Author: RealClearWire

Commentary: School Choice’s Rapid Post-Pandemic Expansion Sets Up a Big Pass/Fail Test for Education

RealClearWire

A growing number of states are adopting a comprehensive new type of school choice program that would pose a threat to public schools if many students were to leave them for a private education. 

Eight states – including Arizona, Florida, Indiana, and West Virginia – have approved “universal” or near-universal school choice laws since 2021. They open the door completely to school choice by making all students, including those already in private schools and from wealthy families, eligible for about $7,000 to $10,000 in state funding each year for their education. 

Read More

Commentary: Queering Jesus Is Going Mainstream at Progressive Churches and Top Divinity Schools

RealClearWire

Vignettes from progressive Christianity today:

A Presbyterian church goes viral online for marking the Transgender Day of Visibility with a public prayer to the “God of Pronouns.” The congregants of the church, First Presbyterian of Iowa City, pay obeisance to “the God of Trans Being,” giving due glory to “the Great They/Them.”   

Read More

Commentary: Trump’s Indictment and the Collapse of Confidence in Our Institutions

RealClearWire

Democracies cannot thrive – and may not survive – when citizens lose confidence in their basic institutions. That is exactly what is happening in America today. This loss of confidence and a bitter ideological divide are our country’s most profound challenges. Those challenges form the essential backdrop for understanding the controversy surrounding Donald Trump’s indictment.

Before turning to the charges facing Trump, consider their larger political setting, which begins with any democratic government’s most fundamental responsibilities: preserving public order, ensuring its citizens’ safety, and applying the law fairly. The institutions charged with those responsibilities are crumbling at the local, state, and federal levels, and millions of voters on both sides of our gaping ideological spectrum know it. Each blames the other and accepts no blame for themselves.

Read More

Commentary: The EPA’s Proposed Carbon Capture and Storage Regulations Is a Trial Lawyer’s Dream

RealClearWire

In May, the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed new regulations that will require power plants to capture almost all their CO2 emissions, compress them, transport them via a network of pipelines, and store them underground. The plan is economic folly, but the problems go beyond money: CO2 injected underground may well escape into the atmosphere or contaminate underground water supplies, either of which could yield deadly results and create a feeding frenzy of litigation. The liability risks will be another nail in the coffin for the country’s reliance on fossil fuels to supply electricity, which in 2022 accounted for about 60% of all generation.     

Read More

Commentary: Iowa and Minnesota Are Neighboring States That Show Different Futures for America

RealClearWire

There is no Berlin Wall or 38th Parallel separating Lyle, Minnesota, from Mona, Iowa, just 1.4 miles south along 1st Street, but the two towns are under governments with widely diverging visions. Iowa, once a “purple” state that leaned Democrat is now a “red” conservative state, while Minnesota, long a reliable Democrat state, has taken a radical, leftward turn. These neighbors exemplify the different visions for America that its citizens are likely to be offered in 2024.

Read More

Commentary: The Odious Practice of ‘Taxation by Citation’

RealClearWire

Poverty can be a jailable offense in Whitehall Village Court, a judicial outpost in upstate New York. Brandon Wood learned the hard way after pleading guilty to two misdemeanors in 2015.

His sentence included no incarceration, but he faced $555 in fines and fees. A wealthier defendant could have settled the tab on the spot and walked free, but Wood lacked the money. After failing to pay—for no reason other than insufficient funds—he found himself behind bars until his wife could appear in court and confirm his financial straits.

Read More

Commentary: Two Tiers of Justice Aren’t Democrats v. Republicans, But Bureaucratic Insiders v. the Rest of Us

RealClearWire

The elite set of individuals that sit atop our federal agencies have completely weaponized our entire government apparatus. It is no longer a one-off “mistake,” but rather the intentional creation of a two-tier system of justice that has gone unchecked. The resulting impact is a death knell for American faith in all three branches of government.

Allow me to preface with one important factor: This is not an indictment of the men and women who are our “boots on the ground.” They remember every day why they signed up to serve. They investigate real crimes, protect the public from acts of terror, and root out rampant corruption. These men and women across the country serving in all agencies remain heroes and are equally as frustrated with the leadership at the top of our federal government.

Read More

Commentary: A Whisper to the Conservative Movement

RealClearWire

America is in a state of decline, if not chaos, following disappointing results in three straight elections and too many years of organized turmoil in our streets, schools, government institutions, and elsewhere. Reversing this requires fundamental changes in conservatives’ political and philanthropic strategies.

Read More

Commentary: The FBI Lost, Found, and Rewarded the Alleged Russian Spy Pivotal to Surveilling Trump

RealClearWire

Twelve years ago, FBI agents in Baltimore sought to wiretap former Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko on suspicions he was spying for Russia. But the counterintelligence analyst they were assigned to work with Brian Auten told them he could not find their target and assumed the Russian national had fled back to Moscow. 

Read More

Commentary: Combating the Censorship Industrial Complex

RealClearWire

It’s been nearly six months since the first installment of the Twitter Files — the journalistic effort by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and many others to expose the myriad channels by which the U.S government cooperated with Twitter on content moderation and censorship — was first published. Twitter Files One, perhaps the mildest of more than 20 unique reports, details the social media company’s internal deliberations in the days before the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was removed from the site. Later reports have exposed the tendrils of a governmental apparatus that influenced some of the most significant media distortions in recent American history, from the fraudulent Hamilton 68 misinformation tracking dashboard to the FBI’s intimate involvement with Twitter’s content-moderation practices.

Read More

Private Americans Patrol the Smuggler-Blighted Border Badlands of Arizona

RealClearWire

As blazing sunlight ebbs to a star-studded sky along the U.S.-Mexico border, members of the Arizona Border Recon group peer through field glasses at a trio of men on the southern side in camouflage fatigues and carrying pistols and AK-47s.

The men, almost certainly members of Sinaloa cartel factions, are using their own binoculars to scan random gaps in a roughly 30-foot-high wall of thick metal bars that stretches for miles along a flatland carved by arroyos and dotted with rocks, saguaro cactus and high grasses. At times, a solo gunshot echoes on the Mexican side, a sound the AZBR knows from experience is a signal to people to start moving north.

Read More

Jack Miller Center Unveils ‘ContextUS,’ a New, Online Civics Library

RealClearWire

ContextUS is the Jack Miller Center’s newly published, free online library that provides citizens with the content to gain that necessary civic knowledge. This state-of-the-art resource gives teachers, students, and scholars access to more than 700 core texts of the American political tradition, paired with the most up-to-date technology in library science, to transmit a civic education in self-government to the next generation of Americans.

Read More

Commentary: Protecting Our Forgotten Rights

RealClearWire

Robbing a bank is a crime everywhere. But in some places and times you could become a criminal just by growing vegetables, feeding the homeless, playing poker or working without a government-mandated license.

African immigrant Tedy Okech risked arrest when she started working as a hair braider. She learned the craft in her youth by practicing on her mother and sisters. When she settled in Idaho in 2005, she found neighbors willing to pay for her skills. Soon she had a thriving side gig, which supplemented her income as a part-time insurance agent.

Read More

Commentary: The Clear and Present AI Danger

RealClearWire

Does artificial intelligence threaten to conquer humanity? In recent months, the question has leaped from the pages of science fiction novels to the forefront of media and government attention. It’s unclear, however, how many of the discussants understand the implication of that leap.

In the public mind, the threat either focuses narrowly on the inherent confusion of ever-better deep fakes and its consequences for the job market, or points in directions that would make a great movie: What if AI systems decide that they’re superior to humans, seize control, and put genocidal plans into practice? That latter focus is obviously the more compelling of the two.

Read More

Commentary: America’s Radical Criminal Justice Reform Disaster

RealClearWire

Over the past decade or so, America has undertaken a radical experiment with criminal justice reform. The consequences have been devastating.

The number of people arrested in America each year has fallen sharply over the past two decades. Public prosecutors now prosecute significantly fewer cases. Those that are convicted can generally expect shorter sentences. The combined effect of all this is that America’s prison population is now 25 percent lower than it was in 2011.

Read More

Commentary: In Mao’s China, They Even Monitored Talking in Your Sleep

RealClearWire

When the recently deceased Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot sang, “I heard you talking in your sleep… from your lips there came that secret I was not supposed to know,” he was talking about marital infidelity.

Not long after Chairman Mao came to power in China, idealistic college students learned that political fidelity to Mao and the Communist Party was the most important virtue they needed to demonstrate. Party or Youth League members were present at every meal and in every dorm room. Historian Frank Dikötter described in his book The Tragedy of Liberation, “These Communists took notes on the day and night behaviour of every student. Even the words of a student talking in his sleep were recorded and considered for political significance.”

Read More

Commentary: Immigration Court Backlog Is Growing Worse

RealClearWire

New migrants pouring into the U.S. after the Biden administration let a COVID-19 restriction called Title 42 expire last week will not break the nation’s stretched court system. The system is already shattered, according to several former judges, immigration experts, and Department of Homeland Security data.  

The average wait time for a “Notice to Appear” before a judge at one of the nation’s 66 immigration courts is now four and a half years. In some cities it is much longer. In New York City, new migrants do not have to appear in court until 2032. This growing backlog creates an incentive for more people to cross the border and request asylum as each new case pushes assigned court dates further into the future. In the meantime, many migrants are permitted to live and work in the United States.  

Read More

Commentary: Biden-Era Funding Is Skewing Scientific Research More Woke

RealClearWire
Man on sight with microscope

While pushing record spending for research and development, the Biden administration is working not just to advance science but also progressive ideology. In line with the administration’s “whole of government” commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, recent grants and requests for proposals from the National Science Foundation encompass research that: 

Read More

Ex-DOJ Official and Wife Had Bigger Roles in Dossier than Known: Durham Report

RealClearWire

While it’s bad enough the debunked dossier the FBI used to spy on the Trump campaign was paid for by the Clinton campaign and authored by a foreign FBI informant and his carousing researcher, the newly released report of Special Counsel John Durham strongly suggests a top Justice Department official and his wife had an early hand in shaping the political rumor sheet.

According to the 306-page report, former Justice Department prosecutor Bruce Ohr’s wife Nellie Ohr first plowed the ground for the dossier with a series of a research reports she wrote for Fusion GPS, the D.C.-based opposition research firm the Clinton campaign commissioned to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia.

Read More

Commentary: Time Is the Best Mother’s Day Gift

RealClearWire

What do you want for Mother’s Day? Perhaps you’ve asked your mother, spouse, or co-parent this question within the past couple of weeks. You might expect her to say flowers, shoes, a purse, or jewelry — tangible gifts you can order with a few clicks and have delivered to her doorstep in two business days. Yet, the gift that most mothers want is both free and expensive. It’s time, time to herself. The question is how can we give mothers more of their time?

Read More

Commentary: Confronting China’s War on Religion Part Four

RealClearWire

On Thanksgiving Day, 90-year-old Cardinal Joseph Zen, a Hong Kong priest, was convicted, along with five others, of failing to register a defunct charitable organization that tried to help pro-democracy demonstrators targeted by the regime.

Ostensibly, the charges stemmed from the group’s failure to submit paperwork to authorities. But Chinese people of faith and governments around the world understood the real message Beijing was sending when it arrested Fr. Zen, known as “the conscience of Hong Kong,” last May. The purpose of the prosecution, said U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price, was to show that China’s government “will pursue all means necessary to stifle dissent and undercut protective rights and freedoms.”

Read More

Commentary: The Long Road to Confronting China’s War on Religion Part Three

RealClearWire

It’s morning in Istanbul, but Joseph is reliving his morning routine in the camp, before the 16-hour shift starts. After the prisoners had sung Communist songs for their breakfast, the Chinese guards played a video for them shot in cinema verité style. It began with Chinese plainclothes agents tackling Uyghurs, cramming them into unmarked cars, and pulling bags over their heads.

Then, the camera would pan away, revealing, not China, but a foreign street with signs in German, Arabic, or English. Joseph says the film was a tease: Run away. Please try it. We’re everywhere. Even Washington, D.C. 

Read More

Commentary: U.S. Government Will Not Default on Loans If Congress Doesn’t Raise the Debt Ceiling

RealClearWire

Contrary to widespread claims that the U.S. government will default on its debt if Congress doesn’t raise the debt limit, federal law and the Constitution require the Treasury to pay the debt, and it has ample tax revenues to do this.

Nor would Social Security benefits be affected by a debt limit stalemate unless President Biden illegally diverts Social Security revenues to other programs.

Read More

Commentary: It’s Time to Take the Unnecessary Politics Out of ESG and Retirement Savings

RealClearWire
New York Stock Exchange

Increased politicization of “environmental, social and governance” (ESG) factors in investment has resulted in one side claiming it only promotes social and political objectives, and the other side claiming that ESG is always relevant to making sound investment decisions.
 

President Biden’s veto of a Congressional resolution, regarding recently finalized amendments to a 2020 Department of Labor (DOL) administrative rule on retirement security, has brought ESG to the forefront again. The DOL’s amendments address how fiduciaries of a person’s 401(k)s and private pension funds make decisions about their retirement savings and the role of ESG in making those investment decisions. The DOL, under ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974), regulates private retirement plans. ERISA covers roughly $12 trillion in retirement savings for 150 million Americans. 

Read More

Commentary: If Hunter Biden Is Indicted

RealClearWire
Hunter Biden courtroom

What will President Biden do if his son is indicted by the federal prosecutor in Delaware? That’s one of three questions looming over U.S. Attorney David Weiss’ fateful choice. The second is whether the indictment will go after a larger, coordinated family scheme of influence peddling or confine itself to smaller, tightly-confined issues like lying to get a gun permit and not registering as a foreign lobbyist. The third is whether Attorney General Merrick Garland will approve Weiss’ proposed charges. Significant political calculations follow from those decisions.

Read More

Commentary: Christian Popular Culture’s Revival Cast Out the Money Changers

RealClearWire

“Jesus Revolution” and “The Chosen” are not just Christian dramas but the avant garde in a revolution in faith entertainment. The former – a feel-good movie about hippies who returned to Christ during the 1970s, starring former “Cheers” and “Frasier” star Kelsey Grammer – has grossed more than $52 million since its debut just a few weeks ago, making it the most successful film released by studio heavyweight Lionsgate since 2019.

Read More

Commentary: The Long Road to Confronting China’s War on Religion Part Two

RealClearWire

Falun Gong emerged in China in 1992, a time of a spiritual renewal in a land still under Communist rule, but one recovering from the horrors of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Drawing on Buddhist traditions, Falun Gong combined meditation and tai chi-style exercises with a moral philosophy centered on the tenets of “zhen,” “shan,” and “ren” (truth, compassion, tolerance.) The word, in both English and Chinese, to describe this contemplative mind and body approach to life is qigong.

Read More

Commentary: The Long Road to Confronting China’s War on Religion Part One

RealClearWire

In 2016, when President Xi Jinping delivered a speech calling for the “Sinicization of religion” in a nation of one billion, he was espousing a century-old impulse among his people while also inadvertently underscoring a persistent paradox that Chinese Communists brought with them when they took over the country in 1949 – and have never shaken.

The impulse is that the major faiths observed in China are not indigenous to the world’s oldest civilization. Buddhism was imported from India and Tibet. Islam arrived in overland trading routes and human migration from the Middle East, while Christianity, another Abrahamic faith, came across the ocean from Europe and America. To Communist leaders, and many Han Chinese civilians, these traditions represent potentially destabilizing foreign influence. 

Read More

Commentary: The Experts Were the Crisis in 2020

RealClearWire

The quote from Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a useful way to begin addressing the Washington Post editorial board’s confident assertion that “’A collective national incompetence in government’” was at the root of the U.S.’s alleged failure vis-à-vis the coronavirus in 2020. According to the Post quoting from a recently released report (“Lessons from the Covid War”), “The United States started out ‘with more capabilities than any other country in the world,’ but “it ended up with 1 million dead.” Were he still around, one guesses Tolstoy would mock the conceit of the Post’s editorialists.

Read More

Commentary: Equity and the Race to the Bottom

RealClearWire

Over the last few years, the rallying cry of “woke” activists has become “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (often abbreviated to DEI). There is little reason to object to such principles on the surface. After all, America was founded on the principle that all people are created equal. Unfortunately, the meaning of words can change over time.  

Rather than the Founders’ vision of equal opportunity for all, the use of the word “equity” today denotes equal outcomes for all. The implementation of this “equity agenda,” however well-intentioned, will lead to terrible consequences. 

Read More

Commentary: On Economy, Biden Re-Election Faces Challenges

RealClearWire

As President Biden embarks on his reelection campaign, a majority of American voters are dissatisfied with his stewardship of the U.S. economy. Aware of the general angst among the electorate, Biden is threading the needle by saying he’s running on the strength of his overall record, while vowing to “finish the job” that he started when he stepped into the Oval Office. It’s a daunting task, with an overwhelming majority of registered voters expressing deep pessimism about the economy: 40.2% say the United States is currently in a recession, 17% call it a general state of stagnation, and 10.4% believe the country is in an outright depression.

Read More

Commentary: Insane Deficit Spending Is Immoral

RealClearWire

In Armageddon, Bruce Willis blows himself up on an asteroid to save his daughter and all of humanity. (Sorry for the spoiler, but the movie is 25 years old.) That theme—parents providing for, and sacrificing for, their children—is the deeply moral and moving story that Americans used to love. 

I say “used to,” because something troubling has happened. We now accept that young people should be worse off for a lifetime in order to benefit those who have already lived full, comfortable lives. We saw this during COVID-19, when an elderly leadership class locked children out of classrooms, playgrounds, friendships, and sports, and wiped out jobs, training, and mentorship for young workers.

Read More

Commentary: Let Parents Opt-Out of Low-Performing Schools

RealClearWire

Single mom Shinara Morrison discovered homeschooling by accident. When public schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, she found herself taking the lead on her child’s education to fill the gap.

Morrison never withdrew her son, who was 7, from the public school system. But she supplemented his online instruction with custom coursework that blended academics and life skills. Morrison had no formal training as an educator, but she had special insight as a mother.

“I had a little cheat sheet in my head,” she says. “I knew his learning style.”

Read More

Commentary: The Financial Costs of Biden’s Illegal Immigrants on American Cities

RealClearWire

In New York City, if the newcomers aren’t put up at the luxury cruise terminal that served the QE2, they could get $700-a-night midtown hotel accommodations with iconic Manhattan views. In Chicago, they found themselves whisked to suburban lodgings. In Denver, officials refer to them discreetly as “guests” and you needn’t bother inquiring about their inns or addresses.  

Read More

Commentary: Tax Armageddon Day Is Coming

RealClearWire

Benjamin Franklin famously wrote in 1789 that “our new Constitution is now established and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Death and taxes are fated. However, are enormous tax hikes also a fait accompli? Is it a certainty – ‘an accomplished fact’ – that the White House and Congress will repeal tax reforms that worked? Tax breaks that helped small business owners and families.

For the past several days Americans have been scrambling to make the deadline to complete their 2022 tax returns. Most taxpayers will be relieved once the ordeal is done. However, here’s an unfortunate reality: if Washington fails to act, the federal tax code is headed for major changes in just a couple of years, including massive tax hikes on families and small businesses.

Read More

NIH Gives $2.2 Billion to Foreign Animal Testing Labs That Lack Oversight

RealClearWire

There are disturbing gaps in oversight at overseas labs that use animals in experiments. Labs to which the National Institutes of Health has given $2.2 billion in contracts and grants from 2011 to 2021, according to a recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

Read More

The House GOP Effort to Defund ‘Wokeness’

RealClearWire

Through executive orders and budget requests, the Biden administration has sought to embed “diversity, equity, and inclusion” principles across the entirety of the federal government – and in turn to touch the lives of every American. Now members of the Republican House majority, who see this whole-of-government effort as a woke assault on America and its core values, are working to combat it using the power of the purse.

In a series of letters to House appropriations leaders, Rep. Jim Banks and like-minded colleagues have identified and called for the defunding of all “‘woke’ programs and initiatives that are rooted in discrimination and promote far-left ideology in the federal government” in 2024 spending bills.

Read More

Commentary: ‘Net Zero’ Is Not a Rational U.S. Energy Policy

RealClearWire

Despite Germany’s last-ditch attempt at realism, the European Union recently approved a 2035 ban on gas-powered cars, moving ahead with its “net zero” emissions agenda. In the U.S., the cost of achieving net-zero carbon emissions would be staggering – $50 trillion if the goal is reached by 2050 – as would the demand for raw materials, which in most cases would exceed current annual worldwide production. 

Read More

Commentary: Onsite Nuclear Provides 24/7 Clean Power

RealClearWire

Most of us don’t think about the huge data centers that enable our constant internet usage. But they’re essential to our civilization—and they consume enormous amounts of electricity 24/7.

Powering these data centers is fast becoming a problem. Northern Virginia, for instance, hosts the largest concentration of data centers in the world. Tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have invested $126 billion in Virginia data centers. And the region’s insatiable appetite for power continues to grow due to surging demand for cloud computing services. 

Read More

Sen. Ted Cruz Commentary: The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Self-Serving Double Standard

RealClearWire

Two lawyers with the notorious Southern Poverty Law Center have been in the news in recent weeks. One is facing domestic terrorism charges; the other is votes away from a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.

The SPLC fully supports both lawyers: Thomas Webb Jurgens, a suspected Antifa terrorist arrested and charged for his involvement in a violent riot against the police in Atlanta, Georgia, and Nancy Abudu, the SPLC’s director for strategic litigation, whose job involves overseeing all of the SPLC’s legal work – including its special litigation related to “hate groups.” Abudu is currently a nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit awaiting a confirmation vote by the U.S. Senate.

Read More

Commentary: In Biden’s America, There Are No More Gas Stoves

RealClearWire

On February 1, 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) proposed an “energy efficiency standard” for gas cooking products. For those who are unaware, this is a blatant backdoor attempt to ban gas appliances—at least half of gas stove models sold in the United States today would not comply with this regulation according to DOE. The American people deserve answers to stop this draconian measure that would be detrimental for families, small businesses, and rural communities across our nation.

Read More

Commentary: Rural America Needs Permitting Reform

RealClearWire

If something isn’t farmed, mined, or manufactured it can’t exist. And if a burdensome, archaic, and overly bureaucratic permitting scheme doesn’t allow America to farm, mine, or manufacture, we risk the detriment of our economy. That’s why the new House Republican Majority responded with H.R. 1, the Lower Energy Costs Act.

H.R. 1 updates our broken permitting process to actually let Americans mine, farm, manufacture, process, and build infrastructure so we can get shovels in the ground and move this country forward. For far too long, we’ve sat idle and let bureaucrats in Washington and radical activist lawyers hamstring American workers by suing at every opportunity, long after decisions have been made and permits have been issued.

Read More

63 Christians Face Deportation Back to China

RealClearWire

Influential members of Congress and top human rights advocates in Washington are urging the Biden administration to take immediate action to ensure the safety of a group of Chinese Christian dissidents and two Americans detained by Thai authorities Thursday.

The group of refugees, including 35 children and 28 adults, fled China in 2019 to escape persecution. They initially sought refuge in South Korea and then Thailand while seeking emergency asylum in the United States. But the U.S. State Department and Department of Homeland Security have declined to grant the church members emergency asylum, as it has done for many others, including tens of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing their war-ravaged countries, and the first group of Afghans airlifted into the United States amid the chaotic U.S. evacuation in August 2021.

Read More

Commentary: The Energy Transition Is a Delusion Indeed

RealClearWire

The “energy transition” continues to receive thunderous applause from all the usual Beltway suspects, an exercise in groupthink fantasy amazing to behold. For those with actual lives to live and thus uninterested in silliness: The “energy transition” is a massive shift, wholly artificial and politicized, from conventional energy inexpensive (Table 1b and here), reliable, and very clean given the proper policy environment, toward such unconventional energy technologies as wind and solar power. They are expensive, unreliable, and deeply problematic environmentally in terms of toxic metal pollution, wildlife destruction, land use massive and unsightly, emissions of conventional pollutants, and in a larger context large and inexorable reductions in aggregate wealth and thus the social willingness to invest in environmental protection.

Read More

Commentary: BlackRock’s Larry Fink and the New Post-ESG Realism

RealClearWire

As regular as the turn of the seasons, each January sees Larry Fink, founder and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, publish a lengthy letter on the state of the world and its implications for finance and investors. This year, January turned to February, and still no letter. Instead, February saw Tim Buckley, CEO of Vanguard, global number-two asset manager, give a groundbreaking interview explaining Vanguard’s decision late last year to quit the Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) initiative, which had been formed ahead of the 2021 Glasgow climate conference to reallocate capital in line with net zero emissions targets.

Read More

Commentary: It’s Time to End Mexican Cartels’ Reign of Terror

RealClearWire

Walking down long, ornate hallways, across a grand central courtyard adorned with a Pegasus-topped fountain, and through yet more corridors, our bipartisan delegation was guided to the offices of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for what we hoped would be a timely and useful meeting for our nations. Since the enactment of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), ongoing trade issues continue to flare up, and since the beginning of the Biden Administration our southern border with Mexico has deteriorated into a chaotic, dangerous, and lawless morass.

Read More

Commentary: More Work to be Done on Emergency Powers as Pandemic Wanes

RealClearWire

Most Americans are likely pleased that when they turn on their television, no longer are there talking heads and public health figures breathlessly discussing COVID-19 case counts and deaths. Broadly, the media as a whole is no longer incessantly reporting on the topic, and nationally, the federal public health emergency declared for the COVID-19 pandemic terminates on May 11. 

While the old signs of the pandemic have virtually vanished, Americans won’t forget what their governments did to them.

Read More