Cynicism in America Is Growing

It’s no secret that Americans today are collectively losing their faith in our cultural and governmental institutions. We have previously noted polling data indicating that an increasing political polarization has been spreading across the country, characterized by the bluing and reddening of the states. People move away from governments they don’t trust.

One of the primary drivers of migration in America today is politics. As states like California and New York increasingly embrace hard-left policies, a growing number of conservative residents of these states have opted to move to greener pastures in states like Texas, Florida, and Tennessee.

As a result, this migration has allowed for and even encouraged a broadening gap in the political polarization between the states.

Against this backdrop, Gallup has observed four distinct big-picture trends becoming more apparent across the nation. These four trends, outlined by Gallup senior scientist Frank Newport, are declining public trust in America’s institutions, declining sexual morality, declining religious affiliation, and growing political polarization.

Not only have all of these trends been developing for years, they are all interrelated. As Newport observes, “We can look at these shifts in American public opinion as representing a report card on how America is doing these days (the people’s answer: not well!).”

Newport’s assessment leads him to ask a fundamentally important question: Are these normal societal growing pains, or is the U.S. experiencing a significant cultural crisis that is increasingly defined by national cynicism? If the latter is the case, it’s difficult to see how the growing divergence in American identity will be bridged.

Trust has fallen in America’s institutions in part because too much trust has been afforded to them in the first place. Just as a narrow footbridge is ill-designed for a car, so too America’s institutions were never intended to uphold the totality of our cultural and individual identities.

While Gallup correctly notes the negative impact of the declining role of religion in Americans’ lives, there doesn’t seem to be a true appreciation for the significance of this decline. Indeed, it is from this one foundation, religious liberty under the Judeo-Christian worldview, that our great nation was birthed.

America rightly traces its history back to the Mayflower and those bold and brave pilgrims who came to the New World seeking to build a world where religious liberty flourished. Without that foundation of a Judeo-Christian worldview, there never would have been America; there never would have been a Constitution; and there never would have been the embrace of equal value for every individual citizen under the law. As John Adams presciently put it: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

It also comes as no surprise that with the erosion of Americans’ Christian religious faith comes the erosion of Americans’ sexual ethics. With the loss of faith in God, who is the ultimate sustainer of life and happiness, that vacuum is quickly being filled with idols. Given this reality, it comes as little surprise that sexual deviancy has not only been embraced by the broader public as permissible but is increasingly viewed as normal and even celebrated as virtuous. If there’s no Creator or objective standard, then anything goes.

Similarly, a loss of trust in America’s institutions is ironically tied to that cultural loss of religious faith as well. With fewer people looking to God as the ultimate source for solving the myriad problems they face, people are instead turning to institutions like the government for salvation.

Once again, however, that only affords greater polarization. If people view government as the only means to better themselves, then government becomes ultimate, and the stakes grow ever higher with each election cycle. Out of this comes intense tribalism, wherein tribal identity takes precedence over everything else. Under these conditions, the foundational principle view of the equality of every individual is lost to a chaotic sea of identity politics.

Americans are facing a time eerily similar to that of the Israelites of old as described in the Old Testament book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” If there is no recognition of a uniting value system and a commitment to a common culture, then all that’s left is a bunch of individuals judging everything and everyone as if they themselves were God. And the inevitable result is a fracturing and disintegrating of the nation.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/103250-cynicism-in-america-is-growing-2024-01-03

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Federal Appeals Court Foils Another Biden Abortion Scheme

The Biden administration will stop at nothing to push abortion on the country, but a federal court put a stop Tuesday to another of its illegal schemes.

The Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization returned regulation of abortion to where it belonged all along, to “the people and their elected representatives.”

But that is too risky for the abortion warriors in the Biden administration. Those warriors are constantly looking for some statutory ambiguity to exploit, some legal hair to split, some regulatory spaghetti to throw at the wall to keep abortions happening.

President Joe Biden’s latest abortion scheme is to turn a law that requires hospital emergency rooms to treat patients into what is a federal abortion mandate.

The law, called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act or EMTALA, was enacted in 1986 to combat “patient dumping” in which hospitals refuse to treat, or unnecessarily transfer, indigent patients.

EMTALA covers emergency rooms in hospitals that participate in the Medicaid program. It requires the screening of patients, regardless of their ability to pay, to determine whether a patient has an “emergency medical condition.” If she does, she must be offered either “stabilizing treatment” or transfer to another medical facility.

Two weeks after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, issued “guidance” about enforcing the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act in pro-life states.

If a physician believes that “abortion is the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve” an emergency medical condition, the agency said, “the physician must provide that treatment.” In that situation, a state pro-life law “is preempted.”

In other words, according to federal guidance, EMTALA mandates whatever a physician decides is necessary to stabilize whatever medical condition he observes, regardless of what state law may say.

The state of Texas and two pro-life medical associations challenged this guidance, arguing that it amounts to a substantive policy change that EMTALA does not support and, in any event, requires a formal rulemaking process rather than a mere guidance letter. The U.S. District Court, and now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, agreed.

The 5th Circuit’s unanimous opinion Tuesday in Texas v. Becerra was written by Judge Kurt Engelhardt, a Trump appointee. The appeals court made three important observations about the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.

First, the law “does not mandate any specific type of medical treatment, let alone abortion.”

Second, the law does not clearly supersede the states’ historic power to regulate both the medical profession and abortion. In fact, a provision specifies that it preempts state or local law only when those measures “directly” conflict.

“In sum,” Engelhardt wrote, “EMTALA does not govern the practice of medicine. … While EMTALA directs physicians to stabilize patients once an emergency medical condition has been diagnosed … the practice of medicine is to be governed by the states.”

Third, under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, emergency medical conditions include those that place “the health of the woman or her unborn child … in serious jeopardy.” The 5thCircuit said that this approach “imposes equal stabilization obligations.”

EMALA’s text, the court concluded, “speaks for itself” and “requires hospitals to stabilize both the pregnant woman and her unborn child.” It does not establish an “unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child.”

Not only did the Biden administration attempt, as the 5th Circuit put it, to “expand the scope of EMTALA” through an executive branch agency rather than Congress, but it did so in the wrong way. The Medicare Act requires a formal rulemaking process for rules or statements of policy that establish “a substantive legal standard.”

That formal process requires public notice and an opportunity for public comment; in other words, it is open and transparent. Using a “guidance” letter, like the one from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, instead shuts out the public and minimizes any scrutiny.

The Biden administration has tried to push its abortion agenda through every avenue from AIDS relief programs to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Nor is it the first time the administration has tried to turn a federal statute into something else to facilitate abortion. The Comstock Act, for example, prohibits using the U.S. Postal Service to send any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.”

Biden’s Justice Department issued an opinion claiming that the Comstock Act simply doesn’t mean what it plainly says, offering a different version that would be virtually unenforceable. Its arguments are untenable on their face, but demonstrate how far the Biden administration is willing to go to promote abortion.

The 5th Circuit decision in this case, like the District Court’s, is limited to the state of Texas. But this scheme of using the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act to promote abortion is being implemented elsewhere, so we can expect more challenges and rulings on this important issue.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/03/federal-appeals-court-foils-another-biden-abortion-scheme/

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Are You a Maker or a Taker?

John Stossel

Politicians are often takers. They take our money (and freedom) in the name of achieving goals they rarely achieve.

Elon Musk and Sen. Elizabeth Warren may be the best examples of maker and taker. They’re the stars of my video this week.

Warren shouts, “Tax the rich!” She especially wants to tax Musk, the richest man in the world.

In her eagerness to grab his money, she spun a scandal in the media, claiming Musk paid no taxes. She went on TV again and again to tell people that in 2018, “He paid zero!”

It was true. In 2018, Musk paid no federal income tax. But that was only because his pay was entirely in the form of “stock options,” and that year, they gave him no income.

But at the very moment Warren launched her “zero tax” screed, Musk was paying the U.S. government $12 billion—more tax than anyone has ever paid in history.

Warren didn’t mention that.

I wish Musk paid much less tax. It would be better for the world if he spent the $12 billion himself—rather than giving it to Warren and her cronies.

I say that because Musk, a maker, does so many useful things. That includes things that government is unable to do.

NASA has given up building spaceships. Even NASA bureaucrats now understand that they don’t do things very well.

In 2008, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin said, “We can’t keep doing the same old things as before,” and invited private companies to join the space race.

That got results.

By 2020, Musk had sent astronauts into orbit, something NASA hadn’t been able to do for nine years.

Musk lowered the cost of nearly every component of space flight. NASA spent $1,500 on door latches. Musk’s team built the part for $30 by modifying a latch from bathroom stalls.

Musk developed reusable rockets, which drastically cut costs.

“Reuse the rocket, say, 1,000 times,” said Musk. “That would make the capital costs of the rocket per launch only about $50,000.”

Why didn’t NASA do that? Because in government, people do what they’ve always done. Lowering costs isn’t important. They’re spending other people’s money.

Musk also created Starlink. Starlink satellites now provide low-cost internet service to people all over the world. He’s so successful launching satellites that most satellites now orbiting Earth are Musk’s. He’s given more poor people access to the internet than any government ever has.

Musk develops the world’s most popular electric car, gives poor people internet access, reinvigorates space exploration, and creates 110,000 jobs.

So, Warren wants to punish him?

She sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, demanding the government investigate Tesla for “not properly representing shareholders.”

Seems like a bizarre accusation, given that Tesla’s stock has increased in value by $790 billion.

Warren didn’t like that Musk became CEO of Twitter. She demanded that “conflict of interest” be investigated.

But it’s great that Musk bought Twitter. He told Joe Rogan that he’s lost money on the company, but that taking over Twitter was still worth “everything,” because he’s protecting open debate.

I agree. Twitter’s previous owners censored political views that didn’t conform to left-wing bias.

They even reduced the number of my Twitter followers. Only when Musk took over did the total climb back above a million again.

Now Musk’s company, Neuralink, is trying to help paralyzed people access the internet and operate artificial limbs—just by using their thoughts.

Neuralink, Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink. Musk is a maker and a hero!

Warren, the taker, attacks people who create wealth. She pushes a skewed narrative about “greedy” corporations.

Of course corporations are greedy! Greed works. It motivates people to try harder.

But (outside of government) greedy people can only satisfy their greed by pleasing customers. Unlike politicians, they can’t force anyone to pay.

Our world needs fewer Elizabeth Warrens and more Elon Musks

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/03/are-you-a-maker-or-a-taker/

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The Arrogance of the Media Creates an 'Illiberal Bias'

An essential ingredient in the stew of hysteria over a second Trump term is a heavy-breathing concern for "vital institutions" like the press. On the badly named public radio podcast "Left, Right & Center" -- originating from KCRW, the NPR affiliate in Santa Monica, California -- former NPR morning host David Greene furiously pushed the panic button in a yearend review on Dec. 29.

Greene is supposed to be the "center" in this program's name, but he never is. Pondering a Trump reelection, he kvetched about how he "lived through" Donald Trump's presidency at NPR, where they had the "hardest conversations" ever in newsrooms.

They couldn't figure out how to cover Trump. The more they would cover him, the more they wanted to "fact-check" him, and "then your fact-checking became this very self-validating thing." But this self-righteous Trump-bashing only led to the feeling that Trump was using you, playing off your self-validation. You just became part of Trump's "constant show."

Greene quoted from journalist George Packer in a special issue of The Atlantic magazine, chock-full of jeremiads about a second Trump term. Packer's article is titled "Is Journalism Ready? The press has repeatedly fallen into Donald Trump's traps. A second term could render it irrelevant."

This is the purple prose that Greene shared: "Trump doesn't have to have journalists poisoned. He doesn't even need to have them investigated. His most powerful weapon is his ability to convince large numbers of Americans that the press has no particular value for democracy and deserves no special protection."

Greene left out what came next: the notion that the media are "just another racket of corrupt, self-serving elites." Did that cut too close to the bone? They can't believe anyone would think they're self-serving while they're energetically "self-validating." He's like Packer, who couldn't imagine The New York Times is "supposedly unfair." Their bubble is impenetrably thick.

Democracy needs a free press. The problem for leftists like Greene is they think their voices are the only essential voices and that their media outlets are the only "vital institutions" that help democracy function. They refuse to acknowledge that the Republican half of the electorate thinks they're all stooges for Democrats, and they can't imagine that conservative journalists have any important function in holding Democrats accountable.

Sarah Isgur, the current "Right" member of this cast, pressed Greene with a quote from James Bennet, who was fired from The New York Times for publishing an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). Bennet wrote the newspaper's "problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favor one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether."

Greene sputtered at this, saying this was the "heart of the problem," that people complain about a liberal bias while the media worried about "elevating extreme voices," like the elected president. After asking four follow-up questions, he lazily claimed, "I could show why your argument is really weak. But I'll set that aside." He did not elaborate.

So good for Isgur, but it was even better when the "Left" of this equation, Democrat Mo Elleithee, quoted from the late Fox News chief Roger Ailes when he said, "We are the balance" at Fox News, the corrective to all the liberal tilt. Elleithee surprisingly said the solution to rebuilding trust -- with conservatives and with minorities who feel unrepresented -- is to "diversify, in every way."

Fat chance! But if NPR were ever forced to admit any confident conservatives to work there, that old Greene lament about the "hardest conversations ever" in the newsroom would pale by comparison.

https://townhall.com/columnists/timgraham/2024/01/03/the-arrogance-of-the-media-creates-an-illiberal-bias-n2633114

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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