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I have a mental model of American voters. For instance-- A lot of Republican voters are pretty fixed MAGA voters (even if Trump isn't their cup of tea). This election, next, whatever, that's the way they are going to vote. On the other hand-- A lot of Democrat voters are progressive, but another big bunch are just media followers. Whatever the NY Times is selling works for them. The result is a set of voters that aren't really under much stress in most election seasons. Convinced MAGA voters aren't going to change much. Progressives and media followers are working from...

Lately, there has been so much frustration with the last election and the direction of our country that some Trump supporters have been talking about “secession.” Many conservatives and libertarians are asking if it makes sense for certain states to leave the union the way South Carolina left in 1860, after the election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States. Whether it makes “sense” or not, we can be assured that it will not happen. Although the South Carolina state legislature voted in November of 1860 to initiate the process of secession, no state legislature would do that...

Remember the old New Orleans Saints coach Jim Mora, who went nuts at a press conference? "Playoffs? Are you kidding me? Playoffs?" he said. You can quote me today: "Unity? Are you freakin' kidding me? Unity? There's no unity. President Joe Biden can mouth the word 'unity' all he wants. It's a lie. Democrats don't want unity. They want to censor us, ban us, purge us, wipe away American history like it never happened and then intimidate us into meekly going along with it all. They want us to kneel and say thank you while they destroy America and the...

"We must end this uncivil war," Joe Biden proclaimed shortly after he became the 46th president on Wednesday. Hours earlier, in his last moments as the 45th president, Donald Trump extended "best wishes" to the "new administration." Graceful words, but accompanied by sharp and, in some cases, deserved attacks. Our presidents since George Washington have come to office through an inevitably adversary process, and while they may inspire "unity" on occasion, that's more the exception than the rule. That process has become especially adversary in times of close division, like the polarized partisan parity prevailing since the 1990s. Joe Biden...

In a terribly unsettled time in American history, there are a few voices on both sides of the political aisle calling for "healing" and "unity." To say that these are desperately needed is an understatement. But merely wishing for it will not make it so. To use an analogy of bodily illness, just as physical healing is not possible without an accurate diagnosis of the ailment, there can be no political healing without truth. And, just as an accurate diagnosis is a prerequisite to the successful combination of all available treatment methodologies, there can be no national "unity" when large...

With the Democrats' maniacal actions since January 6th, not to mention Leftist tech giants, a fawning and mendacious press, street-mob organizations, and Obama-styled weaponized federal agencies aiding and abetting Democrats, endless conflict is all but predictable. No one can guarantee the USA will exist for the duration of the decade, let alone the next four years, or even this year. Our 245-year experiment in representative democracy is rapidly fraying at the edges, and not merely because of anarchists and agitators or a contested election. Big money has always been the controlling factor in Washington D.C. Today, the levels of influence...

The Scriptures we are studying today were spontaneously chosen only after I sat down to write this study. Since last Monday, I had every intention of writing about Psalm 46 and spent time researching the meaning of that magnificent “song” for these troubled times. Such a last-minute switch-out has never happened in the 42 previous volumes. Thus, my interpretation is that I am “supposed” to write about this famous phrase of scripture, which happens to be a political cliché, usually attributed to Abraham Lincoln:"A house divided against itself cannot stand."However, Lincoln was quoting Jesus. During Lincoln’s time, Americans often read...

It’s mid-September and two different Americas now embrace two different election processes, with each side convinced of the illegitimacy of the other’s process and skeptical of the results. The mainstream media and social media giants have lined up on the expected side, with Facebook recently announcing they’ll somehow support, versus detract from, the integrity of the elections by preventing political campaigns for advocating for their interests or declaring victory before they – Facebook – deem appropriate. Opposition leader Barack Obama seeds doubt about the fairness of the election and even the survival of the country if his slate of candidates...

Last year, rhetoric about “uniting the nation” was virtually absent from the presidential campaign trail — an observation applied equally to President Trump and all the Democrats vying to unseat him. Henceforth, will the concept of “uniting” make a 2020 comeback? No, and here’s why: The plague of polarization has so thoroughly infiltrated the American psyche that even asking the question, “Who can unite the nation?” sounds like a quaint 20th-century flashback.  That’s because it is from back in May 1999 when then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush famously stated, “I'm a uniter, not a divider," describing his governing style. He...

The current state of American politics is eerily reminiscent of the wildfires that recently engulfed the state of California. The conditions are right, the tinder is dry, the crosswinds are high, and the landscape is ripe for conflagration. This is why it's incumbent upon our political leadership to refrain from lighting a match at this critical time. Pointing out that America is more sharply divided than ever before is an understatement hidden within an obvious truth. The latest polls show that Americans are sharply divided along party lines over the Democrat-led impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. The divisions are...

Fifty years ago, the United States was facing crises and unrest on multiple fronts. Some predicted that internal chaos and revolution would unravel the nation. The 1969 Vietnam War protests on the UC Berkeley campus turned so violent that National Guard helicopters indiscriminately sprayed tear gas on student demonstrators. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of major cities as part of the "Moratorium to the End the War in Vietnam." In Washington, D.C., about a half-million protesters marched to the White House. Native American demonstrators took over the former federal prison on Alcatraz Island in...

The real national emergency is capable of consuming the national boundaries, the national civility, and eventually, the very soul of America. There truly is a National Emergency in 2019! As the nation celebrated Presidents’ Day on Monday, the people are in the midst of sorting out the “National Emergency” that President Donald Trump declared this past Friday. But, despite the various “insights” and numerous concerns over the wisdom of the president’s actions, the real question remains as to whether the United States is facing a national emergency at the southern border or whether it is not. Despite whether the Border...

The election of Donald Trump—and his presidency thus far—did not create the social and political divide tearing America apart. The forces aligned on the right and the left were already doing that long before Trump or Barack Obama or George W. Bush entered the political arena. But the conflict that has erupted since Trump’s victory has exposed the chasm that divides us more dramatically than any event in the last 150 years. Americans hardly think any more about the motto that adorns our currency: “E Pluribus Unum”—an example of the dreams of national unity—“From many, one.” Today those dreams...

America stands at a precipice. It's a moral precipice of our own making: We're not facing any external existential threat, or any serious economic crisis. Nonetheless, we're at each other's throats in a shocking and unique way. At least in the 1960s, serious issues divided us: the national attempt to grapple with legally enshrined racism, the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War. We have no such excuse now. Yet to view the sheer chaos surrounding the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh is to realize that we may simply have nothing in common anymore, other than our sheer blind luck at having...

Did you ever think you'd see the day when a prominent political party would accuse the president of being divisive and exclusionary for saying "America" too many times during his State of the Union speech? The American Civil Liberties Union made that very complaint. No, the ACLU is not the Democratic Party, but their positions on such matters are virtually indistinguishable. Besides, many prominent Democrats and media liberals made similar objections after the speech. MSNBC host Joy Reid brazenly trashed traditional American values and institutions with her tweet accusing President Trump of trying to force the normalization of himself by...

Almost a half-century ago, in 1968, the United States seemed to be falling apart. The Vietnam War, a bitter and close presidential election, antiwar protests, racial riots, political assassinations, terrorism and a recession looming on the horizon left the country divided between a loud radical minority and a silent conservative majority. The United States avoided a civil war. But America suffered a collective psychological depression, civil unrest, defeat in Vietnam and assorted disasters for the next decade -- until the election of a once-polarizing Ronald Reagan ushered in five consecutive presidential terms of relative bipartisan calm and prosperity from 1981...

Michael Brown was a college-bound, black teenager who no longer has an opportunity to forge a future he could be proud of. He is dead, allegedly killed execution style after a confrontation with a policeman. Darren Wilson is a white police officer, who after six years of blemish-free service to his community, used deadly force to allegedly defend himself in an escalating confrontation with an unarmed teenager. Do you know which version is closer to the truth? The search for justice is always difficult. In the rush for judgment in Ferguson, Missouri, it has become all but impossible. As coverage...

People bemoan the divisions that exist in America today. On a recent trip to New York City it took a New York minute (actually seven minutes) to show the grand demarcation that has occurred and it is more like a rupture. We were recently in New York to celebrate my wife’s birthday when the encounter happened. My wife follows from afar the social scene in New York with her principle source of information being the New York Social Diary which she reads daily. The creator and editor of the Diary, David Patrick Columbia, usually lunches on Wednesday at Michael’s restaurant,...

It seems to me that almost every time President Obama talks publicly about race, he stirs things up rather than calms them down. Whether intentional or not, it's unfortunate -- and damaging. It's difficult to express opinions on race that don't conform to the politically correct narrative, because race baiters are always lying in wait to denounce anyone who dissents from their assessment as a bigot. Indeed, many leftists who call for a national dialogue on race routinely brand conservatives as racists -- merely because they are conservative -- even when they remain silent on racially sensitive issues. But understand...

America-Could We Lose It? About ten years ago, while I was researching my first book, The Languages of the Former Soviet Republics-Their History and Development, I gained a lot of insights into the history of the Soviet Union itself and how it collapsed. True, Gorbachev and his reforms, followed by the attempted coup were the final contributors. Ronald Reagan kept up the pressure on the USSR with his defense programs, also helping push them over the edge. However, one of the largest factors in the collapse of the USSR was the re-awakening of the non-Russian republics and peoples in favor...