P.T. Barnum Was Right

Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in Bethel, Connecticut on July 5, 1810, and died in Bridgeport, CT on April 7, 1891. During the intervening years, he was a small business owner, a newspaper publisher, a mayor, a state legislator, and of course, the founder of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Barnum was the quintessential entrepreneur, buying Scudder’s American Museum in New York City in 1841 and, after renaming it Barnum’s American Museum, selling tickets to native New Yorkers and tourists alike to see attractions such as the Fiji Mermaid, Chang and Eng the Siamese twins, and General Tom Thumb. At its peak, the museum drew 15,000 customers per day and from 1841 to 1865, 38 million people paid the 25-cent admission.

Part shyster and part showman, Barnum is credited with coining the phrase, “there’s a sucker born every minute.” And so, in an effort to prove Mr. Barnum right, I offer you a list of today’s greatest con jobs and scams.

1. Climate Change. News flash: the climate is changing, just like it has since time immemorial. How else can you explain the Ice Age (actually five different ones, scientists say) giving way to the Medieval Warm Age from 950 to 1250 A.D., which was followed by the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850 A.D.? Now we are told that due to increased carbon emissions, global temperatures and sea levels are rising at an alarming rate. Climatologists warn that unless the United States and Western Europe become third world nations, we are all doomed. Unfortunately for them, history clearly demonstrates that climate is cyclical. Just ask Noah, who witnessed and survived a worldwide flood (talk about rising sea levels!) thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution… or Newsweek and Time, both of which published articles in 1975 predicting yet another Ice Age. Meanwhile, every time we close down a coal-fired plant, China and India build hundreds more.

2. Free Palestine. First of all, there never was a nation called Palestine. It was simply the name given to a geographic region that was home to many different people groups. In Genesis 12, God clearly gave the land where Israel now sits in perpetuity to Abraham and it has remained the Jewish homeland ever since despite being occupied by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks under Alexander the Great, the Romans under the various Caesars, the Muslims, the Crusaders, and the Turks among others. After World War I, the defeated Ottoman Empire was forced to cede that territory to the League of Nations, which created a British Mandate that continued until 1948 when the United Nations voted to reestablish the nation of Israel. At the same time, the U.N. offered to establish a Palestinian homeland as part of a two-nation solution, but the Palestinians refused – wanting all of nothing – and so they got nothing. The neighboring Arab nations subsequently attacked Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973, losing each time in embarrassing fashion. More recently, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, massacring more than 1,100 innocent civilians, raping hundreds of women, and beheading countless babies. History is replete with examples where if you poke the bear, you should be prepared to suffer the consequences… and Hamas poked the Israeli bear in a hideous and cowardly way. However, that hasn't stopped hordes of clueless college students from skipping class so they can support a nonexistent country and a reprehensible terrorist organization.

3. Joe Biden and the Democrat Party care for minorities. There is a reason why Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King Jr. were all registered Republicans. Not only did the Republican Party spearhead the abolition of slavery and the reconstruction of the South, but it also promoted and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 against vicious opposition from Southern Democrats. Since the inception of LBJ’s Great Society, Black poverty rates have remained virtually the same while out-of-wedlock births (which is the leading predictor of future incarceration and lifelong poverty) have soared from 25% to 72%. Meanwhile, Joe Biden and the Democrat Party continue to advocate for abortion-on-demand, which has proven to be a scourge on the Black community. Blacks represent 12% of the general population but comprise 37% of all abortions… just like Margaret Sanger, the racist founder of Planned Parenthood had hoped. Conversely, minority unemployment set record lows under Donald Trump, who also supported and signed the Second Chance Act to help ex-offenders successfully reintegrate into society.

4. Gender is fluid. There are two sets of chromosomes, XX and XY, meaning that your biological sex is set in stone at conception. No matter how you dress, what hormones you block or ingest, or what parts of your anatomy you chop off or sew on… you are still either a male or a female. I almost said, “a man or a woman,” but radical Progressives are trying to legitimize and legislate such barbaric bodily mutilation for adolescents, too. The bottom line is that gender dysphoria is a psychological disorder that can and should be treated – not enabled and encouraged – and under no circumstances should a biological male be permitted to compete in women's sports, period!

More to come…