Censorship Is Alive And Well In the United States!

Harry Truman sagely observed,

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is on the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

Clearly, the protection of speech, no matter how offensive that speech may be, is a time-honored, foundational plank in our nation’s birth and of our system of government. Indeed, our freedom to develop ideas free of government interference, and then deliver them without censure is so important that it earned a place within the most hallowed protections memorialized in the First Amendment of the Constitution, “Congress shall make no law. . . abridging the freedom speech.”

Consequently watching the devolution of our protections during the past two weeks would be as harrowing an experience for the Framers of the Constitution as it ought to be for every one of us who values our independence and fears the consequences of government encroachment.

The latest assault on our freedoms comes from fascist elements decorated with the perfect disguise; the cloak of anti-fascism. These promoters of disorder, violence, and hatred have managed to present themselves as fighters against bigotry while dismantling the very democracy in whose freedoms they take comfort in organizing their spiteful and evil campaigns. And the worst thing about it is that those on the left, and the uneducated who join them, are all too eager to swallow their poison and promote the dismantling of the nation’s foundational precepts.

Case in point?

The prelude to Boston

The run-up to the Aug. 19 Boston Rally was clearly a tumultuous affair. Charlottesville, reeling from the city council’s decision to remove the Robert E. Lee Statue from its place of prominence in the public square (itself an act of censorship and thought control), saw a group of individuals organize a rally to protest the decision. Tragically, the members of the rally spewed hatred and ridiculous, indefensible messages of white supremacy and racism. But they clearly had a right to assemble and deliver their venomous speech.

In response, radical left wing elements hijacked the flag of righteousness and presented themselves with the proclaimed intent of mounting a counter-protest. But they were armed with the willingness, and perhaps even the desire, to engage in violence and promote mayhem.

We do not have any information over who started the violent confrontations in Charlottesville, but suffice it to say that violence did ensue directly resulting in the death of one upstanding citizen who clearly was not there to engage in any activity she did not have the right to pursue, and of two police officers charged with guarding the peace who died when their helicopter crashed.

Boston had been previously scheduled to host a rally by a group calling itself the Boston Free Speech Coalition on the weekend following the events in Charlottesville. Precious little was known about this group.  Through a radio interview the day prior to the rally, we learned that the group consisted of seven young people ages 17-23. Their leader and speaker was a young man named John Medlar. The Boston Free Speech Coalition had been in existence for less than a year and had successfully organized one event in its history, an event that took place in May 2017, at the gazebo in Boston Commons, the same location which was to house the Aug. 19 rally.  That event, although attended by counter-protesters, had been a peaceful affair.

We also know that the Boston Free Speech Coalition had no formal ties to any fringe groups and that their raison d’etre was their concern over what they perceived to be an erosion of First Amendment speech rights in our country. They cooperated fully with the authorities and gave the Boston Police Department every assurance that a) they were totally disinterested in causing any trouble; and b) they would cooperate fully in making sure that peace and order be maintained.

It is true that in their May 2017, rally, they provided a stage for some pretty detestable speakers, but the Boston Free Speech Coalition openly disavowed themselves of their views. Again, their priority was to serve as a conduit for all speech. In fact, recurrently, Medlar said that he had invited all to share in the forum, regardless of the political inclinations of their views.

When Medlar was asked if his group sympathized with white nationalists or Nazis, he said, “The problem with white supremacy is that they don’t extend rights to other people. They use the First Amendment as a shield to protect themselves, but because they’re supremacists, they don’t extend the same rights to people of color, and we believe that the Constitution applies to everyone.”

And this is all we knew — and still know — about the Boston Free Speech Coalition.

Frankly, this doesn’t sound like a hate group. They may be naive.  They may be idealistic, as young people are wont to be. But in their dealings, there is no evidence at all that they a) wanted any trouble; or b) hated anyone or anything, except the assault on the First Amendment to the Constitution.

The censorship efforts of Boston Mayor Marty Walsh

But how about government? Did the government consider the Boston Free Speech Coalition a hate group? Well, to answer that question, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh consulted that pinnacle of neutral arbitration on the matter, the Southern Poverty Law Center — the same extreme leftist group that classified the Christian based organizations like the Family Research Council as hate groups.

And what did the Southern Poverty Law Center tell the mayor?  Well, according to Mayor Walsh, they told him the following: “The Southern Poverty Law Center has been guiding communities throughout the nation on how to handle hate groups.”

Wait! Stop!

Who said the Boston Free Speech Coalition is a hate group? The Southern Poverty Law Center? Well, the Southern Poverty Law Center couldn’t say that the Boston Free Speech Coalition is a hate group because, there is no history to the group! Moreover (I checked), the Southern Poverty Law Center does not — repeat — not(!!) list the Boston Free Speech Coalition as a hate group in its website!

So is it you, Mr. Mayor? Are you singlehandedly calling the Boston Free Speech Coalition a hate group?

Well, it seems so, and if that’s true, then the government of Boston has just injected itself on behalf of one party in a political debate — about free speech no less! And even more offensively, the Mayor brings all the power of the city against that group (Truman’s prophesied “opposition”) with the sole purpose of dissuading people from listening to their speeches.

The Mayor continues, “[The Southern Poverty Law Center] recommend[s] that people not confront (sic) these rallies. So we are urging everyone to stay away from the Commons.”

Translation, “Don’t go to the rally because the City of Boston says this is a hate group and the City of Boston does not want you to hear their message.”

This is the way of dictatorships.

Look, I’m not saying the invited speakers would have been anything other than repulsive. But they had the right to say whatever they were going to say, and the government dissuading others from listening is a core violation of the relationship we have established through our Constitution and its Amendments.

That the mayor of Boston would have behaved in such a manner demonstrates either a gross disregard or a fatal misunderstanding of the importance of free speech to any country claiming to be a representative democracy.

Benjamin Franklin said, “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”

Mr. Mayor, in your zeal to align yourself with the left and ridicule the right, in your own small, little way and within earshot of the final resting places of those who died to protect our freedoms, you just took that very step.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act.

Muslim terrorist slaughters Israeli family of three because ‘he heard laughing’

A military court hearing revealed the pathological evil behind the massacre of the three Salomon family members by self proclaimed Hamas terrorist, 19 year old Omar al-Abed. He has been indicted on 10 charges, 3 of murder and 2 of attempted murder.

Allegedly he chose to enter the Halamish home when he heard laughter coming from within. The innocent victims were celebrating a shabbat dinner and birthday of a grandson.

The description of the unmitigated hatred and savagery that al-Abed unleashed is beyond description.

It is no wonder that when news of the horror was released that many in Israel and abroad suggested the death penalty might be an appropriate sentence.

Israel has only sentenced one person to death and that was SS bureaucratic and mastermind Adolph Eichmann hung by court order on May 23, 1962 for his role in the murder in unspeakable ways of six million European men, women and children.

As we have posted previously, Omar who will likely serve consecutive terms in an Israel jail will be paid a salary of $3,100 a month remitted to his family by the PLO/Fatah.

al-Abed’s heinous crime prompted the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee to pass the eponymous Taylor Force Act on August 4th, just prior to the summer recess. The Act will impound US funds for Palestinian Authority projects. We noted that half of the $693 million in foreign donor funds are used for these ‘pay for slay’ stipends.

Read this Times of Israel report on al-Abed’s indictment for his monstrous crimes:

An indictment filed by the Israeli military prosecution Thursday against the terrorist who killed three members of the Salomon family said Omar al-Abed chose their home in the Halamish settlement after hearing laughter emerging from within.

The 19-year-old native of the neighboring Palestinian village of Kobar was charged with the murders of Yosef, Elad, and Chaya Salomon and the attempted murders of Yosef’s wife Tova and daughter-in-law Michal along with her five children.

Along with the indictment, military prosecution requested that Abed remain behind bars until the end of legal proceedings against him. The army also said that the Salomon family has been “constantly updated” on the proceedings against Abed.

After sneaking into Halamish late Friday night on July 21, the indictment said, Abed “noticed that the house to his right was dark and quiet, while the house to his left was lit up, with laughter emerging from within.”

The Salomon family had been celebrating the birth of a new grandson and assumed the knock on the door was from their first guest. Upon walking inside, Abed rhetorically asked Chaya, “What about Al-Aqsa,” before thrusting his knife to the hilt into her stomach, the indictment said.

In a Facebook post published before he set out from his village, Abed wrote that Palestinians needed to defend the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The previous day, heavy clashes broke out between Palestinian protesters and Israeli police in and around Jerusalem over new security measures at the Temple Mount, following a terror attack on July 14 in which three Israeli Arabs killed two Israeli police officers using weapons smuggled onto the site.

The 10 counts against Abed also include a charge of conspiracy to commit intentional manslaughter. For nearly six months prior to the murders in Halamish, Abed had sought to carry out a still more deadly attack against Israelis. He had met with a friend referred to in the indictment as Zohaib, and paid him NIS 500 in order to buy guns.

When Zohaib returned to Abed two months later and told him that he was unable to obtain the weapons, the 19-year-old suggested that the two of them carry out a stabbing attack instead. Zohaib told him that they should wait until they could obtain more deadly weapons, which would allow them to kill more Israelis. However, Abed was not satisfied and decided to sneak into Halamish later that day, the indictment said.

He had also been in contact with a resident of Gaza referred to as Reem, who tried at the last minute to convince him not to carry out the attack. But after Abed made up his mind, Reem agreed to publish the Facebook post on his behalf as he set out toward the neighboring settlement.

Along with a bottle of water, a knife and wire cutters, Abed also placed a Quran in his backpack, which he read from when he stopped to pray one last time before climbing over the first fence toward Halamish. He used the wire cutters to break through a second fence and managed to climb nearby trees to get over the third and fourth barriers to the settlement, the indictment said.

After killing Chaya, 46, the legal document said, Abed proceeded to stab Tova, 68, who managed to escape and run upstairs shouting “terrorist.”

He went on to stab Yosef, 70, in the stomach, causing the latter to collapse to the floor.

After sustaining three stab wounds, Elad managed to wrestle the knife from Abed’s hands. The two continued to fight until Abed grabbed a wooden cutting board and bashed it over Elad’s head, causing him to collapse. Abed proceeded to stab the father of five 12 times as his children hid upstairs with his wife, Michal.

Then, noticing that Yosef was still conscious, Abed stabbed the grandfather 15 more times until he too stopped moving. At this point, a neighbor, an off-duty soldier who heard the screams, managed to shoot and wound the terrorist through the kitchen window. He and his father secured the house and waited for IDF forces to arrive.

Since the attack, security forces have arrested the father, mother, two brothers and cousin of Abed, all of whom police say knew beforehand of his intention to carry out the stabbing yet took no action to stop him or inform Israeli or Palestinian authorities.

On August 16, Israeli forces demolished the Abed family’s home in Kobar.

After the demolition, Elad’s wife Michal said the measure was insufficient and called for harsher punishments for terrorists, including the death penalty.

“Their house can be rebuilt; my home has been destroyed forever,” she said in a statement. “We need the death penalty so that these terrorists will not be able to build a new home, and if not the death penalty, then we need to seriously toughen their imprisonment conditions and withhold from them everything but the minimum, things like television or the possibility of education.”

Halamish terrorist chose home because he heard laughter – indictment

Military prosecution files 10 charges against Omar al-Abed, including 3 of murder and 2 of attempted murder

TIMESOFISRAEL.COM

Free Speech: The Left Moves In for the Kill

The campaign to label all disagreement as “hate speech” is taking victims. My latest in PJ Media:

The Left is mounting an all-out assault against the freedom of speech, and is using Charlottesville as its Reichstag Fire moment to try to crush all dissent.

Several days ago, I received an email that set in motion a chain of events leading to my website, Jihad Watch, being dropped from PayPal. After an immense public outcry, the Jihad Watch PayPal account was restored — not that I ever intend to use it again. But this episode illustrates the Left’s determination to silence all of its foes rather than debate them, and these fascists won’t rest until no one dares oppose their agenda.

The email that started this incident has ominous implications far beyond the incident itself. Far-Left journalist Lauren Kirchner sent similar emails to other counter-jihad sites as well — here are her questions, along with the answers I sent her:

1) Do you disagree with the designation of your website as hate or extremist? Why?
Yes, certainly I do. For years, Leftists and Muslim groups with numerous ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood have smeared as “hate” all attempts to speak honestly about the motivating ideology behind jihad terrorism.

In reality, it is not hateful, racist or extremist to oppose jihad terror, and the claim that it is [is] not only libelous but insidious: the intent has clearly been to intimidate people into thinking it wrong to oppose jihad terror, and it has worked, as illustrated by the neighbors of the San Bernardino jihad murderers, who saw suspicious activity at their home but didn’t report them for fear of being “racist.”

2) We identified several tech companies on your website: PayPal, Amazon, Newsmax, and Revcontent. Can you confirm that you receive funds from your relationship with those tech companies? How would the loss of those funds affect your operations, and how would you be able to replace them?

The intent of your questions, and no doubt of your forthcoming article, will be to try to compel these sites to cut off any connection with us based on our opposition to jihad terror. Are you comfortable with what you’re enabling?

Not only are you inhibiting honest analysis of the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, but you’re aiding the attempt to deny people a platform based on their political views. This could come back to bite you if your own views ever fall out of favor.

Have you ever lived in a totalitarian state, where the powerful determine the parameters of the public discourse and cut off all voice from the powerless? Do you really want to live in one now? You might find, once you get there, that it isn’t as wonderful as you thought it would be.

3) Have you been shut down by other tech companies for being an alleged hate or extremist web site? Which companies?

No. This is a new thing.

First came the ridiculous claim that opposing jihad terror was “hate,” and now comes the other shoe dropping: the attempt to cut out the ground from under the feet of those who “hate.” You can only hope that you aren’t similarly defamed one day; perhaps if that does happen, you will realize (too late) why the freedom of speech is an indispensable element of a free society.

4) Many people opposed to sites like yours are currently pressuring tech companies to cease their relationships with them — what is your view of this campaign? Why?

Nazis will be Nazis. Fascists will be fascists. Today they call themselves “Antifa” and the like, but they’re acting just like Hitler’s Brownshirts did, when they shouted down and assaulted anti-Nazi speakers. Now the violent thugs work in a more genteel fashion: they just pull the Internet plug on those they hate. You, Lauren Kirchner, are aiding and abetting a quintessentially fascist enterprise. Authoritarianism in service of any cause leads to a slave society despite the best intentions of those who helped usher it in.

I was trying to appeal to any residual sense of decency and fair play that Lauren Kirchner may have had, but it was to no avail. Last Saturday at 1:45 p.m., ProPublica published its hit piece, and it led off with me:

Because of its “extreme hostility toward Muslims,” the website Jihadwatch.org is considered an active hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The views of the site’s director, Robert Spencer, on Islam led the British Home Office to ban him from entering the country in 2013.

But its designation as a hate site hasn’t stopped tech companies — including PayPal, Amazon and Newsmax — from maintaining partnerships with Jihad Watch that help to sustain it financially. PayPal facilitates donations to the site. Newsmax — the online news network run by President Donald Trump’s close friend Chris Ruddy — pays Jihad Watch in return for users clicking on its headlines. Until recently, Amazon allowed Jihad Watch to participate in a program that promised a cut of any book sales that the site generated. All three companies have policies that say they don’t do business with hate groups.

Within hours, PayPal bowed to this defamation. At 6:02 p.m., I got an email from PayPal saying:

[D]ue to the nature of your activities, we have chosen to discontinue service to you in accordance with PayPal’s User Agreement. As a result, we have placed a permanent limitation on your account.

Inside my PayPal account was a further notice:

When you signed up for your PayPal account, you agreed to our User Agreement and Acceptable Use Policy. Because some of your recent transactions violated this policy, we’ve had to permanently limit your account … This limitation cannot be appealed.

These vague messages illustrated the Kafkaesque nature of this Leftist enterprise: PayPal, like the SPLC itself, was acting as judge, jury and executioner. No discussion, no debate, no opposing view, no appeal was possible.

The SPLC never contacts its targets to ask them to respond to charges that they are “hate groups”; it simply hands down its ruling, which the establishment media uncritically accepts. And that’s that.

William A. Jacobson notes at Legal Insurrection:

SPLC, presumably ADL, and ProPublica just don’t like Robert Spencer’s opinions about the practice of Islamism and Jihad. Yet as we have seen in other contexts, rather than winning the war of ideas, they seek to stifle free speech and, in this case, dry up sources of revenue for their political opponents.

They failed this time. PayPal restored my account Monday night after being inundated with emails from people canceling their accounts over PayPal’s fascism.

But this is no time for complacency: PayPal hasn’t suddenly become hospitable to conservative views. The Left’s anti-free speech initiative is not going to stop.

They won’t stop until Jihad Watch is shut down, my books are not offered for sale on Amazon or anywhere else, and no one will dare host a speech by me or anyone else who dares to break with their ideological lockstep.

These fascists — who call themselves “anti-fascists” — are totalitarian: they are determined not to allow their opponents to murmur the slightest whisper of dissent.

Therefore I may be out of action before too long. This initiative is advancing very rapidly, and those who should be standing up to it — the establishment Republicans and the Trump administration — don’t show any sign of even being aware it is happening….

Read the rest here.

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Child Labor Was Wiped Out by Markets, Not Government by Antony Davies & James R. Harrigan​

In 1938 the US government passed the Fair Labor Standards Act mandating a forty hour work week, establishing a minimum wage, and prohibiting child labor. Because of legislation like this, government is often credited for making the American work environment safer and more fair. Yet, as Antony Davies and James Harrigan demonstrate with historical data, market forces were already making things easier on the American worker long before the FLSA.

Note: After this episode, Words and Numbers will be audio-only. Subscribe to the Word and Numbers podcast via iTunes.

Antony Davies

Antony Davies

Antony Davies is associate professor of economics at Duquesne University and Chief Academic Officer at FreedomTrust.

He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

James R. Harrigan

James R. Harrigan

James R. Harrigan is CEO of FreedomTrust.

Some Refreshing Honesty about the Purpose of Mass Schooling in Florida by Kerry McDonald

In case there was any ambiguity over the idea that mass schooling values and rewards conformity and compliance, an elementary school in Florida has made it very clear.

At Deer Park Elementary School in Pasco County, signs appeared this week showing a hierarchy of behaviors from good to bad. “Democracy” was at the top, “Anarchy” was at the bottom. While there are many issues with these posters, beginning with the fact that public schooling is far from democratic, the one causing the most outrage among parents is the desire for children to exhibit “Cooperation/Conformity.”

“Conform! How Orwellian,” one parent wrote on Facebook.

The posters, tied to the school’s “behavior and classroom culture” project modeled after author Marvin Marshall’s Raise Responsibility System of discipline, suggest that a young person who “complies” and “conforms” is a model student. Under relentless pressure from parents and student advocacy organizations, the school indicated they would temporarily remove the posters until they could better communicate their initiative to parents and the public.

These school posters explicitly reveal the troubling reality that mass schooling retains its 19th-century roots as a system of social control. Originally designed to bring order to an increasingly diverse population, the industrial model of mass schooling continues to impose order by encouraging compliance, rewarding conformity and eliminating individuality.

As author and academic, Noam Chomsky, says “the education system is supposed to train people to be obedient, conformist, not think too much, do what you’re told, stay passive…”

In educator John Holt’s bestselling book, How Children Learn, republished this month in honor of its 50th anniversary, Holt writes about the systematic ways schooling destroys children’s natural curiosity and originality:

We like to say that we send children to school to teach them to think. What we do, all too often, is to teach them to think badly, to give up a natural and powerful way of thinking in favor of a method that does not work well for them and that we rarely use ourselves. Worse than that, we convince most of them that, at least in a school setting, or any situation where words or symbols or abstract thought are concerned, they can’t think at all.”

The elementary school posters in Florida are an overt reminder that schooling and learning are strikingly different. Children, especially those young elementary schoolers, have an incredible capacity for creativity, an inherent zest for exploration and discovery, and an insatiable appetite for learning about the world around them. Then they go to school where tactics that encourage conformity and compliance crush their natural learning instincts. At least these posters tell the truth.

Reprinted from Intellectual Takeout.

Removing Statues of Violent Bigots? Start with Ché by Federico N. Fernández

Rosario is Argentina’s second oldest city. Located by the Paraná river, it is the home of hard-working people, a busy port, the national flag memorial, and the country’s bitterest football rivalry between Rosario Central and Newell’s Old Boys.

It is also the birthplace of Ernesto “Ché” Guevara.

In the last fifteen years or so, coincidentally with the rise of leftist populism in Argentina and the rest of South America, there have been plenty of tributes to the figure of “Ché.” All of these tributes are state-financed, one way or another. The most prominent is a 13-foot high statue placed in a public square.

Fundación Bases has its main headquarters in Rosario. Teaming up with the Naumann Foundation, we decided to launch a campaign to remove all the state tributes to “Ché” Guevara. We knew this would generate controversy but, honestly, we didn’t expect the level of reaction that has occurred.

About the Man

So, who was this “Ché” Guevara? Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, globally known as “Ché”, came from an aristocratic, though impoverished, family. He studied medicine and when he was about to finish university he took an initiatory trip across Latin America. In some of the places he visited he saw harsh realities and even exploitation. This part of his life made it to the big screen, starred by then Latin sensation Gael García Bernal.

Nonetheless, he wasn’t a communist yet. As Juan José Sebreli explains, he was more of the adventurous type, looking for a cause, whatever cause this might be. In fact, he was planning to go to Europe when he met the Castro brothers in Mexico in 1955. He joined them and become a revolutionary for the “liberation” of Cuba.

Under the command of Fidel Castro, “Ché” achieved his only military victory. All his other revolutionary adventures were disastrous and eventually got him killed. However, during the Cuban struggle, he quickly became known for his ruthlessness and violence. He executed many, both during the conflict and after the revolutionaries got into power. He not only precisely described how he blew some poor bastard’s brains out but also acknowledged at the United Nations General Assembly that his government executed many and would continue executing as long as it was “necessary.”

He was also responsible for the opening of the first Cuban concentration camp – where homosexuals and Christians were tortured and re-educated.

What is more, he believed hate was the most powerful force and was an admirer of Joseph Stalin.

As a public official, he was president of Cuba’s central bank and minister of industry. In both roles, he failed miserably. As central banker, he basically destroyed the Cuban peso – which for many decades had been at parity with the US dollar. As industry planner, his administration was so chaotic that they even bought snow removal machines for a Caribbean country like Cuba.

The regime “Ché” helped established in Cuba is one of the most authoritarian in the world. Since the triumph of the revolution in 1959, more than 10,000 have been killed, 80,000 have died at sea trying to escape the island, and 1.5 million have had to forcefully migrate.

Remove All Tributes to ‘Ché’

With all this in mind, Fundación Bases launched the campaign “Remove all tributes to ‘Ché’ Guevara.” We are asking the city government to eliminate the plethora of state tributes that have mushroomed in the last fifteen years.

We know it will be difficult to achieve this because the same politicians who started this “Ché” industry are still in power. But we also know we are starting a conversation and a necessary debate.

We want kids who wear “Ché” T-Shirts to know that he’s not an article of fashion but a cold killing machine. Wearing a T-Shirt with his face is the same as wearing one with Stalin, Mao or Hitler.

Moreover, we want to explain to the people in our city that this “Ché” cult is a falsification of history. The local authorities who have raised him to the level of pagan saint neglect to mention his well-documented crimes but also that he has done nothing for Argentina. In fact, he only lived in Rosario until the age of one.

What Fundación Bases stands for is classical liberalism. And classical liberalism is the anti-Ché. We believe in cooperation between individuals and nations, free trade, and peace. As our Executive Director Franco López put it in an interview with Colombian media, “we are for human rights for everybody, regardless of their political ideology.”

Many Friends and Some Foes

Immediately after being launched, the campaign picked up the attention of local media. And in July Jack Aldwinckle wrote a half-page article in The Economist.

After the article, media attention skyrocketed. From then on, basically, all major newspapers, radios shows, and TV channels in the country have covered the campaign. For example, in “La Nación” – the most traditional nation-wide newspaper in Argentina – our article was the most read of the day.

And that’s not all. We also caught the attention of international media like “La Razón”(Spain), “El Mercurio” (Chile), “El Comercio” (Perú), “Radio Marti” (Miami), just to name a few.

Definitely, one the campaign’s highlights is the help we have received by like-minded institutions and people. Great guys like Bob Murphy, Gustavo Lazzari, Javier Milei, Steve Horwitz, Roberto Cachanosky, Marcelo Duclos. And also think tanks like Libertad y Progreso, Atlas NetworkAustrian Economics Center, Independent Institute, Relial, Mises Hispano, Instituto Juan de Mariana, and so on.

The general public reaction towards our campaign has been spectacular. Our posts on social media are highly retweeted and shared. Roughly 65 percent of the social media comments have been in favor of our view. What’s more, our online petition has received thousands of signatures.

Of course, it would have been impossible to escape some leftist hysterical reactions. We have been called all names you can imagine, from “neoliberals” to “neonazis.”

We have received death threats and some very sick wishes. For instance, a commenter on Facebook called for the arrival of a communist dictatorship to make us all disappear.

“Ché” Guevara could not have said it better.

Federico N. Fernández

Federico N. Fernández is the Senior Research Fellow of Austrian Economics Center and Vice president of Fundación Bases

De Senectute [Age]: You’re not getting older; you’re getting better.

Michael Apichella writes about his great, great, great uncle, Leo XIII, a great pope who quite literally confirmed the often patronizing quip: You’re not getting older; you’re getting better.

It’s cliché (and a distinctly patronising one), to say: You aren’t getting older; you’re getting better. But there’s more than a little truth about it. As the writer of the book of Job asks: “Is not wisdom found among the aged? Does not long life bring understanding?” (Job: 12:12)

Growing old is difficult, and it’s misguided to idealize it by assuming old age always yields wisdom. But by the same token, old age mustn’t be seen intrinsically as a period of barrenness and decline.

After all, like some wines that improve with age, not only do God’s servants gain wisdom over time, but often it isn’t until they’re downright elderly that they may reach their greatest achievements – think of Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Elizabeth, Zechariah, and others – including Cardinal Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci.

Pecci was 68 years old when he became Pope Leo XIII in 1878. Given his advanced age and frail health, many assumed he would be a stopgap pope until a younger man could be put in place. Instead, he became the oldest pope in Church history and enjoyed the third-longest period in office. During those years, he established himself as a tireless reformer up to his death at age 93.

In Protestant England, Leo XIII is best remembered for astutely appointing the 78-year-old priest-theologian-poet, John Henry Newman, as a cardinal in 1878. Newman’s Cardinalate won wide approval in Britain and helped to lessen lingering anti-Catholic feelings.

London’s strongly establishment Financial Times has suggested that Newman was Britain’s leading religious thinker and writer of the last two centuries. No small praise, considering that Britain has produced numerous intellectual giants in modern times. But also to the point, putting Newman forward was a neat piece of international diplomacy on the part of sage old Leo XIII.

Click here tor read the rest of Dr. Apichella’s column . . .

Michael Apichella

Michael Apichella

Michael Apichella, PhD, is professor emeritus (English) with the University of Maryland, University College, Europe. He has written many books and articles, and is a great, great, great nephew of Leo XIII.

The Humanum Video Series: Presenting the traditional Christian vision of sex, gender, marriage & family

“The destiny of humanity passes through the family.” – Humanum

Rod Dreher in his book The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation warns:

Post-Obergefell, Christians who hold to the biblical teaching about sex and marriage have the same status in culture, and increasingly in law, as racists. The culture war that began with the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s has now ended in defeat for Christian conservatives.

The cultural left-which is to say, increasingly the American mainstream, has no intention of living in postwar peace. It is pressing forward with a harsh, relentless occupation, one that is aided by the ceaselessness of Christians who don’t understand what’s happening.

[ … ]

Christian parents must never assume that their children understand that the natural family is God’s plan for humanity. We have to make this explicit in our teaching. We have to make it implicit too by modeling mutual respect, sacrifice, affection, and all the good things that come from a spiritually fruitful marriage.

For parents concerned that their children are not receiving a biblical perspective of sex, gender, marriage and family there is hope. Humanum has produced a series of six videos on these topics and they are now available on Vimeo. Episode 1 is free, the other five are available for rent or to buy for a minimal amount.

Episode 1: The Destiny of Humanity from Humanum on Vimeo.

Available on DVD and with the companion book at HumanumDVD.org.

EDITORS NOTE: The Humanum Series is now available on Vimeo on Demand: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/humanum. For further information, please contact Humanum at info@humanum.it.

My talk at Google on the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had spoken at Google on the moral case for fossil fuels. My talk just went up on their YouTube​ page! You can watch it here.

If you watch it and like it I hope you click thumbs up and make a comment. It would be really cool to get this video to ascend the ranks of the Google Author talks

Thanks again to Dan Hackney for getting me the invite.

Two Great Videos from Kansas Strong

Recently, I received the following note from Warren Martin, Executive Director of Kansas Strong, “a nonprofit organization voluntarily funded by oil and natural gas producers in Kansas” that “works to educate and inform people about the important role our industry plays in their live.”:

“As a philosophy graduate myself, I found Alex Epstein’s book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels very compelling and informative. His book and additional resources have played a major role in my efforts with Kansas Strong to promote the Kansas oil & gas industry. Alex’s perspective, initiatives and data have been a tremendous asset in our efforts to reframe the issue and emphasize the importance oil and natural gas have on our day to day lives. We have developed videos, articles, print campaigns and keynote presentations that delve into the everyday lives of everyday people to show how vital oil and natural gas is to how they live. It is far more than the price at the pump. It enables people to maximize their lives. Whether you look at life expectancy, infant birth rates, quality of life or numerous other data points, oil and natural gas have played a major role in improving our lives and enabling, as Alex says, ‘human flourishing.’ Alex’s work has proven to be an extraordinary resource for our efforts to engage the public in creative ways to begin conversations, facilitate education and challenge misconceptions about the industry!” -Warren Martin

Kansas Strong has done an outstanding job of putting these ideas into practice in two of their recent videos.

In this video, they take the moral high ground on environmental issues, pointing out that “the issue is not a choice between the environment and the industry. Nor is it about protecting the environment from the industry. The real issue we should be discussion is how is the oil and gas industry working to create the best environment for humanity?”

One of the tactics I use to get people to appreciate the vital importance of fossil fuels is I take them on an “oil walk,” where I go step-by-step through their day, pointing to all of the things in their lives made from petroleum. This video does a great job of visualizing the omnipresence of oil products, ending with the tagline “Petroleum. It’s Part of Everything We Do.”

I hope you watch both videos. This is the sort of impactful content that’s possible when you learn how to reframe the debate in pro-human, whole-picture terms. I’m excited to see much more of this kind of messaging from the industry in the future.

ALSO: Whenever you’re ready,here are 3 ways I can help your organization turn non-supporters into supporters and turn supporters into champions.

1. Hire me to speak at your next event.

If you have an upcoming board meeting, employee town hall, or association meeting, I have some new and updated speeches about the moral case for fossil fuels, winning hearts and minds, and communications strategy in the new political climate.

If you’d like to consider me for your event, just reply to this message and put “Event” in the subject line.

2. Hold a free Lunch-and-Learn (inside or outside the industry).

This program contains one of my favorite debates along with some “cheat sheets” to help you make the moral case for fossil fuels in your professional and personal life more easily than you thought possible. You can have access to the entire program right now. By the end of the session you and your team will:

  • gain a deeper sense of meaning from their work
  • be able to turn fossil fuel skeptics into fossil fuel supporters
  • learn the secrets to having constructive conversations about energy instead of frustrating fights

Click here to sign up for the free program.

3. Fill out the free Constructive Conversation Scorecard to assess where you are and where you want to be in your one-on-one communications.

Email it back to me and I’ll send you my step-by-step Constructive Conversation System that will enable you to talk to anyone about energy.

FLORIDA: Define ‘Free Public Schools’ and Limit School Board ‘Home Rule’ Authority

Every 20 years, Florida convenes a Constitutional Review Commission to consider possible changes to Florida’s Constitution, and to then place those proposed revisions on the ballot.  The Constitutional Review Commission convened this year, in anticipation of the November 2018 ballot.

Preamble to the Florida Constitution of 1865.

Many of us have observed first-hand the overreach of our local school boards beyond classroom “reading, writing and arithmetic” into collectivist “collaborative partnerships” with various non-government community organizations. This is classic “mission drift” that surely goes beyond our state’s constitutional framers when they drafted Art. IX, Section 4(b) which provides that the School Boards shall operate the “free public schools.”

The problem is, “free public schools” has never been defined, and to this day the Florida Attorney General and Florida courts struggle to understand the outer limits of that term.

Adding to this problem, in 1983 the Florida Legislature gave school boards “home rule power,” telling them in essence that they can do whatever they want — without any check from other branches of government — unless the Legislature has “expressly prohibited” the school board from acting on that subject.  Here is an excerpt from an  Florida Attorney General advisory opinion drafted shortly after the 1983 legislative change:

Section 230.03(2), F.S. [now 1001.32(2), F.S.], currently provides: “SCHOOL BOARD.–In accordance with the provisions of s. 4(b) of Art. IX of the State Constitution, district school boards shall operate, control, and supervise all free public schools in their respective districts and may exercise any power except as expressly prohibited by the State Constitution or general law.” (e.s.) Section 7 of Ch. 83-324, Laws of Florida, deleted the language contained in s. 230.03(2), F.S. 1981, which stated that district school boards may exercise any power “for educational purposes except as otherwise provided by the State Constitution or law” and added the language “except as expressly prohibited by the State Constitution or general law.” (e.s.) Since the issuance of AGO 83-72, it has been the position of this office that the 1983 amendment conferred on school boards a variant of “home-rule power,” and that a district school board may exercise any power for school purposes in the operation, control, and supervision of the free public schools in its district except as expressly prohibited by the State Constitution or general lawSee also AGO’s 84-95, 84-58.

Most people will agree that local control of schools is a good thing, and thus the concept of “home rule power” is also a good thing.  But most people would also agree that our public school system should focus on education in the classroom, plus traditional extracurricular activities such as athletics, music, academic clubs, etc.  Schools go beyond their mission when they delve into (i) instructing parents on how to be better parents; (ii) providing welfare to students; (iii) providing affordable housing; and (iv) “collectively collaborating” with local non-profits on pet projects such as “Future Ready Collier” and NCH’s self-serving special interest “Blue Zones Project.”  These all take the eye off of the ball of teaching in the classroom; they are expensive; and they create a bloated school district administration that becomes an out-of-control behemoth.

As Joe Whitehead analogized on his 8/19/2017 radio show, the behemoth bureaucratic administration becomes like “Hal 9000,” the computer in 2001: a Space Odyssey, which takes on a life of its own and serves itself rather than the people it was originally designed to serve.

So here’s a simple proposed solution to this mission drift:

1. Constitutionally define “free public schools” under Art. IX, Section 4(b) of the Florida Constitution.  Limit it to teaching students within the four corners of the school district campus, with focus on reading, writing, arithmetic, science, fact-based American history, and traditional extracurriculars.

2. Legislatively amend Fla. Stat. Section 1001.32(2) to allow school board home rule authority only within the constitutional definition of “free public schools.”  The amended statute might read as:

(2) DISTRICT SCHOOL BOARD.—In accordance with the provisions of s. 4(b) of Art. IX of the State Constitution, district school boards shall operate, control, and supervise all free public schools, as constitutionally defined, in their respective districts and may exercise any power except as expressly prohibited by the State Constitution or general law.  For actions or matters beyond the scope of free public schools, district school boards may not exercise any power except as expressly authorized by the Legislature.

(changes in bold).

3.  Legislatively define the statutory terms “educational purposes” and “school purposes” in alignment with the new definition of “free public schools.”

4.  Constitutionally (or at least legislatively) prohibit school boards from engaging in “for profit” activities such as after-school child care, or affordable housing.  All school board programs should be “revenue neutral,” with the school board required to provide studies containing sufficient data to demonstrate fiscal neutrality.

ADDITIONAL ITEMS FOR FURTHER CONSIDERATION BASED ON THE PREMISE THAT SCHOOL DISTRICTS HAVE BECOME TOO BIG, BUDGETS TOO LARGE AND DIFFICULT TO TRACK, AND SUPERINTENDENTS HAVE TOO MUCH ABILITY TO CONSOLIDATE POWER, NOT JUST WITHIN THE SCHOOL SYSTEM, BUT IN THE COMMUNITY:

5.  Amend Fla. Const. Art. IX, Sect. 4(a) to define a “school district” as something smaller than the region of each county.  That may have been appropriate a century ago when Florida’s population was smaller and more spread out, but it now consolidates too much power in a centralized school district administration.  (Take, for instance Collier’s  annual budget which now for the first time exceeds $1 billion).  Alternatively, keep the “county” geographical limits for a school district, but break it into elementary, middle and high school subdistricts, each with a separate superintendent and budget.  Some may counter that this will lead to fiscal inefficiencies in areas such as busing, athletic fields, etc., but this can be resolved legislatively by allowing inter-district sharing of such resources and services.

6.  Change F.S. 1010.33 to state that each School Board “shall” (not just “are authorized to”) have its own independent certified public accountant to perform its own annual financial and performance audit.  In other words, take this out of the control of the superintendents, who may otherwise too easily control these audits. 

6.  Provide term limits for superintendents.  They have too much ability to “roll up” individual power by their connections within the community, serving themselves more than the students.  Also provide a prohibition on superintendents lobbying school boards once they depart.

7.  Recognize that individual school board members were elected by the people as their policy-making representatives.  Enact legislation authorizing any school board member to add a policy item to the school board agenda, so that the rights of the “minority” board group may be heard and not subverted by all-powerful superintendents and the “majority” board members they all-too-often control.

Constitutional Review Commission member / Collier School Board member Erika Donalds.

We in Collier County are fortunate to have one of our school board members, Erika Donalds, serving on the Constitutional Review Commission.  In fact, Ms. Donalds chairs the “local government” panel and serves on the “education” panel , which includes Article IX of the Constitution which needs amending as mentioned herein.  Ms. Donalds would do well to consider the foregoing constitutional proposals, with local state representatives Byron Donalds and Bob Rommel leading on the legislative issues.**

** (Particularly Mr. Donalds, who now serves on various k-12 legislative subcommittees.)

The Death of the American Woman

I have been thinking a lot about Bill O’Reilly and his departure from Fox News. This is the first time that I have commented on it because I wanted to thoroughly think it through first, and this is the conclusion that I have arrived at;

I am not a big fan of Bill O’Reilly, and never have been, but that isn’t because of any allegations of womanizing. I just find him to be an obnoxious bore, but Mr. Bill has become the latest victim of liberalism, that’s all. Nothing to do with sex, or harassment, or anything of the sort….just liberalism and here’s why.

Woman have gone the way of every other minority in this country, namely blacks, in the respect that they have become abusers of the very system that has given them equality and justice. At one time, that pendulum of justice swung far to one side and treated women unfairly…..same as it did for blacks, but then things changed and there was a correction, rightfully so, and that pendulum swung the other way, but instead of stopping it in the middle where truth and fairness for all is found, they, like blacks, kept on pushing it far to the opposite side to where now they are able to manipulate and abuse the very system that sought to correct the uneven balance.

Women have become like political and social IED’s. The slightest provocation, and even no provocation, could cause them to explode, and if you are in their path…..you are going to get hurt.

One word from a woman, and without one iota or scintilla of evidence or proof, and a man is immediately under the microscope by the social and legal communities and his entire life is at risk. Let’s take a couple of scenarios that are going on right now and that I am personally familiar with:

The first, a young couple living together. He bought the house, and she is the “live in” girlfriend with three kids. They get into a fight, she calls the cops and accuses him of hitting her. He is arrested and cannot return to his house. This has become an old story. It is now almost commonplace for a woman to file a “protection from abuse” when couples seek divorce, just to get him out of the house, and if she files it, she automatically gets it. No proof of abuse, she just gets the order.

Next, did you know that it is a sad fact that many young fathers will not bathe their daughters? It’s a fact. Why? Because of the ever increasing accusations of sexual abuse if the couple becomes estranged. One accusation from a woman immediately puts a man under the microscope of the legal authorities. Yes, I know of such a case right now……and it never happened. The playwright, William Congreve said it best, “….Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turn’d, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

These are not isolated cases or situations. This has become the norm across the Nation. The American Woman has proudly taken her place alongside Black Lives Matter. Unless you have your head buried in the sand, you’ll have noticed that there is a war against whites, there is a war against boys and there is a war against men.

So if you’re a white boy who has grown to be a man? Well, you’re pretty much screwed.

In the shadow of Joshua Chamberlain

What are you mad at? What is it about these marble monuments that have you so worked up.

I live in Maine so I am a Northern Yankee. That is about as “Northern” as you can get, and trust me, it’s as Yankee as you can get. In fact, I live just a few miles from where the great Brigadier General, Joshua Chamberlain was born. Now, you do know who he was, don’t you? NO? Well, I’ll tell you….

Joshua Chamberlain was born in 1828 in Brewer, Maine, just across the river from where I live. He served four terms as the Governor of Maine and he was the President of the Prestigious Bowdon College in Brunswick, Maine. Before all that, however, he commanded a Regiment of Union soldiers at the battle of Gettysburg known as the 20th Maine. Chamberlain and the boys of the 20th Maine were positioned at a place called, “Little Round Top.” That position was the back side of the Union line. Should the Confederate soldiers break through Chamberlain’s line, they would be able to attack from the rear, winning the battle and then advancing to Washington with ease and winning the war.

Confederate Infantry repeatedly marched up the hill and advanced on the 20th Maine, killing many of those good Maine boys, and wounding much more. Those Confederate soldiers advanced so many times that Chamberlain’s forces began to run low on ammunition. It was at this point that Chamberlain ordered the left side of his line to join the right and his men to fix bayonets. He then ordered a “Right Wheel Forward” which was to swing down like a wheel, screaming bloody murder, charging at the enemy. His maneuver was a successful one, the Confederate soldiers were pushed back, and many killed. Many historians have credited Chamberlain for saving the Union with his stand at Little Round Top, but that’s for historians to debate.

So what does all this have to do with you? Let’s look at that now.

Just shy of two years later, on April 9, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant met with Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia to accept the unconditional surrender of the Southern Army. The war was over. The North had won. A new era was about to begin. With tensions still high, General Grant placed Joshua Chamberlain in charge of the Union Troops at Appomattox.

Now here’s the thing…..In spite of the terrible battle waged at Little Round Top and the Maine boys who lost their lives there, Brigadier Joshua Chamberlain ordered the Union Troops to form a column on both sides of the stairs of the Courthouse where Lee was surrendering and when Lee emerged, every Union soldier was at attention and saluting the General and affording him the respect and courtesy that his rank and position demanded. After Lee’s surrender, they also stood at attention as Lee’s conquered army passed by.

The average age of the Civil War soldier was 25 years old. More than 625,000 of them were laid in their graves before their lives ever began and still, a Brigadier General from Maine along with hundreds of of other young boys in blue who marched until their feet bled, froze in the cold winter night, and went hungry for days when rations were scarce, stood at attention and in solemn respect to their Confederate counterparts at wars end. So I ask you; What gives you the right of righteous indignation. What dues have you paid that usurped those who showed respect to these boys in grey.

What is this self aggrandizement that you would place yourselves above the likes of Joshua Chamberlain and his charitable gesture of respect to Robert E. Lee.

Finally, will it be your greatest moment in life when you someday sit with your grandchildren on your knee and point to a faded photo of a coward, their face covered with a handkerchief, and proudly exclaim, “That was me!” Which one of you will defiantly tear the mask from your face as you pull the statue of Robert E. Lee to the ground and proudly proclaim, “Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain, you now stand in my great shadow.”

RELATED ARTICLE: President Trump Praises Veterans for Keeping ‘History and Culture’

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Alt-left Terrorist Tries To Blow Up Statue With IED

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Union soldiers drawing up their weapons in salute as the surrendered Confederates march past. Image courtesy Don Troiani, Historical Art Prints.

Child Abuse in Indiana: Pray or Prey?

It’s not a pretty picture, as they say. No, I retract that. It’s a hideous, odious picture of a Midwestern capital that shuts its eyes to child abuse and trafficking, shuts its eyes, closes its doors to victims, and slams its doors against mandatory reporters like teachers.

Years ago, CPS, in an Indianapolis suburb, would repeatedly receive reports of a prolific child molester, a prominent elected official, and routinely shred them, according to its staff. Long ago, the official left Indianapolis, but his trail of tears stayed.

Now, City headlines tout such good news as “Indianapolis man won’t go to prison for molesting daughter with cancer.” Even if you believe in climate change, the climate for kids in Indy is not changing, except for the worse.

If your heart breaks to know that this tiny victim of predation gets no justice, move. I am quite serious. Show your intolerance for hate against children with your feet and the seat of your pants. Do not let your children and grandchildren grow up in a climate of hate against the child, hate against the sanctity of the child.

Can we envisage a more vulnerable victim than a 6-year-old girl with brain cancer, spending several months in the hospital, a year in chemotherapy, and being abused nightly by her father? Marion Superior Court Magistrate Steven Rubick ruled that this Super Dad deserved a chance to financially support his wife and children, although he had failed to do so for the year after being prosecuted when he was living in the family home and they could not move back in until he left.

Twelve years of probation for crushing a deathly-ill child’s life … Indy should be proud of its continuing record of protecting predators like the Park Tudor hero basketball coach who preyed upon his student for months and two other students before her.

In exclusive Park Tudor school, where tuition exceeds $20,000 per child per year, a combination basketball coach and chemistry teacher was finally sentenced to 14 years in prison for his repeated crimes against one of his Park students, after the school’s attorney, Michael Blickman, partner in Ice Miller law firm, refused to provide law enforcement with child pornography evidence that he had obtained directly from the victim’s family until three weeks after receiving said graphic images and written messages between the predator and the victim … three weeks during which a predator was being effectively protected from prosecution by withholding of evidence.

Where is Blickman’s prosecution 1 ½ years after he illegally obtained child pornography, transferred it to his own thumb drive, took it to the Ice Miller offices, and withheld the evidence from law enforcement for three weeks? U.S. Attorney Josh Minkler, per reports in the Indianapolis Star, when asked about Park Tudor’s handling of the evidence, merely said, “We’ll save that for another day.” Does anyone believe that Michael Blickman would have been allowed to possess and transfer child pornography and to withhold the explicit evidence of crimes against a child if he were not in a protected class of people, as was the prominent Indianapolis public official who was a prolific child molester?

Looking at the facts of the Park Tudor case is a disgusting revelation of how precious children are sacrificed for political considerations. The timeline shows that Park’s coach not only repeatedly exchanged pornographic pictures and videos with his victim for months and Michael Blickman withheld the evidence of said crimes for three weeks from law enforcement, but it took the Indiana Department of Child Services multiple reports of the crimes and 20 days from the initial report to DCS for a DCS case manager to speak to the family for the first time. Thirty-seven days after the initial report, detectives interviewed the head of Park Tudor, who allegedly hanged himself in his garage at his home adjacent to the Park Tudor campus two days later on a Saturday morning, which suicide has been widely reported as being “unrelated to investigation” going on at his school. The proximity in time between the Headmaster’s interview and his reported suicide was certainly a mere coincidence.

In a case that involves the questionable death of a brilliant man, husband, father of two children, exceedingly handsome, Headmaster of one of Indiana’s most exclusive private schools, living in a home valued at over $800,000, who would possibly believe that his reported suicide, two days after being interviewed by law enforcement on a child pornography case in which the evidence was withheld from detectives for three weeks by the attorney advising him, was for reasons “unrelated to” the crimes being investigated?

Indianapolis attorney Jack Crawford, according to Indianapolis Star reports, is quoted, “That’s child pornography,” commenting on Blickman’s making of copies of explicit messages and images and keeping them at his office. Blickman also allowed the predator to take his school computer home with him to remove “personal” content after Blickman had control of the evidence of the coach’s crimes against the child; yet, Blickman remains unprosecuted.

In the Park Tudor Deferred Prosecution Agreement between the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the school, only the Headmaster, now dead, is subject “to prosecution for the offense of Misprision of a Felony, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 4,” meaning failure to promptly report a felony to appropriate authorities; although it is irrefutable that Blickman was actually the owner of the child pornography for three weeks and was the legal counsel for the Headmaster, advising him on handling the crimes at hand committed by Park Tudor’s coach. Nowhere in the Deferred Prosecution Agreement is the name of Michael Blickman ever printed or the offense of Misprision of a Felony attributed to Blickman, only to a dead Headmaster.

Taking a look at the predator and the evidence placed before Magistrate Judge Debra McVicker Lynch, it is astonishing to note that she ruled against the prosecutors’ recommendation that the coach remain jailed at a federal prison until his trial, commenting, “I am troubled by the gross immaturity,” referring to the coach’s communications with a minor Park Tudor student who knocked the victim to the ground after she had reported the coach’s crimes, saying, “It was fun knocking her to the ground.” The coach’s reply was, “It would have been pretty epic if you would have caused a concussion lol,” and “I would turn my head if you messed her up.”

Is this “gross immaturity,” or is it violent, dangerous, vicious rhetoric from a teacher and coach after he has been caught in his crimes against a child, encouraging another child to attack her, which attack did indeed occur at Park Tudor, further traumatizing the victim and her friend, who was also attacked by their fellow classmate.

Judge Lynch and the coach’s attorney in this abysmal case have served together in the Senior Counsel division of the Indy Bar Association.

Unbelievably, with all of the irrefutable evidence in hand of repeated crimes against a child, the coach was not arrested until seven weeks after his resignation from Park, with his protective father proclaiming, “I don’t believe my son is a criminal.” The predator’s attorney, James Voyles, who has repeatedly served as the President and Vice President of the Indy Bar, boasted that 47 people had written letters to the court on behalf of the predator, which letters described the predatory coach as “paint[ing] a picture of a wonderful young man.” This “wonderful young man,” after he had been exposed as a remorseless serial predator, repeatedly tried to persuade his victim to take the blame herself for the crimes he had committed and texted the male Park student, who had violently attacked the victim and her friend on the Park campus, “The nice thing is that I can get any job in the state.”

In the face of all of the written and visual evidence indisputably proving that a Park Tudor teacher had repeatedly committed crimes against a student and additionally against two other students beginning in 2010, prior to said series of crimes, U.S. District Judge Larry J. McKinney ordered a sentence of only 14 years, for which crimes the law permits life in prison.

At this point in time, Magistrate Judge Lynch had refused to incarcerate the predator before his trial; law enforcement did not arrest the predator until seven weeks after his forced resignation and confidentiality agreement with Park Tudor had been signed; DCS did not investigate the case until 20 days after the initial report had been received; detectives did not interview the headmaster of Park Tudor until 37 days after the initial report; Michael Blickman, law partner at Ice Miller, who possessed child pornography and brought it to his office for three weeks, has never been prosecuted; two Park Tudor girls, the victim and her friend, were assaulted at school because the coach had been exposed for his crimes against one of the girls; and children’s lives were needlessly and irreparably harmed either as victims of the crimes or potential victims who know of the crimes and were left unprotected by the entire system from top to bottom.

To be certain, the persons who did not commit Misprision of a Felony were the family members of the victim; yet, they have suffered and will continue to suffer immeasurably for blowing the whistle on the Park Tudor coach who had affairs with at least three students beginning in 2010, according to reports. What really happens to the reporter of child abuse? As we have learned through generations of children and families reporting child abuse in the Catholic Church, the children themselves commonly become the victims of betrayal and abandonment by society, namely their community, neighbors, clergy, educators, and others they should be able to trust implicitly for solace and support during their times of intense crisis, after reporting crimes committed against them.

Let me direct you to my case of reporting child abuse to the Boone County court involving a convicted predator who had committed three separate counts of Child Molesting Class B Felony when committed by an adult. When I served the mother of the convicted molester a subpoena for her to testify under oath about her son’s six-year close relationship with minor children whom I sought to protect, Boone Judge Steven David immediately quashed my subpoena and thereafter ordered me to pay the child molester’s family $60,000. The Indiana Supreme Court subsequently refused to hear my appeal, and later, Steven David was appointed to become Justice of the Indiana Supreme Court.

In his order to me, issued just before Mother’s Day, Judge David described the predator as a young boy who tugged at the pants of a child (in addition to his first victim for whom he had been incarcerated). Because the second molestation was never prosecuted, the victim had no recourse to obtain justice. Judge David, now Justice David, fined me $60,000. for serving a subpoena on the predator’s family, despite the fact that the Marion Superior Court judge actually hearing the criminal case against the predator specifically acknowledged his danger to society, noting specifically “the seriousness/repetitiveness of the delinquent act … endangering the safety and welfare of the community ….”

Like the family that reported the crimes of the Park Tudor coach, my family suffered immeasurably for reporting the crimes of the grandson of a prominent developer in Indianapolis.

In his Affidavit for Probable Cause, the detective noted that the predator had molested a child much younger than he in multiple ways, and additionally had destroyed the little girl’s doll by cutting out the private area, stuffing the doll with things to make it look like his victim, and then setting fire to the victim’s dolls “to release his anger.” Later, while on probation, the predator was found with “eight drawings of people performing and receiving deviant sexual acts,” for which the probation department requested a revocation of probation. At the present time, the predator, now much older, spews dark foreboding poetry on the Internet about “blood blood blood” and brags that he does online videos and work in lingerie specializing in fetish.

At the time that Judge David described the predator’s molestation of a second victim as a young boy tugging at the pants of a child, he was President of the Indiana Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and has been currently appointed by the Indiana Supreme Court to serve on the Judicial Conference Court Improvement Program Executive Committee, the Judicial Conference Juvenile Justice Improvement Committee, the Judicial Conference Strategic Planning Committee, and the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, amongst other programs and committees.

During the time that convicted child trafficker, Jared Fogel, was being investigated by the FBI for sexually abusing children in the United States and other countries of the world, I personally witnessed a serious child abuse incident by an afterschool counselor, weighing approximately 350 pounds, lying on top of a child, who was moaning and groaning while being pinned down by the counselor on a bare floor against a concrete wall, which abuse I immediately reported. A home base for Jared Fogel, the afterschool counselor, and the predator I reported to Steven David was the same facility, where all of these men frequented and where I was targeted as a whistleblower.

Enter my husband’s boss, Robert W. York, a hearing officer for the Indiana Supreme Court in attorney disciplinary cases, whose law firm had employed my husband for years prior to my reports of serious child abuse at the popular facility frequented by predators. York also served with the coach’s attorney and 13 other lawyers and judges in the Indy Bar Senior Counsel Division, including the supervising judge of the Marion County courts. Upon learning of my reports, York pulled my husband into his office with an ultimatum, that being, paraphrased, “either your wife does not further expose the popular facility [where predators frequent] through litigation, or you’re fired.” Indeed, my husband was fired by York, whose visceral hostility against our family has never abated in a dozen years.

Enter Robert W. York again, when a few years later, York represented one of my husband’s former clients, resulting in the suspension by the Indiana Supreme Court, where Judge Steven David serves, of my husband’s law license on minimal grounds, in order to further punish and silence our family for reporting crimes against children.

Enter Robert W. York again, ten years after he fired my husband, when York is appointed by a judge, who himself was appointed by the Indiana Supreme Court, to serve as the administrator of my Dad’s estate. As administrator, York took actions to ensure that my husband’s administrative expenses could not be collected from my Dad’s estate – over $50,000.00 in funds that my husband had advanced to pay the estate’s bills.

Enter York again, now seeking contempt of court citations for fines and imprisonment against both my husband and me by making allegations, documented as false, against us. The judge, the long-time colleague of York in close-knit Lawrence Township, was appointed by the Indiana Supreme Court to supervise the Estate of Holocaust Survivor Al Katz, my Dad. The day of our intended arrests is September 6, 2017, at 1:00 PM, in the courtroom of Judge James Joven on the 14th floor of the City-County Building in Indianapolis, and the media have been banned by the court from taking photographs or making any recordings of our arrests.

In this case, our efforts to report to the Marion County court, as required by the federal Misprision of Felony law, the documented crimes committed by Robert York were met swiftly by orders from Judge Joven that we are forbidden to disrespect York; and our motion for the court to refer Robert York to law enforcement under the Misprision of Felony statute was immediately denied.

What do all of these cases emanating from Indiana have in common? Abusers are protected in Indiana; reporters of abuse are marked; and victims are marred for life. Those who commit child abuse, even heinous serial molestations of young children, are given light sentences, only probation, or remain unprosecuted; but those who report such child abuse can face decades of retribution for their exposure of protected predators who end up in our children’s classrooms or on the Internet making on-line videos laced with fetish lingerie and pornography to lure children into a dark web world from which many will enter innocently and never escape.

Our goal is to get hundreds of letters/emails in support of us sent to:

Vice President Mike Pence, the former Gov. of Indiana
vice.president@whitehouse.gov

Richard Payne Attorney for Indiana Supreme Court
Richard.payne@courts.in.gov

Judge Timothy Oakes Presiding Judge of the Marion Superior Court
toakes@indy.gov

Surely, we should get hundreds of emails in support of us when the predator at Park Tudor school got 47 letters sent to the court in support of him. Please blind copy me with your letters/emails, and urge others to speak out against these grotesque injustices in Indiana to children and elders.

For your information, Robert York and the court are fully informed by expert medical opinions filed with the court that travelling to Indianapolis from Florida is dangerous to my health, medically impermissible, and possibly lethal; but both demand for me to risk my life and health to personally appear before Judge Joven on York’s fraudulent claims that I did not file a second accounting in Dad’s probate case (which second accounting was filed in 2015 and so appears on the court’s own docket) and that I interfered with the sale of Dad’s home by objecting to its sale without any court hearing on administrative expenses owed to my husband for over four years. For these fraudulent claims, I am to risk my life in violation of my religious convictions that I can never risk my life but in extreme emergencies. Since I cannot travel without risking my life, I am to be arrested and shipped to Indianapolis on September 6, 2017.

Please act now, urge others to speak now, and contact the media to cover this story. For further information and documentation, you can reach me at helpelders@hotmail.com.

The Benedict Option: Relative versus Revelatory Truth

“God moves in a mysterious way.” – Isaiah 55:8-9.

I am a member of a weekly men’s prayer fellowship. Each member is required to give a Biblical lesson for a month. It turns out that I will be giving the lesson next month.

I began thinking what should I speak about that hasn’t already been covered? I thought about discussing the Book of Revelations because many Christians are seeing signs of the end of times and the second coming of Jesus. While thinking about my topic God revealed to me a book titled “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by Rod Dreher.” After reading Dreher’s book I asked members of the prayer fellowship to read the book and discuss the ideas contained in it during our weekly Friday meetings during the month of September.

Why did God, who moves in a mysterious way, reveal this book to me?

Because I and many others, Christian and non-Christian alike, feel something is wrong, very wrong, in America and it’s getting worse.

Dreher in his book bears his soul and his concerns for the future of his family, community and the nation. Dreher writes in the preface to his book:

In my 2006 book Crunchy Cons, which explored a countercultural, traditionalist conservative sensibility, I brought up the work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who declared that Western civilization has lost its moorings. The time was coming, said MacIntyre, when men and women of virtue would understand that continued full participation in mainstream society was not possible for those who wanted to live a life of traditional virtue. These people would find new ways to live in community, he said, just as Saint Benedict, the sixth-century father of Western monasticism, responded to the collapse of Roman civilization by founding a monastic order.

Dreher explains how, over the past 7 centuries, Western civilization has come to embrace relative truth and abandon revelatory truth.

Relative truth is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths. Revelatory truth is the knowledge that there are absolute truths. Truths that transcend culture, civilization and mankind itself. These absolute truths have been revealed to us thus the term I use in the title “Revelatory Truth.”

William “Bill” Hild, Pastor of First Sarasota Baptist Church, gave a sermon on “Revelatory Truth.” You may wish to listen to what Pastor Bill has to say by clicking here.

Lindy Keffer in her column “Absolute Truth” wrote:

In a society where ultimate truth is treated like a fairy tale, an outdated idea or even an insult to human intelligence, the motto of the day becomes, “WHATEVER!” Believe whatever you want. Do whatever seems best to you. Live for whatever brings you pleasure, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. And of course, be tolerant. Don’t try to tell anyone that their whatever is wrong.

But where does that leave us? If we have ultimate truth, it gives us both a way to explain the world around us and a basis for making decisions. Without it, we’re alone.

Dreher notes:

Unprecedented numbers of young adult Americans say they have no religious affiliation at all. According to the Pew Research Center, one in three 18-to-29-year-olds have put religion aside, if they ever picked it up in the first place.

[ … ]

In 2005, sociologist Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton examined a wide variety of backgrounds. What they found was that in most cases, teenagers adhered to a mush pseudoreligion the researchers deemed Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD).

MTD has five basic tenets:

  • A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
  • God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible, and by most world religions.
  • The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
  • God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
  • Good people go to heaven when they die.

This creed, they found, is especially prominent among Catholic and Mainline Protestant teenagers.

MTD reeks of relative truth, not Revelatory or Absolute Truth.

Dreher writes:

MTD, in both its progressive and its conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others. It has little to do with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition, which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends suffering-the Way of the Cross- as the pathway to God. Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the Self and material comfort.

Dreher warns, “Nobody but the most deluded of the old-school Religious Right believes that this cultural revolution can be turned back. The wave cannot be stopped, only ridden.”

What Dreher presents is another way forward for those who embrace revelatory/absolute truth.

He asks,

“Could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to . . . stop fighting the flood?”

That is to quit piling up sandbags [to fight the flood] and to build an ark in which to shelter until the water recedes and we can put our feet on dry land again? Rather than wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, we should instead work of building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.

Dreher unequivocally states, “We have been in a place like this before. In the first centuries of Christianity, the early church survived and grew under Roman persecution and later after the collapse of the empire in the West. We latter-day Christians must learn from their example-and particularly from the example of Saint Benedict.”

Dreher is on to something. Christians must go back in time, and back to the basics, in order to regain a virtuous Christian future.

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The Four Corners of Life

Anthony Esolen reflects on what happens when we tear down the solid foundations of Christian life. We need builders now. We must have slow, patient building, the building up of human souls.

One day when I was a boy I was riding in the car with my father, in the countryside north of Carbondale, Pennsylvania, when we came to an open crossroads at the top of a high hill.

They call this intersection The Four Corners of Life,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. “Can you guess why?”

I looked out of the windows left and right and back, and saw a church and a cemetery on two of the corners, and a couple of buildings which I couldn’t identify on the others.

Well, I can guess, but you’d better tell me.”

That building over here,” he said, “used to be a small hospital, and this over here is a beer garden.” That’s what we called bars in that part of the world. “So you’re born in the hospital, you get married in church, and you get buried in the cemetery.”

What about the beer garden?”

That,” said my father, with his humorous understatement, “is where some guys go after they get married and before they get put in the ground. The Four Corners of Life!”

Eclipse in America, 08/21/17

My father was a good man and a devout Catholic, not above visiting the Pine Cafe on a Sunday afternoon, owned and operated by his old friend Joe with the Italian accent. He took me with him sometimes, as you could do then without fear of anything indecent, and I’d play shuffleboard or skee-ball, snacking on red-dyed pistachio nuts which Joe provided free of charge.

My father has been gone these twenty-six years, the Pine Cafe is no more, and the Four Corners of Life might be remembered by a few old-timers; I think I can still find the intersection. But that place came to my mind this evening when I went to Mass in a rural village in Nova Scotia.

I like the people in that old place of fishing boats and lobster traps; they’re a lot like the coal miners of my youth. They bear no resentment against the Church, and have little use for modern ideologies.

But they have been ravaged by modernity all the same. The church was filled with people who really wanted to be there; almost all of them older than I am, and I’m not young. The priest is newly ordained: his hair is white and he breathes heavily and he clearly has seen the other side of seventy.

He preached a fine sermon, and before Mass he addressed the people directly, telling them that the diocese of Antigonish has no ordinands this year, and not one young man in the seminary. It will be at least seven years before a man from the diocese will minister as priest to his people.

No children, no priests. No healthy habits of manhood, no priests; no vocations to the married life, no priests. But my mind returned to the jest my father told.

Click here to read the rest of Tony Esolen’s column . . .

Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. His latest books are Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child and Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture. He directs the Center for the Restoration of Catholic Culture at Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts.