I’ve been familiar with at least a few of Vernon Duke’s songs — among the most famous of them being “April in Paris,” “Autumn in New York,” “I Can’t Get Started,” and “Taking a Chance on Love” — for as long as I can remember. But until I read his newly reprinted autobiography, the delightful Passport to Paris (originally published in 1954), I knew almost nothing about his life. All I knew was this: he was born in Russia and composed a great deal of serious music under his birth name, Vladimir Dukelsky, before fleeing to the West and starting to write American-style popular songs under the pen name Vernon Duke. The life story of Vladimir Dukelsky … is a stirring account of the American dream made real. Well, Duke’s story turns out to be a fascinating one. Born in 1903, he grew up speaking both Russian and French, attended the conservatory in Kiev with Vladimir Horowitz, and composed his early music — all of it classical in style — under the influence of Debussy and Prokofiev. While he was still a conservatory student, just before the Bolshevik Revolution, his teachers disappeared overnight, replaced by young men who, instead of using musical terms in their lessons, spoke of “class war” and “bourgeois tendencies.” When the October Revolution took place, Dukelsky’s grandfather, who owned a conservative newspaper, was one of the first to be arrested. Soon almost everyone was spying on everyone else, including their own families. At the conservatory, Dukelsky and his fellow students were ordered to collaborate — in good collectivist style — on a Soviet propaganda opera. Dukelsky complied, but his appalled mother refused to let him attend the performance. During the next three years, Kiev underwent 19 changes in government — each of them accompanied by street battles, bombings, and machine-gun fire. Eventually, with Soviet troops closing in on the town, Dukelsky, his mother, and his younger brother, Alex, fled to Odessa. Not long afterward, with the Communists bearing down on that city, they escaped to Constantinople, where Dukelsky played piano in lowbrow saloons whose patrons wanted only to hear the latest hits by Irving Berlin and George Gershwin — whose “Swanee” sent Dukelsky “into ecstasies” and inspired him to write tunes that “sounded as if they were in the authentic American jazz idiom.” In 1921, the family relocated yet again, this time to New York. “Russians used to flee from the czar,” writes Duke, “we fled from the czar’s murderers.” In New York, Dukelsky began to meet the musical glitterati of the day. When he played one of his pieces — “an extremely cerebral piano sonata” — for Gershwin, the latter disapproved: “‘There’s no money in that kind of stuff,’ he said, ‘no heart in it either. Try to write some real popular tunes — and don’t be scared about going lowbrow. They will open you up!’” That last sentence, recalls Duke, “stayed with me through all the years that we were friends.” And with good reason: “opening up” was, after all, an American concept, alien to the Russian mind but key to Dukelsky’s musical assimilation. Gershwin did Dukelsky another favor: he came up with the name Vernon Duke, which the Russian, while continuing for many years to sign his serious music as Dukelsky, began using to distinguish his American-style pop music from his still Russian-flavored classical works. Living in New York was a heady experience. At swank Manhattan soirees, he met Marcel Duchamp, E. E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, and H.L. Mencken, among many others. Professionally, however, he struggled. Although he got a piece played at Carnegie Hall, there was no money in it. He made small sums playing inferior popular music at down-at-heel night spots, an activity that he found mortifying; phoning Gershwin in desperation, he was taken him to meet Max Dreyfus, heads of the Harms Music Publishing Company. Alas, Dreyfus didn’t cotton to the kid’s work. One feels for the youth, whom the elder Duke does a wonderful job of bringing to life: he loves nice clothes and enjoys parties but is not good “at either drinking or lechery.” Indeed, the idea of sex, Duke confesses, “still filled me with uncomprehending terror.” On the whole, then, “I was a badly frightened young man.” A sojourn in Paris changed his luck. He earned some of the money for the trip by arranging the piano solo version of Rhapsody in Blue (the job paid $100). In Paris there were more big shots: Georges Auric, Francis Poulenc, Jean Cocteau, Coco Chanel. He met Diaghilev, who loved his first piano concerto. “I began to feel important,” he writes, “a dangerous feeling when one is twenty.” Just as he credits Gershwin with having done more for Duke’s songwriting career than anyone else, he credits Diaghilev with doing more than anyone else to help Dukelsky succeed in the classical realm. Like Gershwin, Diaghilev had advice for him, which Duke records in a characteristically amusing passage: Diaghilev warned me to keep away from women, whom he professed to abhor, not merely as useless (to him) sexually but because of their colossal stupidity and greed. Sergei Pavlovitch was, I’m afraid, overfond of such generalizations; along with women, his pet peeves were homosexuals and balletomanes. This intelligence might appear startling in view of his being both of these things himself. However, he explained the paradox by insisting that he only liked manly and virile youths….Simpering and mincing tantes [fairies] he detested and thought worse than women. While in Paris, Duke sat for a portrait by Picasso. He triumphed with a ballet, Zephyr et Flore, which took him to Monte Carlo and London — where there were still more marquee names, including William Walton, P. G. Wodehouse, and Cecil Beaton. In London, he wrote pop songs with lyrics by the author Beverley Nichols and signed the name Vernon Duke to his first published popular song. He met George Balanchine, “probably the most lovable creature that ever lived,” with whom he visited a bordello in Turin where both men, upon inspecting the availablle ragazze, decided not to avail themselves of their services after all. He made a road trip with Prokofiev to the south of France. Back in Paris, he was slapped at a party by Jean Cocteau. The Soviet government invited him to translate Gershwin shows into Russian — a proposition that “greatly intrigued me, as I felt that no better anti-Soviet propaganda could be imagined than a big, healthy dose of Gershwin music, and all the good American things it stands for.” Soon enough Duke was back in America, a country that he frequently pauses to celebrate. America, he notes, is “the country to which we Dukelskys owed everything — our exodus from enslaved Russia, our subsistence in Constantinople, Alex’s brilliant scholastic career [he attended MIT], made possible by Americans who had faith in him.” As for Russia, Duke regards the change of St. Petersburg’s name to Leningrad as an “unspeakable sacrilege” but consoles himself with the thought that the now vanished St. Petersburg “will live forever in the music of Pushkin’s poetry.” (I would like to think that Duke, who died in 1969, somehow knows that the city’s old name has been restored.) Time went on, and Duke accumulated more celebrity friends: Oscar Levant, George Kaufman, Yip Harburg, Fanny Brice. He composed songs for Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers. In 1932, missing the City of Light, he wrote “April in Paris,” which, like his later song “Autumn in New York,” made no impact at the time, even though both would go on to become standards. One person who appreciated his pop music, it turned out, was none other than Jerome Kern, the father of modern American popular song, who, encountering him in the offices of Harms, staggered him by saying: “I’m under your influence.” Prokofiev was less impressed by Duke’s — as opposed to Dukelsky’s — output. From the moment Duke began writing pop songs, his mentor referred to them as “whoring.” This didn’t reduce Duke’s affection for Prokofiev, whose story, as told here, is particularly poignant. Having fled to the U.S. from Russia in 1918, Prokofiev spent much of his life in Paris before returning to the USSR in 1936. When asked by Duke how he could bear to live under Communism, Prokofiev replied loftily: “I care nothing for politics.” Alas, it turned out that politics cared about him. Although the Soviet Union treated him as a national treasure and supplied him with a chauffeured limousine, he was forced to write propaganda music and was obliged, when he traveled to the West, to leave his sons at home as hostages. Inevitably, the ax fell: in 1948, he was officially denounced, his works banned, his finances ruined, and the right to travel to the West denied him. In a cruel irony, he died on the same day as Stalin. Meanwhile, back in the West, Dukelsky’s career as a serious composer was moving along nicely, although Duke’s efforts to churn out hits were hit-and-miss. After Cabin in the Sky (1940) conquered the Great White Way, his luck ran out. Self-deprecatingly, he claims to have spent years as “Broadway’s No. 1 Composer of Unproduced Shows.” Tired of failure, he returned to Paris, where his serious music was still being enthusiastically performed and respectfully reviewed. In his closing pages he deplores the state of serious music “today” (i.e., in the 1950s), most of which, composed by the melodically challenged disciples of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, didn’t — and still doesn’t — appeal to wide audiences. Duke’s own taste ran to the more traditional and melodic — Gian Carlo Menotti, Kurt Weill, Walter Piston, Leonard Bernstein’s Fancy Free, and, not least, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which he pronounced America’s best opera. For what it’s worth, I share Duke’s musical taste. I haven’t heard all of his songs, but I love the ones I know. I love his love of America and his withering contempt for the upscale “progressives” he encountered in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris who were appalled that he’d left the Soviet Utopia for the capitalist hell of the U.S. I love the humor, humility, and frankness with which he recounts his life story, telling us as much about his professional failures as his successes, and not omitting the several occasions on which he experienced unrequited love and had his heart broken. I’ve never been familiar with his classical work, but I’ve started to acquaint myself with it, and what I’ve heard is beautiful. (I can’t promise to learn it all: his catalog, both as Duke and Dukelsky, is voluminous.) How to sum up? Easy. The life story of Vladimir Dukelsky, who officially changed his name to Vernon Duke when he took U.S. citizenship in 1939, is a stirring account of the American dream made real. It’s the story of a man who deeply loved the freedom and the people of his adopted country and who, in turn, became one of that country’s undying cultural ornaments. Perhaps it was his fellow songwriter Alec Wilder who, in the section devoted to Duke in his definitive, delicious 1972 book American Popular Song, said it best: “although he was born in another culture, his absorption of American popular music writing was phenomenal.” Indeed. And the immensely charming Passport to Paris is an ideal introduction to this two-headed musical marvel. READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Prepare to Say Goodbye to the Transgender Moment Almost Famous Turns 25 Play It Again, Woody

As Daniel Flynn shows in The Man Who Invented Conservatism, the unlikely life of Frank Meyer offers insight into the Communist Party, the founding of National Review, and what Meyer called “fusionism.” For readers of all persuasions, the “Homeschool” chapter could prove the most significant. “Perhaps no other issue,” Flynn notes, “even Communism, ignited Meyer as education did.” Meyer decried the “totalitarian implications” of  government education and found it rife with “gobbledygook.” The teachers “no longer studied the subjects they taught and presented themselves as partners facilitating learning rather than classroom authorities transmitting established methods and truth.” (RELATED: The Organizer of Victory: Frank S. Meyer) Frank and Elsie Meyer paid taxes to support the system, but “could not entrust the cultivation of the most precious fruits of their union to the state.” So after kindergarten, they homeschooled their children, John and Eugene. With her background in literature at Radcliffe, Elsie taught English and geography. Frank taught algebra, and the couple brought in tutors for French, science, and so forth. The children did well in their Woodstock home, but as Flynn notes, the state of New York “did not always tolerate” the arrangement. A “flustered social worker” told Elsie she had not received permission to keep her children home. She responded with a “libertarian roar.” “You need my permission to do anything with my children,” Elsie told the social worker. “I don’t need yours.” “You need my permission to do anything with my children,” Elsie told the social worker. “I don’t need yours.” Elsie was right about that, but “other authorities looked askance upon the unusual arrangement beyond grade school and into college.” John averaged above 700 on college boards, but Princeton sought to have John interviewed by a psychiatrist. Princeton eventually relented but “made further requests that Frank found onerous and unnecessary.” Just so parents know, homeschooled John Meyer became an attorney, a kind of “fifth columnist” for Frank inside the federal leviathan. Homeschooled Eugene Meyer helped found the influential Federalist Society, and in time became its president. Frank Meyer passed away in 1972, and in 1983, the A Nation at Risk report contended that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.” If the 1950s offered “gobbledygook,” readers have to wonder what Frank would say about the “junkthought” now forced on children and, in some states, hidden from their parents. Long before the lockdowns of the COVID pandemic, many parents discovered the advantages of homeschooling. But as with the Meyers, their tax dollars continue to support the government monopoly system, in which money must trickle down through layers of bureaucracy before reaching the classroom. (RELATED: For Too Many in Education, Charlie Kirk’s Assassin Is Exactly the Type of Person They Are Trying to Create) The government and the teacher cartels believe they have a right to perpetuate this failed system for all time. They don’t, but at some point, parents’ right to choice seems to have been cancelled. Congress should tap the insight of Frank Meyer and deconstruct government monopoly education, a vast collective farm of mediocrity and failure. With the fervor of Elsie Meyer, parents should demand a system in which the dollars follow the scholars, a GI Bill for K-12 students. (RELATED: Linda McMahon Body-Slams Woke Classrooms) Parents don’t need the state to tell them what’s best for their children. Putting parents in charge will help restore the nation’s fortunes moving forward. READ MORE from Lloyd Billingsley: California’s ‘Pillage’ People Lose Equity Theft Battle California’s Real Safe Districts Newsom’s Search for the Secret Police Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.

Just as airlines reward high spending customers with perks such as flight upgrades and special airport lounges, so the Trump administration has decided to provide concierge service to nine universities that, apparently, for the most part, have generally been cooperative with it during the turmoil of the past year. One of the schools, MIT, has already turned down the deal, suggesting that giving preferential treatment to schools on such things as scientific research is totally inappropriate, violating the principle of giving grants solely on the basis of perceived scientific promise. The nine schools (six private, three public) have been told they will gain special benefits, such as enhanced grant support for agreeing to abide by a fairly extensive number of provisions, seven of which are listed below. First, the schools have to agree not to discriminate in admission based on such non-merit-based achievement criteria as race or gender, with new undergraduate students required to take a standardized test like the ACT, SAT, or the newer Classical Learning Test. Related to that, secondly, they must agree that not more than 15 percent of undergraduate admissions will be foreign-born (and not more than 5 percent from one country). A Wall Street Journal analysis by Brian McGill and Sara Randazzo shows all nine schools are currently below that level. A related third provision extends the non-discrimination strictures to staff hiring. (RELATED: Higher Education’s Triple Crisis: Finances, Integrity, Leadership) A fourth provision states that the signatory schools agree to be marketplaces of ideas, with no tolerance for disruptive behavior inconsistent with civil free expression. Fifth, schools must commit to requiring students to earn their grades based on academic achievement, implying a crackdown on grade inflation. Sixth, schools must agree that there are two genders, based on biological realities. Seventh, the schools must agree to freeze tuition fees for five years. This is an innovative approach to using federal financial pressures to effect change. Four of the nine schools are prestigious elite Ivy League (plus MIT) institutions. A couple of others are highly regarded but not top 10-ranked private schools (Vanderbilt and the University of Southern California), while three are flagship state universities (Virginia, Texas-Austin, and Arizona) with good to superb reputations. By providing extra funds and favored treatment to these schools, presumably the administration believes it can gain the cooperation of other institutions wishing to share the spoils of concierge service. And the goals are superb ones. For example, institutional neutrality is critical to a truly open marketplace of ideas where discussion is heated and frenetic, but also fruitful and consistent with robust discoveries and civil debate that advance humanity. This idea promotes academic excellence over identity politics. In particular, I am delighted to finally see a governmental agency attack the grade inflation that has, over time, led to a pronounced decline in work effort by American college students. The standards in the new rules are disappointingly very vague, although they are a first step to recognizing a huge problem: most college students don’t study very much or work very hard because it is unnecessary. (RELATED: The Outrageous Scandal That Should Be Rocking Higher Education) The tuition freeze is probably mostly meaningless, since few students pay the posted sticker price in this era of rampant tuition discounting. Oscillating and contradictory federal policies sow confusion and over-politicization of higher education, so presidential educational proclamations likely will do more harm than good in the long run. Moreover, the new higher education fatwa from the Trump administration can be criticized on principle. To begin with, modern American political history is replete with big changes in presidential administration policy orientation. The Obama administration’s higher education policies differed materially from those of the first Trump administration. Take the issue of sexually inappropriate behavior  — the Obama administration’s dramatic and, to my mind, un-American assault on the rights of those accused was dialed back dramatically in the first Trump administration, only to be largely reversed under Biden and, no doubt, once again under Trump II, which wants to radically reduce the regulatory state. Oscillating and contradictory federal policies sow confusion and over-politicization of higher education, so presidential educational proclamations likely will do more harm than good in the long run. For example, a Democratic administration elected in 2028 might declare climate change is the premier issue of the day, requiring completion of a wokish course on the topic by all schools receiving federal subsidies. Indeed, while I like the tenor of most of the recent provisions in the Trump concierge grant approach, I think it would be far more preferable to decentralize federal funding of higher education, reduce federal grants, end the disastrous student financial assistance programs, and, better yet,  eliminate the entire U.S. Department of Education — even going so far as to destroy its headquarters building or turn it over to the very popular and nearby Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. A strength of American higher education, and of our federal system of government generally, is that we have 50 different approaches to higher education competing with one another for customers and academic leadership. American higher education today, by many criteria, is in worse shape than it was in, say, 1970, before we had a federal education department and heavy-handed federal efforts to direct the creation and dissemination of knowledge and ideas to new generations of Americans. Borrowing from Chairman Mao, let us “let 50 flowers bloom,” (one for each state), or even better and more accurately, “Let’s let thousands of flowers bloom,” by decentralizing control over the business of higher education largely to the university-college level, just as we have largely allowed private firms to quite successfully control literally thousands, even millions, of business enterprises. Then let these individual institutions, constrained by student preferences, work with their governing boards and donor bases to remain competitive in a world where declining fertility, irresponsible federal spending, and other problems create big challenges for the next generation of higher educational leaders. The concierge approach to higher education should be a transitory strategy to restore rationality to existing broken national attempts to govern what is best handled by individual schools. Hopefully, schools can ultimately be weaned off a dependence on a federal government that cannot even put its own fiscal house in order. READ MORE from Richard K. Vedder: Higher Education’s Triple Crisis: Finances, Integrity, Leadership Why Are People Fleeing Highly Educated States? Blue States’ High Tax State-of-Mind Richard Vedder is an emeritus economics professor at Ohio University, a Senior Fellow at both the Independent Institute and Unleash Prosperity, and author of Let Colleges Fail.

It took pro-life conservatives 49 years to gather enough legal might to overturn Roe v. Wade. We have the power to end Roe‘s successor — the abortion pill — immediately, but only if President Donald Trump acts with his trademark iron will. Given that the pro-death Left has everything to lose, Christians must marshal every ounce of support they need to win. The evolution from surgical abortions to at-home, chemical infanticide marks the final degeneration of Abortion Inc. — from “safe and legal, but rare” in the 1990s to casual pill-popping in 2025. It’s no longer about comforting grieving mothers who’ve made the tragic decision to terminate a pregnancy. The already ugly process has morphed into a cynical assembly line, dispensing pharmaceutical death to young women from the comfort of home. It’s “healthcare” minus the physician… or the care. (RELATED: ‘Dr. Maggie,’ Notorious Abortionist) Yet medical insurance claims data show the abortion pill is 22 times more dangerous than the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) admits… For years, Planned Parenthood has held that mifepristone and misoprostol, the drugs used in chemical abortion, are “safer than Tylenol.” Yet medical insurance claims data show the abortion pill is 22 times more dangerous than the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) admits, according to a recent study by my colleagues at the Restoration of America Foundation. Nearly 11 percent of women who ingested mifepristone from 2017-2023 experienced a serious adverse health event, ranging from sepsis to ruptured ectopic pregnancy, and even death. (RELATED: When the Abortion Lobby Cries Wolf, They Might Just Summon One) Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised to investigate the abortion pill, but so far has little to show for it. In fact, we’ve gone backwards since that revelation, with the FDA approving a second generic form of mifepristone earlier this month. When the agency first greenlit Mifeprex, brand-name mifepristone, in 2000, it limited dispensation to in-person visits with licensed physicians. Even then, the drug was only approved for pregnancies up to seven weeks’ gestation and mandated three trips to the doctor. In the years since, the Obama and Biden administrations made sweeping changes that dramatically expanded access and gutted oversight requirements — until the Biden FDA nixed the doctor’s visit altogether in 2021. Since then, anyone has been able to purchase mifepristone online. (RELATED: Enforce Comstock: End ‘Mail-Order’ Abortions) Predictably, the drug’s popularity exploded. “I could go online to over 70 websites right now [and] put in fake information … and they will send me the medication abortion pills to anywhere I request,” pro-life champion Abby Johnson explained last year. Chemical abortion now represents nearly two-thirds of all abortions in America compared with less than 31 percent a decade ago. That’s an incredible industry-wide transformation in just 25 years — one accelerated by the COVID lockdowns and 2022 Dobbs decision — with horrifying ramifications for women’s safety. Without an in-person visit to a physician, for example, there’s no way to discover an ectopic pregnancy, setting up a potentially lethal scenario for a woman who believes she’s successfully aborted her child when, in fact, she has not. Unbelievably, the FDA considers that sufficient oversight, even under Kennedy and Trump. So how on earth did we arrive here? It Didn’t Happen Overnight First, we have to acknowledge that this sinister project took root three decades ago while pro-life Christians were preoccupied with fighting Roe. In 1994, Bill Clinton ordered the FDA to import the French-invented mifepristone with the help of the Population Council, a powerful abortion lobby rooted in the eugenics movement. Worth noting: John D. Rockefeller III, liberal grandson of the pious Baptist entrepreneur and philanthropist, co-founded the council in 1952 to shrink the global population, beginning with forced sterilization in India. (RELATED: UN Population Agency Seeks to Cover Up the Disaster They Wrought) Interestingly, President Clinton agreed with the basic premise of the abortion pill as a tool for shrinking the global population. “It is clear that we need a comprehensive approach to the world’s future,” he asserted weeks after striking a deal with the French manufacturer in May 1994. “If you look at the numbers, you must reduce the rate of population growth.” Mifepristone, the key ingredient in the abortion pill, was the answer. Abortion and population control have always been siblings. Mifepristone’s French developer was owned by a German firm that once manufactured Zyklon B, the gas used to slaughter millions in the Holocaust. In 2009, no less than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained to the New York Times that Roe v. Wade was decided out of “concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” Warren Buffett, secretly one of the largest funders of abortion activism — and possibly the largest funder in human history — has poured a fortune into the Gates Foundation, which in turn bankrolls the UN’s population reduction crusade in poor, non-white countries. Buffett’s own foundation was a top donor to Gynuity Health Projects, a New York “charity” that experimented with second-trimester abortion drugs, inducing miscarriage and very often lethal hemorrhaging. (RELATED: Warren Buffett Walks Away From Wall Street — But Not From Butchering Unborn Babies) They call it “medication abortion,” and it relies on the same drug Clinton unleashed upon America: Mifepristone. Second, this is a moral clash between the God of life and the spiritual forces of evil. We may battle in the courts and legislatures, but our struggle is against death itself. We’re locked in a new civil war between red and blue states that will end with abortion either legalized everywhere or nowhere. The Dobbs decision wisely returned control of abortion laws to the states, a victory for federalism. Yet it also unleashed the next stage in the spiritual conflict. We’re locked in a new civil war between red and blue states that will end with abortion either legalized everywhere or nowhere. In the past half-decade, the professional Left has manufactured a network of abortionists and advocacy groups to smuggle the abortion pill into red states with strict abortion laws. One of these organizations, Plan C, targets 6,000 women each month in red states. Its fiscal sponsor has raked in over $65 million from George Soros’s Foundation to Promote Open Society, the Pritzker family’s Kataly Foundation, and the Gates Foundation. These are tax-exempt mockeries of “philanthropy,” the biblical love of one’s neighbor. The Left has weaponized Americans’ generous charitable laws against us. (RELATED: The Godfather of Global Disorder) Plan C was founded by Francine Coeytaux, a French-born abortion activist who worked for the Population Council around the time it helped introduce France’s mifepristone into the United States. Astonishingly, her brother — Remy Coeytaux — stands accused of illegally mailing mifepristone to individuals in two pro-life states, according to a recent Louisiana arrest warrant and a Texas lawsuit filed in July. He’s sheltered from justice by California’s “shield law,” crafted specifically to protect abortionists who fuel this open black market. (RELATED: Gavin Newsom’s New Low) In Louisiana’s case, a man coerced his pregnant girlfriend into ingesting the drugs in 2023, which he reportedly purchased from Coeytaux for $150. “If the Biden FDA had not removed in-person dispensing, my then-boyfriend would not have been able to obtain abortion drugs and pressure me to take them against my will,” the alleged victim, Rosalie Markezich, explained. She’s backing the lawsuit and demanding the FDA outlaw mailing mifepristone altogether. But “the trauma of my chemical abortion still haunts me,” Markezich said. Rosalie Markezich’s story is just one tragedy amidst thousands. In Texas, a Marine pilot allegedly spiked his girlfriend’s hot chocolate with 10 misoprostol tablets, putting her in the hospital. Another is accused of spiking his girlfriend’s coffee. One mother even stands accused of pressuring her teenage daughter into ingesting the drugs, nearly killing the young girl. (RELATED: The Unspeakable Evil of Christopher Cooprider) All or Nothing Third: Abortion, like slavery, has never been a states’ rights issue. Mail-order abortifacients murder over 600 unborn babies in Louisiana each month despite the state’s near-total ban on abortion. In other words, abortion persists even in most pro-life states — defying both the law and the will of the people. We won’t solve it with a patchwork of pro- and anti-abortion laws. As in the first Civil War, the nation cannot endure half pro-death and half pro-life. “Progressives” are correct when they argue that there’s no neutrality on this battlefield. The secular Left is all-in on demanding unlimited abortion access nationwide. As a Christian people, we must likewise unite around eradicating this lawlessness everywhere. Democracy isn’t the solution; national obedience to God is. Sometimes that will require clever maneuvering, like a 15-week ban in purple states such as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin proposed in 2023. That’s useful so long as we don’t stop there. We can learn a valuable lesson from our enemies and turn it to God’s glory. Every compromise should be in service to an unchanging vision: No abortion, anywhere, at any time, for any reason. Anything less is merely anti-abortion when we must be genuinely pro-life. On the surface, the abortion lobby has never been more powerful or wide-reaching. Thanks to mifepristone, abortions have surged to one million per year, the highest in a decade. Yet the same drug responsible for this rapid expansion will also prove Big Abortion’s downfall. That’s where the Trump administration comes in. Secretary Kennedy has the authority to reinstate the original Trump-era rules requiring in-person doctor visits and genuine medical oversight — measures that would end the mail-order abortion pill overnight. His FDA has ample evidence to recall the drug for further study — or better yet, ban it outright as too unsafe to be marketed. But that’s only one path. President Trump could immediately rescind the December 2022 Biden memorandum allowing mifepristone and misoprostol to be mailed nationwide, shutting down the black market with the stroke of a pen under a little-known law with enormous potential. If you’ve never heard of the Comstock Act, it’s time to get acquainted. Passed in 1873 and named for the great Calvinist and Postal Service Inspector Anthony Comstock, it was a powerful tool Republicans used to counter post-Civil War debauchery by banning the mailing of materials used for abortion. The law led directly to the arrest of Madame Restell, a New York abortionist famous for marketing early at-home abortion pills nearly 150 years ago. Inspector Comstock himself later scuffled with Margaret Sanger, the future founder of Planned Parenthood. (There’s truly nothing new under the sun.) (RELATED: Enforce Comstock: End ‘Mail-Order’ Abortions) Unfortunately, the Comstock Act fell out of favor with the rise of radical feminism. In 1973, it went inert after Roe v. Wade rendered its abortion restrictions unenforceable. But with Roe’s demise, Comstock could become Trump’s secret weapon — a proton torpedo fired straight into the Left’s Death Star. Think I’m exaggerating? Congressional Democrats, realizing they blundered in not banning Comstock when they had the chance under Biden and Obama, have introduced a “Stop Comstock Act” — bleating the law “could be misused to implement [a] national abortion ban.” Leftists are already panicked over the rash of abortion clinics closing down in the past year in friendly blue states. Planned Parenthood, recently defunded by the Big Beautiful Bill, is desperate for funding from blue states like Colorado and California — which face deficits of $1.2 billion and $68 billion, respectively. Pro-abortion groups are likewise scrambling as donations dry up and overhead skyrockets. Now imagine what happens if they’re barred from mailing mifepristone altogether. Unconstitutional “shield laws” won’t protect abortionists like Remy Coeytaux from federal law enforcement. This is the battle plan for abolishing the gravest injustice our nation has ever allowed. As Christians, we can’t expect God’s blessing upon our country if we tolerate rampant sin in our midst. National restoration flows from national repentance. We’ve been blessed with a president — however flawed — who acknowledges Christ as King: “The living Son of God who conquered death, freed us from sin, and unlocked the gates of Heaven for all of humanity,” Trump said last Easter. “This Holy Week,” he continued, “my Administration renews its promise to defend the Christian faith in our schools, military, workplaces, hospitals, and halls of government. We will never waver in safeguarding the right to religious liberty, upholding the dignity of life, and protecting God in our public square.” Mr. President, it’s time to make good on that promise. Honor God — and end the carnage for good. READ MORE from Hayden Ludwig: The Left’s Top Dark Money Monster Is Dying — and Taking the Democratic Party With It Warren Buffett Walks Away From Wall Street — But Not From Butchering Unborn Babies Defunding USAID: Trump’s Biggest Gift to Pro-Lifers After Dobbs Hayden Ludwig is the founding editor of Restoration News and executive research director for Restoration of America.

Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and former commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, testified before Congress in April 2025 about the growing threat from the People’s Liberation Army and Navy in the western Pacific and beyond. “China,” he said, “continues to pursue unprecedented military modernization and increasingly aggressive behavior that threatens the U.S. homeland, our allies, and our partners.” (RELATED: China’s Threat to Taiwan: Intentions and Capabilities) China’s aggressive exercises near and around Taiwan, he continued, “are not just exercises — they are rehearsals for forced unification.” China, he said, “is out-producing the United States in air, maritime, and missile capability,” building combatants at the rate of 6-to-less than 2 for the U.S. China’s aggressive moves and military, especially naval, buildup may be presenting the U.S. Navy with its Trafalgar moment. At stake may be control of the western and central Pacific Ocean. (RELATED: Japan Set to Elect Female Nationalist, Pro-Taiwan, Anti-China Hawk as Next PM) Oct. 21, 2025, will be the 220th anniversary of the naval Battle of Trafalgar, fought off the coast of Cadiz, Spain, by the British fleet under the command of Admiral Horatio Nelson and a combined French-Spanish fleet in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars. Bonaparte at the time controlled most of the European continent, and the combined French-Spanish fleet confronted what Alfred Thayer Mahan described as those “far-distant, storm-beaten ships … [that] stood between [France] and the dominion of the world.” A French-Spanish naval victory at Trafalgar would have made Napoleonic France supreme on land and at sea. “Make us masters of the [English] Channel,” Bonaparte told his admirals, “and we are masters of the world.” But, as Winston Churchill later noted, “Britannia remained unreconciled, unconquered, implacable … mistress of the seas and oceans … facing this immense combination alone, sullen, fierce, and almost unperturbed.” Nelson’s navy defeated the combined French-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar, a heroic victory that cost Nelson his life. Although Britain’s victory at Trafalgar did not directly lead to Napoleon’s final defeat — he won more victories on land at Austerlitz, Jena, Auerstadt, and Friedland after Trafalgar, and only suffered final defeat at Waterloo in June 1815 — it prevented him from invading and conquering Great Britain, which would have eliminated all effective opposition to France in the Eastern Hemisphere, leaving him free to turn his whole strength toward the Western Hemisphere, including the United States. Technology will matter, but so will numbers because China is closing the technological gap with the United States. Trafalgar was fought during the age of sail. If conflict breaks out in the western Pacific between the United States and China over Taiwan, the warships will be nuclear-powered, armed with precision-guided missiles, naval air power, cyber warfare capabilities, anti-satellite weapons, submarines, on-shore hypersonic missiles, and perhaps even tactical nuclear weapons. Technology will matter, but so will numbers because China is closing the technological gap with the United States. (RELATED: Competing With China in the Gray Zone) Geography will matter — and it favors China. It is unclear whether China would be fighting with Russia and perhaps North Korea, and whether Japanese, Filipino, South Korean, British, and Australian forces would fight with the U.S. What is clear, however, is that the victor in such a war would effectively control the western and central Pacific Ocean. If China wins such a conflict, there would be nothing standing between it and our Pacific coast, except for the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal — which the Pentagon says China will match by 2030. (RELATED: We’ll Need Innovation to Fight China, But Will We Have it?) Admiral Paparo said that he remains confident that the United States can effectively deter a Chinese attack/invasion/blockade of Taiwan, but “the trajectory must change.” The correlation of forces has been shifting in China’s favor as the U.S. was distracted by peripheral conflicts. “Deterrence remains our highest duty,” according to Admiral Paparo, but “it must be backed by real, winning combat power.” (RELATED: Trump’s Reinvigoration of the Monroe Doctrine Informs His Turn to Greenland) As America celebrates the 250th anniversary of its navy, let us pledge to ensure that we possess and deploy that “real, winning combat power” that will deter and, if necessary, defeat China in the event of war. The United States Navy must, to borrow Churchill’s words, remain “mistress of the seas and oceans” and face China’s challenge “unreconciled, unconquered, implacable.” That is the true lesson of Trafalgar. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Trump Is the Colossus That Bestrides the World What Flag Comes Next for Philly — the Hammer and Sickle? The Ideologies of Western Suicide

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