The report reveals how the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence is a venture by left-wing nonprofits to ‘influence every aspect of election administration.’
After flooding local election offices with private money to alter election operations in key battleground states ahead of the 2020 presidential contest, Democrat-aligned groups have been looking for new ways to take over America’s future elections — and a new bombshell report reveals just how they plan to do it.
Released by the Honest Elections Project (HEP) and the John Locke Foundation, the shocking report reveals how the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence — a self-professed “nonpartisan collaborative” claiming to bring together election officials for the stated goal of developing “a set of shared standards and values” — is actually a venture by left-wing nonprofit groups to “systematically influence every aspect of election administration” and advance Democrat-backed voting policies in local election offices across the country.
The Alliance’s efforts are similar to those orchestrated by groups such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which, after receiving $400 million from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, poured millions of dollars into local election offices to change how elections were administered in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. As The Federalist previously reported, these “Zuckbucks” were used to expand unsecure election protocols like mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes. To make matters worse, the grants were heavily skewed towards Democrat-majority counties, essentially making it a massive Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.
Unsurprisingly, CTCL is one of the main groups partnered with the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence.
While CTCL’s actions in the 2020 election were intrusive enough to provoke 24 states to pass laws banning or restricting Zuckbucks, the Alliance seeks to take CTCL’s election-interfering tactics a step further. According to membership and grant agreements obtained by HEP, the Alliance’s “unusual and complex structure” appears to be “designed to thwart meaningful oversight and accountability.”
“For instance, after the Alliance had recruited its first cohort of members it announced plans to begin charging offices to join. However, the Alliance also created ‘scholarships’ to cover those membership costs, which are instantly converted into ‘credits’ that member offices can use to buy services from CTCL and other Alliance partners,” the HEP report reads. “As a result, offices receive access to funds they can spend exclusively on services provided by left-wing companies and nonprofits, entirely outside normal public funding channels.”
In other words, existing Zuckbucks bans wouldn’t necessarily prevent local election departments from contracting with the Alliance to obtain services ranging “from ‘legal’ and ‘political’ consulting to public relations and guidance on recruitment and training.”
Such services are already being utilized in places such as Brunswick County, North Carolina, where the locality’s board of elections director used “talking points and hyperlinks provided by the Alliance” to push back against criticism of the county’s acceptance of CTCL funds. In a series of emails obtained by HEP via public records requests, Board of Elections Director Sara LaVere is documented defending the acceptance of the grants and admitting that The Elections Group — an Alliance partner — assisted her in writing articles published during the 2022 election cycle.
“I have personally worked with the Center for Tech and Civic Life, Democracy Fund, Elections Group, and the Center for Civic Design in the past,” LaVere wrote. “The two election columns I published for this election? Those were written with assistance from the Elections Group. Most of my social media posts during the general election came from templates provided by the Elections Group.”
Legislation banning Zuckbucks and other types of private funding in North Carolina’s elections successfully passed the Republican-controlled legislature in 2021, but was vetoed by Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper.
But Alliance doesn’t provide its “benefits” to local election offices without expecting something in return. As described in the report, election departments that become Alliance members “are expected to work with the [coalition] to develop and implement an ‘improvement plan’ that reshapes the way each office functions.” This requirement allows the Alliance to gather significant data on the internal operations of participating offices.
“No matter what it claims to be, the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence is nothing more than a dark money-fueled scheme to push liberal voting policies and influence election administration in key states and localities,” said HEP Executive Director Jason Snead in a statement. “Nobody should be able to manipulate the democratic process for partisan gain. … This report should make clear that a private funding ban, vigorous oversight, and complete transparency from officials are essential to restoring trust in our election system and making it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
To date, the Alliance-connected CTCL has committed to distributing $80 million to 10 counties (including Brunswick) over the next five years in states such as Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan, among others.
CDC V-safe data show 7-8% of Americans get so sick they have to go to the hospital. And still these Democrat villains are mandating the vaccine. It’s war-fare.
By Sandy Fitzgerald | Newsmax, 21 January 2023 11:22 AM EST
Twitter CEO Elon Musk, a frequent critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci and COVID-related mandates, says he felt like he “was dying” after he got his second COVID booster vaccine, and that a cousin of his suffered myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, after getting his shot.
And my cousin, who is young & in peak health, had a serious case of myocarditis. Had to go to the hospital.
“I had major side effects from my second booster shot,” Musk said in a tweet Friday. “Felt like I was dying for several days. Hopefully, no permanent damage, but I dunno.”
In a subsequent message, Musk said that his cousin “who is young & in peak health, had a serious case of myocarditis. Had to go to the hospital.”
The second booster shot, he explained in another tweet, wasn’t his choice but a requirement to visit one of his Tesla locations in Berlin, Germany.
Musk also said that he had contracted COVID-19 before the vaccines came out and “it was basically a mild cold,” and then he had the Johnson & Johnson vaccine with “no bad effects, except my arm hurt briefly.”
He added that his first mRNA booster “was ok, but the second one crushed me.”
His posts came after a Rasmussen Reports tweet saying that about 12 million people may have had “major side effects” after getting the COVID vaccines.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been “rare cases” of myocarditis or pericarditis” that have occurred, most often among adolescent and young adult males ages 16 and older within a week of getting a second dose of an mRNA COVID-19 Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine. However, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has not had similar reports.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2023-01-23 06:45:162023-01-23 06:48:25Elon Musk: ‘Felt Like I Was Dying’ After COVID Vaccine
Mayssaa Abdul Khalek is another in a long string of antisemitic BBC reporters. Apparently for the BBC, Jew-hatred in a “journalist” is not a bug, it’s a feature.
A journalist hired by the BBC has ranted “death to Israel” on social media and described it as “occupied Palestine” live on air, the JC can reveal.
Regular BBC Arabic contributor Mayssaa Abdul Khalek, a Lebanon-based reporter, also called on Arab states to attack Israel on Twitter, alongside links to her broadcasts for the corporation.
The disclosure comes despite a JC campaign which has revealed a catalogue of anti-Israel bias in BBC broadcasts and has led to the establishment of parliamentary inquiry due to start later this year.
In a live report, Ms Khalek, who describes herself as a “BBC Arabic co-host”, described a Hezbollah rocket attack on northern Israel as an attack on “occupied Palestine”.
Khalek’s tweet in which she sends a ‘message to the Israeli enemy’
Three rockets had been launched against the Israeli border town of Metula, which she then called “an imperialist colony”.
The town is located at Israel’s northernmost point, inside the internationally-recognised 1967 border with Lebanon.
During the 2006 Lebanon war, the town’s population was forced to flee as it was bombarded by Hezbollah rockets.
During a live report in May 2021, Ms Khalek described how a Lebanese man had died, saying, “he and a group of youths were hit by RPGs that Israeli military shot at them during their attempt to cross the border fence in front of the imperialist colony of Metula”.
Without interruption by the presenter interviewing her, she went on:
“These events also come after three rockets were launched yesterday from South Lebanon towards occupied Palestine.”
She also used the phrase “occupied Palestinian territories” to describe Israel in a tweet linked to the same broadcast, which contravenes BBC guidelines. Last week, after she was contacted by the JC, the post was deleted.
Ms Khalek has used the social media account to publicise 30 broadcasts she has made for the BBC, alongside anti-Israeli material.
In March last year, she liked a tweet commemorating Diaa Hamarsheh, a terrorist who died in a gun battle after killing a rabbi, a policemen and three civilians in Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv.
Then in November she described “the enemy, Israel” alongside photographs of a Palestinian rally and a teenager holding up a sweatshirt with the slogan “Freedom for Palestine”.
A December 2017 post under a photo of the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir read: “The Arabs are in a deep slumber… Confronting Israel was limited to statements of denunciation that do not make us fat, do not satisfy our hunger, and do not restore our Jerusalem to us.”
A post on the Syrian war in February 2016 began with the phrase “Death to Israel”. It went on: “Is it your business to resist the Arab countries or Israel? Oh, sorry, Israel is an ally of your friend Russia, and they coordinate in the Syrian war.”…
Many of us are familiar with the ideological and political biases of mainstream media, in particular the media’s uncritical embrace of leftist commitments on issues like inclusive language, hate speech, transgenderism, abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration, the Christian faith, education, and pandemic policies.
It’s par for the course.
Much of the mainstream media does not simply defend its favoured positions; it also refuses, all too often, to give a fair hearing to opposing viewpoints. The silencing, censoring, and exclusion of opinions that newspaper, radio, and TV editors deem politically incorrect impoverishes our public square by making open and candid discussion of a wide range of issues practically impossible.
This would not necessarily be the case in an ideologically and politically diverse media system, because the one-sided and exclusionary editorial policies of one media organ could be checked and balanced by the diverse biases and editorial policies of another. However, in practice, many mainstream media do in fact speak with one voice on lots of important issues, including issues that are by no means settled in the general population.
Sometimes the silencing of dissenting viewpoints is achieved through overt censorship – as we saw when Facebook suppressed arguments that entertained the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis, or when Twitter censored pretty much any assertion that could be construed as even slightly unfavourable to Covid vaccines. But more often than not, it is achieved by refusing to give any airtime to arguments from “the other side.”
In many ways, this is more sinister than overt censorship, because it is subtle and may easily go completely unnoticed.
I have had personal experience of this “from the inside,” so to speak. I used to write occasionally for a prominent national newspaper in Ireland, as well as a regional newspaper in Spain. Soon after I began to seriously question Covid measures or the science behind lockdowns, my contributions at both newspapers ceased to be published, quite abruptly. There was simply no editorial interest in questioning the fundamentals of the national response to the virus.
The average newspaper reader or TV viewer knows nothing of this filtering process. They just pick up the newspaper or switch on the TV and assume that there are “serious” people and experts who will be given a platform to express themselves. They will naturally assume that if no credible voice defends this or that position, it must be because the position is weak or indefensible. It will not occur to the average reader or viewer that the reason there are no “credible voices” on the other side is because they have been filtered out in advance.
Mine is one of those voices. There are many others.
It is not that mainstream media never discuss contentious issues. Rather, media “debate” on contentious issues is often bland and uninspiring, due to its near total exclusion of reasonable voices from the other side. Officially sanctioned positions are echoed uncritically by talking heads on TV and radio, and the “other side” is dismissed as a bunch of crazies or “extremists” in op-eds and on chat shows, even though moderate dissenting voices are refused airtime or never invited to participate in the debate in the first place.
This is bad for citizenship and bad for democracy, because citizens are exposed to one set of pat answers on the issues of the day, and not taught to process complexity and nuance. Citizens who should be learning to think for themselves are instead encouraged to passively imbibe a set of one-sided slogans, slogans that most journalists do not even think to interrogate or put to the test, like “I’m personally against X, but would never impose my opinion on someone else,” or “I am spiritual but have no time for organised religion,” or “Populists are a looming danger to democracy,” or “We must do everything possible to combat misinformation and hate speech,” or “The unvaccinated are granny-killers.”
The top ten
Here are ten topics that most mainstream media cover from a broadly leftist-progressive perspective, with almost no consideration of dissenting arguments, no matter how evidence-based and no matter how qualified or credentialed their author happens to be. In other words, ten topics that most mainstream media cannot or will not discuss openly and rationally:
The birth shortfall across a large part of the Western world and its contribution to the ageing of our populations – barely mentioned, let alone debated.
The ethics of administering transgender hormone therapy to children and adolescents – seems to be taboo for many editors.
Religious faith as a personal commitment and way of life – almost invariably, this is either ignored, treated superficially, or discussed as a wholly subjective “lifestyle option,” rather than a serious truth claim.
The ethics of abortion and techniques of assisted reproduction and their impact on women’s lives – the pro-life perspective is almost never given a fair hearing.
The difficulties and challenges surrounding the accommodation and integration of refugees – anyone questioning refugee policies is dismissed out of hand as “anti-immigration” or bigoted or racist.
The evidential basis and ethical merits of Covid policies like lockdowns, mandatory masking and mandatory vaccination – government advisors were essentially given a free pass to say whatever they wanted, while dissenters were either silenced or dismissed as enemies of public health.
The steep increases in excess mortality in 2021 and 2022, and its possible underlying causes – it has been reported on, but strikingly, not discussed to even a fraction of the extent that Covid deaths were.
The claim that reducing our “carbon footprint” can reverse global warming, and that this will avert a global catastrophe – you will rarely if ever hear this topic treated in a rational, critical and scientific manner, just uncritical repetition of a set of pre-packaged climate crisis mantras.
Populist and anti-establishment political movements – instead of engaging rationally with their claims, these movements are generally dismissed as “alt right,” “hard right,” or “demagogic” and anti-democratic.
The perspective of stay-at-home mothers or women who choose to sacrifice their careers or accept more modest careers, in order to be more available to their children – apparently, most mainstream journalists are unable or unwilling to discuss such a choice sympathetically.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2023-01-23 05:36:082023-01-23 05:39:58Ten Topics You Rarely Hear Discussed Openly and Rationally on Mainstream Media
Single women are reshaping American society, education and public policy.
Soccer Moms are giving way to Single Woke Females — the new “SWFs” — as one of the most potent voting blocs in American politics.
Unmarried women without children have been moving toward the Democratic Party for several years, but the 2022 midterms may have been their electoral coming-out party as they proved the chief break on the predicted Republican wave. While married men and women as well as unmarried men broke for the GOP, CNN exit polls found that 68 percent of unmarried women voted for Democrats.
The Supreme Court’s August decision overturning Roe v. Wade was certainly a special factor in the midterms, but longer-term trends show that single, childless women are joining African Americans as the Democrats’ most reliable supporters.
Their power is growing thanks to the demographic winds. The number of never-married women has grown from about 20 percent in 1950 to over 30 percent in 2022, while the percentage of married women has declined from almost 70 percent in 1950 to under 50 percent today. Overall, the percentage of married households with children has declined from 37 percent in 1976 to 21 percent today.
The Pew Research Center notes that since 1960, single-person households in the United States have grown from 13 percent to 27 percent (2019). Many, particularly women, are not all that keen on finding a partner. Pew recently found that “men are far more likely than women to be on the dating market: 61 percent of single men say they are currently looking for a relationship or dates, compared with 38 percent of single women.”
There’s clearly far less stigma attached to being single and unpartnered. Single women today have many impressive role models of unattached, childless women who have succeeded on their own — like Taylor Swift and much of the US women’s soccer team. This phenomenon is not confined to the United States. Marriage and birthrates have fallen in much of the world, including Europe and Japan. Writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, columnist Emma John observed, “Singleness is no longer to be sneered at. Never marrying or taking a long-term partner is increasingly seen as a valid choice.”
Rise of identity politics
The rise of SWFs — a twist on the personal ad abbreviation for single white female — is one of the great untold stories of American politics. Distinct from divorced women or widows, these largely Gen Z and Millennial voters share a sense of collective identity and progressive ideology that sets them apart from older women.
More likely to live in urban centres and to support progressive policies, they are a driving force in the Democratic party’s and the nation’s shift to the left. One paradox, however: Democrats depend ever more on women defined in the strict biological sense, while much of the party’s progressive wing embraces the blurred and flexible gender boundaries of its identity politics.
Attitudes are what most distinguish single women from other voters. An American Enterprise Institute survey shows that married men and women are far more likely than unmarried females to think women are well-treated or equally treated. As they grow in numbers, these discontented younger single women are developing something of a group consciousness. Nearly two-thirds of women under 30, for example, see what happens to other women as critical to their own lives; among women over 50, this mindset shrinks to less than half.
This perception of linked fate stands in contrast to survey results regarding single men, who report that they are increasingly disconnected from each other while women bond more closely. This is not a temporary phenomenon, and it is much bigger than the bohemian movements of the past.
There is even a sense in which women are redefining families, and themselves, by choosing to neither get married nor have offspring. And social observers such as Bella DePaulo, a University of California, Santa Barbara professor and singles advocate, are all in favour. As she told Nautilus magazine:
“[It’s] a tremendously positive thing! Once upon a time, just about everyone in the United States thought that they needed to squeeze themselves into the heterosexual nuclear family box, even if they weren’t heterosexual or weren’t interested in getting married or had no interest in raising kids.
Now, people can create the lives and the families that allow them to live their best, most authentic, and most meaningful lives. They can choose to put friends at the center of their lives. Or they can assemble their very own combination of friends and family to be the social convoys that sail beside them as they navigate their lives. They can have kids in their lives without having children of their own.”
The key driver of these attitudes may be universities, where feminist ideology often holds powerful sway. Women now predominate on college campuses. In the late 1960s, they were about 39 percent of college graduates; now they are about 59 percent. The percentage of full-time female professors has risen dramatically; at the full professor level the percentage has grown by roughly one-third.
Women now earn more than half of advanced degrees, not only in education but health and medical sciences, and are making great strides in engineering and law. With this growth, a feminist agenda has become increasingly de rigueur in colleges. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of women’s and gender studies degrees in the United States has increased by more than 300 percent since 1990, and in 2015, there were more than 2,000 degrees conferred.
There are widespread movements to establish women’s centres almost everywhere, even as men are abandoning college and university life in record numbers, and those who remain are hit with messaging about behaviour and status from diversity, equity, and inclusion offices along with various student life offices that regularly call them toxic, aggressive, and born misogynists.
While both married and unmarried women have made impressive gains in the workplace, family status appears to be driving a big cleavage in politics among women. Research shows that having children tends to make one more conservative — critically, divorce does not change this calculus decisively, although it moderates leftism.
The AEI 2022 data shows that divorced women — of all age cohorts — tend to be more conservative than liberal. In aggregate, 23 percent of divorced women are liberal while 31 percent are conservative — the plurality (38 percent) are somewhere in the moderate middle.
The fault lines, however, run deeper and appear to be generational. The data show that 40 percent of Millennial women — those born between 1981-1996 — identify as liberal and 20 percent identify as conservative. For single women of the baby boomer generation (born between 1946-1963), the number of liberals drops to 25 percent and the number of conservative women increases to almost 30 percent.
We are witnessing, as sociologist Daniel Bell noted a half-century ago in The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society, a new type of individualism, unmoored from religion and family, something fundamentally transforming the foundations of middle-class culture. This echoes what the popular futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970 described as a growing immersion in work at the expense of family life. He envisioned a revolution in marriage that would result in a “streamlined family,” and, if children are in the picture, relying on professional child-raisers. The ideal of long-term marriage would give way, he expected, to more transient relationships and numerous partners at different stages of life.
There is a clear economic divergence between married and unmarried women, if for no other reason than that two incomes provide more resources and children present different demands. There are plenty of renting couples and home-owning singles, but married people account for 77 percent of all homeowners, according to the Center for Politics. Married women tend also to do far better professionally and economically, and their rate of marriage has remained constant, while those without spouses have declined by 15 percent over the past four decades, notes the Brookings Institution. Single-parent households, they find, do far worse.
This economic reality impacts political choices. Not part of an economic familial unit, they tend to look to government for help, whether for rent subsidies or direct transfers. The pitch of Democratic presidents as reflected in Barack Obama’s “Life of Julia” and Joe Biden’s “Life of Linda” — narratives that advertised the government’s cradle-to-grave assistance for women — is geared toward women who never marry, with the occasional child-raising addressed not by family resources but government transfers.
Critically, unmarried women also tend to be employed heavily in “helping professions” like medical care and teaching, an expanding field even as many traditional male jobs, particularly in manufacturing, construction, and transportation, have disappeared.
Whereas high taxes and regulation pose problems in the general economy, women predominate in fields that actually benefit from more government spending. This now includes the once GOP-leaning medical profession, nurses as well as doctors who now lean Democratic. In contrast, heavily male professions like engineers, masons, and police officers tend toward the GOP.
These differences are also showing up in backlashes against left-wing education policy, epitomised by such programs as Drag Queen Story Hour for K-12 students. Parents have been at the forefront of movements to replace progressive school board members from Virginia to California.
Geography is destiny
The divisions between married and unmarried women are reinforced and amplified by the geographic divisions in the country — what some call “the big sort” — as Americans increasingly settle into distinct communities of likeminded individuals. Urban centres, for example, are particularly friendly to singles.
In virtually all high-income societies, high density today almost always translates into low fertility rates, led by San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Boston. In urban cores like Manhattan, single households constituted nearly 50 percent of households, according to American Community Survey 2019 data.
And with many businesses and cultural opportunities moving away from cities and diffusing and becoming more diverse and family friendly with varied amenities, the polarisation between cities and their narrowly left residents and the rest of the nation may increase.
According to the recent AEI data, even married women in the Northeast are conservative. This gap, unsurprisingly, widens in the South and Midwest. But the major divides are in terms of type of community. Married women who live in urban settings are evenly split between conservative and liberal, but among single women, just 18 percent are conservative with 44 percent liberal (the rest identify as moderate or refused to say).
In the suburbs, the key political battleground, 35 percent of married women are conservative and 22 percent liberal. For unmarried women, 23 percent are conservative and 34 percent are liberal. In rural areas, 42 percent of married women are conservative compared to 14 percent liberal, while single women divide evenly.
Unlike the wave of immigrants or rural migrants who flooded the American metropolises of the early 20th century, urbanites today generally avoid raising large families in cramped and exceedingly expensive spaces. According to analysis by demographer Wendell Cox, households in suburbs and exurbs are roughly four times more likely to have children in their household than residents of the urban core.
The lowest birthrates are found in ultra-blue cities and states, magnets largely for singles and the childless. Six years ago the New York Times ran a story headlined “San Francisco Asks: Where Have All the Children Gone?” and stories abound about the Golden Gate City having the fewest children of all major American cities. Many other major cities lost families with children during the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2021, Manhattan saw a whopping 9.5 percent decline in the number of children under 5 — and many families are not returning.
Some of this reflects policies associated with driving housing prices up more than elsewhere. Like other blue states, California has adopted policies that discourage single family housing favoured by married couples with children in favour of dense, usually small urban apartments. Given the political orientation of single women, urban areas can be expected to go further left, while the suburbs, and particularly the exurbs, with their concentrations of married families, will likely shift towards the centre and right.
The great demographic race
In the near future, American politics, both national and local, may turn on the degree to which people remain single, and also whether they decide to have children. Right now, the short run demography favours the Democrats. People are getting married at the lowest rate in American history and the birth rate remains depressed. The longer people stay single, and perhaps never marry, the better things will be for the Democrats.
The wild card may be age — specifically whether historic patterns hold and women, like men, tend to become conservative as they get older. This is hard to gauge as the evolution has usually taken in place of the context of marriage and motherhood. Unmarried women, in particular, may hold onto their youthful ideology far longer than those whose lives are transformed by marriage and parenting.
In many places, particularly on the coasts, single women have become a politically rising force. Twelve women were elected governor in 2022, a record. Maura Healey’s election as the nation’s first openly lesbian chief executive shows that in states like Massachusetts, once a Catholic conservative bastion culturally, there is enough support for single women in politics to overcome traditional reluctance to elect childless and non-heterosexual candidates.
“It’s thrilling to see Maura break down historical obstacles to both women and LGBTQ candidates to lead Massachusetts,” says Janson Wu, executive director of the Boston-based GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders. “It really shows the progress we’ve made as a society, in understanding that what counts is really the quality of the leader and not who they are.”
Future policy conflicts
Public policy may have a strong influence on this dynamic. The single, the unattached, and the unmarried are already demanding state provisions to guarantee “affordable” urban housing, more money for transit, and steps toward a guaranteed income for individuals — all of which will, in turn, provide incentives to remain unattached. In contrast, the demands of family-oriented voters may be more focused on economic growth, safety, improving basic education, and ways to save money for their offspring.
If the policy preferences of singles become more significant, the United States may have to brace for the kind of long-term demographic decline already evident in Japan and parts of Europe. Some suggest that one possible solution, attractive to some on the left, would be to adopt the “Nordic way” which encourages reproduction (if not marriage) by transferring much of the burden of child-raising from families to the state.
Other countries have also adopted pro-birth policies — like free or low-cost childcare, or even cash payments. These schemes have been applied in places as dissimilar as Poland and South Korea, as well as Quebec. But according to United Nations data, all of them, including the Scandinavian states, still suffer well below replacement rate fertility rates.
Some women in particular embrace singleness not just as a lifestyle, but a chance to redefine the role of women in society. Author Rebecca Traister, herself married with children, has followed this movement, calling it a “a radical upheaval, a national reckoning with massive social and political implications … a wholesale revision of what female life might entail.”
“We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood as a norm, not an aberration,” she adds, “and the creation of an entirely new population: adult women who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry.”
The likely best way to overcome the demographic decline may lie instead in boosting the economic prospects of the next generation. This includes steps that could allow for easier purchase of homes or lower cost apartments suitable for families. As Richard Florida, among others, has suggested: Efforts should be made to lower housing prices, which correlates to higher rates of fertility.
Reforms that encourage home-based businesses could spark greater fertility rates, as historian Alan Carlson suggested almost two decades ago. The rise of home-based businesses and work, now taking off, offers a unique opportunity for increased family formation. Indeed, a recent study by the Federal Reserve of Kansas City suggests that the current rise in remote work could spark a family-friendly housing boom, as people can live further away, and spend more time being parents. For that to occur, however, it would require that such housing can be constructed, which would require loosening of regulations that seek to restrain construction both in cities and suburban areas.
Ultimately the question remains what kind of society Americans want to have. Historically, here in the US and elsewhere, the family perspective has generally been prevalent and tied intimately to the sense of a common polity. But as the country changes and becomes ever more single and female-influenced, the historical pattern is likely to be challenged and significantly modified.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2023-01-23 05:22:092023-01-23 05:26:33The Rise of the Single Woke [and young, Democratic] Female
CDC Aware of Hundreds of Safety Signals for COVID Jab.
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
In September 2022, The Epoch Times asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining results. The CDC refused. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has now forced the release of these data, and they are stunning
The CDC’s PRR monitoring has identified several hundred safety signals, including for Bell’s palsy, blood clots, pulmonary embolism and death. In individuals aged 18 and older, there are 770 safety signals for different adverse events, and more than 500 of them have a stronger safety signal than myocarditis and pericarditis
In the 12- to 17-year-old age group there are 96 safety signals, and in the 5- to 11-year-old group there are 66, including myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction, cardiac valve incompetency, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis and appendectomies, Kawasaki’s disease and vitiligo
The proportions of deaths, which were only provided for the 18-plus age group, was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines
The FDA is also required to perform safety monitoring, using empirical Bayesian data mining. The Epoch Times asked the FDA to release its monitoring results in July 2022 but, like the CDC, the FDA refused, only to admit in December 2022 they’d confirmed the Pfizer shot was linked to pulmonary embolism
In September 2022, The Epoch Times asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining results. PRR1 measures how common an adverse event is for a specific drug compared to all the other drugs in the database.
According to the standard operating procedures2,3 for the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is run jointly by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC is required to perform these data mining analyses.
Not only did the CDC refuse to release the data, but it also provided false information — twice — in response to The Epoch Times’ questions about the monitoring being performed. As reported by The Epoch Times back in September 2022,4 the CDC initially claimed PRR analyses were “outside the agency’s purview” and that no monitoring was being done by them.
Eventually, the agency admitted it was doing PRRs, starting in February 2021, only to later claim they didn’t perform any PRRs until March 2022. The Epoch Times also cited several papers in which the FDA and/or CDC claimed their data mining efforts had come up empty handed.5 Now, we find that was all a pack of lies.
CDC Monitoring Reveals Hundreds of Safety Signals
In reality, the CDC’s PRR monitoring reveals HUNDREDS of safety signals, including Bell’s palsy, blood clots, pulmonary embolism and death — all of which, according to the rules, require thorough investigation to either confirm or rule out a possible link to the shots. As reported by The Epoch Times in early January 2023:6
“The CDC analysis was conducted on adverse events reported from Dec. 14, 2020, to July 29, 2022. The Epoch Times obtained the results through a Freedom of Information Act request after the CDC refused to make the results public …
PRR involves comparing the incidence of a specific adverse event after a specific vaccine to the incidence after all other vaccines. A signal is triggered when three thresholds are met, according to the CDC: a PRR of at least 2, a chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and three or more cases of the event following receipt of the vaccine being analyzed. Chi-squared tests are a form of statistical analysis used to examine data.
The results obtained by The Epoch Times show that there are hundreds of adverse events (AEs) that meet the definition, including serious conditions such as blood clotting in the lungs, intermenstrual bleeding, a lack of oxygen to the heart, and even death. The high numbers, particularly the chi-squared figures, concerned experts.
For many of the events, ‘the chi-squared is so high that, from a Bayesian perspective, the probability that the true rate of the AE of the COVID vaccines is not higher than that of the non-COVID vaccines is essentially zero,’ Norman Fenton, a professor of risk management at Queen Mary University of London, told The Epoch Times in an email after running the numbers through a Bayesian model that provides probabilities based on available information.”
Myopericarditis Is Far From the Only Problem
One of the few side effects of the COVID jabs that the CDC has actually acknowledged is myocarditis (heart inflammation), and a related condition called pericarditis (inflammation of the heart sack). Alas, the PRR monitoring results reveal there are more than 500 other adverse events that have stronger warning signals than either of those conditions.
Josh Guetzkow, an Israeli professor trained in statistics at Princeton University told The Epoch Times:7
“We know that the signal for myocarditis is associated with something that is caused by the mRNA vaccines, so it’s more than reasonable to say that anything with a signal larger than myocarditis/pericarditis should be taken seriously and investigated.”
Guetzkow expanded on his commentary in a January 4, 2023, Substack article.8 Below is a summary list of some of the key findings from the CDC’s PRR analysis. Guetzkow goes deeper in his article, so for more details, I suggest reading it in its entirety.
For even more analyses and commentary, see Fenton’s Substack article, “The CDC’s Data on COVID Vaccine Safety Signals.”9 If you want to investigate the PRR data for yourself, you can download them from The Epoch Times’ January 3, 2023, article.10 You can also find them here.11
In individuals aged 18 and older, there are safety signals for 770 different adverse events, and two-thirds of them (more than 500) have a stronger safety signal than myocarditis and pericarditis. Of those 770 signals, 12 are brand-new conditions that have not been reported following other vaccines.
Topping the list of safety signals are cardiovascular conditions, followed by neurological conditions. In third and fourth place are thromboembolic conditions and pulmonary conditions. Death is sixth on the list and cancer is 11th. Considering the uptick we’ve seen in aggressive cancers, the fact that death tops cancer really says something.
The number of serious adverse events reported between mid-December 2020 and the end of July 2022 (just over 19 months) for the COVID jabs is 5.5 times greater than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the U.S. over the last 13 years (approximately 73,000 versus 13,000).
Twice as many COVID jab reports were classified as serious compared to all other vaccines given to adults (11% vs. 5.5%), which meets the definition of a safety signal.
The proportions of reported deaths, which was only provided for the 18+ age group, was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines. As noted by Fenton,12 “If the CDC wish [sic] to claim that the probability a COVID vaccine adverse event results in death is not significantly higher than that of other vaccines the onus is on them to come up with some other causal explanation for this difference.”
In the 12- to 17-year-old age group, there are 96 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, Bell’s Palsy, genital ulcerations, high blood pressure, menstrual irregularities, cardiac valve incompetency, pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrhythmia, thrombosis, pericardial and pleural effusion, appendicitis and perforated appendix, immune thrombocytopenia, chest pain and increased troponin levels (indicative of heart damage).
In the 5- to 11-year-old group, there are 66 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction, cardiac valve incompetency, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis and appendectomies, Kawasaki’s disease, menstrual irregularities and vitiligo.
It’s worth noting that the CDC didn’t perform its first safety signal analysis until March 25, 2022 — 15 months after the shots were rolled out. Why the long wait — especially since the CDC had announced it would begin monitoring in early 2021? Just consider, for a moment, how many lives have been lost because the CDC failed to properly monitor safety, and still drags its feet when it comes to warning people about the risks involved.
FDA Still Refuses to Share Safety Data
The FDA is also required to perform safety monitoring using another technique called Empirical Bayesian data mining. The Epoch Times first asked the FDA to release its monitoring results back in July 2022,13,14 but like the CDC, the FDA refused and insisted the data showed no evidence of serious adverse effects. In other words, “Just trust us. We’re experts.”
According to the FDA, the only potential signal they’d found through April 16, 2021, was for raised body temperature.15 Then, in mid-December 2022 — just four months after The Epoch Times tried to get these data — the FDA announced that pulmonary embolism (blood clots that block blood flow in the lungs) had met the threshold for a statistical signal, and continued to meet the criteria after in-depth evaluation, but it was only linked to the Pfizer jab.16
As noted by The Epoch Times,17 pulmonary embolism is also identified as a signal in the CDC’s PRR analysis for individuals as young as 12, which really ought to strengthen concerns.
The FDA also admitted it had already evaluated three other warning signals: lack of oxygen to the heart, immune thrombocytopenia (a blood platelet disorder) and intravascular coagulation (a type of blood clotting), but none of these continued to meet the threshold after analysis.
If the FDA was evaluating four warning signals, why did they tell The Epoch Times there was no evidence of ill effects, and why did they claim the only potential signal they’d found was slight fever? Are we to believe they discovered these signals after The Epoch Times asked for the monitoring results and then completed four in-depth investigations in four months?
Whatever the truth, it’s clear that both the CDC and FDA are not being transparent. Worse, they’ve hidden data, knowing it could mean the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands of people.
CDC Has Ignored Clear ‘Death’ Signal
The CDC ignoring a clear signal for death is probably the most egregious example of its failures as a public health institution. As early as July 2021, Matthew Crawford published a three-part series18,19,20 detailing how the CDC was hiding safety signals by using a flawed formula. In August that year, Steve Kirsch informed the agency of these problems, but was ignored.
Then, in an October 3, 2022, article,21 Kirsch went on to show how “death” should have triggered a signal even when using the CDC’s flawed formula (which is described in its VAERS standard operating procedures manual22). Here’s an excerpt:23
“The formula the CDC uses for generating safety signals is fundamentally flawed; a ‘bad’ vaccine with lots of adverse events will ‘mask’ large numbers of important safety signals … Let me summarize the key points for you in a nutshell: PRR [proportional reporting ratio] is defined on page 16 in the CDC document24 as follows … Table 4. Calculation of Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR)
A ‘safety signal’ is defined on page 16 in the CDC document as a PRR of at least 2, chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and 3 or more cases of the AE [adverse event] following receipt of the specific vaccine of interest. This is the famous ‘and clause.’ Here it is from the document: 2.3.1 Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR)
Only someone who is incompetent or is deliberately trying to make the vaccines look safe would use the word ‘and’ in the definition of a safety signal.
Using ‘and’ means that if any one of the conditions isn’t satisfied, no safety signal will be generated. As noted below, the PRR will rarely trigger which virtually guarantees that most events generated by an unsafe vaccine will never get flagged.
The PRR value for the COVID vaccines will rarely exceed 1 because there are so many adverse events from the COVID vaccine because it is so dangerous (i.e., B in the formula is a huge number) so the numerator is always near zero. Hence, the ‘safety signal’ is rarely triggered because the vaccine is so dangerous.”
A Fictitious Example
Using a fictitious vaccine as the example, Kirsch explained how an exceptionally dangerous vaccine will fly under the radar and not get flagged, thanks to this flawed formula:25
“Suppose we have the world’s most dangerous vaccine that causes adverse events in everyone who gets it and generates 25,000 different adverse events, and each adverse event has 1,000 instances.
That means that the numerator is 1,000/25,000,000 which is just 40 events per million reported events. Now let’s look at actuals for something like deaths. For all other vaccines, there are 6,200 deaths and 1 million adverse events total.
Since 40 per million is less than 6,200 deaths per million, we are not even close to generating a safety signal for deaths from our hypothetical vaccine which killed 1,000 people in a year … The point is that a dangerous vaccine can look very ‘safe’ using the PRR formula.”
Calculating Death Signal for the COVID Jab
Next, Kirsch calculates the PRR for death for the COVID jab — using VAERS data and the CDC’s definitions and formula. As of December 31, 2019, there were 6,157 deaths and 918,717 adverse events total for all vaccines other than the COVID shot. As of September 23, 2022, there were 31,214 deaths and 1.4 million adverse events total for the COVID jabs. Here’s the formula as explained by Kirsch:26
“PRR = (31,214/1.4e6) / (6,157/918,717) = 3.32, which exceeds the required threshold of 2. In other words, the COVID vaccine is so deadly that even with all the adverse events generated by the vaccine, the death signal did not get drowned out!
But there is still the chi-square test. Chi-square test results were 18,549 for ‘death,’ which greatly exceeds the required threshold of 4. The CDC chi-square test is clearly satisfied for the COVID vaccine. Because the death signal is so huge, it even survived the PRR test.
This means that even using the CDCs own erroneous … formula, all three criteria were satisfied:
PRR>2 [PRR greater than 2]: It was 3.32
Chi-square>2 [Chi-square greater than 2]: It was 18,549
3 or more reports: There were over 31,214 death reports received by VAERS … which is more than 3
A safety signal should have been generated but wasn’t. Why not? … Hundreds of thousands of American lives have been lost due to the inability of the CDC to deploy their own flawed safety signal analysis … It’s been known since at least 2004 that using reporting odds ratio (ROR) is a better estimate of relative risk than PRR.27 I don’t know why the CDC doesn’t use it.”
The CDC is also hiding the severity of side effects in other ways. As explained by Fenton,28 the way side effects are categorized by the CDC help obfuscate the scale of certain problems. For example, “cardiac failure acute,” “cardiac failure,” “infarction,” “myocardial strain” and “myocardial fibrosis” are listed as separate categories, even though in real life they’re all potential effects of myocarditis.
By separating them, you end up with fewer frequency counts per category, thereby giving you an underpowered chi-square test so that a warning signal is not triggered. If related categories were merged, far stronger safety signals would likely emerge.
CDC Has No Reasonable Defense
The CDC is responsible for monitoring both VAERS and V-Safe, and between these two databases, there’s no possible way they could ever say they didn’t know the shots were harming and killing millions of Americans.
The CDC also has access to other databases, including the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), which (before it was intentionally altered29) showed massive increases in debilitating and lethal conditions, including a tripling of cancer cases.30
The findings in these databases have never been brought forward during any of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meetings or the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meetings, at which members have repeatedly voted to authorize the jabs to people of all ages, including infants and pregnant women.
They even added these toxic shots to the childhood vaccine schedule — which allows states to mandate them for school attendance — without addressing any of the 66 safety signals found in the CDC’s PRR analysis. The fact of the matter is that the CDC has known about these risks all along, and there’s no excuse for not sharing and acting on these data.
Help Spread the Word
Mainstream media are ignoring all of this, so help spread the word. Everyone needs to know what the CDC’s safety data reveal. To that end, here are a few suggestions for how you can help:
Write or call your members of Congress and ask them to investigate the CDC’s safety monitoring — We cannot have a public safety agency that is incapable of monitoring safety and taking appropriate action when problems are found, be it correcting a flawed formula or announcing that a safety signal has been detected. Of course, they must also publish their findings once an investigation has been made.
Contact your local newspaper and urge them to investigate and report on the CDC’s failure to act on safety signals.
Share the data on social media and ask why no one in the media, Congress, academia or medical community is investigating these matters.
Share this information with your doctor and members of the medical community.
Also share it with university administrators, and ask them to explain how and why, in light of these data, they are still mandating COVID shots.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MERCOLA Take Control of Your Healthhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMERCOLA Take Control of Your Health2023-01-23 05:05:172023-01-24 07:10:59Mind Blowing: CDC Forced to Tell How Deadly the COVID Jab Is
On January 22nd, 2023 Atlanta, Georgia, a Democrat stronghold, is in flames. Antifa is in full attack mode. It appears that Antifa wants to create an “autonomous zone” called “CopCity” in Atlanta. At least one police officer has been killed and other injured.
The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund provides emergency support to anti-fascists anywhere in the world, whenever they find themselves in a difficult situation as a result of their stand against hate. Whether it’s replacing damaged/stolen property, paying medical bills, helping them find a safe place to stay, funding legal defence, helping their families, or doing antifa prisoner support, this Fund seeks to alleviate the harm that results from doing the right thing sometimes.
Atlanta erupted on Saturday night, with police arresting at least six people after a protest over the death of Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, 26, turned violent.
Teran, also known as “Tortuguita,” or “little turtle,” was killed by police on Wednesday after he allegedly ignored authorities and shot at state troopers on the grounds of the new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, Fox News reports.
If an officer-involved shooting wasn’t enough to inflame the woke mob, Tortuguita reportedly identified as nonbinary and used they/it pronouns. It was a perfect storm that handed Antifa the excuse they crave to riot.
For context, the #ANTIFA riot is happening in #atlanta tonight because they had set up an “autonomous zone” called #CopCity and shot a police officer who made contact with them and he killed the shooter when returning fire.
In June 1967, Israeli paratroopers under the command of Mordechai (Motta) Gur broke through the Jordanian defenses and captured the Old City, where the Jewish Quarter, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount – the holiest site in Judaism – are all contained. Many Israelis believed that after 19 years of being denied access, they, and Jews everywhere, would again have unfettered access to the Temple Mount, where they would be able to pray. Alas, it was not to be. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, a secularist, who was intent on mollifying the defeated Arabs, had other ideas. Meir Soloveichik writes about Dayan’s tragic blunder here: “Moshe Dayan’s Tragic Blunder,” by Meir Y. Soloveichik, Commentary, February 2023:
There is an argument to be made for permitting wider access and the right to pray for Jews at the site of the biblical Temples. In part, this argument charges that defense minister Moshe Dayan, in electing not to fully realize Israel’s sovereignty over the Mount immediately after its breathtaking capture in the 1967 war, helped facilitate the resonant Palestinian lie that the Jews have no connection to our ancient homeland—for surely, if the Temple Mount was historically ours, religiously ours, we would not have handed it back to them.
Dayan had the perfect opportunity to end, once and for all, the Arab attempt to cut Jews off from the holiest site in Judaism. When east Jerusalem, and the Old City, were under Jordanian control, from 1949 to 1967, no Jews could visit the Temple Mount or the Western Wall. Dayan might, in the heady aftermath of that spectacular victory in June 1967, have declared that from now on, Jews could visit the Temple Mount, at any time of day, and on any day of the week, just as the Muslims could. He might have insisted that Jews could say their prayers on the Temple Mount, just as the Muslims did. But instead he strictly limited Jewish “visiting hours” on the Mount to four hours a day, and then on only five days of the week. And more terrible still, he decided to forbid Jewish prayer, open or silent, at the holiest site in Judaism, a policy that has been dutifully followed by every Israeli government since Dayan’s day.
Anxious to avoid a full-on confrontation with the entire Muslim world [but just how, following Israel’s stunning victory against three Arab states, would that Muslim world be able to summon the strength to “confront” Israel?], and utilizing the halachic argument that Jews should not set foot on the Mount for fear of defiling the sacred ground where the Temple and its Holy of Holies once stood, he allowed Jordan’s Muslim Waqf to continue to administer the compound’s holy places.
It was not wrong to let the Waqf continue to administer the Muslim holy sites. What was wrong was Dayan’s not asserting the right of Jews to visit the Temple Mount at any time, “just as Muslims do,” and especially, in not insisting that “Jews of course will now have the same rights as Muslims to pray on the Temple Mount.” Put that way, it would be hard for the Western powers to reject such a reasonable, and modest, request.
Netanyahu, David Horovitz [editor of the Jerusalem Post, writing in a recent article] continued, had “wisely” adopted Dayan’s approach previously, but now the prime minister had “sanctioned” an act of “potential pyromania.” This is a reference to [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir’s visit to the Temple Mount. Horovitz’s account leaves out the fact that the decision of the ardently secular Dayan was founded on total disregard for what the Temple Mount meant to religious Jews.
Horovitz, another left-wing secularist, calls on Netanyahu not to change Dayan’s policy on the Temple Mount, but to continue to limit Jewish access and to block Jewish prayer. He preposterously calls Ben-Gvir’s visit to the Temple Mount an act of “potential pyromania.” There were all sorts of Arab threats, that if Ben Gvir made that visit, there would be an “explosion” of Arab violence. But he visited, walked around the perimeter of the Compound, steered clear of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, did not pray, made no statement, and left after 13 minutes. And no upsurge of Arab riots and violence resulted from this so-called “pyromaniac’s” visit.
After his paratroopers broke through Jordanian lines in 1967 and reached the site, Mordechai Gur exultantly exclaimed that “the Temple Mount is in our hands.” Dayan, in contrast, infamously reflected, “What do I need this Vatican for?”As the Israeli journalist Nadav Sharagai has documented, Dayan’s actions were based in the presumption that the Temple Mount is not of any religious significance to Jews at all:
Dayan thought at the time, and years later committed his thoughts to writing, that since the Mount was a “Muslim prayer mosque,” while for Jews it was no more than “a historical site of commemoration of the past…one should not hinder the Arabs behaving there as they do now and one should recognize their right as Muslims to control the site.”…
Dayan was a brilliant military commander, but otherwise he left much to be desired. He did not feel any religious attachment himself to the Temple Mount, which, given that he was an atheist, can be understood, but what he also lacked was any comprehension of how much that site meant to others, not just to religious Jews, but even to many secular Jews less dogmatic than he. He did not feel along his pulse that the Temple Mount was the holiest site in Judaism, and was unable to empathize with the millions of Jews who felt that it was such. Nor did he see the Temple Mount as the site not just of religious significance, but of the greatest historical importance to the Jews, the place where both the First and Second Temples had stood. Dayan’s description of the Temple Mount only as a “Muslim prayer mosque,” and his dismissal of the Jews’ 2600-year-old attachment to the site, are shocking. He famously, and unforgivably, wrote that “one should not hinder the Arabs behaving there as they do now” and “one should recognize their right as Muslims to control the site.” He was sympathetic to Muslim claims, but not to those of the Jews, to the Temple Mount; he was unable to grasp the depth of the Jewish attachment – that is, of Jews other than himself – to the Temple Mount. And that led to his unforgivable blunder, in forbidding Jewish prayer on the Mount, at the very time when allowing it would have been accepted by the defeated and thoroughly demoralized Arabs.
The Palestinian attempt to insist that there never was a Jewish connection to the Haram al-Sharif (as Muslims call the Temple Mount), even denying that there ever were two Jewish temples at the site, despite what even non-Jewish historians have written, has had the effect of pushing religious Jews, and some secular ones too, to more forcefully stake the Jewish claim by visiting the Mount in much greater numbers than before the Palestinian denial.
The hysteria over the “far-right” members of the Netanyahu government, expressed by Jews and non-Jews alike, is hardly warranted. And so far these incessant cries of alarm, that “Israel is no longer a democracy,“ that “Israel has lost its soul,” and suchlike alarm, overlook the obvious: the new government that is being called “an enemy to democracy” was itself elected democratically, and can be turned out anytime the voters of Israel chose to do so. That Israeli electorate has, after all, gone through ten governments since 2001.
Now is the time for Israel to state clearly its case for undoing Moshe Dayan’s historic blunder. Prime Minister Netanyahu can speak thus to the world:
“For 2600 years, even before the destruction of the First Temple on the Temple Mount in 586 B.C., and the destruction of the Second Temple on the same site in 70 A.D., what we Jews call the Temple Mount and the Muslims call Haram al-Sharif was the religious and historical center of Jewish life. Under the Babylonians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, and the British, Jews maintained their right to visit and pray on the Temple Mount. During these thousands of years, it was only during the period from 1949 to 1967, when Jordan held east Jerusalem and the Old City, that Jews were forbidden to visit the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. In 1967, Israel came into possession of the Old City, and once again Jews could visit the Temple Mount. But it was the decision of one man, Moshe Dayan, in June of 1967, that deprived Jews of the right to pray on the Temple Mount. And ever since, we Jews have had to endure the paradox of not being able to pray at the holiest site in Judaism. Now that prohibition has been lifted, and Jews will again be free to pray — as Muslims have been able to — just as they did before 1949, on the Temple Mount.
The world’s most notorious state exponent of anti-Semitism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is on a path to uproot, not only all that is perceived as civilized but to annihilate the greatest threat to its existence, the Iranian people. The mullahs and their mercenaries are wasting precious human life in order to maintain their power by terrorizing the population.
The Iranian people are simply hopeless and helpless. Even the UN does not come to their rescue. From its past performance, rather than its absence of performance, we know that the UN watchdog is a true disgrace to dogs since all it does is eat, sleep and look the other way. Furthermore, the dog has no teeth. The vet had to pull all its teeth before the dog became acceptable to the crafty cats that constitute the UN itself.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is a unique creature—it is best described as a Theocratic Aristocracy. The “divinely ordained” rulers maintain power through an elaborate patronage system. Lucrative positions, contracts, and valued privileges are distributed by patronage. The result is that the ruling Mullahs enjoy a significant number of supporters in all strata of society—the civil service, the military, the powerful Revolutionary Guards, (IRGC), and the hooligans and thugs who are ready to unleash their vicious attacks on anyone or group that dares to challenge the in-charge men of Allah. The illegitimate government of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a quisling entity that has betrayed its people, its tradition, and its glorious pre-Islamic achievements, and is incessantly working against Iran’s national interest.
Under the stranglehold and machinations of the Mullahs, Iran has been transformed, in less than three decades, to the lead perpetrator of all that is abhorrent to humanity. The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Ali Khamenei, like his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, whose callous disregard for human life was matched only by his consuming paranoia, allegedly has issued a decree to hang Iranian dissidents publicly in all the towns and villages with a population that exceeds 1000 people. For Ayatollah Khamenei, the dissident viewpoints represent an unacceptable threat. Anyone found questioning the Sharia Law — and many hundreds of thousands were — had to be “weeded out.” The Islamic Republic is on a mission to end human life in Iran. Mass public hangings, as well as secret executions in prisons, are routine in the tyrannical Islamic Republic of Iran. Recently Majid Kavousifar, 28, and his nephew, Hossein Kavousifar, 24, were hanged for the alleged murder of a hardline judge, Hassan Moghaddas, who also was a deputy prosecutor and head of the “guidance” court in Tehran and notorious for jailing and condemning to death political dissidents. The victims were hanged from cranes and hoisted high above one of Tehran’s busiest thoroughfares. This “judge” had repeatedly bragged publicly that he often issued a death verdict without even examining the charges against the individual.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has the dubious distinction of executing more children, those under the age of 18, than any other country in the world. Such is the plight of the Iranian people.
Iran’s ruling Mullahs are clustered around major factions such as the conservatives, the moderates, and the so-called reformists. Yet, the differences among these factions are tactical rather than strategic. One and all share the same overarching goal of defeating the “Crusader-Zionists” by any and all methods possible, bringing about the “end of the world” Armageddon, and thereby creating the requisite conditions for the appearance of the Hidden Imam, the Mahdi, to assume his rule of the world. What is the likelihood that the ruling Mullahs will actually use the bomb, you may ask? If they remain in power long enough to have it, they are very likely to use it, in one form or another, you are told. At the very least, they will use the bomb for blackmail and intimidation in the region. How can you help to prevent this catastrophe from happening, you may ask?
Support the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom, by at least petitioning, you are told. [As for Majid and Hossein Kavousifar, they left Iran for Abu Dhabi following the assassination of the murderous judge, Hassan Moghaddas, and apparently, they both took refuge in the U.S. Embassy where they had applied for U.S. asylum. We have no information as to why they were handed over to the Islamic Republic authorities when they were aware that they would definitely be facing execution.
We hope that the US State Department can give us more information. In order to achieve total control, the Islamic Republic and its lackeys spawned a series of immense internal purges — beginning in 1988 and known as the “Massacre of Political Prisoners of 1988”– and have intensified their domestic terror in recent months and weeks. A society that is intense in its struggle for change has a flip side to its idealism: intolerance. This totalitarian regime sees enemies everywhere, enemies who want to destroy the Islamic Revolution and diminish the results of its hard work of creating an Islamic utopia in the land of Cyrus the Great. The regime seems to be panicking with hyper-suspiciousness. They have installed watchdogs in schools, universities, factories, and all offices across the country, and are urged to be vigilant against sabotage, against those who crave freedom and democracy. Many innocent Iranians are being victimized, and the saying has gone around that “when you chop wood, the chips fly.” As with Khamenei, it was believed that some who were innocent would have to be victimized if all of the guilty were to be apprehended.
In fact, they stigmatize, victimize and murder people without any due process of law. On the slightest suspicion, they arrest, convict, and execute. Few people would deny any longer that Islam and its variants mean, in practice, bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal actions, forced ‘hijabs”, fatal deportations, extrajudicial executions, show trials, and genocide. It is a widespread plague upon humanity, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the greatest threats to the stability of the civilized world and humanity at large. It continues to impose this horrendous ideology called Islam on the Iranian population.
The world must file legal charges against the leaders of the Islamic Republic’s wanton violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: for their crimes against humanity and genocidal actions against religious and political groups; for support of international terrorism; for demolition of sacred sites and cemeteries; for rape, torture, and summary executions of prisoners of conscience; for forgery of documents; for acts of blackmail and fraud; and for much more. To those misguided advocates of negotiation with the mullahs, beware. The mullahs are on an Allah-mandated mission. They are intoxicated with petrodollars and aim to settle for nothing less than complete domination of the world under the Islamic Ummah. It is precisely for this reason that they consider America and the West as “Ofooli,” setting-dying system, while they believe their Islamism is “Tolooi,” rising-living order. They are in no mood to negotiate for anything less than the total surrender of democracy, the very anathema to Islamism. This is only one reason, but perhaps, one of the greatest reasons, for fostering democracy.
In short, we have an excellent opportunity to topple these parasitic terrorists once and for all. History will judge us all. At Munich, Chamberlain got an international agreement that Hitler should have the Sudetenland in exchange for Germany making no further demands for land in Europe. Chamberlain said it was ‘Peace for our time’. Hitler said he had ‘No more territorial demands to make in Europe. Neville Chamberlain, appeasement (1938) Hitler, our European allies, and the United States, are doing the same with the ayatollahs. [I really like to know how these people become National Security Advisors)?
Bewildered by what fanatic Muslims do, some conclude that Muslims are brainwashed. Otherwise, how can their totally illogical belief system and barbaric behavior be explained? But the notion of “brainwashing” that is bandied about is the stuff of science fiction and Hollywood movies such as the Manchurian Candidate.
The human person arrives in this world with his brain already washed in the sense of being what John Lock called tabula rasa, a clean slate—ready for an experience to imprint its script on it. John Lock was only partly correct. The brain also arrives with numerous predispositions already in place. It is a combination of life’s influences and a person’s own decisions that determine which of these dispositions develop and which ones fail. It is through this process that a unique human being is formed.
Many animals come with already in-place programs that automatically run much of their lives. Birds’ migration, mating courtship, and thousands of other complex behaviors are instances of this type of specific programming. A catchword for this type of behavior is “instinct.” As a general rule, the higher the organism the less is its rigid pre-programs and the greater its latitude to exercise choices.
Making choices depends on what there is to choose from and to what extent a given choice appeals to the person. And the human newborn enters the arena of life without the means of being other than a passive recipient of “things” already chosen for him.
It is like the old joke by Henry Ford who reportedly told his customers that they could have the choice of color for their car as long as it is black. Things are almost as bleak for the new arrival. He didn’t have a say in choosing his parents, his socio-economic condition, his environment of birth, and much more. All are already in place and he is to start in life from the context of his birth.
The development of a newborn in any family is influenced by many factors, among them how hands-on the parents are; how religious they are, and how severely they micromanage him in an attempt to make him not only a good person but also a person better-one than they themselves.
Parents tend to live vicariously through their children by programming them, the best they can so that they become or achieve much of what they had failed to become or accomplish. This attitude covers all areas of life such as giving the child the education they didn’t have, helping him with fame and fortune, nurturing him to become a top-notch athlete, and so forth.
It is a fact that early influences play a cardinal role in shaping a person. For this reason, for instance, the overwhelming majority of Muslims have been born into Muslim families, Catholics into Catholic families, Hindus into Hindu families, and so on. It is also a fact that the degree of religiosity ranges from mild to strong, with most people falling somewhere between the two extremes.
Interestingly, two siblings raised by the same set of parents under the same influences may end up at the opposite extremes in their religious views and practices. Here, the human dynamic of freedom of choice comes into play and steers one to one extreme and the other to the other extreme. Occasional extreme deviations notwithstanding, the great majority of siblings of a given family end up with various degrees of that family’s overall religious and other values. The same general principle of subscribing to a set of common values exists in all human groupings, in some cases with broad flexibility and inclusiveness while in others with rigidity and exclusivity.
In order to enjoy the privileges of belonging to a group, the person must also pay his dues of membership.
The very young human faces, beginning with the minute he can make some sense of the world, a bewildering array of mysteries, challenges, and enticements. There are questions at every step, fears, and hopes entangled with the need to survive and possibly thrive.
Who am I? What is this world all about? What’s the purpose? What am I supposed to do and how? Where am I headed? People die. Where do they go? And on and on and on. The information booths available to him in the fairground of life provide him with answers that may help relieve his innate existentialistic anxiety. And it is here that religion plays a critical role and holds a great appeal. Religion provides a surefire answer to those who are willing to take it on faith.
And Islam is a powerful magnet for the masses that are unable to deal with the uncertainties of life and death on their own. It is from this population, many already thoroughly indoctrinated from birth, that the majority of diehard jihadists emerge.
It is the bargain the jihadist makes. He surrenders totally to the religion of surrender in exchange for blanket security. Islam gives him all the answers he really seeks for dealing with this world and promises him a lush and eternal paradise of Allah once he leaves it. And leaving this world in perfect submission as the foot-soldier of the paradise’s creator gives the faithful unimaginably glorious sensual eternal reward in his next life. It’s a bargain that some buy in whole, some in part, and some refuse and seek other means of dealing with their questions and the unrelenting existentialistic anxiety.
The great majority of jihadists emanate from the ranks of those born into the religion of Islam, simply because they are the ones who are most thoroughly indoctrinated and influenced by the Islamic dogma in their most receptive early years. Yet, there are others who embrace Islam in adulthood, on their own and enlist themselves as devoted jihadists for the same rewards that Islam offers them.
Islam has a great advantage of the first call on the new arrival. It is an omnipresent system with masses of believers, mosques, madrasahs, and a host of other social and economic organizations that overpower the person and steer him into the same fold; it is a sea of people who seem to know what they are all about, what life and death are all about, and what one must also do.
Within this sea of surging humanity composed of some 1.5 billion Muslims, each individual believer—a drop—through a combination of choice and forces beyond his control, ends up in one of its many waves. It is the jihadist wave that is highly attractive to the deeply indoctrinated and poorly adjusted in dealing rationally and independently with life. Here, he finds the iron-clad perfect solution to his anxieties and perplexities.
To a jihadist, death is nothing more than casting off a shell of the worthless earthly existence and donning the suit for winging joyously to the life of bliss promised by none other than Allah’s beloved final emissary, Muhammad.
The eradication of jihadism is a daunting task since Islam is a virulent persistent pandemic disease. Massive education efforts, combined with a resolute confrontation of all sources and people that support and promote this deadly philosophy, hold the best promise of dealing effectively with this affliction of humanity.
In addition to the family, places such as mosques and madrasahs, Islamic associations and charitable organizations, prisons, and the like are incubators for jihadists. Massive efforts are required, on the one hand, to drain the breeding swamps of the Islamic virus, while on the other hand helping Muslims adopt an alternative perspective of life that addresses their perplexities and offers a degree of comfort that religions dispense without pitting one segment of humanity against another.
In the monumental task of dealing with jihadism, every individual, group, and government must combine their resources and energies to prevail. The destiny of civilized life hangs in the balance. It is an unpardonable act of shirking responsibility for anyone to adopt the attitude of “let George do it.” George is you. George is I. George is every enlightened human being and organization that values human liberty and dignity.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Amil Imanihttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngAmil Imani2023-01-22 10:31:042023-01-22 10:41:13The Making of and Dealing with Jihadists
An election integrity group said 10.9 million out of a total 22.1 million ballots that had been mailed out to registered voters during the 2022 midterm elections went “unaccounted for,” according to a Jan. 18 report.
“Mail voting practices have an insurmountable information gap,” the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) said on Monday. “The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient by someone at the same address.”
The watchdog released the two-page report (pdf) detailing what it called “the failures” of California’s first mass-mail balloting election following the passage of Assembly Bill 37 (AB 37), which requires that ballots automatically be mailed to all active registered voters statewide. The bill, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September 2021, makes vote-by-mail ballots, a practice implemented in the 2020 general election in conjunction with the COVID-19 pandemic, permanent for all elections.
California has more registered voters than any other state. Yet its vote-by-mail policies—among the nation’s most expansive—have resulted in large numbers of ballots “disappearing at poll closing time,” PILF’s data show.
“After accounting for polling place votes and rejected ballots in November 2022, there were more than 10 million ballots left outstanding, meaning election officials do not know what happened to them,” reads the Wednesday report.
“It is fair to assume that the bulk of these were ignored or ultimately thrown out by the intended recipients. But, under mass-mail elections, we can only assume what happened,” it continued.
Besides the almost half unaccounted-for mail ballots, data show that 9.8 million were accepted, over 120,000 were rejected, and 1.4 million were counted from in-person voting centers.
The Golden State, which has been a Democratic stronghold for over two decades, mailed out more than 22.1 million ballots to its registered voters—nearly 47 percent Democrats and 24 percent Republicans—during the 2022 elections. A GOP victory in California on Nov. 16 granted the party slim control of the U.S. House.
Mail-In Ballot Rejects
PILF, after finding that election officials in California had rejected 226,250 mail-in ballots during the 2022 primary and general elections, argued that the switch to mail balloting has taken away voters’ rights.
According to the report, the state would reject mail ballots primarily for nine reasons, including mismatched or missing signatures, and double voting when a registrant casts a vote both in-person and by-mail, which took place 813 times in the past midterms.
The most common reason, which researchers said is “endemic to mail voting,” turned out to be late-arriving ballots—taking up 48 percent of all rejects during the 2022 elections, finding show.
Every registered voter in California should receive a ballot in the mail a month prior to Election Day. All ballots returned by mail must be postmarked by Nov. 8 to be counted, and received within seven days by county election officials, who would then verify the signatures on the return envelopes and process ballots through their vote tallying system.
“In the November contests, more than 57,000 ballots arrived after November 15, setting them up for rejection,” PILF stated.
“The official datasets do not differentiate between ballots postmarked too late or delivered too late. The U.S. Postal Service also touts its 2022 performance by claiming that 99 percent of mail ballots were delivered nationally within 3 days to officials for counting once in their custody,” the repost reads, noting that the Post Office sets the success rate at 94 percent for timely delivery of political mail.
“Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.” — Vladimir Lenin, Russian politician, communist theorist and the founder of the Soviet Union
There’s no doubt why Obama and the Democrats pushed so hard to get it passed and nationalize the greatest medical institution in the world. The barbarians took a wrecking ball to it.
First part of an incredible story that shows just how broken our public “health” apparatus is — very, very broken.
Sometimes an institution or movement turns on the society that supports it, harming the whole for its own benefit. A public bureaucracy can forget its underlying purpose and focus on perpetuating itself, or an organization comes to believe that the rest of society owes it special privileges. When an organ within the body of society becomes thus corrupted, and proves itself unwilling to reform, society must excise the diseased tissue before it spreads.
Cancer and its causes
Cancer starts when cells within an organ begin to operate outside the strictures and rules that the body’s cells were programmed to follow. This can be triggered by environmental factors such as chemicals, radiation, or viral infections. It can also occur due to structural errors in the DNA that determine the body’s growth and function.
Immune mechanisms often control and eliminate early cancerous change, with the person remaining unaware that there was even a threat. Sometimes however, the cancerous change is too great for these inbuilt checks to overcome. Its growth is beyond what the body was designed to address, or the body has become so sickened by age, attack or neglect that it can no longer mount an adequate defense.
As a cancer grows, it slowly corrupts the organ it arose within, impairing or changing its function. Demanding more nourishment to support its own rapid growth, it saps the body’s ability to support the rest of its billions of cells. In time the whole body deteriorates, though the cancer continues to grow and extract nourishment to the end, effectively repurposing the body solely towards its own support.
Death may be averted by removing the offending cancer, or even the entire organ from which it arose. But if the organ is vital to survival or the cancer has infiltrated other vital organs, excision is not possible. Sometimes the cancer may be poisoned or killed with radiation or immunotherapy without killing the entire body. But if it cannot be so dealt with, it takes the entire body down with it. This is a relatively common way to die.
Society is in many ways like the human body. Its various organs perform their functions to support the whole, all interdependent for survival. Corruption of one organ will, if left unchecked, corrupt the whole body. Most societal organs have rules that keep them in line with society’s needs. When external influences poison or degrade them and these rules are broken, the organ grows to the detriment of the whole. If society is healthy, it may be able to reform or replace the offending organ. If it is not, or if the corruption has infiltrated too deeply, society will become increasingly sick as its lifeblood is sucked away, and in time it may die.
A cancer on society
The international public health sector comprises the World Health Organization (WHO), a growing bevy of other international health agencies and numerous non-governmental organizations and foundations. Ostensibly its role is to support global society in maintaining overall health. By WHO’s definition, health is the ‘physical, mental and social wellbeing’ of all people, in equal measure. For reasons of promoting equality and human rights, the sector focuses on populations in low-income countries where life expectancies are lower and resources most limited. Various rules on conflict of interest, together with the traditional unprofitability of poor people’s healthcare, had once kept the private sector mostly uninvolved and uninterested. WHO’s lifeblood funding was restricted to assessed national contributions of its Member States.
Over the past two decades, the growth of mass vaccination has provided a viable way to extract profit from the healthcare of these low-income populations. Reflecting this, private interests and corporations have become keen to fund WHO’s work. These sources follow a ‘directed funding’ model through which they specify how and where their sponsorship will be used. Private money and corporate direction also heavily influence new organizations set up in parallel including Gavi and CEPI, focused on supplying commodities from which these sponsors profit. This has changed international health from a horizontal, country- and community-driven approach to a vertically-driven commodity-based model.
While the international public health sector is still heavily dependent on taxpayer funding, the funding of corporations and their investors has won them great influence over this increasingly commoditized agenda. Public funding thereby shifts wealth from the average taxpayer to the wealthy who have invested in these goods. An organ nourished by and designed to support the whole has been repurposed by these external influences into acting like a cancer on society, still fed by the body but directed to its own benefit.
Cancerous growths sicken the body
If this cancer analogy seems a stretch when applied to the ‘humanitarian’ sector, it is instructive to review recent history. In 2019, after a structured process laid out for guideline development, WHO published their guidelines for pandemic influenza. These specifically state that contact tracing, border closures and quarantining of well individuals should not occur during an established pandemic. At most, sick people could be confined at home for 7-10 days. School closures, if used, should be short-term. Restrictive measures, as WHO noted, would not significantly reduce mortality but would disproportionately harm low-income people and raise major ethical and human rights concerns.
A few months after publishing these guidelines, senior WHO executives recommended restrictive measures far beyond those that their own guidelines had warned against. To appreciate the gravity of the harms inflicted on the billions of people in low-income countries, we must understand that those orchestrating them knew that these populations were at very low risk from Covid-19 itself.
The massive skewing of Covid mortality towards old age was published in the Lancet in early 2020. More than half of the 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa are under 20 years of age and therefore at near-zero risk, whilst less than 1% are over 75 years. The average age of Covid-associated deaths in Western countries is about 80 years.
The WHO, CEPI, Gavi and other public health organizations knew that rapid health service access and good nutrition are fundamental to reducing child mortality. They knew that infant mortality in low-income countries is strongly tied to gross domestic product (GDP) and therefore harming economies would kill millions (which it is, with UNICEF noting over 200,000 lockdown deaths in South Asia in 2020 alone).
In advocating for measures to restrict health service access and disrupt supply lines, they knowingly caused an immediate and sustained increase in malaria, pneumonia and other acute infectious disease. By restricting access to tuberculosis and HIV care, the death rate of those already infected would increase whilst also promoting transmission, locking in greater future mortality. These diseases kill at a far younger average age than Covid.
Recommendations to close workplaces in cities left millions of workers in the same crowded living conditions as before, but with no income to buy food and medicine for their families. Closure of markets further reduced access to nutrition, whilst also reducing farm earnings. Knowing the importance of tourism to the service and retail industries that support millions of women’s education and independence, advocacy to block international travel further impoverished these people.
CDC admits mRNA shots can cause myocarditis and blot clots. Also admits natural immunity is real. And concedes that the shots don’t prevent infection or spread of the virus.
Therefore COVID “vaccine” mandates are immoral and unethical even according to govt. End all of them now. pic.twitter.com/c6x3ndKnm4
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2023-01-22 07:24:322023-01-22 08:30:14The Cancer that is Public Health
The women of Iran are leading the first female-led revolution in the history of the world, revising what bravery means. These women deserved to be named Time Magazine’s people of the year.
“The Iranian people’s nationwide protests erupted on September 16, 2022, after the death of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jina Amin while in the custody of the Islamic morality Police.
How did we get here?
The upheavals of 1979 shattered the existing order and a turbaned charlatan that Jimmy Carter called a saint, Ayatollah Khomeini, skillfully steered the forces of change to promote his brand of totalitarian rule — a rule aimed at taking Iran backward to a primitive, violent, and misogynistic society.
In no time at all, Carter’s saint turned out to be the true devil he was. Khomeini’s mob started killing Americans, took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran with Americans as hostages, and launched a most virulent anti-American campaign that is bleeding America to this very day.
Carter made a bone-headed decision some forty-five years ago. Both Iranians and Americans paid dearly and continue to pay.
Islamic theocracy
Many Iranians sensed the catastrophic tragedy of Islamism and really began doing what they could to prevent it from destroying Iran’s nascent civil democratic system. Before long, Khomeini and his gangs capitalized on the frustrations of the masses, promising them everything under the sun while simultaneously murdering thousands of Iran’s best children who opposed them and their system of rule.
2009 Green Revolution
The world witnessed a massive anti-regime movement in 2009 by millions of Iranians, subsequent to the fraudulent re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The regime’s response to those protesting people was a set of dastardly measures typical of dictatorships. People were severely beaten, huge numbers arrested and herded like cattle into makeshift prisons, some were shot in the streets as they marched; others were raped and killed in Iran’s prisons. And the world simply watched. Now it was Obama’s turn. He too was hood-winked by the same Machiavellian Shi’a gang that took Carter on a ride of infamy.
The Obama Administration not only failed to voice its support for the people, but it also implied that what was happening in Iran was a kind of family squabble best left to be settled by Iranians themselves. A family feud indeed. One side of the “family” with legions of savages armed to the teeth, the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) and their hired thugs, and the other side of the “family” defenseless civilians using their voices to plead their case. The Islamic rulers spared no heinous means in mercilessly silencing the voices of the people.
No nation provided even moral support for the Iranian people while the savage mullahs and their thugs consolidated their rule of terror with impunity. The same scenario is recurring and the silence of the world is deafening while we are engaged in the Ukraine war.
2022 Iran revolution and the world reaction
The world leaders as usual were indifferent. The sanctions decided by the EU are finally toothless figurative politics. Only after weeks of protests did the EU adopt very limited entry injunctions and freeze assets.
By the way, did you watch the deafening sound of silence at the Golden Globes bash this past Sunday where the horde of self-righteous champions of women’s rights busily applauded each other without bothering to say a single word (except for Sean Penn) in support of the valiant Iranian women presently risking everything battling the women-oppressing Islamist rule?
Indeed it is times like this when principled freedom fighters are separated, by their words and deeds, from the frauds.
These young martyrs and so many others remain as eternal testaments to the depravity of the 7th-century primitive system and the horrors it has visited on innocent people. And these young victims of Islamic tyranny are by no means isolated cases. Tragically, women as a gender bear the brunt of Islamic misogyny. Women are systematically exploited, maltreated, and disenfranchised from their God-given rights.
When circumstances call upon us, society generates heroes. Heroes are those extraordinary people who make sacrifices and become agents of historical and social change. We sometimes speak of other forces that rule the world. Iran’s women and girls have shaken the Islamic regime’s core. Indeed, they are the true heroes of our time.
We should also salute Masih Ali Nejad, Nazanin Boniadiand Nazanin-Afshin Jam MacKay and many others who have risen to the occasion and have set themselves apart from the shameful gang of self-serving liberal women loudmouths who find themselves suddenly tongue-tied when speaking up do not serve their myopic and parochial agenda.
Women in Iran are chanting the phrase “Women, Life, Freedom” despite the threat of being shot and incarcerated by the régime. They are risking their lives. There are photographs of women raising their fists while the streets around them burn.
The decent humans of the world stood and mourned in solidarity with Iranian women’s freedom aspiration while their lives were cut short from the loving bosom of their families into the eternal embrace of Mother Iran.
They mourned their death, yet they all honored their call and summons: A call and summons to follow in their footsteps with iron resolve. A call and summons for the complete emancipation of millions of women, as well as men, who are suffering under the yoke of Islamic tyranny.
The brave women of Iran will shine forever as beacons of hope and a source of inspiration to those across the world who struggle for justice, equality, and liberty. This is the final scene. This is do-or-die. Nothing less than a subversion of this regime and recapture of Iran will stop these warriors. And it has been heard among people in Europe, the United States, and worldwide. This time we see that these heroic people are determined to overthrow the rule of the mullahs.
The brave Iranian women are not stopping, nor will they any time soon. They are taking to the streets to cut their hair and burn their hijabs, indicating to the Islamic government that they will no longer stand for this totalitarian regime. Time for the mullahs to pack up and leave.
California Governor Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, are the dream team. He runs the state and she’s a nonprofit founder, entrepreneur, and filmmaker.
While her husband attends to state business, Siebel Newsom engages in her passion: advancing “gender justice” through her charitable nonprofit The Representation Project. According to tax documents the organization is “committed to building a thriving and inclusive society through films, education, and social activism.”
Then, the Newsom nonprofit scrambled to submit their proper registration. Working with the California Attorney General, a process that normally takes days or weeks was completed in hours.
So, just what does Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s charity do – with the full support of her husband, the governor, and underwritten by the wealthy California establishment?
THE FILMS
Siebel Newsom, through her non-profit The Representation Project, has released four films advocating gender justice. The films are leased for screenings to individuals, corporations, and schools, and come with their own lesson plans. Schools spend between $49-$599 to screen these movies to children.
Jennifer Siebel Newsom is credited as a writer and director on each of these films. Two of the movies feature Gavin Newsom himself, and many of the lesson plan activities are oriented toward engaging children in social and political activism.
Because of Gavin Newsom’s role in these films and because licenses are sold to schools which the governor is responsible for funding with tax dollars, auditors at OpenTheBooks.com felt the organization deserved further scrutiny.
Who’s Watching? 2.6 million students in 5,000 schools
According to The Representation Project’s Impact Report (2011-2021), the organization’s film curricula are being used in over 5,000 schools in all fifty states. The Representation Project claims over 11,200 copies of the curricula have been distributed, reaching more than 2.6 million students.
Tax records show that since 2012 the nonprofit has generated $1,483,001 in film screening revenue, although it is unclear how much money came from schools versus other sources. We asked The Representation Project for the number of California schools that purchased a screening license and received no response.
Auditors at OpenTheBooks.com watched Newsom’s movies and read the lesson plans. What we found was, at times, shocking: sexually explicit images, political boosterism, and something called “The Genderbread Person.”
Screenshot from “age-appropriate” middle school curriculum video for Miss Representation; see full video here.
Miss Representation’s curriculum links to “age-appropriate” video clips in its K-12 lesson plans and says that the full film is rated PG-14. (Certainly, parents may still object to clips from the “age-appropriate” film like the animated, upside down stripper shown above).
The filmfeatures strong language and women dressed provocatively:
Caroline Heldman, who is now executive director of Newsom’s non-profit, described women’s role in action movies as “the fighting fuck toy.”
Actress Daphne Zuniga, famous for Melrose Place and film parody Spaceballs, suggested women should “tell those fuckers to get penis implants,” in response to being told to get plastic surgery.
Middle school children are served images of upside-down strippers with little left to the imagination (see above).
Then, it gets worse.
Newsom’s film The Mask You Live In features the website addresses of porn sites including Porn Hub, MassiveCams, BDSM.XXX, and Brazzers.com. The pornographic images displayed in the film are tagged with descriptions such as “domination,” “face fuck,” “kinky couples,” and “…dirty brunettes.”
Newsom included images of naked or mostly naked women being slapped, handcuffed, and brutalized in pornographic videos. The pictures are graphic even when blurred. Screenshots of those scenes can be found HERE (VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED).
These jarring pictures are displayed with their corresponding porn website addresses – providing a roadmap for future exploration. The film seems to justify their harmful content by saying that “34% of youth online receive UNWANTED PORNOGRAPHIC EXPOSURE.”
In 2019, one parent filed a complaint about a screening of The Mask You LiveIn for his 12-year-old daughter’s class at Creekside Middle School in California. In an interview with The Sacramento Bee the father said,
“Some of the images when slowed down were not blurred, and even when they are blurred, it is obvious what is going on. It is absolutely profane and disgusting.”
An investigation found a substitute teacher accidentally screened the full version of the film rather than an “age-appropriate” version. However, The Representation Project recommends the full version for ages 15+.
Siebel Newsom’s idea is to protect children from highly exploitative and disturbing sexual media content seems to involve showing it to them personally.
BOOSTING GAVIN NEWSOM – THE COMPASSIONATE POLITICIAN
Screenshot of then-Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom in Siebel Newsom’s film, Miss Representation.
Gavin Newsom himself provides interview commentary for Miss Representation and The Great American Lie.
Newsom speaks three times in Miss Representation and is portrayed as a champion of women’s rights—see this example from the middle school curriculum video (18:37):
“One of the first things I did when I came to San Francisco (as mayor) is I appointed a female police chief and appointed a female fire chief.”
Getting paid by schools to portray your politician husband as a standup guy to captive children in the classroom was such a winning idea, Siebel Newsom deployed it again in The Great American Lie.
Here, Newsom makes five appearances to deliver political talking points, including:
At the end of the day a budget is a set of values, budget reflects your values.”
“This notion of interdependence—that we’re all in this together, that we all rise and fall together—is absolutely true.”
“We’re not bystanders in this world, we have the ability to step up and solve big problems, we have done that in the past, it’s just a question of prioritization, of political will.”
Siebel Newsom’s provided companion curriculum require student discussion of Gavin Newsom’s points and are told to vote, and help others vote, for politicians “who show empathy through their support care [sic] policies.”
Activity from The Great American Lie curriculum for high school and college students. Students are asked to watch and discuss a clip of Gavin Newsom.
Call to action from The Great American Lie curriculum for high school and college students. Students are told to vote and help others vote for candidates “who show empathy through their support care [sic] policies”
Overview: Jennifer Siebel Newsom makes a movie portraying Gavin Newsom as a politician that supports certain policies, and then in the movie’s curriculum advises students to vote and campaign for politicians that support those policies.
Schools, which receive funding from the state, pay The Representation Project to show this movie, and use taxpayer-funded class time to facilitate these lessons.
In July 2022 Gavin Newsom signed a budget of $128 billion for state schools and community colleges.
Source: Genderbread Person activities from The Mask You Live In curriculum for middle and high school students.
Multiple lesson plans from The Representation Project promote radical notions of gender and sexuality.
One such lesson for middle and high schoolers includes the “genderbread person,” who aims to show children how biological sex, “gender expression,” “sexual attraction,” and “gender identity” exist on a spectrum, which can be mixed and matched.
While kindergarteners are spared the genderbread person in their curriculum, they are offered similar lessons on “gender identity,” introducing genders other than “boy” and “girl.”
Kids forced to watch The Representation Project films in schools aren’t just subjected to gender ideology, sexually explicit images, and Gavin Newsom’s one-liners. They’re being given a left-wing framework through which to see the world, and then prompted to conduct social and political activism.
In The Great American Lie curriculum, students are asked to do a “privilege walk,” divulging personal information in order to compare themselves to peers inside and outside the classroom. “Privileges” include being “a cisgendered man,” “white,” “born in the United States,” “straight,” and speaking English as a first language.
Activity from The Great American Lie curriculum for high school and college students.
Speakers in The Great American Lie are clear about what “privilege” means—something you hurt other people with, something you should feel bad about, and something you should work to change.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Open The Bookshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngOpen The Books2023-01-21 15:33:192023-01-21 15:43:36Newsom Twosome: Siebel Newsom’s Films – Shown In Middle Schools – Feature Porn, Radical Gender Materials, And Her Husband Gavin
When we break down the core institution of free speech, we lose a lot of what made America so successful in the first place.
Free speech used to be held up as one of the core American institutions. It was enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights for a reason: while other countries have also adopted free speech, it is a fundamentally American tradition.
More than that, free speech is essential on its own terms. It is the single best way for humans to make progress. None of us are perfect, and none of us know the full truth. Therefore we all need to engage in the marketplace of ideas in order to find the truth and develop the best path forward.
But free speech has been under attack for decades.
Herbert Marcuse
One of the earliest—and most influential—critics was Herbert Marcuse, a college professor and the father of the New Left. In an essay called Repressive Tolerance published in 1969, Marcuse recommended removing rights (including the right to free speech) from conservatives. Marcuse didn’t see the world in terms of human beings who all have equal worth; he saw the world in terms of power. Those with power should be forcibly silenced (at least, the ones he disagreed with) so that those at the bottom could have more freedom. For Marcuse, if a majority is being repressed, what is needed is “repression and indoctrination” of the powerful so that the weak get the power they deserve.
In recent years, Marcuse-style attacks on free speech have filtered down from academic institutions into the mainstream.
Subjective Rules Focused On Impact (Real Or Claimed)
Ilya Shapiro, adjunct law professor at George Washington University and the University of Mississippi, provides a case study on the new rules around who can speak and what they can say. Early in 2022 Georgetown Law School hired him to teach. When President Biden said he would only nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court, Shapiro expressed dismay at this form of blatant affirmative action. At the voicing of this heterodox view, the sky fell down on him.
Georgetown swiftly placed Shapiro on administrative leave, where he languished for months without knowing whether or not he’d be fired. An administrative investigation into the offending Tweets lasted 122 days.
Georgetown finally reinstated Shapiro, but only on the technicality that he hadn’t officially started at Georgetown at the time he sent his tweets. The Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action (IDEAA) said that his comments were “objectively offensive” and that saying something similar in future may be enough to get him fired.
Even more disturbingly, the IDEAA adopted a blatantly subjective standard for deciding whether or not speech by faculty would be punishable. “The University’s anti-harassment policy does not require that a respondent intend to denigrate,” according to the report. “Instead, the Policy requires consideration of the ‘purpose or effect’ of a respondent’s conduct.”
As Shapiro puts it: “That people were offended, or claim to have been, is enough for me to have broken the rules.”
This punishment of heterodox speech isn’t an isolated incident. A 2017 survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov found that over a third of Democratic responders said that a business executive should be fired if they “believe psychological differences explain why there are more male engineers.” A substantial number of respondents thus advocated stripping someone of their job for the crime of saying what many psychologists know to be true.
Walking On Eggshells
The new cultural norms around free speech aren’t just a problem for right-wingers. In an in-depth explainer on cancel culture, Julian explains the scope of the problem:
“Heterodox Academy surveyed 445 academics about the state of free inquiry on campus, asking them, ‘Imagine expressing your views about a controversial issue while at work, at a time when faculty, staff, and/or other colleagues were present. To what extent would you worry about the following consequences?’
One of the hypothetical consequences Heterodox Academy listed was, ‘my career would be hurt.’ How many academics said they would be ‘very concerned’ or ‘extremely concerned’ about this consequence? 53.43%.
To put it another way: over half of academics on campus worried that expressing non-orthodox opinions on controversial topics could be dangerous to their careers.
We see the same self-censoring phenomenon among college students. In 2021, College Pulse surveyed 37,000 students at 159 colleges. They found that 80% of students self-censor to at least some degree. 48% of undergraduates reported feeling, ‘somewhat uncomfortable’ or ‘very uncomfortable’ expressing their views on a controversial topic in the classroom.
In a panel on free speech and cancel culture, former ACLU president Nadine Strossen said, ‘I constantly encounter students who are so fearful of being subjected to the Twitter mob that they are engaging in self-censorship.'”
It’s not just students and professors. In an article titled “America Has A Free Speech Problem,” the New York Times editorial board noted that 55 percent of Americans have held their tongue in the past year because they were concerned about “retaliation or harsh criticism.”
Extremists on both sides of the aisle increasingly wield their power to shame or shun Americans who speak their minds or have the temerity to voice their opinions in public. This problem is most prominent on social media, but is spilling into offline conversations as well. Citizens of a free country should not live in fear that a woke or far-right mob will come for them because they express an idea that isn’t sufficiently in vogue.
Pretending That Speech Is Violence
The very concept of free speech is increasingly associated with violence. When former vice president Mike Pence planned to speak at the University of Virginia, the student newspaper Cavalier Dailypublished a furious editorial saying that Pence shouldn’t be allowed to speak. Why not? “Speech that threatens the lives of those on Grounds is unjustifiable.” It takes a lot of mental contusions to conclude that letting Pence give his opinion could threaten anyone’s life.
It’s not just students. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “When is speech violence?”
According to Barrett, “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.”
She continued: “That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.”
The fact that psychologists are lending the veneer of science to the idea that speech is violence should be deeply troubling to every American.
Why Is Free Speech Essential?
When we break down the core institution of free speech, we lose a lot of what made America so successful in the first place. Robust norms of free speech helped people build the emotional and mental resilience to cope with ideas they disagreed with. It helped us build bonds with people who believed different things, because we were able to listen to and understand their position.
Free speech also enabled multiple parties to argue from competing worldviews and find a solution that was better than what any party had formulated going into the discussion.
The silver lining is this: Americans increasingly recognize that free speech is a value whose preservation is essential. The New York Times editorial board notes that “84 percent of adults said it is a, ‘very serious’ or ‘somewhat serious’ problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.”
What Can You Do?
As a strong and integrous person, what can you do to limit the impact of the degradation of free speech on your own life?
First, speak up about what you know to be true—even if no-one else is speaking up, even if there are risks to you. Develop the courage to call a spade a spade. If you see insanity—in your workplace, in politics, in your home—call it out openly and honestly. You’ll sleep better at night. You’ll also become stronger through the act of speaking out. Speaking takes courage, but it also creates courage.
Second, seek out people who disagree with you. Listen to them. Go further; try to be persuaded by them. Skewer your sacred cows and let go of your ideology. Neither one is serving you.
Third, banish forever (if you haven’t yet) the infantile notion that words are violence. This notion is profoundly damaging, because it makes you weak. If mere disagreement can hurt you, after all, then so can everything else in life. So will everything else in your life. Instead, embrace the adage of the Stoics: other people are responsible for their actions, you are responsible for your response. Once you embrace the idea that mere words—whether vicious or merely heterodox—cannot hurt you, you are on the path to emotional strength and groundedness.
Fourth, don’t let yourself become a “tribe of one.” It’s easy, in this environment of chilled speech, to always feel scared to speak up. Find a group of friends who encourage you to speak your truth, and who speak their truth in return to you. Find people who aren’t afraid to share heterodox ideas and to challenge your sacred cows, nor to have their own challenged in return.
Find a group you’d trust to have your back in a firefight, and who will love you and expect you to have theirs in turn.
Julian is a former political op-ed writer and current nonprofit marketer. His work has been featured in FEE, National Review, Playboy, and Lawrence Reed’s economics anthology Excuse Me, Professor.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2023-01-21 14:51:462023-01-23 05:52:27The Opponents of Free Speech Are Gaining Ground. Here’s How We Can Fight Back
