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I’m not a TV critic, because I don’t watch television anymore. But when I was in a place late Thursday afternoon with a television blaring the “Judge Judy” show at me, I became a critic — not just of a television show, but of our society.

I was vaguely aware of who the woman is, but I’d never watched the show. I remember the old “People’s Court” show and I knew she was a bit like that, but more like a stern grandmother than the kindly and wise man Judge Wapner was supposed to be. Still, I wasn’t prepared for her. It was like watching the judicial version of a shock jock.

If you’ve seen the show and you’re disgusted by it, I don’t have to tell you why. The woman is rude. She interrupts. She says things that don’t make sense and then treats confused people like fools. She’s just plain nasty, and she seems to revel in her rudeness. If you’ve seen the show and like it, well, I don’t guess you’re going to get what I’m saying.

The show doesn’t bother me as much as I’m bothered by the fact that people watch this garbage on purpose. Why would anyone be interested in watching people share details of their personal lives — in ways that sometimes embarrass them — and then seeing this hyena tear into one of the parties without apparent reason? Why is that entertaining?

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Those on the progressive left are just flat-out lying when they claim they believe in individual rights. They certainly believe in group rights, but in their vision of the world, individuals have no rights that “society” doesn’t graciously allow them to have.

We’re told that society has the right to control us because of the “social contract” that we allegedly have with government. I don’t know about you, but I never got my copy of the contract to read and agree to before people with guns started coercing me to obey their will.

Let’s be clear. The so-called social contract is just an excuse to control you. What it means is that the people who expect you to obey them have invented a reason that you’re required to obey. Is that a contract? Or is that a one-sided demand, enforced at the barrel of a gun?

I’ve talked before about this social contract fiction, but it comes up again today because of a two-minute video clip from a U.S. Senate candidate in Massachusetts — in which she defends the progressive left version of the social contract by trying to justify higher taxes on people who make more money.

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For much of my life, I’ve been stymied by the question of what I was. I could tell people how I made my living, but I wasn’t sure how to define myself. I went through a serious identity crisis when I was 29 years old.

I had been operating a publishing company for about three years, but the company failed and I had to shut it down. It was the first major failure of my life, and it threw me into a tailspin. Up until that time, I had defined myself as a businessman and as a newspaper editor, but everything felt hollow at that point. I realized that I had a serious question: “What am I?”

I spent the next year in a general state of depression and despair. I’m not sure how I made it through that period. Nothing seemed to matter. And every day, the question from the face in the mirror mocked me: “Who are you, David?”

After considering and discarding a million ways of defining myself, I finally found an answer to my existential crisis, but that answer scared me even more than the nothingness of the depression had. It felt true, but I somehow felt like a fraud to say it. I was an artist.

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