Two years ago, I did a commentary on how progressive activists were using the “cancel culture” to destroy the lives of individuals and drive small businesses into bankruptcy. One of the examples I cited was the plight of Gibson’s bakery. Although it has taken years, the bakery has finally won.

The Ninth District Court of Appeals ruled unanimously in favor of the bakery that accused Oberlin College of damaging its business and libeling it with false accusations of racism. The incident occurred in 2016, and the owners sued in 2017. A county judge ruled in their favor in 2019, and the appeal just came down in 2022. Sometimes the wheels of justice grind very slowly.

The son of the bakery owner stopped three black Oberlin students because one of them was stealing wine bottles from the store. Students started protesting the bakery after the arrest by handing out flyers outside the store calling it racist establishment with a history of racial profiling. The student senate passed a resolution accusing the bakery owners of being racist and emailed that resolution to all the students. Oberlin College regularly purchased baked goods from the bakery for the dining hall, but suspended its purchasing for month after the incident.

The Gibsons denied any wrongdoing and asked for a public apology from the college in order to repair the damage to their reputation. Apparently, they never received one.

When we discussed this case on my radio program, one of my guests applauded the bakery’s response. Too often, victims of “cancel culture” cower in fear even when they haven’t done anything wrong. The bakery illustrated what happens when you stand up for your rights and reputation.

Today your income taxes are due. Of course, those are just some of the taxes you pay each year. This increasing list of taxes we pay are why Kevin Williamson argues that “We Have Enough Taxes.”

He wrote his column because President Biden has been proposing a “billionaires’ tax” that would essentially tax imaginary income. You pay capital gains taxes on income you receive. You don’t pay taxes on assets that increase in value you have not received as income. Biden wants to change that

This is a bad idea for many reasons. First, the value of assets not only go up; they also go down. Think of the stock market. Think of the estimated value of a home that then deceases significantly during a housing collapse. Second, the value of an asset can best be assigned when a sale is made. As I said in a commentary recently, my kids used to ask me what something was worth. My standard answer was “it’s only worth what another person will pay for it.”

Kevin Williamson also raises another question about the sheer number of taxes. There are taxes on incomes, payroll, capital gains, dividends, tariffs, estates, gasoline, and diesel, along with tobacco excises, liquor excises, Affordable Care Act excises, and much more. We aren’t just talking about the taxes we need to pay today, we are paying taxes all the time, often in ways we don’t notice. I wonder if this is by design.

In my previous commentary, I asked you to imagine what would happen if we had to pay all our taxes in one lump sum. We would probably have a tax revolt. But when we pay lots of taxes every day and have taxes deducted from our paychecks, we don’t notice. But we should.

Today is usually Tax Day, but the IRS says we don’t need to have our tax forms until Monday.

A more important date is Tax Freedom Day. That is the date when your tax burden is lifted. It is calculated by dividing the official government tally of all taxes collected in each year by the amount of all income earned in each year. Put another way, it is when you are no longer working for the government but are now working for yourself and your family.

This year Tax Freedom Day occurs on April 18. And remember this is an average. Citizens in states like Louisiana already have had their Tax Freedom Day. Citizens in New York have to wait until the middle of May for their Tax Freedom Day. Let me also add that Americans will pay more in taxes than they will spend on food, clothing, and housing combined.

There is one more date worth mentioning. It is called Cost of Government Day. This is the date on which the average American has paid his share of the financial burden imposed by the spending and regulation that occurs on the federal, state, and local levels. This date occurs a few days after the 4th of July. This date is a little less precise since it is difficult to calculate all the costs of government regulations.

Even so, the Cost of Government Day really puts things in perspective. It takes a little more than half of the year to finally get government off your back so that you can begin to earn a living for you and your family.

Both of these dates help us realize what is happening around us. There is a cost, but often we don’t see it. Our taxes are withheld from each paycheck, so we often don’t think about what we are paying. And since the cost of most regulations is hidden, we don’t see those costs either. But imagine if we had to pay all our taxes in one lump sum. You can bet there would be an outcry.

Yesterday, I talked about an academic study by Dr. John Lott. He concluded that Joe Biden received hundreds of thousands of “excess” votes in Democratic-controlled areas in the 2020 election. But that may not sound that significant because we have been told by this president and the media that he had an electoral mandate.

It is true that Joe Biden won the popular vote by a significant number. But if you focus on the electoral votes, you will notice that that 2020 presidential election was very close. So were the elections for the House and Senate. In fact, Republicans merely needed 90,000 votes to control all of Washington. Here’s how it breaks down.

Joe Biden won three key states (Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin) by the slimmest of margins (by 0.6 percentage points or less). If you flip fewer than 43,000 votes across those three states, the electoral college would have been tied 269 to 269. In case you are wondering, the outcome would be decided by each House delegation. Since the Republicans control more states, it is likely that Donald Trump would be re-elected.

But the races for House and Senate were also very close. Change 32,000 votes in just five House races, and the Republicans would have had a majority and would control the US House of Representatives. Give former Senator David Perdue an additional 14,000 votes and he would have avoided a runoff. His reelection would have kept Republicans in the majority, and the Republicans would control the US Senate.

These numbers illustrate how close elections have been in the last few decades. A few votes and small percentages make all the difference in who runs the country and what legislative agenda is enacted.

An academic study conducted by Dr. John Lott concluded that Joe Biden received hundreds of thousands of “excess” votes in Democratic-controlled areas in the 2020 election. In his research, he compared areas where Democrats are dominant to places where Republicans were dominate in the past two presidential elections.

Looking at six swing states, he crunched the numbers and discovered that voter turnout in Republican areas increased from 2016 to 2020. Voter turnout among Democrats dropped, except in places where voter fraud was claimed. In those few countries where voter fraud was alleged, John Lott explains, there was a huge increase in turnout.

He not only examined and compared counties in these swing states, but he also looked at specific voting precincts that touched each other. Sometimes these precincts were separated by one street and in every other way were homogeneous. He said there is no clear reason why absentee turnout should increase in just Democratic jurisdictions.

Does this study prove voter fraud? No, it does not, especially since this happened more than a year ago and there is no forensic evaluation that can be done now. But remember that in many of the court cases alleging voter fraud, the judges dismissed those cases because they lacked concrete evidence of voting irregularities.

Last year, when John Lott wrote an op-ed about his findings, two Stanford University professors argued that Lott relied on “faulty” data. He went back and reworked the data to accommodate their concerns and found that the excess votes persisted.

Statistical anomalies don’t prove voter fraud. There may be other explanations. But this study is a reminder that we need to pay more attention in the elections this year to how votes are cast and how they are counted.

A significant archaeological find in Israel should change the minds of skeptics about when much of the Old Testament was written. Archaeologists have found a fragment that includes the earliest reference to God (YHWH) ever discovered.

The discovery is important because critics of the Bible assume that the first books in the Old Testament were written hundreds of years after the Exodus. The assumption is that Moses and the Israelites did not have the ability to write these biblical texts at the time the Exodus occurred. Christians believe the book of Exodus was a firsthand account that was concurrent to the events in the Bible.

The archeological report concludes this “would be the first attested use of the name of God in the Land of Israel and would set the clock back on proven literacy by several centuries” and shows “that the Israelites were literate when they entered the Holy Land, and therefore could have written the Bible as some of the events it documents took place.”

This discovery came from a re-examination of earth from a dump pile formed from excavations in the 1980s at Mount Ebal in Israel. The earth had been dry shifted previously, but the fragment was found when they used a wet shifting technique.

This discovery also challenges the statement by one reporter that “the Bible, including the Book of Exodus, which details the Israelites’ flight from Egypt, was written somewhere between 600 B.C. and 300 B.C.” No, Exodus was NOT written when Daniel was taken to Babylon. It was written many centuries earlier.

This is a significant archaeological find and should encourage Christians who believe the biblical record.

The financial system in this country, and in the world, is based on trust. When you write a check, the shopkeeper must trust that you have money in the bank. When a major corporation sends ten million dollars to another company in another country, it assumes that the money being sent exists. Of course, there are checks in the system to make sure that the funds are transferred correctly.

But some of the trust we have had is beginning to break down. For example, we assume that when we put money in the bank, it will be there when we need it. But the truckers in Canada (and some of their supporters) discovered that Justin Trudeau and his administration could freeze their accounts and even seize their financial assets.

I am starting to see commentators express their concern that you could lose your finances simply because a politician decided your views were unacceptable. We have seen that in third world dictatorships, but this happened in one of the most advanced democracies in the world.

More recently, we have seen how the US and EU seized assets in Russia. The governments seized gold and Russian central bank assets. Even if you are the head of a country, you could have another country freeze and seize your assets. Not only are other countries concerned about what could happen to them, but companies in these countries are also beginning to wonder what could happen to their assets.

How confident can you be in your property rights? Every person, every company, and every country must now consider what could happen to them in the future. Add to that rising inflation and currencies that are declining in value. It’s been years since we boasted that the dollar is as good a gold.

We used to trust in the government. We used to trust in the banking system. We used to trust in our currency. Not any longer. So much of that has disappeared just in the last few months.

President Biden recently suggested that the war in Ukraine will usher in a “new world order.” We have heard that before from other presidents both Democratic and Republican. As I mentioned in a previous commentary, globalists are convinced that we need a “great reset.”

Victor Davis Hanson believes a real reset is coming. It should arrive around November of this year, when American voters say no to all that has been taking place over the last few years. He reminds us of what we have been seeing: “fleeing from Afghanistan, the embrace of critical race theory, trying to end the filibuster, pack the court, junk the Electoral College, and nationalize voting laws.”

In every case (it seems) these formulations of the new world order and the great reset involve more government, with more and more power to unelected bureaucrats. The average American, they believe, is incapable of making wise choices, so we must let our more educated and sophisticated betters make all the important decisions for us.

We have noticed that the rules they set down for us never seem to apply to our leaders. “We common folk must quit fossil fuels, but not those who need to use corporate jets.” We can’t have walls on the border, but walls must “protect the homes of Nancy Pelosi, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates.”

They also never can explain why so many around the world want to come to America given that these same leaders are always criticizing this country. “Few asked how a supposedly noxious West of some 2,500 years duration became the number one destination of millions of global non-Western migrants and offered the greatest degree of global prosperity and freedom for its citizens.”

There is a reset coming. Look for it on election day in November of this year.