They can be won, as James Brooke suggests in the The Sun:
In the latest sign of a rightward swing of the pendulum in Latin America, voters in Ecuador opted overwhelmingly for tough anti-crime measures, including joint army and police patrols against cocaine gangs.
Ecuador is only one example.
This reminder does not mean the border does not need to be brought to order or that the Democrats’ illegal immigration flood should be absorbed in entirety. It also does not mean Republicans should try to win immigrants’ support the same way Democrats do: by pandering to them and trying to win their votes.
Rather, Republicans should put in the effort to craft a genuine and coherent set of policies with positions many immigrants will find attractive. Furthermore, they should not dehumanize immigrants, as Democrats do when they instrumentalize and infantilize them. Rather, even when policies involve options for deportation, the humanity of people seeking a better life should never be forgotten.
Too often we lose the debate to progressives when we accept their emotionalist intellectual shortcut. The fact that somebody is deserving of compassion does not mean the appropriate actions of others is obvious. The success of the West is premised on trying to bring people into the fold and to offer them a path toward mutually beneficial relationships. Keep that always in mind.
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This has become a focus of the Providence Journal’s city reporter:
What stories is Russo not covering because she’s spending so much time on this one? Why is a personnel matter at a private organization newsworthy?
As for the content, it finally provides some explanation for a mythical cliché. I’ve never understood the rule that you had to invite a vampire into your house. The rule applies well to DEI “professionals.” Once you let them in, they’ve got you. That is the critical decision point.
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With that perspective, I’d suggest that America works better when voters put the adults in charge but then laugh at them through media and entertainment. Once, adults could be of either party, but they became increasingly of the Republican variety. Unfortunately, voters’ frustration with the inability to return to adult policies is loosening that rule, too.
That said, what we need above all is a division between government and social and cultural institutions. That means electing problematic Republicans so the media can come closer to fulfilling a healthy role, rather than acting as propaganda organs for problematic Democrats.
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That’s why, although I agree with Jordan, here, I think he’s a step away from the key point:
We must reframe. A libertarian lean is correct, but valorizing success won’t work. The impulse to identify with the oppressed has to be changed to wanting to help people, to make THEM successful. It’s the principle at the intersection of Christianity and free markets.
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This exchange between CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr has made the rounds and received its share of commentary:
To my mind, the most telling part is when Collins looks for a comparison among conservatives to progressive bureaucratic government impositions and points to a local library debate. What Barr should have asked is: “Do you think you’ll have a better chance changing policies you don’t like in your hometown or in Washington, D.C.?”
The notion that different activities are appropriate at different levels of government is too often glossed over, and it’s central to our civic system. Arguably among the biggest contributors to growing division is the sense that progress means political questions are answered at higher and higher levels. In that view, it’s great if your local library board promotes your beliefs, but it’s even better if the federal government does, because it affects more people. That isn’t the pluralistic ideal of self-governance on which our country was founded.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- A picture of McKee traffic unseen
- Details of McKee’s plan proclaimed but not provided
- Superman bills yet to come
- Differentials in campaign announcement coverage
- The unions’ “captive audience”
- The DEI vampires on campuses
- State Police catch sight of Cranston politics
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop.
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The concept of triangulation used to mean politicians looked at the political landscape and positioned themselves on the field to advance their policy goals. The worsening development, facilitated by mass media and social media, is the attempt to manipulate the landscape. That’s where we start to think of the Overton Window, shifting the range of positions people think are acceptable, and it’s what we see here:
I think Jonah misunderstands (or pretends to misunderstand) what’s going on, here. Democrats (among whom I count the mainstream media) promoted Trump and are doing everything they can to paint him as a monster because the worse they make him out to be the worse they can be. That’s why Barr is right that, in a binary decision, Trump is preferable, and not seeing it may be why Jonah has taken his wise reservations about Trump so far as to be an error.
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And they’re both artificial thresholds created by interventionist policies. realEstateTrent makes a great point, here:
Progressive policies, which shift decision-making to the blunt tool of government, create these unhealthy thresholds everywhere. People stay on the public dole because they’d have to earn so much money for a job to be worthwhile that no job for which they’re qualified will suffice. They stay in houses that aren’t a good fit because the current arrangement is so sweet that the incremental benefit of a change is too small.
In a healthy system, you want to reduce friction from one step to the next and match effort (or risk) to reward so parties have continual incentive to improve. This is so obvious to anybody who thinks about it that one has to conclude the goal of those progressives who think about it is to stifle improvement for their own benefit.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.
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One suspects mainstream journalists don’t see this as a problem because they can’t imagine reporting any differently just because the governments they support are directly paying them money:
And realistically, we’re finding in Rhode Island that government PR is such a lucrative next step for journalists that it’s more a question of whether they work for government sooner or later in their careers.
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Catching up on email, I came across this October article from the American Stewards of Liberty about a federal push for conservation areas:
The Service is planning to acquire 250,000 acres of private land in the new federally designated area by offering “voluntary” conservation easements in perpetuity to landowners. Those who do not want to be a part of the program may not escape being targeted. The Service and its environmental organization partners have priority acquisitions in mind. And the agency has an array of regulations and restrictions they can deploy to encourage compliance.
The plan will allow the Service to use Land and Water Conservation Funds to purchase conservation easements in perpetuity on the private lands. Congress appropriates $900 million annually for this purpose as well as for direct acquisition of private lands. Property rights advocates would like to see this funding permanently rescinded as the government already owns 40 percent of America. These funds allow them to gain control over the remaining private lands.
Reviewing the above article, a friend reminded me that Tiverton gives a substantial portion of one of its revenue streams to an agency to buy up land. Some years ago, voters passed a budget resolution reducing the percentage to 10%, but (oops!) the town treasurer neglected to change the payment.
Out of curiosity, I went in search of data about public land ownership, finding this useful interactive tool. Probably because it was so well established by the time government began its land-grabbing practices, our region has largely escaped federal purchases, but public ownership still ads up. According to the associated charts, federal, state, and local governments own 13% of all land in Rhode Island, ranging from 16% in Washington County to just 8% in Bristol County.
That isn’t the whole story, though. In my county (Newport), 5% of privately owned land is locked up in conservation easements. That’s 3,196 acres. In Providence County, this number is 5,158 acres. Statewide, 113,151 acres are either owned by government or locked up in conservation easements. That land could accommodate a huge number of homes and apartments.
I’m definitely not suggesting Rhode Island should wipe away all of its open space, but with all the noise about housing, it’s strange one never hears about these numbers. The implied reason is familiar: The call to “fix” the housing crisis comes with sharp boundaries. Just like we have to “fix” education without reconsidering labor unions or progressive social engineering, we have to “fix” housing without noticing that governments are taking land off the market and making it difficult to build in other ways.
In these heavily proscribed prescriptions, we see the origin of the divisive us-versus-them corrupting our politics. People who want the power to tell other people how to live need the focus always to be on how much more the “haves” can give up, implying that they’re holding out and oppressing everybody else out of greed.
More likely than not, when they have control, the powerful will claim for themselves nice homes surrounded by open space and private views that can never be changed by the peasantry.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop.
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