I wrote last week about the collapse of the Soviet Union as result of the strength, moral clarity and leadership of President Ronald Reagan.
I quoted Reagan&#8217;s observation that the ultimate battle we fight, around the world and at home, is one of good and evil.
This battle never ends. Evil always seeks to advance, constantly in search of the retreat of the presence of good, as it seeks opportunities for expansion.
There simply is no other way to understand the horrible realities we confront today.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is an evil man. A murderer and a thief. He chose to advance his outrageous and murderous agenda because he understood that opposite him in the world stood weakness and moral relativism, not strength and moral clarity.
While Putin utilizes Russia&#8217;s prodigious production of oil and gas as a major weapon in his war of aggression, the Biden administration is fighting its own war against America&#8217;s oil and gas industry.
I wrote recently about Biden&#8217;s nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin to be vice chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Raskin is a leading voice to shut down America&#8217;s oil and gas industry, which she called &#8220;a dying industry.&#8221;
Under President Donald Trump, America&#8217;s oil and gas industry was booming. However, President Joe Biden has reversed everything.
The Biden administration returned the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change, from which Trump withdrew.
Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline that would have delivered 830,000 barrels per day of Canadian crude oil to the United States.
And the Biden administration has committed to blocking any new oil and gas development on federal lands. One of the first victims has been suspending oil and gas leasing in Alaska&#8217;s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Now, as Americans see prices at the gas pump skyrocketing, and as Biden and Democrats worry about the fallout of this in an election year, the Biden administration is turning hat-in-hand for supplies to socialist despot Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, who ruined his own country and was sanctioned by Trump.
Biden also is turning to Gulf producers Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to increase production.
Aside from the rocky relations we now have with Saudi Arabia as the result of misguided Biden diplomacy, the Saudis and Emiratis are concerned, as The Wall Street Journal points out, about alienating the Russians, who now are a force in the Middle East.
How is it that the Russians have become power brokers in the Middle East?
Israeli leader and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky writes in The Wall Street Journal that the Russians stepped in as a force in the Middle East to fill a strategic vacuum left when the Obama administration, of which our current president was a part, chose to ignore its threat to stand against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad&#8217;s use of chemical weapons against his own citizens. Then the Obama administration followed up with its ill-conceived nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump pulled out of and now the Biden administration is working to renew.
Iran poses a threat to Gulf oil producers such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE and also to Israel, which it threatens to destroy.
Sharansky notes that after Obama&#8217;s retreat, the Russians set up a military base in Syria and now broker its air space. Israel is dependent on Russian goodwill to allow them to counter Iranian aggression in Syria, a direct threat to their security.
Two seats on the board of American&#8217;s largest oil company, ExxonMobil, were gained last year by Wall Street climate change activists committed to transform the oil company to &#8220;clean&#8221; energy.
Among Wall Street climate change activists is Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the largest money manager in the world.
Perhaps our president and these billionaire leftists can explain their logic to the Ukrainian citizens now being murdered by Putin.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show &#8220;Cure America with Star Parker.&#8221; To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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Biden/Putin

PARKER: A Morally Weak Biden Invites Putin’s Advances

Joe Biden

Oil and Gas

Vladimir Putin

Regardless of what any American feels about what steps we should take in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin&#8217;s aggressive incursion into Ukraine, for sure most are appalled by what he has done.
As Putin moves to regain Russian control over nations that once were part of the Soviet sphere, we ought to think about the circumstances under which the Soviet Union collapsed to consider how it all might be reversed.
In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan spoke to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, and delivered what would famously become known as the speech in which he called the Soviet Union the &#8220;evil empire.&#8221;
Discussing America&#8217;s efforts to confront the Soviet Union&#8217;s nuclear arsenal, he said: &#8220;I urge you to beware the temptation of pride &#8230; declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire &#8230; and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.&#8221;
Reagan spoke more than powerful words of truth that day. He spoke almost as a prophet.
He noted further: &#8220;While America&#8217;s military strength is important, let me add here that I&#8217;ve always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.&#8221;
Some eight years later, the Soviet Union, which for years during the Cold War was thought to be the superpower rival to the United States, collapsed. There was no war. There was just resolve and Reagan&#8217;s unwavering commitment to the principles he articulated that day in 1983.
And eight years after that speech, in 1991, Ukraine, now under siege by Putin, was freed from subjugation under the Soviet regime and declared its freedom, independence and sovereignty.
As Putin tries to reverse history, it is upon us to not forget that Reagan declared the global struggle as first and foremost a spiritual struggle, a struggle of good against evil.
As Americans watch events unfold in Ukraine, we must refocus on what is going on in our own country. If we lose a sense of the importance and relevance of Reagan&#8217;s words as they apply at home, we surely will not know how to relate to events as they transpire in the rest of the world.
And there is plenty of reason to believe we are losing that perspective at home.
We see a direct correlation within our own borders, in our own country, of the decline in faith in the eternal principles that keep us free, and with this decline, Americans are gradually but decisively choosing to abandon their freedom.
In a survey published at the end of last year, Gallup reported that 69% of Americans self-identified as Christians in 2021, compared with 90% who self-identified as Christians in 1971. Twenty-one percent said they have &#8220;no religion&#8221; in 2021, compared to 4% in 1971.
In 1965, 70% of Americans said religion is &#8220;very important&#8221; to them. By 2021, this was down to 49%.
Coincident with the decline of the importance that Americans give to religion, Americans have turned their lives increasingly over to government control.
In 1950, government at federal, state and local levels took almost 23% of the American economy. In 2020, this reached almost 45%.
Turning back again to Reagan&#8217;s words, &#8220;But we must never forget that no government schemes are going to perfect man.&#8221; Our struggle, said Reagan, is about good and evil.
It&#8217;s no accident that as America retreats in this struggle, as Americans increasingly believe that government can perfect man and as we relinquish our freedom, that despots like Putin will step forward and try to move the world back to a darker time.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show &#8220;Cure America with Star Parker.&#8221; To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Putin

PARKER: Return Of The ‘Evil Empire’

Russia

Ukraine

A new report from Pew Research shows that the sharpest drop in approval for President Joe Biden is among the Democratic Party&#8217;s most loyal and consistent supporters — Black protestants.
In March 2021, shortly after he took office, Biden&#8217;s support among Black protestants stood at 92%. By January 2022, this was down to 65%, a drop of 27 points.
Over the same period, overall national approval for the president, per Gallup, was down from 54% to 40% — 14 points. About half the drop among Black protestants.
Other polls among all Black voters tell the same story.
An NBC poll shows Black approval for Biden dropping from 83% last April to 64% now. A Quinnipiac University poll shows Black approval during Biden&#8217;s first year in office dropping from 78% to 57%.
What&#8217;s going on? Should Democratic strategists be worried that a sea-change is occurring among voters on whom they could always most depend?
Trying to define some new grand reality is always a dangerous game in political analysis.
But what we can do is note two major areas of great concern to Black Americans where they have reason to be dissatisfied with the leadership they see in Washington.
One is inflation.
The president and his Federal Reserve chairman bear responsibility for the new round of inflation now rearing its head and disrupting American lives.
The Wall Street Journal recently noted in an editorial that the now 7.5% annualized increase in the price level is the worst in 40 years. During January &#8220;some 73% of the items saw annual price rises of 3% or higher&#8221; and &#8220;some 55% of items saw inflation of 5% or higher.&#8221;
A Gallup poll in December showed that 71% of households earning $40,000 per year or less reported hardship as result of price increases; 28% reported &#8220;severe hardship&#8221;; and 42% reported &#8220;moderate hardship&#8221;.
These are households that are disproportionately Black households. According to Statistica, whereas 37% of all American households earn $50,000 or less, 55% of Black households are in this income category.
The Wall Street Journal calls this new round of inflation the result of a &#8220;historic policy failure&#8221; at the White House and the Federal Reserve.
But also, prominent Democratic Party economists and businessmen are calling out this administration.
Wall Street businessman Steven Rattner, who was counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, wrote a piece recently in The New York Times titled &#8220;Biden Keeps Blaming the Supply Chain for Inflation. That&#8217;s Dishonest.&#8221;
Rattner calls on the president to set a priority for reducing spending and the deficit, the complete opposite direction in which they have taken things, despite many warnings.
The terrible irony is that a major rationale for all the spending was to allegedly help the very low-income Americans who are now being hurt.
The other issue is COVID-19.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, after adjusting for age differences, the incidence of hospitalization due to COVID-19 has been almost three times higher among Black than white Americans. And the incidence of death almost twice as high.
A new Gallup survey shows 69% of Black Americans reporting being &#8220;very stressed&#8221; or &#8220;somewhat stressed&#8221; because of threat of COVID-19 infection, compared with 57% of white Americans.
Morning Consult reported that in the three weeks following Biden&#8217;s announcement of federal rules mandating vaccines, Black approval for Biden&#8217;s handling of the crisis dropped nine points from 70% to 61%. Among unvaccinated Blacks, Biden&#8217;s net approval — approve less disapprove — dropped 17 points.
One might say that the Biden administration has been operating in a fashion detached from the very real and challenging realities — day-to-day life and the cost of living, and health concerns during a terrible pandemic — with which Black Americans have been struggling.
Good reason to believe this is what is causing Biden&#8217;s approval ratings with Blacks to plummet.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show &#8220;Cure America with Star Parker.&#8221; To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Voting

PARKER: Blacks Saying Bye-Bye To Biden

February is Black History Month.
Why do we need Black History Month? Why don&#8217;t we set aside special occasions to observe the history of other ethnicities in our country?
My answer to this question is that Black history tells a uniquely important story in our nation. It is a story that no other race or ethnicity shares. It is a story that must be grasped and understood if we are to understand our country as a whole, where it has been and where it needs to go.
Unique among a large percentage of Black Americans is a history in which their ancestors did not choose to come to America. They were brought here by force and enslaved. No other ethnicity shares a history in which their ancestors did not come here by choice.
According to the 1790 Census of the United States, of a population of 3,893,635, 17.8%, or a total of 694,280, were slaves.
In a nation founded on the principle of human liberty, almost one-fifth of the population were slaves. How should we understand this?
Some want to tell us that slavery is not just a stain on American history but that it defines America and American history. That America is a nation founded in racism and evil and that the task today is to reinvent and recreate the nation.
This is what &#8220;wokeness&#8221; and DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion programming — is about.
Those who have declared that the nation was evil at its birth now want to seize control and put themselves in charge of deciding what it should be about and what it should look like.
This is a great and dangerous distortion, doomed to add on to, not erase, the sin at America&#8217;s founding.
The proclamation from the White House noting National Black History Month 2022 says, &#8220;Our nation was founded on an idea: that all of us are created equal and deserve to be treated with equal dignity throughout our lives.&#8221;
This, I think, is false.
Our nation was not founded on an idea. An idea is a product of thought.
When slave trader John Newton, composer of the haunting hymn &#8220;Amazing Grace,&#8221; had the horrible confrontation with himself, realizing the grave sin he had committed, he wrote &#8220;I was lost, but now I&#8217;m found. / Was blind, but now I see.&#8221;
Newton did not discover he had a bad idea and decide to replace it with a better idea.
He realized that there is truth in the world, which he gravely violated.
The ideals upon which our nation was founded were rooted in divine principles and recognition that all are created equal because all are the product of the same Creator.
It is for this reason that those who signed the Declaration of Independence concluded saying, &#8220;With a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.&#8221;
&#8220;Sacred&#8221; is not about ideas. &#8220;Sacred&#8221; is about faith and divine truth.
The presence of slavery at our nation&#8217;s founding was about Man&#8217;s ability and willingness to sin.
Slavery was the symptom, not the cause.
Black History is documentation that even in a great nation, sin was present.
The Creator gave man the ability to choose. This is why freedom is important. Men cannot be denied their ability to choose. But they also cannot escape their responsibility to choose good over evil.
This is the lesson we must learn from Black History.
We will not live right, we will not treat our neighbors right, until we recognize that we all are the results of the same Creator.
America is in crisis today because recognition of that Creator has been widely purged.
And like the plantation owners that usurped truth, so today we have a new generation of usurpers.
This is what we must recognize and fix.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show &#8220;Cure America with Star Parker.&#8221; To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
The Daily Wire’s first original film, Shut In, has made its cinematic debut, being met with rave reviews. The Daily Wire is building an alternative to the leftist entertainment industry, one gripping movie at a time. Join us in this mission and stream Shut In today by becoming a Daily Wire <a class="in-cell-link" href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe" target="_blank" rel="noopener">member</a>.

American flag

PARKER: Learning The Lessons Of Black History

Black History Month

With all the attention directed to President Joe Biden&#8217;s commitment to nominate a Black woman to replace retiring Associate Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, sadly lost is what we expect from our court and what we expect from our nation.
If we have detached from what our nation supposedly is about, what idea could we possibly have about what its top judiciary body is supposed to be about?
But this is what is happening. The American ideal that a just society is a free society is disappearing into the wind. And replacing it is the progressive idea that we give ultimate power to selected men and women to decide what our lives should be about.
Nothing demonstrates this more than the lineup of nominees that Biden has been sending to Congress for confirmation.
Most recent is Sarah Bloom Raskin, whom the president has nominated to be vice chairman of supervision of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
Raskin doesn&#8217;t see her potential new role merely as supervising a smooth-running economy and banking system. She sees her role as prophet and navigator of America&#8217;s future.
But the difference between today&#8217;s progressive prophets and the prophets of the Bible is the latter knew they were not God but spokespersons for the Creator.
Raskin is convinced she knows the future. She questions, for instance, why oil and gas companies received credit and capital infusions from the government during the coronavirus crisis along with other industries.
&#8220;The decision to bring oil and gas into the Fed&#8217;s investment portfolio not only misdirects limited recovery resources but also sends a false price signal to investors about where capital needs to be allocated.&#8221;
&#8220;Why is the Fed Spending So Much Money on a Dying Industry? It should not be directing money to further entrench the carbon economy,&#8221; reads the headline of her New York Times article.
Based on what does Raskin declare a death sentence on the multitrillion-dollar oil and gas industry?
In April 1977, President Jimmy Carter made the same prediction. He spoke to the nation, announcing that we are in an &#8220;energy crisis,&#8221; that the world is running out of oil and gas, and that the only way to transition to a new world with energy alternatives would be building and investing in major new government programs.
The result of Carter&#8217;s vision that big government was the answer to our challenges was multibillions of dollars in wasteful government spending and years of delay in the country making adjustments to new realities in energy — adjustments that could only be achieved by letting free markets work.
The crisis then, like today, was not a crisis about natural resources but a crisis in governing, where too many Americans bought the distortion that they needed much more, not much less government.
Carter was a one-term president, and by 2019, the United States was energy-independent, producing more oil and gas than it consumed.
Meanwhile, Raskin&#8217;s husband, Rep. Jamie Raskin, has been hit with an ethics violation charge for failing to report the sale of stock by his wife, cashing in for $1.5 million, in a firm under supervision by a federal agency that she used to lead.
I am reminded of the quote of Lord Acton, &#8220;Power corrupts &#8230; &#8221;
Corruption and political power are bedfellows. One follows the other.
It&#8217;s not the job of our politicians or our government to decide what America&#8217;s future should or should not look like. It&#8217;s not their job to decide which industries will flourish and which will fail.
Let me remind all of the critically important phrase in the preamble to our constitution, explaining why it was created and adopted: &#8220;to secure the blessings of liberty.&#8221;
The job of our politicians and our government is to work to &#8220;secure the blessings of liberty.&#8221;
Securing life, liberty and property is what will secure our future.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show &#8220;Cure America with Star Parker.&#8221; To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
The Daily Wire’s first original film, Shut In, has made its cinematic debut, being met with rave reviews. The Daily Wire is building an alternative to the leftist entertainment industry, one gripping movie at a time. Join us in this mission and stream Shut In today by <a class="gmail-c-link" tabindex="-1" href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe-shutin?utm_campaign=shutin&amp;utm_medium=editorial&amp;utm_source=facebook&amp;utm_content=subscribe_shutin&amp;utm_talent=dailywire" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">becoming a Daily Wire member</a>.

Sarah Bloom Raskin

PARKER: Sarah Bloom Raskin – Biden’s Latest Anti-Freedom Nominee

With Democrats&#8217; multitrillion dollar Build Back Better initiative hitting a wall in the U.S. Senate, President Joe Biden has suggested that components of the bill be advanced separately.
One of these components is a plan for government funded universal pre-K schooling.
It would fund school for some 6 million children ages 3 and 4.
Federal funds would be provided for six years, the first three funded 100% by the federal government, with the share provided by states increasing up to 40% by year six.
Total cost estimate generated by the bill&#8217;s sponsors is $200 billion.
But like the entire Build Back Better Plan, the cost estimate is far below reality.
Who will believe that the plan will die after six years?
American Enterprise Institute analysts suggest a more realistic price tag should be around $500 billion.
We&#8217;re talking here about adding hundreds of billions of dollars of new pre-K education infrastructure, requiring, by some estimates, around 50,000 new teachers, plus classrooms, etc.
It is an indication of either the quality or the honesty of thought going on that Democrats want to spend hundreds of billions at a time when the nation is already deeply in debt for a massive new, basically untested concept, to which, on paper, the federal government is only committed for six years.
What exactly are the merits of the idea?
Research indeed shows benefits from a well-structured pre-K program. But absent are solid conclusions of lasting benefits. Most likely to benefit are low-income, disadvantaged children. But providing pre-K investment and then sending these children off to the broken K-12 public schools in these same neighborhoods is ridiculous.
Let&#8217;s turn to Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist James Heckman, a highly regarded expert on the importance of early child development.
When asked about universal pre-K in a recent interview, Heckman&#8217;s reply was: &#8220;I have never supported universal pre-school. &#8230; Public preschool programs can potentially compensate for the home environments of disadvantaged children. No public preschool program can provide the environments and the parental love and care of a functioning family and the lifetime benefits that ensue.&#8221;
Heckman observes: &#8220;The family is the source of life and growth. Families build values, encourage (or discourage) their children in school and out. Families — far more than schools — create or inhibit life opportunities. &#8230; Schools can only partially compensate for the damage done to the children by dysfunctional families.&#8221;
But even if we accept Heckman&#8217;s observations, we&#8217;re still left with big questions.
What is our understanding now of family and what is deemed to be dysfunctional? Woke culture will condemn any defense of traditional values and therefore our traditional idea of family.
Recently Pew Research surveyed displacement of the traditional family with alternative lifestyles, such as cohabitation, increasing number of Americans delaying marriage, single-parent households and same-sex marriage. When Pew pollsters asked whether the growing alternatives to the traditional family are a good or bad thing, in 2010, 32% said it made &#8220;no difference.&#8221; By 2019, 45% said it made &#8220;no difference.&#8221;
The one option for 3- and 4-year-olds to receive education in a traditional framework is church schools. But this one option is not available through the Democrat pre-K megafunding program. Democrats are just interested in options that are basically extensions of public schools.
Facilities that are used primarily for &#8220;sectarian instruction or religious worship&#8221; don&#8217;t qualify, per Biden.
This despite government data indicating about one-quarter of parents participating in child care send their child to a church-related facility.
The bottom line is that, once again, what Democrats really want, this time in the name of child care, is the government-funded progressive takeover of our lives.
The multibillion-dollar Democrat universal pre-K program should meet the same fate as the Build Back Better legislation of which it was a part. It should be stopped.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show &#8220;Cure America with Star Parker.&#8221; To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

School

PARKER: Universal Pre-K – Another Progressive Bad Idea

Build Back Better

Public Schools

After a COVID-19 driven timeout last year, March for Life returns this year to Washington, D.C., for the 49th year, noting the anniversary of and support to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision of Jan. 22, 1973. This began the era of legal abortion in the USA.
A high turnout is expected due to last year&#8217;s hiatus, but even more so, to express optimism that this could well be the last March for Life with Roe v. Wade the law of the land.
The Supreme Court heard last December Dobbs v. Jackson Women&#8217;s Health Organization, challenging the constitutionality of Mississippi&#8217;s Gestational Age Act, passed in 2018, posing a frontal assault on Roe v. Wade.
Should the Mississippi law be found constitutional, the Roe v. Wade era, after a half-century, would be over. Given that we now have the most conservative Supreme Court in years, pro-lifers anticipate history in the making.
The Mississippi law alters the viability standard, key to Roe v. Wade, which permits abortion up to the 24th week of pregnancy — the period after which the child is deemed able to survive outside the womb.
The Gestational Age Act moves the focus to when the infant first can feel pain, rather than alleged viability, substantially reducing the time when abortion would be permitted.
Looking back over the last half century that abortion has been part of our national culture, it is difficult to imagine how anyone can see anything but damage that this decision has done to our nation and to our national soul.
The most obvious statistic to consider is the some 63 million children whose lives were taken over those 49 years.
Those whose lives were taken in 1974 would be 48 years old now, at the height of their working careers and, if not for the cultural damage that has been done over these years, may have been well into building their own families.
Surveying our national culture since 1973, I cannot identify a single cultural institution that is better. On the contrary, regarding our core social institutions, everything is uniformly worse.
The American family is in far worse shape today than in 1973.
According to the Census Bureau, in 1968, 85.4% of American children lived with two parents. By 2020, this was down to 70.4%.
Fewer and fewer of our young people are interested in marriage and children.
In 1970, per the Census Bureau, the median age at first marriage for men was almost 24 and for women a little over 20. By 2021, for men this reached almost 31 and for women almost 29.
Fertility rates have dropped dramatically. The fertility rate — the average number of children that a woman brings during her productive years — must be 2.1 to keep a population from shrinking. In 1970, our fertility rate was 2.54. By 2020, it was down to 1.78.
The overall implications are an ageing society. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, in 1970, 10.1 % of Americans were over 65. Today, almost 17% are over 65.
An increasing burden of caring for the elderly falls each year on a shrinking number of working Americans. Per the Kaiser Family Foundation, those over 65, now 17% of the population, account for over 35% of our health care expenditures.
How can anyone not see all this as flashing danger signs to our national future?
The bottom line is a country with a future is a country that values and respects the sanctity of life.
With all the supposed concerns of woke culture, the truth is that respect between people — whether between races and ethnicities, or between men and women — begins with respect for the sanctity of life.
Let us all pray, as we begin a new year, that this will be the last year that pro-lifers need to march in Washington to protest the Roe v. Wade regime.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show &#8220;Cure America with Star Parker.&#8221; To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Fetus

PARKER: End Of The Roe V. Wade Era?

Abortion

Roe v. Wade's Long And Brutal Legacy

Supreme Court

We celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day on the third Monday of January — this year, Jan. 17.
On Aug. 28, 1963, King delivered one of the great speeches in American history, popularly known as the &#8220;I Have a Dream&#8221; speech. It is a speech that must be dusted off and studied anew today, because it contains the very message that our nation sorely needs to hear and digest now. A message that has been tragically lost and buried and replaced with great and destructive distortions.
Two things jump out when reading through that speech.
One is how this Black preacher captured in his words that day the heart and soul of America.
Second, how King&#8217;s great message that day stands in total contrast to the rhetoric peddled by today&#8217;s progressives as the remedy to our racial strife.
The indictment of the woke movement is that America is the problem.
King offered up America as the solution.
He talked about the &#8220;magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.&#8221;
&#8220;I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: &#8216;We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'&#8221;
The problem, as King explained, is not America or the eternal truths that were brought to bear in its founding.
The problem was the failure of the nation to live up to the challenges of its great founding principles.
This was the heart of King&#8217;s message that day.
He appealed to the nation to realize the dream of its founding fathers. Not to crush it and bury it, as we hear today.
The problem is not white people.
&#8220;The marvelous new militancy &#8230; must not lead us to a distrust of all white people,&#8221; he said.
And, of course, the most memorable and oft-quoted line of the speech, &#8220;I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.&#8221;
What has happened instead? Where has this great message of King gotten lost?
In the name of racial justice, our race campaigns today are defined by selection and placement based on race, based on the color of skin, and not based on the content of character, as King implored the nation to do.
King&#8217;s speech is divided into three parts.
Part one is an appeal to the nation to live up to its great founding principles.
Part two is an appeal to Black Americans to rise up and act accordingly in the noble cause of the pursuit of liberty and justice. Let&#8217;s not drink &#8220;from the cup of bitterness.&#8221;
Part three is an appeal to the ideals of the Christian soul of the nation.
He quoted the prophet Isaiah that &#8220;the crooked places will be made straight &#8230; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.&#8221;
Biblical truths and ideals have been sadly lost to wokeism, which has for all practical purposes become a religion in itself.
Let&#8217;s honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. now, as we come out of COVID-19 and enter 2022, by revisiting and taking to heart the great truths he spoke on that summer day in Washington, D.C., 1963. Great truths that have very sadly been cast to the side and replaced with the religion of politics and power.
Let us honor King by seeing America as he presented it then, as embodying the ideals of a free nation under God.
And then we can join hands and sing, as King appealed, &#8220;the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.&#8221;
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show &#8220;Cure America with Star Parker.&#8221; To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

PARKER: Dusting Off Dr. King’s Great Message

Martin Luther King Jr.

One great mystery is the persistent refusal of those on the left to abandon what is clearly not true.
That is, that the means for reducing the burden of poverty is more government spending.
It all really started in the 1960s under President Lyndon B. Johnson. He declared in his State of the Union address in January 1964 an &#8220;unconditional war on poverty in America.&#8221; Despite tens of trillions of spending since then, poverty remains, and so does the conviction of progressives that it can be wiped out with government spending.
Worth recalling is that the avalanche of government spending launched in the 1960s was followed in the 1970s by runaway inflation.
We now face the latest round of this misguided idea with the expansion of the Child Tax Credit in the Build Back Better Act — now derailed thanks to Sen. Joe Manchin.
Fellow Democrats are now all over the beleaguered senator for allegedly not caring about child poverty.
Build Back Better would have increased the credit from $2,000 per child to $3,000, or $3,600 for children under 6.
In a particularly destructive move, they detached any work requirement from receiving the Child Tax Credit.
A team of University of Chicago economists estimates providing a new generous Child Tax Credit, with no work requirement, would result in 1.5 million parents leaving the workforce.
More government, less work. This is somehow the answer that Democratic Party leadership is serving up to us for how to build a better future for our nation.
Where does the passion of Democrats really lie — in improving lives of Americans or in dramatically expanding government?
Equally revealing is what does not interest progressives at all.
A little more than a decade ago, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution publicized what they called the &#8220;success sequence.&#8221;
The success sequence consists of three steps in behavior to avoid poverty. Complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until age 21 before getting married and then having children.
According to testimony of Haskins in the U.S. Senate in 2012, those following the &#8220;success sequence&#8221; have a 2% chance of being in poverty and a 75% chance of reaching the middle class.
But the success sequence doesn&#8217;t much interest progressives because the focus is about individuals taking personal responsibility for their lives in a free country. The &#8220;personal responsibility&#8221; part and the &#8220;free country&#8221; part have little standing in the Democratic Party.
Also of little interest to our progressive friends is that larding down our economy with massive amounts of government retards economic growth. Why would anyone think slow economic growth is good for the poor, let alone any American?
As Americans allow themselves to be convinced that government is the answer to their lives, they become more likely to abandon faith and religion, which provide the light and principles for individuals to take control of their own lives.
New data from the Pew Research Center shows the toll that secularization is taking on our country.
According to Pew, 63% of Americans in 2021 identify as Christians, compared with 78% in 2007. In 2021, 29% indicated they have no religion, compared with 16% in 2007. Whereas in 2007, 56% said religion was &#8220;very important&#8221; in their lives, in 2021 this was down to 41%.
Perhaps as we close out 2021, we should again recall the words of America&#8217;s first president, George Washington, in his farewell address.
&#8220;Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. &#8230; And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.&#8221;
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show &#8220;Cure America with Star Parker.&#8221; To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Capitol

PARKER: More Government, Less Religion – The Progressive Doctrine

Leftism

Poverty

The saying, &#8220;One man with courage makes a majority&#8221; has been attributed by historians to different sources.
But regardless of who said it, there is one man who stands out today worthy of this description.
It&#8217;s West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.
Manchin has been a one-man show in the Democratic Party, standing often in solitude, holding feet-to-the-fire of his president and his party&#8217;s leadership, pushing back on the massive and irresponsible spending avalanche in the Build Back Better act.
Now, Manchin has slammed the door, saying he can&#8217;t vote for the bill, effectively killing it.
In so doing, Manchin has done a great service to his country and to his party.
Ideologues in leadership in the Democratic Party, intoxicated with the power voters gave them in the last election, lost touch with those same voters.
Last February, immediately after the elections, Democrat voters gave the Democrat-controlled Congress a 61% approval rating, per Gallup. By October, the approval rating for Congress by Democrat voters was down to 33%.
And, of course, President Joe Biden&#8217;s own approval rating has plummeted from 57% from early last February to 42% by the end of October.
Voters gave Democrats control of Congress in the last election by a tiny eight-seat margin.
Yet, they have been governing like they were voted in in a landslide with a major mandate to transform the United States into a new secular humanist bastion of socialism.
It&#8217;s not true, and Manchin has been a bulwark holding fast against this usurpation of power by the far Left in his party. As he said in his statement announcing that he will not vote for the bill, &#8220;My Democratic colleagues in Washington are determined to dramatically reshape our society in a way that leaves our country even more vulnerable to the threats we face.&#8221;
The senator also expressed very legitimate concern that it was all being done dishonestly, accusing his colleagues of camouflaging the real cost of the legislation they were advancing.
House Democrats advertised the cost of the Build Back Better act at around $2 trillion.
However, the nonpartisan University of Pennsylvania Penn Wharton Budget Model, run by former government economists, estimated it at more than twice this at $4.6 trillion.
Then the Congressional Budget Office, which answers to Congress, issued its estimate at close to $5 trillion.
The issue is dishonest game-playing by congressional Democrats. Multibillion-dollar programs that clearly will be permanent are scored by those who produced the bill to expire after one year. Informed observers agree that this is ridiculous. The Congressional Budget Office scored the bill, assuming these programs last for the 10-year duration of the projection. As a result, the CBO estimated the cost of the bill at 2 1/2 times more than those who produced the legislation.
Manchin also did voters a great service by calling inflation, which has been one of his great concerns about the bill, &#8220;inflation taxes.&#8221;
Inflation is indeed a tax and also a result of sleight of hand of legislators. How many politicians would specifically legislate $2 trillion in tax increases to pay for a $2 trillion spending bill? Did you say none?
Instead, funds get borrowed and then the central bank prints money to pay the bills.
More money in circulation means every dollar is worth less. Prices go up — inflation.
The latest report of a 6.8% increase in the CPI means a 6.8% reduction in the real income and savings of every American.
All this without even getting into the misguided plans for all these funds. And, hidden in it all, elimination of the Hyde Amendment, which, for almost a half-century, has prevented the use of federal funds for abortions.
Thank you, Sen. Manchin. Every American who cares about saving our country is indebted to you.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show &#8220;Cure America with Star Parker.&#8221; To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Joe Manchin

PARKER: Thank You, Sen. Manchin

Nikki Haley, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has served up a kind of Christmas present to the nation in the form of a new comprehensive policy book, issued by her organization Stand for America, serving up conservative solutions for our nation&#8217;s many challenges — domestic and foreign.
Conservatives get a bad rap that they just say &#8220;no.&#8221; That they&#8217;re against everything but never clear what they are for.
Haley is one conservative that cannot be accused of not having a broad vision and not being forthcoming in sharing it.
It&#8217;s all here in &#8220;American Strength: Conservative Solutions Worth Fighting For.&#8221;
Latest Gallup polling shows just 24% of Americans are satisfied with how things are going in their country.
Recent polling from Pew Research shows only 24% of Americans say they trust their government to do the right thing &#8220;always&#8221; or &#8220;most of the time.&#8221;
The only thing Americans seem to agree on these days is dissatisfaction with their government and the state of affairs in their country.
Trust in government has not exceeded 30% since 2007. The last time it exceeded 50% was in October 2001, after the nation unified behind President George W. Bush&#8217;s effort to respond to the horrible terrorist attack on our nation on Sept. 11, 2001.
Per Pew, data reporting trust in government started in 1958, when the National Election Study first began asking the question. Those years from the late 1950s to the early 1970s were the last time, except for that brief moment in October 2001, 50% or more of Americans surveyed said they trust their government to do the right thing. Subsequently, it all went downhill.
What characterizes the years from the late &#8217;60s/early &#8217;70s up until the present is vast expansion of government power and intrusion into the lives of citizens. In other words, the more government goes where it doesn&#8217;t belong, the more confidence and trust that citizens feel in their government deteriorate.
Only when we were attacked, when government was the focus of what is clearly its job — national defense — did trust get back above 50%.
The flow of information from the economic and cultural fronts in the nation radiates troubling news.
Inflation is surging for the first time in over 30 years. National debt is growing to dangerous levels, equal to the size of our whole national economy with projections from the Congressional Budget Office that it will get much worse.
Our entitlement programs — Social Security and Medicare — have severe projected financing problems that make it impossible to continue without major reform.
Culturally, family and marriage are collapsing. Birthrates are at historic lows, and surveys show Americans of ages where families are formed indicate low interest in having children.
America needs conservative leadership to get us back on track with policies driven by traditional American values of limited government.
&#8220;American Strength: Conservative Solutions Worth Fighting For&#8221; serves up the blueprint.
I was honored to write the chapter on Overcoming Poverty and Building Long-Term Wealth.
But I am in distinguished company with leaders such as Ken Langone, founder of The Home Depot; Sens. Tim Scott and Pat Toomey; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; Pastor John Hagee; Dennis Prager; and others, covering the full gamut of domestic and foreign policy
The USA is badly in need of a 21st-century conservative makeover.
Nikki Haley and Stand for America serve up the vision and the plan.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show &#8220;Cure America with Star Parker.&#8221; To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Nikki Haley

PARKER: Nikki Haley’s Christmas Present To America

The Biden administration is hosting, in upcoming days, a &#8220;Summit for Democracy,&#8221; in which 110 nations worldwide have been invited to participate in this global virtual event.
The U.S. State Department notes that the purpose is &#8220;setting forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies through collective action.&#8221;
The Biden administration lists on the White House website as among its priorities &#8220;Restoring America&#8217;s Global Standing.&#8221;
This summit will accomplish exactly the opposite.
The nations of the world will see on display that those at the helm of leadership in America have barely a clue what their own country is about. And then want to impose their fractured understanding of America&#8217;s mission on the rest of the world.
The State Department brings the phrase from the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, &#8220;to form a more perfect union,&#8221; in noting the aims of the summit.
But the nations of the world are not part of a union, as are our states, bound by a constitution.
They are autonomous nations, each marching to its own drummer, trying to live and, hopefully, thrive together on one planet.
The State Department could have picked a much more relevant phrase from the constitution&#8217;s preamble, to &#8220;secure the blessings of liberty.&#8221;
Liberty is the point. And I am sure it is no accident that the Biden administration chooses to focus on democracy and not liberty.
To appreciate the basic difference, we can turn to our Declaration of Independence that says that, among our God-given inalienable rights, are &#8220;life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.&#8221; Then, continues the Declaration, &#8220;That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.&#8221;
The principles of liberty, on which our great nation was founded, precede government. Men form government to protect their liberty, not to bestow it or deny it.
But liberals love control. They don&#8217;t love liberty. So, they want to grow government to impose their values, their worldview, on citizens.
The State Department states that the themes of the summit are &#8220;1) defending against authoritarianism, 2) fighting corruption and 3)promoting respect for human rights.&#8221;
If authoritarianism is about government imposing itself on individuals, what else can we call it when government takes over an increasingly large percentage of our economic activity.
In 2000, the U.S. government consumed, per the Cato Institute, 17.7% of our GDP — our national economy. In 2020, this was up to 32%. With the passage of the additional trillions that Democrats are now trying to move into law, the percent of our economic lives taken over by government will ratchet up another several percent points. Coupled with state and local government spending, Americans are now turning over almost half their economic sovereignty to government.
The fact that the politicians who are enacting these vast government programs were democratically elected simply says that Americans are choosing authoritarianism; they are voluntarily giving up their liberty.
The Wall Street Journal notes, for example, that the Build Back Better Act just passed in the House contains $555 billion in &#8220;grants, credits and deductions&#8221; for green energy projects.
In order to qualify for these funds, firms must pay &#8220;prevailing wages.&#8221; Meaning union wages. Nonunion and small contractors will be shut out.
Of course, the reason that this can even happen in a nation founded on the principles of human liberty is because, over many years, our courts and unelected judges have undermined and changed understanding of our Constitution that was originally written &#8220;to secure the blessings of liberty.&#8221;
Now, of course, government looms large everywhere. Employers are told who they can hire and how they must speak and relate to their employees.
No, I am sorry, Mr. Biden. America should be promoting liberty, not government. Our confusion and duplicity will be there for all the world to see.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show &#8220;Cure America with Star Parker.&#8221; To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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