Americans Unhappy with Biden’s Handling of Immigration

Illegal Immigrants

Immigration has become a toxic issue for President Joe Biden, with many voters citing it as their top problem with the president, according to newly released survey data.

Gallup released the poll, which was taken in January and found that only 41% of Americans approved of the job Biden is doing as president while 54% disapprove. Among those disapproving of Biden’s work, 19% cite immigration as the reason, far more than any other specific issue.

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Decline in White Recruits Fueling the Military’s Worst-Ever Recruiting Crisis, Data Shows

Military Recruits

Each U.S. military service saw a notable decline in white recruits over the past five years, according to data obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, likely factoring into the military’s crippling recruiting crisis.

The Army, Navy and Air Force missed their recruiting objectives by historically large margins in fiscal year 2023, which ended on Sept. 30, as the broader American public has grown wary of military service, according to Department of Defense (DOD) statistics, officials and experts who spoke to the DCNF. Since 2018, however, the number of recruits from minority groups has remained steady — or, in some cases, increased — while the number of white recruits has declined, according to data on the demographics of new recruits obtained by the DCNF.

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Commentary: Why Are Fewer Americans Celebrating Valentine’s Day?

Valentine's Day

Fewer Americans are planning to celebrate Valentine’s Day in 2024 than in years past.

America isn’t totally losing its love for the saccharine holiday, though. In fact, spending on Valentine’s Day gifts—for everyone from a significant other to one’s cat—has increased.

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Commentary: The Meaning of Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is—oddly perhaps—a day I have long associated with bushfires, better known in the American hemisphere as wildfires.

I come from the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, where on Ash Wednesday in 1983, catastrophic bushfires, driven by 70-mph winds and fueled by years of drought-ravaged eucalyptus forest, tragically claimed 28 lives. In the neighboring state of Victoria, even more lives were lost under similar conditions. In total, 75 Australians perished and 3,000 homes were destroyed in what were the nation’s deadliest bushfires up to that point.

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Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: Do Leftists Now Believe Leftism Doesn’t Work?

San Francisco Homeless

It is hard to destroy a naturally beautiful city like San Francisco, with ideal weather and stunning infrastructure inherited from far better earlier generations.

Yet San Francisco continues its much-publicized and self-inflicted doom loop. The productive classes still flee the increasingly crime-ridden city and its self-induced pathologies. The city is eroding not because of the doomsayers and not because of what people say about San Francisco, but because of what San Franciscans have done to San Francisco.

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Commentary: Another Far-Left Progressive Admits the ‘Very Fine People’ Claim Was a Hoax All Along

President Donald Trump "Very Fine People" screenshot

Hard to Kill is a Steven Seagal action thriller from 1990 that garnered scornful reviews, though I loved it as a then-teenager. But that phrase, “hard to kill,” also aptly describes the “Very Fine People” hoax surrounding Charlottesville and the lingering myth that President Trump praised bigots there.

In recent days, liberal social media rabble-rouser actor Michael Rapaport stated on the Patrick Bet-David podcast that “the Charlottesville, that I ranted about, I was wrong… that there’s good people on both sides, and when you see the full quote, that wasn’t what he [Trump] said.” Rapaport has been a prolific Trump hater, producing vitriolic online rants that frequently go viral, earning him nearly 700,000 followers on X/Twitter.

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Teacher Who Exposed School’s ‘Woke Kindergarten’ Program Put on Leave

The San Francisco-area elementary school whose test scores dropped following implementation of the so-called “Woke Kindergarten” program suspended the teacher who exposed the controversial program.

On Thursday, the teacher who blew the whistle on the program was “summoned […] to a video conference” during which he was told to “turn in his keys and laptop and not return to his classroom […] until further notice,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

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Commentary: Far from Environmentalists’ ‘Immoral’ Claim – We Need Children Now More than Ever

New Born Baby

In a recent television interview, environmental activist Donnachadh McCarthy informed the public that having more than two kids is selfish. McCarthy states in the interview that humanity has destroyed 70 percent of “nature” in one generation, presumably due to our so-called carbon footprint, although he doesn’t explain exactly how this has occurred.

“There’s a moral issue here,” he says. “How can we pass that on to the next generation? Every child in an industrial country like ours has around 505 hundred tonnes of carbon over their lifetime. That’s equivalent to 1000 years of electricity for a household. So each child has an impact, and we’re saying one is great, two is plenty, and three is selfish.”

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Commentary: Battles We Can Win Are on Family, Morality, and Education

Family

In “Burke on Our Crisis of Character,” which appeared in the December 2023 issue of Chronicles, Bruce Frohnen notes, “The American Way was real, rooted in families whose rights trumped the demands of the state because families were more natural and fundamental than the state.” The following month in the same magazine, Stephen Baskerville reviews a collection of essays, Up from Conservatism, in which he briefly addresses the pernicious effects of government welfare on family life and fatherhood.

As is the case in nearly everything that the federal government touches, be it education, health care, or anything else, its policies in the last 50 years have severely damaged the American family. Given the additional harms done by government in the first quarter of the 21st century—trillions of dollars in wasted expenses, woefully ignorant public school graduates, divisions along the lines of race, politics, and gender, a diminished pride in our past, the attacks on our liberties—some people I know despair about the future. Others of us want to restore the good that has been lost but feel frustrated and even defeated by the immensity of the task. We vote, we grouse (as I am doing here), yet each day brings some new assault on the culture, some new governmental dictate or intrusion, and we just want to hunker down in the trenches hoping that this bombardment will end of its own accord.

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