NJ women’s prison inmates pregnant after sex with transgender prisoner
A transgender woman behind bars at a New Jersey women’s prison impregnated two fellow inmates, prompting officials to move her to a different facility, a report revealed Saturday.
Demi Minor, 27, was moved last month from the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women to the Garden State Youth Correctional Facility — a prison for young adults in Burlington County, a New Jersey Department of Corrections spokesman told NJ.com…..
Iran has been quite public about wanting to do this, but nonetheless the questions remain: Who leaked it? Why? What was the objective?
“Iran plotting to kill Donald Trump in assassination plot, intelligence leak says,” by Rachel Hagan, Mirror, July 15, 2022:
Iran is plotting to kill or capture Donald Trump and his former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, according to a leaked US government intelligence report.
The Middle East nation is seeking to avenge the United States for the death of Major General Qassim Soleimani, a powerful Iranian commander, at the hands of a US drone strike two years ago.
The astonishing claim came from the latest National Counterterrorism Centre report that said the Iranian regime is “waging a multi-pronged campaign against select US officials”.
It said this includes threats of lethal action, international legal manoeuvring, and the issuance of Iranian arrest warrants and sanctions….
“Since January 2021, Tehran has publicly expressed a willingness to conduct lethal operations inside the United States and has consistently identified former President Donald Trump, former secretary of state Michael Pompeo, and former General Kenneth McKenzie as among its priority targets for retribution,” the report says according to Yahoo News.
It continued that Iran would likely view the killing or prosecution of a US official like Trump as an equivalent in rank and stature to Soleimani “or responsible for his death as successful retaliatory actions.”
Yahoo states that the report is marked with “Not for Public Release” and “For Official Use Only.”…
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2022-07-18 07:59:452022-07-18 08:23:19Leaked Government Intel Report says Iran Plotting to Murder Trump Inside the U.S.
“Politicians are more or less so warped by party feeling, by selfishness, or prejudices, that their minds are not altogether balanced. They are the most difficult to cure of all insane people.” — Robert E. Lee, from his personal journal, circa 1860
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.” — Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
“Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named…but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.” — Robert A. Heinlein, in his book Friday
“For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
As a youngster, my church and my family educated me as to what was coming in the future, Biblically and politically. I knew about communism, but back then I didn’t know it had been around since the early 19th century. President Kennedy was shot and killed when I was a junior in high school. Then came the murders of Martin Luther King and two months later, Bobby Kennedy. Tanks rolled down the streets of Chicago in April and August of 1968, and a 10 p.m. curfew was declared for the entire city. Apartment buildings were boarded in case of attacks by rioters. Chicago was on fire, looting and burning was everywhere after King’s death. Mayor Richard J. Daley told the police, shoot to injure if they are stealing, shoot to kill if they’re starting fires.
Fires were dotted across the South Side and the Near North Side. Six hundred fires burned destroying 28 blocks on Chicago’s West Side. Daley, looking down from a police helicopter, broke into tears. He asked, “What did they do to my city?” That was 1968.
I don’t believe I fully realized the enormous consequences of what had happened back then, and it wasn’t the beginning; it was just another piece of the slow destruction of our beloved nation.
Murders on the world stage, every one of them for an evil purpose.
In 2020, the assassinations were aimed at the “Rule of Law” and our culture. Antifa, BLM and smaller communist groups joined together to riot and destroy public property and to set fire to anything that would burn, all allegedly because of George Floyd’s death. Police were injured and some killed, often outnumbered, or told to stand down while cities and towns were set ablaze. Monetary damages reached two billion.
Instead of mayors telling the police to halt the violence by shooting those who set fire, they encouraged the riots. Kamala Harris promoted the Minnesota Freedom Fund that bailed out a twice-convicted rapist accused of sexual assault, an alleged murderer and a woman accused of shooting at police. And no one can forget Maxine Waters urging rioters to attack people when they see them in restaurants, at gas stations, etc. She actually asked Minnesota rioters to get more “confrontational.”
Our once courteous and well-bred culture has been purposely eviscerated.
Now we face an even worse threat. Alex Berenson reports that official Canadian data show vaccines now RAISE the risk of death from Covid. It’s much the same in Britain and worldwide. We all know it, but Big Pharma, WHO, FDA, CDC, NIH all continue.
Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum, made it clear when he said, “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world.”
There’s only one conclusion, they want us dead. Those who survive will be enslaved.
Control of food production will guarantee massive genocide.
Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street
In August of 2021, Jim O’Neill wrote a stunning expose of Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street entitled Monolithic Monopoly. Take a gander at it. Jim has listed the large companies of which Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street are top shareholders. His article first alerted me to Blackrock’s Chairman and CEO, Larry Fink.
In March of 2022, Investopedia reported, “BlackRock Inc. (BLK) is by some measures the biggest investment management company across the globe, with more than $10.0 trillion in assets under management (AUM) as of Dec. 31, 2021. [1] As a major publicly traded company with a market capitalization of about $112.3 billion, Black Rock provides investment and technology services to both institutional and retail clients around the world.”
According to a May 1, 2022 Newstarget article, Blackrock and Vanguard have taken over centralized food production technologies and will have near-total control over the future food supply in America. It’s been under the radar for the majority of America, and it certainly doesn’t bode well for the future. Remember Kissinger’s famous quote, “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”
The USDA and FDA have already approved lab grown meat, genetically modified cattle, and are funding the globalists to research and develop cellular agriculture as well as indoor growers and genetics companies, while they slack on regulations for gene-edited produce.
Union Pacific is mandating railroad shipping reductions by 20%, impacting CF Industries Holdings, the world’s largest fertilizer company. Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street happen to be the top shareholders of Union Pacific, and BlackRock and Vanguard are in the top 3 shareholders of CF Industries Holdings.
Only 10 companies control almost every food and beverage brand in the world. Vanguard and Blackrock are the top shareholders in most of these companies. Their plans include owning all the seeds, produce and meat. Everything will be grown inside secured facilities after a gene splice or inside a petri dish, and farmland will become dormant due to overreaching regulations, lack of supplies, and manufactured inflation.
Bill Gates owns tons of our farmland, 242,000 acres, but insists that all foods will eventually be grown in huge indoor vertical farming and will be in urban areas where people will migrate to, more like forced into. Who gets to sit at the table with healthy produce served up by Gates while the rest of the population eats gene-edited produce from locked-down facilities, delivered to their local grocery store, and accessed only through a digital ID? Check out the 11-minute video of one of these farms in Wyoming.
But guess what else Gates owns? In an April 27, 2022 article on controlled food systems, we read, “The Consultative Group of International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) holds the world’s largest private seed banks consisting of 10% of the worldwide germplasm across the globe, which is controlled by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and World Bank, managing 768,576 accessions of hijacked farmers seeds.” How lovely! Total control by total evil!
“In August 2020, Monsanto/Bayer helped found a startup called Unfold, which develops new vegetable seed varieties specifically geared for vertical farms. According to investigative journalist, Corey Lynn, ‘GMOs already account for 75 to 80% of food Americans consume,’ and once fresh produce is under patent, that percentage will inch closer to 100%.
The University of California is also working on plant-based mRNA vaccines. The idea there is to disseminate vaccines through the conventional food supply, which puts a whole new spin on the old adage to ‘Let thy food be thy medicine.’” (Oh yummy!)
Good old Monsanto/Bayer who has allegedly poisoned the planet with Roundup’s cancer-causing glyphosate has a long and evil history. Eva Moses Kor and her twin were in Auschwitz. Mrs. Kor sued Bayer and stated, “They were right there with Dr. Joseph Mengele at Auschwitz.” The parties negotiated a settlement establishing the creation of a $5 billion fund for the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future. I was fortunate to have had a lengthy conversation with Eva in 1997; what an unbelievably amazing woman.
German companies, Bayer and BASF, two of the world’s largest suppliers of seed, are both heavily involved with the vertical farm industry.
It was during the Obama administration in 2014 when congress established the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research Act (FFAR) through the Farm Bill, which ultimately created a non-profit organization outside of the government with a $200 million kickoff from taxpayer dollars and additional millions in support from Bill Gates as seen here, and here. Then a 15-member board of directors was appointed which unsurprisingly included deputy director Dr. Robert Horsch of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and high-ranking employees from Cargill and the Aspen Institute, among others.
In June of 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development was held in Rio de Janeiro. It is known as the “Earth Summit.” In the book, “Earth Summit, Agenda 21, The United Nations Programme of Action from Rio,” the foreword is written by Maurice Strong, who was at the time, the Secretary-General, United Nations Conference on Environment and Development.
He starts out telling us that humanity is in the midst of a profound civilization change and we can see the signs everywhere and that all the people who attended the Rio summit and all the people of the world, there are exhilarating and uplifting signs.
He states, “While it is still too early to provide a precisely calibrated measure of the ultimate success of the Earth Summit, I believe it has ignited a wildfire of interest and support at every level of society in every corner of the planet.” He goes on to tell us that since the Summit, “There has been a profusion of conferences, seminars, symposia and other organized colloquies of major sectoral groups. Industrialists, economists, financiers, engineers, scientists – those who, in truth, hold the levers of economic power and change –have joined the constituency of earnest environmentalists in a commitment to the fulfillment of the hopes and aspirations engendered by Rio.”
Strong continues, “In short, the movement to turn the world from its self-consumptive course to one of renewal and sustenance has unmistakably spread from the grass roots to the brass roots. The Declaration of Rio and its Agenda 21 action programme are now, it seems clear, on everyone’s agenda.”
United Nations Agenda 21/30 is now called the “Great Reset.” All of this was planned long ago and it is fast coming to fruition.
Conclusion
Fifty-nine years ago, President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. Five years later, Martin Luther King was fatally shot in Memphis, Tennessee. On April 4th, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, who just announced his presidential candidacy, delivered the news to a predominantly black neighborhood in Indianapolis that King had died. That night, amid one of the most chaotic years in American history, the country burned. Riots broke out in more than 100 cities, including Washington, where at least a dozen people died. Two months later, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The country reeled in shock, horror, and disbelief.
In March of 2020, America was locked down due to COVID. We lost many of our unalienable rights, especially those of the first amendment. That summer, Antifa and Black Lives Matter looted and torched the entire country.
America was set ablaze, but the Insurrection Act was never used. There were no Mayors like Richard J. Daley.
Communism isn’t on its way, it’s already here.
Klaus Schwab wants to “reflect, reimagine and reset our world.”
Yes, a reset to totalitarian control. The world population and all its resources will be run by governments empowered to “fairly” distribute goods and services to the people.
Food production is the number one target of control by the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. The key to genocide is food control and a totalitarian slave system.
As Americans, we must make Schwab’s “rare but narrow window” an impossibility.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Kelleigh Nelsonhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngKelleigh Nelson2022-07-18 07:46:182022-07-18 07:46:18The Global Food System and Totalitarian Control
“It is not from 1947 or 1967 that the relentless aggression against Israel by the Arab and Muslim world and the so-called Palestinians began. To fully understand its origins, we must go back to the early years of the 20th century.”
It was oh so predictable that Joe Biden’s disastrous visit to first Israel and then to Saudi Arabia would not augur well for peace but exacerbate the situation by continuing to unearth the rotting corpse of the failed Two-State-Solution and encourage false Palestinian sovereignty over the eastern half of Israel’s ancient and ancestral 3,000 years old Jewish capital: Jerusalem.
The Biden regime wishes to perpetuate the so-called status quo in the city by giving another $100 million dollars of American taxpayer money to the Palestinian Authority, the terrorist organization, even as it incites more violence and are accessories to the killing of Jewish men, women and children on an almost daily basis. This is a hideous stain upon America for those U.S. dollars provide the Palestinian Arb terror boss, Mahmoud Abbas, with the means to continue his murderous policy known as “Pay to Slay.” All the murderous terrorists whom Abbas sends to kill Israeli civilians are paid a generous pension if they are jailed by Israel. If they are killed while in the execution of their barbarous campaign of carnage, then the money goes to their families. This is how American taxpayer money is being used.
The policies of Pres. Biden and his leftovers from the Obama regime are intended to extend and exacerbate the conflict by the Arabs against Jews. There are several groups that support these policies: Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, whose only purpose for continued existence is to continue the destruction of the reborn Jewish state; the American left, who want the USA and Israel to cease as entities in order to accomplish their leftist/globalist agenda; the old/new communist alliance of Russia/China, who intend to take over and colonize the world and the Israel/Arab conflict helps them in this regard; the antisemites throughout the world who hate the Jews and have always done so.
BUT THE REAL QUESTION IS WHY PRES. BIDEN AND OTHERS SUPPORT THE GOALS OF THESE ASSORTED MISCREANTS.
In the 11th hour and 59th minute of his miserable term in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama struck his knife deep into the heart of the embattled Jewish state.
With the appalling anti-Israel passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, engineered by President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry on December 23, 2016, the blame for the Israel-Palestinian conflict was falsely imparted upon the easy target: Israel and the so-called “settlements.”
There were no “settlements” before the June 1967 Six-Day War, when the Jewish state survived yet another Arab war of genocide launched against it and freed the embattled nation from the existing and mere 1947 nine to fifteen mile-wide armistice lines which Israel’s earlier minister of foreign affairs, Abba Eban, appropriately called the Auschwitz lines. These were the lines that existed after the fledgling Israeli forces had pushed back the invading Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, Iraqi, and Lebanese armies.
It is not from 1947 or 1967 that the relentless aggression against Israel by the Arab and Muslim world or the so-called Palestinians began. To fully understand its origins, we must go back to the early years of the 20th century.
In 1920, Great Britain was given the responsibility by the League of Nations to oversee the Palestine Mandate after the ending of the 400-year-old Ottoman Turkish Empire’s occupation of much of the Middle East. Britain was to uphold the League’s express intention of reconstituting within the Mandatory territory a reborn Jewish national home.
The League of Nations created several articles in line with the original intent of the Balfour Declaration of November 29, 1917. At the last minute, however, a new article was introduced by the British Colonial Office: Article 25.
It became apparent that its inclusion directly enabled Great Britain in 1921-22 to tear away all the vast Mandatory territory east of the river Jordan and give it away to the Arab Hashemite tribe: The territory to become Trans-Jordan, led by the emir Abdullah.
British officials claimed that the gift of Mandatory Palestine east of the Jordan River was in gratitude to the Hashemites for their contribution in helping defeat the Turks. However, T.S. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) described in derisory terms the Hashemite role as “a side show of a side show.”
This was the first partition of the non-state geographical territory known as Palestine and the first two-state solution. It created a new Arab entity some 100 years ago called Trans-Jordan, covering some 35,000 square miles, or nearly four fifths of the erstwhile Palestine Mandate. Immediately, Jewish residence in this new Arab territory was forbidden in an act of Islamic apartheid, and it is thus historically correct to state that Jordan is Palestine. Note too that Jordan’s population is comprised of well over 75% of Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
In 1923, the British and French colonial powers also divided up the northern part of the Palestine Mandate. Britain stripped away the Golan Heights (with its ancient Biblical Jewish roots) and gave it to French-occupied Syria.
The Balfour Declaration issued by Lord Balfour, British foreign secretary, never envisaged that the Jordan River would be the eastern boundary of the reconstituted Jewish homeland.
As early as September 19, 1919, the London Times newspaper had thundered in an editorial: “The Jordan will not do as the eastern frontier of Palestine … Palestine must have a good military frontier east of the river Jordan … Our duty as Mandatory is to make Jewish Palestine not a struggling state but one that is capable of vigorous and independent life.”
During its administration of the remaining Palestine Mandate’s tiny territory, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, (a mere forty miles in width) Britain severely restricted Jewish immigration and purchases of land while turning a blind eye to massive illegal Arab immigration into the territory from neighboring stagnant Arab territories. This had been Britain’s policy since it was given the Mandate from 1921/22 up until 1947 and Israel’s subsequent independence in 1948.
Britain’s sorry record of appeasement of the Arabs, at the expense of Jewish destiny in the remaining tiny territory, culminated in the infamous 1939 White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration to a total of just 75,000 souls over the next five years. This draconian policy, coming as it did on the eve of the outbreak of World War 2 and the Holocaust, was a deathblow to millions of Jews attempting to flee extermination by Nazi Germany.
Britain’s mismanagement of the Mandate finally led to the United Nations’ Partition Plan of 1947. The Jewish Agency reluctantly accepted this additional dismemberment of what was left to them of the promised Jewish national home in Mandatory Palestine.
They did this to provide a refuge for the surviving Jewish remnants of the Holocaust and for the over 800,000 Jewish refugees being driven out of their homes throughout the Arab world. In contrast, the Arab regimes rejected the Partition Plan. Then, as now, they worked against the existence of an independent Jewish state. Only since President Trump’s espousal of the Abraham Accords have several Arab states embraced diplomatic relations with Israel in addition to Egypt and Jordan.
However, under the new Biden-Harris regime, the Accords may not survive the Democrat/Socialist Administration’s evolving policies and sadly these new ‘Arab friends’ in the Gulf had falsely blamed Israel for the Arab rioting in Israel’s capital city, Jerusalem, perpetrated at the urging of Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the terrorist Palestinian Authority aided by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Both these Gaza based terrorist gangs had launched over 600 deadly missiles into Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ashkelon, and the little town of S’derot, which alone has endured over 10,000 missiles from Hamas occupied Gaza during the last ten years.
Israel was officially reborn as a sovereign nation in 1948, and its 600,000 Jews fought to survive the massive onslaught by the combined Arab armies, which intended to wipe out the Jewish state.
In 1948, Trans-Jordan, now renamed the Kingdom of Jordan, joined the other Arab nations in invading the Jewish state. Its British mercenary led Arab Legion drove out the Jewish inhabitants from east Jerusalem, the Jewish Quarter, and the Old City, annexing the Biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria and renaming it the ‘West Bank.’ Only Britain and Pakistan recognized that illegal annexation.
Nineteen years later, the Arab states declared again their imminent intention to destroy Israel. In the June 1967 Six-Day War, Israel liberated Jewish and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria from Jordan in a defensive war.
Israel foolishly offered to give away newly liberated Judea and Samaria and the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, to the Hashemite regime in Jordan in the hope that a full and lasting peace could be established. But the Arab League, meeting in Khartoum in August 1967, delivered their notorious three nos: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.
It is within the narrow territory remaining for the Jewish state, which includes the more than 3,500-year-old ancestral and Biblical Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria, that much of the world now demands the establishment of a fraudulent Arab state to be called Palestine – a state that has never existed before in all recorded history.
Here then would be the next so-called two-state solution, which would dismember what is left of Israel and drive hundreds of thousands of Jewish residents from their homes, villages, and farms – what a hostile world calls by its pejorative description, “settlements.” Why? Because just as in Jordan, Jews will not be permitted to live within Muslim claimed Arab territory, while Muslim Arabs can remain free to live within Israel.
The searing tragedy is that a second two-state solution may presage for the Jewish people yet another Final Solution – the German Nazi regime’s euphemism for the Holocaust. One wonders if any of this history is at all known to Pres. Biden or to the malefactors who control him. I think not!
The fact is that this is not a dispute over borders. This is a religious war, and the Muslim Arabs, so long as the overwhelming majority remain Muslim, will never accept the existence of a non-Muslim state in territory previously conquered by them in the name of Allah. That apples also to all the lands in southern Europe from Spain to the Balkans which over time have been occupied by Islam.
Nearly 100 years ago, the original two-state solution was enacted in infamy. Certainly, the Obama-Biden administration, consumed as it was by Obama’s anti-Israel animus, was equally infamous during its baleful two terms in office. Now, it is increasingly obvious, the present Biden-Harris regime will act towards embattled Israel in a similar policy of betrayal and ignominy. In the last few days, we have just seen the proof.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Victor Sharpehttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngVictor Sharpe2022-07-18 07:26:192022-07-19 12:34:17A Look Back at the First Disastrous ‘Two-State Solution’
An Israeli-American scholar shows how conservatism went astray after the Reagan-Thatcher era.
The Israeli academic and Biblical scholar Yoram Hazony has acquired a considerable reputation as one of the intellectual leaders of the nascent “National Conservatism” movement.
As chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, he has played a key role in organising NatCon conferences which have attracted various right-leaning figures (including populist nationalists and more traditionalist social conservatives) who are united in their dissatisfaction with the main centre-right parties.
Hazony’s new book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, provides a thorough and thought-provoking overview of what he sees as the failings of the right-of-centre political establishment in the post-war era.
Setting out his stall early on, Hazony claims that in this time period Enlightenment liberalism became the new framework in which political life was conducted.
He further argues that this “liberal democracy” – which went hand-in-hand with a social revolution that weakened national, religious and familial ties — represented a new system divorced from the classic Anglo-American political tradition.
Cultural upheavals and the rise of the “woke” movements (which Hazony views as an updated variant of Marxism) have put the kibosh on talk of an “end of history,” and this means that conservatives must reconsider what they believe in.
Hazony defines political conservatism as “a political standpoint that regards the recovery, restoration, elaboration and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time,” while adding that the crucial distinction between it and either liberalism or Marxism is that conservatisms is not “a universal theory, which claims to prescribe the true politics for every nation, at every time and place in history.”
His key criticisms of political conservatives in recent decades relates to their failure to conserve the ideas and institutions on which modern Britain and America were built, and he also takes aim at their alleged confusion as to the difference between conservatism and Enlightenment (or “classical”) liberalism.
Structurally, the book is divided into four parts: history, philosophy, current affairs and personal – with this final section dealing how Hazony and his wife came out of broken homes to rediscover the religious traditions of Orthodox Judaism.
Having grown up in the United States, Hazony focuses strongly on the historical development of that country’s politics, which owe much to the parliamentary tradition which had developed in Britain centuries before the American colonists declared independence.
Included among what the author sees as the key principles of Anglo-American conservatism are various historical traditions, the nation state, the importance of religion, limitations on executive power and individual freedoms.
Yet there was never uniformity among key historical figures about many of these matters. One of the most interesting elements of Hazony’s account is his examination of the sharp divisions between the Federalists and Jeffersonians in the republic’s early days.
Federalists took a conservative line on a range of issues, including attitudes towards the French Revolution, immigration and the role of religion in society.
While the Federalist Party eventually declined, their insistence on the need for a strong, unified and coherent nation was to have a lasting impact, just as Thomas Jefferson’s animosity towards religion would lead to the creation of a “wall of separation between church and state” which would harden considerably in the 20th century.
Yoram Hazony first came to the attention of many readers after writing The Virtue of Nationalism, and the importance of the national community is a recurring theme here, going back to when the 15th century theorist Sir John Fortescue recognised that though the English constitutional system was a superior model, it would probably not serve other nations so well.
As the father of philosophical conservatism, Edmund Burke’s description of England’s constitution as being born of the nation’s long experience (“It is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time”) is a quote particularly well-chosen.
Less wise is the author’s attempt to portray the brutal and radically unconservative Tudor reformation as “the first modern movement for national independence,” while his description of Elizabeth I “tolerating Catholics … as long as they remained discreet in their practices” suggests that his knowledge of 16th century English history is rather limited.
Hazony is more convincing when he sticks to more familiar ground. One of the key weaknesses which he detects within political liberalism is its blindness to the importance of the nation state, and he sees this limitation as explaining why Western elites cannot recognise why foreign interventionism has failed so miserably in recent times.
In the same way that liberals seek to impose what they see as universalist norms abroad, they are also prone to making needless and often counterproductive changes at home: “[F]oolish rulers are moved by ideology and arrogance, or by an eagerness to make a name for themselves that will be remembered in place of those who came before them, to create everything they touch anew.”
Surveying the recent history of Anglo-American conservatism and the obvious difficulties since the Reagan/Thatcher era, Hazony lays much of the blame on the policy of “fusionism,” whereby American conservatives such as William F. Buckley forged a strong alliance with right liberals and libertarians to combat Communism abroad and economic statism at home. As well as contributing to confusion as to the difference between conservatism and liberalism, Hazony maintains that this led to a “dogmatic rejection of government” while also preventing people from recognising the need for restraints on individual freedoms.
Tradition – which for Hazony is heavily rooted in religion and Scripture – represents the unifying strand which ties together so much of his argument, just as it unifies whole societies. “[T]he enterprise of seeking truth is not one that the individual pursues by his own powers alone. Tradition is the instrument by means of which human societies pursue truth over time,” he observes.
A religious reader (Hazony is consistent in his attitude towards church-state relations, endorsing a strong role for Christianity in the public life of majority Christian societies) will likely agree with his denunciation of key US Supreme Court decisions in the mid-20th century which banned organised prayer and Bible reading in America’s public schools, and eased access to abortion and pornography.
Though he is surely correct about the importance of a religious underpinning in ensuring a stable society, at times he appears to overstate the importance of government action in driving a process of secularisation. After all, the de-Christianisation of the public square has tended to occur as a result of society’s widespread secularisation, not as a prelude to it.
Israel is that rare example of a country which has grown more religious recently, but the unique circumstances of its difficult existence foster this closer link between the spiritual and national identities of Jewish Israelis, just as the fecundity of the devout minority tilts the scale in their favour.
It is doubtful that many lessons from Hazony’s homeland can be applied to other societies, but he does a good job in laying out a basic and workable manifesto for “conservative democracy,” including: a clearer emphasis on national identity; greater openness to religion in public life; a stronger role for parents in education; more scepticism about the concentration of power among big business; immigration policies focused on national cohesion; and a non-interventionist foreign policy.
Countries such as Poland and Hungary already have democratically-elected governments who more or less subscribe to this, and nations like Italy have popular parties of a similar mindset.
Britain’s Tory Party remains more socially liberal, but it has increasingly emphasised the importance of sovereignty and secure borders; while in the United States, large sections of the Republican Party (like Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis or the Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance) would happily identify with Hazony’s vision.
Clearly, his fellow travellers are growing in strength. For those pondering where this process may lead, Conservatism: A Rediscovery would be an excellent place to begin.
James Bradshaw works for an international consulting firm based in Dublin, and has a background in journalism and public policy. Outside of work, he writes for a number of publications, on topics including… More by James Bradshaw
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2022-07-18 06:54:192022-07-18 06:59:41A Fresh Theoretical Foundation for Modern Conservatism
The concept of privacy lies mostly in tatters anyway …
With the June 24 Dobbs decision overturning of Roe v. Wade and Casey, the US Supreme Court withdrew the nationwide blockade against the intention of many states to ban abortion to a greater or lesser degree. Depending on where you live, abortion may already be illegal or will shortly become so.
Texas, where I live, is one of the more aggressive states, having effectively banned most abortions since last fall by authorizing private citizens to sue anyone who assists in an abortion. To the best of my knowledge, the penalties for performing abortion focus mainly on the providers. But any woman who wants an abortion now faces a new forest of legal complications, including the possibility that law enforcement agencies may obtain extremely private information such as data from period apps in building a case that an abortion was performed.
In a recent Vox online piece, Sara Morrison pointed out that although women concerned about keeping their possible pregnancy status private should probably get rid of their period apps, that is not the only way you can be spied on, although period-app companies have a rather poor record when it comes to data privacy anyway.
Most media companies have a boilerplate clause as part of that agreement everybody pretends to read (and nobody does), which allows them to share information with legally constituted law enforcement agencies that have a reason to obtain it. So even if a woman sent a private text message to her closest friend saying that she thought she was pregnant, and a state police investigation thought it was relevant in prosecuting an abortionist, they could legally obtain that message.
The concept of privacy lies mostly in tatters these days for anyone who spends any amount of time online, which is pretty much everybody. While the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees the right to be secure in one’s “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” it does allow searches (presumably including online ones) in cases where a crime is suspected and a warrant for the search can be justified.
What is so different today from the circumstances in 1792, when the Bill of Rights was enacted, is that all of us leave electronic trails that are in legal grey areas in many cases. Simply being on social media and using one’s mobile phone creates gobs of data that clever analysts with adequate resources and access to commercial databases by means of search warrants can use to create an incredibly intimate portrait, including one’s pregnancy status or attempts to obtain an abortion.
Morrison says the ultimate solution is better data-privacy laws. And she may be right. The problem with this is that the entire economic basis of social media relies on the violation of the kind of privacy that data privacy laws would protect. So unless the Big Tech giants figure out an entirely new revenue model, their heavy hands on the scale of justice will outweigh any desire on the part of the general public to be more private online.
This is not an easy column for me to write, because I am personally opposed to abortion. At the same time, I realize that trying to enact (or revoke) a law that creates a situation which is hugely unpopular among a large segment of the public leads to situations in which law either loses respect or unduly harsh measures are used to enforce it. Probably some of both will happen in the coming months as the nation readjusts to the new circumstances surrounding abortion.
Judging from the way Morrison wrote her article, she seemed to take the point of view of a woman who finds herself pregnant against her intention and wants to get an abortion, but lives in a state where abortion is now illegal. What are the options?
Over half of current abortions are achieved by means of medication, which means the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol taken to induce a spontaneous abortion. Many states are or will shortly take steps to make such medications illegal for use in abortion, and the natural first thought of many—to order them online—leaves one open to surveillance as explained above.
The next option would be to travel out of state to a place where abortions are still performed. But in a state like Texas, even helping someone with travel arrangements could be grounds for a lawsuit—remote grounds, maybe, but who wants to do something that leaves their friends liable to be sued? And everyone’s whereabouts are being tracked 24/7, or at least the whereabouts of your phone, unless you turn it off. So as things stand, there are really not many places to hide.
Far from solving the problem, the Dobbs decision has brought abortion into the spotlight of public consciousness and debate in a way that perhaps hasn’t been equaled since the original 1973 decision that legalized it by judicial fiat nationwide. The real problem, the one that lies deeper than online privacy, or legal decisions or codes, is a cultural one.
We live in a hypocritical culture which both promises untrammelled freedom and withholds from nearly everyone the means to realize that freedom, which is illusory in any case. The culture has convinced millions of women that pregnancy and childbirth is simply not an option compared to all the other treasures of the world, and if a woman becomes a mother without meaning to, she must correct the error even if it means the death of an innocent being.
This is a serious distortion of how the world is, and correcting it is going to take more than the passage or revocation of a few laws or judicial rulings. But if Dobbs and its fallout get us to thinking about these things, there is at least hope that the truth will eventually emerge. And it is only the truth that makes people truly free.
Karl D. Stephan received the B. S. in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1976. Following a year of graduate study at Cornell, he received the Master of Engineering degree in 1977… More by Karl D. Stephan
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2022-07-18 06:44:142022-07-18 06:44:47New Cause for Concern over Chemical Abortion and Data Privacy in the wake of Dobbs
Robert Royal: As happened after Soviet Communism unexpectedly fell, the fall of Roe will lead to serious conflicts. But our new freedom to speak the truth is now the foundation for great hopes.
Abortion “rights” were always a tissue of lies. A lie about the U.S. Constitution, to be sure, but before that the lie that “a woman has a right to control her own body.” Which no one denies, up to a point. That point is clearly defined by the sound principle that your right to swing your arms stops at the tip of my nose. There’s another living, human body (half the time a very young woman’s body) also involved in abortion – which admittedly complicates matters. But that body had to be lied into invisibility with talk of “clumps of cells” and “products of conception” before the other lies could become even remotely plausible.
Yet after fifty years of such lies, vigorously promoted by our dominant cultural and political institutions as simple, progressive truth (even though progressives say “truth” is, in other contexts, a kind of violence and hate), we never heard the fanciful claims that have begun to appear since the Dobbs decision – with more on the way.
Some of those claims might even be regarded as rather comic, if the stakes were less serious. For instance, Dobbs has even spurred some people into a kind of lying poetry. Take this blunt couplet, which was chanted by 2,000 people who marched in front of NYC’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral the weekend after Dobbs:
F*** the Church, f*** the State,
You can’t make us procreate.
This lie (that Dobbs or the churches are forcing anyone to do anything) is intimately connected, so to speak, to another lie: that the act that naturally makes babies is, willingly engaged in, not supposed to make babies.
Some pro-abortion voices, indirectly, admit as much. Take the new argument (click here for one among many other examples) that “women,” to use an indefinite term at the moment, who fear pregnancy in states with limits on abortion post-Dobbs may now consider turning lesbian. Or even forgoing sex altogether.
In America anno Domini 2022, anything is possible when it comes to sex. Still, this particular bit of “news” seems to serve a double purpose, like many of the new lies. It confirms the apostles of gender fluidity in their belief that one option, now that the Holy Writ of Roe has been debunked, is just to switch-hit, which maybe you were thinking about doing already anyway. But it also seems to be intended to induce second thoughts among pro-lifers: take away abortion and you’ll get even more gays, non-binaries, child-avoiding “birthing people.”
Even conceding the absurdity of the premise, how many people will actually face pressure to make such moves? There have been about 900,000 abortions annually in recent years, and the available figures show that at least two-thirds take place in the states with high abortion rates, like California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and Michigan. Among high-abortion-rate states, only Florida seems likely to change anything significantly.
And the lying hardly stops there. We’ve all just been treated to the horror show of the 10-year-old girl in Ohio who was raped and, it was said, had to travel to Indiana to get an abortion. (She actually didn’t need to, since Ohio’s abortion laws have a “medical emergency” exception for such cases.)
But there was something obviously fishy from the start when the doctor – a pro-abortion activist – who made this case national news announced that the girl was six weeks and three days “pregnant” and therefore just outside Ohio’s six-week limit on abortion. Most medical texts define pregnancy as beginning at “implantation,” i.e., when the fertilized egg actually attaches to the uterus, a process that can take from one to two weeks.
Many women have discovered when they give birth that the doctors were wildly off about the due date. So it beggars belief that, in the Ohio case, at such an early and uncertain stage, a doctor in another state could say, with high scientific accuracy, that a poor Ohio girl was in distress because she was only three days beyond the legal limit.
The Indiana doctor, to be charitable, may only have been engaging in misguided compassion to make a point. But to the uncharitable eye, this looks very much like a deliberate and politically motivated lie by a medical professional
We’ll hear many more of them as the Dobbs ruling plays out. The president of the American Medical Association, which expresses rock-solid certainty about affirming every LGBQT+ claim and even seems untroubled about pumping puberty blockers into children and performing surgery on them at their merest request, claims that post-Dobbs “confusion” is making many medical professionals “deny” or “delay” legitimate treatments out of fear of the law.
Given the AMA’s ideological track record, count me skeptical.
Doctors aren’t the only ones allegedly “confused.” Many people in other countries and the foreign press are, too. Somehow the message has gone out to the world that America has “banned” abortion. A few of the individual States may do something close to that. But as the case of the 10-year-old Hispanic girl indicates, even if you are very poor and from a marginalized minority group, it isn’t hard to get around State-level restrictions. Yet many people abroad, seeing the lies of our own public officials and media, reach the opposite conclusion.
So what is to be done?
As with any regime of lies, the first thing is not to let the liars have their lying way. It will take great courage and much preparation, steadiness about when it’s wise to speak and not, but above all conviction that, despite the passionate debates over Dobbs, truth is powerful. Which is why many institutions these days deny truth-tellers a platform.
As happened after Soviet Communism unexpectedly fell, the fall of Roe will, yes, lead to serious conflicts. But the main thing that’s happened – the disappearance of a murderous and mendacious tyranny – needs to be constantly kept in mind, because our new freedom to speak the truth is now the foundation for great hopes.
Reference the article below on Risk Protection Orders in the Lakeland Ledger. While I don’t subscribe to the Lakeland Ledger—this article was sent to me by a friend. I think it was published on July 15th, 2022. It illustrates several points we have been making about the unconstitutional Florida’s Risk Protection Order (RPO) or Red Flag Law codified within SB 7026, Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Act signed into law in June 2018 following MSDHS, school shootings in Parkland, FL.
See our points in BOLD letters below. As always, your comments are welcomed.
The deputy found the student, a senior, in a reading class on the afternoon of May 4. He asked the student to give him his backpack, and the student replied, “Why?”
When the 18-year-old student finally handed over the backpack, the deputy found another pack inside it that contained a Glock 42, a subcompact, semi-automatic pistol, loaded with four rounds, according to an arrest affidavit. The deputy also discovered two boxes of ammunition holding 43 rounds, the report said.
The student, Terrance Broome, made the unprompted statement, “I’m scared. Someone is trying to kill me,” according to the deputy’s report. He didn’t elaborate.
After the arrest of the student on multiple charges, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office decided that the circumstances fit the state’s guidelines for seeking a risk-protection order. Under a law passed in 2018 in response to the killing of 17 people at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, law-enforcement agencies can petition a court to have weapons temporarily removed from someone deemed to be a danger to themselves or others.
Two weeks after the incident, the request for a risk-protection order went before Judge Ellen Masters, the chief judge for the 10th Judicial Circuit, based in Bartow. Masters denied the petition, writing that the allegations the PCSO presented were “insufficient to establish by clear and convincing evidence that the Respondent poses a significant danger of committing personal injury to himself or others by having in his custody or control or by purchasing, possessing or receiving, a firearm or any ammunition”
The Sheriff’s Office has appealed the denial to Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal, which has administrative offices in Lakeland and holds hearings in Tampa.
The case illustrates the limits that law-enforcement agencies face in seizing weapons from citizens under the 2018 legislation, often described as a “red-flag law.” All petitions for risk-protection orders, or RPOs, must be approved by a judge, and judges don’t automatically concur with the arguments agencies make.
Not So – the power of the RPO is almost unlimited including ignoring Due Process. Shows how bias Gary White is.
The Polk County Sheriff’s Office reported filing for 984 RPOs since the law took effect in 2018, with 858 petitions granted. That means that 12.8% have been denied or dismissed.
This means that 126 of those respondents accused of being a threat had to go thru the nightmare of receiving a no notice ex parte seizure without Due Process and were later found not to be a threat.
It also means they most likely incurred the personal expense of hiring an attorney to represent them at the Hearing which took place 2 weeks post-seizure to counter the evidence presented by the PCSO attorney before the Judge. LE attorneys have a definite edge without private attorney’s present to defend the respondent. White is mistaken when he implies they get to attend the “compliance hearing”.
The accused person (“respondent”) also must go thru a bureaucratic procedure to be removed from state and federal criminal data bases and retrieve their property without any guarantee in the law that their property be returned in same condition found.
126 people having their property seized without Due Process is far too many law abiding citizens having to go thru this stressful process which implies one or more of the following conditions: e.g. those accusing them of being threats lied; a faulty investigation was performed and/or the reviewing judge rubber stamped these petitions.
The law allows 3rd degree misdemeanor charges to be filed against an accuser who deliberately lied about the respondent being a threat. To our knowledge this part of the laws has not been prosecuted.\
Nothing was stated in this article that other existing means to legally seize firearms and ammunition already were in place in FL law e.g. Baker Act, Marchman Act; Court Injunctions.
A spokesperson for Polk County Public Schools said confidentiality rules prevented the district from disclosing whether Broome had been expelled after the incident.
Broome did not appear for the court hearing, just as he had missed a previous compliance hearing after being released on May 5. John W. Lees, a lawyer for the Sheriff’s Office, sought a default order. Lees did not present any testimony, saying the petition was based on an arrest affidavit and witness statements. Masters, who has been a judge since 1999, was not persuaded of the need for an RPO.
“I don’t think I can enter this one, Mr. Lees, based on those facts, even though it’s a default, which is pretty rare,” Masters said during the hearing, according to a court transcript.
Lees added that the student had been arrested in January 2021, while a minor, on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon. That case is still pending.
Masters acknowledged that it was “a serious violation” for the student to bring a weapon to school but said she didn’t see grounds for issuing a risk-protection order.
“I cannot make a finding based on those facts that the Sheriff’s Office has presented clear and convincing evidence that the incident or the circumstances involving this respondent indicates that there is a significant danger of personal injury to the respondent or to some other person,” Masters said.
Agree with Judge Masters. This is exactly the kind of decisions which should be made. Clear and convincing evidence is very subjective and is used because the RPO is a civil and not a criminal law. However, evidence beyond a reasonable doubt should be the standard before these seizures occur.
The judge declined a request from The Ledger to discuss her decision.
Reached by phone, Broome ended the call without answering any questions.
He is charged with carrying a concealed firearm without a permit, possession of a firearm on school property and disrupting a school function, as well as possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia.
These charges are grounds for seizing firearms using a regular Court Arrest Order – why was an RPO even necessary.
The Sheriff’s Office filed a notice of appeal with the Second District Court of Appeals on May 26. Judd said it is the first time his office has appealed a denial of a risk-protection order.
Judd emphasized that he respects Masters but said he found the denial difficult to understand. He noted that Broome did not even appear in court to contest the request for an RPO.
“Certainly, we believe that an 18-year-old high school student with a fully loaded handgun, semi-automatic, and two boxes of ammunition is a danger to all of the students in the school,” Judd said. “So we were shocked to see that the RPO was denied.”
Judd said that in some other situations a student has made a direct threat against others when the Sheriff’s Office sought to have weapons removed. He acknowledged that Broome claimed to fear for his own safety but said personal protection did not require a loaded gun and two boxes of extra ammunition.
“I’m shocked because I don’t believe she nor any other judge would want it on her conscience if he would have taken that handgun and those two boxes of shells and shot up a school,” Judd said. “Fortunately for us, another student saw something and said something and we were able to intervene before a potential shooting occurred.”
One of main arguments against using Risk Protection Orders to seize firearms is they are based on what “might occur in the future” or in Sheriff Judd’s words above “if he had taken” based on “reasonable suspicion” and not what has actually occurred. This is not a good standard to be using to take away 2nd Amendment rights or any rights for that matter.
Further, there is no evidence that any school shooting which has occurred or one that might occur in the future would be prevented by use of Red Flag Laws. This certainly was not the case in any School Shootings of the recent past. Existing laws including the Baker Act, Marchman Act and Court Injunctions should be used instead.
School shootings are a societal problem based on grossly deteriorated morals; insensitivity to violence brought on by the entertainment industry; lack of mental health intervention and; in some cases, including the FL MSDHS and TX Uvalde school shootings, a failure of LE, school districts and school administrations to take actions to either prevent or at least marginalized these active shooting events by performing their jobs. .
Some lawmakers in Florida and elsewhere have criticized red-flag laws as an infringement on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, speaking privately to supporters at a Polk County restaurant in April, said he would have vetoed the law if he had been governor when it passed under his predecessor, fellow Republican Rick Scott.
Rick Scott was under pressure to sign this bill into law and knew he was leaving office soon. He should have declared a special session to give legislator’s more time other than the 3 weeks remaining in regular session to consider the Bill and all its consequences before signing it. Although outgoing FL Senate President RINO Wilton Simpson has taken credit for writing this bill the fact is the 48 pages covering the Risk Protection Order are almost an exact lift from the existing laws of Blue States like Oregon.
A caveat is that not all of this law is bad. We fully support the part establishing Sheriff Judd’s Sentinel or Guardian Program requiring a trained, armed LE officer or security guard in every school. We further support the follow on Law signed by Gov DeSantis, SB 7030 which authorized trained school officials/teachers to be armed as additional security. Unfortunately, few school districts including PCPS have availed themselves of this opportunity to even better protect our children.
Judd has repeatedly defended the use of RPOs as a way to prevent potential violence and said he doesn’t know what to expect from the Second District Court of Appeals.
“We need to find out what the courts believe is the parameters of the RPO,” Judd said. “And I think that will give either direction to us or it will give direction to the Circuit Court judge.”
We are hopeful the 2nd District Court of Appeals will rule in favor of Judge Master’s decision.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Royal A. Brown IIIhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRoyal A. Brown III2022-07-17 12:18:382022-07-18 07:08:46Responding to the Risk Protection Article in The Lakeland Ledger
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http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00John Droz, Jr.http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJohn Droz, Jr.2022-07-17 11:48:182022-07-18 07:33:40AWED MEDIA BALANCED NEWSLETTER: We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz blamed woke elected officials in Democrat-run cities for the abrupt closure of 16 stores.
By: Tristan Justice
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz placed blame on woke elected officials in Democrat-run cities for the abrupt closure of 16 stores located primarily on the West Coast.
On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that six locations each will shut down in Seattle and Los Angeles, in addition to two in Portland, Ore., one in Philadelphia, and one in Washington, D.C., by August. The company cited repeated safety incidents behind its decision.
Leaked footage of Schultz at an internal meeting, published by The Post Millennial’s Ari Hoffman on Thursday, revealed the coffee-chain executive blaming elected officials for an environment in which it’s too hostile to operate.
“In my view at the local, state, and federal level, these governments across the country and leaders, mayors, and governors and city councils have abdicated their responsibility in fighting crime and addressing mental illness,” said Schultz, who returned to the company as chief executive in April. “We are going to have to refine and transform and modernize many of the things we do to meet the needs of our customers in a very changing operating environment in which customer behavior is changing.”
In a letter to employees on Monday, Debbie Stroud and Denise Nelson, both Starbucks senior vice presidents, outlined reforms to address inner-city safety issues plaguing corporate stores.
“We read every incident report you file — it’s a lot,” they wrote. “We want you to know that creating a safe, welcoming, and kind third place is our top priority. Because simply put, we cannot serve as partners if we don’t first feel safe at work.”
In March, employees began to unionize after being confronted with a spike in homeless and violent people entering cafes after the company changed its bathroom policy. Following a woke controversy, Starbucks opened its restrooms to all members of the public, even people who weren’t buying anything. Schultz said in that June the four-year-old bathroom policy is now on the chopping block.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2022-07-17 08:03:142022-07-18 13:01:51Starbucks CEO Blames Woke Elected Officials For 16 Store Closures In Dangerous Cities
A One America News Network (OAN) report showed leaked audio from a 2016 phone call of then Vice President Joe Biden threatening former Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko with assassination should he cooperate with incoming President Donald Trump.
The phone call was recorded on November 16, 2016 – two weeks after Donald Trump’s electoral victory against Hillary Clinton.
The video report started going viral on social media Wednesday.
WATCH:
Leaked audio from days after the 2016 election, before Trump’s inauguration—Biden calls Poroshenko, then head of state of Ukraine, and threatens him with assassination if he cooperates with the incoming Trump administration. pic.twitter.com/j3dDzYU3gd
— Rodney Howard-Browne (@rhowardbrowne) July 16, 2022
“This is getting very, very close to what I don’t want to have happen. I don’t want Trump to get in a position where he thinks he’s about to buy onto a policy where the financial system is going to collapse and he’s going to be looked to pour more money into Ukraine,” Biden told Poroshenko.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2022-07-17 07:50:412022-07-17 08:59:10Leaked Audio: Biden Threatened Ex-Ukraine President Poroshenko With Assassination If He Cooperated With Trump
He doesn’t work for the voters, he works for the Left.
The new New York Times poll is bad news for Biden and bad for America.
It’s not just the 33% approval rating that’s truly worrying. Biden has hit a new polling low, but he hits new polling lows every week. 70% of Democrats still claim to approve of Biden, much as they would a diseased cat, the propped up corpse of Osama bin Laden, or small piece of dried spaghetti as long as it was a Democrat. But only a quarter of the party wants Biden to run again.
Biden’s few remaining brain cells aren’t worried about the 2024 election. They’re worried about the Democrat primaries that he barely survived last time around. And isn’t likely to this time.
64% of Democrats want someone, anyone, other than Biden to run in 2024.
As Biden’s poll numbers have slid down the slopes faster than a falling skier, he hasn’t moved to the center, but to the fringes. Like most of his party, the primary threat comes from the Left. And the more unpopular Biden becomes, the harder he pivots leftward to protect his primary options.
Even if they’re mostly imaginary.
That’s why the poor poll numbers are nothing to celebrate. Biden pretended to run from the center, but never governed from the center. And his growing unpopularity has only made his administration more extreme. Biden doesn’t need America and doesn’t have it anyway.
He needs the Left.
Leftists and Americans wanted opposite things from the Biden administration. Americans wanted stability, sensible policies and an end to the chaos. Leftists wanted endless spending on their agendas, identity politics and a perpetual state of crisis. Biden took office in a locked down city with a heavily military presence, appointed an attorney general bitter at having a Supreme Court seat taken from him and tasked with pursuing partisan grievances. Gargantuan spending bills aggravated the already unstable economy and pushed the country to the brink.
Everything else followed from that.
Biden locked his administration into a leftist worldview that alienated most of the country. The more the rest of the country shuns him, the harder he clings to the “one that brought” him.
Barack Obama.
Biden isn’t popular, but he never was. He first got to the White House riding leftist coattails. He certainly wasn’t elected based on his own popularity, but because the Left waged a scorched earth campaign. The only reason someone so corrupt and inept ever ended up in the White House was as a beneficiary of the outpouring of rabid leftist hatred against conservatives.
The 2020 strategy of lying low and letting the Left rage got him in the White House. And Biden knows that his only shot of getting back in is once again letting the Left do its worst.
Biden’s national poll numbers don’t matter because he didn’t win a popularity contest.
It doesn’t matter if he’s at 41% or 33% or 6%. Biden’s gambit will be once again lying low and letting the Left shape the battlefield. Faced with the likelihood of being a one-termer, his staffers are leftists who aren’t in it for the money or the career development, but are true believers in the “cause”. And he needs leftist donors who aren’t invested in personalities, but in ideology.
Much like Xi, Biden understands that the ‘party’ matters and the public doesn’t. And ‘party’ doesn’t mean the official one with a donkey on the box, but the ideological leftist movement that cares about the things he’s vigorously promoting from critical race theory to gender identity to modern monetary theory and all the theories that in their sum add up to Marxist theory.
Joe Biden likely doesn’t believe any of it, but just as Hunter didn’t have to read Mao’s Little Red Book to cut business deals in China, Biden doesn’t have to understand what he’s promoting.
Biden came into office after outsourcing much of his administration’s policy apparatus to the Bernie and Warren people. The “Big Guy” doesn’t care much about policy. Biden has been anti and pro-abortion, pro and anti-terrorism, and pro and anti-racism depending on the moment.
What Biden cares about is having the big job and whatever benefits flow from it. An egomaniac who kept on lying about his college grades while running for president, he accidentally landed in a position commensurate with his inflated self-image. And one that offers plenty of rewards.
Much as Hillary, another compulsive liar, wrecked her own party and then the country while trying to cling to power no one thought she should have, Biden, even in his diminished state, is not going to let go. In that, Biden is no different than the rest of a gerontocratic oligarchy, men and women like Speaker Pelosi and Senator Bernie Sanders, claiming to speak for the youth.
After generations in power, none of them are eager to let go and accept the inevitable. Especially since the inevitable is no longer as inevitable as it once used to be.
It’s inevitable to most that Biden won’t run and won’t win if he does. And in the normal state of things, that would be true. But we are in a post-polling world in which public opinion is no longer just a reaction to events, but can be directly shaped by manufacturing a series of crises.
And if Biden works hard enough for the Left, perhaps the Left will work to keep him in office.
Some race riots, lockdowns, and crises yet to be unleashed can do wonders for changing people’s perspective. It likely won’t work and may not even be tried, but Biden doesn’t have any other cards to play. And he never did. Biden can’t win elections on his own. So he won’t try.
The more unpopular he becomes, the less likely he is to even bother going through the motions.
Biden may sit in the White House (when he’s not vacationing in Delaware), but he doesn’t work for the American people. He works for the Left. And he may not remember much of anything else, but that is the one thing he has never forgotten. It’s the only reason why he’s here.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2022-07-17 07:41:442022-07-17 07:42:28The More Unpopular He Gets, the More Radical Biden Becomes
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” ― George Orwell
Jerone Davison is running for the U.S. Congress from the State of Arizona. We have seen many non-politicians run but none who have been so willing to take on the Democrats and some Republicans as this man.
His latest political ad goes to the core of what the Democrats really are—the nouveau Ku Klux Klan who want to keep blacks on their political plantations. Well Jerone is taking them on an issue near and dear to Constitutional Conservatives—The Second Amendment.
Jerone is a former Arizona State University student athlete and NFL player who travels the country sharing inspiration, passion, and faith. His unifying speeches full of truth, faith, and freedom of this country are memorable and moving.
He spent his childhood growing up in the deep south in the small town of Picayune, MS. It was there that he and his family fell upon rough times, and Jerone dropped out of high school. Sometime later, Jerone was able to enroll into Solano Community College in Northern California, in which he broke school rushing records as a player on the college’s football team. The once ‘drop-out’ became an inductee into the school’s Football Hall of Fame.
He accepted a full-ride scholarship from Arizona State University for football and was selected by the Los Angeles Rams. Frequently, as Jerone talks to youth, he retells his story and his example of how the American Dream can be achieved.
“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children, this, the last best hope for man on earth. Or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.” — The Gipper
— Jerone Davison for Congress #AZCD4 (@Jerone4Congress) July 14, 2022
“We've got to stand up and fight against these people, the Democrats, because I believe that the evil one, the wicked one, Satan has landed in their hearts and we got to fight before they take away our freedoms.” .@Jerone4Congresspic.twitter.com/JhwVOprl9d
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2022-07-17 06:55:312022-07-18 06:34:49The Most Powerful Political Ad from a Black Republican running for Congress in Arizona — A Must Watch!
On July 13th I testified to the House Ways and Means Committee on the Building Back Better Act. I explained how the bill’s funding proposals will double down on past failed policies, fuel inflation, and once again place low-income and minority households in harm’s way.
You can find the executive summary in this email and on the Housing Center website here and read the full testimony here.
Chairman Neal and Ranking Member Brady, and distinguished Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today.
Executive Summary:
The housing market is changing and the real culprit is a massive house price boom fueled by federal housing and monetary policies, which is increasingly crowding out lower-income Americans out of the housing market.
The current single-family housing boom, which began in 2012, was entirely foreseeable and was first noted by the AEI Housing Center in 2013. Since then, the housing market has been marked by too much demand chasing too little supply. Yet the policy response has been to boost demand even more: Federal housing agencies have loosened underwriting and the Fed has pursued zero interest rates and multiple rounds of quantitative easing, continuing even when the housing market began to appreciate at 16% in July 2021. In May 2022, home price gains were 17% and are only now expected to slow down as the Fed reverses these policies.
As a result, homeownership has gotten further out of reach for many lower-income and minority Americans. Consider that since 2012 wages have grown by 38%, but entry-level home prices have increased about 160%.[1]
This out-of-control price spiral means increased competition for fewer and fewer affordable homes. Potential entry-level buyers are increasingly pushed to the sidelines as they cannot afford to compete with more deep pocketed individuals, who experience the same competition, but higher up the price spectrum.
This is creating knock-off effects for people downstream. Left unable to buy a home, they remain in the rental pool, helping to drive up rents, which are now increasing at 16% nationwide. Many who cannot afford these rent hikes will be pushed into homelessness.
If that were not enough, inflation is now running between 8% and 9% and a Gallup survey from Jun. 1-20, 2022 finds that the Gallup Economic Confidence Index is now at its lowest level since 2009[2]
Inflation is a regressive tax and getting by – not to mention building savings to buy a home – is becoming increasingly difficult. Thus, misguided policies have severely hamstrung lower-income Americans, in particular minorities, who severely lag White Americans in homeownership and intergenerational wealth. If they can no longer reach the first rung of the housing ladder, how will they ever catch up?
The solutions are straightforward.
First, do not repeat the mistakes of the past.
Congress has undertaken 70 years of efforts involving many trillions of dollars in program expenditures, tax benefits, and government guaranteed financing. Yet neither the goal of making owner-occupied and rental homes affordable for low-income households, nor the goal of achieving generational wealth for low-income homeowners have been met.
The Build Back Better Act (BBBA) provides $184 billion in new housing related program expenditures, confirming that we have not learned from these failures.
As a cautionary tale, let’s examine the Housing and Community Development Act of 1968 and its aftermath. By 1975 its devastating inflationary impact and ineffectiveness were clear as these two books so forcefully document.
The first, “Cities Destroyed for Cash: The FHA Scandal at HUD”, was written by a reporter at the Detroit Free Press in 1973. As the title indicates, in the aftermath of the 1968 act, neighborhood after neighborhood was ruined as they were “FHA’d”. Many of these neighborhoods have yet to recover.
The second, “Housing Markets and Congressional Goals” (1975), was written by Ernest Fisher, one of the nation’s leading housing economists for 50 years. Fisher noted that the 1968 act and its goals “were unrealistic as a quota of production, and…were inappropriate and would probably prove as disappointing as had many of the programs presented to and adopted by Congress over the past two and a half decades.”
He observed:
[f]rom 1967 to 1971…the Boeckh index of cost of residential construction rose by nearly 33%, and the average sales price of new houses purchased with the assistance of FHA mortgage insurance rose by 28%, from $18,611 in 1967 to $23,835 in 1971.
[Expanding leverage] so as to make home purchase “possible for lower income prospective purchasers” may bring greater profits and wages to builders, building suppliers, and building labor rather than assisting lower-income households compete in the market.
There you have it: the 1968 act led to neighborhood ruination, scandal, housing inflation, and government profit seeking.
In my view, BBBA would have the same unrealistic and disappointing results.
Next, with regard to zoning, the federal government has again had a sordid past. The federal government back in 1921 led a national effort to implement exclusionary zoning and land use policies designed to make newly built homes too expensive for racial and ethnic groups to afford and we are still living with the consequences.
There is no denying that we need more market rate supply. But subsidies and easy credit are not the solutions. There is a growing consensus that to make housing more affordable we must increase supply, not ease credit or increase government subsidies or suppress interest rates. In order to stop the price spiral that is pricing lower-income Americans out of the housing market and driving up rents we need more market-rate supply. Let me add, zoning and land use policies are fundamentally a state and local issue and should be addressed at those levels. We are already seeing promise across the country, even in California, where the legislature has recently passed laws, which could meaningfully encourage new construction activity.
Next, federal policies to boost demand have been shown to be counterproductive. The Fed has belatedly realized that it needs to tighten the monetary spigot. But its policies have already done a lot of damage and will continue to haunt lower income Americans in the form of higher home prices, inflation, and rents for years to come.
The compounding effect of these changes will mean less resiliency for borrowers and neighborhoods, many of which are lower-income and minority, to withstand an economic stress event. With many economic dangers from rising interest rates, inflation, and sky-high home prices, lurking, regulators should do more to protect borrowers and taxpayers, rather than lowering lending standards. We have seen this movie before and we should not allow it to happen again.
What should be done beyond state and local actions to add to supply? Congress should set a policy goal of reliably building sustainable generational wealth for lower-income and minority Americans. Build intergenerational wealth and neighborhood and borrower resiliency by reducing the loan term to 20- or 15-years on high-risk loans (Low-Income First Time Homebuyers (LIFT Home)):[3]
The FHA should implement Low-Income First Time Homebuyers (LIFT Home) for low-income, first-time, first-generation home buyers.[4]
The GSEs should implement the Wealth Building Home Loan to reduce risk to taxpayers and to encourage borrowers to build equity.[5]
Congress should consider funding the Low-Income First-Time Homebuyer tax credit (LIFT Home).[6]S. Senator Mark R. Warner (D-VA) and colleagues in 2021 introduced the Low-Income First Time Homebuyers (LIFT) Act to establish a new program to help first-time, first-generation homebuyers – predominately Americans of color – build wealth much more rapidly. By offering new homeowners a 20-year mortgage for roughly the same monthly payment as a traditional 30-year loan, LIFT will allow them to grow equity twice as fast.[7]
Find the executive summary on the Housing Center website here and read the full testimony here.
[4] LIFT loans should be structured as an interest rate buy down on a 20-year loan made to first-generation homebuyers, rather than down payment assistance. The rate buy down, combined with a slightly lower rate due to the shorter term, along with a lower mortgage insurance cost, allows LIFT Home to have the same buying power as a 30-year loan. For the rate buy down, assistance should be provided as compensation to HUD/Rural Housing/Treasury for buying a below market yield Ginnie MBS.
[5] Applies the same concepts as LIFT Home, but runs through conventional loans and without federal subsidy.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Edward Pintohttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngEdward Pinto2022-07-17 05:51:482022-07-17 05:58:07Testimony to House Ways and Means: Government Policies are Responsible for the American Housing Crisis
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams, Founding Father
“Once faith dies, the death of hope follows hard on its heels.” ― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Author
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” — Karl Marx, founder of Communism, July 10, 2018
“If you fully obey the LORD your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country.” — Deuteronomy 28 : NIV.
We recently learned about the Barna Group which has been for 38 years surveying the populations of one-hundred cities across America and measuring how Godless, individuals without faith, religion or morals, their people are.
The Barna Group is a private, non-partisan, for-profit organization under the umbrella of the Issachar Companies.
Located in Ventura, California, Barna Group has been conducting and analyzing primary research to understand cultural trends related to values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors since 1984.
One of the areas studied is the loss of the populations of certain cities of their Christian beliefs which they call “Post-Christian” enclaves. We like to refer to the populations in these cities as part of a “Godless Enclave.”
Barna Group looks at these Post-Christian Metrics:
Do not believe in God
Identify as atheist or agnostic
Disagree that faith is important in their lives
Have not prayed to God (in the last week)
Have never made a commitment to Jesus
Disagree the Bible is accurate
Have not donated money to a church (in the last year)
Have not attended a Christian church (in the last 6 months)
Agree that Jesus committed sins
Do not feel a responsibility to “share their faith”
Have not read the Bible (in the last week)
Have not volunteered at church (in the last week)
Have not attended Sunday school (in the last week)
Have not attended religious small group (in the last week)
Bible engagement scale: low (have not read the Bible in the past week and disagree strongly or somewhat that the Bible is accurate)
Not Born Again
To qualify as Post-Christian “the citizens in the cities studied had to meet nine or more of the above factors. To be classified as ‘Highly post-Christian’ individuals must meet 13 or more of the factors (out of these 16 criteria).”
Florida’s Post-Christian Populated Cities
Here are the Florida cities rated “Post-Christian” with their ranking (out of 100 cities in America) and percent of Godlessness:
#14 Ft. Myers-Naples, FL (52%)
#44 Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, FL (45%)
#49 Orlando-Daytona Beach-Melbourne, FL (44%)
#56 West Palm Beach-Ft. Pierce, FL (42%)
#62 Tampa-St. Petersburg-Sarasota, FL (41%)
#85 Jacksonville, FL (34%)
#93 Mobile, AL-Pensacola-Ft. Walton Beach, FL (33%)
Religion and religious beliefs are based upon two critical social and cultural constructs:
A belief in a monotheistic and all powerful God.
A set of rules by which one must live their lives (i.e. The Ten Commandments contained in Exodus 20:3)
The Ten Commandments are the fundamental basis of Western Civilization’s laws and beliefs. With out these Commandments mankind can literally do anything to anyone without any ultimate punishment, such as certain people always getting away with murder and the glorification of criminals and criminality. In some cases for political gain.
For those who forget, here’s what is in Exodus 20:3:
“You shall have no other gods before me.
“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
“You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.Six days you shall labor and do all your work,but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns.For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
“Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
“You shall not murder.
“You shall not commit adultery.
“You shall not steal.
“You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
We believe that the most egregious sin is coveting for it leads to all other sins, which are:
Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Wrath
Envy
Pride
Godlessness and sin are opposite sides of the same coin called life.
Live the good life under God with faith, religion and morals and you will have blessing in this life and the promise of life everlasting in heaven.
If you live a godless life you will succumb to the seven deadly sins and be damned both in this life and for eternity.
BTW, isn’t it ironic that there are seven godless populations in Florida and seven deadly sins?
And thus ends the lesson on Florida’s Godless Enclaves.
In its nearly 40-year history, Barna Group has conducted more than two million interviews over the course of thousands of studies, and has become a go-to source for insights about faith and culture, leadership and vocation, and generations. Barna Group has carefully and strategically tracked the role of faith in America, developing one of the nation’s most comprehensive databases of spiritual indicators.
Barna Group has worked with thousands of business, nonprofit organizations and churches across the U.S. and around the world, including many protestant denominations, Catholic parishes, and faith leaders. Some of its notable clients have included the Salvation Army, World Vision, Compassion, the American Bible Society, and Habitat for Humanity. It has also served mainstream business and non-profit leaders at organizations like Sony, Walden Media, Easter Seals, CARE, the ONE Campaign, the Humane Society, the Gates Foundation, and NBC Universal.
The firm’s studies are frequently cited in sermons and talks, and its public opinion research is often quoted in major media outlets such as CNN, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, the New York Times, Dallas Morning News, and the Los Angeles Times.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2022-07-16 15:38:182022-08-16 08:27:05GODLESS ENCLAVES: The Most ‘Post-Christian’ Populated Cities in Florida
