Your Whereabouts Are Known at All Times

Townhall 

"Big Brother is watching you" is no longer a fictional admonition. Everywhere you go, your location is recorded by phone technology, license plate readers, Uber and Lyft transactions, and cameras.

Privacy? Forget about it. Your location history is in the hands of many tech companies. Can the police and other government agencies force tech companies to share that information about you? The U.S. Supreme Court took up that question on Monday. The court's decision could have widespread impact on your privacy.

If your location history puts you within a 1-mile radius of a bank robbery with hundreds of other people, you could become a suspect, swept up in the wide net cast to find the perpetrator.

Many people find the growing surveillance creepy, but law enforcement is using this technology -- called geofencing -- to solve crimes rapidly, including some that would go unsolved.

During Monday's oral arguments in Chatrie v. United States, the justices tackled this tradeoff between privacy and effective crimefighting, and how the U.S. Constitution, written over two centuries ago, can be interpreted to safeguard your rights in the age of Big Brother.

In 2019, a gunman robbed the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia. Stumped, the police secured a "geofence warrant" instructing Google to produce location history records for every digital device within a 17.5-acre circle around the crime scene for a two-hour timeframe. Then the police asked Google for the identity of three device users, including the man ultimately charged with the crime, Okello Chatrie.

Chatrie claims his Fourth Amendment right to be protected from "unreasonable" government search was violated when police used geofencing and compelled Google to disclose his location history.

The case is making for strange bedfellows, bringing together the often left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union and the more conservative Institute for Justice and CATO Institute. They argue that when a judge issues a warrant allowing law enforcement to pore over hundreds of thousands of location records implicating hundreds or thousands of people in order to narrow down a list of possible suspects, that is the modern version of the "general warrant," which British customs officials 250 years ago used to burst into every home in a town to look for smuggled goods; the Fourth Amendment banned these generalized searches.

But during Monday's session, that argument made little headway, as Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh cited statements on geofencing's usefulness for law enforcement. Most of the Justices will likely uphold the bank robber's conviction. Law enforcement has to get a warrant to use geofencing -- and much of the discussion focused on whether the standards for granting warrants need to be stricter.

The justices anticipated how geofencing could be abused by government. "What's to prevent the government from using this to find out the identities of everybody at a particular church, a particular political organization?" Chief Justice John Roberts asked.

The court will announce its ruling in June, and the implication will reach far beyond cellphone technology. Google actually has phased out storing location data and announced that it will no longer comply with geo-warrants. Alito wondered aloud why the court was even hearing the case. But many other tech companies collect location data.

Flock Safety, a license plate reading company, has cameras in more than 5,000 communities and provides reports to 4,800 law enforcement agencies in 49 states.

License plate readers, according to Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahon, allow for much faster arrest of car thieves and more successful prosecutions in court.

But the ACLU objects that extensive tracking of every person's whereabouts via license plate readers amounts to an invasion of privacy. The ACLU is calling for "clear regulations to keep the government from tracking our movements on a massive scale."

As usual in politics, there's a fair share of hypocrisy. Several Democratic-led cities in New York, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas are terminating their contracts with Flock Safety because it has cooperated with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

They apparently think it's OK to arrest American-born criminals using geo-searches, but not illegals. Ridiculous. The Denver City Council unanimously voted to terminate Flock Safety, but the city's mayor, Mike Johnston, saw the light, calling it a useful crimefighting tool.

One takeaway from Monday's hearing: Wherever you go, assume you are creating a digital and photographic record of your own movements. Privacy is a thing of the past. The issue now is using these technologies to fight crime without empowering government to crush our personal liberties.

Podcast thread for April 29

 

Zzzzzzzzzzzz....

And Is This ‘Late-Stage Capitalism’ In The Room With Us Now?

American Thinker 

The phrase “late-stage capitalism” has become a kind of shorthand for dissatisfaction with modern economic life. It appears in commentary on everything from financial markets to gig work to social media, often as a way of suggesting that capitalism has entered a terminal phase: decadent, unstable, and perhaps nearing collapse. The term carries rhetorical force, but its analytical content is far less clear. As an economic concept, “late-stage capitalism” rests on a set of logical and structural problems that make it more evocative than explanatory.

Historically, the phrase originates in Marxian and post-Marxian thought, where capitalism is understood as a dynamic system moving through stages. The “late-stage” phase is typically associated with financialization, globalization, and the dominance of large firms. But this framing embeds a strong assumption: that capitalism follows a linear, teleological path toward some definable endpoint. That assumption is difficult to defend. Market economies are not organisms with predetermined life cycles; they are evolving systems shaped by institutions, technologies, preferences, and policy choices. To describe the present as “late-stage” presumes knowledge of an endpoint that has never been clearly specified or empirically observed.

This is the first major flaw: the term smuggles in a conclusion - decline or impending transition - without establishing the mechanism. If capitalism is “late-stage,” what precisely is ending? Profit? Large profit margins (and on the basis of what standard)? Private ownership? Market exchange? None of these show signs of disappearance. On the contrary, they have expanded globally over the past several decades. What has changed are the forms they take: digital platforms, global supply chains, and increasingly complex financial systems. But describing transformation is oceans away from demonstrating terminal decline.

A second issue is the conflation of outcomes with systems. Critics often point to rising inequality, financial instability, or perceived cultural excess and attribute these directly to “late-stage capitalism.” Yet these phenomena do not uniquely identify a stage of capitalism. Inequality has varied widely across time and place, depending on taxation, education, technology, and institutional arrangements. Financial instability has been a recurring feature of market economies since their inception. To treat these outcomes as evidence of a terminal phase is to confuse symptoms with structure—to substitute description for explanation.

Related to this is the collectivists' tendency toward unfalsifiable contentions. “Late-stage capitalism” functions less like a hypothesis and more like a catch-all category. Any undesirable feature of contemporary life—precarious employment, consumer culture, speculative finance—can be folded into it. But a concept that explains everything explains little. If every outcome is taken as confirmation, there is no conceivable evidence that could count against the claim. In economic terms, the concept lacks discipline.

There is also a category error at work. “Capitalism”—less freightedly, free markets—is not a single, uniform system but a family of institutional arrangements defined by varying degrees of market coordination, state intervention, and legal structure. The U.S., Germany, Japan, and Singapore all operate within broadly capitalist frameworks, yet their outcomes differ significantly. To speak of “late-stage capitalism” as if it were a single, homogeneous phase obscures these differences and invites overgeneralization. It attributes to “the system” what may be better explained by policy choices, regulatory frameworks, or cultural factors.

Perhaps the most persistent analytical weakness, however, lies in the neglect of price signals and adaptation. Market economies are characterized by decentralized coordination through prices. When conditions change, whether due to technological innovation, resource constraints, or policy shifts, relative prices adjust, and economic activity reorganizes in response. This process is rarely smooth, and it can produce dislocations. But it is precisely this capacity for adjustment that defines the system’s resilience. The language of “late-stage capitalism” often treats current arrangements as static or brittle, overlooking the extent to which they are continuously reshaped by market signals.

Consider financialization, a common marker of “late-stage capitalism.” The expansion of financial markets is often portrayed as evidence of excess or decay. Yet financial systems perform essential functions: allocating capital, managing risk, and facilitating intertemporal exchange. Their growth reflects, in part, the increasing complexity of modern economies. That complexity can generate instability, particularly when incentives are misaligned or regulation is poorly designed. But these are issues of governance and institutional quality, not necessarily signs of systemic exhaustion.

None of this is to deny that contemporary economies face real challenges. Technological disruption, public debt accumulation, and geopolitical fragmentation are substantive issues that merit careful analysis. But invoking “late-stage capitalism” does little to clarify them. It compresses a wide range of distinct phenomena into a single, ambiguous label, often replacing explanation with insinuation. More importantly, aside from the already well-known conceptual failures of Marxian and collectivist frameworks, the term introduces an additional layer of illogic and cognitive dissonance—purporting to diagnose systemic decay while obscuring the institutional and policy drivers actually at work.

A more useful approach is to disaggregate. Instead of asking whether capitalism is “late-stage,” it is more productive to examine specific mechanisms: how labor markets are evolving, how monetary policy transmits into asset prices, how regulatory structures shape competition, and how energy constraints influence production. Among the most pressing areas for analysis are government interference, rent-seeking behavior, fiscal extravagance, and the persistent inflationary bias embedded in modern policy regimes. These are tractable questions, grounded in observable relationships and open to empirical testing—and far more relevant to understanding current economic dynamics than broad, stage-based characterizations.

In the end, “late-stage capitalism” as a descriptor persists not because of its analytical precision but its rhetorical appeal. It captures a mood — a sense that something is off — without requiring the discipline of a clear argument. For consumers of news, informed observers, and pundits alike, the task should be to move beyond vacuous labels and toward more rigorous understandings of the forces shaping modern economic life.

Americans Won’t Have a Country Unless They Have Sex — And Babies

If Americans do not have children, America will not remain American.

The Federalist

We’ve stopped having sex!” former Republican Sen. Ben Sasse pointed out in a recent interview.

“It is very weird. I don’t have a phone on me, but that we carry around these super devices in our pockets that have distracted us from some of the most fundamental human activities and aspirations: having a baby is a bet on the future,” he continued.

It’s not a new observation; in fact, it’s not merely an observation, it’s a warning of a civilization emergency. An emergency that has plagued the United States and other civilizations throughout history.

Teddy Roosevelt warned in 1901 that “All the problems before us in this country … are as nothing compared with the problem of the diminishing birth rate and all that it implies.” He saw low fertility among Americans as an existential threat to the continuity of the country itself.

Before Roosevelt it was Polybius, who wrote in his book Histories that Greece was suffering a self-inflicted birth rate crisis. Polybius diagnosed the cause as a cultural and moral shift.

“In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth-rate and a general decrease of the population. … For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.”

Sasse himself made the same observation about the cause, that is, prosperity is seemingly breeding selfishness, which is leading to a decline in birth rates.

“Almost everywhere in the world — and the world is richer and richer and richer statistically than it’s ever been — people have decided, ‘Eh, actually babies are kind of an inconvenience.’ Babies have always been an inconvenience and the most glorious thing you can do to enrich your family and to make a bet on the future,” Sasse said. “How weird that we’ve stopped having sex, we’ve stopped making babies, we’ve decided being distracted by a dopamine hit around Candy Crush might be a good way to spend your time — not if you’re a full human.”

Data shows such diagnoses are accurate.

A 2026 study by the Institute for Family Studies found that only about 31 percent of young adults said they were actively dating, while 74 percent of young women and 64 percent of young men “had not dated or dated only a few times in the last year.” And, to Sasse’s point, adults ages 18-64 simply aren’t having as much sex as they were. The General Social Survey shows weekly sex among adults 18-64 plunged to 37 percent in 2024, down by nearly 20 percentage points from 1990.

Marriage rates hit a 140-year low around 2019 and have remained near historic lows since, with 25 percent of 40-year-olds having never married in 2021 compared to just 6 percent in 1980. The New York Times reported that Gen Z and young Millennials show high rates of having never dated or had relationships at all.

And Pew Research polling shows that the top reason for not having children is as simple as “I just don’t want to” and “I want to focus on other things,” like career and personal interests. In fact, childless adults report that not having kids has made career success easier and social life better. To Sasse’s point, people are treating children as an “inconvenience” not worth taking on because the short-term gratification from career success and personal hobbies feels more rewarding — despite the decision robbing a civilization of long-term prosperity.

But as Roosevelt warned in 1901 — and as remains true today — this decline is among the greatest problems our country faces. So what did he mean by that? Well, as Pat Buchanan wrote in Death of the West, “First world nations are dying. They face a mortal crisis, not because of something happening in the Third World, but because of what is not happening at home and in the homes of the First World.”

And what’s happening in the Third World is they’re having sex and children at far higher rates than in the United States (though Third World countries have also seen fertility rates decline). They’re doing what Americans aren’t doing. A country that does not reproduce cannot sustain itself, Buchanan continued. Employment needs in particular demand workers, and as Americans become a dying breed, such shortages must be filled.

It’s a point made by The Heritage Foundation’s Jonathan Abbamonte, who wrote that “without a substantial increase in fertility, the United States will continue to be increasingly dependent on immigration to slow down population ageing and prevent population contraction.”

While Americans delay or entirely avoid marriage and children, Third-World foreigners, many of whom have entered this country illegally, are having babies. Efforts to slow mass migration and preserve American culture — such as those taken by the Trump administration to limit the admission of foreigners into the country (and therefore stemming their ability to reproduce here) — are fragile. Democrats have promised to reverse Trump’s immigration policies, and it’s likely Americans will see waves of mass Third-World migration if Democrats return to office.

Americans are choosing wealth, comfort, and personal freedom over the responsibility of building families and repopulating the country. The tradeoff in the short term may feel good: more money and time and fewer obligations. But nations are not sustained on short-term gratification. As Buchanan warned, a nation that does not reproduce cannot sustain itself. And if that void is filled by Third-World foreigners with vastly different customs, cultures, histories, languages, and religions, America will not remain America.

Over time, America will begin to resemble the places those populations came from. In fact, the very conditions that allow Americans to choose affluent living and money and individual “prosperity” over children and family are ironically the product of a particular culture, people, and set of values — or in short: Americans and American babies filling those shoes with each generation cycle.

If Americans do not have children, America will not remain American, and none of the extra money or time that Americans have gained by putting off children will count for much.

The Problem with Eternal Vigilance

The Problem with Eternal Vigilance

George Ford Smith for Mises

“Politics in all its variants, particularly the politics of political parties, is the archenemy of freedom, prosperity, and peace. Yet wherever one looks, more government is invoked as the solution.”—Antony P. Mueller, “Is Anarcho-Capitalism Viable”

People are supposed to exercise eternal vigilance to keep themselves free. How does one exercise vigilance when the entity in question can pretty much do what it wants and can back its actions with superior force? How does one exercise vigilance when nature requires him to spend his time supporting his life and the lives of those he chooses to support? How does one exercise vigilance in defending freedom when most people today would rather be the subject of a state than be free?

It is a formidable task that has little in the way of a promising future.

Imagine how life is for people in Ukraine or Gaza or Iran—or anywhere else where bombs are falling or missiles striking. Borrowing from Hobbes, you might describe their lives as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” but you’d be immediately faced with another problem. Hobbes was describing what life would be like in the absence of a state. People suffering the consequences of war are suffering at the hands of states.

Is life one vast contradiction that can only be resolved at one’s death? Is that one of the appeals of religion, that it replaces suffering with peace and good will in the afterlife? Or is it possible people still on earth can find a way to live peacefully with one another without a state?

If it is possible then anyone looking to persuade others of this position will find resistance everywhere he turns. And not just from warmongers.

More moderate positions on the state’s necessity come from thinkers who self-identify as libertarians, who promote peace, prosperity, and freedom but also claim none of it is possible without a sovereign authority to establish and enforce laws. They argue for limited government—keep the state but limit its functions to those needed to protect the Declaration’s inalienable rights.

It’s intellectually easy to criticize the state as it exists today, rather than the idea of the state itself, here understood in Oppenheimer’s sense as a predator of the producing class. Taxation is theft, inflation is deceptive theft, conscription is kidnapping—each established libertarian positions, and all attributable to the state’s aim of increasing its power. Do away with these and others, such as a standing army, and we will arrive at a version of the state that satisfies libertarians because it’s the best we can hope for. Their axiom: We will always have states. Libertarians want them as small as possible.

But even this version is alien. States grow. It’s in their nature. Their purpose is to provide security. There are always more and better ways to secure. For the state, security comes at a cost of imposing restrictions on freedom. People can turn to private security firms but they operate under state permission. If the security sought is that provided by sound money, the whole industrialized world opposes it. Fiat money, best understood as legal counterfeiting, grows the state, not sound money.

How does a state get away with growing? Usually, in response to a crisis. What is government for if not to fix or alleviate it, as FDR allegedly accomplished with his New Deal? Isn’t that how security is understood? It will require government expansion but most people are led to believe it’s worth it. Besides, under a fiat monetary regime, such as most states have, the hit on its subjects’ net worth will be mostly hidden until much later, a result of the Cantillon effect, at which time there will be market actors to blame, not the government.

Instead of demanding a flat sum immediately such as a sales tax imposes, the state has an ingenious theft installment plan of which most people are unaware. The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee has as policy an innocent-sounding target of a 2 percent inflation rate, translated as a 2 percent hit on the purchasing power of the dollar that is achieved by creating money ex nihilo—out of nothing, like a child playing make believe, only these children are considered the best and the brightest so are obliged to do it in a very circuitous way by adjusting something called the federal funds rate. Fed monetary inflation is sometimes augmented with higher taxes on the rich that slides down to the middle and lower classes who are mostly puzzled at this outcome. As for the benefit of state expansion, the combination of welfare and warfare has worked every time. At home it helps the “needy” often on the basis of their support for the current regime, abroad it devastates lives and destroys critical infrastructure to impose political ideals on people who don’t want them, always with the threat of blowback.

All this is how the state provides protection to ensure the freedom and well-being of its subjects. For this difficult task it claims a legal monopoly on the use of force. Monopoly defined:

A situation, by legal privilege or other agreement, in which solely one party (company, cartel etc.) exclusively provides a particular product or service, dominating that market and generally exerting powerful control over it.

The “particular product or service” a state allegedly provides is protection of your status as a human being. Did you vote to be under rule by a state? No. Did you vote for the particular constitutional state now in effect? No, your ancestors did. The Constitutional US replaced the Articles US by means of a quiet coup d’etat. Pro-Constitution delegates in 1787 argued that their purposewas “to render the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of Government and the preservation of the Union [i.e., the State]” which they claimed justified ditching the Articles. In their view, an adequate government required a monopoly central state with the power to tax.

Americans have always inveighed against monopolies, usually without making a distinction between coercive and non-coercive monopolies. Problems emerge when coercive monopolies have the force of law behind them.

In the late 19th century, for example, voluntary cartel agreements couldn’t establish the market control big business wanted so they turned to the state, the mother of all coercive monopolies, to get the legal advantages they wanted.

Always, the legal establishment of monopolies that began with the creation of the federal government was done under the moral umbrella of the public interest. The Constitution’s preamble gives it away, that it was created by “We the People . . . to promote the general Welfare . . .” A person genuinely concerned with the general welfare of the country would not agree to assign that task to the state, the historical record of which is anything but a promoter of its subjects’ welfare.

The idea of eternal vigilance suggests the task of keeping the state in line, of keeping it from overstepping its boundaries. But ask yourself: what boundaries does a nuclear superpower have today? We would be far more effective in elaborating the raw essence of any state and its threat not just to our freedom but to our lives.

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Trump Makes Stirring Case for America, Dismissing the Myth That It's 'Just an Idea' in Epic Speech

RedState 

The "No Kings" nutcases have been pretty silent when we, right here in these United States, hosted an actual king right here on our soil. On Tuesday, while hosting the United Kingdom's King Charles III (No, Rep. Omar, he's not the one-hundred and eleventh King Charles), President Trump made some statements that may well be among his best ever, noting the historical relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States — while throwing in a big, heaping serving of American exceptionalism.

Watch: 

The President said:

"Here in the shadows of monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, honoring the British King might seem an ironic beginning to our celebration of 250 years of American independence, but in fact, no tribute could be more appropriate.

"Long before Americans had a nation or a constitution, we first had culture, a character, and a creed. Before we ever proclaimed our independence, Americans carried within us the rarest of gifts: moral courage, and it came from a small but mighty kingdom from across the sea. For nearly two centuries before the Revolution, this land was settled and forged by men and women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British here on this wild, untamed continent. They set loose the ancient English love of liberty and the Great Britain's distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride. And that's what it is, glory, destiny, and pride.

"The American patriots who pledged their lives to Independence in 1776 were heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true."

This is true and then some. Even today, after waves of immigration from places as far removed as Italy, Ireland, Germany, and China, America's culture retains much from our Anglo-Saxon roots. Much of our legal system is based on English common law. Beginning with the Magna Carta, the concept of rights sprang from Europe, most especially, from what is now the United Kingdom. We originally shared much more than just a common language.

The United Kingdom seems to be letting this slip away, now. But America? Not yet. The president continues:

"In recent years, we've often heard it said that America is merely an idea. But the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Fate drew a long arc from the meadow at Runnymede to the streets of Philadelphia that ran through the lives of people born and bred on the British code that no man should be denied either justice or right.

"American patriots today can sing 'My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty' only because our colonial ancestors first sang 'God save the King.'"

No, America isn't just an idea. America is a nation. And America is, or is supposed to be, a people.

But the American people aren't a people in the sense that the Japanese people are a people, or that the German people are a people. Those are nations with long and great histories, but America is something else, a place where you are identified not by your national origin or ethnicity, but by what you do, what you achieve. Or at least, that's how things are supposed to be.

America, from the founding, was a nation of people who built, who worked, who explored, who did great things, because great things needed to be done. I think that, for the most part, we still are such a nation. Leave the huge, rabbit-warren cities and get out in the countryside, in the small towns, in the villages and townships and counties that make up what the urban elites contemptuously call flyover country, and you'll see a lot of that spirit. It's still alive. America is still here.

President Trump understands that. In this speech, we can presume that this statement was aimed primarily at one person: King Charles III, whose country is in danger of losing its culture, its people, and its way of life. Will it have the desired impact? That remains to be seen, but these words are something that should resonate with any American listening. And that, alone, made it worth saying.

Why The United States Became A Powerhouse After Colonialization While Central America Collapsed

Many years of self-government, a more united geographic landmass, and a civilization that largely shared a common European heritage gave the United States a far better chance of survival.

The Federalist

Four hundred years ago this year, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and 160 men departed the small Spanish community of Panama in search of a great and wealthy empire they had heard existed to the south. Although that particular expedition to Peru was largely a failure, Pizarro’s steadfast bravery alongside the so-called Los trece de la fama (the “famous 13”) was enough to gain royal support and inspire enough Spaniards to fund another voyage to Peru a few years later. Pizarro and a few hundred men would conquer the mighty Inca.

Without a doubt, Spanish conquistadors such as Pizarro’s army (and their successors in the ensuing centuries) created an impressive empire, one that eventually traversed thousands of miles from California to Tierra del Fuego, incorporating millions of people. Yet, compared to that of their British rivals to the north, it was a markedly different animal, one whose instabilities, dysfunction, and corruption eventually spelled its doom.

As Americans celebrate our own 250th anniversary, it’s worth contemplating with gratitude what differentiates the “American experiment” from what transpired to our south.

A Larger and Less Governable New World

One of the most dramatic differences between the British and Spanish colonial experiments was simply the sheer size of their New World holdings. Spanish claimed and administered holdings in the Americas — encompassing the Caribbean, Mexico, and what is now the southwestern United States, Central, and South America — were at least ten times larger than what was eventually the 13 colonies governed by the British.

Scholars Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo note in their book, How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400-Year History: “The most impressive feature of the Spanish monarchy — its enormous reach — was a source of weakness, for it spread tenuous along effectively indefensible frontiers and vulnerable routes, with resources thinly distributed.”

Thus, even though in total more Spaniards immigrated to Spanish America than did British subjects to the American colonies, the British were concentrated in a far tighter geographic area, with most arrivals arriving in a shorter amount of time. The vastness of the Spanish empire and the small number of actual Spaniards, of course, made their colonies far more difficult to govern. This was especially true given that some of those administrations, such as that in the Andes region, were quite remote, even from other Spanish holdings elsewhere in the Americas.

Moreover, while European diseases wreaked havoc across all indigenous populations, British North America lacked the densely populated urban centers or empires that existed under the rule of the Spanish. This meant that the British colonies from the very beginning were often composed of settlers who created communities of European immigrants.

The Spanish, in contrast, governed former Aztec and Incan empires that had millions of people. This had a direct effect on the character of the colonies in British- and Spanish-administered regions: While the British generally settled sparsely populated (or depopulated) areas, the Spanish ruled over large indigenous populations who lived effectively as second-class citizens, if not little more than slaves. Indeed, Fernández-Armesto and Giraldo note that the Roman Catholic Church often kept indigenous people busy building churches and other projects to shield them from the encomiendas.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Spanish had little familiarity with republican self-government. While both colonies were originally formed under the auspices of a European crown, the British had centuries of decentralized parliamentary government upon which to draw, while the Spanish were exclusively familiar with a traditional and stratified monarchical form of rule. Thus, while the English-speaking Americas formed self-governing communities that were politically and economically independent — permitted, in Edmund Burke’s famous phrase, by “wise and salutary neglect” — the Spanish colonists tended to act as lords of a kingly realm.

An Inherently Unstable Spanish Colonial Rule

All of this said, it is truly remarkable what the Spanish accomplished in their colonies given the geographic obstacles and far more developed indigenous civilizations. As Fernández-Armesto and Giraldo relate, the incredible engineering feats alone across the Spanish colonies often improved upon what had already been accomplished by native peoples. “The Spanish Empire of the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth would not have functioned without the efforts of the engineers,” they write.

In Mexico City, the Spanish improved on the great Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan by building canals, cisterns, and ditches to curb regular flooding that swamped the city and its inhabitants. In South America, Spanish observers expressed admiration for the Andean peoples’ ingenuity, including roadworks through mountains and valleys which one Spaniard described as inspiring admiration similar to that of “Hannibal’s conquest of the Alps.”

Early on, the Spanish recognized the possibilities associated with a canal across the isthmus of Panama, although it would require modern (American) engineering to pull it off. The church was often at the forefront of construction projects, including bridges, roads, irrigation systems, and rope-walks. All of this was accomplished despite tremendous difficulties in identifying construction materials.

Nevertheless, both the geographic nature of the Spanish Empire and its exploitative character — with colonies viewed as little more than means to extract wealth to send back to Europe — meant that it was only a matter of time before the colonies would attempt to strike out on their own. Inspired by the American Revolution, Simón Bolívar and other revolutionaries eventually threw off the shackles of the Spanish Empire.

However, unlike the Founding Fathers, the Bolívarians were unable to keep their new government together, and the Spanish Empire soon devolved into more than a dozen new countries across Central and South America. Almost immediately, these fledgling nations embraced the same authoritarian qualities as the former Spanish regime.

Thank God for the Peculiarities of America

Fortunately, the American colonists did not suffer the same fate. Many years of self-government, a comparatively tighter and more united geographic landmass, and a civilization that largely shared a common European heritage gave the United States a far better chance of survival.

Despite the many differences between the colonies, they held together, both during the American Revolution and afterward, and labored together to form a “more perfect union” that would in time realize the vision of freedom articulated in the Declaration of Independence. They created a republican form of government that in its political genius and realism regarding the human condition has thus far weathered tempests both within and without.

Evaluating the Spanish empire, Fernández-Armesto and Giraldo observe: “But if one allows for the acceleration of change, it was no discreditable achievement to keep so vast and diverse an empire going for so long in the unpropitious circumstances of the modern world.” It’s undoubtedly true, and an achievement worthy of admiration. But as history has shown us, it was no United States of America.

When Females Fail, Society Fails

When Females Fail, Society Fails

Women are the heart and soul of any society and if they fail, all of society is at risk.

John Conlin for American Thinker

When I look at the faces of those eight young Iranian women about to be hanged for the “crime” of wanting freedom I think of their grandmothers.

Their very own grandmothers -- who enjoyed wide-ranging individual freedom and wore bikinis, miniskirts, and smoked cigarettes -- are sadly the root cause of their grandchildren’s demise.

Decades ago, they welcomed the revolution with open arms. At its core, they are the reason it succeeded. And now, 47 years later their grandchildren are being slaughtered for wanting the same freedoms their grandmothers had, yet foolishly gave away.

They are the reason women are beaten and raped by their own government as retribution for not doing what is demanded. They are the reason a young wrestler and thousands of others -- both men and women -- are routinely hanged in public spectacles for the crimes of wanted to be free. They are the reason tens of thousands of unarmed Iranians have been gunned down by their own government, again for the terrible crime of wanting a better life.

Although these eight have supposedly been spared the noose, women are regularly raped before execution in the belief this dirties their souls and thus denies them salvation on their death. We don’t know if these eight dodged that or not.

Gee thanks, grandma!

You see, women are the heart and soul of any society and if they fail, all of society is at risk.

Ask any horse breeder and they will tell you the strength and size of a colt will come from the stallion. But the heart -- that strength of will and indomitable spirit that will make the colt an incredible horse -- comes from the mare.

Or look at the animal kingdom. Older, female elephants are the heart of the herd and their knowledge is what ensures its survival. They are the ones who know what to do when the droughts hit. Where the potential food and watering holes are. How to take care and protect the little ones and the entire herd. All the nuts-and-bolts of survival rests with them.

In organizations we often talk about institutional knowledge. This is unwritten knowledge that exists in the individuals in the organization and once they are gone, so is the knowledge.

Storing this vital information in females makes evolutionary sense as females live longer than males so they have the longer-lived experience. And of course, just from a breeding perspective, the survival of females is always far more important to the continuation of the society than are males. 

This is true across the animal kingdom and it true for us too. But when females fail in their roles, all of society will begin to unravel. It is a guarantee.

Obviously, this isn’t a planned strategy, but once it happens it’s tough to get that genie back in the bottle. This isn’t a single female’s failure but rather a slow eroding of what has been. Speaking as a Baby Boomer, I’d say the problem started with us.

And just as obviously, females don’t exist in a vacuum. Males carry just as much blame as females but the females are the glue that hold society together and this is just the way it is. When this glue fails, cultures cease to be what they had been -- almost always for the worse.

Those Iranian grandmothers might have not wanted this to happen but they are the reason nonetheless.

Look at this country. Grandmothers have always been the purveyors of knowledge on childbirth and rearing and general family matters. This has fallen apart as young women now look elsewhere for their guidance. Any objective analysis screams this has been bad for children, families, and all society.

Where did cancel culture come from? Failed women. The no-contact craze destroying families? Failed women. Suicidal empathy? The same. Feel-good socialism? Trans-insanity and before that the Satanic Panic. The list is long

We have young women who track and brag about their sexual “body count.” Biologically, that’s kind of like bragging how good a salesperson you are because you can give money away. Speaking as a guy, although we're all for you giving it up, I can assure you that easy sex does not make men better creatures. And women and families are the losers.

Can these things be fixed? I honestly don’t know. Sadly, the odds seem pretty low, especially over the short term.

I’m not assigning blame, it’s just that the “institutional knowledge” of females has seldom been truly understood and as highly valued as it should be. And we are all worse off because of it. They are far more important to the heart of a culture than are the men. You can’t grow boys or girls into strong adults without strong women.

Our educational systems -- both K-12 and higher ed -- seem intent on destroying young women. I often think the sexual mores they embrace were actually designed by horny, drunken frat boys who didn’t give a damn about women.

Instead, these institutions seem to draft them into a cult -- one that will destroy the very society that provides them with the freedom to do so. Think of those Iranian grandmothers.

Rather than assigning gender blame -- and there is plenty to go around -- we need to be thinking about how we can re-instill females into their society-saving role.

They will either be our saviors or the catalyst of our downfall. Ask those eight young Iranian women on their way to the gallows.

Can we all find it again? We had better hope so.

Image: Pixabay

Greg Gutfeld Nailed It With His Comments About the WHCD Shooter

 

Amy Curtis | April 28, 2026 | Townhall

Greg Gutfeld absolutely nailed it when he talked about Cole Allen, the suspect arrested for the third failed assassination attempt on President Trump.

Allen's manifesto made it very clear that he was targeting the President and members of his Cabinet. Despite the Left insisting there isn't violent rhetoric coming from their side, it's a problem.

And Greg Gutfeld spelled it out perfectly.

"It's not for me to hear, it's for your side," Gutfeld said of the call for unity. "We don't need it because it's only a one-way thing. You mentioned some examples like the Pelosi thing, which was a mental illness thing ... the Whitmer thing was a plot. Who created the plot? That would take an entire special to go over."

"I disagree with Jessie. This guy did hear voices. They were Tim Walz's, they were Ted Lieu's, they were Brandon Johnson's, they were CNN's, they were 'The View,' they were MS NOW," Gutfeld continued. "I think this is a helpful assassination attempt because it is the first one that shows you can be radicalized by liberal smugness."

"If you read his posts and if you read his manifesto, it sounds like every smarmy, sanctimonious, self-satisfied pronouncement from an a***ole like Brandon Johnson, like Walz, like Lieu. The people who think they know better than you. This guy was not a crank. He was not deranged," Gutfeld said. "Don't buy into that narrative because it lets these pompous a***s off. He didn't do this because ... he didn't have voices in his head. He was just following orders."

A large part of the radical Left is Maoist, and that should terrify us.

All of this.

Correct.

It's truly fantastic to watch.

And as we've seen in the aftermath of the third failed assassination attempt, the Democrats keep doubling down on the rhetoric that led to this in the first place.