Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me! The present only toucheth thee: But Och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear! An’ forward tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear! —Robert Burns, “To a Mouse” Ivan Pavlov’s salivating dogs, Burrhus Frederic Skinner’s ping pong-playing pigeons, Harry Harlow’s love-starved rhesus monkeys — these laboratory animals have entered into the pantheon of behavioral science, aiding us in our understanding of conditioning responses, non-contingent reinforcement, and the importance of contact comfort, among other phenomena. Yet these renowned experimental subjects, through no fault of their own, cannot shed much light on those existential questions concerning the fate of our own species. Enter John Bumpass Calhoun and his self-destructive colonies of rats and mice. The story of Calhoun’s investigations into rodent overpopulation is well enough known. It was in the spring of 1947 that the American ethologist, then living in Towson, Maryland, approached his neighbor with a rather unusual request. He was seeking permission to establish a colony of Norwegian brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) in the extensive and unused woodlands located behind his neighbor’s suburban home. The neighbor assented, and Calhoun promptly set about constructing not a simple hutch or two, but a sprawling 10,000 square-foot rat pen, before spending the next twenty-eight months carefully monitoring the progress of the newly-founded “Rat City,” as part of the Johns Hopkins University Rodent Ecology Project. What the obliging neighbor made of the experiment is anyone’s guess, but his cooperation had helped set in motion one of the most influential animal behavioral studies of the twentieth century. Calhoun initially seeded his Towson rat colony with five pregnant dams. Given that a female rat has around six litters annually, with as many as twelve pups per litter, and can manage the trick of nursing one litter while pregnant with another, and given that rats reach sexual maturity at around four months of age while breeding year-round, it is possible for two rats to become 1,250 rats in the span of a year. According to Calhoun’s calculations, the quarter-acre rat-pen could accommodate around 5,000 rats. The post-war Baby Boom was just beginning, and Calhoun was looking forward to a rodential Baby Boom of his own, so it came as a surprise when the pen’s population leveled off at around 150 rats, and never exceeded 200 — an astonishingly low number for that famously concupiscent species, and far below the environmental carrying capacity. It was as if some innate sensibility was preventing the rats from over-running their idyllic woodland domain. As frightened as we were of Universe 25, we now face the equally frightening prospect of demographic collapse. In the years to come, Calhoun would move his base of operations to a barn outside Rockville, and then to Poolesville, both in Montgomery County, Maryland, pursuing research that would result in his 1962 Scientific American paper “Population Density and Social Pathology.” Working for the National Institute of Mental Health, he constructed so-called “mouse-universes” designed to override his subjects’ instinct to avoid overpopulation, the most famous of which, Universe 25, was established in July 1968. There eight albino mice — inbred to ensure genetic homogeneity — were introduced into a nine square-foot pen lined with vertical mesh tunnels, and then provided with unlimited supplies of food, water, and bedding material. The population doubled every 55 days in the early stages, reaching 2200 by day 600. Unfathomably cramped conditions in Universe 25 took a terrible toll on the murine inhabitants, however, with the females abandoning their young or refusing to reproduce, and males engaging in obsessive grooming, and hyper-sexual or homosexual behavior. Infant mortality reached 96 percent, reproduction ceased, and the remaining mice fell into a “behavioral sink,” huddling in the center of the pen, unable to function on even the most basic level. Calhoun’s “Population Density and Social Pathology” would be go on to be included in Roger Hock’s psychology textbook Forty Studies That Changed Psychology: Explorations Into the History of Psychological Research, and Universe 25 would attain positively iconic status in popular culture. (Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, for example, was based on Calhoun’s lab rats.) Calhoun would be described as “the researcher who loved rats and fueled our doomsday fears,” whose research “led to grim predictions for the future of humanity.” It just so happened that Universe 25 was founded the very same year the biologist Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb — the cover of which claimed that ,“While you are reading these words four people will have died from starvation. Most of them children” — was first published. Ehrlich, for his part, had not counted on the twentieth century’s Third Agricultural Revolution, which massively enhanced the planet’s carrying capacity through the use of high-yielding cereals, chemical fertilizers, and improved irrigation, thereby preventing his dire predictions of mass starvation from being realized. Calhoun’s equally alarming warnings, however, were not predicated on the scarcity of resources, but rather on the opposite, and for this reason Calhoun’s rats have retained their purchase on the popular imagination. Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams, in their 2009 article in The Journal of Social History, “Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence,” noted that the macabre spectacle of crowded psychopathological rats and the available comparisons with human life in the densely-packed inner cities ensured the experiments were quickly adopted as “scientific evidence” of social decay. Referenced far outside of the fields of ecology and mental health, Calhoun’s rats have – or certainly had – come to seem part of the common cultural stock, shorthand for the problems of urban crowding just as Pavlov’s dogs were for respondent conditioning. ***** It is the very nature of the social, behavioral, and psychological sciences that research in those fields tends to produce results that are either so obscure as to be of limited utility, or so obvious as to represent a mere recapitulation of common sense. Calhoun’s findings, while clearly compelling to a wide audience, largely belong in the latter category. Indeed it would have been surprising if inhumane levels of overcrowding, filth, and inbreeding had not produce drastic results in the mouse-universes. Even the most inexperienced of backyard chicken-hobbyists is aware that poultry overcrowding soon results in elevated corticosterone levels, growth retardation, compromised immunocompetence, aggressive pecking, feather-pulling, and eventually cannibalism. Mice and rats are no different. No organism could function properly, let alone thrive, when subjected to such insalubrious conditions. (READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: The Strange Life and Ironic Death of Putin-Loving Russell ‘Texas’ Bentley) Decades spent torturing animals likely took a psychological toll on Calhoun as well, and his writing took on a quite literally apocalyptic quality. His 1973 think-piece “Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population” began thusly: I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life and its evolution. Threatening life and evolution are the two deaths, death of the spirit and death of the body. Evolution, in terms of ancient wisdom, is the acquisition of access to the tree of life. This takes us back to the white first horse of the Apocalypse which with its rider set out to conquer the forces that threaten the spirit with death. Further in Revelation (ii.7) we note: “To him who conquers I will grant to eat the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God” and further on (Rev. xxii.2): “The leaves of the tree were for the healing of nations.” This takes us to the fourth horse of the Apocalypse (Rev. vi.7): “I saw… a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him…” He goes on like this for some time. Here we are getting dangerously close to the sort of thing that might be found scrawled on the wall of a public toilet or a madhouse, or sent to a police station in the form of a cut-paper note. Calhoun was clearly not immune to the temptation to anthropomorphize his test subjects. Writing in 1972 about the collapse of Universe 25, he referenced the concept of a “second death,” or spiritual death, as described in Revelation 2:11 (“He, that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches: He that shall overcome, shall not be hurt by the second death”). His pseudo-scientific formula, which studiously ignored neuroendocrine responses to unfathomable stress levels, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, corticosterone and other glucocorticoids involved in stress regulation in rodents, was as follows: Mortality, bodily death = the second death Drastic reduction of mortality = death of the second death = death squared = (death)2 (Death)2 leads to dissolution of social organization = death of the establishment Death of the establishment leads to spiritual death = loss of capacity to engage in behaviors essential to species survival = the first death Therefore: (Death)2 = the first death While demographic alarmists latched on to Calhoun’s experiments, eager to continue sounding the alarm about the harmful social, instead of dietary, effects of overpopulation, skeptics of modernity had also been given potent ammunition. The Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, writing in the October 13, 1908 edition of his magazine Die Fackel, despaired of a world “deprived of oxygen by progress” — which was to say the “feverish progress of human stupidity” — and warned that “the real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit [die Vernichtung des Geistes]; the other depends on an indifferent attempt to see whether, after the destruction of the spirit, there can still be a world.” According to Kraus, the spiritual death of a society would come first, after which there would be nothing left to salvage, a potential fate seemingly foreshadowed by Calhoun’s teeming mouse colonies as they floundered in their behavioral sink, and then ceased to propagate themselves altogether. It hardly matters at this point that Jonathan Freedman, Stanley Heshka, and Alan Levy, in their 1975 study “Population density and pathology: Is there a relationship?,” published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that population density, people per acre or per room, had little or no direct independent effect on pathologies. (Though surely there exist limits in this regard, as the survivors of the Black Hole of Calcutta might have testified.) Nor does it matter that, at a Royal Society of Medicine symposium on “Man in His Place,” Calhoun was strongly cautioned that “he had been discussing mice, and the Chairman agreed with Professor Mellanby that there were some very strong contra-indications. Hong Kong, for example, was a most marvellous population of people living under much higher densities than in east London. He thought the inhabitants to be impressively happy as far as one could see,” to which Calhoun could only respond, rather feebly, that “he did not know what happened in Hong Kong. He had been in Calcutta and was frightened by it. His interpretation of what was happening there might be happening in Amsterdam and other places now.” (Amsterdam?) And nor does it matter that the deplorable conditions in which Calhoun’s subjects were kept differed completely from even the most soul-crushing Pruitt–Igoe-style brutalist tenements or the most densely-packed Japanese coffin-apartments, or that being subjected to traffic jams or the crush of sweaty bodies in a subway system is still not the same as residing in the dystopian hellscape of Universe 25.  Despite all these criticisms, Calhoun’s pathetic little rats and mice, wallowing in feces and urine and surrounded by the corpses of their expired relatives, are nevertheless still widely, and perhaps even increasingly, viewed as portending a bleak future for humanity. With polls showing that nearly half of teenagers agree with phrases like “I can’t do anything right,” “I do not enjoy life” and “My life is not useful,” and with 57 percent of single Americans reporting that they are “not currently looking for a relationship or casual dates,” it is hard not to be reminded of Calhoun’s listless, spiritless test subjects. ***** The Population Question has dominated modern thought ever since the appearance of Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), in which the English clergyman-turned-economist posited that the geometric increase of the population would inevitably outstrip the arithmetic progression of food production. As we have seen, the global famine Malthus prophesied was avoided, but Malthusianism did successfully introduce the notion of a “surplus population,” which Charles Dickens memorably pilloried in A Christmas Carol: “Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!” Concerns about overpopulation persist, viz. Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 comments regarding sub-Saharan Africa’s need for “a successful demographic transition when countries today have seven or eight children per woman.” At the same time, the developed world’s declining total fertility rate (TFR) has led people to revisit the supposed lessons of Universe 25. Consider South Korea, which famously maintains the world’s lowest TFR at 0.78, and in particular the Seoul region, which can only manage a TFR of 0.55. The South Korean government has spent some $280 billion over the last 18 years on various public policy measures designed to reverse its plummeting birth rate, to no avail whatsoever. South Korea is only the most extreme example, as the entirety of the developed world enters into a veritable Baby Bust. Acolytes of John Calhoun suspect that this unprecedented “demographic transition” is the result of high social density and vertiginous “social velocity” (the volume and frequency of unavoidable social contact), leading to a “loss of capacity to engage in behaviors essential to species survival.” It is an explanation appealing in its simplicity, although it should be noted that TFR decreases are occurring across the board. Between 2007 and 2017, American TFRs fell 12 percent in rural, 16 percent in small or medium metro, and 18 percent in large metro counties, suggesting that social density may play a role, but not a dispositive one. “It is almost universally acknowledged,” observed researchers with the International Institute for Environment and Development in the 2013 study “Urbanization and Fertility Decline,” “that urban fertility is lower than rural fertility,” with the notable exception of “the very poorest urban slum areas,” where, incidentally, social velocity is doubtless at its highest. There are cities where the excess crude birthrate exceeds that of the surrounding countryside (Stockholm, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Bratislava), and cities where it is far, far lower (Paris, Dublin, Helsinki, Boston). The relatively high fertility of immigrant communities, and other relevant cultural or socio-economic factors, must also be taken into account when grappling with these numbers, since we are dealing with phenomena far more complicated than inbred albino mice stuffed into a tiny pen.  If the population of the developed world is indeed descending into demographic oblivion, then we are dealing with something akin to a systems collapse. Elon Musk, not without reason, has described falling birth rates as “the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” while contributors to The Lancet have warned that “national governments must plan for emerging threats to economies, food security, health, the environment, and geopolitical security brought on by these demographic changes that are set to transform the way we live.” Advocates for negative population growth grasped the demographic monkey’s paw … and their wish has now come true. Systems collapses, as any archaeologist can tell you, are complex by their very nature, produced by a cascading series of events that cannot be viewed in isolation. The Late Bronze Age collapse was not just the consequence of environmental changes, or the invasion of the Sea Peoples. The Roman Empire did not decline and fall because of the barbarian invasions, the debasement of imperial coinage, or the effects of the Antonine plague, but because of all of these factors and more besides. In the case of our present-day demographic crisis, we are obliged to venture beyond the effects of high social density.  We do not lack for alternative explanations. As Ms. Gulick discussed in these pages, Pope Francis has blamed “selfishness, consumerism, and individualism, which make people satiated, lonely, and unhappy.” While these are aspects of modern life that tend to inhibit family formation and promote anti-natalism, collectivist societies do not invariably fare better. Is a general decline in religiosity responsible? In the United States, birthrates among Roman Catholics have dropped below replacement levels, and even Mormons are seeing a considerable decline, while a comparison between the relatively pious Poland (TFR of 1.33 in 2021) and the relatively non-believing Czechia (TFR of 1.83 in 2021) is instructive. Ben Sixsmith, writing in The Critic, addressed still more theories. “Are childcare costs too high? Certainly! But Sweden has some of the lowest child care costs in Europe and is also hitting record fertility lows. Is housing too expensive? Yes! But Germany has far more affordable housing and its birth rate in 2022 was 1.46 — even lower than that of the UK.” (READ MORE: Gustav Klimt’s Last Painting Was Among His Best) Is it the widespread availability of low-dose oral contraceptives? As Mr. Sixsmith notes, birth control pill usage is incredibly low in Japan (something like 0.9 percent of women), yet Japan still has a TFR of 1.374, and only 1.04 in the Tokyo prefecture. Maybe it has something to do with microplastics, or xenoestrogens, or increasingly fragmented genetic material in spermatozoon. Perhaps it is the effect of rampant social media use, which inflicts its own kind of social velocity. American TFR was relatively stable between 1980 and 2007, and was even on the upswing, before slumping shortly thereafter. Some blamed the deteriorating recession-era economy, but recall that the first iPhone was released on June 29, 2007. Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s Prime Minister from 1959 to 1990, writing in his memoir One Man’s View Of The World, denied that the “Stop at Two” population campaign of the 1970s was responsible for Singapore’s moribund TFR, which has since dropped to 1.12. “Our low birth rates,” he insisted, “have nothing to do with economic or financial factors, such as high cost of living or lack of government help for parents. They are instead the result of changed lifestyles and mindsets … Once women are educated and have equal job opportunities, they no longer see their primary role as bearing children or taking care of the household. They want to be able to pursue their careers fully just as men have always been able to. They have very different expectations about whether or whom they should marry because they are financially independent. There is no turning back the clock, unless we want to stop educating women.” All of these explanations tell part of the story, but the fact remains that modernity and urbanization are not conducive to the formation of large family units. For the first two hundred thousands years of human history, our demographic situation was fairly predictable. Hunter-gatherers populations typically maintained a TFR of 5-6, while agriculturists averaged around 6.6, levels of fecundity that were kept in check by high child mortality, disease, starvation, and war. Modern urban populations perforce have very different fertility levels, particularly as infant and child mortality rates have declined. Modernization and urbanization will necessarily produce a shift from a high mortality/high fertility paradigm to a low mortality/low fertility paradigm. Now, as that iron law of demographics is joined by the aforementioned socio-economic circumstances, we are finding out just how low it can go. Fertility rates have been dropping since the Industrial Revolution, with the post-war Baby Boom representing, if anything, an aberration. Around 1860, nearly two-thirds of couples in Great Britain were producing families of four or more children, but by 1925 that number was closer to one-fifth and dropping. Among hunter-gatherers, horticulturists, and agriculturists, children represent economic assets, while in modern societies children are treated as investments requiring considerable expenditure. As child mortality rates have plummeted, parents have chosen to allocate resources accordingly, a “quantity versus quality trade-off” that some may view as selfish, but others may see as efficient or responsible. Lee Kwan Yew, as he so often did, represented the voice of reason. Falling fertility is not just about “economic or financial factors,” though they undoubtedly play a role, but also about the “changed lifestyles and mindsets” inherent in modern life. But Lee’s facetious suggestion that the only way to turn the demographic tide would be to “stop educating women” is not quite accurate. To return to pre-modern levels of fertility, we would likely have to return to a pre-modern ratio of peasants to city-dwellers. If we truly want to encourage large families, we will need more subsistence farmers. ***** The writings of John Calhoun and Paul Ehrlich, the twentieth’s two most prominent prophets of demographic doom, catalyzed a concerted effort to reduce global population. China had its one-child policy, Singapore its “Stop at Two” campaign, while the ecologist Garrett Hardin, in his Tragedy of the Commons (1968), demanded an immediate end to the “freedom to breed” through “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” Back in my salad days as a young student of anthropology, my adviser was one J. Kenneth Smail, whose cause célèbre can be easily gleaned from the title one of his papers, “Confronting The 21st Century’s Hidden Crisis: Reducing Human Numbers by 80%.” Dr. Smail began with the premise that a global population of ten billion would be insupportable, but an eighty-percent drop could be effectuated not by coercion — dystopian sterilization programs, eugenics, and the like— but “with relative ease by establishing a worldwide average fertility rate of approximately 1.5 to 1.7 over the next several generations.” He foresaw that a consequence of this demographic shift would be “the fact that populations will inevitably get ‘older’… as both mortality and fertility rates decline and human numbers (hopefully) reach stable levels,” a development that would present “unique set of problems to resolve.” Now that we are living in a world of sub-replacement fertility, we are becoming quite familiar with that “unique set of problems,” which should never have been downplayed. While there is nothing objectionable about a global population of two billion — the world of 1950 was hardly a barren wasteland — the numbers at present do not lie. In South Korean, with its current TFR in the 0.7 range, there will only be 4.3 great-grandchildren for every 100 great-grandparents. Faced with a completely inverted population pyramid, and the inevitability of economic atrophy as a consequence, China and other counties are desperately trying to reverse course on the population control measures of the past. Policymakers throughout the developed world are legitimately terrified that decreasing fertility will mean GDP contraction, and that no amount of human capital investment or productivity gains can offset a rapidly dwindling populace, which presumably plays no small part in the ongoing mad rush in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, and elsewhere to admit unprecedented numbers of immigrants, legal or otherwise. University admissions departments worry that enrollment numbers will suffer given the oncoming deficit of college-aged Americans, though the shortfall will no doubt be made up either by relaxing standards or admitting more international students. Japan was forced to close 8,580 public schools between 2002 and 2020, for lack of pupils. Churches and cultural institutions are confronted with dwindling congregations and audiences and donor bases. Demographic concerns even implicate national security and war-fighting capabilities. Despite being outnumbered by the invading Russian hordes, the government of Ukraine first set the draft age at 27, and only recently and very reluctantly lowered it to 25, in an understandable effort to preserve the country’s most reliable contributors to its demographic future. The result has been a military in which the average soldier is 43 years of age, a very different dynamic from the Second World War, in which the average solder was 26, or Vietnam, in which the average soldier was around 22. Elsewhere, militaries are exploring the possibilities of drone technology, and autonomous, driverless military ground vehicles, the better to make up for demographic deficits. Advocates for negative population growth grasped the demographic monkey’s paw, the withered finger curled, and their wish has now come true. Sub-replacement fertility rates are here to stay, for now in the developed world, and eventually all across the globe, an unavoidable consequence of modernity. There are those, like the British Conservative MP Miriam Cates, who have argued that “the most pressing issue of our generation” is “not climate change. It’s not Russia or China or Iran. It’s not the neo-Marxist ideology that has so weakened our institutions. It’s not inflation or taxation or poor productivity. No. There is one critical outcome that liberal individualism has completely failed to deliver and that is babies.” We are belatedly realizing the extent of the oncoming demographic crisis, but there are, as yet, no solutions to this complex problem; in the words of Ben Sixsmith, “no one actually knows how to raise birth rates.”  As frightened as we were of Universe 25, we now face the equally frightening prospect of demographic collapse, which poses “threats to economies, food security, health, the environment, and geopolitical security,” and will produce a world likely to be dominated by drones and automata, artificial intelligence chatbots and algorithms, and also by mass immigration, with all the societal upheaval that will surely follow. And thus we see, as Robert Burns put it in his poem dedicated “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785,” how “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.” ***** Speaking of rodents, let us endeavor to end on a slightly more optimistic note. We have seen the horrors to which Dr. Calhoun subjected members of the Mus musculus species in Universe 25. Other behavioral experiments, involving morphine-self administration, have demonstrated that mice and rats, kept in small metal cages and offered the choice between water and a morphine solution, would attach themselves to the morphine bottles, ignore basic needs, lapse into torpor, and eventually expire. The Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander and his team at Simon Fraser University, however, suspected that the conditions of the heroin-addicted mice were profoundly unnatural in their austerity, and instead provided them with the opposite of Universe 25. In Alexander’s “Rat Park,” the little creatures were given ample space, and toys, and plenty of opportunities to exercise, play, and mate. The rats of Rat Park eschewed the morphine-water solution, and even rats that had been brought up in cramped conditions, with only morphine-laced water to drink, flourished when introduced to the Elysian Fields of Alexander’s rat paradise. Environments matter. (READ MORE: Most Americans Can’t Find Ukraine on a Map. That Doesn’t Dilute Our Duty to Defend It.) We do not live in Universe 25, not yet at least, but our society does share some of its afflictions. “We’re in a crisis of connection,” according to Niobe Way, psychologist and founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University, a crisis of “disconnection from ourselves and disconnection from each other. And it’s getting worse.” As Bruce Alexander demonstrated, the onset of seemingly fatal apathy can still be reversed by improvements to the social and physical environment, and by changes to the prevailing culture. We may rightly lament, as did Rabbie Burns, that “man’s dominion, / Has broken nature’s social union,” but we can and must keep fighting for a world of vitalism, beauty, and hope, without which we will be reduced to the level of lotophagi, with the real end of the world, the destruction of the spirit, sure to follow. The post The Human Disappearing Act: Why Are We Not Reproducing? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — Three years ago, The Washington Post deemed a story about an upside-down flag outside U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s Virginia home as too thin. As the Post reported May 25, the paper had corroborated the story, but “decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of (wife) Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors.” You can’t divorce them from politics or their deeply held personal beliefs. On May 16, The New York Times ran the Alito flag story — just as the court is about to rule on two cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Opposition research usually is saved so it can be leaked when it can do the most damage. Senate Democrats have called on Alito, a George W. Bush nominee, to recuse himself from cases involving the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol because of that 2021 flag display at his home. (READ MORE from Debra J. Saunders: Trump Is Now a Convicted Felon. That May Not Be Good for Biden.) Also, in 2023, an “Appeal to Heaven” flag flew at a New Jersey beach house, according to the Times. “My wife is fond of flying flags,” the justice wrote in a letter to Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. To the skepticism of critics, Alito has denied any involvement in the flying of the flags, which he credited to “a very nasty neighborhood dispute” involving his wife and a neighbor who called Mrs. A “the vilest epithet that can be addressed to a woman.” The Alitos didn’t have Trump campaign signs on their lawn. But now the justice is in trouble for banners that, to the casual observer, might seem unrelated to a presidential election. In the letter, Alito explained that his wife also has flown flags that support colleges and sports teams, as well as seasonal flags. When he became aware of the upside-down banner, he added, he asked his wife to take it down, “but for several days, she refused.” Marriage. Multiple outlets have reported on the story with little to no mention of the rights of spouses to their own political beliefs. To some of us chickens, expecting wives to subjugate their views for their husbands’ careers, well, that’s so 1950s. I write this fully aware that appearances matter. That’s why the conservative jurist pushed his conservative wife to stifle her conservative expressions. But, sheesh, if the “Appeal to Heaven” flag so clearly denotes support for Donald Trump or his bogus view that he won the 2020 election, why was that flag hanging in front of San Francisco’s City Hall until May 25? As for the efforts of Durbin and Whitehouse to push Alito to recuse himself from votes on all things 2020, Alito rightly noted he has a duty to rule on cases before the nine-person court. Citing separation of powers concerns, Chief Justice John Roberts on Thursday declined the two senators’ invitation to meet for a discussion of the situation. (READ MORE: 2024 Could Be a Race Between Bidenomics, Trump Tax Cuts) All of the justices have political ties. Their careers have flourished with the support of like-minded leaders; they were confirmed by the U.S. Senate. You can’t divorce them from politics or their deeply held personal beliefs, and yet the system is predicated on the belief that all nine justices will rule impartially. It’s a system that, while imperfect, generally works. So the idea that Martha-Ann Alito’s choice of flags ruins that balancing act is downright risible. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM The post Democrats Overreach on the Alito Flag Kerfuffle appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

As Gen Z youth reach adulthood, graduate college, and head off into the workforce, they’re quickly finding that housing prices are more expensive than ever, grocery bills are through the roof, and that it might just be Bidenomic’s fault. There are many reasons President Joe Biden is unpopular among younger voters, including the potential ban on TikTok and his administration’s position on the war in Gaza. But it’s undeniable that as the cost of living has risen for young Americans, their approval of Biden has correspondingly decreased. The president won the young vote in 2020 by more than 20 points. Recent polling, however, shows Donald Trump winning the Gen Z vote by six points. That’s a massive shift that has Democrats rather nervous for the 2024 election cycle. (READ MORE: Gen Z Has Had Enough Therapy) Watch the video to find out more! Check out the latest on the Spectator P.M. Podcast:   Ep. 49: UCLA Faculty Members Admit Medical School’s Preference for Black, Hispanic Students Ep. 48: Dead Worms, Bad Speeches, and Old Politicians The post Democrats Failed Gen Z. That Will Matter in November. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Back in April the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute (RRPFI) announced the following: On June 5, 2024, twenty years after the passing of former President Ronald Reagan, speakers will reflect on his enduring legacy and examine his profound influence on both domestic and foreign policy. Panelists will include senior Reagan administration officials and media commentators. With June 5th upon us, many of those speakers have now been announced. They include: Carol Thatcher, Journalist, Author, and Daughter of Former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher Ben Mulroney, Producer, Broadcaster, and Son of Former Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney William Inboden, Academic and Author of The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink Steven Hayward, Author of The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964–1980, Greatness: Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Extraordinary Leader and The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980–1989 Paula Dobriansky, Vice Chair of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, the Atlantic Council, Director of European and Soviet Affairs, Reagan White House Guy Benson, Columnist, commentator, and political pundit on Fox News, Townhall.com, and talk radio Ken Adelman, President Reagan’s Arms Director, and author of Reagan at Reykjavik Art Laffer, Member of President Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board KT McFarland, Former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Moore, Reagan Administration Office of Management and Budget The following day, the Foundation will be celebrating the 80th Anniversary of D-Day. Those speakers will be: Condoleezza Rice, 66th U.S. Secretary of State (Keynote Conversation) Douglas Brinkley, Historian and Author of The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion Richard Burt, Former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Lisa Zanatta Henn, Daughter of D-Day Army Engineers 37th Combat Battalion Private First Class Peter Robert Zanatta Matt Kroenig, Vice President and Senior Director, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, Atlantic Council James Kuhn, Assistant to the President, Reagan White House Frank Lavin, Former Political Director, Reagan White House, and Former U.S. Ambassador to Singapore Kate Bachelder Odell, Member of the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board Cameron Toor, Veteran of the U.S. Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment In other words, what the Reagan Foundation has put together is a decided celebration of, first, President Reagan himself. Followed by a remembrance of one of the most memorable moments in all of American history: the day Allied troops hit the beaches of Normandy to begin bringing down the horrendous evil that was Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich. With all the chaos surrounding the current president and the lawfare targeting the former president … a decided reminder that life is never without its struggles. Not to be missed is the fact that D-Day and the Allied victory over Hitler set the stage for a postwar world rhat would, as it turned out, birth what became known as the Cold War. Which in turn was an epic, thankfully mostly peaceful, battle between former allies America versus the Communist Soviet Union. And that battle, (again, thankfully mostly peaceful with the decided exceptions of the Korean and Vietnam wars and other flare-ups in places like Central America, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia), brought forth the unique political career of the man there-to-fore known as an American movie and television star: Ronald Reagan. Reagan began to gather political attention when he took on the role of president of the Screen Actors Guild and discovered that Communism had infected Hollywood. Historian ( and the The American Spectator’s own) Paul Kengor has recounted Reagan’s career in multiple books. Notable in the group would be 11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative, a decidedly important book for upcoming young conservatives to learn from the man himself. Then there is The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, in which Kengor recounts “The story of his lifelong crusade against communism, and of his dogged–and ultimately triumphant–effort to overthrow the Soviet Union.” Then there is the amazing behind-the-scenes story of A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century   There is more like this from historian Kengor, including the not to be forgotten God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life And it should also be noted that Reagan biographer Steven F. Hayward has a two-part very detailed Reagan biography: The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980 and The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980-1989.  Time, as they say, flies. And for those like myself who had the distinct honor of working in the White House for the President and will be gathering at the Reagan Library to recall and celebrate his remarkable life and achievements, it will be a momentous evening. With all the chaos surrounding the current president and the lawfare targeting the former president, remembering President Reagan and the battles he fought — and won — will serve as a decided reminder that life is never without its struggles. The issue always is standing up for principle — and America. Twenty years before he was sworn in as the 40th president — in fact five years before being elected Governor of California — private citizen Reagan gave a speech to the Phoenix, Arizona Chamber of Commerce. In which he said this: Our Founding Fathers, here in this country, brought about the only true revolution that has ever taken place in man’s history. Every other revolution simply exchanged one set of rulers for another set of rulers. But only here did that little band of men so advanced beyond their time that the world has never seen their like since, evolve the idea that you and I have within ourselves the God-given right and the ability to determine our own destiny. But freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it and then hand it to them with the well thought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free. Twenty years later, President Reagan’s words and wisdom still ring true. With this week serving as a particular reminder for Americans to celebrate Ronald Reagan’s life and times. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: ‘Our Republican Legacy’ Is Not What the Washington Post Claims Biden Presidency Becomes Biden Dictatorship The post Reagan Remembered appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Teenagers are stereotypically rebellious. They push boundaries, make bad decisions, and are frequently ornery enough to do things precisely because they were told not to. In retrospect, banning rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t an effective strategy if the goal was to encourage teenagers to pick a different kind of music to jam to. (READ MORE from Aubrey Gulick: The Mother of Invention) It all started at a weekend dance in the town’s Civic Auditorium. Lieutenant Richard Overton of the Santa Cruz Police Force was assigned to the event and clearly did not enjoy the assignment. At 12:20 a.m. on Sunday — a full 40 minutes before the dance was supposed to end — Overton decided to send the band packing and the teenagers home to bed (which, it should be noted, they did so obediently and quietly). The issue? Overton determined that the music “excited the crowd to passion at times, and it was feared the crowd might become uncontrollable.” There doesn’t seem to have been alcohol present or even any kind of disturbance; it was simply that Overton thought a few of the teenage couples were engaging in what he considered objectionable dancing. The following Monday, the Santa Cruz Sentinel-News reported that authorities had decided on June 3, 1956, to ban rock ‘n’ roll “and other frenzied forms of terpsichore” (which is the kind of word we should use far more frequently to spice up news reports). On June 3, 1956, the City of Santa Cruz, California, imposed a ban on rock and roll music, as a result of 'obscene & highly suggestive dancing' by teenagers pic.twitter.com/EgKUH50vnD — RetroNewsNow (@RetroNewsNow) June 3, 2019 And Santa Cruz wasn’t the only town to ban rock ‘n’ roll. In Boston, a police commissioner shut down a planned concert because he was concerned that the event could result in riots. San Antonio, Texas banned the music in dance halls, and in Jersey City, New Jersey, Mayor Bernard Berry banned both rock ‘n’ roll and blues concerts. (READ MORE: Hunter S. Thompson: American Idiot) Rather than suppress the teenage urge to listen to rock ‘n’ roll, the bans helped the music grow in popularity. Now the music wasn’t just cool, it had become associated with rebelling against cultural norms. Santa Cruz’s ban lasted for just a few weeks that summer. Not only did the community itself complain about it, but the media picked up the story and the Santa Cruz Police Department’s phones didn’t stop ringing for weeks with eager calls from reporters around the country. The City Council quickly clarified that they hadn’t really banned rock ‘n’ roll, just “what some people do while listening to it” and gave the Civic Auditorium’s manager permission to end any dance he deemed immoral. The issue with that resolution, however, was that the council hadn’t exactly defined what it meant by “immoral” dance. Besides, as some parents noted in letters to the city newspaper, rock ‘n’ roll was “dead” compared to “the Modern and Jazz dances during and since” their youth. (READ MORE: Defeating China’s ‘Great Game’ in Cold War II) Just a year later, Santa Cruz youth were back, happily jamming away to rock ‘n’ roll, undisturbed by Lieutenant Overton. This article originally appeared on Aubrey’s Substack, Pilgrim’s Way on June 3, 2024. The post How Not to Ban Music appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

While we still do not know — indeed, likely will never know — what conduct the Manhattan jury convicted President Trump of committing, one possibility would evidence the gross duality and unfairness of “justice” in America, 2024.  If Trump was convicted of disguising campaign expenses as legal fees in order to influence an election, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s analogous conduct should have resulted in similar treatment by our justice system.  It did not. For her campaign misconduct, the Clinton campaign was ordered to pay a civil — not a criminal — fine of $8,000.  In 2022, the Federal Election Commission fined the Clinton campaign for fraudulently mislabeling payments made for the bogus Steele dossier as “legal fees” to the law firm Perkins Coie in the 2016 election.  That is, the payments for the Steele dossier were clearly non-legal campaign expenditures — “opposition research” — but the Clinton campaign falsely labeled them as “legal fees.”  The purpose of the Clinton misrepresentation was to hide the fact that the Russia collusion fraud was paid for by the Clinton campaign; thus concealing her involvement in sleazy conduct influencing the election and embroiling the country in a three-year paroxysm of the Russia collusion hoax.  The Steele dossier was, until then, the most effective campaign dirty trick in US history — although arguably the Bragg prosecution eclipses the dossier in the dirty tricks pantheon. (READ MORE: Liberals Willfully Deluded Themselves on the Russia Collusion Hoax) Trump may have been convicted of similar conduct, though his treatment was starkly different.  The Manhattan jury may have found Trump guilty of mislabeling an alleged campaign expenditure, the non-disclosure payment to Stormy Daniels, as legal fees.  (Many have argued the non-disclosure payments are not campaign contributions and have discussed the legion of defects in the prosecutor’s case and the prosecution’s and judge’s misconduct.  Here I only address the dichotomy between how Trump and Clinton were treated based on essentially the same conduct.) For her campaign misconduct, the Clinton campaign was ordered to pay a civil — not a criminal — fine of $8,000.  The Democratic Party was ordered to pay $105,000.  Unlike Trump, Clinton was not the subject of a local DA’s selective prosecution in a county that had voted against her by almost 90 percent. She was not indicted, not charged with any crime, did not have family sexual peccadillos paraded before a court, was not trapped in a courtroom for four weeks just months before the election when she should have been campaigning, and did not have her due process rights trampled. By the way, Clinton’s 2016 campaign was headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. (READ MORE: Post-Trump Verdict, Will the American Right Finally Wake Up?) So, Hillary Clinton is found to be liable for mislabeling payments for the Steele Dossier as legal fees and gets an $8,000 civil fine; Trump has been found guilty of mislabeling non-disclosure payments as legal fees and is a convicted felon.  Justice in America. Mr. Daukas served as Principal Deputy and Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, 2020-21; and as a Chief Counsel on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, 2023. The post Hillary Mislabeled Steele Dossier Payments as ‘Legal Fees’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The surviving members of the Sex Pistols, sans John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), are getting back together for a pair of benefit gigs August 13th and 14th at London’s Bush Hall. Guitarist Steve Jones, bassist Glen Matlock and drummer Paul Cook will play the band’s debut album “Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols” with vocalist/tattoo artist Frank Carter (pictured) filling in for Lydon, who is on the outs with his former bandmates over the use of Sex Pistols music in the “Pistol” miniseries based on Jones’s “Lonely Boy: Tales From A Sex Pistol.” That dispute reignited longstanding, and apparently still unresolved feuds, among the band’s surviving members. Proceeds from the shows will benefit Bush Hall, which like many independent live music stages, has been struggling lately. ### The post Sex Pistol’s Reunion To Feature Frank Carter appeared first on RockinTown.

from Mark Dice:  TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Stefan Stanford, All News Pipeline: Conservatives are understandably outraged after the “guilty” on all counts verdict against Donald Trump came in, set up by a Democrat judge that donated to Joe Biden, from a jury of New Yorkers, a state which went to Biden in 2020 by 23.2 percent. There were no riots, nor vandalism, and […]