Utah Legislature’s Unanimous Committee Resolution Declares Pornography a Public Health Crisis

/in , , , , /by

GREAT FALLS, VA–  On Friday February 5th, the Utah State Legislature’s resolution on the  public health crisis of pornography  passed unanimously through committee.

“Enough Is Enough® applauds the leadership of the Utah State Legislature’s committee resolution declaring the public health crisis caused by pornography. This unanimous landmark decision shows the courage and conviction of a legislative body to deal with unpopular and often misunderstood  social justice issues such as pornography.

Unfortunately, deviant and extreme Internet pornography has become increasingly more mainstream due to few barriers of entry since 1994 when EIE launched the national movement for prevention solutions to protect children from prosecutable content online.

Since that time, numerous  peer-reviewed research studies continue to reveal that Internet pornography use is a  fueling factor in  the sexual exploitation of children, violence against women, sex trafficking, sexual  and erectile dysfunction and  physiological and chemical changes in the brain. A shared responsibility between the public, Corporate America and government is necessary to curb the continuous flood of Internet pornography in our nation. Now that science backs up the reality of Internet pornography’s harm to children, adults and cultures, we are hopeful that other states will address this serious issue very soon.”

For more information on the issue, please see “The Internet Pornography Pandemic: The Largest Unregulated Social Experiment in Human History” by Donna Rice Hughes. 

enough is enough logoAbout Enough Is Enough®

Enough Is Enough® (EIE) is a 501(c) 3 national, non-partisan non-profit with a mission to make the Internet safer for children and families by advancing solutions that promote equality, fairness and respect for human dignity with shared responsibility between the public, technology and the law. www.enough.org; www.internetsafety101.org;www.friendlywifi.org

EDITORS NOTE: The features image is courtesy of Reuters.

Zika, Mass Murderers and Radical Environmentalists

/in , , , , /by

If we were to compile a list of history’s most prolific mass murderers, who would we put on our list?  Attila the Hun ravaged the Roman Empire during the 5th Century, killing and maiming all who stood in his way.  In the 13th Century, Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes roamed far and wide, creating a bloody empire that stretched from China and the Korean peninsula all the way to Iraq and Eastern Europe.

From 1921 to 1959, Josef Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with a cruelty unprecedented in human history, killing some 60 million of his own countrymen.  In the 1930’s and 40’s, Adolph Hitler murdered some 6 million people – mostly Jews, Gypsies, and others who were deemed ineligible for membership in the “master race.”  And from 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, murdered nearly 4 million in a wanton political “cleansing” of the Cambodian countryside.

But who would we select as the greatest mass murderer of all time?  The leading candidate for that title would be American marine biologist Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, the principal force behind the banning of the pesticide DDT and the godmother of radical today’s radical environmentalists of the political left.

DDT is an odorless chemical pesticide used to control disease-carrying and crop-eating insects.  Developed in Germany in 1874, it did not come into common usage until World War II when it was effectively used for pre-invasion spraying of jungles and marshes.  Following the war, it was widely used throughout the world as a means of combating yellow fever, typhoid fever, malaria, and other diseases carried by insects.

Not only was DDT a major boon to the life expectancy of people throughout the world, it could be purchased for just pennies a pound.  In India alone, the number of cases of malaria was reduced from 75 million to less than 5 million in just ten years.

But then, in 1962, Rachel Carson published her book, Silent Spring, and environmental activism quickly became a leading fad among American liberals.  Carson charged that, as DDT entered the food chain, certain reproductive dysfunctions, such as thin eggs shells in some species of birds, might occur.

In late 1971, the Environmental Protection Agency initiated a series of hearings on the potential dangers of DDT.  After seven months of exhaustive hearings, the EPA’s Administrative Law Judge, Edmund Sweeney, ruled that, “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man… The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife… The evidence in this proceeding supports the conclusion that there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT.”

Nevertheless, in spite of all of the scientific testimony to the contrary, pressure by radical environmentalists caused EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus, a wealthy member of the Environmental Defense Fund, to reverse Judge Sweeney’s ruling, declaring that DDT was a “potential human carcinogen” and banning its use for virtually all applications.

Although reliable statistics are hard to find, it is estimated that, in the forty-five years since the banning of DDT, more than 9 billion cases of malaria have been reported, most of them in developing countries.  At the rate of 700,000 to 800,000 malaria-related deaths per year, more than 36 million people have lost their lives to malaria in the past forty-five years… 90% of them pregnant women and children under age 5.

By comparison, the Great Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26, 2004, killed more than 227,900 people in 14 countries, and 125,000 more were seriously injured.  But the loss of life and the injuries due to drowning and the collapse of buildings may have been exceeded by those who would die as a result of starvation and the spread of disease, such as typhoid fever, dysentery, cholera, and malaria.

Typhoid fever, dysentery, and cholera can be treated with a combination of drugs and/or oral rehydration, but malaria is another matter.  Malaria is best controlled through the application of DDT in mosquito-infested areas.  But DDT is no longer an alternative.  Its use has been banned since the early ‘70s as a result of pressure by radical environmentalists in the United States and Europe.

But now, in the early months of 2016, epidemiologists are confronted with yet another incurable disease related to mosquito infestation.  According to a February 5, 2016 report by Investor’s Business Daily, “The Zika virus is spreading and some public health officials seem to be near panic.  Whatever happens, don’t blame the mosquitoes.  This is a man-made problem.”

The report goes on to say, “Maybe the Zika outbreak will fade without having become too widespread, the way the Ebola scare never lived up to the hype.  But for now, Zika is apparently on the move and government health officials believe it will spread throughout the Americas, except for Canada and Chile.”

A January 2016 report by the World Health Organization (WHO) tells us that, “Zika virus disease outbreaks were reported for the first time from the Pacific in 2007 and 2013 (Yap and French Polynesia, respectively), and in 2015 from the Americas (Brazil and Colombia) and Africa (Cape Verde).  In addition, more than 13 countries in the Americas have reported sporadic Zika virus infections indicating rapid geographic expansion of Zika virus.”

Although generally not fatal in either adults or infants, the normal symptoms of Zika virus infection include mild headaches, skin rash, fever, malaise, pink eye, and joint pain.  With symptoms lasting only a few days in adults, Zika fever has been a relatively mild disease of limited scope, with only one in five persons developing symptoms and with no fatalities.  As of 2016, no vaccine or preventative drug is available.  However, the WHO recommends that symptoms can be treated with rest, fluids, and acetaminophen.

However, the WHO reports that, “During large outbreaks in French Polynesia and Brazil in 2013 and 2015, respectively, national health authorities reported potential neurological and auto-immune complications of Zika virus disease.  Recently, in Brazil, local health authorities have observed an increase in Zika virus infections in the general public as well as an increase in babies born with microcephaly in northeast Brazil.  Agencies investigating the Zika outbreaks are finding an increasing body of evidence about the link between Zika virus and microcephaly.”

Microcephaly is a birth defect in which a baby’s head is smaller than expected when compared to healthy babies of the same sex and age.  Babies with microcephaly often have smaller brains that might not have developed properly.

Zika virus is a member of the virus family Flaviviridae (genus Flavivirus), transmitted by the sting of the Aedes mosquito.  Under normal circumstances, since DDT poses no threat to humans or to the environment when properly used, the mosquito populations could be controlled through the use of DDT.  However, controlling the spread of deadly diseases through the use of DDT is not a part of the radical environmentalist agenda.  As Investor’s Business Daily correctly points out, “(T)he eco-activists would rather tolerate tens of millions of Third World deaths for the sake of a political agenda.  That’s the cruel and inhuman way of the environmentalist.  He will trade lives – and jobs, and economic liberty, and others’ wealth – in exchange for making the world… worse.”

So who wins the title of the greatest mass murderer of all time?  If we count all of the lives that would have been saved in the past forty-five years through the application of DDT, that number would exceed the total number of people murdered by Attila, Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot, combined.

To allow all of those lives to be lost in the name of “environmental protection” and “animal rights,” using junk science as a basis, is not just inhumane, it is genocide on a grand scale.  The title of “Greatest Mass Murderer of all Time” goes to the late Rachel Carson and all of her radical environmentalist followers.

Why the 20-Year Mortgage Is the Answer to Housing Finance Mess

/in , , , /by

A recent Associated Press poll found more than six in 10 respondents expressed only slight confidence — or none at all — in the ability of the federal government to make progress on important issues facing the country.

The public’s skepticism is well founded, especially when it comes to federal housing policy. Notwithstanding an alphabet soup of government agencies and federally backed companies — Federal Housing Administration, Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae, Freddie Mac, Federal Housing Finance Agency, etc. — and trillions spent on government-mandated “affordable housing” initiatives, our home ownership rate today is no higher than it was in the mid-1960s. What is best described as a nationalized housing finance system has failed to achieve its two primary goals: broadening home ownership and achieving wealth accumulation for low- and middle-income homeowners.

The U.S. home ownership rate as of the fourth quarter of 2015 is 63.8%, the same as in the fourth quarter of 1966, and only marginally higher than the rate in 1956. More troubling, our housing policy has been unsuccessful at building wealth — the antidote to poverty. Between 1989 and 2013, median total accumulated wealth for households in the 40th to 60th percentiles has decreased from $76, 100 to $61,800, while median wealth for households in the 20th to 40th percentile has decreased by more than 50%, from $44,800 to $21,500. It was precisely these groups that were targeted to be helped by affordable housing policies.

For the last 60 years, U.S. housing policy has relied on looser and looser mortgage lending standards to promote broader home ownership and accomplish wealth accumulation, particularly for low- and middle-income households. Leverage first took the form of low down payments combined with the slowly amortizing 30-year term mortgage, which resulted in rapidly accelerating defaults, foreclosures and blighted neighborhoods. Since 1972, homeowners have suffered between 11 million and 12 million foreclosures. During the 1990s and early 2000s, new forms of leverage were combined with declining interest rates. With demand increasing faster than supply, the result was a price boom that made homes less, not more affordable, necessitating even more liberal credit terms. We are all familiar with the outcome—a massive housing bust and the Great Recession.

Today, in the shadow of Fannie and Freddie’s continued existence, taxpayers are again driving home prices up much faster than incomes — particularly at the lower end of home prices. U.S. housing policy has become self-justifying and self-perpetuating — loved by the National Association of Realtors, many housing advocacy groups, and the government-sponsored enterprises, but dangerous to the very home buyers it is supposed to help.

To help achieve sustainable, wealth-building home ownership opportunities for low- and middle-income Americans, our current government-backed command and control system should be replaced with market-driven antidotes. For most low- and middle-income families, the recipe for wealth-building over a lifetime contains three ingredients: buy a home with a mortgage that amortizes rapidly, thereby reliably building wealth; participate in a defined contribution retirement plan ideally with an employer match; and invest in your children’s college education.

Here are three steps to make the first goal — quickly amortizing mortgages — more of a reality:

First, housing finance needs to be refocused on the twin goals of sustainable lending and wealth-building. Well-designed, shorter term loans offer a much safer and secure path to home ownership and financial security than the slowly amortizing 30-year mortgage. Combining a low- or no-down-payment loan with the faster amortization of a 15- or 20-year term provides nearly as much buying power as a 30-year FHA loan. A bank in Maine offers a 20-year term, wealth-building loan that has 97% of the purchasing power of an FHA-insured loan. By age 50 to 55, when the 30-year-term loan leaves most homeowners saddled with another decade or more of mortgage payments, the cash flow freed up from a paid-off shorter-term loan is available to fund a child’s post-secondary-education needs and later turbocharge one’s own retirement.

Second, low-income, first-time home buyers should have the option to forgo the mortgage interest deduction and instead receive a one-time refundable tax credit that can be used to buy down the loan’s interest rate. Borrowers who participate in a defined contribution retirement plan might receive a larger tax credit, enabling them to lower their rate even more.

The one-time tax credit would support wealth-building by being available only for loans with an initial term of 20 years or less. To avoid pyramiding subsides and reduce taxpayer exposure, only loans not guaranteed by the federal government would be eligible. This would provide a big start to weaning the housing market off of government guarantees. With the Low-income First Time Home buyer — or LIFT Home — tax credit in place, the Fannie and Freddie affordable housing mandates could be eliminated, ending the race to the bottom among government guarantee agencies. Reductions in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget and other budgeted amounts supporting “affordable housing” should also be used to fund LIFT Home. Better to provide the dollars directly to prospective homeowners, than to be siphoned off to bureaucracies and advocacy groups.

Third, the home mortgage interest deduction should be restructured to provide a broad, straight path to debt-free home ownership. Today’s tax code promotes a lifetime of indebtedness by incenting homeowners to take out large loans for lengthy terms so as to “maximize the value” of the deduction. Current law should be changed to: limit the interest deduction for future home buyers to loans used to buy a home by excluding interest on second mortgages and cash-out refinancing; for future borrowers, cap the deduction at the amount payable on a loan with a 20-year amortization term; and provide a grandfather on the deduction cap for existing home loan borrowers with 30-year loans as long as their interest savings go toward shortening the loan’s term.

A 21st-century market approach to wealth-building offers a safe and secure path to home ownership and financial security, something we haven’t had for decades.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The American Banker.

Progress Will Hurt Blameless People by Aaron Ross Powell

/in , , , , , /by

There’s an unfortunate tendency among some free market advocates to blame the victim: If you can’t find work, it’s because you’re lazy or you somehow screwed up. Hard work’s all that’s necessary to succeed. But of course that’s not true. It’s quite easy to think of counterexamples. We know creative destruction is a necessary part of a well-functioning economy. Market churn means people lose their jobs through no fault of their own, and shifts in technology and consumer preferences mean that skills once lucrative can suddenly become relatively worthless. Markets are overwhelmingly good, yes, and are responsible for the astonishing amelioration of poverty we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution, but they have their victims.

A changing global economy has meant a changing American economy and a changing American economy has meant that some people who did well in the old pattern are having a harder time in the new. This harder time is felt by, among others, a segment of America’s lower-middle class who used to be able to find decent-paying jobs that demanded physical labor and the kinds of skills you don’t learn in school.

That segment increasingly faces a fact about the modern economy: Unless you’re a knowledge worker, it’s become a whole lot harder to find a well-paying, stable, long-term job because the skills you bring to an employer aren’t as in demand as they used to be.

And that’s awful for the people going through it. We can say that free markets change over time and that those changes lead to more prosperity in the long term, and that’s true. But it doesn’t make life better for the machinist or construction worker without a college degree and without much retirement savings. Empathy seems an appropriate response by those of us not facing such hardship.

That even well-functioning markets hurt some people some of the time makes selling market solutions to policy problems often a difficult task. We know that the solution to unemployment or underemployment is more economic freedom. Get rid of the barriers to entry and the protectionist policies keeping afloat what would otherwise be failing firms. Enable private schools to create a robust and successful educational system so more people have the skills needed to succeed in a modern economy. Open trade with the rest of the world, so we can grow our economy, buy goods at lower prices, and sell into more markets.

But here’s the thing. Every one of those solutions ends up sounding, to the person economically hurting now, like saying, “Leave it alone and things will work themselves out. Don’t know quite how or when, but they will.”

Market solutions are emergent solutions, and emergence takes time and can’t be planned or predicted. In fact, it’s the attempt to plan and predict that leads so many non-market-based policies to fail. Economists understand this and so largely trust markets. But most Americans aren’t economists.

I think this explains, in part, the appeal of people like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. We see them as misdiagnosing the problems and offering counter-productive, and sometimes abhorrent, “solutions.” Immigrants are taking your jobs. (They aren’t.) So let’s fix it right now by closing the borders. Trade with China is making us poor. (It isn’t.) So let’s fix it now by establishing quotas and tariffs.

But to people hurting right now, people like Trump or Sanders offer something free markets can’t: certainty, even if illusory. These people right here are the cause of your problems. Punish or stop them and your problems will go away. America will go back to being great, with “great” meaning the way it was when low-information, low-skill Americans could spend their lives comfortably in the middle class. In other words, before America’s economy became modern.

We don’t want that, of course. The economic visions of Trump and Sanders aren’t just backwards, but are dangerously retrograde policies that will hurt everyone without doing much to improve the lives of those who support such policies.

Liberty struggles when confronted with this combination of widespread economic ignorance and the political incentive for politicians to pander and promise solutions that are anything but. And I don’t know how to solve that. Nor do I believe there’s an easy solution. The incentives in politics run against us, and so we somehow need to get better at articulating the story of markets, of the voluntary and the emergent, and do it in a way that’s as compelling and hopeful in its rhetoric as the false hopes sold by those pitching meretricious intervention.

Part of that means consciously avoiding a panglossian picture of markets, and recognizing that sometimes people get hurt by them, and that often that hurt is blameless.

Cross-posted from Libertarianism.org.

Aaron Ross PowellAaron Ross Powell

Aaron Ross Powell is a research fellow and editor of Libertarianism.org.

Policy Science Kills: The Case of Eugenics by Jeffrey A. Tucker

/in , , , , /by

The climate-change debate has many people wondering whether we should really turn over public policy — which deals with fundamental matters of human freedom — to a state-appointed scientific establishment. Must moral imperatives give way to the judgment of technical experts in the natural sciences? Should we trust their authority? Their power?

There is a real history here to consult. The integration of government policy and scientific establishments has reinforced bad science and yielded ghastly policies.

An entire generation of academics, politicians, and philanthropists used bad science to plot the extermination of undesirables.

There’s no better case study than the use of eugenics: the science, so called, of breeding a better race of human beings. It was popular in the Progressive Era and following, and it heavily informed US government policy. Back then, the scientific consensus was all in for public policy founded on high claims of perfect knowledge based on expert research. There was a cultural atmosphere of panic (“race suicide!”) and a clamor for the experts to put together a plan to deal with it. That plan included segregation, sterilization, and labor-market exclusion of the “unfit.”

Ironically, climatology had something to do with it. Harvard professor Robert DeCourcy Ward (1867–1931) is credited with holding the first chair of climatology in the United States. He was a consummate member of the academic establishment. He was editor of the American Meteorological Journal, president of the Association of American Geographers, and a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Meteorological Society of London.

He also had an avocation. He was a founder of the American Restriction League. It was one of the first organizations to advocate reversing the traditional American policy of free immigration and replacing it with a “scientific” approach rooted in Darwinian evolutionary theory and the policy of eugenics. Centered in Boston, the league eventually expanded to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Its science inspired a dramatic change in US policy over labor law, marriage policy, city planning, and, its greatest achievements, the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the 1924 Immigration Act. These were the first-ever legislated limits on the number of immigrants who could come to the United States.

Nothing Left to Chance

“Darwin and his followers laid the foundation of the science of eugenics,” Ward alleged in his manifesto published in the North American Review in July 1910. “They have shown us the methods and possibilities of the product of new species of plants and animals…. In fact, artificial selection has been applied to almost every living thing with which man has close relations except man himself.”

“Why,” Ward demanded, “should the breeding of man, the most important animal of all, alone be left to chance?”

By “chance,” of course, he meant choice.

“Chance” is how the scientific establishment of the Progressive Era regarded the free society. Freedom was considered to be unplanned, anarchic, chaotic, and potentially deadly for the race. To the Progressives, freedom needed to be replaced by a planned society administered by experts in their fields. It would be another 100 years before climatologists themselves became part of the policy-planning apparatus of the state, so Professor Ward busied himself in racial science and the advocacy of immigration restrictions.

Ward explained that the United States had a “remarkably favorable opportunity for practising eugenic principles.” And there was a desperate need to do so, because “already we have no hundreds of thousands, but millions of Italians and Slavs and Jews whose blood is going into the new American race.” This trend could cause Anglo-Saxon America to “disappear.” Without eugenic policy, the “new American race” will not be a “better, stronger, more intelligent race” but rather a “weak and possibly degenerate mongrel.”

Citing a report from the New York Immigration Commission, Ward was particularly worried about mixing American Anglo-Saxon blood with “long-headed Sicilians and those of the round-headed east European Hebrews.”

Keep Them Out

“We certainly ought to begin at once to segregate, far more than we now do, all our native and foreign-born population which is unfit for parenthood,” Ward wrote. “They must be prevented from breeding.”

But even more effective, Ward wrote, would be strict quotas on immigration. While “our surgeons are doing a wonderful work,” he wrote, they can’t keep up in filtering out people with physical and mental disabilities pouring into the country and diluting the racial stock of Americans, turning us into “degenerate mongrels.”

Such were the policies dictated by eugenic science, which, far from being seen as quackery from the fringe, was in the mainstream of academic opinion. President Woodrow Wilson, America’s first professorial president, embraced eugenic policy. So did Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who, in upholding Virginia’s sterilization law, wrote, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Looking through the literature of the era, I am struck by the near absence of dissenting voices on the topic. Popular books advocating eugenics and white supremacy, such as The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, became immediate bestsellers. The opinions in these books — which are not for the faint of heart — were expressed long before the Nazis discredited such policies. They reflect the thinking of an entire generation, and are much more frank than one would expect to read now.

It’s crucial to understand that all these opinions were not just about pushing racism as an aesthetic or personal preference. Eugenics was about politics: using the state to plan the population. It should not be surprising, then, that the entire anti-immigration movement was steeped in eugenics ideology. Indeed, the more I look into this history, the less I am able to separate the anti-immigrant movement of the Progressive Era from white supremacy in its rawest form.

Shortly after Ward’s article appeared, the climatologist called on his friends to influence legislation. Restriction League president Prescott Hall and Charles Davenport of the Eugenics Record Office began the effort to pass a new law with specific eugenic intent. It sought to limit the immigration of southern Italians and Jews in particular. And immigration from Eastern Europe, Italy, and Asia did indeed plummet.

The Politics of Eugenics

Immigration wasn’t the only policy affected by eugenic ideology. Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race(2003, 2012) documents how eugenics was central to Progressive Era politics. An entire generation of academics, politicians, and philanthropists used bad science to plot the extermination of undesirables. Laws requiring sterilization claimed 60,000 victims. Given the attitudes of the time, it’s surprising that the carnage in the United States was so low. Europe, however, was not as fortunate.

Freedom was considered to be unplanned, anarchic, chaotic, and potentially deadly for the race. 

Eugenics became part of the standard curriculum in biology, with William Castle’s 1916 Genetics and Eugenicscommonly used for over 15 years, with four iterative editions.

Literature and the arts were not immune. John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (2005) shows how the eugenics mania affected the entire modernist literary movement of the United Kingdom, with such famed minds as T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence getting wrapped up in it.

Economics Gets In on the Act

Remarkably, even economists fell under the sway of eugenic pseudoscience. Thomas Leonard’s explosively brilliant Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (2016) documents in excruciating detail how eugenic ideology corrupted the entire economics profession in the first two decades of the 20th century. Across the board, in the books and articles of the profession, you find all the usual concerns about race suicide, the poisoning of the national bloodstream by inferiors, and the desperate need for state planning to breed people the way ranchers breed animals. Here we find the template for the first-ever large-scale implementation of scientific social and economic policy.

Students of the history of economic thought will recognize the names of these advocates: Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, Irving Fisher, Henry Rogers Seager, Arthur N. Holcombe, Simon Patten, John Bates Clark, Edwin R.A. Seligman, and Frank Taussig. They were the leading members of the professional associations, the editors of journals, and the high-prestige faculty members of the top universities. It was a given among these men that classical political economy had to be rejected. There was a strong element of self-interest at work. As Leonard puts it, “laissez-faire was inimical to economic expertise and thus an impediment to the vocational imperatives of American economics.”

Irving Fisher, whom Joseph Schumpeter described as “the greatest economist the United States has ever produced” (an assessment later repeated by Milton Friedman), urged Americans to “make of eugenics a religion.”

Speaking at the Race Betterment Conference in 1915, Fisher said eugenics was “the foremost plan of human redemption.” The American Economic Association (which is still today the most prestigious trade association of economists) published openly racist tracts such as the chilling Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro by Frederick Hoffman. It was a blueprint for the segregation, exclusion, dehumanization, and eventual extermination of the black race.

Hoffman’s book called American blacks “lazy, thriftless, and unreliable,” and well on their way to a condition of “total depravity and utter worthlessness.” Hoffman contrasted them with the “Aryan race,” which is “possessed of all the essential characteristics that make for success in the struggle for the higher life.”

Even as Jim Crow restrictions were tightening against blacks, and the full weight of state power was being deployed to wreck their economic prospects, the American Economic Association’s tract said that the white race “will not hesitate to make war upon those races who prove themselves useless factors in the progress of mankind.”

Richard T. Ely, a founder of the American Economic Association, advocated segregation of nonwhites (he seemed to have a special loathing of the Chinese) and state measures to prohibit their propagation. He took issue with the very “existence of these feeble persons.” He also supported state-mandated sterilization, segregation, and labor-market exclusion.

That such views were not considered shocking tells us so much about the intellectual climate of the time.

If your main concern is who is bearing whose children, and how many, it makes sense to focus on labor and income. Only the fit should be admitted to the workplace, the eugenicists argued. The unfit should be excluded so as to discourage their immigration and, once here, their propagation. This was the origin of the minimum wage, a policy designed to erect a high wall to the “unemployables.”

Women, Too

Another implication follows from eugenic policy: government must control women.

It must control their comings and goings. It must control their work hours — or whether they work at all. As Leonard documents, here we find the origin of the maximum-hour workweek and many other interventions against the free market. Women had been pouring into the workforce for the last quarter of the 19th century, gaining the economic power to make their own choices. Minimum wages, maximum hours, safety regulations, and so on passed in state after state during the first two decades of the 20th century and were carefully targeted to exclude women from the workforce. The purpose was to control contact, manage breeding, and reserve the use of women’s bodies for the production of the master race.

Leonard explains:

American labor reformers found eugenic dangers nearly everywhere women worked, from urban piers to home kitchens, from the tenement block to the respectable lodging house, and from factory floors to leafy college campuses. The privileged alumna, the middle-class boarder, and the factory girl were all accused of threatening Americans’ racial health.

Paternalists pointed to women’s health. Social purity moralists worried about women’s sexual virtue. Family-wage proponents wanted to protect men from the economic competition of women. Maternalists warned that employment was incompatible with motherhood. Eugenicists feared for the health of the race.

“Motley and contradictory as they were,” Leonard adds, “all these progressive justifications for regulating the employment of women shared two things in common. They were directed at women only. And they were designed to remove at least some women from employment.”

The Lesson We Haven’t Learned

Today we find eugenic aspirations to be appalling. We rightly value the freedom of association. We understand that permitting people free choice over reproductive decisions does not threaten racial suicide but rather points to the strength of a social and economic system. We don’t want scientists using the state to cobble together a master race at the expense of freedom. For the most part, we trust the “invisible hand” to govern demographic trajectories, and we recoil at those who don’t.

But back then, eugenic ideology was conventional scientific wisdom, and hardly ever questioned except by a handful of old-fashioned advocates of laissez-faire. The eugenicists’ books sold in the millions, and their concerns became primary in the public mind. Dissenting scientists — and there were some — were excluded by the profession and dismissed as cranks attached to a bygone era.

Eugenic views had a monstrous influence over government policy, and they ended free association in labor, marriage, and migration. Indeed, the more you look at this history, the more it becomes clear that white supremacy, misogyny, and eugenic pseudoscience were the intellectual foundations of modern statecraft.

Today we find eugenic aspirations to be appalling, but back then, eugenic ideology was conventional scientific wisdom.

Why is there so little public knowledge of this period and the motivations behind its progress? Why has it taken so long for scholars to blow the lid off this history of racism, misogyny, and the state?

The partisans of the state regulation of society have no reason to talk about it, and today’s successors of the Progressive Movement and its eugenic views want to distance themselves from the past as much as possible. The result has been a conspiracy of silence.

There are, however, lessons to be learned. When you hear of some impending crisis that can only be solved by scientists working with public officials to force people into a new pattern that is contrary to their free will, there is reason to raise an eyebrow. Science is a process of discovery, not an end state, and its consensus of the moment should not be enshrined in the law and imposed at gunpoint.

We’ve been there and done that, and the world is rightly repulsed by the results.

Jeffrey A. TuckerJeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.  Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

United Nation’s Homosexual Stamps create outrage among member nations

/in , , , /by

Josh Craddock in an email reports:

The United Nations issued new LGBT stamps celebrating homosexuality and transgenderism.

The six new stamps show same-sex couples kissing, homosexuals with a young child, and a butterfly figure apparently representing transsexuals.

The U.N.’s unilateral decision to promote LGBT “sexual rights” offends the sensibilities of the majority of nations and contradicts many member states’ cultures, traditions, religious beliefs, and laws.

I didn’t think the U.N. could surprise me with their uselessness and anti-family agenda… But this event shocked me! C-FAM reports that the stamps were revealed after the NYC gay men’s choir sang “against the backdrop of a giant painting of naked figures dancing around a fire presided over by a nude statue of the Greek God of the sea Poseidon.”

The U.N.’s “Free and Equal” initiative, which sponsored the new stamps, promotes a “right” to engage in sodomy and enter into same-sex “marriage.” Of course, there isn’t any such “right” under international law or U.N. treaties. “Free and Equal” has never received support from a majority of United Nations member states. The controversial initiative is mostly funded by Scandinavian countries and channelled through the Secretary General’s human rights agency.

EDITORS NOTE: Those readers wishing to protest this unilateral move by the United Nations may sign a petition by clicking here.

International Olympic Committee: ‘Transgenders’ will be allowed to compete

/in , , , /by

Sex and Sport in Transition – Brad Miner wonders why the International Olympic Committee will allow genetic (transgender) men to compete as women. Read Genesis 1:27, please!

This morning we’re in the afterglow of the Super Bowl, which in recent years has had worrisome elements of pagan spectacle. But there are still worse spectacles in sport – in this, the Silly Season in the progress of our species.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced that “transgender” athletes will be allowed to compete in the upcoming Rio de Janeiro Olympics in whatever sexual identity he/she chooses – with or without reassignment surgery. This means a male runner may enter any race for women, simply because he declares himself to be woman. (The IOC will test male-to-female athletes for testosterone levels – too high, and you’re out. And since those T-levels must have been observed for one year prior to the Games, we’ll be spared commentary by Bob Costas from Rio about what a glorious breakthrough for humanity the new rule represents.)

Women were first permitted to compete in the Olympic Games in 1900 at Paris – in tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrian, and golf. (The golf and the tennis were women-only events. Golf was dropped after 1904 and will finally return at this year’s Games.) By 1928 a fuller schedule of competitions for women began, culminating in the most recent Games (London 2012), the first in which both sexes competed in every event, although, obviously, segregated by sex: 100 meters for men, 100 meters for women, etc.

But when the Games return to Tokyo in 2020 – an eon in terms of cultural change – I promise you the athletes who were women at birth and have remained so will raise loud and justifiable protest about any “transgender” athlete whose T-levels happen to pass muster.

I don’t know what one has to do to drive down testosterone levels, so I asked a prominent physician, who told me that serum testosterone as low as the IOC has established for male-to-female transgender athletes makes it “very unlikely” that a more-or-less normal man could qualify.

Click here to read the rest of Mr. Miner’s new column . . .

The Islamic Rape and Murder of Christian Boys by Raymond Ibrahim

/in , , , /by

A group of Muslim men recently went into a Christian district in Pakistan, abducted a 7-year-old boy, and took turns gang raping him before finally strangling him to death with a rope. Locals found the child’s body dumped in a field the next day:

[T]he body was sent for post-mortem examination which revealed that the 7-year-old was killed after being brutally raped….  Speaking to The Express Tribune, a local said, “The suspects belonged to rich families and were drunk when they kidnapped the child and took him to their dera where they raped him.

Interestingly, while the NY Daily News, the Independent, and other media state that the boy was seized from a “Christian district,”  the original report, published by one Kashif Zafar in the International New York Times’ Express Tribune, avoids mentioning the religious identity of either rapists or raped.  It even fails to mention that this atrocity took place in Pakistan and merely names the region, Bahawalnagar, in both the title and body of the report, though few have any clue what country Bahawalnagar is located in.

Perhaps the NYT’s Express Tribune does not want readers to connect the dots and realize that “rich and drunk” Muslims regularly rape and kill Christian “infidels” in Pakistan.  One week after this 7-year-old boy was gang raped and murdered, another group of reportedly “rich and drunk” Muslims in a car accosted three Christian girls walking home from work.  They sexually harassed them, saying “Christian girls are only meant for one thing, the pleasure of Muslim men.”  When the girls tried to run away, the Muslims chased them down in their car and ran them over, killing one girl, 17-year-old Kiran.

While Muslim men regularly and openly prey on Christian girls in Pakistan, even the gang rape and murder of Christian boys is not as aberrant as the Express Tribune would have people think.  Back in 2012, Samuel Yaqoob , aged 11, went to the markets of Faisalabad to buy food for his family and never returned.   Like the 7-year-old boy mentioned above, Samuel’s body was “found near a drain in the Christian colony, bearing marks of horrific torture, with the murder weapon nearby. His nose, lips and belly had been sliced off, and his family could hardly recognize him because the body was so badly burnt.”  Autopsy found “23 wounds by a sharp weapon” and indications “of sodomy.”

According to Wilson Chowdhry, Chairman of the British Pakistani Christian Association, “Parts of Pakistani culture have a strong homosexual pederast culture, and Christian and other minority boys are especially susceptible to rape and abuse because of the powerlessness of their community and their despised status.”

Chowdhry goes on to mention another case where “a Christian boy was kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed by a police officer, his body similarly being dumped in a drain.”… Keep reading

RELATED ARTICLES:

At UN, Pakistan calls on world to combat not jihad terrorism, but “Islamophobia”

Pakistan: Muslims waving pistols storm Hindu temple, desecrate idol of Hindu deity

Tennessee: Refugee agency places Muslim migrants in jobs Americans would love to have!

/in , , , , , /by

And, adding insult to injury, the biggest chunk of their funding comes from you—the taxpayer!

Update!  National layoff numbers skyrocket! Breaking story.

This story from The Tennessean is meant to give the impression that this program of World Relief (National Association of Evangelicals) is doing wonderful humanitarian work by helping immigrants and refugees with advanced degrees find good paying jobs.

But, if you are like me, you reacted to this story by immediately asking these questions:

What about Americans who have advanced degrees and no work?  What about all of our children, recent college graduates (with big student loan debt), who can’t find jobs? Shouldn’t they come first?

Not according to World Relief’s REACH program or The Tennessean.

As is too often the case, one must read through refugee sob stories and eventually the reader learns that there are 10,000 immigrants in Tennessee who need high level jobs—-ahhhhhh!  10,000!  I wonder how many Americans with advanced degrees are competing with them for limited job opportunities?  Of course The Tennessean would never give us that number!

And, the American job seekers don’t have the services your tax dollars provide the immigrants through REACH. Here is what World Relief (a so-called Christian charity) does for the immigrants according to The Tennessean.

REACH, in Nashville, connects immigrants to mentors, who seek to introduce them to local individuals in their field, and coaches them through licensing processes. The organization also offers training on resumes and interviews. Between licenses and networking, it typically takes between nine and 12 months for an individual to move from a survival job to a professional one.

REACH, launched in 2011, has been able to help as many as 100 people a year. Among them are Coptic Christians fleeing Egypt, Kurds from Iraq and those coming from Congo after fleeing ethnic persecution in Rwanda.

Watch an unidentified REACH employee explain how they helped ‘Ahmed’ get a $93,000 a year job!

Here is what a reader said this morning about this story:

I have a very close friend, also an Ivy League masters graduate who is struggling to find a job in the Middle Tennessee job market. In fact, I have several friends, middle-age, well educated, intelligent, hard-working contributors to their communities who live in Middle Tennessee, and who are either unemployed or underemployed.

But the newspaper and the Chamber of Commerce isn’t taking up their cause.

Neil-MacDonald-3112161-220

Neil MacDonald of the Chamber of Commerce told The Tennessean: “If we want to continue to compete on an international basis, it’s essential we continue our growth in diversity.”

Nor do my friends have federal contractor agencies helping them find jobs.

And my friends aren’t wired-in either. They too are struggling.

At least the refugees and their federal contractors can blame the receiving community for not being more “welcoming” and ensuring that new arrivals get the jobs they thought would be waiting for them when they arrived.

According to this article, there are 10,000 refugees in Tennessee who can’t find the jobs they want. Predictably, federal refugee resettlement contractor World Relief and the refugees themselves blame the receiving community as “unwelcoming” because circumstances haven’t unfolded as they had planned.

But, this, of course, doesn’t stop World Relief from keeping their own cash flow going by bringing ever more refugees to the area.

And the Nashville Chamber of Commerce is telling us that businesses here value “diversity” over workers that are raised, educated and have roots in our Tennessee communities.

Speaking of World Relief’s financial position, World Relief Nashville directs people to its national headquarters where we can examine recent financial documents and their Form 990s.

Here we learn that in 2014, World Relief (National Association of Evangelicals) is a $61 million a year operation and that $41 million comes directly from U.S. taxpayers.

They could not supply all of these benefits to job-seeking immigrants if you (or the good-for-nothing Congress!) weren’t willing to pay for it.

Go here to see who else is funding World Relief’s REACH job hunting program.

More on MacDonald, here.

See 83 previous posts on Nashville by clicking here.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Did UPS plane(s) secretively bring “refugees” to America from the Middle East?

Senate Homeland Security Committee worries about Canada’s Syrian refugee flood

Germany: Police raid refugee shelters thwarting ISIS terror plot

France bans protest march at Calais

Americans’ Incomes Are Unequal, But Mobile by Chelsea German

/in , , , , /by

Americans often move between different income brackets over the course of their lives. As covered in an earlier blog post, over 50 percent of Americans find themselves among the top 10 percent of income-earners for at least one year during their working lives, and over 11 percent of Americans will be counted among the top 1 percent of income-earners for at least one year.

Fortunately, a great deal of what explains this income mobility are choices that are largely within an individual’s control. While people tend to earn more in their “prime earning years” than in their youth or old age, other key factors that explain income differences are education level, marital status, and number of earners per household. As Mark Perry recently wrote:

The good news is that the key demographic factors that explain differences in household income are not fixed over our lifetimes and are largely under our control (e.g. staying in school and graduating, getting and staying married, etc.), which means that individuals and households are not destined to remain in a single income quintile forever.

According to the economist Thomas Sowell, whom Perry cites, “Most working Americans, who were initially in the bottom 20% of income-earners, rise out of that bottom 20%. More of them end up in the top 20% than remain in the bottom 20%.”

While people move between income groups over their lifetime, many worry that income inequality between different income groups is increasing. The growing income inequality is real, but its causes are more complex than the demagogues make them out to be.

Consider, for example, the effect of “power couples,” or people with high levels of education marrying one another and forming dual-earner households. In a free society, people can marry whoever they want, even if it does contribute to widening income disparities.

Or consider the effects of regressive government regulations on exacerbating income inequality. These include barriers to entry that protect incumbent businesses and stifle competition. To name one extreme example, Louisiana recently required a government-issued license to become a florist.

Lifting more of these regressive regulations would aid income mobility and help to reduce income inequality, while also furthering economic growth.

This post first appeared at HumanProgress.org.

Chelsea GermanChelsea German

Chelsea German works at the Cato Institute as a Researcher and Managing Editor of HumanProgress.org.

America Declines At The Rate Of Rejecting Christianity

/in , , , /by

Have you noticed how America continues to decline as rapidly as she sheds our nation’s Christian Heritage?  From two major directions, the assault on Christianity and even the right of Christians to freely exercise their religious liberties continues to manifest.  The first major battering ram against Christianity in the United States is the government school system.  For many generations, the bigoted administrators and their educator lackies have systematically weaned generation after generation away from Christian influences.

That Carl Marx, John Dewey, Saul Alinsky influenced practice has helped change America into a mobocracy of dumbed down anti-Christian robots who are increasingly devoid of wisdom.  It is as if wisdom has taken wing and flown back to the one who long ago shed his grace upon our now troubled republic.  The bigoted progressive agenda of consists of throwing Christianity, patriotism, constitutional restraint upon government, personal and property rights and self-protection under the bus to be smashed into oblivion.  By the way, the bigoted progressives believe in free speech, as long as whatever is spoke is in concert with their narrow and society killing desires.

The Reverend Franklin Graham recently pointed out that this godless agenda is being pushed by government, politicians, and judges who are openly hostile to Christianity.  Due to the pressure and influence of President Ronald Reagan in 1989, the Berlin Wall was beaten into little rocks.  The world was fooled into thinking that life would continue to improve for individuals throughout the world.  Folks naïvely believed that communism/socialism would fade away and become a relic of the past.

Unfortunately, communism/socialism never went away.  Those promoting such madness never suspended their campaign for world influence, or dominance.  The hotbed communism/socialism has been further solidified in America via the lecture halls and classrooms of institutions of higher indoctrination known as colleges and universities.  Even high schools, middle schools and even elementary schools are dens of communist/socialist and in some cases, Muslim indoctrination.  That does not bode well for the future well-being of the onetime envy of the world.

Much like water dripping on a rock and eventually breaking the rock into sand, the steady stream of anything but what’s right for “We the People,” has cascaded through and overrun the influential pillars of society.  Whether it’s education, the economy, the media, the arts, the family, government, and even some church denominations, progressivism/socialism has caused untold damage which in turn has greatly contributed to the alarmingly massive decline of the U.S.A.  Unfortunately, the negative influences permeating society is hurling our republic toward an ugly crash with reality in the form of blatant immorality, the worst education quality among developed nations and a decline in the quality of almost every segment of society.

If you will take an honest look at our troubled land of rampant anti Christian bigotry, you will notice that matters in America have gone awry, perhaps fueled by president Obama’s mission of hope and change away from all that was good for the United States best interest.  We even have a president who refers to Jesus as “a son of God.”  Oh don’t worry, if your offended, I am not trying to force my Christian beliefs upon you.  One cannot ignore the fact that as America continues to turn her back upon the principles that made her great she will remain in grave danger of suffering a dramatic setback of some kind.

The father of our nation, George Washington implored America to always remain a society that maintains her good standing with God.  He also warned of the dangers that would set upon our republic if she would cease to seek God’s guidance and wisdom.  Yes indeed, our America is in deep trouble.  In fact, God could conceivably soon remove his hand of blessing altogether.  My fellow Americans, the upcoming election is of the highest importance.  I believe it will reveal if Americans is to remain on the current wide road of destruction, or turn right and follow the narrow road that leads back towards the Providential guidance that blessed our republic from it’s founding.

Just to give a little historical perspective, Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826) was a pioneer American teacher, clergyman, geographer, and the father of Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph and “Morse Code.”  After the American Revolution, he taught school while a graduate student at Yale.  His students needed a good geography text, so he wrote Geography Made Easy and published it in 1784. Young Jedidiah Morse also studied for the ministry. As time progressed he became disenchanted with the growing move of the Boston clergy away from Orthodox Christian doctrine.  One of the first sermons Morse delivered was “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?

Mr. Morse also stated “To the kindly influence of Christianity we owe that degree of civil freedom, and political and social happiness which mankind now enjoys.  In proportion as the genuine effects of Christianity are diminished in any nation, either through unbelief or the corruption of it’s doctrine, or the neglect of it’s institutions; in the same proportion will the people of that nation recede from the blessings of genuine freedom, and approximate the miseries of complete desposition.”

In other words America, if you turn your back on the virtues of the Christian doctrine and Providential guidance, do not be shocked if the blessings that came as a result of faith in God leave with him if he is permanently booted out of society by the progressive bigots.

VIDEO: Debate Questions on Immigration That Don’t Get Asked

/in , , , , , , , /by

WASHINGTON, D.C. /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — As in previous presidential elections, several recent debates have featured questions posed by non-journalists via YouTube. They weren’t very good.

Debates in New Hampshire on February 4th (the Democrats) and Saturday, February 6th (the Republicans). To help journalists and ordinary voters try to extract the actual immigration views of the candidates, the Center for Immigration Studies has posted a series of video questions addressing critical aspects of the immigration issue that don’t receive the attention they warrant.

This first batch of questions ranges from a former Executive Director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation asking about the impact of mass legal immigration on American workers, to a retired Border Patrol agent asking about people fraudulently passing through legal entry points (as opposed to jumping the fence). Other questions for the candidates are posed by the mother of a man killed by an illegal alien, a former Foreign Service Officer, a law professor, and others.

Watch the video questions for the presidential candidates here:

As the presidential debates continue, both in the primaries and the general election, the page will be updated with more video questions from citizens. To have your own brief (30 seconds) video question for the candidates be considered for inclusion, send it to mrt@cis.org.

The learn more about the Center for Immigration Studies click here.

PODCAST: On the Muslim Migrant Crisis in Sweden and Across Europe

/in , , , , , /by

Kent Ekeroth, a Jewish Deputy of the Sweden Democrats in the national parliament, the Riksdag, was a guest on the Sunday, January 31, 2016,Lisa Benson Show. Benson, Richard Cutting, Advisory Board Member and this writer participated in the discussion with Ekeroth.  The topics discussed during the segment covered various aspects of the current migrant crisis in Sweden and Europe caused by the flood of one million asylees and migrants in 2015 who penetrated the broken Schengen borderless system. LISTEN to the podcast.

New Year’s Eve, the sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany by 1,000 North African and Arab looking migrants was evidence of threats to native European women and their communities. We posted on the graphic violence perpetrated daily in Germany and the rising call for the resignation of German Chancellor n Angela Merkel. Then there was the disturbing Europol report that 10,000 migrant children have gone missing, presumed to victims of sex trafficking and slavery.

In Sweden, 200 men went on a rampage attacking Moroccan migrants at the central Stockholm rail station provoked by the murder of a 23 year old woman at a reception center. The Swedish Interior Minister ordered  the expulsion of 80,000 migrants, virtually half of the 160,000 that poured into the country in 2015. The 23 year old woman victim was killed trying to stop an altercation involving a 15 year old Somali migrant.  One of the more than 35,000 unaccompanied minors who entered Sweden, four fifth of them young men.

Kent Ekeroth, Sweden Democrat Jewish deputy

Kent Ekeroth, Sweden Democrats, MP, the Riksdag.

A Politico Magazine article on “Europe’s Man Problem”, noted this about migrant demographics in Sweden:

According to Swedish government statistics, as of the end of November, 71 percent of all applicants for asylum to Sweden in 2015 were male. More than 21 percent of all migrants to Sweden were classified as unaccompanied minors, representing more than half of all minor migrants to the country. For accompanied minors, the sex ratio was about 1.16 boys for every one girl. But for unaccompanied minors, the ratio was 11.3 boys for every one girl. In other words, the Swedish case confirms IOM’s statistic that more than 90 percent of unaccompanied minors are male.

Sweden’s current ruling left Social Democrats and the center right Alliance Party condoned the opening of mass Muslim immigration over several decades. Muslims in Sweden account for 700,000 of the country’s 9.8 million population.  Jews, in contrast account for less than 20,000 of Sweden’s population. Ekeroth mother is Jewish who emigrated from Poland. Ekeroth had served as an intern at the Swedish Embassy in Tel Aviv in 2006. He visited Israel in 2014 as part of a delegation of foreign Jewish parliamentarians.

Ekeroth’s debates with Margot Wallstrom, Foreign Minister of the ruling Social Democrats occurred over her accusations that Israel should be investigated for alleged “extrajudicial killings”. He considers Swedish Foreign Minister Wallstrom both “gullible and antagonistic.”

On January 19, 2016, Itamar Marcus, executive director of Palestine Media Watch (PMW) followed up Ekeroth’s actions with a presentation to members of the Alliance and other parties in the Riksdag. At the conclusion of the presentation, Marcus proposed a resolution be introduced   by concerned MPs to end Swedish funding of Palestinian Authority education and media programs demonizing Jews and hatred of Israelis.

Watch this PMW video of the Swedish Parliamentarians presentation on Palestinian incitement of violence and anti-Semitic hatred:

In 2014, Ekeroth and the Sweden Democrats brought a bill before the Riksdag attempting to overturn the budget for the hundreds of millions of kroner in Palestinian Authority funding that was opposed by the remaining seven parties.  Center right Liberal or Alliance parties and the current left Social Democrats, Ekeroth said, funded hundreds of millions of kroner for the Palestinian Authority that had engaged in incitement to violence and demonization of Israeli Jews. The Sweden Democrats introduced the bill in 2014 during the budget debates to stop all PA funding.

When we asked him following the Lisa Benson Show, what his reaction was to the resolution proposed by PMW during the January 19, 2016 presentation, he replied:

I held the debate with [Foreign Minister] Wallstrom. Then other parties met with PMW from the Alliance-parties. What’s funny though is that when they were in government and had the power they did nothing to stop the funding the PA.

On the position of the Sweden Democrats in the Riksdag, Ekeroth said that the party platform includes reduction of personal and business taxes, preservation of the existing welfare system, but zero tolerance for mass Muslim immigration and asylum.  He considers as legitimate refugees, not unlike his immigrant mother, those fleeing a conflict or persecution. Migrants, however, are those traveling to take advantage of benefits “provided by a naïve system” like that in Sweden and many EU countries. Once admitted, he said, the asylees can bring in others through family reunification or workforce immigration. During the period 2015 to early 2016, more than 200,000 so-called asylees and migrants entered Sweden. Regarding the smorgasbord of benefits available to migrants, Ekeroth noted that in 2005, the seven other parties in the Riksdag endorsed expansion of benefits to include free health, free schools and even assistance in starting a business.

When asked about the recent Interior Minister’s expulsion order, he doubts that the police can round up more than 4,000 a year. The rest may leave for other EU countries or go into hiding.

Regarding the attack by 200 Swedes against Moroccans at the Stockholm central railway station, he doesn’t condone violence. However, he said it was a reflection the police and state haven’t protected Swedish citizens from violence and petty crime. On the question of sexual assaults by migrants, he indicated they have been grossly over represented since 1975. He pointed towards Swedish crime statistics for 2015 that indicated over 41% of those convicted were non-citizens. Further, he said if you included the sizable Swedish Muslim population the proportion would be well over 50%.

When asked about how Swedish youth reacted to these developments, he suggested that while the Sweden Democrats are the second largest party in the Riksdag, they tend to be less politically involved. Sweden men are more sympathetic to the programs of the Swedish Democrats; while female voters aged 18 to 24 in surveys are not as inclined as they are more prone to social pressures. He credits that to the treatment of the Sweden Democrats by the media that by turns calls the party “far right wing,”  “racist,” “anti-Immigrant,” and dismisses the party as “stupid peasants”.  Ekeroth said the state TV and media are overwhelmingly pro-immigrants. Surveys in Sweden he cited showed that 75% of working journalists are left wingers.  He said that some alternate media has been created, including one developed by the Sweden Democrats. But overall the media situation is biased.

When the matter of Sweden’s small Jewish community arose, Ekeroth has tried to convince them that mass immigration was problematic.  He said their opinion reflected their support for Muslim mass immigration. In effect, he said, the Jewish community told him that “they don’t want to awaken the bear that sleeps.”

In light of the current migrant crisis, he said who would have thought 20 years ago that today the Eastern European countries of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia would be the saviors of Europe. The dialogue continues with Kent Ekeroth. He returns to The Lisa Benson Show for a reprise on Sunday, February 7, 2016.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Germany placing trouble-making migrants in security-fenced camps

Finally, Europe Is Waking Up to Dangers of Multiculturalism

EDITORS NOTE: This column with podcast originally appeared in the New English Review.

Obama Addresses Terror Linked Baltimore Mosque which Practices ‘Gender Apartheid’

/in , , , , , /by

President  Obama went to Baltimore for a friendly gathering at the Islamic Center of Baltimore Mosque in Catonsville, Maryland. He was there  to convey a message that Muslims are as American as apple pie. Problem is that he chose a Mosque deep into political Islam, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, the Islamic Society of North America , supporting suicide bombers  and professing  hate  for U.S. ally Israel.  All despite the FBI file sent to the White House confirming this information. No matter. It was a photo op moment to show support for embattled American Muslims  given statements from Republican  hopeful, Donald Trump that he would stop immigration of Muslims.

The scene was replete with introduction by a hijab swathed college student on track for a medical career. The President in his remarks pointed out another  hijab wearing  fencing marvel that may be carrying the U.S. flag at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janiero this summer. The President spoke of the kind comments of  founding Fathers John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson who purportedly included Mohammedans in the ambit of freedom of worship in America guaranteed by our First Amendment.

Problem is that he forgot to mention the real reason Thomas Jefferson had a copy of a Qur’an in his library at Monticello. A Qur’an, upon which , the first elected U.S. Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) swore a private oath of office on January 4, 2007. I know I passed by his office with a clutch of TV cameramen recording this for posterity. Ellison was at the ISB gathering,  as was the second elected Muslim Congressmen, Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN).  Doubtless, as this was the President’s alleged first visit to an American Mosque, there may have been notables at the Mosque in Catonsville from CAIR and ISNA.  But not too worry this was kumbaya day at the ISB.

Watch the You Tube video of the President’s expansive, yet, cautionary message of support for American Muslims:

American Muslims  that he pointed out  in his remarks  assembled Ford automobiles in Michigan, built the first  continuous Mosque in  Cedar Rapids,, Iowa, served  honorably in the US military and some were buried in the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery. Yes, there were those small pockets of extremists in the Muslim Ummah like ISIS or ISIL as he likes to call it with its self-declared Caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Barbarically beheading Christians, enslaving minority Yazidi women and children, destroying ancient cultures in the name of Allah, their God.  Then there are the extremist Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan killing women, homosexuals and Christian infidels. Oh, we forgot the Mahdist Shia in Tehran who the President makes deals with to prevent a nuclear war, he thinks. Last year, they only executed 1,000 for crimes of gender, homosexuality and heterodox beliefs.

As to the reason why Jefferson had a Qur’an in his library, just recall their encounter in London with the Tripolitanian Ambassador in their roles as US Commissioners trying to understand why the Bey of Tripoli enslaved American sailors he seized along with their ships in the Mediterranean. Note this  Notable and Quotable in the Wall Street Journal:

From a March 28, 1786, letter written by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who were American diplomats at the time, to U.S. Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay reporting on their conversation in London with the ambassador from Tripoli regarding piracy by the Barbary States:

We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet; that it was written in their Koran; that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners; that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners; and that every Mussulman [Muslim] who was slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Clearly, Adams and Jefferson knew something that President Obama doesn’t choose to admit in public.  That Islam is not the religion of peace and tolerance that its religious theocrats make it out to be.  Subsequently, as the Third President of the US, Jefferson would conduct a covert war that freed American hostages with a few Marines at the fabled ‘walls of Tripoli’ from the likes of the Sharia-mad Bey.

Leo Hohmann at WND, cited an Investigative Project Report by Steve Emerson giving details on why the FBI thought the ISB was a poor choice for the President for this encounter, “Obama.” Hohman cites Emerson  saying:

IPT founder and executive director  Steve Emerson told WND his organization was told by FBI sources that Obama was presented the evidence against the Islamic Society of Baltimore.

According to Emerson’s investigation, federal law enforcement officials told him they were asked about whether the Baltimore mosque had engaged in radical politics or was connected in any way to terrorism in the past.

“They prepared memos for the president’s aides that specifically laid out the sordid history and nexus to terrorism of the Islamic Society of Baltimore,” Emerson told WND.

So what did the president do?

“As he has done so many times in the past, he decided to ignore this evidence and still continue his plans to confer legitimacy on a mosque that has a history of having officials connected to Islamic terrorism and to this day still has officials making outrageously pro-terrorist statements that would seem to conflict with the president’s policies,” Emerson said.

The mosque is affiliated with the Islamic Society of North America or ISNA, which has its own sordid history.

ISNA was started by members of the international Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s. The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, is banned in many countries as an extremist organization.

“One can only conclude that the selection of this mosque by the president was made as part of his consistent policy to not even utter the term ‘radical Islam’ and the simultaneous policy of inviting only radical Islamist groups and leaders to the White House that FBI documents clearly show were derived from the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas,” Emerson told WND.

But there was another problem with the  choice of the ISB, the occurrence of gender apartheid prior to this auspicious occasion.

The media was  atwitter about the President’s  presentation at the Islamic Society of Baltimore. All of those media pundits should read this New York Times op ed by a leader of the Muslim Reform Movement (MRM), Asra Nomani and Ify Okoye, a disaffected member of the Mosque, about the gender apartheid practiced at the ISB, “Obama’s mosque visit demonstrates tacit acceptance of a form of gender apartheid.”

We have interviewed colleagues of Asra Nomani, Dr. M. Zhudi Jasser and Canadian leader of MRM, Raheel Raza who recently returned from a successful trip to Israel on The Lisa Benson Show. We hope to bring back Raza and introduce Ms. Nomani to discuss what the MRM is advocating and doing. Note what Nomani and Okoye wrote:

At the Islamic Society of Baltimore this past Sunday, the air was filled with the scent of Sherwin-Williams paint that workers were rolling onto the walls of the run-down balcony section where women and girls are usually segregated, unable to see the imam unless they peek over the balcony’s edge. A sign outside the door to the balcony said, “STOP Please. No Shoes. No Strollers. No Diaper Change. Beyond this point.”

Asra slipped into the mosque’s main hall to join the “halaqa,” or study circle. There, the study circle leader, teaching a half dozen men gathered around him, talked about the virtues of the first Muslim community in Medina, saying that a society isn’t “civilized” just because it’s technological.

Then, a young man, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned “Who Do You Love?” piped up, “So that means the West isn’t civilized.”

“That’s right,” the study circle leader said.

Another man railed against the West and its “atheists.”

Asra took a deep breath, listening to the sound of the crew white-washing the mosque for the president’s visit. “That’s a very unfair conclusion,” she said. “You are sitting in the West and railing against the West as not being civilized? It is not fair to make the assumption that the West ‘isn’t civilized.’”

The men tried to backtrack. They spoke with more nuance, before the study leader digressed again into the idea that those who aren’t Muslim act out of “self-interest,” while Muslims act out of an “order from God to do righteousness,” a point that Asra also politely refuted as motivated by “self-interest” and as an unfair representation of the many good people who aren’t Muslim.

As women and girls, we should be supported by policies that allow us to be part of such conversations. The president can support this urgent cause by speaking out against gender segregation in American mosques. In the spirit of the civil rights moment when whites stood with blacks, we hope men and women will refuse the privilege that “interfaith” events give them, and, in act of solidarity, stand outside with us on Johnnycake Road and the other pathways leading to the mosques in our world, advocating for equal rights for all.

So,  the President did what he wanted to do  with the ISB visit; show solidarity with the plight of American Muslims, sidelined by GOP hopeful Donald Trump.  He chose to avoid the advice of the FBI busily tracking down and arresting ISIS inspired lone wolves out to kill Americans on the streets here in the US that he Mosque leaders consorted with terrorist networks. That would upset  the President’s  alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood seeking their active participation in countering violent extremism and conducted a less than strenuous war against the Islamic State inspiring  tens of thousands from across the Ummah to join and practice the pure Islam in the self declared Caliphate.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image is of President Obama at the Islamic Center of Baltimore in Catonsville, Maryland, February 3, 2016 – Source: Reuters.