Opinion

One area in which progressives destroy conservatives is their ability to capitalize on polarizing incidents. As soon as a story makes national headlines, progressives jump on it as a way to prove their pre-held beliefs. Many times, this turns out to be a good tactic. If we’ve learned anything from the last month, we know how well progressives have capitalized on the murder of George Floyd. Calls for defunding the police have garnered actual support in major US cities. More Americans believe in the concepts of institutional racism and implicit bias than ever before. Of course, there are times where jumping immediately to the worst possible conclusion backfires on the progressive movement, like the case of Jussie Smollett, but these cases never do any harm to the progressive movement once they are proven to be false. It always is in the progressives’ best interest to jump on a story as soon as it drops as the publicity generated from the initial story is always more than the fallout from the reveal.

Your boss doesn’t want you to discus your salary with your coworker; this has been drilled into you from the time you start working. The reasoning given comes in different forms. You may be told that it’s just unpolite to talk to other people about their income. You may be worried about coming off as nosy or braggadocios. But the one thing your employer is definitely worried about is if you discuss your salary with coworkers, one of you may find out that you aren’t earning your worth. The knowledge that someone who does a similar job makes significantly more money would certainly be a factor in a pay increase negotiation. Some employers have even gone so far as to make it against company policy to discuss your salary with coworkers. Some of them ingrain it into you that in fact, the reverse might happen. If you go in with a complaint that you don’t make as much as your coworker, your boss may just say, “Okay, we’ll lower his salary to be comparable.” With that threat, employees are less likely to complain, lest they gain nothing for themselves, while losing something for their colleague.

I don’t know how closely you pay attention to the news, but race is a pretty hot topic these days. Aside from police brutality and the COVID’s disproportional effect on minorities, the nation was treated to two more “racial hoaxes” in the last two weeks. I’d like to examine these stories as well as a number of similar racial hoaxes in recent history and determine what they say about the battle for racial equality today.

Breaking down 7 of the biggest talking points of the current BLM saga

In the wake of the tragic event in Minneapolis, where a police officer murdered a defenseless black man, we are now in the second national crisis of 2020. And just like the last one, there are a lot of arguments out there being made from all sides of the political aisle. I would like to take the opportunity to go through some of the less compelling arguments I’ve heard and explain why it’s a bad point. Of course, this will not be all-encompassing, so I apologize if I leave out your favorite.

There, I said it. Someone had to. Because all I’ve been hearing for the last two weeks is how both men were murdered in cold blood by police officers for the grave sin of being born with the wrong skin pigment. But the conflation of these two cases has incredible ramifications for the future.

If the government has the ability to suspend rights enumerated in the constitution, that right never existed. Many have argued that in times of extreme circumstances, the government is should be given this ability. President Lincoln, for instance, famously suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. More recently, many states and cities have suspended the right to assemble in the wake of the COVID outbreak. Several weeks ago, I brought up the notion that even though laws exist to give governments the power to remove certain freedoms in extreme cases (including pandemics), that definitionally negates the right to begin with. Rights exist exactly for extreme times. Government shouldn’t be given the authority to just decide when a situation allows for the suspension of a right.