The gun ban that nobody noticed

I have been racking my brain trying to remember a scarier ruling from the Supreme Court in my lifetime and I’m at a loss. The court’s refusal to hear Friedman v. City Highland Park is mind-boggling. 

Highland Park is a suburb of Chicago. They banned the sale and possession of “assault weapons” and that law was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, allowing the appeals court decision and the ban to stand. This is problematic on so many levels.

First, what is an “assault weapon?” The military defines an assault weapon as a weapon capable of automatic fire. In other words, a machine gun. Highland Park defines an assault as a semiautomatic firearm. That covers a lot of ground. If you’re not familiar with what a semiautomatic gun is, it’s a gun with a magazine that fires once when the trigger is pulled then fires again when it’s pulled again.

The 7th Circuit claimed the ban was permissible because it “may increase the public’s sense of safety.” Not that it would make them safe. It would make them feel safe. Big difference. Which left me wondering if the citizens of Highland Park would “feel safe” with no churches in their town would this same Supreme Court be fine with obliterating the First Amendment as they’ve now done with the Second?

There were only two dissenting votes on the court. Not surprising, the smartest man on the bench — Antonin Scalia — and probably the second-smartest person on the court, Clarence Thomas. These two men have demonstrated over and over again that they understand the Constitution. The others simply bend the Constitution to their own wishes.

And think about the ramifications of this decision, or lack thereof. Any city will now be able to enact their own “assault weapons” ban and define assault weapons as they see fit. The problem with the original assault weapons ban passed by Congress in the ‘90s was it was all about cosmetics. For example, that assault weapons ban prohibited the ownership of rifles with a grenade launcher mount. Not grenades or even a grenade launcher. A grenade launcher mount. It banned bayonet mounts. Not bayonets, but bayonet mounts. The weapon would certainly be less lethal if someone were coming at you with a bayonet rather than shooting at you, but a bayonet mount sounded menacing so it was banned.

The assault weapons ban prohibited pistol grips. A pistol grip on a rifle doesn’t make it more lethal. In fact, it can be argued that it makes it less accurate. Your aim is going to be much better when you have a stock to press against your shoulder allowing you to look down the barrel. Speaking of stocks, the assault weapons ban banned folding stocks. These make a rifle a little more compact for traveling, but it’s not like it makes it possible to hide an assault weapon in your pants. They banned flash suppressors, too, which do what they sound like they do. They reduce the flash signature of the rifle. Doesn’t make it any more powerful or lethal.

My point is most of the people who want to ban assault weapons have no idea what one is. They see rifles with cosmetic add-ons that make them look like military rifles, but it’s like painting fire down the side of your Nissan Versa. It doesn’t make it any faster.

Hysteria and symbolism are the calling cards of political correctness which, these days, is rotting this country from the inside out.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

It's time for college students to get over themselves

It's a peculiar thing, this notion of being offended. What does it really mean? It’s probably the most subjective phrase in the English language. When someone says ‘That offended me’ it’s implied that whoever did the offending should somehow stop. Such is the state of affairs on college campuses.

Buzz phrases these days are ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings.’ It’s the culmination of decades of coddling by liberal professors who found a way to be offended by everything. Now students are rising up to demand that no one say anything or do anything that might upset them, and the target of the ire are, ironically, some of the same professors who taught them this nonsense.

Now they need only proclaim that they’re offended by something and demand that whatever or whoever is offending them be stopped. In reality, that’s the truly offensive part.

The College Art Association and the Modern Language Association conducted a survey recently regarding ‘trigger warnings.’ These are procedures adopted by some colleges to warn students of disturbing topics that may be presented in class. Students who tend to freak out over such topics are allowed to miss the class. Fifteen percent of the professors surveyed said students in their classes had requested trigger warnings.

It’s insanely stupid, I know, but it’s the college professors who have created this atmosphere. Some of them have now formed the National Coalition Against Censorship to combat it. Meanwhile, at Occidental College, the faculty acknowledged their complicity in “structural racism and oppression” and voted on a resolution mandating diversity training and compulsive racial sensitivity training in class. 

It starts even before college. A high school cheerleading captain in Revere, Mass. was disciplined because she tweeted that 90 percent of the city wasn’t legal. The school said she was a racist for saying so.

The president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University had enough. After a student complained that a chapel sermon on love made him feel “offended” and “victimized,” President Everett Piper went off. “This is not a day care,” he blogged. “This is a university. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic. Any time their feelings are hurt, they are victims! Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them ‘feel bad’ about themselves, is a ‘hater,’ a ‘bigot,’ an ‘oppressor,’ and ‘victimizer.’”

He went on to tell Todd Starnes of Fox News, “The bottom line is that, at the end of the day, I would argue that college is not about safe spaces or being a safe place. OWU is not a safe place.” 

OMG! What a cold, callous, and heartless man. Why, he oughta be ashamed of himself, not coddling these spoiled little brats.

Once Mizzou students were able to get the university president fired, this new-found power spread like wildfire to other schools. Princeton students staged a sit-in to have any vestige of Woodrow Wilson removed from the campus. Forget that he was not only president of Princeton but president of the United States. He was a racist. This particular fight is especially delicious because Wilson is known as the father of modern liberalism. He paved the way for FDR, LBJ, and Obama, and ultimately paved the way for his own undoing.

Wait until these students get a load of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his adulterous womanizing. Using women for sex? Victimizing his poor wife? Tsk-tsk. And don’t get me started on Bill Clinton.

There are people who sit around all day dreaming up ways to be offended. They are not to be indulged. They’re to be ignored.


Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Some advice for the class-envy crowd

I’ve about had it up to my eyeballs with all this white privilege nonsense. The EPA recently gave a $30,000 grant to a Unitarian church that preaches “white privilege” and says America is “structurally racist.” The money was given out in a so-called “environmental justice grant” for climate change education. What that has to do with white privilege is anybody’s guess, but it’s time to set the record straight.

Certainly there was a time in this country when being born white gave one a distinct advantage. We’re now 50 years beyond that. There’s, no doubt, an advantage to being born rich, but that’s no longer to the exclusion of minorities. The folks a couple of doors down from me live in a huge house with a swimming pool and a gate and they’re black. They are privileged, I guess, but not because of race. They’re privileged because they worked hard and worked smart.

What’s ironic about this white privilege foolishness is it’s oftentimes coming from exclusive schools that charge outlandish tuition. If you’re black and you’re attending one of these universities, I have news for you. You’re privileged.

But what does privileged even mean? It means you’ve reached a level where you’re able to enjoy the finer things in life. That used to be what we strove for in this country. Now it’s something to be ashamed of. That needs to end.

We all dream of working our way up the ladder and being able to enjoy that five-star resort vacation. We don’t always get there, but it’s part of what motivates us. It’s called capitalism, and that’s the crux of problem.

These people who whine and moan about white privilege are the same ones who whine and moan about capitalism. It’s not fair. The reason it’s not fair to them is because they’re lazy. They’d rather have the government redistribute money to them than work for it. Of course, “redistribute” is an odd term. In order for income to be redistributed it would first have to be distributed. Income is not distributed. It’s earned. That’s a hard pill to swallow for those who spend their lives coveting what everyone else has.

I’ve often noted it says a lot about a person when they’re more concerned about those who make more than they do rather than those who make less. This obsession with the one-percenters is not only perverted, it’s dangerous to the future well-being of the country.

Did you know that the vast majority of the wealthy in this country didn’t inherit it? PNC Wealth Management conducted a survey several years ago. They polled people with more than $500,000 in extra cash available to invest. I think we can all agree, these people qualify as rich. Only 6% got their money through inheritance.

Here’s another stat you’ll find interesting. According to National Review, the average rich household has four times as many full-time workers as do poor households. Egads, I think we’ve found the secret to wealth. Work!

Here’s something else that may interest you. Handling money is a skill that has to be developed through good habits. Seventy percent of lottery winners will go broke within seven years. Also, researchers at Vanderbilt, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Pittsburgh found the more money you win, the more likely you are to go broke, and more likely to go broke faster.

In other words, it ain’t that easy to get rich and stay rich. Instead of chastising the rich, these class warfarists should study how it’s done. And then get to work.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

What now since Paris?

The Paris terrorist attacks have led to much soul-searching here in America. Sure, there are terrorist attacks on a regular basis, but when a western republic so similar to ours is hit it sends a collective chill down our spines. It’s now known that Syrian refugees who sought asylum in France took part in the terrorist attacks. With that knowledge, we reflexively do one of two things. We either immediately want to close the borders and keep something like this from happening here, or we lunge to the opposite side, longing to keep the spirit of the “huddled masses” alive, something that undoubtedly made our country great.

Which side is right?

To answer that question, one must first understand the evolution of immigration in this country. Up until a Supreme Court decision in 1875 that declared immigration a federal responsibility, individual states had their own immigration laws. The first major federal immigration law after the decision was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. At the request of California, the law prohibited anyone from China from immigrating to the United States. The reason being, Chinese laborers were driving down wages. The Immigration Act of 1891 expanded the list of reasons one could be barred from the country to include polygamists, criminals, and those carrying certain diseases.

Ellis Island opened the following year, ushering in the largest wave of immigrants the country had ever seen until it closed in 1954. It wasn’t until the 1920s that the concept of a passport came into being. It came from a conference at the League of Nations, which was replaced by the UN after World War II. The passport became a very important tool in regulating immigration. No longer could you just board a ship and head to America. You had to have the proper papers which each member nation recognized as demonstrating someone had legitimate business in a foreign land.

Naturally, there have been exceptions to normal immigration in time of crisis. One such exception that stands out in American history is the Mariel boatlift of 1980. An economic downturn in Cuba had caused a lot of Cubans to seek asylum in the Peruvian embassy. Castro eventually allowed them to leave Cuba for Florida. About 125,000 successfully made the trip. However, it was later learned that Castro released inmates from mental hospitals and prisons to join the refugees.

Which leads me to a salient point about today’s refugees.

We have a new wave of Syrian refugees coming to America. How do we know there aren’t terrorists among them like the ones who were granted asylum in France? Our State Department tells us they’re vetting them, but how does one vet an individual from a foreign country? They must depend on the intelligence provided by that foreign country. Who controls Syria? Bashar al-Assad, a man we’ve been actively trying to depose since Obama’s ill-fated Arab Spring and the whole “line-in-the-sand” business.

Castro loaded the boats with crazies and criminals. What on earth gives us any reason to believe Assad isn’t loading planes with terrorists bound for America? A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and Assad is the weak link.

We also need to be asking why no Christian Assyrians from that region are being allowed to emigrate. There are an estimated 200,000 Assyrian refugees, but no one in this government seems too concerned about them. Why? And why are a disproportionate number of refugees men of fighting age? 

Bring us your huddled masses? Sure. Bring us your stealth terrorists? Absolutely not. We should be smarter. 


Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

It's time to stop the conservation movement

It’s time somebody put a stop to this whole conservation movement. We’ve been conditioned to believe our entire lives that conserving everything is good. Not only is it good, to do otherwise is simply immoral. I’m here to tell you it’s all bovine scatology.

You conserve when there’s a shortage, plain and simple. Otherwise, conservation is destructive to the free market and capitalism.

Let’s take energy, for example. It’s the lifeblood of capitalism. We’ve been told forever that we need to conserve energy. Has anybody stopped to asked why? I have, and I am right now. Why are we conserving energy? Are we running out? No. Economist William Stanley Jevons put out a book warning of the depletion of coal. That was 1865. David White, chief geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, said of the oil supply “the peak production will soon be passed—possibly within three years.” That was in 1919, and we’ve been hearing about peak oil ever since. Paul Ehrlich famously predicted mass starvation in 1968 because of ‘The Population Bomb’ and was famously wrong.

We’re not running out of anything, really. This nonsense of conserving water is just that. Sure, you conserve in a drought, but most of us aren’t in a drought. In fact, around where I live there’s a surplus of water. It literally falls from the sky. Why in the world would I fret over running out of water?

According the U.S. Energy Information Administration, at year-2000 consumption rates, the world has thousands and thousands of years of crude oil. The only thing stopping me from jumping in my car and taking a trip is the price. How much can I afford? We should consume what we need and what we want to consume as long as we can pay for it. To do otherwise is to short-circuit the free market.

Now, I’m not saying that anybody who conserves is a commie. What I’m saying is we’ve been brainwashed into believing that conservation is a virtue. It’s not.

A lady called my radio show just before the Great Recession and suggested we should all sacrifice and do without because we had soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. I tried to explain to her that self-imposed conservation is exactly what brings on recessions. When we’re not consuming as we normally would we’re hurting the economy. That’s why, in every recession, economists start looking for signs of consumer confidence. When are the people going to come back out and start buying stuff again?

That’s why it’s imperative that you stop listening to people who prey on your guilt and start listening to your own common sense. You consume what you can afford. That’s why I transport my family in an SUV and Trump transports his in a 757. It’s all based on what you can afford.

That’s not to say that we go around purposely wasting energy. That doesn’t make good economic sense. I tell my kids to cut the lights off in their rooms when they leave not because I fear running out of energy or I’m some tree hugger, but because I don’t want to pay the extra money for the power bill and have to replace the lightbulbs unnecessarily. It’s a matter of common sense instead of hysteria.

We have worked mighty hard as a nation to reach the top of the economic food chain. It makes no sense to needlessly sit around in a house with the thermostat set on an uncomfortable temperature. Don’t deprive yourself. Live as comfortably as you can afford and enjoy your life.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

As Paris nears, the hysteria increases

You can detect the level of desperation in the global warming movement by the ridiculousness of their claims. Now they’re saying global warming means less sex on the planet. I thought that was a good thing. They’re always telling us there are too many people on the planet. Of course, I’m sure there’s going to be a lot less sex during Spring Break at Ft. Lauderdale than there would be in the dead of winter in Wyoming. 

And just to make sure we’re fully redistributing the wealth, the UN Paris Climate Summit includes a provision for an International Tribunal of Climate Justice. I guess we’ll get some new superheroes to go along with it like Recycle Man or Compost Woman. This proposed tribunal is for the express purpose of determining crimes committed by the producer nations like us along with suitable ‘fines’ to be paid to the non-producing countries. Karl Marx could not have dreamed up a more clever scheme.

The heart of the global warming movement has always been marxist. What’s interesting is to hear mega-capitalists like Bill Gates say that capitalism can’t save us from climate change, as he recently did. The assumption is socialism or communism can. Socialist and communist countries have horrible records when it comes to the environment. China is one of the nastiest places on earth. Why? Because poor people generally don’t care about keeping things clean. I know that sounds horrible but it’s true.

Look around your own town. Where’s the cleanest place in town? Where the rich people live. What part of town has graffiti and trash all over the place? The poor side of town. Come on, folks. It ain’t that hard to figure out. The richer, the cleaner. And the more capitalist, the richer. It’s just that simple. It’s the third world countries where you find the most polluted water and air.

Ah, but you see, the dirt people have changed the definition of pollution. When I was growing up, we had the ecology movement. Captain Kangaroo told us not to throw junk out of our car windows. We had clean-up days at ponds and streams. It was all about cleaning up the area we lived in. Something happened on the way to utopia. Now pollution is carbon dioxide. What’s ironic is CO2 is one of the cleanest substances on the planet. It’s odorless, colorless, tasteless, and beneficial to all plant life. It’s plant food.

The entire argument for redistributing wealth, dismantling our economy, and making life in general more miserable is falling apart. I’m a consumerist. My interest is the well-being of the American consumer. I don’t conserve because we’re not running out of anything. I use exactly the amount of gasoline I need and can afford to use. I don’t waste it because it doesn’t make good money sense, but I don’t fret over how much I’m using or some foolish ‘carbon footprint.’ I keep my thermostat on the temperature that’s going to keep me the most comfortable. I don’t make myself miserable to placate the crazy people who wake up each day in a knot over the temperature of the planet. I don’t conserve water unless I’m in a drought. The notion that we’re running out of water is insane. We have the exact same amount of water on the planet that we’ve always had. It’s not going anywhere.

Anything that guilts us into consuming less than we need creates behavior that wouldn’t ordinarily exist. It short-circuits the free market. I suspect that’s been the goal all along. Don’t fall for it.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The Paris climate meeting approaches. Let the freak-out begin.

As the big climate confab in Paris approaches, the forces of hysteria are upping their game. Roman Catholic leaders gathered at the Vatican to make a joint appeal. They urged a “complete decarbonisation” of the world’s economy. Ostensibly, that’s to help the poor countries battle the effects of climate change, but, in reality, it’s all about dismantling capitalism. This pope has been no friend to capitalism and global warming is the perfect guilt trip toward its annihilation. 

The great irony is if the pope really wanted to help the poor countries he would encourage development. The only way countries develop is through energy. Lots of cheap energy. 

Don’t know if you heard about this, but Greenpeace set up this power grid in a little village in India last summer. It was supposed to demonstrate how viable green energy is in the third world. As it turned out, solar power was three times the cost of regular energy, so the village scrapped solar for coal-fired electricity.

President Obama is trying to put coal out of business so there’s no alternative. Much like the liberals did with our lightbulbs. Before they outlawed the incandescent lightbulb, CFLs accounted for less than 3 percent of the lightbulb sales. In order to get us off inexpensive incandescent and onto expensive CFLs, they have to force us by law. It’s unlikely the free market would’ve made CFLs viable anytime soon.

Incidentally, the CFLs in India cost about $10. The incandescent bulbs cost about 15 cents. The solar grid in that little Indian village only supports CFLs. Another reason they opted to go back on the coal-fired grid.

And now we learn there are actually people waking up all distressed about global warming and worrying constantly about the survival of life on earth. Yeah, I know. These folks need to get a life. Probably can’t afford one after paying for that expensive green energy. They’ve actually come up with another psychobabble expression for their malady: Pre-traumatic Stress Disorder. Yes, the other PTSD. This one isn’t based on any horrible experience. It’s based on the imagination of the idiot who suffers from it.

A wise man once said: “Worry is interest paid on trouble before it’s due.” I’ve lived my life by that saying. I never worry about anything I can’t change. And I certainly don’t dream up things to worry about, but that’s exactly what these people have done. They worry about hurricanes that never materialize. We’re now in a ten-year hurricane drought. We haven’t had a Cat 3 or above hit the United States in 120 months. Hurricane Patricia, that was billed as ‘the worst storm in history,’ turned out to be much ado about nothing. Minimal damage and no fatalities.

By comparison, Hurricane Camille plowed into Mississippi in 1969 and killed 259 and caused $9.13 billion in damage in today’s dollars. Now, that was a storm. But it wasn’t the worst to hit the U.S. The worst was the Labor Day hurricane in 1935. That’s before we were naming them. It killed as many as 600 people. The worst by damage was Hurricane Andrew in 1992. It did over $26 billion in damage. Let’s see 1935, 1969, 1992. Do you see a pattern? Neither do I.

Oh, but these PTSD folks do. They see more hurricanes, more droughts, more rain, more heat, more cold. The simple fact is there’s no more of any of that than there ever has been.

Maybe the pope needs to rethink that birth control thing. The last thing we need is more people exhaling CO2.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.