By John F Di Leo -
The following are facts. There are innumerable issues in the world of public policy which are opinions, but there are also hard facts.
Society often does itself a great disservice by conflating the two. Treating a fact as if it were mere opinion can be even worse than treating an opinion as if it were fact.
- The earth is not a static planet; our climates change, our weather changes, from day to day, from year to year, and from century to century, through no fault or effort of our own. Sunspots and volcanic activity have a great deal of influence on the earth’s climate. Human activity has almost none. The very idea of manmade climate change being substantial enough to be perceptible or even noticeable is hogwash.
- Petroleum is one of the greatest gifts that Divine Providence bestowed on this planet for our benefit. Petroleum provides us with everything from energy to clothing, from laundry detergent to eyeglasses. Almost everything we live with is based on petroleum in some way; it should be championed, not demonized.
- Most so-called “green energy” is anything but green. While there are rare exceptions, wind power and solar power cost so much to manufacture, use, and eventual decommission, the fiction that they are cost-efficient requires both massive government subsidies and incredible self-denial about the environmental damage they do. From the birds they fry or shred, to the incredible landfill space they use when retired, to the huge acreage they require for operation, green energy can honestly be described as little more than a colossal scam.
- Recycling is wonderful when it makes sense, but it usually doesn’t. Newspaper biodegrades on its own; plastic and glass cost more to reclaim than making from scratch. Recycling makes sense for some places, in some times, for some products; aluminum can recycling can sometimes be a convenient source of aluminum for reprocessing. Landfill space is not the problem that many ideologues imagined it to be in the 1960s. Society needs to stop viewing recycling programs as a necessity, and instead view them on rational cost-benefit terms. The answer will differ from community to community; we need to accept this fact and leave our society’s religious devotion to it behind.
- Reasonable immigration law must be enforced. No country can afford to absorb unlimited outsiders. Counting both legal and illegal arrivals, the United States population has doubled in the past two generations because we have allowed all forms of immigration to be unchecked. This isn’t good for anyone – not for those already here OR for the new arrivals. Allowing unchecked immigration makes it impossible to assimilate the new arrivals; this long error has superimposed a caste system onto a nation that for 150 years had advanced in equality of opportunity and equal treatment under the law. We must return to respect for borders.
- The Laffer Curve is Right. There used to be a recognition in the public dialogue that if tax rates are too high, they punish growth and retard opportunity. The actual point on the graph – the point of no return beyond which higher tax rates produce less actual revenue by this effect – will vary from community to community, and from industry to industry. But the general fact remains. Our polity must relearn the importance of this concept, that tax rates must not only be lowered for philosophical reasons, but for practical reasons too. Our city, state and federal tax codes are holding us back, and that means, they are holding back every individual American from the economic opportunity that our Founding Fathers intended to be our birthright.
- Men are men, and women are women. With the tragic exception of an infinitesimally small number of people born with the biological deformity of some version of hermaphroditism, a boy is a boy, and a girl is a girl. Period. If a child (or adult) struggles with gender dysphoria or other mental challenges, they may need and deserve our care and our support, but it helps neither that patient nor society at large to enable, or worse, encourage, the delusion that a boy is a girl, or that a girl is a boy. The damage this rapidly-spreading error has done to our schools, and particularly to girl’s and women’s sports, is both incalculable and unforgivable.
- There is no “pandemic exception” for human rights. The unconstitutional, illegal lockdowns that numerous governors (and foreign governments too) have implemented in response to the spread of the virus first noticed in Wuhan, PRC in late 2019 has done irrecoverable damage to the world economy, plunging millions worldwide into starvation and poverty. Here at home, the most fundamental elements of law – that government cannot ban public assembly, cannot ban church or synagogue attendance, cannot ban interstate commerce and travel – have been violated to an outrageous degree. The elderly die alone in nursing homes after a year without visits from family. Young people become addicted to drug or drink from lack of the social interaction that all human beings need. Suicide has skyrocketed. None of this because of a sometimes-fatal virus that affects very few; all of it because of government mandates that weren’t even legal. As bad as this is for every country that went the lockdown route, it is unforgiveable in America, where our Constitution specifically bans such errors.
- The right to free speech outweighs any personal desire to avoid being offended. The cancel culture has in recent years taken a wrecking ball to literature, to broadcasting, even to entertainment. Instead of simply choosing individually to avoid a product, the modern Left has decided that what they don’t like, they must ban, to prevent anyone else from exposure to things they don’t like. Recent outrages in this witch hunt writ large have included the destruction of library books from Dr. Seuss and Mark Twain, the deplatforming of Prager University’s educational videos, even canceling the social media accounts of businesses, nonprofit organizations, and politicians. And the Left intends to use its governmental power to endorse and support such outrages when done by the private sector. This must stop; America was built on free speech.
- There was vote fraud in the 2020 election. This is not in question, and the mass media and social media efforts to deny it – even to delete references to it – are both an assault on the free speech and on the simple truth. We may not be able to say for certain, until full audits are completed, which specific races went the wrong way because fraud made the difference, but of course we can honestly say there was fraud. There is always fraud in American elections. The number of non-citizens voting, the number of people with multiple residences casting ballots from each address, the number of ballots fabricated by corrupt political machines, the number of ballot boxes stuffed through abuse of the mail-in ballot program… these are all undeniable occurrences in American elections, and they have grown, year by year, for decades now. How often does this fraud make the difference? How often does this fraud provide a winning margin to the actual loser? This is unknown. But the Left’s refusal to even tolerate mention of the fact is telling indeed.
Copyright 2021 John F Di Leo
John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland based international trade professional, writer and actor. His columns have been published by Illinois Review now for twelve years. A collection of his Illinois Review columns on vote fraud – The Tales of Little Pavel – is available in eBook or paperback on Amazon.
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