official thought it necessary means that he, like so many today, perhaps misses a simple point. As I wrote last month:

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By Selwyn Duke

One generally unmentioned reason prices are so high is that government taxation and regulation increase businesses’ costs, which then are handed down to consumers. A prime example is a regulation dictating that not only must a herring fishing vessel have a federal monitor aboard, but that its owner also must pay the cost of the observer, which reportedly can be $710 a day (this requirement is currently before the Supreme Court). And now there’s another example:

The Emperor Has Your Clothes — in the crosshairs — and aims to regulate their makers and sellers, supposedly to combat “global warming.”

What’s more, this is apparently based on a lie that the fashion industry pollutes more than it does.

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By Selwyn Duke

“I think there is a lot of voter fraud,” said one Alan Schulkin, caught on hidden video in 2016. Schulkin should know, too: A Democrat, he was at the time New York City’s commissioner of the Board of Elections.

Unfortunately, little has changed for the better since 2016. A case in point is a recent investigation by two experts that has found massive voter-database irregularities in another Democrat-run state: Illinois.

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