Prominent Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have repeatedly expressed interest in reinstating a federal assault weapons ban. Biden himself included an assault weapon ban in his 1994 crime bill, which lasted ten years until its expiration in 2004. Biden has claimed that the ban did its job and reduced mass shootings: “When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.”

Raising interest rates is a necessary but insufficient measure to combat inflation. To reduce inflation to 2 percent, central banks must significantly reduce their balance sheets, which has not yet occurred in local currency, and governments must reduce spending, which is highly unlikely.

The most challenging obstacle is also the accumulation of debt.

The US trade and tech wars against China continued under President Joe Biden, who escalated export controls related to technology. The US wants to cut China’s access to advanced semiconductors and the equipment used to manufacture them in order to prevent their use for military purposes.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
—George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946

I joined Crisis editor Eric Sammon to discuss secession and my new book Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities.

What matters in every election is what progress has been made by constitutionalists.

Constitutionalist voters and politicians have formidable difficulty getting constitutionalists past the Republicans’ Progressives. Progressives are helped by state primary processes, party rules and practices, crony media buys, and legacy-media support.