The Democrats are willing to talk the talk about a cradle-to-grave welfare state, but not walk the walk. There can be no European-style welfare state, at least not sustainably so, without European-style taxes.

Where to cut? I have long promoted the idea that what is needed is an outside auditor to come to Washington, D.C., and review every program and agency, recommending which ones to keep and more importantly identifying which ones have outlived their usefulness, or were never useful.

Those who won’t get the quick jab in the arm, for whatever reason, have an alternative. If they want to keep their jobs, they might have to let someone push a 6-inch Q-tip-like swab up their nose on a regular basis, but — and repeat this for the last time — it’s their choice.

[Texas] has a political culture that launches serial attacks on voting rights and obsesses over transgender youth in high schools. It has now deputized citizen creeps to hunt down anyone who helped a woman obtain an abortion — her parents included — for which they can collect a $10,000 bounty. And we’re only on our second cup of coffee.

Following one of my lectures in a packed university auditorium in Brescia, I was approached by a young, hijab-wearing Muslim woman. By her name, appearance, and accented English, I read her as Italian of Arab extraction, possibly the daughter of immigrants to Italy or an immigrant herself. Unlike the other students who queued to speak with me, she had a concise question: “Why is the United States waging war on Islam?”

The United States’ first full-scale invasion of a nation state came more than a century ago, with the Mexican-American War fought from 1846 to 1848. The war resulted in vast territorial gains for the United States that included all or parts of California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma. Mexico lost 55 percent of its claimed territory.

Consider that Virginia used to celebrate not Martin Luther King Day, but a monstrosity it called Lee-Jackson-King day, pairing King with [Robert E.] Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, as if a moral ocean did not yawn between a Black civil-rights icon and two slave-holding Confederate generals. America, you see, has always run from the truth of itself. That’s what made Lee’s last retreat so satisfying.

With their win in Afghanistan, terrorists by whatever name can only be further motivated to conduct new attacks. What might those look like? From experience we know they prefer the big event, such as crashing airliners into buildings and blowing up high value targets. There are other options when big targets are not vulnerable.