With So Much at Stake in 2024, Christians Must Vote in November

While former President Donald Trump’s recent comments on the life issue have brought concern to many pro-life leaders, it remains important to recall the totality of what is at stake in the 2024 election.

Of the five Republican presidents elected after the infamous Roe v. Wade (1973) decision legalizing the abortion of children throughout the entire pregnancy, Donald Trump is the only one who secured the appointment of enough United States Supreme Court justices to reverse Roe: Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. President Trump appointed a total of 231 judges to federal courts (District, Appeals and the Supreme Court).

The Supreme Court decided 5-1-3 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) that the “right” to an abortion is neither a fundamental right recognized by the Constitution, nor part of America’s national history and traditions. The court’s reversal of Roe returned the legality of abortion to the states as it had been before Roe was decided.

Abortion State Referenda in 2022-2024

The Dobbs decision apparently galvanized pro-abortion advocates, who won all of the state ballot referenda in 2022 that instituted pro-abortion constitutional amendments for California, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, Kansas, and Montana, as well as Ohio in 2023. Two pro-abortion candidates for state Supreme Courts won in 2023 in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania with support for abortion as the deciding factor. Pro-life organizations lost all nine state referenda on abortion even in politically conservative states. In May, however, a pro-life Republican judicial candidate in Georgia beat the pro-abortion candidate, a former 10-year Democrat congressman, who had Planned Parenthood’s support.

Abortion referenda are on the 2024 ballots in 10 states: the swing states of Arizona and Nevada, the solid blue-leaning states of Maryland, Colorado, and New York, and the red-leaning states of Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota. In June, Planned Parenthood announced it will spend $40 million ahead of November’s election to help elect Democrats in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.

Political commentator Victor Davis Hanson said in August that Democrats “have nominated two neo-Marxists who are openly proud of what they have done.” Steve Forbes noted that the Harris-Walz team is promoting “the most radical leftist Stalinist policies in American history.”

The Communist Party USA, which has the identical abortion policies of Harris-Walz including providing taxpayer-funded abortions, noted:

“The recent overturning of Roe v. Wade casts a shadow over the country … Our own party has rightfully joined the chorus in condemnation of the Supreme Court’s decision … The October Revolution gave birth to the first successful socialist experiment. … In 1920 the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to legalize abortion on request. The People’s Commissariats of Health and of Justice passed a decree, noting that the procedure was to be ‘made freely and without any charge …’”

Freedom of Speech, Press, and Assembly

  • The First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and petitioning government for redress of grievances is the foundation of the entire Bill of Rights! At the Faith and Freedom Coalition Rally in June, President Trump promised to pardon the peaceful, pro-life picketers imprisoned by the Biden-Harris justice department.
  • Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) stated recently, “There is no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” But in Matal v. Tam (2017) the Supreme Court ruled (9-0) that “we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’” For Harris-Walz, hate speech or misinformation is any speech they disagree with. During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Harris urged Twitter to shut down Trump’s account: “Donald Trump, who has 65 million Twitter followers … he and his account should be taken down.”
  • As California’s attorney general, Harris “co-sponsored” a 2015 bill compelling California pro-life pregnancy centers to distribute abortion facility information to their clients (AB 775, the Reproductive FACT Act). Fortunately, the Supreme Court ruled that the bill violated the First Amendment (NIFLA v. Becerra, AG of California, 138 S.Ct. 2361).
  • In September 2024, a federal district court in Louisiana decided in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. v. Joseph R. Biden that the Biden-Harris administration illegally censored Kennedy, who opposed the Biden-Harris COVID-19 policy: “The Court finds that Kennedy is likely to succeed on his claim that suppression of content posted was caused by actions of Government Defendants … there is a substantial risk that he will suffer similar injury in the near future.”

Freedom of Religion and Conscience

  • As California’s attorney general, Harris filed a brief asserting that Hobby Lobby’s owners had no religious liberty or conscience rights and should be compelled to supply abortion drugs to employees. The Supreme Court disagreed in 2014 (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 573 U.S. 682).
  • In 2018, Democratic Senators Kamala Harris (Calif.) and Maise Hirono (Hawaii) opposed President Trump’s judicial nominees Brian Buescher, Paul Matey, and Peter Phipps, claiming they could not be impartial because they belonged to the Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus, which opposes abortion and same-sex marriage. The Harris-Hirono “religious test” violates Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution; “[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust.” The Senate confirmed Trump’s nominees despite the Democratic senators’ anti-Catholic bigotry.
  • Harris introduced the “Do No Harm Act” (S. 2918) in 2018 to stop churches from relying on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which the Supreme Court has ruled exempts religious organizations from being required to support abortion, LGBTQ+ ideology, and other polices against their religion. Fortunately, S. 2918 failed.
  • The Biden-Harris Equality Act (HR 5 from 2021) compels Christians and Christian institutions to accept behavior condemned by Scripture, or pay huge fines. It prohibits federally chartered banks from loaning money to non-compliant churches and also allows up to $500,000 in fines for not “celebrating” same-sex marriages. Churches and schools would lose tax-exempt status and school certification unless they promoted LGBTQ+ policies. (HR 5 has failed so far.)
  • Tim Walz mandated that education administrators and public and private school teachers certified by the state who do not accept or affirm a student’s transgender identity and sexual orientation will not receive a teaching license per the latest version of the regulations.

Right to Life and Reproductive Ethics

  • The Planned Parenthood Votes super PAC stated that it “is working to ensure Kamala Harris and Tim Walz make it to the White House.” Planned Parenthood sent a mobile clinic to the Chicago Democratic Convention, offering attendees free abortions and vasectomies.
  • Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) boasted that Harris was the “first vice president in history to visit an abortion clinic.” What colossal hubris and utter disregard for babies!
  • Senator Kamala Harris introduced S.510 (2017) to forbid states from requiring that only doctors do abortions, and to make it illegal to delay abortions or increase costs (think of informed consent, parental consent, 24-hour waiting periods, health/safety regulations, and banning taxpayer-funded abortions).
  • On CBS’s “Face the Nation” in September 2023, Harris was asked, “At what week of pregnancy should abortion access be cut off?” Harris answered, “We need to restore … Roe v. Wade.” In February 2019, The Daily Caller asked Senator Harris if there was any point in pregnancy at which she thought abortion was immoral. She said, “I think it’s up to a woman to make that decision, and I will always stand by that.”
  • Tim Walz told the Democratic Convention, “[T]he government stays the hell out of your bedroom.” But Walz justified China’s forced late-term abortion, infanticide, sterilization and IUD policy. Walz claimed it was necessary because, “the Chinese population was so large.” Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute) states that “hundreds of millions of Chinese women didn’t just pay a tax. … Their babies were ripped out of their wombs by cesarean section by Red doctors who went on to sever the fallopian tubes of those who violated the one-child policy.” So much for Walz’s “choice” or government staying out of the bedroom.
  • Walz signed HF 1 in 2023, stating that, “Every individual has a fundamental right to make autonomous decisions about the individual’s own reproductive health, including the fundamental right to use or refuse reproductive health care.” Walz’s law includes teen minors. Reproductive care includes transgender drugs/surgery. The Minnesota Senate voted 34 to 33, and Minnesota’s House voted 69 to 65 to pass HF 1.
  • Senator Kamala Harris, in an interview with The Root in 2019, was asked whether she thought sex work “ought to be decriminalized.” “I do,” Harris responded.
  • The 2024 Democratic Platform states, “With a Democratic Congress, we will pass national legislation to make Roe the law of the land again. … We will repeal the Hyde Amendment [which bans taxpayer-funded abortions].” Harris-Walz will force all Americans to fund abortion in every state.
  • The Human Rights Campaign states, “The Biden-Harris Administration has been the most pro-LGBTQ+ administration in history … [and has] appointed a record number of LGBTQ+ … to key posts … including the first gay cabinet secretary, first Senate-confirmed transgender appointee, and historic federal judges. … [W]e must stop Donald Trump.”

Second Amendment

  • In 2019, presidential candidate Harris said, “I support a mandatory gun buyback program.” That is confiscation. Law abiding citizens would lose their means of self-defense. What policies do they intend to impose that warrant ending the inalienable right of self-defense? In 2008, Harris filed a court brief asserting that the Second Amendment (2A) allows a total hand gun ban, and that 2A applies only to the militia. The Supreme Court ruled firearm ownership is an individual right (District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008; McDonald v. Chicago, 2010); and that it is a self-defense right to carry outside the home (New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 2022).
  • In a 2023 poll, Gallup asked Americans if handgun possession should be banned, except for police or authorized persons. It found that “just 27% of U.S. adults believe that no one outside of police or other authorized persons should be able to possess a handgun.” Still, Harris-Walz push a radical anti-self-defense agenda.

Select Pro-Life, Pro-Family Actions of the Trump Administration

2017: The Trump administration ended Obama’s funding for international organizations that carry out or promote abortions, Obama’s policy requiring public schools to allow transgender students to use restrooms and showers of their choice, and Obama’s Department of Defense transgender policy.

2018: Trump ended Obama’s abortion policy that restricted states’ ability to stop abortion funding under Medicaid and Child Health Insurance Program, prevented those who identify as transgender from joining the military going forward, issued an executive order to release American Christian pastor Andrew Brunson who was jailed in Turkey, terminated a $15,900 HHS contract for securing fetal tissue from abortion for “research,” and exempted groups with religious or moral objections from being forced to purchase health insurance with birth control or abortion coverage.

2019: President Trump informed Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) he would veto any bills that weakened current pro-life policies or legislation and prevented Title X family planning grantees from referring or carrying out abortions.

2020: Under Trump, HHS authorized Texas to operate its Medicaid program without paying for abortion, the DOJ filed a statement of interest on behalf of a Virginia church which received a criminal COVID-19 violation by Democratic Governor Ralph Northam for holding a 16-person service, an HHS final rule clarified that in the Affordable Care Act “discrimination based on sex” did not include “gender identity” or “termination of pregnancy,” and that the federal government would not compel doctors to do abortions or gender reassignment surgery, and withheld $200 million in Medicaid funds from California for its abortion insurance policy requirements.

2021: An HHS final rule eliminated requirements that all grant recipients including faith-based foster care and adoption providers must accept same-sex marriage and profess gender identity policies to receive federal grants.

Republican Platform

The 2024 Republican Platform opposes late-term abortion and defends the religious liberty of businesses, hospitals, churches, and individuals from supporting or carrying out abortion. It recognizes parental authority over children, prohibits taxpayer-funded gender transition procedures (drugs/surgery) of minors, protects students’ religious freedom, and the right to pray and read the Bible in schools, and keeps men out of women’s sports. It opposes federal funding of schools for critical race theory or radical gender ideology classes. Harris-Walz and the Democratic Platform oppose these policies.

November 5 Voting

This race is very close. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently endorsed Donald Trump, is attempting to remove his name from the ballots in 10 “swing states.” Although Democrats tried to keep Kennedy off the ballot to protect President Biden, they are now working to keep him on the ballot to undermine Donald Trump in some states!

If neither Trump nor Harris receive the necessary 270 electoral votes to win, the House of Representatives would vote by state to pick the president (26 to win). Each senator would cast a single vote for vice president (51 to win). This happened in 1800 and 1824. Therefore, the majority party emerging from the 2024 election could choose the president and vice president in January 2025.

Conclusion

If a sufficient number of pro-life Americans decline to vote, and Harris-Walz wins along with their Democratic down-ticket colleagues, the Republicans will likely lose the majority in Congress. With so much at stake, how can anyone justify not voting?

AUTHOR

Bob Marshall

Bob Marshall served 26 years in the Virginia House of Delegates and was the chief House sponsor of the 2006 voter-approved Virginia Marriage Amendment and a ban on late term abortion. He authored 60+ laws and studies, and was Chairman of the General Assembly Stem Cell Study.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘A New Way Forward’? Harris Campaign [Finally] Announces 2024 Policies

One day ahead of her debate with former President Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris has unveiled a policy agenda that could compel Christian businesses to participate in abortion and LGBT events that violate biblical morality, sign a national abortion expansion bill, pack the Supreme Court, give amnesty to the entire illegal immigrant population of the United States, strip law-abiding U.S. citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process, double-down on inflationary economic policies, continue criminal lawfare against Trump, and promote universal daycare.

Until Monday morning, the “issues” section of Kamala Harris’s campaign website did not exist 49 days after the Democratic Party coronated Harris without a primary. Harris has dubbed her policy plan “A New Way Forward” — the same name President George W. Bush gave to his 2007 surge in Iraq, intended to end terrorism against U.S. soldiers and transform Muslim Iraq into a pluralistic Western democracy.

Equity for the LGBTQ movement, bankruptcy for Christian businesses: The cornerstone of Harris’s LGBTQ policy, which she brands as promoting “civil rights,” would prevent Christian business people from living out their faith in the private sector and economically impoverish believers. After noting she began unlawfully officiating same-sex marriage in 2004 as California attorney general and “refused to defend” a marriage protection amendment democratically passed by California voters, Harris promises “to pass the Equality Act to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more into law.” The so-called Equality Act would add sexual preference and, in some versions, gender identity, to landmark civil rights legislation designed to protect racial minorities and women from discrimination. By raising homosexuality and transgenderism to the same legal status as race and religion, the Equality Act could force Christian doctors to perform gender-reassignment surgeries and require Christian business owners to take part in services that violate their religious beliefs — or go out of business. State and local statutes modeled after this bill have resulted in such lawfare prosecutions as the never-ending legal disputes of Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips.

Throughout the issues section, Harris contrasts her policy positions, not with the radically truncated 2024 Republican Party platform which Trump campaign operatives foisted on rank-and-file delegates at the Republican National Committee on July 8, but with “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda.” The Trump campaign publicly opposed the project, which the Heritage Foundation subsequently shut down. Trump replaced GOP’s historic commitment to a Human Life Amendment, and Republican vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) confirmed that Trump will veto any national pro-life protections that cross his desk during the next four years.

The “Project 2025 agenda will eliminate federal rules that protect LGBTQI+ Americans from discrimination,” says the website, referring to laws like the SAFE Act that prevent the predatory transgender industry from targeting minors for puberty blocks, cross-sex hormone injections, and life-altering surgeries.

A national abortion expansion act: The website continues the Harris campaign’s rebranding of abortion as “reproductive freedom,” vowing that, as president, “she will never allow a national abortion ban to become law. And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom nationwide, she will sign it.” The Biden-Harris administration has endorsed the so-called “Women’s Health Protection” Act (WHPA), which would strike down more than 1,300 state pro-life protections including laws protecting children from late-term abortions (including some after the point of viability), repealing parental consent and notification laws, and repealing conscience protections for pro-life healers.

“If elected, Trump will ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control, force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, and jeopardize access to IVF,” it claims, although no law nor proposal would curtail IVF, and Trump controversially promised to force insurance plans, or U.S. taxpayers, to fund the procedure, which has resulted in unknown millions of abortions and abandoned embryos.

“He even called for punishment for women who have an abortion,” says the website — based on an off-the-cuff remark Trump reversed the day after he made it in a March 2016 interview with Chris Matthews, who resigned from MSNBC four years ago. Trump explained during the 2016 campaign, “I didn’t mean punishment for women like prison” but rather that women who have abortions “punish themselves.” Numerous surveys show women suffer psychologically, and often physically, after enduring an abortion.

The section apparently praises her own administration’s foray into compelling taxpayers to fund abortion. “Vice President Harris and Governor Walz believe we have a sacred obligation to care for our nation’s service members, veterans, [and] their families,” says the website. Last July, the Biden-Harris administration Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, called paying for abortions a “foundational, sacred obligation of military leaders.”

Amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants: Harris promises to “secure our borders and fix our broken immigration system,” which her website ranks below promoting gun control. She “will bring back the bipartisan border security bill,” which she called “the strongest reform in decades.” Harris promises to reward tens of millions of illegal immigrants who broke U.S. immigration law with U.S. citizenship, calling her amnesty plan “an earned pathway to citizenship.” The Biden-Harris administration has presided over record-breaking levels of illegal immigration every year in office, not counting new legal pathways they have been established for immigrants from nations such as Haiti. Previous historic levels of illegal immigration came when candidates promised, or delivered, amnesty. This “is her attempt to make permanent what we have seen, which is lawlessness,” Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) told Fox Business on Tuesday morning.

The Democratic candidate blames the broken border on Donald Trump. “Trump fail to tackle violence in our communities or fix our broken immigration system — he will make us less safe,” the Harris website states. “He’ll advance his cruel immigration agenda which includes separating children from their parents,” a policy carried out by the Obama-Biden administration and continued by the Biden-Harris administration.

The fentanyl crisis: “This past year, the number of overdose deaths in the United States declined for the first time in five years,” the website boasts. But the Biden-Harris administration presided over record-breaking numbers of overdoses, largely driven by fentanyl crossing the Southern border from Mexico. The administration’s drug policy aimed to decriminalize marijuana and promoted so-called “harm reduction” policies, which distributed crack pipes to addicts as part of taxpayer-funded “smoking kits.”

Supreme Court packing: Harris supports a plan that would overhaul the U.S. Supreme Court by “requiring [j]ustices to comply with ethics rules that other federal judges are bound by and imposing term limits.” The recent term limits plan embraced by prominent Democrats would sideline the most conservative justices and transform the court from a lifetime appointment to one continually threatened by, and responding to, political pressure.

More gun control: Harris promises to “ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” The Biden-Harris administration has applied the term “assault rifle” to America’s most popular rifle, the AR-15; California law also bans magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The vice president’s pledge to “require universal background checks” would require the government to pry into all sales, and potentially gifts, of guns between private individuals. She also vows to pass “red flag laws,” which unconstitutionally remove guns from the home of law-abiding citizens without due process, if their neighbors, criminals, or vengeful ex-boyfriends report them as mentally troubled. The laws would render those reported defenseless in their own homes.

The website notes, “As head of the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, she spearheaded policies to expand background checks and close the gun show loophole. Under her and President Biden’s leadership, violent crime is at a 50-year low, with the largest single-year drop in murders ever.” In fact, the U.S. homicide rate rose again in 2021 to 8.2 out of 100,00 according to the CDC. The homicide rate in 2022, the most recent year for which data are available, stood at 7.7, significantly higher than the 5.9 rate in 2018.

The website complains that Donald Trump “wants to arm teachers in our classrooms” in response to an ongoing string of school shootings.

Prosecuting Donald Trump? The Harris campaign website promises the Democratic presidential candidate will “fight to ensure that no former president has immunity for crimes committed while in the White House.” That comes in response to a Supreme Court ruling which granted presidents extremely limited immunity for actions carried out in his official capacity as president of the United States — not for private actions. Legal experts warn the threat of prosecution would criminalize political differences and turn the United States into a banana republic.

Nonetheless, the website claims President Trump will “bring the Department of Justice and the FBI under his direct control so he can give himself unchecked legal power and go after his opponents.” Similarly, at the first night of the Democratic National Convention, Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow (D) warned, “Under Project 2025, Donald Trump would be able to weaponize the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents.”

“Donald Trump is a convicted criminal who only cares about himself,” the website says.

Recycling lies about Donald Trump: The issues section also misleads about the two candidates’ biographies and policy positions. “Vice President Harris grew up in a middle[-]class home as the daughter of a working mom,” says the website. But Kamala Harris grew up in the famously left-wing city of Berkeley where her father, Donald J. Harris, was “a renowned Marxist professor” and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a cancer researcher. The vice president also grew up in Montreal.

Donald Trump has “said he would let Russia ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to our NATO allies. And he calls soldiers who gave their lives in defense of American democracy ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’” it says. Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton — a neoconservative who has persistently criticized Trump’s non-interventionist foreign policy — called reports that President Trump disparaged fallen U.S. soldiers “simply false.” The comments from Trump, a master of overstatement, about NATO came in response to a question from a foreign leader about whether the U.S. would defend a nation that steadfastly refused to meet its obligations under the treaty to spend a requisite amount of funds on its own national defense. For decades, Trump has criticized one-sided deals in which foreign nations freeload off U.S. taxpayers.

Demonizing Trump: “Someone as dangerous as Donald Trump should never again be allowed to serve as commander-in-chief,” says the website. “Top American military generals and national security officials — including those who worked for Trump — have warned that he is ‘dangerous’ and ‘unfit’ to lead, and now he is surrounded by ultra-loyalists who enable his worst impulses.” These remarks come despite a near-fatal assassination attempt against the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, which missed by a fraction of an inch, something the president has credited to divine intervention.

Civil rights: Kamala Harris commits herself to securing “$2 billion in funding for Offices of Civil Rights across the federal government,” which will supersize federal lawsuits against private employers who refuse to implement Woke policies on the basis of race, sexual preference, and gender identity.

Inflationary economics and price controls: Kamala Harris says that “guilding up the middle class will be a defining goal of her presidency.” Yet on her watch, inflation reached a 40-year high of 9.1% in 2022, lifting costs and squeezing families across the nation. Overall groceries have risen nearly 20% over four years. The median price of a new house has more than doubled since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office. Americans must spend an extra $13,000 a year under the Biden-Harris administration to have the same standard of living they enjoyed under the Trump administration, according to one expert analysis. The spike in prices, which critics dub Bidenflation, has reduced Americans’ savings levels by 3.2%. The website notes “[h]er tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act,” which economists say carried a real price tag of $1.2 trillion and sparked inflation, in addition to piling more money onto the $35 trillion national debt. As the site also points out, “Vice President Harris cast the deciding vote on the” $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan.”

Harris has promised to implement national price controls on food and rent. She will implement the “first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries,” says the website, although grocers have an extremely thin profit margin. She also promises national rent control. “Vice President Harris knows rent is too high and will sign legislation to outlaw new forms of price fixing by corporate landlords.” She claims she’ll build three million more rental units and “Vice President Harris will provide first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 to help with their down payments, with more generous support for first-generation homeowners.” Economists agree the policy will simply raise the price of houses by $25,000 while price controls, which failed in the 1970s, will restrict supply.

“Trump would raise rents and add $1,200 a year to the typical American mortgage,” she claims without proof.

Harris’s campaign promises she “will take on Big Pharma,” although the Biden-Harris administration passed vaccination mandates that the White House claimed applied to two-thirds of all U.S. workers, including attempting to force the approximately 25 million people employed at a workplace with at least 100 employees to take the COVID-19 shot or be fired. They also dismissed 8,400 members of the U.S. armed forces who refused to take the shot. Researchers have subsequently linked the injection to an increased risk of myocarditis and excess deaths.

“Vice President Harris will protect Social Security and Medicare against relentless attacks from Donald Trump,” who has steadfastly opposed any reform of the entitlement programs. Social Security is scheduled to become insolvent in 2033. Medicare faces the same fate in 2036.

Environmental globalism: Meeting the “global challenge” of climate change “will require global cooperation,” and she is committed to continuing “the United States’ international climate leadership,” says the Harris campaign website. The U.S. will lead global compacts on fossil fuels. “[S]he will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice.” Harris, who promised she would “absolutely” end fracking in the 2020 Democratic primaries, claims this will result in “lowering household energy costs” and “record energy production.”

Kamala warns Trump will increase gasoline prices: “Trump asked Big Oil executives to give his campaign money so he could roll back regulations and cut taxes for Big Oil to boost their profits, and Trump’s plans would push gas prices up,” she asserts. The cost of a gallon of gasoline has increased from $2.33 when President Donald Trump left office in January 2021 to a record high of $5.02 in June 2022 under Biden-Harris, despite releasing nearly half of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The cost now sits at $3.62 a gallon.

“Trump’s economic plans would also trigger a recession by mid-2025,” she said, although some economists agree America is already in a recession. The U.S. experienced the textbook definition of a recession — two consecutive quarters of economic contraction — under the Biden-Harris administration in the first two quarters of 2022. But the administration has denied the recession took place, since the panel tasked with declaring a recession, the Business Cycle Dating Committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research, did not formally make such a pronouncement.

PRO Act/public sector unions: “She’ll sign landmark pro-union legislation, including the PRO Act to support workers who choose to organize and bargain and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act to make the freedom for public service workers to form unions the law of the land.” The PRO Act would force millions of workers to pay union dues against their will, cripple freelance work, erase free speech and privacy rights, skew elections in favor of unionization, and radically increase the federal government’s intervention into everyday workplace disputes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed the 1935 Wagner Act codifying Americans’ right to union representation, believed public-sector unions should not exist and called militant labor tactics “unthinkable and intolerable.”

“She’ll fight to raise the minimum wage, end sub-minimum wages for tipped workers,” radically altering the landscape of tipped work.

Harris’s agenda will be paid for by “making millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.” The top 1% of U.S. income earners pay 46% of all federal income taxes, while the bottom 50% pays 2% of taxes.

Manufacturing jobs: “Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 1.6 million manufacturing and construction jobs have been created,” Harris claims. But most of these are jobs destroyed during COVID-19 lockdowns coming back online. The Biden-Harris administration has in fact added 147,000 manufacturing jobs above the level in January 2020.

Universal preschool: “Vice President Harris will fight to ensure parents can afford high-quality child care and preschool for their children. … [E]nsuring hardworking families can afford high-quality child care, all while ensuring that care workers are paid a living wage and treated with the dignity and respect they deserve,” the website states. However, surveys consistently show most mothers would like to remain home with their own children, at least part of the time, during their child’s formative years.

Transferring student loan debt and medical costs to taxpayers: Harris will “continue working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt,” she promises. “As Vice President, she also announced that medical debt will be removed from credit reports, and helped cancel $7 billion of medical debt for 3 million Americans. As President, she’ll work with states to cancel medical debt for even more Americans.”

Promising not to raise taxes on most Americans, but … : Harris is also “committed to ensuring no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes.” But the Biden-Harris administration has already raised fees on the middle class and working poor by:

  • expanding the number of items that must be registered under the National Firearms Act, with a $200 fee for each item;
  • reinstating the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and $695-per-person penalty, which President Trump eliminated;
  • imposing a carbon and/or methane tax. One proposal would charge companies $1,800 per ton of methane they handle (not emit), with the cost rising 2% above inflation each year;
  • increasing corporate taxes, which pass on approximately one-third of increased costs to consumers by raising prices (and another third by reducing payroll costs/hours); and
  • hiking cigarette taxes, which fall disproportionately on the working class.

She also praises tax-and-spend policies, claiming that “when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad-based economic growth and creates jobs, which makes our economy stronger.” But Paul Mueller of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) described Harris’s economic interventionism as “extensive government involvement, huge amounts of spending,” and “a giveaway campaign.”

She also plans more Woke equity, pledging to “increase access to capital for small businesses and bring venture capital to parts of middle America that have for too long been overlooked … tripling the Small Business Administration’s lending to [b]lack-owned businesses, and more than doubling small-dollar lending to Latino and women-owned businesses.”

Harris also supports increasing taxpayer-funded subsidies for the Obamacare health care exchanges.

Foreign policy: Harris says she “will always stand up for American interests in the face of China’s threats.”

“Vice President Harris will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself,” the website avers. “She and President Biden are working to end the war in Gaza, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”

The vice president’s website also notes her strong support for Ukraine. Under the Biden-Harris administration, U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $175 billion aiding Ukraine, despite its stalled war with Russia, the Zelensky government’s well-documented corruption, and persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

The website boasts that Kamala Harris has been “advising on tough decisions in the Oval Office and the Situation Room.” Harris bragged about being “the last person in the room” before Joe Biden decided on the details of the calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which cost the lives of 13 U.S. service members and left an unknown number of Americans stranded behind the Taliban’s lines.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Cleaning Up Kamala’ | TRAILER OUT NOW

A couple months ago, Kamala Harris was the worst VP in American history. Now, she’s heralded as the Savior of the Republic.

Suffering from whiplash? We are too. That’s why we set out to expose how this inexplicable 180 happened.

The Daily Caller’s new documentary, “Cleaning Up Kamala,” shows that one doesn’t just become a warm, joyful “Momala” overnight. It takes a whole billion-dollar media effort.

“Cleaning Up Kamala” debuts Sept 13. and is available exclusively for Patriots subscribers. Catch a first glimpse below.

First, the Daily Caller uncovered the true cost of the Defund the Police movement in “Lawless.”  Then “Rigged” exposed the issue Democrats fear most: how their political machine managed to secure Joe Biden the presidency in 2020. Now, with “Cleaning Up Kamala,” we take on a corrupt corporate media establishment that built a new presidential candidate, their candidate, out of whole cloth.

Harris was nobody’s first choice. Voters resoundingly rejected her in the 2020 primaries. Joe Biden chose her as VP to check an identity box, but she proved more incompetent than anyone could have imagine. A revolving door of staffers found it unbearable to work with her. She failed miserably as the border czar and her cackle made everyone uncomfortable. Unsurprisingly, her approval rating stood deep underwater — until she was made into the new Queen of the Democratic Party.

With hilarious clips and insightful interviews, “Cleaning Up Kamala” shows how the media turned this trainwreck into a tulip.

The Daily Caller’s documentary productions are made possible by our faithful Patriots members, and we wouldn’t be able to do it without them. To watch “Cleaning Up Kamala” on Sept. 13, and to help support future investigative documentaries, please consider subscribing.

AUTHOR

Gage Klipper

Commentary and analysis writer.

RELATED VIDEOS:

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column with video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Potential For Abuse’: Kamala’s Debate Prep With Lead Google Attorney Sets Off Alarm Bells With Gov’t Watchdogs

The attorney helping Vice President Kamala Harris with debate preparation is also defending Google from the antitrust lawsuit brought by the Biden-Harris Department of Justice (DOJ), which government transparency advocates say presents a conflict of interest.

Karen Dunn, who is helping Harris prepare for Tuesday’s debate against former President Donald Trump, gave the opening statement Monday during Google’s trial. While there is nothing explicitly preventing Dunn from taking on both roles, experts say the campaign’s decision to work with her should raise concern.

“Somebody in the Harris Campaign should google ‘conflict of interest,’” Protect the Public’s Trust Director Michael Chamberlain told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Imagine being a DOJ attorney, working on this case in good faith. Your potential future boss is entrusting her campaign to someone who is working for one of DOJ’s most formidable opponent litigants — against you. That’s disheartening.”

Chamberlain noted there is “tremendous potential for abuse with the overlap of the Vice President’s political world and an executive branch agency.”

“Relationships like these ignite howls of outrage when they involve other campaigns,” he said.

Dunn has helped Democratic candidates in every presidential election since 2008 prepare for debates, according to The New York Times.

Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, told the NYT that “you can’t serve both sides.”

“If these were legal cases, she would be ethically barred from doing what she’s doing,” Stoller said.

Stoller told the DCNF that there’s no formal ethics rule restricting Dunn because “the Harris campaign is a political campaign, not a lawsuit.”

While Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, told the DCNF he sees the “theoretical conflict,” he also explained that “helping with debate prep is a way of volunteering for a campaign.”

“Lots of people and organizations both volunteer for campaigns and provide financial backing to campaigns that have business before the federal government,” Painter said.

The Trump campaign called Harris out over the potential conflict in August.

“Kamala Harris will never stand up to Big Tech because she’s being coached on what to say in the debates by Google’s top lawyer,” Trump campaign senior adviser Tim Murtaugh told Fox News. “Think about how outrageous it is — their administration is suing Google, but Harris is taking political advice from the defendant’s lawyer.”

The debate between Harris and Trump, which will take place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is scheduled for 9 p.m. Tuesday on ABC News.

The Harris campaign and Dunn did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

AUTHOR

Katelynn Richardson

Contributor.

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‘Afraid To Have Her Speak’: Kellyanne Conway Claims Harris Squandered Her Chance To Change Her Image By ‘Hiding’

CNN Guest Says Harris Avoiding Interviews ‘Raised The Stakes’ For Debate

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


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Trump Kicks Off Coalition to Shore Up Catholic Support

Former President Donald Trump is launching a new initiative to bolster his support among American Catholics. On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign launched the “Catholics for Trump” coalition.

“The Catholics for Trump Coalition is committed to safeguarding the vital principles of religious liberty and the sanctity of life that President Donald J. Trump has ardently championed,” the coalition’s mission statement says. “Under President Trump’s leadership, our nation witnessed unprecedented support for religious freedoms, with significant victories both domestically and globally. President Trump restored protections for faith-based organizations and bolstered the rights of religious institutions against governmental overreach.”

“Unlike the Harris-Biden administration, which has systematically undermined these fundamental rights, President Trump has stood unwaveringly in defense of traditional values and the sanctity of human life,” the mission statement continues. “Catholics for Trump stands with President Trump to continue building a nation where the rights of every individual to practice their faith freely is protected. Together, we have the opportunity to secure a future that honors the principles of freedom, faith, and life that are integral to our American heritage.”

Trump has been encouraging Catholics to back his reelection, noting the anti-Catholic policies of his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D). Trump recently posted on social media, “Catholics are literally being persecuted by this Wack Job, just ask the Knights of Columbus. They say that she is the most Anti-Catholic person ever to run for high office in the U.S.” He called on “ALL CATHOLICS TO VOTE AGAINST KAMALA…”

While polling over the years has shown Trump — and the Republican Party more generally — gaining support from American Catholics, especially as the Democratic Party embraces increasingly extreme positions on abortion, a more recent EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research survey found that Trump is trailing Harris among Catholic voters, though neither candidate has the support of a clear majority. Abortion has proven to be a dividing issue, with Trump’s declaration that the federal government has no role in abortion-related legislation finding little favor among Catholic voters. Like most Americans, Catholics rank inflation and the economy, as well as border security and illegal immigration, the most pressing issues ahead of November’s election.

The Catholic Church is strictly and directly opposed to abortion, unequivocally declaring the practice a grave moral evil. Trump’s positions on abortion, voiced over the course of this year, along with the positions of his running mate, Catholic convert and Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), have caused some concern among pro-life Americans, including Catholics. For example, Trump recently suggested that he would support an amendment to Florida’s state constitution allowing abortion, which is currently prohibited past the sixth week of pregnancy in the Sunshine State. In response to backlash from pro-lifers, including Catholic pro-life activist Lila Rose, Trump reversed his position and announced that he would be voting against the amendment. The former president’s abortion-related comments have thus been a source of consternation for Catholic voters.

In comments to The Washington Stand, Catholic League President Bill Donohue explained, “Most practicing Catholics are pro-life (the non-practicing ones are more in tune with the secular pro-abortion side), but they also want to win, and that means we need to be pragmatic.” While Donohue did say that Trump “did the right thing initially” by focusing on politically winning issues like inflation, the economy, and illegal immigration, his more recent comments on abortion show that he has “faltered” and needs “to rebound” on the issue. “He will find a sympathetic audience with Catholics, and most Americans, if he talks about the real extremists — Democrats who favor late-term abortions and who vote against bills that protect the life of a child who survives a botched abortion. He needs to be more consistent on this issue,” Donohue continued.

He added, “Trump won the Catholic vote in 2016, 52% to 45%, but he barely won it in 2020. Given the anti-Catholic animus of the FBI, and other agencies under Biden-Harris, the Catholic vote should be his in 2024.”

The “Catholics for Trump” coalition boasts that, while in office, Trump “did more for Catholics than any administration in history!” Among the achievements listed are conscience protections to ensure that Catholics in the health care industry are not forced to commit or support abortions, pro-life executive orders, and Trump’s address to the annual March for Life — the first time a sitting U.S. president ever spoke to attendees of the event.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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RELATED VIDEO: Rasmussen Reports: Trump is on his way to WINNING the national popular vote

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

This is not fake news: U.S. Surgeon General warns that parenting is a health hazard

The US Surgeon General, Dr Vivek Murthy, just issued an official advisory warning against the stressful nature of parenting and labelling it “an urgent public health issue.” The document says Surgeon General Advisories “require the nation’s immediate awareness and action.” So, according to the Surgeon General, what exactly is the urgent issue and what immediate actions should be taken to rescue parents from the stress of raising their own children?

In short, the advisory cites data showing that parents experience more stress than non-parents and that sometimes, some parents’ stress levels are so high they cannot function. It says parental stress can negatively affect children. It says major sources of parental stress include “financial strain and economic instability, time demands, concerns over children’s health and safety, parental isolation and loneliness, difficulty managing technology and social media, and cultural pressures.”

All true.

I’m a mom of five children, and I birthed four of them within a time span of roughly five years. 12 years later, I had a baby in my 40s. We had diapers and dating going on at the same time. I’m no stranger to stress. I have known financial strain, the instability of layoffs, bone-deep fatigue, and so much more.

As for not being able to function, that depends on your definition of the word “function”. (Does inventing games where I lay motionless on the bed while my kids pile heaps of clean laundry on top of me count as “functioning”?) Parenting has beat the stuffing right out of me at times. But through all these years, I never saw my children as a threat to my mental health.

Children are a danger to their parents

This Surgeon General’s Advisory is the first time I recall seeing an official government entity framing children as a clear and present danger to their parents. It reminds me of radical feminist Sophie Lewis’ assertion that babies in utero commit “fetal violence” toward their mothers by introducing health threats to and demanding nourishment from their unfortunate maternal hosts. Likewise, Suzanne Sadedin says an unborn baby employs “manipulation, blackmail, and violence” against its mother while floating in the womb and usurping whatever sustenance it can suck from her body.

Collectivism is always the answer

What does the Surgeon General say should be done about this assault on parents’ health? The “We Can Take Action” section of the advisory starts with this preface: “[W]hile parents and caregivers may have the primary responsibility for raising children… [it] is a collective responsibility.” It then gives a laundry list of collectivist solutions including the following:

  • “Bolster support for childcare financial assistance programs such as childcare subsidies and child income tax credits; universal preschool; early childhood education programs.”
  • “Establish a national paid family and medical leave program.”
  • Prioritise “poverty reduction, prevention of adverse childhood experiences… and improve access to healthy food and affordable housing.”
  • “Strengthen public and private insurance coverage of mental health care.”
  • Expand workplace policies, including “paid parental, medical, and sick leave” and “access to childcare (in the community or on-site)”.

Unsurprisingly, most of the solutions call for more government intervention and lots more childcare. (Sorry, but universal preschool has not been shown to improve the situation of the majority of children or their parents.) We will never fix the problem by encouraging less family unity and more government “help” that comes at the cost of higher taxes.

There doesn’t seem to be acknowledgment in the Surgeon General’s Advisory that the separation of parents and children for most of the waking hours of every day and the reality of both parents focusing most of their time and efforts outside the home may be contributing to the very problem they’re trying to solve: the widespread breakdown of the mental health and happiness of both children and their parents.

The advisory does have some solid suggestions that deserve kudos. For instance, it urges friends and family members to offer practical support to parents, including “lending assistance with household chores, childcare responsibilities, or running errands” and “looking for ways to support parents and caregivers so they can take breaks, attend needed appointments, and engage in self-care activities.” Bravo.

Humble solutions

Here are some additional suggestions for policymakers and individuals:

  • Live near familyGrandparents and others can offer vital support. Studies show that living near grandparents can benefit children, parents, and grandparents.
  • Ease parents’ financial burdens by lowering taxes; do this by eliminating social programs, not increasing or expanding them. Largely let families solve their own problems with their own money.
  • Cultivate an economy in which one parent can primarily support the family financially, and one parent can primarily focus on the physical and emotional needs of their children.
  • Spend more time and effort preparing children for parenthood. Cultivate selflessness, sacrifice, and responsibility in children (Hint: Large families often foster this.)
  • Limit time spent on electronic devices for both parents and children (for more vital information on this, see my articles here and here.)
  • Revitalise THE NEIGHBOURHOOD. Initiate simple neighbourhood gatherings to get to know the people around you. Use social media neighbourhood groups to support each other, like offering to pick up a gallon of milk, etc., for the family next door.
  • Don’t wait for the government to save you. If you are overstressed — as I was at one time when my kids were young — ask another parent to swap babysitting with you every week (or as often as needed.) Doing this reduced my stress level significantly.
  • Reconsider and revise your priorities. If work has become more dominant than home life, or if your life is overrun with too much to do, simplify and sacrifice in order to focus on what matters most to you.

Despite the often chaotic and stressful nature of parenting, most parents see their children as a deep and satisfying source of joy — despite the pain. There is work and struggle in parenthood. That’s part of what you sign up for when you decide to welcome a helpless person into your life.

But you also sign up for a life of purpose and boundless adventure beyond what you could have imagined. And almost all parents rise to the occasion. They embrace the adventure of raising a family, and it gives them both daily and lifelong purpose. At the end of the day — and at the end of their lives — most parents consider themselves better off rather than worse off for having embarked on the irreplaceable adventure of becoming parents.


What do you make of the US Surgeon General’s advisory? Leave your thoughts below.


AUTHOR

Kimberly Ells is the author of The Invincible Family. Follow her at Invincible Family Substack.

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

Will ‘Generation Z’ Take Us All to Hell?

David Warren: We were counting on the younger generation to provide us with further generations of kids, but they seem to have come to believe that they have better things to do.


“Well done, good and faithful servant,” as we said to ourselves in thinking (here) of Saint Bruno today, that courageous enemy of decadence and filth, and of the Carthusian Order he founded. “Euge!”

I’ve been trying to catch up with our social degeneration with the help of Jonathan Haidt, the only social psychologist who is, apparently, not also a left-wing lunatic. His recent book, The Anxious Generation, is a study of the latest generation of our youth, and how they’ve been rewired by the Internet.

It’s a challenging topic, for none of the subjects of his study has – as a result of entanglement in apps, video games, and influencers – what was previously known as an “attention span.” Dr. Haidt writes about people who have no use for books, and will only tune into a summary for as long as it takes to call up another screen.

The beginning of this “revolution” was in approximately 2014, or prior to the visitation of Batflu. Or perhaps 2011, according to alternative reports. The “Zoomer” cohort was born about 1997, so as their teens began to pass into adulthood, “social media” arrived.

It arrived for their elders, too, but we had the advantage of familiarity with a world before, which I fondly remember. The speed with which it came, saw, and conquered, was not an event. There is simply a before, and an after, when nothing will ever be the same.

Around here in Toronto, for instance, it is difficult to spot a young person who is not jangled and inhabited by extra-planetary voices, to which he is wired via headphone. Except, the little buds sticking out his ears seem now to have been “integrated” with his flesh.

Dr. Haidt investigates the brave new world of mental illness that follows from youthful addiction, in America, and more or less simultaneously, everywhere on earth. He looks at the consequence of lost childhoods, where play has ceased to happen, along with independent exploration, on the path to maturity. He surveys the explosion of anxieties that have resulted: the children have freaked out.

My son, who is a technologist (but nevertheless sane) points to the apps, rather than the telephony, available through various hand-held devices. It’s more or less plain that unrestricted commercial “sponsors” govern them, and direct the social damage for their own material gain, without the slightest sense of responsibility.

As are the political interests, which do not give a damn about moral consequences, but wish to censor deviation from their narrow party lines. They are the co-authors of the catastrophe, by using heretical inquisitions to constrain our ability to resist, by suppressing freedom of speech.

Yet so would the (sometimes attractive) idea of shutting the whole Internet down – which would be the shortest way with the abusers. The sun will do that anyway, at the next Carrington Event.

For Generation Z itself, there is a question whether it would survive Internet closure – as the final step in the dramatic decline, from many causes, of the birthrate. For we were counting on the younger generation to provide us with further generations of kids; but they have better things to do.

Perhaps they are “the last generation”? Or maybe they merely precede a great depopulation, as the Black Plague did in the XIVth century.

For like ants, and bedbugs, the creatures with which Heaven favors this world are characteristically robust, within their allotted “time zones,” and do not simply disappear without something ready to replace them. It isn’t for us to know what, or who, that will be.

And if we did know, we would be mortally surprised.

But meanwhile we have some years to run, with a generation that can’t be counted on, for anything. This is what makes Generation Z unique.

We cannot even count on them to be evil, in the time-honored ways, as previous generations were, since Adam. I would not mistake this for innocence, however.

We cannot expect them to follow self-interest, or even the perversions of self-interest that bring wealth and power.

Of course, people will write in to tell me that they know, say, some lads or lasses who are an exception to my rule, and have not been acting like the “Zees” at all. That is the marvelous thing about the humans. You can’t expect them all to go to hell by the same route. There are, however, some very broad highways.

And the Internet has, since it was recently created (barely a generation ago), provided such a highway, over a landscape that was, comparatively, just flowers and trees. It was an extraordinary economic opportunity, for both good and bad actors. And as usual the bad were awfully quick.

If humans should last so long, it would, like other revolutions, be gradually assimilated and tamed, but how soon? The Industrial Revolution still hasn’t been assimilated, after two or three centuries. The Electronic Revolution may take much longer, for it slides much farther along the track of mobility, and moves closer to everyone, everywhere.

To a perhaps unprecedented extent, it even enables us to slide out of our minds.

This is a world in which men can become women, and women can become men, and half the men and women are comfortable with that: the former men and women in quite different ways. For the behavioral differences between the two sexes have become more apparent to psychologists and sociologists than ever before, even while their bodies become interchangeable. For females and males have succumbed to contrasting mental illnesses.

It is a time when Generation X is almost forgotten as if in antiquity, in which Millennials are about to be forgotten, and in which the new Generation Alpha (arguably still being born) does not have a parentage – except for those happy exceptions, chiefly of weird people who still go to church.

But the “reset” that Generation Z brings, rises to God; with Whom, as I have observed, all things are possible.


You may also enjoy:

Robert Royal The Time of the Gentiles

Michael Pakaluk Faith Counts


AUTHOR

David Warren

David Warren is a former editor of the Idler magazine and columnist in Canadian newspapers. He has extensive experience in the Near and Far East. His blog, Essays in Idleness, is now to be found at: davidwarrenonline.com.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2024 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Is America Pro-Abortion?

About 25 years ago, I had the privilege to sit down to interview the late George Gallup, Jr., the esteemed pollster whose father founded Gallup Polls.

One of the things Gallup, Jr. said that I’ve never forgotten was his response to my question: Is America pro-abortion rights or pro-life?

He said 20% of Americans are strongly pro-choice. 20% are strongly pro-life. And the other 60% are in the “mushy middle,” and they can go either way depending upon what you ask and how you ask. I imagine that is still roughly the case.

Fast forward to this election season, and abortion is on the ballot again, directly or indirectly.

Obviously, the key presidential candidates and their teams differ greatly on this, as do others running for office. But abortion is more directly on the ballot in 11 states that have referenda dealing with the issue. One of those is Florida, generally a pro-life state.

Since “Roe” was overturned, some states have voted to allow even more abortions than would have been accepted before. Is Ohio pro-life? If so, why did they vote for abortion up to the moment of birth last year?

Eric Scheidler, executive director of the Pro-Life Action League, remarks that if given a choice between two extremes: either zero abortions allowed or abortion without any restrictions, Americans will choose the latter not the former.

Dr. Chris Leader of Vote Your Faith has studied the ballot initiatives on abortion. As noted, Florida has Amendment #4 on the ballot. A vote “yes” on that referendum is a vote for abortion up to the moment of birth.

Surprisingly, some polls find Americans far less pro-abortion than the mainstream media would have us believe.

I interviewed Dr. Leader for a radio segment on this recently. He told our listeners: “What we found at the America First Policy Institute through a Rasmussen poll that we commissioned is that 73% of Americans now believe that there are two lives involved in any abortion, the life of the mother and the life of the baby.”

He noted that that finding is very different than polls conducted in the 1990s, where it was hard to get people to recognize the life of the baby. So, this new shift in thinking is a great improvement to the pro-life cause.

Furthermore, Leader said that their polling also found that 92% of Americans oppose late-term abortion, up to the moment of birth—or even after birth. Thus, the left’s hardcore position is out of step with majority of Americans on this point.

Leader also said that 71% of Americans believe there should be some legal limits to abortion. However, he hastens to add that we disagree as to what those limits should be. Nonetheless, it is significant that the position taken by many on the hard left—abortion without limits—is not a position held by the majority of Americans.

If you support abortion, do you know what you are actually supporting? In testimony before Congress, Dr. Anthony Levatino, an OB/GYN, explains a common abortion procedure—what they actually do in second trimester abortions (not the majority of abortions, but there are thousands of them in America every year).

Here is a recent article about Dr. Levatino and some of his testimony before Congress on how they do abortions—and the left’s attempt to ignore him.

Levatino used to do abortions (having performed more than 1200), but then he became pro-life. How? “One day, after completing one of those abortions, I looked at the remains of a preborn child whose life I had ended, and all I could see was someone’s son or daughter. I came to realize that killing a baby at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason, is wrong,” he said.

But what about first trimester abortions? Surely, they are justified, argue some. But Lila Rose’s organization, Live Action.org, shows this too is a lie. And then there are third trimester abortions.

Meanwhile, abortion is sold in the name of “choice,” but Dr. Ingrid Skop, OB-GYN, notes that many women feel they were forced to abort. She writes, “Some 20-60 percent of women obtaining abortions may desire their pregnancy but experience pressure or coercion to terminate.”

Our Declaration of Independence, our nation’s birth certificate, says that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights—the first one being, the right to life. But abortion undermines those rights.

If we continue down this pro-abortion path, I believe that future generations will look at us with horror—the way we look at previous Americans who blithely accepted human slavery as the norm.

One day God will hold us all accountable for these things, including how we vote on these matters. May God send a true revival, leading to a culture of life.

©2024. All rights reserved.

CHRISTIANS MUST VOTE: Watch My Faith Votes’ Laurel Brooks interview with Tom Trento

Tom Trento and Laurel discuss the controversial issues of the day including, the war in Gaza, Abortion, the sad situation of Christians who do not vote, and provide solutions for all these problems!

WATCH: CHRISTIANS MUST VOTE: Watch My Faith Votes’ Laurel Brooks interview with Tom Trento

 THE MY FAITH VOTES STORY

An estimated 25 million Christians who are registered to vote, fail to vote in presidential elections. My Faith Votes is on a mission to change this statistic by helping Christians act on their faith and vote in every election. When we pray unceasingly for our nation, think biblically about the issues, and vote consistently in every election the impact of Christians taking action from the local to the state and federal level will be unprecedented.

©2024. The United West/ Defend The Border. All rights reserved.

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Florida Must Vote No on Amendment 4, Don’t Put Abortions Up to Birth in the State Constitution

Thank goodness for the Population Research Institute. Somebody is telling us the truth about the world birth dearth

Steven Mosher is his own man: an attribute, which, in our corrupt epoch, is a decided disadvantage. Thinking for oneself, no matter the mania, fad or fashion into which the mass of humanity is herded, has cost him dearly. Those of us “bitter clingers” who still value archaic concepts such as integrity understand that elite opprobrium comes with the territory of not selling your soul to get ahead.

Yet get ahead he has. Mr. Mosher is president of the Population Research Institute, thus he knows a thing or two about demography.

[The Institute’s] core values hold that people are the world’s greatest resource. PRI’s goals are to educate on this premise, to expose the myth of overpopulation, and to expose human rights abuses committed in population control programs. Our growing, global network of pro-life groups spans over 80 countries.

They’ve got some heavy lifting to do. So Mr Mosher didn’t mince words in a profound New York Post piece that speaks volumes about the state of our world.

Just the facts

His essay is headlined “The world is running out of children as birthrates are collapsing across the globe.”Clickbait? Drama? I know, NYP does play to the crowd. But his straightforward essay simply lays out the facts:

The collapse in birth rates that began in post-war Europe has, in the decades since, spread to every single corner of the globe.

Many nations are already feeling this death spiral, filling more coffins than cradles each year.

Just this past year, Japan lost nearly a million people, Poland 130,000. [That’s over 100 every hour]

The big story comes from China, home to one-sixth of the world’s population.

The decades-long devastation wrought by the one-child policy has sent that country, for centuries the pacesetter in population, into absolute decline.

China finally admitted that its population was shrinking, but demographers — including myself — believe that the numbers have actually been falling for almost a decade.

The Chinese government’s official population figure of 1.44 billion also greatly exaggerates its overall numbers, some analysts say by as much as 130 million people.

India, the country that has now overtaken China in population, is still growing, but not for long.

The average Indian woman was having only two children over her reproductive lifetime, the Indian government reported in 2021, well below the 2.25 or so needed to sustain the current population.

The same story is being repeated all over the world, as birthrates in Latin America, the Middle East, and even Africa are not just falling — they are collapsing.

Has he left anything out? Not since the bubonic plague has there been a similar culling of the human species like that into which we are headed. Homo sapiens has been around an estimated 60,000 years. Perhaps advanced civilizations are aberrations. We are surely dismantling those temporal achievements by not reproducing ourselves.

Did I mention that Mr Mosher is a veteran China hand? He was recognised as such early on when President Jimmy Carter facilitated his studying in China, this in the days before Westerners could simply come and go to the Middle Kingdom. China has made great strides of late, but the government tightly “manages” information, especially about demography. It is not good to not look good. University of Wisconsin demographer Dr Yi Fuxian has warned us for years about cooked population stats handed down by the Politburo.

But what is new here? Mercator’s stable of writers has already told us as much about the impending – already underway – demographic collapse. It is thanks to the tireless work of Mr Mosher and his ilk that we can do so.

My take: It is time to stop beating around the bush about population collapse. Nothing short of a social revolution is required to turn things around. By that, I mean a reordering of values and priorities towards a family-centric rather than profit-centric world. Mammon worship has clearly failed us.

Disinformation

Candor aside, Mr. Mosher’s message is also valuable as an information strategy. Hear me out. The popular press, such as “tabloid” New York Post, is largely off the radar of chattering elites; appearing in its pages disseminates important information apart from the dysfunctional thinking and censorious filtering of legacy media. Mr Mosher:

Now you may be excused for not knowing about the current birth dearth.

After all, powerful international agencies like the UN Population Fund and the World Bank have done their best to keep it out of the public eye.

Moreover, these agencies, set up during the height of the hysteria over “overpopulation” in the 1960s, like to overestimate births in one country, and pad population numbers in another.

Sounds like a conspiracy theorist – until you understand that yes, Virginia, governments, NGOs, etc. lie all the time about population, fertility, wars, inflation and just about everything else. Regime media is their megaphone.

The New York Post has been down this road before. In October 2016 it ran factual pieces about “secret emails” from the Hunter Biden laptop tying the “big guy” to corruption. The ink was barely dry when 51 veteran intelligence professionals signed a letter telling the American people that the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Not true. As far as I know, none of those folks has paid any price for their chicanery. I digress.

Fibbing for profit

Why fudge population stats? Wouldn’t we all be better off learning the truth about humanity’s prospects? This is so important. Mosher zeroes in on the United Nations, which has projected population peaking decades later than other studies. What gives?

The UN exaggerates human numbers for the same reason that the Biden-Harris administration exaggerates employment numbers: for financial gain and political survival.

There are billions of dollars at stake, funding that is fueled by a dark fear of mushrooming human numbers.

The population control movement does not intend to go quietly to its grave, even as it continues to dig humanity’s own, so it feeds this fear.

There we have it. Once again, it’s all about filthy lucre. That social revolution, if it ever comes, will need to do some serious culling of the budgets of these globalist agents of influence. That’ll be a very tall order, but I can tell you this: big changes are coming on the world scene.

Hang on to your hat.


Forward this article to your friends! 


AUTHOR

Louis T. March has a background in government, business, and philanthropy. A former talk show host, author, and public speaker, he is a dedicated student of history and genealogy. Louis lives with his family in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

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

Democrats Do Not Realize that Kamala is a ‘Knock-Off’ Gucci Bag Inferior, Fake and 2nd Rate!

ON NOVEMBER 6, 2024—YOU CANNOT GET A REFUND


Democrats worship at the altar of killing babies.

Killing babies is what happens when the euphemism “reproductive freedom” occurs, of course after you pay the doctor a lot of money.

Kamala Harris’ primary objective of her Presidential campaign is to INCREASE the killing of babies by scaring women into thinking that if they give up the right to kill their babies, their children will never forgive them.

So, what about “Gucci” Harris, the knock-off.

Well, look at her in this video as she pontificates on her “expertise” on national security, because she “studied the maps.”

For Democrats with Trump Derangement Syndrome (all of them) a knock-off Gucci, is infinitely better than a guy who has already excelled at the job she has dreamt about for 25 years.

Knock-Off Harris is 100% WRONG on her (real Gucci-sounding) analysis of a military operation 6000 miles away by one of the most elite fighting forces in the world!

“Israel is WRONG,” babbled Knock-Off, as TDS Democrats had chills running up and down their legs, wiping their tears, saying in unison, “we now have a Gucci!”

As most knock-offs are very quickly discovered, same here, only took a couple of months for the IDF to completely reveal to the whole world that Kamala Harris is a first-class fraud who knows absolutely nothing about Israel, Islam, HAMAS Gaza, jihad, war or truth.

Although Kamala was able to completely abort the truth about the Rafah crossing in Gaza.

So, will this short video convince Democrats to NOT vote for a fraud on November 5, 2024?

Will people ever stop buying knock-off Gucci bags?

CHRISTIANS

Get out and vote for the party that has a platform that reflects your core beliefs. As Christians, your core believe does not include killing babies..

No knock-offs on November 5, 2024!

Get the real stuff, you can’t afford not to!

If you want to do more than vote then PLEASE CLICK ON: “WRITE NOW”

This amazing letter writing campaign designed to contact, educate and mobilize millions of “dis-engaged” Christian voters is needed now more than ever.

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: TUW@TheUnitedWest.org

©2024. The United West/ Defend The Border. All rights reserved.

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In a World Obsessed with Feelings, Whose Feelings Matter?

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.


Hidden deep within the Gospel of Yuval Harari is the question “Do children belong to their parents or to the state?” Harari’s position clearly favors the state, because the “intelligent design” he describes is an arm of the state body politic. To repeat what he said at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos on January 24, 2020:

In the coming decades, AI and biotechnology will give us godlike abilities to reengineer life, and even to create completely new life-forms. After four billion years of organic life shaped by natural selection, we are about to enter a new era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design.

Harari’s “evolutionary” biology sees human beings as hackable animals whose future will be shaped by artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and the reengineering of life into new life-forms. The new life-forms Harari refers to are transhumanist beings totally controlled by the globalist elite—the “intelligent designers.”

To “transcend” means to go beyond the range or limits of something. Transhuman means going beyond the current limits of being human and acquiring the powers and abilities of an enhanced human being in what the World Economic Forum calls “Humanity 2.0″—the stated goal of “intelligent design.” Harari’s narrative is grooming your children for Humanity 2.0.

To understand the insidious plan to move humanity from Humanity 1.0 to Humanity 2.0, it is necessary to examine the tactical shift away from meritocracy—the traditional metric of achievement foundational to American life, progress, and success.

In a society that eliminates meritocracy by shifting its metrics from achievement to feelings, whose feelings actually matter? What is the political purpose of the shift?

Competence is the mother of self-esteem. We know this is true by simply observing the delight of young children as they learn to dress themselves, feed themselves, or sound out their first words and realize they can read! Each achievement increases the child’s competence and enhances his developing sense of self. Achievement makes little Johnny feel proud of himself and good about himself. Let’s consider what incentivizes competence and achievement, and what doesn’t. Let’s also consider the motivations for either incentivizing or discouraging competence.

If you want to know the motive, look at the result. What made America great was having its cultural roots in meritocracy. Our society awarded achievement with upward mobility. It was called the American Dream, and America was the land where American dreams came true. In every sector of society, little Johnny was encouraged to become an independent, autonomous, rational adult, capable of living a life of ordered liberty in our constitutional republic. In other words, little Johnny was encouraged to grow up and perpetuate the American Dream.

Each of little Johnny’s achievements was rewarded with praise. As he grew older, he earned grades in school that marked his achievements. Then he competed in sports with friends, and games with family. His grades were awarded with certificates of achievement or advanced placement. His sports achievements were awarded with trophies, and his wins in family games were rewarded with admiration.

The competitions all served to incentivize achievement. As an adult, Johnny competed for jobs and advancement. Winning and losing were part of everybody’s private and public life. Meritocracy was society’s infrastructure, rooted in achievement. Those who lost were encouraged to try harder, work harder, study more, and try again.

The association between individual achievement and self-esteem was unmistakable. Winning and losing were part of America’s infrastructure that anyone and everyone could identify with. Individual and team play were instrumental in teaching the valuable lessons of cooperation and teamwork. This is no small thing. Whether in a classroom, on a baseball field, or in an orchestra hall, competition encourages both individual and team competence, cooperation, and achievement.

In the 1970s, ABC’s Wide World of Sports announcer Jim McKay immortalized the words “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” His words described the drama caught on televised sports, but they also apply to the everyday lives of everyday people, describing how it feels to win and how it feels to lose. In the past, American culture supported a can-do spirit of encouragement, an ethos that insisted the agony of defeat need not triumph: anyone and everyone could experience the thrill of victory through hard work and practice. It was the same ethos that made America the greatest, freest, wealthiest nation on Earth.

But we are a world at war, whether people acknowledge it or not—a war between globalism and the nation-state. The globalist war on the nation-state is a multifaceted culture war, fought without bullets, that targets the world’s children. In an unconscionable humanitarian hoax, the globalist social engineers advanced the deceitful narrative that little Johnny’s feelings must always be protected.

To remind the reader, a humanitarian hoax is the deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy. America’s humanitarian hucksters, under the guidance of the globalist social engineers, simply eliminated competition in order to “protect” little Johnny’s feelings. No winning. No losing. No grades. No competition. No incentive for achievement. No competence. No self-esteem. No thrill of victory. Participation trophies do not incentivize achievement; they just blur the boundary between trying and doing.

Eliminating competition does not protect little Johnny from hurt feelings, or save big Johnny from the agony of defeat. Eliminating competition just disincentivizes his achievements and robs him of self-esteem. It produces a society of incompetent, dependent, childlike, fragile citizens who are very easy to manipulate and control—precisely the goal of a caretaker government.

We are born without the ability to survive on our own, entirely dependent upon our caretakers to teach us the necessary survival skills to live in society. Today, a battle is being fought in America over who are the rightful caretakers of our nation’s children.

Historically, it was the parents who had the responsibility to protect their children and prepare them for life in our constitutional republic. Increasingly, the caretakers in America are no longer the parents, because the traditional family of stay-at-home Mom and working Dad is no longer the norm. Non-traditional families are reliant on daycare, preschools, babysitters, and after-school programs to provide child care and instruction for America’s children.

Since 1979, when Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education, the government began taking an increasingly active role in children’s education. Today, the National Education Association (NEA),[i] the largest professional-employee organization in America, with over 3 million members, is a major political player. Ninety-seven percent of its millions of dollars in donations from membership dues go to Democrat and liberal political candidates. The politicization of American education is funded by labor unions as well as federal and state funding. A stunning March 31, 2023, article by journalist and political analyst Daniel Greenfield, “Whose Children? Our Children,”[ii] asserts:

The shift from the single-income family to the two-income family with preschool encompassing children as young as 18 months and then to an ever more intensive chain of state educational institutions happened gradually enough that most parents thought it was their own idea. But what the Soviet Union and Communist China had failed to accomplish, happened in America.

Children, from even before they could talk, were being raised either directly by the state or by the institutions that it closely regulated. The unintended consequences of that, emotional fragility, a lack of healthy models for interpersonal relationships, and an obsession with ‘snitching’ on others that persists well into adulthood, were only the collateral damage….

Such children raised by the state become adults who want the state to go on raising them. When they’re hungry, the state feeds them, when they’re cold, the state shelters them and when they’re unhappy, the state tells them whom to blame. When their relationships fall apart or when their feelings are hurt, they turn to the state to soothe them with a dose of revenge.

The infantilization of America is a leftist/globalist weapon of mass destruction. The American Dream has been replaced by regressive dreams for eternal childhood. The old Soviet Union and today’s Communist China share the collectivist ideology that prioritizes the state above the individual, so what is good for the state is good for the individual. America has increasingly adopted communism’s collectivist “ethic” and its self-destructive Marxist messaging, most evident in politicized education and medicine.

The battle over who is the rightful caretaker of America’s children is a battle over ideologies. The Biden-Obama-Harris regime has eliminated meritocracy and stopped incentivizing competence, competition, achievement, success, independence, upward mobility, and the thrill of victory to obtain the American Dream. Instead, the regime incentivizes eternal childhood, incompetence, and lifelong dependence upon the government. The objective is to destabilize and destroy America’s infrastructure of family, seen as a competing ideology, and collapse the country internally. Remember, in order to “build back better,” one must first destroy what exists.

Substituting compliance for competence is collapsing America from within. So, in the end, Johnny’s feelings don’t matter at all. Little Johnny is the target of the duplicity, being groomed to become a permanently dependent, unthinking, unproductive drone for the globalist elite—a worker bee. In a world obsessed with feelings, the only people whose feelings actually matter are the globalist elite.

©2024. Linda Goudsmit. All rights reserved.

SOURSES:

[i]  National Education Associationhttps://www.influencewatch.org/labor-union/national-education-association-nea/

[ii]  Whose Children? Our Childrenhttp://www.danielgreenfield.org/2023/03/whose-children-our-children.html?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Daniel+Greenfield+Article:+Whose+Children?+Our+Children&utm_campaign=20230331_m172639745_Daniel+Greenfield+Article:+(post_title)&utm_term=Whose+Children_3F+Our+Children


• Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is is available in paperback, hardback, and eBook formats on barnesandnoble.comamazon.com, and directly from Ingram in paperback.


Please visit Linda’s Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and her website: lindagoudsmit.com 

‘Radicalized And Increasingly Out Of Touch’: Texas Dem Abandons Party

A Texas Democrat ditched her party in a scathing rebuke Friday and added that she plans to defect to the GOP.

Shawn Thierry declared the party switch while attending the Moms for Liberty summit in Washington, D.C., noting that she cannot support some of the liberal policies like sex change surgeries for minors and stripping Title IX protections for female athletes. The Democratic representative lost in the May primaries to opponent Lauren Simmons, which kept Thierry from a fifth term, The Texas Tribune reported.

“This is not the party I grew up with,” Thierry said in a statement posted to X. “I have witnessed firsthand how the so-called ‘liberal’ left now stifles thoughtful debate, silencing dissent with an iron fist—demanding blind allegiance to ideology, where one must ‘comply or be cast out.’ This is not the Democratic Party I once supported and represented.”

“As the years have passed, I have watched with dismay as the party I once knew has drifted far from its roots,” Thierry said. “It has become almost unrecognizable—radicalized and increasingly out of touch with the values that millions of everyday Americans hold dear.”

Thierry faced significant backlash from her liberal constituents and the Democratic party for supporting a bill banning cross-sex hormones and sex change surgeries for minors, a press release accompanying Thierry’s statement notes. The representative now serves in her fourth term in the Texas Legislature.

“In 2024, the Republican Party champions economic empowerment, by investing in Historically Black colleges and universities like the one I proudly graduated from,” Thierry noted in her statement. “It’s the party of parents, believing that they have the fundamental right to determine the best educational environments for their children to learn, grow, and succeed.”

“I am leaving the left because the left has abandoned Democrats who feel betrayed by a party that has lost its way, lost its commitment to hard working families,” Thierry’s statement says.

AUTHOR

Jennifer Nuelle

Contributor.

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


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‘Gender-Industrial Complex’ Worth Billions Annually: Report

The most mysterious feature of the 2023 SAFE Act Wars was that virtually every major hospital system — across 20+ states — lobbied vehemently against the bills. At nearly every public hearing, the speaking roster was saturated by three groups speaking in opposition: transgender activists, families with trans-identifying youth who hadn’t yet come to regret the procedures, and medical professionals, typically associated with a local hospital system.

Yet 2023 was a tipping-point year, in which the number of states with laws protecting minors from gender transition procedures increased from four to 22. This dramatic shift occurred because the dangerous, experimental nature of these surgeries became increasingly apparent. Otherwise progressive European countries such as the U.K.Norway, and Denmark pulled back on providing gender transition procedures to minors. Even state legislators, many of whom lack a medical background, were able to clearly grasp the lack of medical evidence and the potential for harm with these procedures, often articulating those reasons in the legislation they passed.

This raises the question, if the fundamental unsoundness of providing gender transition procedures to minors was evident to everyone from Norway to North Dakota, why couldn’t hospitals see it? A recent report from the American Principles Project suggests an explanation: hospitals and drug manufacturers were blinded by the Benjamins — billions of dollars’ worth.

The American Principles Project (APP) commissioned business consulting firm Grand View Research to conduct a market analysis measuring the volume of the gender-reassignment surgery industry. They recently estimated its value at a whopping $4.12 billion in 2022, with a compounded annual growth rate of 8.4% through 2030. The APP published those numbers this summer in an 88-page report.

Estimate Is Likely an Undercount

Due to various complications in data collection, nearly all estimates of the U.S. gender transition industry will be conservative (tending to undercount rather than overcount), the APP report stated, including the one they commissioned. American health care lacks the comprehensive, centralized data collection of socialized medicine, so researchers must compile data in other ways. For instance, a 2022 study by Komodo Health analyzed insurance claims and found 42,000 minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021, but this necessarily excluded all medical activity not covered by insurance.

Other studies have also struggled to find complete datasets. For example, studies that analyze gender transition procedures based on their medical code will necessarily fail to detect gender transition procedures labeled with a generic medical code. In a 2019 video, Dr. Shayne Taylor explained that this was a deliberate strategy. “For the patient who gets a big bill because their insurance doesn’t cover any transgender-related codes, I usually write ‘endocrine disorder not otherwise specified’ to allow me to order the labs that I want,” Taylor said.

Taylor was influential in convincing Vanderbilt University Medical Center to practice gender transition procedures because “these surgeries make a lot of money.” Based on figures from the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery, “female-to-male chest reconstruction could bring in $40,000,” and “around $20,000 for a vaginoplasty,” Taylor cited. “That doesn’t include your post-op visits. That doesn’t include your anesthesia, your OR. So I would think this has to be a gross underestimate. I think that’s just, like, the surgeon’s piece of it.”

Leaked video of the profit rationale behind the gender transition program at Vanderbilt University Medical Center may have played a role in Tennessee enacting legislation to protect minors from gender transition procedures in March 2023.

Another reason to believe these numbers represent an undercount is that estimates of the number of trans-identifying people in America are significantly higher. The pro-LGBT Williams Institute estimated in June 2022 that 1.6 million Americans identify as transgender, including approximately 300,000 youth aged 13-17. While it’s possible that the Williams Institute has a political motive to inflate these numbers, it still yields a much larger estimate than studies that look at medical data.

Transgender activist Robbi Katherine Anthony “(who prefers going by RKA),” APP notes, multiplied the number of transgender-identifying Americans with the “average cost of transition,” estimated at $150,000, to speculate that the potential gender transition market could be valued in excess of $200 billion, “larger than the entire film industry.”

Even if these studies are significant undercounts, they do serve to show the trend. Every study shows a dramatic increase over time in people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria, especially among young people. One study reviewed for the APP report showed that “health system encounters for gender identity disorder rose from 13,855 in 2016 to 38,470 in 2020.”

Costly Procedures

Why such staggering costs? Gender transition surgeries are attempting to reshape — or more accurately, war against — a person’s natural biology. Advanced plastic surgery techniques can recreate the appearance if not the function of different organs. But, as Taylor suggested, the price tag for each individual procedure can be pricey. The APP includes a list of common procedures and their prices:

  • Augmentation Mammoplasty, $6,000-12,000
  • Voice Feminization Surgery, $5,000-9,000
  • Reduction Thyrochondroplasty, $3,500-7,000
  • Orchiectomy, $5,000-8,000
  • Vaginoplasty, $10,000-40,000
  • Chest Masculinization Surgery, $6,000-10,000
  • Scrotoplasty, $4,000-6,000
  • Hysterectomy, $9,500-22,500
  • Phalloplasty, $20,000-150,000
  • Mastectomy, $15,000-50,000
  • Metoidioplasty, $20,000-30,000
  • Facial Feminization Surgery, $20,000-50,000+
  • Electrolysis, $50-200 (one-hour session)
  • Laser Hair Removal, $200-1,000
  • Vocal Training, $50-200 per hour

In general, these are surgeries to a person’s face, throat, chest, or genitalia that result in him or her looking more like the opposite sex. Readers who want more specificity can do their own research. It will not be family-friendly or conducive to good digestion. You have been warned.

These costs add up as trans-identifying individuals pursue multiple procedures. The APP estimated that the “total cost of fully transitioning” ranges from $87,300-410,600 for males and from $66,500-605,500 for females. This assumes five years of puberty blockers (at $3,000-$25,000 per year) and 60 years of cross-sex hormone use (from age 16 to age 76, the average life expectancy, with estrogen estimated at $240-2,400 per year and testosterone at $200-4,200 per year).

These cost estimates do not factor in related medical costs, such as hospital stays and anesthesia. Nor does it factor in the potential for secondary surgeries. “A study in the medical journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found that up to a third of patients ‘undergo secondary surgical revision to address functional and aesthetic concerns after penile inversion vaginoplasty,’” cited the report. “A similar study in Aesthetic Plastic Surgery reported that revisions for transfeminine vaginoplasty are frequent. These are lifetime, repeat customers, and there are more of them all the time.”

Market Competitors

Whether the market is worth $4 billion annually or a somewhat larger amount, that’s a large pot to split between relatively few players.

According to the market analysis from Grand View Research, 11 hospital and surgery systems account for nearly half (48.7%) of the sex reassignment market revenue in 2022, with other medical systems comprising the rest. Seven of these are in California and New York (including Cedars Sinai, Mount Sinai, and Kaiser Permanente), and the other four are: Regents of the University of Michigan, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and The Johns Hopkins University.

(Keep in mind, however, that hospital and surgery centers operate in somewhat location-specific markets; coastal surgery centers are likely not competing for clients with, for instance, Sanford Health, the pro-transgender hospital giant of the upper Plains states.)

Grand View Research also attempted to construct a snapshot of the top drug companies providing gender transition hormones. However, this picture was far less complete; many puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are prescribed off-label, making them harder to track, the APP explained.

The research only accounted for an estimated 14.6% of the market, totaling $234 million in 2022. The top five companies Grand View Research tracked were Pfizer, Inc. (4.6% estimated market share), AbbVie, Inc. (3.2%), End International plc (2.9%), Novartis AG (2.1%), and Lilly (1.8%).

Disaggregated data such as these contribute to the reliability of Grand View Research’s overall estimates. It shows their work, demonstrating that the overall estimates were not invented out of thin air, but represent the aggregate of more minute and concrete estimates, which are more likely to be accurate.

Lobbying Incentive

With such large potential profits on the line, it puts in perspective the efforts by hospital lobbyists seeking to defeat bills protecting minors from gender transition procedures.

If hospitals view gender-confused children as potential lifelong patients, then state laws protecting children from the depredations of gender transition procedures are a direct threat to their business model. Not only does it delay their ability to profit off these children for five years or so, but it also threatens their ability to recruit that child as a lifelong patient at all. Research cited by the Indiana State Medical Association in 2023 has shown that 60% to 95% of minors with gender dysphoria will eventually embrace their biological sex, if puberty is allowed to occur normally, whereas 95% of children who begin puberty blockers will proceed to cross-sex hormones and surgery.

These lobbying campaigns cannot be reduced to the simple question, what is the best practice medical care for children? The APP report notes, “There lurks beneath the surface of ‘best practices’ an incentive structure and a market, both real and potential.” That incentive structure and market are preventing medical systems from seeking the best interest of their gender-confused patients.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: On the ‘Weaponization of U.S. Healthcare System’ from FDR to Today by Dr. Tamzin Rosenwasser

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Harris Hiding from Far-Left Record by Plundering Trump Policies

Vice President Kamala Harris is trying to be unburdened by what has been — namely her far-left political record — by adopting MAGA policies. The latest instance of flip-flopping is Harris’s support for the border wall proposed by former President Donald Trump. According to Axios, the vice president is now pledging to spend an estimated $650 million to complete the border wall Trump started, despite having called the initiative “racist” and “un-American” during Trump’s White House tenure. Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, commented, “Kamala Harris is a fake. If she wants to build the border wall, she could start right now!”

In recent weeks, Harris has adopted a “tough” persona regarding border security, with immigration consistently ranking as one of the top two most pressing issues for voters ahead of November’s election. In fact, Harris’s latest campaign ad features images of the border wall while touting the Democrat’s past role as a “border-state prosecutor.” The ad claimed that Harris, if elected, would “hire thousands more border agents” and “crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.” The ad concluded, “Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris.”

Yet the incumbent Biden-Harris administration is responsible for at least 10 million illegal immigrants crossing the southern border since taking office in January of 2021, including “at least 99” illegal immigrants on the U.S. terror watchlist, according to a congressional report released earlier this month.

“Americans are used to presidential candidates flip-flopping on unpopular positions they’ve taken in the past, that’s nothing new. But, the outright copying of major pieces of an opponent’s policy agenda in the middle of an election less than 70 days from election day certainly is unprecedented,” said FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter in comments to The Washington Stand. “I think it exposes the Harris-Walz campaign as being fundamentally insecure about the policies they’re offering the American people,” he added.

“This is further evidenced by the fact that their own campaign website is a policy desert, they have no policies listed on their campaign website, and they have only just recently announced the first sit down interview with their candidate on a major news outlet since becoming the presumptive nominee,” Carpenter continued. “To me, all of this suggests a campaign that is not confident in the abilities of their candidate and the appeal of her agenda.”

“Vice President Harris will say and do anything, and she will change her positions on policies like a chameleon … to get elected,” said former acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan in an interview. “They realize now that in every single poll, she’s upside down with respect to their border security policies. What [has] she [done]? A 180 degree-flip flop and now actually shows the picture … of the very tool and resource that she took away from the border control agents, making their job more difficult,” Morgan continued. He added, “Now all of the sudden, she’s acting like she’s for the wall. … I’m hoping the American people are going to see through this and they’re not going to buy this.”

Early in 2021, Harris was appointed “border czar” by President Joe Biden and was charged with stemming the flow of illegal immigration, while the administration dismantled many of the border security measures put in place by Trump. Her handling of the illegal immigration crisis has been described as “one of the most catastrophic failures in American history.” Numerous reports have exposed the “infighting” and “ineffectiveness” of the Biden-Harris administration’s treatment of the border.

The border wall isn’t the only Trump-team initiative that Harris has quickly adopted as her own. Earlier this month, Harris announced plans not to tax service industry workers’ tips, a plan originally devised by Trump and approved by many elected GOP officials. Just days ago, Harris also changed her tune on the Child Tax Credit (CTC). After attacking Vance for supporting the CTC, claiming that supporting and encouraging families is a means of declaring “war” against “childless people,” Harris reversed her position and proposed expanding the CTC, after Vance had already done the same.

While Harris herself has not formally or personally said anything on the subject, unnamed individuals in her campaign have reported that Harris is “changing her position” on several issues, including fracking, gun control programs, and the idea of a “single-payer health insurance program.” Harris has consistently endorsed far-left policies and positions throughout her career. During her tenure in the U.S. Senate, she maintained the furthest-left voting record of any Democrat. The Trump campaign recently released a new ad featuring side-by-side comparisons of Harris complaining about issues such as inflation and bragging about the Biden-Harris policies which have resulted in the issues Harris is complaining of.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


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