New Book Offers Return to a Conservative Future

“Many can now see that the nations of the West are hurtling toward the abyss,” writes American-Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony in his recent 400-page magnum opusConservatism: A Rediscovery. Herein he provides a tour de force review of Anglo-American conservative political thought, from fifteenth-century England to the modern West, and draws lessons for why increasingly fragmented free societies must abandon failed “Enlightenment liberalism.”

At home and abroad, Hazony surveys the Enlightenment’s political wreckage. Domestically, a “dogmatic belief in the individual’s freedom has moved liberals to destigmatize—and, eventually, to actively legitimize—sexual license, narcotics, and pornography, as well as abortion, easy divorce, and out-of-marriage births.” Correspondingly, the “family has been broken and fertility ruined in nearly every Western country.” In foreign affairs, it was “just this kind of rationalism that brought America and other Western countries into the last generation of costly and unsuccessful wars seeking to bring Enlightenment liberalism to the Balkans, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.”

The antidote for Hazony comes in a “revived nationalist conservatism” that has appeared in recent years in places such as America, Britain, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and Italy. This movement “is rightly called a ‘nationalist’ conservatism, since it seeks to return the national interest, or the common good of the nation, to the center of political discourse,” he writes. By contrast, the “liberal paradigm is blind to the nation” and sees “only individuals and the state that rules over them.”

“Conservative democracy,” as Hazony terms it, or the “Anglo-American tradition is rooted in the ideal of a free and just national state, whose origin is in the Hebrew Bible.” This nation arises “out of diverse tribes, its unity anchored in a common traditional language, law, and religion,” he notes. “Conservative democracy regards the traditional family and congregation as the most basic institutions necessary for the conduct of civilized life,” he adds. “At the same time, the state offers toleration to religious and social views that do not endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole.”

In contrast to the seventh-century English political philosopher John Locke, the “decisive figure in the liberal tradition,” Hazony praises the eighteenth-century British Parliamentarian Edmund Burke. Empiricists including Burke rejected “Locke’s axioms” that “one need only consult reason to arrive at the one form of government that is everywhere the best, for all mankind,” Hazony notes. The “only realistic prospect for advancement in politics and morals is by means of an empirical method, which requires a course of trial and error over centuries,” as exemplified by Anglo-American constitutional history.

Hazony elaborates that “there are certainly principles of human nature that are true of all men, and therefore natural laws that prescribe what is good for every human society.” Yet these “are the subject of unending controversy” due to the “great variety of human experience, and the weakness of the operations of the human mind that are used to generalize from this experience,” he adds. In actuality, the “way people think and the things they believe are largely the product of the particular culture in which they were raised,” not pure reason.

Hazony juxtaposes the French Revolution with the “Second American Revolution” following the ratification of the United States Constitution, both in 1789. Following views developed by Locke and others such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French Revolution unleashed “its universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and subsequent terror for those who would not listen to reason,” Hazony observes. Meanwhile, after the failed Articles of Confederation, the United States Constitution, “ended a decade of shocking disorder by restoring the familiar forms of the national English constitution.”

At Philadelphia’s 1787 constitutional “convention dominated by the conservative party,” of the “initiators and the most consequential participants, most were longtime nationalists and later Federalists” such as George Washington, Hazony notes. “The Federalist Party was from the start the party of American nationalist conservatism,” he adds, whose legacy, including opposition to slavery, would continue in the later “American Whig party.” This “name strikingly intended to invoke the Anglo-American conservative tradition and the ideas of Edmund Burke,” ideas that later laid the basis for the emergence of the Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln.

This concrete political history means underlines for Hazony that “[n]either America nor Britain has ever been a ‘creedal nation,’ defined primarily by an abstract formula as found, for example, in the American Declaration of Independence.” Beginning with the Federalists, national conservatives therefore believed that the “adoption of immigrant communities into a new nation can only be successful if the immigrants are sufficiently weak, and therefore willing to assimilate,” Hazony notes. Belying mantras that diversity is strength, he observes that the

relationship between cohesion and tyranny is actually the reverse of what is commonly supposed. Where a nation, tribe, or family is cohesive, it may be ruled with a light hand, and a greater degree of freedom can be entrusted to its constituent members.

Enlightenment rationalism has unleashed a “perpetual cultural revolution,” Hazony notes. As he explains, “since liberalism constantly inculcates an aversion to tradition, it is unstable and unsustainable. For this reason, it is easily overthrown by Marxists and others claiming that their own reasoning is superior to that of any liberal.” Accordingly, merely thirty years after the Cold War’s end, an “updated Marxism—one that has taken the oppressed to be people of color and LGBTQ rather than the working class,” has conquered leading American institutions.

A major engine of American social upheaval has been the United States Supreme Court since its 1947 Everson v. Board of Education decision, which falsely proclaimed a “separation between church and state,” Hazony writes. He ironically notes that Washington, America’s first president, and his successor, John Adams, “appointed only committed Federalists to the Supreme Court” such as John Marshall, and thereby further strengthened national union. They never “imagined the circumstances that most Western nations face today, in which jurists use the national Supreme Court to impose what is in effect a new constitution—one that is post-national and hostile to Christianity.”

Changing America’s judicial direction is thus a key concern for Hazony in his drive to restore faith and family to societal prominence in America as part of a wider national renewal. His analysis of American judicial history is just one of the many fascinating facets of this richly detailed, insightful book.  “Conservatism begins at home” with conservative mores, Hazony pithily concludes his tome, which would be a welcome addition to any curious home.

AUTHOR

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden DOJ asks judge to go easy on Leftist terrorists who threw Molotov cocktail into police car

They were facing 30 years in prison. They’ll get less than two. Surprised? Don’t be. If Mattis and Rahman had been standing at the Capitol on January 6, they would be facing much longer sentences. But they’re on the side of the elites. So the other justice system in America today comes into play.

“How the Left Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Domestic Terrorism,” Washington Free Beacon, June 7, 2022:

On the cusp of nonstop, around-the-clock (primetime!) coverage of the Jan. 6 committee hearings, a couple of domestic terrorists are actually getting their day in court, and it is informative to see how Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is handling their prosecution.

Recall Garland’s breathless declaration, during his confirmation hearings, that “150 years after the Department’s founding, battling extremist attacks on our democratic institutions also remains central to its mission.”

Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman were arrested in the “mostly peaceful” protests following George Floyd’s murder. The two lawyers handed out Molotov cocktails to the crowd, and Rahman tossed one into a police car before fleeing the scene in Mattis’s van. They reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors in October 2020 that wiped out six of the seven charges against them. Those prosecutors, nonetheless, sought a maximum 10-year sentence and argued that the incident qualified for a so-called terrorism enhancement that would turbocharge sentencing—a determination with which the U.S. Probation Office concurred.

Ginning herself up to distribute explosives to the crowd, Rahman gave a video interview in which she declared, “This shit won’t ever stop until we fuckin’ take it all down,” adding that “the only way [the police] hear us is through violence.”

Then, Garland and the U.S. attorney for New York’s Eastern District, Breon Peace, who’s handling the prosecution, took office, and you won’t believe what happened next!

In mid-May, the same career DOJ prosecutors who argued for that 10-year sentence were back in court withdrawing their plea deal and entering a new one that allowed the defendants to cop to the lesser charge of conspiracy. It tosses out the terrorism enhancement entirely.

The new charge carries a five-year maximum sentence, but the prosecutors are urging the judge to go below that, asking for just 18 to 24 months on account of the “history and personal characteristics of the defendants” and the “aberrational nature of the defendants’ conduct.”…

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Why Do People Become Communists, and Why Do They Stick With It?

So if there is no rational case for communism as such, why do people go for this stuff?


For as long as I can remember, I’ve puzzled about why people become communists. I have no doubt about why someone would stop being one. After all, we have a century of evidence of the murder, famine, and general destruction caused by the idea. Ignoring all this takes a special kind of willful blindness to reality.

Even the theory of communism itself is a complete mess. There is really no such thing as common ownership of goods that are obviously scarce in the real world. There must be some solution to the problem of scarcity beyond just wishing reality away. Perhaps ownership and trade? Slogans and dreams are hardly a suitable substitute for a workable program.

But how communism would work in practice is not something they want to talk about. They just imagined that some magical Hegelian shift would take place in the course of history that would work it all out.

So if there is no rational case for communism as such, why do people go for this stuff?

The Red Century

The New York Times has been exploring that issue in a series of remarkable reflections that they have labelled Red Century. I can’t get enough, even the ones that are written by people who are—how shall I say?—suspiciously sympathetic to communism as a cause.

The most recent installment is written by Vivian Gornick. She reflects on how her childhood world was dominated by communists.

The sociology of the progressive world was complex. At its center were full-time organizers for the Communist Party, at the periphery left-wing sympathizers, and at various points in between everything from rank-and-file party card holders to respected fellow travelers….

When these people sat down to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them; above all, History sat down with them. They spoke and thought within a context that lifted them out of the nameless, faceless obscurity into which they had been born, and gave them the conviction that they had rights as well as obligations. They were not simply the disinherited of the earth, they were proletarians with a founding myth of their own (the Russian Revolution) and a civilizing worldview (Marxism).

While it is true that thousands of people joined the Communist Party in those years because they were members of the hardscrabble working class (garment district Jews, West Virginia miners, California fruit pickers), it was even truer that many more thousands in the educated middle class (teachers, scientists, writers) joined because for them, too, the party was possessed of a moral authority that lent shape and substance, through its passion for structure and the eloquence of its rhetoric, to an urgent sense of social injustice….

The Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified. It was to this clarity of inner being that so many became not only attached, but addicted. No reward of life, no love nor fame nor wealth, could compete with the experience. It was this all-in-allness of world and self that, all too often, made of the Communists true believers who could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their faith.

Sounds fascinating, if bonkers (Marxism is hardly a “civilizing worldview”). It sounds less like an intellectual salon of ideas and more like a religious delusion. Those too can be well intentioned. The key here is a dogmatic ideology, which serves as a kind of substitute for religion. It has a vision of hell (workers and peasants exploited by private-capital wielding capitalist elite), a vision of heaven (a world of universal and equal prosperity and peace), and a means of getting from one to the other (revolution from below, as led by the vanguard of the proletariat).

Once you accept such an ideology, anything intellectual becomes possible. Nothing can shake you from it. Okay, that’s not entirely true. One thing can shake you of it: when the leader of the cult repudiates the thing you believe in most strongly.

Khrushchev’s Heresy

She was 20 years old in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev spoke to the Soviet Communist Party about the crimes of Stalin. Apparently the unrelenting reports of famine, persecution, and mass death, from the early years of Bolshevik rule – and even the revelation of the Hitler-Stalin pact – would have demoralized them earlier. But no:

The 20th Congress report brought with it political devastation for the organized left around the world. Within weeks of its publication, 30,000 people in this country quit the party, and within the year it was as it had been in its 1919 beginnings: a small sect on the American political map.

Amazing.

The Early Reds

And speaking of this small 1919 sect, I’m reminded of one of my favorite movies: Reds (1981). I could watch it another 20 times. It explores the lives of the American communists of the turn of the 20th century, their loves, longings, and aspirations. The focus is on fiery but deluded Jack Reed, but it includes portraits of a passionate Louise Bryant, the gentile Max Eastman, an edgy Eugene O’Neill, and the ever inspiring Emma Goldman.

These people weren’t the Progressives of the mainstream that history credits with having so much influence over policy in those days. These were the real deal: the Communists that were the source of national frenzy during the Red Scare of the 1920s.

The movie portrays them not as monsters but idealists. They were all very talented, artistic, mostly privileged in upbringing, and what drew them to communism was not bloodlust for genocide but some very high ideals.

They felt a passion for justice. They wanted to end war. They opposed exploitation. They longed for universal freedom and maximum civil liberty. They despised the entrenched hierarchies of the old order and hoped for a new society in which everyone had an equal chance.

All of that sounds reasonable until you get to the details. The communists had a curious understanding of each of these concepts. Freedom meant freedom from material want. Justice meant a planned distribution of goods. The end of war meant a new form of war against the capitalists who they believed created war. The hierarchies they wanted to be abolished were not just state-privileged nobles but also the meritocratic elites of industrial capitalism, and even small land owners, no matter how small the plot.

Why be a communist rather than just a solid liberal of the old school? In the way the movie portrays it, the problem was not so much in their goals but in their mistaken means. They hated the state as it existed but imagined that a new “dictatorship of the proletariat” could become a transition mechanism to usher in their classless society. That led them to cheer on the Bolshevik Revolution in its early stages, and work for the same thing to happen in the United States.

The Dream Dies

Watching their one-by-one demoralization is painful. Goldman sees the betrayal immediately. Reed becomes an apologist for genocide. Bryant forgets pretending to be political and believing in free love, marries Reed, and tends to his medical needs before his death. O’Neill just becomes a full-time cynic (and drunk). It took Max Eastman longer to lose the faith but he eventually became an anti-socialist and wrote for FEE.

The initial demoralization of the early American communists came in the 1920s. They came to realize that all the warning against this wicked ideology – having been written about for many centuries prior, even back to the ancient world – were true.

Eastman, for example, realized that he was seeking to liberate people by taking from them the three things people love most in life: their families, their religion, and their property. Instead of creating a new heaven on earth, they had become apologists for a killing machine.

Stunned and embarrassed, they moved on with life.

But the history didn’t end there. There were still more recruits being added to the ranks, generations of them. The same thing happened after 1989. Some people lost the faith, others decided that socialism needs yet another chance to strut its stuff.

It’s still going on today.

As for the Communist Party in America, most left-Progressives of the Antifa school regard the Party as an embarrassing sellout, wholly owned by the capitalist elite. And when we see their spokesmen appear on television every four years, they sound not unlike pundits we see on TV every night.

It would be nice if any article written about communism were purely retrospective. That, sadly, is not the case. There seem to be new brands of Marxian thought codified every few years, and still more versions of its Hegelian roots that take on ever more complex ideological iterations (the alt-right is an example).

Why do people become communists? Because human beings are capable of believing in all sorts of illusions, and we are capable of working long and hard to turn them into nightmares. Once we’ve invested the time and energy into something, however destructive, it can take a very long time to wake us up. It’s hard to think of a grander example of the sunk-cost fallacy.

AUTHOR

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is a former Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Psychologist Explains the Unhealthy Incentives Behind ‘Cancel Culture’

Jonathan Haidt, author of ‘The Righteous Mind,’ says one of the marks of an open and civil society is that individuals are not afraid to share opinions.


If there was a video documenting every second of my life, you can bet it would contain some pretty stupid comments I’ve made over the years. I would also probably be reminded of some opinions I no longer believe. If you’re being honest with yourself, yours likely would be equally cringe.

The things we have said in the past may not have been outrageously offensive, but we have all made comments, or held opinions, we later regret. We are, after all, inherently flawed creatures.

But imagine if one instance of poor judgment or one “fringe” opinion stuck with you forever. This is the problem our society is now facing with the prevalence of cancel culture.

In 2016, then-high school freshman Mimi Groves posted a video to Snapchat in which she used a racial slur. The video later circulated around her school, though it wasn’t met with controversy at the time.

Fellow classmate Jimmy Galligan hadn’t seen the footage until last year when the two were seniors—four years after it first made the rounds at Heritage High School. By this time, Groves had moved on to focus on her role as varsity cheer captain with big dreams of attending the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, a school known for its nationally ranked cheer squad.

For Groves, summer 2020 had been a time of celebration as she found out she had been accepted to the university’s cheer team. But her joy was short-lived when the death of George Floyd rightly outraged the nation, sparking a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Like many teens, Groves used her social media platforms to urge people to protest, donate, and sign petitions in support of ending police brutality. It was then that her unfortunate video came back to haunt her.

“You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word,” one commenter, unknown to the teen, posted on her Instagram.

That’s when her phone began ringing nonstop.

Galligan had held onto the video made four years earlier and had chosen to celebrate Groves’ admission to UT by blasting the footage to every major social media platform.

As the video began going viral, public outrage ensued, calling for the university to rescind her acceptance.

Capitulating to the mob, UT removed her from their cheer team, a decision that resulted in Groves withdrawing from the school because of what she perceived as pressure from the school’s admissions office.

Make no mistake, making racial slurs of any kind is demeaning and inappropriate behavior. But is one comment made four years prior enough to ruin the future of a teen who hadn’t even entered adulthood yet?

The court of public opinion said yes, without giving Groves any chance at redemption.

Groves’ story is just one of many.

Cancel culture has become more widespread over the last several years than anyone could have imagined. When I penned this article on the topic two years ago, I had no idea the problem would escalate to the level it has reached today.

But cancel culture isn’t reserved only for those who have made distasteful comments in the past.

Today, those espousing any opinion that goes against “woke” rhetoric are ridiculed online, fired from their jobs, and some are banned from using popular social media platforms altogether.

One University of North Carolina Wilmington professor, Mike Adams, even took his own life after tweets construed as offensive pushed him into early retirement after years of service to the institution.

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mindhas been an outspoken critic of the cancel culture phenomenon for some time.

“Part of a call-out culture is you get credit based on what someone else said if you ‘call it out,'” he said in a 2018 interview.

This virtue signaling, which is really just a means of proving to society how “good” and “moral” your views are, is only half of the equation, however. Cancel culture is also about personal destruction, which is obvious in Groves’ situation, since Galligan didn’t use this ammunition against her until the time was ripe for maximum harm.

“It(cancel culture) has reached a level of personal vindictiveness, where people go out of their way to find ways the things other people say could be construed as insensitive,” Haidt said.

Slurs and inappropriate comments aside, cancel culture has made people scared to share their opinions lest they be condemned for thinking “incorrectly” about any given issue.

We now live in an era where people are constantly looking over their shoulders, or computer screens, worried that whatever opinion they post might make them victims of cancel culture.

There is no opportunity to change one’s mind, nor is there room to defend opinions you genuinely believe. And this is a huge problem for any civil society.

Haidt spoke of the importance of protecting open dialogue so that we may live in a society filled with varying opinions from which to choose.

“One of the most important [aspects] is that people are not afraid to share their opinions – they’re not afraid that they’re going to be shamed socially for disagreeing with the dominant opinion,” Haidt said.

The odds are high that your opinions about certain issues will change over time. However, some may not, and you shouldn’t live in fear that your beliefs will be met with social condemnation and isolation.

We are no longer given the room to share our opinions today because we are no longer able to disagree with each other respectfully.

You’re not always going to agree with everything other people say — not your professors, your classmates, or your parents. In fact, you might even find that your own views change as you learn new things and grow as a person and adult.

But having the freedom to consider all opinions and decide what you genuinely believe is vital to the human experience and civil discourse.

There is a market of choice in all things, from what clothes you wear, products you buy, and what ideas you subscribe to.

When you go shopping, you might not like the first outfit you try. You might not even like the second or third. But trying on different looks, or opinions, allows you to think for yourself and figure out what it is you want, or believe.

To be truly open-minded, you must be able to consider all opinions, instead of condemning any thought contrary to your own. The free exchange of ideas pushes individuals to share unique ideas and allows for opinions to evolve.

Dissent is what makes democracy strong. Our Constitution has outlasted so many others because the Founders disagreed and debated with each other until they crafted a document that fostered “a more perfect union” than had ever been seen before. We would be wise not to forget the example they set.

Put simply, shaming others doesn’t work. It’s purely punitive, and self-aggrandizing. It also rarely changes a person’s mind and often further radicalizes their beliefs, widening the divide already growing in our country.

To foster a world where ideas can be freely expressed, Pacific Legal Foundation will be hosting an event this Friday featuring Haidt that will examine the many ways free speech serves as a central tenet of innovation, community, and civil society, and how we can preserve and protect this fundamental value that makes our society so extraordinary.

Without the ability to speak freely and consider all opinions, civil discourse cannot occur. In its absence, society as we know it will cease to exist and the divides between us will continue to grow.

AUTHOR

Brittany Hunter

Brittany is a writer for the Pacific Legal Foundation. She is a co-host of “The Way The World Works,” a Tuttle Twins podcast for families.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Pastors: It’s Your 501c3 or God! Who do you serve?

Who do you serve? Government? Or the Lord? It’s time to make that choice…


If Jesus were alive today, He would be unafraid to stand up to Marxist politicians and He would preach Godly politics from the pulpit! Pastors, ministers, and priests: you answer to God not government!

Please subscribe free to The Ledger Report by clicking here: www.GrahamLedger.com

©Graham Ledger. All rights reserved.

Lawsuit Forces Release of DOJ Memo Declining Criminal Prosecution for Ashli Babbitt’s Shooter

Shooter U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd Did Not Create a Police Report on Killing, Byrd Had Prior ‘Use of Force’ Issue 


(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced that it received productions of new records totaling 102 pages from the Department of Justice (DOJ) related to the shooting of January 6 protestor Ashli Babbitt that include a memo recommending “that the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia decline for criminal prosecution the fatal shooting of Ashli McEntee [Babbitt],” also noting that the shooter, U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd, “did not create a police report or documents” related to the shooting of Babbitt.

The documents also reveal that in the press release announcing the decision not to prosecute Byrd for the killing of Babbitt, the DOJ replaced the words “group” and “crowd” with the word “mob” several times. 

The unarmed Babbitt was shot and killed as she climbed through a broken interior window in the United States Capitol. She was a 14-year Air Force veteran. The identity of the shooter was kept secret by Congress, the Justice Department, and DC police for eight months until Byrd went public to try to defend his killing of Babbitt.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, the Civil Rights Division, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (all components of the Justice Department) failed to provide the records responsive to Judicial Watch’s April 14, 2021, and May 20, 2021, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for records related to the death of Babbitt (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:21-cv-02462))

The records contain the prosecution declination memorandum justifying the decision not to prosecute Byrd for the shooting death of Babbitt (nee McEntee) on January 6.

The “Overview and Recommendation” section reads as follows:

This memorandum recommends that the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia decline for criminal prosecution the fatal shooting of Ashli McEntee. 

[ *** ]

 This declination is based on a review of law enforcement and civilian eyewitness accounts, physical evidence, recorded radio communications, cell phone footage, MPD reports, forensic reports, and the autopsy report for Ms. McEntee. After a thorough review of the facts and circumstances in this case, there is insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Lieutenant Byrd violated Ms. McEntee’s civil rights by willfully using more force than was reasonably necessary, or was not acting in self-defense or the defense of others.

The memo details:

Once the demonstrators broke the glass, Lieutenant Byrd took up a tactical position to the immediate right of the barricaded entry doors, [Capitol Police Officer Reggie Tyson] took up a tactical position behind Lieutenant Byrd on the right side behind the third pillar and Sergeant McKenna took up a tactical position behind Officer Tyson and behind the fourth pillar on the right side of the Speakers Lobby.

[ *** ]

All three officers had their service pistols drawn, pointed them in the direction of the barricaded entry doors, and repeatedly instructed the ‘mob’ to get back. The ‘mob’ of demonstrators ignored the officers’ commands and continued to break the glass on the doors in their attempt to breach the Speakers Lobby. Suddenly, Ashli McEntee began to crawl through one of the doors where the glass was already broken out. As Ms. McEntee was climbing through the door, Lieutenant Byrd stepped forward from his tactical position towards Ms. McEntee and fired one round from his service pistol striking Ms. McEntee in her left shoulder, just below her clavicle. Ms. McEntee then fell back from the doorway and onto the floor.

Regarding possible closed-circuit television footage the memo notes “There are several USCP operated Closed-Circuit Television Video (CCTV) cameras inside of the United States Capitol Building. However, there were no CCTV cameras observed or located in the Speaker’s Lobby area.” 

In a section of the memo titled “USCP Lieutenant Michael Byrd,” the memo notes: “He [Byrd] did not create any police reports or documents relating to the incident, and did not provide an official statement regarding use of force” though he did provide a voluntary “debrief” and walk-through of the scene with his lawyer. A footnote details that: “During the debrief of Lieutenant Byrd, he did recall writing a few sentences on an evidence bag the evening of January 6, 2021, at the request of a crime scene officer. To date, the bag has not been located by USCP or MPD.”

The memo reports:

Lieutenant Byrd heard glass breaking and saw some of the items used to barricade the doors being pushed down. Lieutenant Byrd continued to tell the rioters to “geback, get back!” Lieutenant Byrd then saw a rioter with a backpack on start to climb through one of the broken glass doors. Lieutenant Byrd saw the rioter “as a threat,” so he stepped forward from his tacticaposition and fired onround at the rioter. Thrioter fell back out of the opening and Lieutenant Byrd eventually stepped back into the seated area of the Speaker’s Lobby before confirming to other USCP officers that arrived on the scene that he was the one that fired his service weapon.

The memo notes that security staffing on January 6 was less than half the usual amount due to COVID-19:

Lieutenant Byrd did agree to participate with this counsel, Mark Schamel, in a voluntary debrief and walk-through of the scene on January 29, 2021 … Due to COVID-19 and other issues, the normal staffing for a joint session was less than half of what Lieutenant Byrd usually has assigned to the House Chamber. Once he arrived that morning, he was informed that USCP operations had made the decision that the uniform officers needed to pick up riot gear.

In a section titled, “Use of Force History,” it is noted that, “Lieutenant Byrd had one prior use of force matter, that was originally sustained by USCP, but after Lt. Byrd appealed, he was found not guilty by the Disciplinary Review Board.”

In a section titled “Recommendation,” the memo details:

This matter does not constitute a prosecutable violation of the federal criminal civil rights statutes or the District of Columbia homicide statutes. To show a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 242, the applicable federal criminal civil rights statute, the Government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an officer willfully used more force than was reasonably necessary under the circumstances. ‘The “reasonableness” of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.’ Graham v Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 396 (1989).

[ *** ]

Because Ms. McEntee was an active participant in a ‘mob’ that had just illegally entered the Capitol building, and then broke out the glass doors and removed barricades to forcefully gain entry into the Speaker’s Lobby, there is insufficient evidence to refute Lieutenant Byrd’s fear for his life or the life of others at the time he discharged his weapon. Therefore, there is insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he willfully deprived Ms. McEntee of a right protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States of America. Accordingly I recommend declination of this matter. 

The records include a draft version of the April 14, 2021, Justice Department press release announcing their decision not to prosecute Byrd for the killing of Babbitt, the authors replaced the word “crowd” with the word “mob” five times in describing the January 6 protestors.

 The documents also include charts of January 6 investigations and targets. For one of the investigations, it is noted that a New York Times reporter is a “CW” [confidential witness]. Another notation tied to “pipe bombs” notes that a “geo fence” request was made to Google.

Judicial Watch previously uncovered records from the DC Metropolitan Police showed that multiple officers claimed they didn’t see a weapon in Babbitt’s hand before Byrd shot her, and that Byrd was visibly distraught afterward. One officer attested that he didn’t recall hearing any verbal commands before Byrd shot Babbitt. The records include internal communications about Byrd’s case and a crime scene examination report. Investigators who wrote the January 6, 2021, Metro PD Death Report for Babbitt (identified as Ashli Elizabeth McEntee-Babbitt Pamatian) note that the possible Manner of Death was “Homicide (Police Involved Shooting).”

“These records show that Lt. Byrd was given special treatment by the Biden DOJ and that there was a miscarriage of justice in the half-baked shooting death investigation of Ashli Babbitt,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Lt. Byrd, who works for Congress, shot an unarmed woman for no good reason. I suspect that this unjustified shooting isn’t of much interest to the Pelosi rump January 6 committee.”

Judicial Watch is engaged in a comprehensive, independent investigation into the January 6 disturbance: 

  • February 2022: Judicial Watch filed an opposition to the U.S. Capitol Police’s (USCP) effort to shut down Judicial Watch’s federal lawsuit for January 6 videos and emails. Through its police department, Congress argues that the videos and emails are not public records, there is no public interest in their release, and that “sovereign immunity” prevents citizens from suing for their release.
  • November 2021: Judicial Watch released multiple audiovisual and photo records from the DC Metropolitan Police Department about the shooting death of Babbitt on January 6, 2021, in the U.S. Capitol Building. The records include a cell phone video of the shooting and an audio of a brief police interview of the shooter, Byrd.
  • Also in November 2021: Judicial Watch – in its FOIA lawsuit asking for records of communication between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and several financial institutions about the reported transfer of financial transaction records of people in DC, Maryland and Virginia on January 5 and January 6, 2021 – told a federal court that the FBI may have violated law in its January 6 probes.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden DOJ asks judge to go easy on Leftist terrorists who threw Molotov cocktail into police car

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

TAKE ACTION: Stop Pizza Hut’s ‘Book Club’ That Gives Drag Performer’s Book to Kids

Parent company Yum Brands owns Pizza Hut as well as Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell.


Click here to send your email to urge parent company Yum Brands’ officials to show respect for the innocence of children by discontinuing Big Wig and other books that push LGBTQ on young kids.


To see this alert in your internet browser and share this article click here.

News Week published an article titled Pizza Hut Slammed for Suggesting Drag Performer Book in Kids’ Reading Club.  The article reports in part:

Social media users slammed Pizza Hut this week on Twitter over its book club’s latest reading suggestion that includes a drag performer book for kids.

The restaurant’s reading club Book It! Program, which targets grades PreK-6, has listed some books focusing on the LGBTQ community on its website in light of celebrating Pride Month, including Big Wig and Be Amazing: A History of Pride.

Since 1984, Book It! has encouraged children across the country to read more as “schools across the nation and millions of children” participating in the six-month program each year, according to the program’s Facebook page.

Big Wig is still posted at Pizza Hut’s Book It! Program.  Click here to see it.

Parent company Yum Brands owns Pizza Hut and  Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell.

Early attempts by other conservative groups to communicate with Pizza Hut via Twitter were quickly shut down.

Kindergarten and elementary school kids are way too young to struggle with the concept of being transgender.  Children are far too immature to choose a sexual preference for life especially when the overwhelming majority of kids who experiment choose to be straight.   It’s irresponsible to challenge the innocence of children with transgender propaganda when a high percentage of them would have otherwise ended up taking the straight heterosexual path for life.

Pizza Hut certainly has the right to promote whatever books it wants in its library.  You have the same right to object and patronize food chains other than Pizza Hut, KFC and Taco Bell who don’t spend customer money on LGBTQ propaganda.

Florida Family Association has prepared an email for you to send to urge parent company Yum Brands’ officials to show respect for the innocence of children by discontinuing Big Wig and other books that push LGBTQ on young kids.

To send your email, please click the following link, enter your name and email address then click the “Send Your Message” button. You may also edit the subject or message text if you wish.


Click here to send your email to urge parent company Yum Brands’ officials to show respect for the innocence of children by discontinuing Big Wig and other books that push LGBTQ on young kids.


Contact information:

David Gibbs, Chief Executive Officer
Yum! Brands, Inc.
david.gibbs@yum.com

Chris Turner, Chief Financial Officer
Yum! Brands, Inc.
chris.turner@yum.com

Tracy Skeans, Chief Operating Officer
Yum Brands, Inc.
tracy.skeans@yum.com

©Florida Family Association. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Why Should I Oblige Homosexuals – The Video Rant

Methodist leaders say ‘rebellion and dysfunction’ over LGBT issues splitting denomination

Why ‘Trust the Science’ Is a Con

Scientism, Not Science, Rules the Roost 

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • As technocracy and transhumanism have risen to the fore, they have brought with them their own form of science — “scientism” — which is basically the religion of science. In other words, it’s a belief even in the absence of evidence, or in the face of contrary evidence, and this is a very serious problem
  • The clearest problem with the admonition to “believe the science” is that bona fide experts are found on all sides of any given empirical question
  • The scientific priesthood is intolerant to new ideas while, simultaneously, search engines and digitization of scientific literature have eroded their authority as gatekeepers of knowledge
  • The way things look right now, the gatekeepers to the scientific priesthood don’t seem to have any intention to open its doors to outsiders and independent thinkers. If anything, they’re trying to massively increase their control over the information we’re allowed to see and share, even to the point of proposing the creation of certifying boards to police physicians’ sharing of medical opinions
  • The idea that a group of people can be the sole arbiters of “truth” is irrational. Individual biases always creep in, and the greater the influence of such a group, the more ingrained and dogmatic those biases will become, until the system is corrupted to the core. One could argue that dogmatic faith in nonexistent scientific consensuses is the reason for why we are where we are today

Science has long been regarded as a stronghold of logic and reason. Scientists don’t draw conclusions based on emotions, feelings or sheer faith. It’s all about building a body of reproducible evidence. Well, that’s what it used to be, but as technocracy and transhumanism have risen to the fore, it has brought with it its own form of science — “scientism” — which is basically the religion of science. Sheldon Richman with The Libertarian Institute writes:1

“The popular slogan today is ‘Believe in science.’ It’s often used as a weapon against people who reject not science in principle but rather one or another prominent scientific proposition, whether it be about the COVID-19 vaccine, climate change … to mention a few …

The clearest problem with the admonition to ‘believe in science’ is that … well-credentialed scientists — that is, bona fide experts — are found on both (or all) sides of a given empirical question … Moreover, no one, not even scientists, are immune from group-think and confirmation bias …

Apparently, under the believers’ model of science, truth comes down from a secular Mount Sinai (Mount Science?) thanks to a set of anointed scientists, and those declarations are not to be questioned. The dissenters can be ignored because they are outside the elect. How did the elect achieve its exalted station? Often, but not always, it was through the political process …

But that’s not science; it’s religion, or at least it’s the stereotype of religion that the ‘science believers’ oppose in the name of enlightenment. What it yields is dogma and, in effect, accusations of heresy. In real science, no elect and no Mount Science exists.

Real science is a rough-and-tumble process of hypothesizing, public testing, attempted replication, theory formation, dissent and rebuttal, refutation (perhaps), revision (perhaps), and confirmation (perhaps). It’s an unending process, as it obviously must be …

The institutional power to declare matters settled by consensus opens the door to all kinds of mischief that violate the spirit of science and potentially harm the public financially and otherwise.”

Technocracy News also added a comment2 to Richman’s article, noting that “Scientism is at the root of both technocracy and transhumanism, indicating that the revolution waged against the world is religious in nature.”

Whether the war against humanity is truly underpinned by religion or not is open for debate and interpretation. But what is clear is that something has shifted science away from its conventional foundation into something that very much resembles religious faith. In other words, it’s a belief even in the absence of evidence, or in the face of contrary evidence, and this is a very serious problem.

Scientific Gatekeeping as a Priesthood

In “Against Scientific Gatekeeping,”3 published in the May 2022 issue of Reason magazine, Dr. Jeffrey Singer argues that “science should be a profession, not a priesthood.” Indeed, yet that’s basically what it has become. Singer starts out by reviewing the early discovery of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment against COVID-19, and the subsequent demonization of anyone who supported its off-label use.

He then goes on to discuss the scientific priesthood’s intolerance to new ideas while, simultaneously, “search engines and the digitization of scientific literature have forever eroded their authority as gatekeepers of knowledge.” He writes:4

“Most people prefer experts, of course, especially when it comes to health care … But a problem arises when some of those experts exert outsized influence over the opinions of other experts and thereby establish an orthodoxy enforced by a priesthood. If anyone, expert or otherwise, questions the orthodoxy, they commit heresy. The result is groupthink, which undermines the scientific process.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided many examples. Most medical scientists, for instance, uncritically accepted the epidemiological pronouncements of government-affiliated physicians who were not epidemiologists. At the same time, they dismissed epidemiologists as ‘fringe’ when those specialists dared to question the conventional wisdom …

The deference to government-endorsed positions is probably related to funding … President Dwight Eisenhower … warned that ‘we should be alert to the … danger that public policy could itself become captive of a scientific technological elite.’ Today we face both problems …

It is easy to understand why the scientific priesthood views the democratization of health care opinions as a threat to its authority and influence. In response, medical experts typically wave the flag of credentialism: If you don’t have an M.D. or another relevant advanced degree, they suggest, you should shut up and do as you’re told.

But credentials are not always proof of competence, and relying on them can lead to the automatic rejection of valuable insights … Scott Atlas, a former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford Medical School, has published and critically reviewed hundreds of medical research papers. He is a member of the Nominating Committee for the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.

Yet when Atlas commented on COVID-19 issues, the priesthood and its journalistic entourage derided him because he is ‘not an infectious disease expert’ — as if a 30-year career in academic medicine does not provide enough background to understand and analyze public health data. Why? Because this physician had the temerity to contradict the public health establishment.”

The Need to Reassess Dogmatic Thinking

Singer reviews several other examples of bonafide experts who got thrown under the proverbial bus by the medical priesthood during the years of COVID, and highlights instances where we can now, rather conclusively, prove that public health officials made bad calls.

Several studies have concluded that lockdowns had no beneficial impact on infection rates and COVID deaths, for example, while disproportionally harming the young and the poor. Yet no one has publicly admitted this strategy was an unwise one that should be permanently abandoned and never repeated.

Many studies have also demonstrated that natural immunity is better than the COVID jab, yet no changes have been made to the official recommendation to inject everyone, whether COVID recovered or not.

“Just as public health officials must abandon a ‘zero COVID’ strategy and accept that the virus will be endemic, the science priesthood must adapt to a world where specialized knowledge has been democratized,” Singer writes.5

“For scientific knowledge to advance, scientists must reach a rapprochement with the uncredentialed. They must not dismiss lay hypotheses or observations out of hand. They must fight against the understandable desire to avoid any hypothesis that might upset the health bureaucrats who control billions of research grant dollars.

It is always useful to challenge and reassess long-held premises and dogmas. People outside of a field might provide valuable perspectives that can be missed by those within it.”

Effort to Muzzle Doctors Continues

The way things look right now, the gatekeepers to the scientific priesthood don’t seem to have any intention to open its doors to outsiders and independent thinkers.

If anything, they’re trying to massively increase their control over the information we’re allowed to see and share, even to the point of proposing the creation of private medical certifying boards to police physicians’ sharing of medical opinions online and elsewhere. In a May 31, 2022, Substack article, independent medical journalist Paul Thacker writes:6

“This of course, is laughable. We have plenty of evidence that medical boards are incapable of regulating physician behavior simply by looking at the history of drug scandals in America, none of which could have occurred without the complicity of corrupt doctors — few if any of whom were later sanctioned by their own profession.

Anyone notice a medical board going after Duke University’s Dr. Ralph Snyderman for aiding the Sacklers’ opioid scheme and helping spread disinformation that these highly addictive drugs are NOT … highly addictive?

Of course not. Snyderman built up Duke University into the 3rd most prestigious medical school in the States. Despite spreading disinformation about opioids that killed tens of thousands of Americans, he’s obviously a great doctor …

Oddly enough, one of the most prolific tweeters on COVID-19 vaccines is Baylor University’s Dr. Peter Hotez. And while Hotez has spread disinformation about vaccines — in one example, stating that vaccines mandates were never going to happen and were just a dog whistle by anti-vaccine groups — don’t expect any state medical board to come after him.

The reality is that, during the pandemic, the medical profession has become cheerleaders for vaccines, not skeptics. So when a couple MDs write an essay in the NEJM saying we need to confront COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, you automatically know they don’t mean someone like Hotez who has tweeted vaccine misinformation, but who has also religiously promoted COVID-19 vaccines.”

Thacker goes on to detail the history of Dr. Edward Michna, who has spent a large portion of his career promoting and defending the use of opioids for several different drug companies. He’s also conducted several pain trials involving opioids, and despite having received many tens of thousands of dollars from opioid makers, he didn’t disclose those competing interests.

“In coming months, documents will be released, further explaining what the opioid manufacturers did. But nothing … NOTHING will happen to Dr. Edward Michna for defending these companies,” Thacker writes.7 “That’s why nobody should believe … the idea that doctors can regulate doctors. Doctors have had forever to do this, and they continually fail.”

Without Free Discourse, Science Dies

It seems the moral of all these stories is that without free discourse, science cannot flourish and falsehoods become harder to weed out. Free speech is a requirement for any well-functioning system, whether we’re talking about politics, medicine, science or anything else.

The idea that a group of people, no matter how well-intended, can be the sole arbiters of “truth” is irrational on its face, because who among us can claim to know all there is to know? Individual biases always creep in, and the greater the influence of such a group, the more ingrained and dogmatic those biases will become, until the system is corrupted to the core.

One could argue that dogmatic faith in nonexistent scientific consensuses is the reason for why we are where we are today. Gatekeepers to the scientific priesthood have already allowed science to be corrupted to the point its barely recognizable. The answer, then, is not more of the same, but less. We need less censorship and more open-minded sharing of viewpoints, opinions and interpretations.

And when it comes to creating medical boards to police medical “misinformation” shared by doctors, we already know how that would work out. While Thacker doesn’t mention this, many doctors have been targeted by various professional boards, including state medical boards, for publicly opposing COVID measures such as mask and COVID shot mandates. I discussed this in “Medical Boards Hunting Down Doctors Over Mask Mandates.”

Transforming the Health Care System

In his book, “Curable: How an Unlikely Group of Radical Innovators Is Trying to Transform Our Health Care System,” Travis Christofferson addresses questions such as: “What has happened to American health care?” and “What are the foundational disruptions or corruptions in the system?”

His book, in some ways, is based on the theory promoted in Michael Lewis’ book and subsequent film, “Moneyball.” It describes how you can use statistics to massively improve a flawed system.

“Moneyball” showed how, within a simple game of baseball, you can have massive inefficiencies, and by taking away the human biases and just applying statistics to find what is undervalued, you can massively boost the performance of a team.

When I interviewed Christofferson about his book, he offered several examples of how statistics and removal of human biases can be used in the same way to improve inefficiencies within the medical system. For example, the diabetic drug metformin has “massive repositories of data” suggesting it can be useful against a plethora of chronic diseases, including cancer, and it’s extremely affordable.

The reason it’s rarely prescribed for any of these other indications is because there’s a financial motivation to capitalize on more expensive treatments, even if they don’t work well. By focusing on undervalued treatments and low-cost prevention, health care costs could be driven way down, while simultaneously improving patient outcomes.

Another example comes from Geisinger Health in Pennsylvania. By introducing a Fresh Food Farmacy for Type 2 diabetics, Geisinger Health was able to reduce its per-year outlays and cost for Type 2 diabetics by a whopping 80%. Patients with prediabetes or Type 2 diabetes are given a prescription for fresh, whole foods, and allowed two free meals a day from the Farmacy, along with intensive care and educational support.

A third example is Intermountain Health. In addition to paying its doctors a fixed salary plus bonuses based on patients’ health outcomes, they also assess differences between treatments to see which works best.

For example, patients are always given antibiotics before surgery, but it’s never been established when the optimal time to administer the drugs is. Intermountain compared medical records, finding the optimal time was two hours before surgery, which cut their surgical infection rate by more than half.

Bias Corrupts and Corruption Is Inherently Destructive

These are all examples of how we can effectively and efficiently move medicine forward. By silencing debate and discussion, and by ignoring data and statistics, which has become the norm in this COVID era, the conventional health care system is headed for collapse.

This seems particularly true when you consider hospitals have, over the past two years, completely shredded patients’ trust by mistreating and outright killing COVID-19 patients with the most dangerous treatments available. Rather than collaborating with peers, most doctors have blindly followed financially-driven and politically biased protocols handed down from the reigning “priesthood,” and the results have been nothing short of disastrous.

Speaking of disastrous, California has introduced a bill8 that will strip doctors of their medical licenses if they express medical views that the state does not agree with, basically reducing medicine to a state-sanctioned one-size-fits-all endeavor. Absolutely nothing good can come of such a plan. I discussed this in “Bill Seeks to Muzzle Doctors Who Tell the Truth About COVID.”

This bill, AB-2098, was passed by House vote (53 to 20), May 26, 2022, and is currently in the Senate.9 If this law is passed in California, we will probably begin to see similar or identical bills introduced in other states as well.

If your trust in doctors has already waned, implementation of such a law is sure to carpet bomb whatever trust is left into oblivion, because all you’ll be able to get, no matter who you go to, is the state-sponsored opinion. What happens then? How do we care for our health if our doctors are legally prevented from giving us their best advice? This is such a radical departure from sanity and sound practice that it’s hard to even imagine what medicine will look like at that point.

The answer, I believe, will be for good, caring medical professionals to start building parallel health care systems, such as those detailed in Christofferson’s book, “Curable.” We may also have to take on greater responsibility for finding solutions to our own health problems. “Take control of your health” has been my motto and tagline since I started this website, but it’s more important now than ever.

In years past, one of the greatest risks a patient faced was a doctor lacking nutritional know-how. In the future, the greatest risk could be doctors outright lying to you, even to the point of sending you to a more or less certain death, just to stay in practice. I hope it won’t come to that. But prevent it, we must resist and oppose these kinds of treacherous plots wherever and whenever they crop up.

EDITORS NOTE: This MERCOLA column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Why Hasn’t the MPA’s CEO Answered Our Question On Adding a “Q” to Its Rating System?

We sent a fax media inquiry to the office of the Motion Picture Association (MPA) Chairman and CEO Charles H. Rivkin on May 23rd asking about adding a “Q” rating to their existing film rating system to warn parents, grandparents and audiences of films that contain LGBTQ scenes which some may find objectionable.

QUESTION: Given June is Pride Month why wouldn’t the MPA show its Pride by adding a “Q” rating?

For example, G would become G-Q, PG would be PG-Q and so on. Chairman and CEO Charles H. Rivkin’s video (below) would indicate that it is part of their social responsibility to warn parents, grandparents and their audiences of objectionable material in films. In the video CEO Rivkin spoke specifically of insuring parents and their children are protected.

Mr. Rivkin in his Chairman’s Letter states it’s MPA’s mission to, “Provided consumers with impartial assessments of the content of our movies and television through our Ratings System, and in doing so, also protected films from government censorship.‘ Watch:

Here is the fax we sent on May 23rd and we resent this fax via an email to Tom Zigo who is the Vice President of Public Affairs & Communications at the Motion Picture Association.

MEDIA REQUEST

FROM: Publisher

             DrRichSwier.com, LLC

TO: Motion Picture Association of America

SUBJECT: Motion Picture Association of America adding a “Q” rating

This is a media request to the Motion Picture Association of America to determine if the organization will respond to inquiries on adding a rating of “Q” to all its current ratings of G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17. The recommended new ratings would be G-Q, PG-Q, PG-13-Q, R-Q and NC-17-Q.

QUESTIONS:

  1. Is the Motion Picture Association of America considering warning movie audiences of content that features LGBTQ+ scenes and or characters?
  2. Is the Motion Picture Association of America considering warning parents of content in cartoons and animated films, like those released by Pixar, Marvel and Spielberg, that have LGBTQ+ scenes or characters?
  3. Is the Motion Picture Association of America considering warning those who subscribe to Blu-ray, 4K Ultra HD, DVD and Digital/Online Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu, of LGBTQ+ scenes or characters?
  4. If not, why not?

BACKGROUND

We have received multiple calls and emails from individuals, parents of small children and religious organizations asking if the Motion Picture Association of America will create a rating to warn their audiences of content that is LGBTQ+ in films, cartoons, and TV programs.

This media request is to answer our readers’ requests and to get an official statement on the position of the Motion Picture Association of America and its board of directors on this issue.

There is a growing concern, which has turned into a national movement, to warn parents about efforts to groom their children in public school classrooms, public school media centers, by corporations like Disney, Amazon, and Apple and other publishers and distributors of books, films, and TV programs.

Add to this the calls to expose misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.

If you have any questions, please contact the Publisher of the DrRichSwier.com eMagazine at:

Cell: 9413743896

Email: drswier@gmail.com

Thank you for your quick reply to this media request.

The Bottom Line

There is a growing concern, which has turned into a national movement, to warn parents about efforts to groom their children in public school classrooms, public school media centers, by corporations like Disney, Amazon, and Apple and other publishers and distributors of books, films and TV programs.

Add to this the calls to expose misinformation, disinformation and mal-information. We are witnessing a perfect storm to expose untruths and myths in every media format.

It is past time for movie goers to understand what is in each film whether viewed in theatres or via online streaming services or on television.

Knowledge is power. Knowing before one goes to see a movie should be an individual choice but that choice must be based upon the truth of what the film contains. If the film contains any LGBTQ+ character or promotion of the LGBTQ+ agenda then it is up to the buyer to beware.

In the eyes of many Americans what is on the silver screen today is “reprehensible.” It is time for the Motion Picture Association of America to catch up with the valid concerns of we the people.

Better safe than sorry by warning movie goers of “objectionable material.”

Readers who wish to contact the Motion Picture Association of America about adding a “Q” rating please click here.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

Rectifying George Floyd Mania

Liberal San Franciscans threw out Progressive DA Chesa Boudin yesterday.  It wasn’t even close – 60-40.  Good riddance to bad garbage.  It also brings me joy that more than a few of George Soros’ Benjamins went down the drain yesterday.  Mister Chaos has spent $40 million to elect 75 criminal justice crazies as prosecutors-who-won’t-prosecute across the country in the last 10 years.  George Soros really is the devil, as the Soros document leak a few years ago so copiously documented.  If anyone wants to challenge me on that statement, bring it on.  I’m loaded for bear.

With the spawn of the devil out of the way in San Francisco, residents can start reclaiming their city from the smash-and-grab artists and the perps who have been brutally attacking Asians.

But more work remains to be done in reclaiming the criminal justice system from the social justice crazies who were able to hijack it after George Floyd-induced mania got cities to defund the police.  This was a crazy policy now repudiated in several places.  George Floyd mania also allowed Black Lives Matter to rule the roost and get street murals painted in their honor.  BLM is now in tatters after financial scandals exposed it as a get-rich-quick scheme for its organizers – Build Large Mansions indeed, several at a time.

Work remains to be done in Seattle which defunded the police and gave a green light to rioters to take over city blocks for a lawless autonomous zone.  Robberies went up 30 percent and violent crime overall spiked 32 percent after Seattle politicians defunded the police.  One thing that needs to be fixed in Washington is the state’s new law limiting vehicle pursuit by police to cases of probable cause for specific crimes.  The restriction has emboldened criminals not to stop when being chased and has even caused hundreds of ordinary people to refuse to pull over when they should be getting a speeding ticket.  Things are out of whack.

But there are signs of hope.  More people are recognizing the pendulum has swung too far in favor of criminals and the Woke social justice mob that coddles them.  As I mentioned earlier and documented in previous commentaries, several cities have confessed error and re-funded their police departments.  Illinois passed a new law targeting smash-and-grab robberies.  New York is considering bringing back cash bail in some cases.  The liberal New York Times admitted crime is out of control and it’s people of color who are demanding something be done about it.  New York City Mayor Eric Adams called on residents to fund and support the police, a clear rebuke to Democrat AOC who is out to lunch on this issue like so much of her party, the Party of Chaos.  A vote for the Democrats is a vote for mayhem, as is now plain for all to see.

The nation got drunk on George Floyd.  It’s a tragedy what happened to him, but people binged on Woke criminal justice reform after his death and are finally starting to deal with the bad hangover their drinking to excess has caused.  Nothing like brazen smash-and-grab robberies and deadly subway shootings to focus the mind.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Armed Man Arrested Near Brett Kavanaugh’s House Said He Wanted To Kill Him

UPDATE: Nicholas John Roske, 26, of Simi Valley, California was arrested around 1:50 a.m. Wednesday morning near Kavanaugh’s home, according to authorities. Police said he was armed with a pistol, knife, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer and crowbar, according to USA Today. Roske allegedly threatened to kill Kavanaugh because he was upset that the justice may overturn Roe this summer and allow states to protect unborn babies from abortion again, according to the criminal complaint.


A man armed with at least one weapon and burglary tools was arrested near Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home after telling police officers he intended to kill Kavanaugh, The Washington Post reported.

The California man in his mid-twenties was on a street near Kavanaugh’s Montgomery County, Maryland, home when he was stopped by officers and admitted his plans to kill the justice, according to The Washington Post. It remains unclear who alerted authorities to the threat.

He was armed with a handgun, a knife and pepper spray when he was arrested at 1:50 a.m. Wednesday, according to CNBC News. He arrived to Kavanaugh’s neighborhood by taxi.

The man may have been motivated by anger over the leaked draft opinion revealing the likely overturning of Roe v. Wade and by a recent series of mass shootings, sources familiar with the investigation told The Washington Post.

The Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe in its upcoming Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, according to a leaked draft opinion, and could allow states to determine their own abortion laws as they did prior to 1973 or could move the legally understood point of viability to an earlier point in pregnancy.

The leak triggered a series of attacks on crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life groups, including multiple firebombings.

The Chevy Chase Police Department and the Supreme Court news media department did not immediately respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

AUTHOR

LAUREL DUGGAN

Social issues and culture reporter.

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Kamala Harris Refuses to Mention God at Meeting With Christian Leaders Over Abortion

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Sanctuary Cities Now Provide Sanctuary For Deadly Illegal Drugs

The New York City Health Department shows how to use them “safely.”


On May 11, 2022 the New York Times reported: Overdose Deaths Continue Rising, With Fentanyl and Meth Key Culprits.  The subtitle of that reports is stunning:  New data shows a surge in overdose deaths involving fentanyl and methamphetamine. Overall, the nation saw a 15 percent increase in deaths from overdoses in 2021.

Let us begin by noting that fentanyl and other narcotics are illegal because they have the potential to kill or otherwise inflict serious harm.

I can still remember my dad telling me when I was a teenager, so many years ago: “nothing is so good it could not be made better, or be so bad that it could not be made worse.”

My dad’s sage advice certainly came to my mind when I saw a the May 27, 2022 CBS News article, “Let’s Talk Fentanyl” ad campaign raises eyebrows for some straphangers.

You would think that an agency called The New York City Department Of Health would be focused on the health and well-being of the residents of New York City and consequently would do as much as possible to discourage drug use, period.

After all, the massive campaign against cigarette smoking, which is ongoing to this very day, has been extremely effective in getting people who smoke to stop smoking and prevent young people from taking up that dangerous and, all too frequently, deadly habit.

Consider this item posted on the New York State Department of Health:

Information about Tobacco Use, Smoking and Secondhand Smoke

Today, however, in the age of radical madness, the New York City Department of Health is actually focused on preventing overdoses- not be discouraging the use of such dangerous and illegal drugs as fentanyl, but by providing a guide to the supposedly safe use of these deadly drugs!

Consider this item posted on the NYC Health Department’s official website:  Fentanyl Avoid an Overdose.

Here is how this “how to” guide begins:

Fentanyl use can increase your risk of overdose, especially if you do not regularly use opioids.

Fentanyl has been found in many different drugs, including heroin, cocaine, crack, methamphetamine, ketamine and pills from nonmedical sources. Anyone who uses drugs that may contain fentanyl, even occasionally, may be at risk of overdose.

To prevent an overdose:

  • Avoid using alone and take turns
  • Start with a small dose and go slowly
  • Keep Naloxone ready and on hand
  • Avoid mixing drugs
  • Test your drugs using fentanyl test strips

This supremely infuriating and disturbing sentence included in the guide states:  “start with a small dose and go slowly.”  In other words, when you first begin using these drugs in the beginning, this is the safest way to do it!

The “Health Department’s guide also includes this virtual menu of other illegal, dangerous and deadly drugs in this sentence:

fentanyl has been found in many different drugs, including heroin, cocaine, crack, methamphetamine, ketamine and pills from nonmedical sources. Anyone who uses drugs that may contain fentanyl, even occasionally, may be at risk of overdose.

Drug use is, in and of itself deadly and destructive to those who fall victim to addiction.  Even those who do not die from overdoses are likely to find drug addition impacts their ability to support themselves and care for their family members.  Imagine the impact that this has on the children of the addicts.  Drug addiction has been cited as a factor in massive homelessness.

Then there is the issue of the crimes that addicts may commit to be able to buy the drugs they are hooked on.  I would love to know how many deadly shootings involve individuals who have drugs flowing through their veins.  Perhaps toxicology reports should be made public in the aftermath of a violent attack.

With all of the emphasis on gun control in the wake of mass shootings we need criminal control.

The same could be said for the accidents caused by motorists who drive under the influence of drugs and inflict injuries and death to those caught in their paths.

The drug trade also funds terrorism in the United States and around the globe as has been noted in numerous reports and various Congressional hearings.

Consider my earlier articles published in 2018: Iran Threatens U.S. And Its Allies With Drugs, Refugees, Bombs And Assassination” and Congressional Hearing: Iranian Sleeper Cells Threaten U.S. So many hearings, so little action.

Finally proceeds from the drug trade fund violent transnational gangs who create a veritable reign of terror in the communities in which they operate- frequently those communities are ethnic immigrant communities from around the world, because human nature is universal and the proverbial “good, bad and ugly” can be found in every race, religion and ethnicity. (My 30 year career with the former Immigration and Naturalization Service hammered this home to my INS colleagues and me.  Furthermore my approximately 4 year assignment to the Unified Intelligence Division of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration, followed up by my 10 years as an INS Senior Special Agent assigned to the Organized Crime, Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) provided me with a front line seat to the nexus between failures of border security and immigration law enforcement that undermined national security and public safety.)

Last year I wrote an article, Interior Enforcement And The Border Crisis in which I postulated that the borders of the United Sates cannot be made secure against the entry of massive numbers of illegal aliens if they faced no consequences for being illegally present in the United States.  Illegal aliens only come to the United States in violation of law if they are encouraged that law enforcement authorities will ignore their violations of our immigration laws so that they can achieve whatever illegal goals motivated them to come to the United States – whether it is illegal employment, the desire to flee law enforcement in other countries because they are fugitives from justice, or because they seek to engage in activities involving gangs, narcotics, terrorism or other such dangerous activities.

Over the years I have written many articles about how so-called “Sanctuary policies” promulgated by city or state governments.  As I noted in an article awhile back, Sanctuary Cities Endanger – National Security and Public Safety

On February 27, 2003 I testified before a hearing conducted by the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims on the topic, New York City’s `Sanctuary’ Policy And The Effect Of Such Policies On Public Safety, Law Enforcement,And Immigration.

Now New York City and other cities are now apparently providing a sort of “sanctuary” for drug users that imperil not protect public health and the long-term welfare of both the drug users and their family members as well as many others who may fall victim to various aspects of the drug trade even as the Biden Administration has all but dismantled the borders of the United States to not only facilitate the flow of unprecedented numbers off illegal aliens into the United States, but massive quantities of deadly narcotics as well.

The only reason that drugs are being smuggled in such huge quantities into the United States is a direct function of the fundamental economic principle of “Supply and Demand.”  Our open borders facilitate the flow of fentanyl and other deadly drugs into the United States and local governments are helping to drive up and not tamp down the demand.

Consider my article, that sums up the insanity we face from so many directions: For Dems to Succeed, Americans Must Fail.

©Michael Cutler. All rights reserved.

Trudeau bans handgun sales, and now he’s fighting to lessen penalty for major gun crime

Gun sales are flying off the shelves in Canada so fast that many stores are “selling out altogether after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced gun control legislation freezing all pistol purchases.” But something else is happening. Trudeau is now defending another piece of legislation before Parliament that will reduce sentencing requirements for serious gun crimes. The contradiction may seem peculiar to those who haven’t been following Justin Trudeau.

First of all, potential gun owners are properly screened in Canada, so there was no need for tighter gun legislation in the country in the first place.

Trudeau’s ban was announced on the heels of the Texas mass murder, during which Texas police actually stopped parents from trying to go in and save their children. Some Uvalde parents who were armed and ready to storm the school, but were blocked by armed police who refused to go in themselves.

Trudeau branded his gun ban as a safety issue: “Keeping Canadians safe is the Government of Canada’s top priority.” But does Trudeau really care about the safety of Canadians? Trudeau threw out a welcome mat for Islamic State jihadists, and continues a lax immigration policy that provides a perfect opportunity for jihadists and the worst criminals to enter Canada. Yet he touts his commitment to keeping Canadians safe. Trudeau has also faced ethics violations for misusing taxpayer funds. Watch how Member of Parliament Pierre Poilievre humiliated and cornered him about his crookedness and breach of the Ethics Act HERE.  Trudeau isn’t a man that engenders trust.

With Trudeau’s new laws, only criminals and the government will end up being armed. The Trudeau ban also serves as a boon to the illegal market. CTV news republished a radio news story entitled Radio host proves how easy it is to find an illegal gun in Toronto.

Tighter gun controls are feel-good measures employed by Leftist politicians who hijack tragedies to boost their popularity. They do not work. One need only look to Chicago and Washington, DC, with their high rates of violent crime; both are among the strictest jurisdictions for gun laws in America.

Chicago earned the nickname Chiraq to reflect the intensity of its gun violence – comparing the city to the war zone of Iraq. “60% of the guns recovered in Chicago were originally purchased out of state, with Indiana, Mississippi and Wisconsin among the top suppliers.” But Chicago’s violence is driven by illegal guns. Chicago police “recover at least 10,000 firearms every year,” yet “there are zero gun stores within city limits.”

Britain saw knife crime soar in 2020, showing further that it isn’t guns and knives that are activating themselves; it’s disturbed human beings and criminals who are using them.

Leftist leaders continue to push policies that are detrimental to national security, the rule of law, life, the nuclear familyracial harmony, the economy and mental health; yet they scream about gun control in the societies that they helped to destroy.

Gun bans have never worked. Hitler took guns away in Germany, then murdered millions of Jews. Stalin also took guns away, and then murdered millions. Ditto for the worst mass murderer in history, Mao Zedong. Castro also disarmed his population and massacred his own people.

While Trudeau pretends to care about Canada in his move to take away guns from law-abiding citizens, he is merely politicking. His simultaneous reduction of sentences for serious gun crimes is supposedly in service of “racial equity,” which is a real slap in the face to law-abiding blacks and aboriginals. As the Toronto Sun points out:

The prime minister is defending a bill his government has before Parliament to reduce sentencing requirements for gun crimes, saying it’s about racial equity. “What our communities need is a justice system that punishes criminals. What we do not need is a system that targets racialized people because of systemic discrimination.”

Despite Trudeau’s incompetence, dishonesty, ethical infractions, and divisive politics, there is one event that put him on the map globally: the Freedom Convoy. He insulted concerned Canadians before the world as showing “’disrespect to science’ and championing ‘hate, abuse and racism.” Of course, he ignored the many visible minorities and religious groups who took part in the protests. And even prior to Canada’s Freedom Convoy, Lifesite News published the headline: Canada is sinking into totalitarianism. The evidence is overwhelmingIt is also worth noting that Trudeau stated during the trucker protests that police requested need for the Emergencies Act to be invoked. But it was recently revealed that he lied. The Emergencies Act was not requested by police. 

Canada is not only sinking into totalitarianism. It is sinking into complete decay: economically, socially and in regard to the rule of law.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLES:

Supreme Court Ruling on New York Gun Law Could Have a Colossal National Impact

Washington D.C. cannot be trusted to police itself. America will have to police D.C. instead.

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Russia and Iran Conclude Major 20-Year Energy Deal

Both Russia and Iran are running rings around Old Joe on the global stage. Meanwhile, this will help finance a good bit of Iran’s global jihad adventurism.

Biden humiliated as Russia and Iran strikes major 20-year energy deal

by Antony Ashkenaz, Express, June 3, 2022:

Amid the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has expanded its energy ties with Iran, another country that has butted heads with the US in the past. Diplomats from the two countries discussed the second and third phases of the expansion of the Bushehr nuclear plant with Iran, which was built by Russia. Meanwhile, energy companies from Moscow are also set to play a larger role in Iran’s petrochemical industry, posing another hurdle for Western countries that are desperately trying to end their reliance on Russian fossil fuel exports.

The European Union is heavily dependent on Russian gas, having imported 40 percent of its supply from Moscow in 2021.

Last week, Russian Deputy Prime Minister, Alexander Novak, headed a high-level delegation to Iran to discuss their alliance.

According to Iran’s Petroleum Minister, Javad Owji, Russia has already allocated part of its $5billion (almost £4billion) funds promised for Iranian energy, agricultural, and transport projects.

Russia and Iran plan to expand their annual trade to at least $40billion within the next three years.

According to Mr Owji, Tehran and Moscow will significantly increase their cooperation in the financial and banking sector, oil, gas, petrochemicals, and nuclear energy.

He also noted that the two countries have agreed to conduct their bilateral trade in their own currency.

This deal could be a huge boost for rubles, which took a major hit after Western countries sanctioned nearly all aspects of the Russian economy following the invasion of Ukraine….

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLES:

10 months after Biden proclaimed al-Qaeda ‘severely degraded’ in Afghanistan, UN warns it has ‘safe haven’ there

Iranian dissident: ‘The Iranian resistance have lost all hope in the Biden administration’

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

TAKE ACTION: Ask Your Elected Officials to Purge ‘Pride Month’ from All Government Facilities

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – John Stuart Mill, 1867 inaugural address at University of St. Andrews


QUESTION: Why are government officials from local school boards, to city commissions, to county commissions to state legislatures all the way to the federal government promoting Pride Month?

ANSWER: To groom underaged children for sodomy, gay sex and prepare them for the pedophiles and pederasts!

It was first President Bill Clinton who declared June “Gay & Lesbian Pride Month” in 1999 and 2000. Then from 2009 to 2016, each year he was in office, President Barack Obama declared June “LGBT Pride Month.” Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.  has followed suit since his inauguration.

We have reported on the growing movement to purge reading materials that promote sex with underaged children from in public school libraries in the state of Florida and beyond.

Activist, blogger, speaker, and best-selling author who educates and inspires the public on the burning social and moral issues of the day Elizabeth Johnson published the following articles on her website:

Time to Take Action

We have drafted a letter that our readers may send to their elected officials asking them to purge any and all efforts to promote Pride Month on public tax supported properties.

To _________________,

As taxpayers in ___________________, we are writing to protest any and all “Pride Month” displays in your office, in any and all public buildings, public school libraries, in the education system’s classrooms, or in any and all public school, city, county, state or federal buildings in your jurisdiction.

To protect our children, grandchildren and our community, we have taken note that there are displays, books, reading materials and efforts of and by public employees to promote “Pride Month.”

We plan to keep protesting until you agree to remove the inappropriate content and purge any and all “Pride Month” displays from any facility owned or operated by you or your employees.

Flags, signs, advertisements, public statements, films, streaming movies and books based on how adults experience sexual attraction and gender identity have no place in an open and public space for children nor in the classroom nor in public buildings.

We believe that minor children have the right to belong to a community that respects their innocence and allows families to have conversations about sex and sexual attraction privately, and only when parents deem it appropriate.

As parents and grandparents, we should be able to bring our children and grandchildren to public school libraries, to classrooms, public buildings and to your offices without exposing them or subjecting them to displays of adult pride or “Pride Month” propaganda.

We ask you to immediately take down any and all “Pride Month” displays, starting with those placed in children’s and young adults’ sections in media centers, in the classrooms and all public buildings.

We ask that you take action against those employees who promote “Pride Month.” They must be disciplined.

It’s time for America to once again be a respectful space for young children to freely explore great ideas that unite and inspire us all, rather than places where controversial and divisive new ideological movements are given free rein to promote their theories and policy positions about sexuality to children without the consent or notification of parents.

Respectfully,

NOTE: Feel free to edit this letter to fit your needs. Please cc us on any email you send to your pubic officials at drswier@gmail.com

The Bottom Line

It is time for parents, grandparents and every man and woman to take a stand or lose the innocence of generations of children yet to be born to evil.

I ask, if not us then who? If not now then when?

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: Drag Queen Dances for Children in Dallas, Texas

RELATED ARTICLES:

Rejecting the Totalitarian Transgender Movement

Behind the scenes: How your public schools are becoming immersed in radical LGBT ideology and pornography.

Poll: 63% of Americans Oppose Including ‘Gender Identity’ in Education Department Definition of Sex

Burger King Debuts ‘Pride Whopper’ With Two Top Or Two Bottom Buns

Pizza Hut’s book club promotes drag queen books to pre-K children

New York library hosts ‘drag camp’ for kids age 11 and up to adopt a drag persona and perform at pride show

Oreo Cookies Tout ‘Pride Pack’ for June Pride Month