Liberty Nation presents our selection of the best stories this week. Some may be articles, others may be podcasts, videos, or radio broadcasts, but each has been chosen for their quality and scope.
The editorial team at LN hopes you can use this weekly post to catch up on stories that you might have missed. Let us know in the comments section which is your favorite.
#1 Are The Democrats Committing Electoral Suicide? WaPo Says Yes
By Tim Donner
Democrats are misinterpreting their mandate and dramatically overestimating the popularity of their agenda.
In an age where tribalism rules – that’s our narrative and we’re sticking to it, right or wrong – it is increasingly rare to experience the sensation of someone in the opposing tribe reinforcing our own view of things.
Richard Cohen
That’s why it was instructive, if not heartening, to see a long-prominent liberal opinion writer at The Washington Post, of all places, provide unexpected affirmation of what is becoming increasingly clear to conservatives: The Democrats are laying the seeds of their own destruction in the 2020 election.
Richard Cohen, more a conventional 20th century liberal than an AOC-inspired woke socialist, has penned a piece in WaPo entitled “Democrats are Handing Trump a Gift.” And it is quite useful in helping us understand how rank-and-file Democrats view the direction of their party. For while the resistance wing of the party receives most all of the attention these days, don’t kid yourself: There are millions of standard-issue Democrats who want their party to win, but are actually more concerned about the state of the nation than with taking down Donald Trump at any cost, or resorting to socialism to draw as sharp a contrast as possible with the president. Read More.
#2 Venezuela: A Lesson In Why We Should Never Permit Our Firearms To Be Taken
By Leesa K. Donner
The people of Venezuela have little more than rocks with which to defend themselves.
As all hell breaks loose in the socialist paradise of Venezuela, every day brings new hope that the malevolent reign of Nicolás Maduro will be brought to its knees and put in the trash heap of history. It does seem as though Maduro’s s***hole is finally about to implode. But as Americans well know, the struggle for freedom often comes with much bloodshed.
In a last desperate effort to starve his people, Maduro resorted to violence to prevent humanitarian aid from reaching the Venezuelan people this weekend. In just a few short decades, Maduro and his mentor Hugo Chávez have successfully taken a wealthy, prosperous nation and reduced it to nothing more than an apparition of its former self.
Socialism: Now Everyone Has Nothing
Originally nicknamed Little Venice by explorer Amerigo Vespucci, Venezuela sits on one of the world’s largest oil reserves. It was also well known for exporting coffee and cocoa. Back in the late 1980s, when my family first moved to the Washington, D.C., area, it seemed like we were always meeting a new and extremely wealthy couple from – you guessed it – Venezuela. Perhaps that was because they saw the socialist train rolling down the tracks at high speed and got the hell out of Dodge while the getting was good. Read More.
#3 The Popular Death Tax Back On The Docket – What Now?
By Andrew Moran
As cultural Marxism ascends, the American spirit of individualism, family, and determination become relics of distant times.
The death tax is a symbol of everything wrong with politics and leftism. A levy on inheritance taps into the very worst in voters’ dispositions, from feeling entitled to someone else’s property to stewing in envy that somebody else will have it better than you do. While it will not be a hill to die on for conservatives and libertarians come 2020, attacking the estate tax on the wealthiest of Americans is a battle worth winning to protect principles, common decency, and the family.
2020 And Death
With the general election around the corner, the declared Democratic candidates for president are revealing key planks of their platforms. Unsurprisingly, the likes of Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) want to embark upon class warfare as a strategy, mainly by targeting the affluent. The first Native American woman to run for president proposes reducing the estate tax exemption from $11.18 million to $3.5 million. The cause of tens of millions of college Berns, hipster communities, and Karl Marx fan clubs aims to hike the federal death duty to an arbitrary figure of 77%.
Republicans have been as fishy as a Nigerian prince offering millions for only a small transaction charge. Instead of abolishing the 40% cost to die, as they have advocated for years, the GOP decided to double the exemption for the so-called super rich as part of the historic tax bill in December 2017. That said, with the measure in effect until 2025, it inevitably means that the next time the Democrats take power they will allow the law to expire and then jack it up to the suggested 55% rate. Read More.
#4 Don’t Underestimate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – She’s Smarter Than You Think!
By Onar Am
Feelings don’t care about your facts.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has managed to inject herself into the national conversation by enchanting progressives and enraging conservatives with her outlandish proposals. Many on the right dismiss her has ignorant, arrogant, and stupid, but underestimating her would be a grave mistake. She may not be very knowledgeable, but she is intelligent and fiercely persuasive – to her progressive base.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Dilbert-creator Scott Adams, who is a trained hypnotist, was among the first people to recognize her talent, and likened her skills to the master persuader himself, President Donald Trump. The similarities are striking: Both use effective techniques such as hyperbole to expand the Overton window, and both polarize and thereby capture the attention on all sides of the political spectrum. She might well be a left-wing Trump.
But what about her blatant ignorance? How can she be smart when she believes crazy stuff like the idea that we are all going to die from global warming unless we stop flying airplanes? In the realm of politics, Adams points out, facts don’t matter. Political pundit Ben Shapiro likes to say that “facts don’t care about your feelings” when he replies to oversensitive social justice warriors. This is true, but Ocasio-Cortez embodies an even deeper truth: Feelings don’t care about your facts. Read More.
#5 Red Flag Rules Spark 2A Revolution?
By Sarah Cowgill
The Democrat majorities may push gun control bills through legislature, but a growing number of counties aren’t standing for it.
“Listen my children, and you will hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” There once was a time — in the not so distant past — that every school-aged child could recite one or two lines from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem and experience the feeling of pride for country in the accounting of a brave patriot who warned the Minutemen on the eve of the greatest insurrection in history.
It’s a story of defiance in the face of tyranny, fairness over taxation without representation, and freedom from an oppressing autocracy as colonists, reluctant to engage in war, had finally reached a boiling point.
If one listens closely, those rumblings of revolt have begun again in the United States of America, but in this verse, her government is the oppressor.
Proponents of the Second Amendment have been a target of an increasingly socialist government for several decades. Politicians calling for a national firearms registry, strict purchasing and transferring regulations, “red flag” rules, and the banning of certain ammunition have law-abiding citizens on edge. And it might just be what is needed to spark a revolution; several states are readying for battle by organizing their modern-day militias and creating Second Amendment sanctuary counties. Read More.
