Some things have become clear to me.
• That we will never effectively secure our border as long as one of our two major political parties (guess which?) continues to see a future electoral gold mine in the flow of illegals across it.
• That Twitter encourages hyper-polarization, incivility, and shallow thought. It doesn't represent the views of ordinary Americans, but the mass media for some reason thinks it does.
Get off Twitter, and the creepy "Twitter mob" loses its power.
• That we are scraping the bottom of the barrel with Bernie Sanders' proposal that felons should be allowed to vote from prison.
And what kind of candidates would the jailbirds vote for? Presumably candidates who want to allow jailbirds to vote. Like Bernie.
When you're building a constituency featuring the Unabomber and Son of Sam, it's hard to go any lower.
• That government providing free stuff always polls well, at least until voters grasp that it isn't really free and that they will be paying for it.
• Taxing the rich more also always polls well. Because the rich are always other people.
• That there is something wrong with liberals who court an obvious scoundrel like Al Sharpton (as Democratic presidential candidates recently did at his so-called National Action Network confab) but condemn the Salvation Army and anyone in a Chick-fil-A drive-through.
• That the Democrats' innocuous-sounding "For the People Act" would turn our understanding of the First Amendment upside down--whereas the founders sought to prevent tyranny by protecting speech critical of government, the Democrats' proposal would allow government to regulate speech about government.
• That whenever socialism fails, it wasn't true socialism. So socialism, despite being tried in dozens of places in diverse regions over time, has never really been tried and thus becomes effectively immunized against failure.
So we will get Venezuela over and over again in a testament to the inability of human beings to learn from experience.
• That it was amusing to watch Democrats endorse the absurd "Green New Deal" and then scream foul when a vote was actually held on it in the Senate, with none of them willing to vote "yes."
It's easy to express rhetorical support for sanctimonious fluff, but another matter altogether when you have to go on record.
• That Donald Trump's proposal to dump illegals in "sanctuary" cities is both logistically impractical and legally dubious, but a political masterstroke nonetheless--if you engage in trendy "virtue signaling" (as the mayors of sanctuary cities are so obviously doing), and flout the nation's immigration laws, then you should have the courage of your convictions and be willing to accept the consequences, which in this case would be having to find a way to house and pay for all the illegals you have so irresponsibly welcomed to your home.
• That Jussie Smollett staged the fake attack upon himself because he knew that our "woke" media would fall for it hook, line and sinker. Because it so neatly fit their narrative of a racist America in the age of Trump.
• That criticizing Rep. Ilhan Omar for her persistent anti-Semitic remarks doesn't constitute suppression of her right to free speech. It represents its exercise by others.
• That the crisis of free speech on our college campuses stems from the bizarre belief that the expression of contrary opinions somehow constitutes a form of "violence" and makes students feel "unsafe."
But no one should have their right to speech suppressed because others disagree with what they are saying, and no one has a right to be "protected" from disagreeable speech. And isn't it precisely the point of college to be exposed to views other than those you already hold?
• That capitalism is essentially the default economic arrangement of a free people--I'll mow your lawn for you if you agree to pay me enough to do it.
Capitalism thus leaves us free to work, buy, sell and save as we please; to, in essence, pursue our vision of the good life. Socialism, in contrast, represents the imposition upon us of someone else's vision.
• College students who have embraced socialism do so only up to a point, with that point usually being when you propose to use "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" to allocate their grades.
• That were the Democratic candidate in 2020 to lose the popular vote but win the electoral college, the left would acquire a new appreciation for the supposedly archaic, undemocratic institution. And the Republicans would begin to speak ill of it.
• That there are no limits to Elizabeth Warren's pandering. As her campaign sputters, her latest ploy is loan forgiveness for college students; who would then presumably express their appreciation for her generosity at the ballot box. It is to be paid for ... you guessed it--by more taxes on the "rich" (her "ultra-millionaire tax").
As one pundit nicely put it, "Elizabeth Warren wants to pay off your student loans with other people's money."
• That in the wake of the Mueller Report, we can conclude that Trump is a legitimate president (in the sense of not having colluded with the Russians to get elected).
And an even more unscrupulous creep than we thought.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 04/29/2019