Columnistas invitados/Guest columnists

It's no longer okay to have a difference of opinion in politics and academia. Not so long ago, it was possible to have a polite discussion and ask Socratic questions to determine what's right or wrong. Not anymore.

Free speech is one of Western Civilization's most important contributions to the world. Throughout history, of all the world's cultures and civilizations, only the West has made free speech and free thought into cultural icons. Free speech is a major reason why the West —with all its flaws— has always been not only different from but objectively better than any other. Incidentally, just saying that can now get you canceled or even prosecuted in some places.

Without free speech, it's very hard to have free thought because if you're forced to keep concepts within the confines of your own mind, it's very hard to explicate, expand, and concretize them. What's going on now is extremely dangerous. It amounts to putting tariffs on others' ideas so they can't enter your brain.

Europe and the Anglophone world—Australia, New Zealand, England, the US, and Canada—are turning into police states where thought crime is a real thing that can be prosecuted. It's not 1984 yet, but things are rapidly moving in that direction.

One of the most perverse aspects of the trend is that universities have become the center of this anti-freedom groupthink. They once were— and should be—centers of discussion, debate, and free thought. That's no longer true. They've become institutionally corrupt. They're no longer even places to hang out, party, and pick up a few idle facts while delaying the onset of maturity. They've mutated into something destructive and dangerous, as illustrated by the recent scandals at Columbia, Harvard, and Penn.

Hay que repetirlo hasta el cansancio, tanto Daniel Ortega como su co-dictadora Rosario Murillo son dos autócratas insaciables. Sujetos que no respetan limites cuando matar el hambre de poder corresponde.

Por todos es conocido que el castrochavismo se sostiene gracias a las bayonetas, aunque en el presente están sentados sobre AK-47, suministrados por el amigo entrañable de todos los autócratas, Vladimir Putin.

El co-dictador, Daniel Ortega, ha legitimado una práctica que todos conocemos, consistente en la subordinación de los poderes del estado, órganos legislativo, judicial, electoral, de control y fiscalización, regionales y municipales al Poder Ejecutivo, una aberración consagrada por la apócrifa Asamblea Nacional de Nicaragua, compuesta por lacayos del matrimonio supremo que como siempre, votaron unánimemente a favor de la propuesta. Con esta disposición dictatorial los poderes públicos desaparecen, de hecho, la democracia deja de existir y la precaria participación ciudadana se extingue por completo por decisión de dos déspotas y la complicidad de sus servidores.

En realidad, tanto Ortega como su cogobernante son fieles admiradores de sujetos con la peor calaña del mundo, entre los que se pasean, Jose Stalin, Adolfo Hitler, Mao Tse Tung y por supuesto, el gestor de los canceres del castrochavismo, Fidel Castro, quien fuera directamente el diabólico hacedor del régimen nicaragüense.

How fear is consuming a once confident and creative ideology.

For a quarter of a millennium, liberalism as a theory and as a political movement has been dedicated to the cause of social and political freedom and the pursuit of happiness as a material end. Liberalism continues to pursue those ends, but differently understood and by different means. The result is diminished freedom and happiness in all Western liberal societies. The world that classical liberalism made, neoliberalism, and now progressive liberalism are presently unmaking in the name of liberalism.

None of the countries that comprise the Anglosphere—including Great Britain, the United States and Canada, Australia, and others—is as happy a place as it was before liberalism in its updated form went to work on it. But the U.S. is, by almost every standard, the least happy and the most neurotic of them all.

The fact is confirmed by the angry and frequently crazed political polarization here; the racial tensions and the riots; the looting and destruction that American liberals are willing to tolerate and even to excuse; the intellectual chaos and mental and moral confusion produced by “woke” colleges, universities, and the public schools, then promoted in the media; the new liberal biology (comparable to the old Soviet biology) according to which a man can become a woman and give birth to a child and which purposefully complicates the formation of sexual identity among the young.

It is confirmed by the growing restlessness and rebelliousness of middle and lower-middle class Americans angered by the readiness of government at every level to resort to blatantly unconstitutional means to control and, when necessary, to punish the general population; the industrial and commercial regulations imposed on businesses and communities aimed at reversing warming temperatures around the world; federal policies that promote huge economic disparities by subsidizing the enterprises of the wealthy classes while expanding welfare payments to the poor ones (what the late political analyst Samuel T. Francis called “anarcho-tyranny”); recklessly irresponsible immigration policies that have let poor aliens take jobs from native-born citizens while further promoting a polyglot society in which there will soon be no ethnic and cultural majority and therefore no national identity, all to the further cultural confusion, instability, and anxiety of every group; liberal social policies that for the past six decades have been weakening the institution of marriage, discouraging the formation of legitimate families, and promoting the dissolution of existing marriages…

«El dinero corrompe, sobre todo a aquellos que no lo tienen.»
Peter Alexander Ustinov

En China, como en otras partes del mundo, los empresarios sobornan con frecuencia a los jefes del partido y del gobierno a cambio de favores o beneficios. El acceso al dinero incluye sobornos a poderosos funcionarios del partido para acceder a privilegios, como financiamiento barato, concesiones de tierras, derechos de monopolio, contratos de adquisición y exenciones fiscales.

Naturalmente, la corrupción en China no es muy diferente a la de otros países. El peligro radica en su creciente interés en tierras y recursos naturales de países menos desarrollados y su activa inversión en tierras de continentes como Latinoamérica y África donde prácticas igualmente corruptas son una oportunidad predadora para el PCC chino en su apetito por el poder totalitario.

Un reporte reciente, comisionado por el Congreso norteamericano titulado "Riqueza y actividades corruptas del liderazgo del Partido Comunista Chino", revela la naturaleza de la corrupción en la nación asiática y la manera como los funcionarios y sus familias acumulan riqueza gracias a sus posiciones y conexiones en el PCC.

De acuerdo con la investigación, liderada por David O. Shullman, actual jefe del Departamento Nacional de Inteligencia de EE.UU. los esfuerzos del gobierno chino para eliminar las prácticas corruptas de su país, no son suficientes porque se reducen a imponer una dudosa disciplina política y la supuesta pureza ideológica (purgas) para mantener el control del partido y ocultar así, la desenfrenada delincuencia financiera.

Sobornos y “regalos”