Masks have been a part of societies for 9,000 years. The earliest masks were used for rituals and ceremonies. Later, they were used in hunting, feasts, wars, performances, theaters, fashion, sports, movies, and then as protection against medical and occupational hazards. Masks have become symbols for their various functions.
Different masks worn by different people have different motives. A masked bank robber is very different from a masked Halloween trick-or-treater. Masks are coverings that can also disguise messages. So it is with political masks.
The two most controversial political masks in America today are the Muslim niqab and the COVID19 face mask. What do these seemingly disparate face coverings have in common? Both are marketed as protective face coverings with the connotation of safety, both are worn with pride by their adherents, and both disguise a powerful political message of submission. The mask is the message.
Muslim women following supremacist, Islamic religious sharia law are subservient to their fathers, husbands, and brothers no matter where they live in the world, and no matter how protective equal rights laws for women are in the country where they reside. Sharia law does not recognize the authority of the United States Constitution.
Muslim women who embrace sharia law wear their niqabs with pride. They value their submission and, for them, wearing the face-covering is virtue signaling. For most Americans, the face mask worn by Muslim women is a detestable symbol of submission that violates American principles of equality and freedom. It is almost incomprehensible for Americans to understand these Muslim women without understanding that sharia law teaches the supremacy of Islam.
The 1991 Muslim Brotherhood Explanatory Memorandum explains in precise detail the strategic goal for the Muslim Brotherhood in North America. The plan is for settlement not assimilation. Settlement is another word for submission. In its own words:
“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
For decades the radical leftist Culture War on America has been attempting to collapse America from within and replace our constitutional republic with socialism. The leftist promise is that destroying free market capitalism and replacing it with socialism will provide social justice and income equality. The radical leftists have common cause with the Islamists to destroy America from within.
The leftists and the Islamists both have established educational wings to propagandize Americans toward their respective ideologies. They both have established violent paramilitary factions in the United States to terrorize the public and impose their ideologies when persuasion and propaganda are not enough. The Islamists have their jihadis and the radical leftists have ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter (BLM); all unapologetic domestic terrorists. Hawk Newsome, the president of the BLM of Greater New York movement, clarified his willingness to use any means necessary in a jaw-dropping June 23, 2020 interview with Fox News Martha MacCallum on “The Story.”
“You said ‘burn it down, it’s time,’” MacCallum told Newsome.
“I said if this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right?” he replied.
The radical 2020 Democrat party platform kneels to both radical leftism and Islamism. Blue state governors, mayors, and local Democrat authorities are exploiting the coronavirus with COVID19 mask mandates to prolong the economic shutdown, prevent an economic recovery, and collapse the U.S. economy in hopes of defeating Trump in November.
Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s chief of staff, famously said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” The coronavirus outbreak was a bonanza for the radical left, an economic bioweapon unleashed by the communist Chinese designed to collapse Trump’s roaring economy. Political medicine from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the globalist-infested Center for Disease Control (CDC) has been deliberately exaggerating the threat of COVID19 to create panic and social chaos to destabilize the country in advance of the 2020 election.
The stunning June 19, 2020 article by Patrick Wood in Technocracy News, “The Miserable Pseudo-Science Behind Face Masks, Social Distancing And Contact Tracing,” exposes the entire hoax. Wood begins, “Once upon a time there was something called science. It included the discovery of truth about nature . . . Then certain other scientists and engineers rose up and made a discovery of their own. If true science was ever-so-slightly skewed and engineering principles were applied to society at large, then they could indeed use their ‘knowledge’ to dominate and control other people, groups, entire societies or even, heaven forbid, the entire planet. The first group pursued science. The second group pursued pseudo-science.”
Patrick Wood explains that pseudo-science is the principal domain of technocrats. The fraudulent predictive models that the WHO and the CDC relied on to terrify the public were developed using politically driven data. The acronym GIGO means garbage in garbage out – it describes with precision British scientist Neil Ferguson’s doomsday pandemic model. Ferguson’s Imperial College report predicted that 2.2 million Americans would die from the virus, that hospital beds would be overflowing, and that there would be a critical shortage of ventilators. The report was used by CDC globalists Fauci and Birx to persuade President Trump to shut down the U.S. economy. Ferguson’s model was also used by the radical leftist Democrat site COVID Act Now that posted the disinformation used by local and state officials in the U.S. to issue shelter-in-place mandates.
Ferguson retracted his wildly inaccurate model but the economic damage was done and the political hysteria continues. The equally fraudulent Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) report from University of Washington written by institute director Christopher Murray was used by Fauci and Birx to support more political medicine mandating lockdowns to close businesses, schools, and keep people from their right to assembly. The mitigation measures were not intended to flatten the curve, they were designed to flatten America. IHME is committed to globalism and the United Nations 17 sustainable goals.
Medical science does not warrant any of the wildly exaggerated projections or draconian measures, the pseudo-science of political medicine does.
Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population. What this means is that the pseudo-science of leftist “settled science” is being used to achieve the radical leftist political agenda of fundamentally transforming America. Islamists want to make America Muslim. Leftists want to make America socialist.
The Culture War on America is part of the overriding globalist war on American national sovereignty. The leftist, Islamist, globalist, Chinese communist axis participating in the war on America now has its own symbol disguised as public health – the COVID19 face mask. The mandated face mask represents political medicine disguised as medical science. Leftists wear their face masks with pride because, for them, it is virtue signaling.
For those Americans who value their freedom and individual rights the COVID19 face mask is the symbol of submission to radical leftism. It is almost incomprehensible for Americans to understand the radical leftist commitment to collapsing America without understanding that cultural Marxism teaches the supremacy of radical leftist socialism. A Washington Times article 8.22.2019 written by James Veltmeyer defines the issue.
“Cultural Marxism is the father of the Democratic Party’s identity politics and political correctness. It is the father of transgender insanity and racial polarization. It is the father of open borders and rights for illegal immigrants. And, yes, it is even the father of the anarchy and nihilism that gives rise to mass shooters and to Hollywood movies that portray hunting human beings for sport as ‘entertainment.’”
The enemies of America are exploiting public fear of death and dying for political gain. It is a colossal humanitarian hoax. Mandated masks, mandated social distancing, mandated prolonged business and school closures are sinister efforts to establish a new normal of submission in America. This is how the radical left intends to settle America!
COVID19 face masks are now the symbol of submission in the United States. Leftist Democrat governors, mayors, and local authorities mandating masks are presenting their mandates as altruistic. Joe Biden just announced that he would use his federal powers to force Americans to wear face masks if elected. The COVID19 face masks are radical leftist Democrat pseudo-science and virtue signaling designed for submission.
Say NO to settlement by Islamists. Say NO to settlement by radical leftists. Say NO to settlement by globalists. Say NO to settlement by Chinese communists. Say YES to freedom in our constitutional republic, the United States of America!
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Linda Goudsmithttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngLinda Goudsmit2020-06-26 15:36:192020-06-26 15:45:49Face Masks: The Radical Leftist Symbol of Submission
Activists are wasting their time tearing down old statues. Abuse is happening here and now.
Over the last month, global protests have been drawing attention to the unjust treatment of minority communities. As an organisation and as a slogan Black Lives Matter has captured the world’s attention.
In America particularly, police departments are facing serious scrutiny in an effort to root out racial bias and corruption. The Minneapolis Police—whose officers were responsible for George Floyd’s unjust death—is even being disbanded.
Many have suggested an unbroken link between systemic injustice today and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to which most black Americans trace their roots. But for all the talk about a slavery that was outlawed 150 years ago, there’s an eerie silence about the slavery that continues today.
Pornhub is the world’s largest pornographic website, receiving some 42 billion visits every year. Users can upload their own content and view that of others, resulting in a vast video library of rape, revenge porn, abuse and torture—including that of children.
Several Pornhub-linked kidnapping cases have recently made the news, such as 15-year-old Rose Kalemba. As a result, Pornhub has been forced to remove the offending content. But even after 118 confirmed cases of child abuse, Pornhub itself remains untouched as a sex trafficker’s dream, rewarding the most popular content with monetised ads.
The company recently took to Twitter to polish its halo. It declared, “Pornhub stands in solidarity against racism and social injustice,” and it encouraged followers to donate to anti-racist charities.
But the New York Post has called Pornhub out on its hypocrisy. An article by anti-porn campaigner Laila Mickelwait highlighted recent Pornhub content like a video entitled “I Can’t Breathe” that made use of search tags such as “George Floyd” and “choke-out”.
Mickelwait went on: “Countless other titles on Pornhub feature variations on the N-word and “white master”. Exploited black teens” and “black slave” are suggested search terms deliberately promoted by Pornhub to its users.”
If you would like to tell Pornhub that black lives matter, you can join a million others in signing the Trafficking hub petition. The petition’s goal is to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable for aiding sex trafficking. (Click here to sign the petition).
Planned Parenthood is another corporate giant causing immense harm to minority communities. In fact, if you were on the hunt for a still-thriving organisation to “cancel” for its racist past, you couldn’t find a better candidate.
Planned Parenthood was founded by the racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who had ties to the Ku Klux Klan. In a 1939 private letter, Sanger wrote, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” To this day, Planned Parenthood celebrates Sanger as a ‘woman of heroic accomplishments.’
And it continues to carry out her ambitions. The Guttmacher Institute, once Planned Parenthood’s research division, found that African-American women are five times more likely to choose abortion over white women. This data is used by Planned Parenthood with deadly effect.
In 2010, census statistics revealed that almost 80 percent of its surgical abortion clinics were within walking distance of African-American or Hispanic communities. Today, over one-third of Planned Parenthood’s 340,000 abortions are carried out on black babies, even though the black community makes up only 13 percent of America’s population.
As America’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood receives over US$500 million in federal tax dollars. If you would like to take a practical stand against systemic racism and tell Planned Parenthood that black lives matter, you can join 700,000 others in signing Live Action’s petition to defund the abortion giant. (Click here to sign the petition).
There really is no point saying that black lives matter if we don’t actually mean it.
Kurt Mahlburg
Kurt Mahlburg is a teacher and freelance writer, writing for the Canberra Declaration and occasionally the Spectator Australia. He also blogs at kurtmahlburg.blog. More by Kurt Mahlburg.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2020-06-26 06:41:272020-06-26 06:42:39Tell Pornhub and Planned Parenthood that Black Lives Matter
The Supreme Court’s recent opinion that the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition against “sex” discrimination offers protections for the “LGBT” groups has raised eyebrows and ire. But it’s not surprising: The decision’s author, Justice Neil Gorsuch, long ago made clear that he operates from false premises. One of these is what’s called “textualism,” which is not at all the same as originalism.
Conservatives also err, in my view, in claiming that Gorsuch has “redefined ‘sex.’” In reality, his ruling is instead based on a certain rationalization. Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, while essentially applauding Gorsuch’s lawyer-craft, explained it well.
“As applied to Title VII, the classic 1964 anti-discrimination law, the textualist idea is very simple,” he wrote June 15. “The law prohibits discrimination ‘on the basis of sex.’ To discriminate against somebody because of sexual orientation necessarily entails discriminating on the basis of sex. After all, if you’re discriminating against a man because he is attracted to men, you would not be discriminating against him if he were a woman who is attracted to men.”
“The same is true for transgender status,” he continued. “if [sic] you are discriminating against somebody for identifying with a gender that differs from their biological sex at birth, you are necessarily discriminating on the basis of sex — because you would not be discriminating against the person if they had the opposite biological sex.”
(Note: By this logic, bisexuals wouldn’t be protected because the behavior a person could be fired for — being attracted to both sexes — would be the same for both sexes. Although, some future judge will no doubt spin this, too.)
Now, realize that the above isn’t even necessarily dictated by textualism, the legal theory holding that a law’s application should be based on a plain reading of its text, as opposed to its framers’ original intent or some other guide. After all, there’s a difference between discriminating “on the basis of sex” and on the basis of sexual attraction or “gender identification.”
Consider: If an employer won’t hire anyone with same-sex sexual attraction, there is no “sex discrimination” because he will reject lesbians along with homosexuals (he only might be engaging in sex discrimination if he applied the “no same-sex sexual attraction” prohibition to only one sex).
Not only is the same true of so-called “transgenderism” — an employer could reject all people identifying as the sex they’re not — but there’s another factor: The business owner could simply be rejecting anyone who misrepresents himself.
Some may now respond that a man claiming womanhood really is a woman. But this proposition’s validity is irrelevant. The fact remains that the hypothetical employer is discriminating based on perceived misrepresentation, not sex. This is just as how an employer rejecting someone with “species dysphoria,” who claims to be a ferret, isn’t discriminating based on species, but possibly misrepresentation or concerns about the prospective hire’s mental stability. (Though Gorsuch would no doubt say that such discrimination is okay because the employer wouldn’t hire an actual ferret, either.)
Of course, some will still prefer Gorsuch’s argument. Yet this conflict and confusion merely illustrate how textualism doesn’t live up to its billing. Late Justice Antonin Scalia is known for pushing the theory (one of his great mistakes), which he did because in “his mind, textualism discouraged judges from using interpretation to make the law say something different from what the law actually said,” explained Feldman.
Yet while Scalia would no doubt disapprove of Gorsuch’s textual interpretation, this is yet another example of how there just is no simple formula for preventing judicial activism; a judge lacking intellectual honesty and philosophical soundness can always tendentiously spin a ruling.
This said, Gorsuch’s opinion might not have been rendered if he adhered to the only legitimate legal philosophy: originalism. As Justice Samuel Alito pointed out in his dissent, no one in 1964 even imagined that banning sex discrimination would include prohibitions against “homophobic” or “transphobic” discrimination; in fact, neither of these terms even existed, and “transgender” status hadn’t been conjured up yet.
By the way, Gorsuch essentially admitted as much, writing in his opinion that when “the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.”
Moreover, he also rather haughtily insisted that “the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands.”
Now, the contrast between textual tomfoolery and sound judicial theory can be illustrated with a simple analogy: 10-year-old twins Timmy and Oliver and five-year-old Malcolm are siblings. One day mom hears Malcolm crying wretchedly, investigates, and learns that the two older boys had been punching him.
After scolding the twins, the mother warns, “Now, stop hitting Malcolm! If you hit him again and I come in here and find him bawling, you’re gonna’ be in big trouble!”
Yet an hour later Malcolm is crying his eyes out, again. The mother learns that Oliver understood not to hurt his kid brother and that Timmy is the culprit. Instead of being contrite, however, Timmy says, “Mommy, you said not to hit Malcolm; you didn’t say anything about not choking him and twisting his arm…and that’s all I did!”
Then too-clever-by-half Timmy adds, “The limits of your imagination, mommy, are no reason to ignore your rule’s demands. Only what you said matters — and I’m entitled to the rule’s benefits!”
In the above analogy, Oliver is the originalist, understanding and accepting his mother’s command’s spirit. Timmy is the textualist, doing things not expressly forbidden by her rule’s language even while knowing it contravenes her intent.
The problem with this “philosophy” is that insofar as you don’t consider what was intended, you increase the chances of experiencing the unintended. Gorsuch’s approach is every bit as maddening as Timmy’s (because it’s the same), as it places an unrealistic burden on legislators. If their laws are to meet Gorsuch’s textualist standard for being applied as intended, the legislators must have godlike capabilities: They must see into the future so they can craft language covering every social innovation, bizarre fashion or collective insanity that may eventually, one day, manifest itself.
So it’s bad enough we have the “law of unintended consequences.” Now we have textualists turning the law of unintended consequences into a legal philosophy and legislating it from the bench.
I don’t know Gorsuch personally, but he wouldn’t be a very pleasant person to associate with if he were a Timmy the Textualist in everyday life. Would you thus conduct yourself, parsing every friend’s words to seek a loophole and essentially punishing him for not being a seer who speaks like Mr. Spock? You’d have few friends and deserve none.
Interestingly, Gorsuch and his fellow travelers aren’t the first textualists. Two-thousand years ago they were called Pharisees, a group of pseudo-intellectuals whom Jesus excoriated for following the letter of the law, but ignoring its spirit. It’s tragic that we’re back to that, but convenient for today’s Pharisees.
It is ironic, though, that in order to avoid abiding by the intent of laws from a half century ago, some today are resorting to a mistake from two millennia ago.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Selwyn Dukehttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngSelwyn Duke2020-06-24 07:47:112020-06-24 07:47:11Gorsuch the Pharisee and Textualist Tomfoolery
DETROIT (ChurchMilitant.com) – Planned Parenthood (PP) is the newest vocal supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, despite the cognitive dissonance involved. The abortion giant has demonstrated no regard for human lives in general and black lives in particular.
At least two Planned Parenthood affiliates in different regions of the country are now publicly backing Black Lives Matter. Yet racial equality and respect for human life — particularly black lives — is exactly what Planned Parenthood is not concerned with, recognizes Stan Guthrie, author, minister, and contributing editor for Breakpoint, a Christian website whose content “cuts through the fog of relativism … with truth and compassion.”
Guthrie speaks for countless thinking people when figuratively scratching his head, he points out the clear hypocrisy.
Black and Brown communities in the United States have suffered murder, violence, trauma and overt and covert racism perpetrated by white people and white-led systems and institutions throughout our country’s entire history. This state-sanctioned violence and murder is not new, but it is intolerable and horrific and must stop. Black lives matter.
The over-policing of black bodies extends far beyond the actions of individual police officers. It is in our workplaces, our schools, our public institutions. It is in our health care system. It is that same policing of black bodies that makes the promise of reproductive freedom unattainable for so many black people in this country.
The first, obvious contradiction is that Planned Parenthood kills preborn babies. That is a prime money-maker for the abortion giant.
According to Planned Parenthood’s most recent annual report for 2018–2019, it committed 345,672 prenatal murders in the United States in fiscal year 2018. That means 1,768 babies every single day. Its approximately 3 million abortions since 2011 is 38% of all surgical abortions committed in the United States.
Black lives: ‘human weeds’ to ‘exterminate’
With regard to race, Planned Parenthood was founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger.
“Birth control does not mean contraception indiscriminately practiced,” Sanger once said. “It means the release and cultivation of the better elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”
Who she may have meant by “human weeds” was clarified in a letter of Dec. 10, 1939, to Clarence Gamble. Sanger explained the nature of her organization’s outreach to the African-American community, saying: “The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
Sanger also said in her writings that immigrants, the “unfit,” the “delinquent and dependent classes,” and the “feeble-minded” should be controlled, if not weeded out.
Contraception, in her mind, was a great tool for doing so. She said it is a “powerful weapon against national and racial decadence.” Ostensibly, Sanger wanted her Birth Control League, the precursor of Planned Parenthood, to use birth control as a weapon against racial minorities as well as the mentally and physically handicapped.
Black Lives Still Targeted
It is no secret that Planned Parenthood tends to target minorities in impoverished areas of the country. “In 2014, 36% of all abortions were performed on black women, who are just 13% of the female population,” reported Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal.
According to Illinois Right to Life and the 2010 Census, 79% of the Planned Parenthood surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of minority communities. And this is not without effect. In some cities, such as New York, black abortions outnumber black live births by thousands every year.
This is why groups such as Blacks for Life and BlackGenocide.org have sprung up to defend black babies from the abortion suction machine and black communities from the disproportionate number of babies lost each year due to abortion
As commentators note, Planned Parenthood and Black Lives Matter are certainly strange bedfellows.
The whole Washington, D.C. establishment (a.k.a., “the Swamp”) has gone completely in publicly to ensure President Trump does not remain president. General Colin Powell over the weekend added his voice to a growing chorus of Trump-haters within the Swamp to say he will not vote for Trump.
By the way, he added in an interview that he didn’t vote for him in 2016 either: So who cares what he thinks, really? And this is key: The U.S. hierarchy and especially its political arm is an active member of the D.C. Swamp. They have been for decades, and they hate Trump because it’s all being exposed.
It’s high time the Catholic Church in the United States loses its tax-exempt status. There are simply too many crooked shepherds who profit from the deal and who are not using the money they save to fulfill the Church’s mission. Accused homosexual bishops like D.C.’s Wilton Gregory — so gay that in Church circles he’s known as the African Queen — are enemies of Christ and His Church and uncover themselves more and more every day.
Gregory and the entire leadership of the U.S. hierarchy for decades has been fomenting revolution in politics, pretending to care for the poor. They care nothing for the poor, except to mobilize them and use them to keep the Party of Death in power, which in turn keeps giving the bishops money to keep the Swamp filled.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is a very active part of the D.C. Swamp, and that’s why the tax-exempt status needs to go away. You would be hard-pressed to find a more wicked, sinister cabal of liars and thieves — and that’s saying a lot in D.C.
The men who built the USCCB bureaucracy and who now keep it going developed secret pipelines to bring in homosexual men from South America and flood U.S. seminaries. They lied to the faithful, shredded documents, committed perjury, engaged in and/or covered up the rape of thousands of mostly teenage boys and they maintained their control to keep up these moral outrages partially through their tax-exempt status.
The Church as we see it in America today, in the hands of these corrupt shepherds, is little else than a crime syndicate that Donald Trump should break up. Major dioceses and archdioceses are sitting on enormous endowments and not telling the people they continue to soak. For example, the archdiocese of Detroit has an endowment in the hundreds of millions; yet it still applied for and received over $2 million in Wuhan economic-stimulus money.
Even rolling in that much cash, they still laid off a huge portion of staff and are now at the beginning of the most incredible shrinking of a diocese practically on record.
These thieves in miters have stashed away tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars collectively and yet still enjoy a tax-exempt status. For what? These Marxists work to undermine America and replace the nation-state system by ushering in a new world order, complete with its no-borders, globalist, save-the-planet, shrink-the-population, diabolical propaganda.
The latest example of their participation is D.C. Abp. Gregory’s quiet joining-of-forces to help destabilize President Trump by ordering his clergy to show up in cassocks at a protest in Lafayette Park yesterday, and then march on the White House at high noon.
There are a couple of issues here. Gregory hates cassocks, and the word is out in D.C. if you are a priest not to wear one around him, which is a little strange: You’d think he fancies a man in a frock. Second, the “Catholic protest” just happened, by sheer coincidence, out of the blue, to coincide with another leftist protest calling for the president to be deposed.
And the African Queen knows that the sight of priests dressed like priests mingled in with BLM and Antifa types and chanting and fist-pumping would potentially create a firestorm of TV news video as well as headlines like “Catholic Church Wants Trump Ousted.” And headlines like that would be little else than what the Marxist media has become so proficient in: fake news.
Authentic Catholics, as opposed to the ones lobotomized by bishops over the past 50 years, understand the stakes here. So too does Abp. Viganò, who published a letter to Trump saying essentially, “The moment has arrived, Mr. President. It’s good against evil, and you are the one in the Oval Office.”
Viganò also called gay Gregory a “false shepherd.” False shepherds run false churches that they poorly disguise as the true Church. But authentic Catholics can sniff out the smell of sulphur around this putrid lot in a heartbeat. Thousands of black Americans, most of them young men, have been gunned down in urban America — yet not a word about any of them.
Only 2% of black slayings came at the hands of police officers; so even if the police were all defunded, as Minneapolis is now saying it will, what about the other 98% of black Americans being killed? And what about the millions of black Americans who never make it past Planned Parenthood? That’s millions.
Why isn’t Wilton having his priests stampede the White House about all those black lives? Oh, wait — black babies have an ally in Donald Trump, so no need for a riot in cassocks.
Gay Gregory and all his brother Marxist bishops want Trump gone and are spinning the narrative that he’s to blame for all this. Inside operatives told Church Militant that the African Queen became enraged at the Knights of Columbus having invited Trump to the National Shrine and demanded they cooperate with his plan, ordering the local D.C. Knights to e-mail their pro-life list to try and get the troops mobilized to hit the streets.
President Trump, two things, please, for yourself and Catholics who are sick of the bishop tyranny:
Turn off the spigot of funds flowing to the corrupt USCCB
Get the Church’s tax-exempt status cancelled. They engage in politics, not religion.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Church Militanthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngChurch Militant2020-06-17 07:43:172020-06-17 07:44:33VIDEO: The Vortex — Take Their Money, Mr. President. Choke ’em off.
In 2010, The Atlantic said that Dr. John Ioannidis “may be one of the most influential scientists alive.”
The article, written by David H. Freedman, made it clear the Greek-American physician-scientist’s rising star stemmed in part from the fearlessness he demonstrated in challenging bad science in the medical research field.
“[Ioannidis is] what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research,” Freedman wrote. “He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong.”
Ten years after his glowing profile in The Atlantic, however, Ioannidis finds himself in the crosshairs of media and medical professionals for doing what he’s always done: challenging science he believes is flawed. This time, however, Ioannidis is challenging medical findings of a virus that isn’t just deadly, but deeply controversial.
Ioannidis has become perhaps the leading medical voice against COVID-19 alarmism and government lockdowns.
It began with a March 17 article in Stat that suggested governments around the world were taking sweeping and potentially harmful actions to limit the spread of COVID-19 without sufficient data. Then came a May 5 white paper he authored which suggested COVID-19 was not nearly as deadly as initially feared, a claim later supported by an NPR report that cited research from Johns Hopkins University showing a fatality risk as low as 0.5 percent. Ioannidis’s latest research on the COVID fatality rate pegs the median COVID-19 fatality risk at 0.25 percent, much lower than previous estimates but still about two and a half times higher than the seasonal flu.
Ioannidis’s credentials might be impeccable, but his findings have not been without controversy.
In an impressive piece of medical journalism published at Undark.org, investigative journalist Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee of the Lown Institute detail the withering criticism Ioannidis has received from media and medical professionals alike.
Ioannidis appears unfazed by the attacks, which include (very thin) accusations that his study suffered from an undisclosed conflict of interest.
In the medical journal BMJ, Ioannidis recently explained why he believes government lockdowns should be lifted. (An opposing view is offered by Edward R. Melnick of the Yale Medical School.)
Even if covid-19 is far milder than feared, it can still devastate in specific settings. Massacres in overwhelmed hospitals with contaminated personnel and in nursing homes represent the lion’s share of deaths. Hospital preparedness, universal personnel screening, draconian infection control, and social distancing in these locations are indispensable.
However, blind lockdown of entire populations has questionable added benefits. Locking down healthy, no-risk people and transferring covid-19 patients to nursing homes was absurd. Proponents of “lockdown to flatten the curve” should acknowledge that this gains time for hospital preparedness but that most, if not all, covid-19 deaths will still happen when measures are relaxed—unless effective treatments and/or vaccines emerge. Moreover, the lockdown-to-flatten-the-curve rationale ignores seasonality and espouses 100 year old observational data from a 1918 pandemic with an infection fatality rate 100 times higher than covid-19.
Lockdowns have multiple components. Some, such as avoiding mass gatherings, may work; others may not. Some may even increase the number of covid-19 deaths—for instance, school closures may increase frail relatives’ exposure to children. But, regardless of the combination, lockdowns bring multifarious harms beyond those related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, such as the consequences of health system dysfunction and extended harms eroding health, the economy, and society at large.
Lockdowns implemented during high infectious activity will force infective people to spend more time with frail relatives in cramped spaces. Low wage, essential workers adopt higher risks, and shelters for vulnerable homeless people become infection hotspots, while wealthy, healthy citizens get to stay at home. Stress may also affect our immune responses to respiratory infections. And, with the added horror spread by various media sources, lockdowns represent uniquely stressful experiences.
Under lockdown conditions many patients with acute, treatable conditions (such as coronary syndromes) avoid seeking care. This disruption may be seen in the excess deaths accruing so far in the covid-19 lockdown. Patients with cancer whose treatment is delayed have worse outcomes. And when patients avoid hospitals many health systems suffer financially, furlough personnel, and cut services. Covid-19 overwhelmed a few dozen hospitals, but covid-19 countermeasures have already jeopardized thousands of them.
Prolonged lockdowns fuel economic depression, creating mass unemployment. Jobless people may lose health insurance. Entire populations may witness decreased quality of life and mental health. Gun sales in the US have increased sharply since the lockdown began, with unpredictable consequences.
Underprivileged populations and those in need are hit harder by crises. People at risk of starvation worldwide have already exceeded one billion. We are risking increased suicides, domestic violence, and child abuse. Malaise and societal disintegration may also advance, with chaotic consequences such as riots and wars.
And how long a lockdown is enough? If we open now, will lockdown recur in autumn? Next year? Whenever authoritarianism so wishes? No dictatorship could imagine a better precedent for absolute control.
Lockdowns were desperate, defendable choices when we knew little about covid-19. But, now that we know more, we should avoid exaggeration. We should carefully and gradually remove lockdown measures, with data driven feedback on bed capacity and prevalence/incidence indicators. Otherwise, prolonged lockdowns may become mass suicide.
As Undark points out, Ioannidis’s opposition to lockdowns do not stem from libertarianism or a “Trumpian desire to benefit Wall Street,” but a longstanding skepticism of medical interventionism generally, which he says tends to be missed or downplayed by medical researchers.
Ioannidis may be no libertarian, but many of the lockdown themes he touches will sound familiar to FEE readers—deadly government policies that prohibited nursing homes from screening for COVID-19, soaring suicide, and widespread economic destruction resulting in millions of businesses wiped out and 40 million jobs lost.
While the costs of the lockdowns are apparent to all, less clear is how effective they have been in limiting the spread of the virus. A recent Bloomberg found “little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities.” Norway’s top health official recently stated the lockdowns probably were not necessary. Evidence from a recent JP Morgan report suggests most nations saw COVID infection rates fall after lockdowns were lifted.
These results make sense when one realizes, as studies have shown, that Americans were social distancing before lockdown orders were enforced. This fact brings to mind a quote from Nobel laureate economist F.A. Hayek.
“This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not,” Hayek wrote in The Use of Knowledge in Society. “It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.”
Hayek’s point was that centralized planning tends to be irrational because central planners lack the knowledge to make rational decisions. We mustn’t forget that human beings by nature and self-interest will take reasonable steps to protect themselves from a deadly virus. Humans manage risk every single day, and each does so possessing and processing more local knowledge than any central planner can possess.
Government officials no doubt were acting in good faith when they ordered lockdowns, but by removing choices from individuals, businesses, and other organizations they committed what appears to be one of the most costly and ultimately lethal blunders in modern history.
It’s not too late to learn from the mistake. A first step toward that end would be to admit that John Ioannidis is right: The government lockdowns must end.
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.
Bylines: The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
He previously served in editorial roles at The History Channel magazine, Intellectual Takeout, and Scout. He is an alumni of the Institute for Humane Studies journalism program, a former reporter for the Panama City News Herald, and served as an intern in the speechwriting department of George W. Bush.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2020-06-17 05:17:022021-07-16 17:56:03VIDEO: World-Leading Infectious Disease Expert Explains Why Government Lockdowns Should End
Is there an agenda in which Covid-19 has a role? And if so, what is that agenda?
Let’s discuss the New World Order and Covid-19. World government, i.e., the New World Order is part and parcel of this virus. According to Arthur Thompson, CEO of the John Birch Society, “It is a steppingstone to world order.” It definitely fits, and plays into the globalist’s modus operandi.
One of the left’s standard procedures or tactics for bringing about change is by using an existing issue to manufacture crises. If there isn’t an issue which can be used, one can always be produced that will serve the purpose.
The way this begins to play-out, the issue is brought to the surface by propaganda agents, which is currently recognized as “Fake News.” Many instances will be reported as evidence of the dire consequences people will be confronted with if remedial action is not immediately forthcoming.
At this point the solution planners, i.e., the ones who planned it all before the start, will surface with the solution to the issue. Invariably, however, the result will always be more control and less freedom for the people.
This is only one example of how the proponents of change are able to incrementally destroy our society and replace it with a system that is diametrically opposed to individual liberty and independence.
It is quite evident that the forces behind the drive for global control, or world government, for some time, have planned to use something like the coronavirus to advance their plans for establishing a Global one World Government.
Dr. Anthony Fauci
Dr. Anthony Fauci, is an American physician and immunologist who has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, within the National Institutes of Health. He has been closely connected to the World Health Organization (WHO) for many years, and is a good friend of the Director, Dr. Tedros Adhanom whose main advisor is none other than Dr. Ezekiel Immanuel, the man who included “death panels” in Obamacare. In 2015, Bill Gates forecast a coming pandemic, and in 2017, Anthony Fauci predicted a pandemic for President Trump during a speech at Georgetown University, when he said, “No doubt Donald J. Trumpwill be confronted with a surprise infectious disease outbreak during his presidency.” (Dr. Fauci actually wrote adoring letters to Hillary Clinton after her Benghazi testimony and for years prior to that he had worked with Ted Kennedy on HIV/AIDS.)
Dr. Fauci was vaulted into prominence at the White House by Covid-19 Task Force leader, Mike Pence. He was made our infectious disease specialist in charge of our defense against the pandemic that he knew was going to happen, and quite possibly, because of the NIH’s grants to the Wuhan Lab, had been in on the planning.
The Goal is Control
The John Birch Bulletin reports that there are many examples of seminars, reports, and studies by globalists in the last few years that indicate they meant to use a pandemic to start the process of permanent control on a worldwide basis. It includes many of the people within the American government health community, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who has been seen daily at White House briefings and on the mainstream media.
The Birch bulletin stated, “Some of these studies have been in partnership with the Chinese Communists. The Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the China Scholarship Council, and the Natural Science Foundation of China have been cooperating with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute of Health in studies connected to pandemics.” Dr. Fauci sits on the boards of many of these American organizations.
When you are cooking up a big mulligan stew, it attracts many participants. The high-sounding titles of the many entities shield the character and proclivities of many of those involved. For example, in studies connected to pandemics, why would the National Science Foundation, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute of Health be interested and involved in the studies of interest to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chinese Communists? The answer is revealing.
Following is a video of Bill Gates being charged with crimes against humanity in a session of the Italian Parliament. The legislator is speaking in Italian but subtitles are in English.
Bill Gates
James Corbett’s fourth installment of his series on Bill Gates examines Gates’ youth, family history, business strategies, and surprising personal connections (Jeffery Epstein for example). Altogether, they reveal a disturbing picture of Gates’ rise to fame, fortune, and power. Of particular interest is the fact that his banker father was the head of Planned Parenthood and that the family was connected to a group of wealthy intellectuals who called themselves “Eugenicists.” They advocated so-called public-health programs to sterilize those who are considered by the elite to be unworthy of procreation.
This was the same program that was applied by Hitler to create a super race in Nazi Germany. After the fall of the Nazi regime, American eugenicists needed to distance themselves from Hitler’s sterilization program, so they changed their vocabulary. Eugenicists henceforth were called Population Control. This finally connects the dots between present vaccine design and the Gates’ life-long support of population control.
I personally believe that his population control support goes much deeper than just sterilization of the unfavorable.
According to James Corbett, Gates is generally portrayed as a kindly philanthropist who generously funds projects to improve health and fight poverty. As shown in this report however, the image and the reality are far different. The reality is that Gates, throughout his entire career, has been obsessed with the idea that the human population needs to be drastically reduced and that any means to this end is acceptable, including the creation of vaccines to sterilize people but offered to them as a defense against disease.
Vaccines
With the extreme scare tactics employed regarding Covid-19, we most likely are being set-up. The development of a vaccine that will meet Gates’ specifications is being done. Gates saw the potential for using vaccines for yet another hidden purpose, for injecting microchips and data tattoos into the skin that, in addition to pushing pharmaceutical concoctions into the blood stream, also embed digital data that can be read by scanners to identify every person on the planet. Just think what else can be done with this technology. Link
Thomas Jefferson rightly stated, “When the people fear the government – there is tyranny. “When the government fears the people – there is liberty.”
We are definitely at the point at which the people fear the government. Why? Because the government, for all practical purposes has been taken over by hordes of reprobates, those who God has destined for damnation. They have no regard for the feelings, the rights, or the total well-being of anyone other than themselves, or those who support them.
Bill Gates is obsessed with the idea that the human population of the earth should be drastically reduced and any means to this end is acceptable.
Our Supreme Court supports this. According to G. Edward Griffin, in Need to Know, attorney Alan Dershowitz says we have no constitutional protection against being forcibly vaccinated because no one has a right to spread a deadly disease. The Court contends that the state has an obligation to use force, if necessary, to protect the lives of its citizens against the threat of a deadly disease. Totally and completely unconstitutional to God given freedoms.
This, supposedly, is a proper position, because the defense of life is one of the few proper functions of the just state, but there is no defense of the unborn, neither is there defense of the elderly. The problem is that this position is justified only if the deadly threat is real and not staged as a political ploy, and those who are staging the hoax are the ones who will decide if it is real. Even the polio vaccines and sugar cubes of the 60s were unnecessary…polio was on its way out, but they continued their damning vaccines … vaccines they knew were grown on monkey kidneys and gave the recipients soft tissue cancers.
Those who challenge them will be imprisoned for spreading false information that endangers public health and safety. Furthermore, in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts the court said that the threat doesn’t even need to be real if those making the decision believe it is. That part of the ruling provided a loophole big enough to drive a truck through because it allows political criminals to escape punishment simply by claiming that they had bad advice. (All this per the comments of G. Edward Griffin)
Orwell’s 1984
We have arrived in Orwell’s 1984, and from the “Robespierre Public Safety ruling during the French Revolution, in which 25,000 Frenchmen were beheaded by the guillotine for acts against the ruling. There is no guarantee history won’t repeat itself, especially with America’s history daily being destroyed by anarchists.
I believe that during my lifetime, many of the members of the Supreme Court were people who had been turned over to a reprobate mind, otherwise they could not have ruled as they did in so many cases.
In my previous article, Part 10 of The Path to Understanding, I said that Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion on the 5 to 4 ruling by the Supreme Court on the same-sex marriage case stated in his opinion that “gay people” have a fundamental right to marriage. Implicit in this statement is a veiled assertion that this right comes from God. Whether he and the other four justices who concurred in the ruling are aware of it or not, the reference to rights that are fundamental is a reference to God and His authority.
And then, there are all the pro-abortion rulings which many members of the court from 1973 to today will have to answer for. But they will have no answer – for there isn’t one – they will have to face the consequences at the Great White Throne judgment.
Many people have ridiculed scripture and the Great White Throne Judgment. They have laughed and made jokes concerning it. I can see in my mind’s eye that when they approach the throne of God, He says to them, “I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”
Conclusion
What I’ve written is only the tip of the iceberg relative to what we are being set-up for; the complete regimentation of society in which all individuals will act or react in unison with all others.
It is to prepare us for the future as world citizens. We will then do everything by the numbers; no one will have thoughts, or make comments that do not coincide with instructions passed down from the rulers.
Look at all the people wearing masks even after scientific reports have said that masks are completely useless and of no benefit whatever. The sheeple have complied. It is part of the scenario to establish the national mind-set that we are in crises that all people must be involved in for us to survive, despite the fact that fewer people have perished from Covid than perish from seasonal flu.
Next up, the corruption and cover-up of dangerous vaccines where a doctor is being threatened for exposing the truth of this agenda and the Covid-19 conspiracy. Link
‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Well, maybe.
The past week has seen statues and monuments whose subjects were linked to racism defaced or destroyed in the UK, UK and Australia. The memory cleansing movement also reached the University of Southern California (USC), with a slightly different twist.
The USC President, Carol Folt, swiftly removed the name and bust of her one of her predecessors, Rufus Von KleinSmid, from a prominent historic building on the campus. She was responding to years of agitation to expunge memorials to Von KleinSmid.
In his day, Von KleinSmid was a prominent figure in the United States. He began his career as a professor of education and psychology. In 1914 he became president of the University of Arizona, and moved from there to USC in 1921. He was president of USC for 25 years until 1947.
On his watch, USC experienced a huge expansion and slowly became the major university that it is today. Von KleinSmid was awarded a National Institute of Social Sciences Gold Medal in 1942 and was honoured by 20 national governments for his achievements.
Unfortunately, USC’s president was also an ardent eugenicist. He co-founded the Human Betterment Foundation in 1928, a Pasadena-based think-tank which promoted compulsory sterilization for the improvement of the species. Dr Folt described him as “an active supporter of eugenics [whose] writings on the subject are at direct odds with USC’s multicultural community and our mission of diversity and inclusion.”
There’s no doubt that Von KleinSmid’s views are not acceptable in polite company nowadays. A brief glance at a pamphlet which he wrote in 1913 yields such gems as:
We must all agree that those who, in the nature of the case, can do little else than pass on to their offsprings the defects which make themselves burdens to society, have no ethical right to parenthood. To deny them this privilege is, in the language of John Harris, “no infringement of liberty, it is a curtailment of unbridled license which is a disgrace to our civilization (?) and to our vaunted Christianity. ”
Or
The average worth of the individual to society is constantly lowered because of both the lack of productiveness among the worthy, and the fecundity of the defective. There can be no question of the outcome of the tragedy when society must depend finally upon an average ability too feeble to stand upon its own feet. It is estimated that one million of our population are incarcerated in public institutions, while three times that many, through their own incapability, pull a dead weight against society’s progress.
So there’s no point in denying that Von KleinSmid was a eugenicist, although he could argue in his defense that progressive American intellectuals before World War II shared his views — people like birth control activist Margaret Sanger, African-American rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, botanist Luther Burbank, President Theodore Roosevelt, Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr and others too numerous to list here.
This is just a small incident in the wider movement to purge the US of racism. But it raises a few questions. Von KleinSmid’s sentiments are echoed every day by gynaecologists advising pregnant mothers to abort their Down syndrome child. In fact, a discrete investigation at the USC Keck School of Medicine might be in order if the university wants to purge itself of eugenics.
Isn’t it better to ask how eugenics has evolved rather than to expunge it from the public record? And damnatio memoriae (the Roman habit of rubbing out inscriptions and beheading statues) seems an odd way to obliterate interest in eugenics, which actually seems to be growing by leaps and bounds.
As we all have heard many times, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
Interestingly, this is the best-known maxim of the Spanish-American philosopher, novelist and Harvard professor George Santayana – who was — yes, you guessed it — a eugenicist! “Some races are obviously superior to others,” he wrote in his highly praised five-volume 1906 book The Life of Reason. It figures: all that remembering stuff corrupts the soul.
So what do we do now?
Here’s a suggestion. Forget it; forget everything. Just make it up as we go along. That way, when we do end up repeating the atrocities of the past, no one will notice.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2020-06-15 08:30:572020-06-15 08:30:57Memories of eugenics president erased from USC campus
The author of the Harry Potter series has ignited a firestorm on Twitter over her ‘transphobic’ views.
Skepticism about allowing teenagers to transition to a different gender came from an unexpected source lastweek: J.K. Rowling, the author of the fabulously successful Harry Potter series. She had been provoked by a Twitterstorm over her tweet mocking a Devex headline, “Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate”. “People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,” she wrote. “Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” She published an extraordinarly clear and informative open letter on her website, which we are republishing here.
This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity.
For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.
My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain.
All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.
Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.
I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.
What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.
What are TERFs?
I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health. I only returned because I wanted to share a free children’s book during the pandemic. Immediately, activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every woman involved in this debate will know – TERF.
If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so-called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.
But accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).
So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?
Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.
Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.
The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.
The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.
Protecting young women
The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.
Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.
The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:
‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’
Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’
Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.
The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’
The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.
When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’
As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.
I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.
Misogyny ascendant
We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.
I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much. It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.
But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.
On a personal note
Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.
I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.
I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.
I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.
If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.
I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.
So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.
On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.
Late on Saturday evening, scrolling through children’s pictures before I went to bed, I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.
Defying trans activists
It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”
Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.
But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to educate themselves on how prevalent it is.
The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise, are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them. Political parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard-won rights and widespread intimidation. None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but who’re facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don’t endorse. The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.
The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.
All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.
This letter, originally titled “J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues“, has been republished from her website.
COLUMN BY
J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling is best-known as the author of the bestselling Harry Potter series of seven books, published between 1997 and 2007. The enduringly popular adventures of Harry, Ron and Hermione have gone on… More by J.K. Rowling
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2020-06-15 08:10:032020-06-18 06:46:20‘Harry Potter’ author explains why trans demands are bogus
Yes, nothing could be clearer than that the rioters and looters are deeply committed Christians. In reality, of course, this is wildly absurd, but Kablawi is not interested in facts. He is interested in reinforcing the idea, increasingly widespread nowadays, that the US, its traditions, its culture, its heritage, its dominant religion, are at fault for all the ills in the country and the world today, and that the solution to all our problems is Islam. There are many non-Muslims, ignorant of the true history of the West and filled with the anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Western propaganda that our colleges and universities relentlessly pump into them, who will be susceptible to this.
“Miami Imam Dr. Fadi Yousef Kablawi: Christianity Is Responsible For The Looting In America; Darwin Called To Exterminate Dark-Skinned People He Saw As Half-Humans; Muslims Should Not Attend BLM Protests,” MEMRI, June 5, 2020:
In a Friday, June 5, 2020 sermon delivered at the North Miami Islamic Center, which is known also as Masjid As-Sunna An-Nabawiyya North Miami, Imam Dr. Fadi Yousef Kablawi said that he is saddened by Muslims who participate in Black Lives Matter protests because “every life matters.” He said that Christianity is the main problem in America and the West today since Christians believe that Jesus died for their sins and that as a result, they believe that they can commit crimes such as looting and repent for them later. He stated that the solution to America’s problems is Islam. Later in the sermon, Imam Kablawi said that according to Darwinism, the European race must “exterminate the savage race” of people with bigger lips and darker skin. The sermon, titled “This Is How We Should Look at the George Floyd Issue as Muslims,” was streamed live on the mosque’s Facebook page. Dr. Kablawi, who is a dentist and originally from Jordan, had written an article in Ghurabaa Islamic Magazine in 2010, saying that the Jews incurred the anger of God. In November 2019, Salman Rashid, who is affiliated with the North Miami Islamic Center, was arrested for plotting an ISIS attack against the deans of Broward College and Miami Dade College.
Imam Dr. Fadi Yousef Kablawi: “You look at Muslims going to support the cause of Black Lives Matter – every life matters! Every life matters. And it hurts when you see Muslims raising signs like that. Every life matters. If you are going to stand against injustice, you stand against injustice that could be committed against every individual.
[…]
“That is the very problem I see in America – Christianity. Seriously. And Europe is not any better. Christianity – the way it got corrupted – is the main reason for what we see happening in this country. Christianity.
[…]
“[Jesus] – that’s their god, as they claim – he was killed. But he was not killed for a bad reason, he was killed for your sins. So it does not matter what you do, as much looting as you do – at the end of the week, you are forgiven.
[…]
“Go [to church] on Sunday and confess or repent and you are good. As long as you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins, you are fine. You tell me how such a religion will create good citizens.
[…]
“So what’s the solution for this aspect? Islam. Islam.
[…]
“Christianity – we already established – is the cause of the problem. The way they implemented it… But Christianity – the pure, original one that came from Allah – is Islam. It is the religion of Allah. But the way they changed it and corrupted it is the [reason] they are now suffering.
[…]
“[Charles Darwin] said that the Europeans, this civilized race – [in order for them] to be able to continue to improve and to become more civilized – they must exterminate the savage race. That is Darwinism. So the fact that people have bigger lips, darker skin, or this… And he believes that we come from monkeys… Your father is a monkey, not my father! Your dad is a monkey, and I refuse for my dad to be a monkey or to admit that. Who is happy to say his dad is an ape, are you crazy? But anyway, the fact that people still have big lips and all that, they are closer – that’s what he says… They are in a stage between humans and beasts – animals. I’m telling you brothers. This is Darwin.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2020-06-13 07:08:312020-06-13 07:10:29VIDEO: MIAMI, FL — Muslim cleric says Christianity responsible for riots and looting, Islam is the solution
Federal health officials announced a final rule Friday scrapping an Obama-era regulation that forced medical workers to perform abortions despite their religious beliefs.
The Obama administration’s 2016 regulation, already vacated by a court ruling, also redefined sex-based discrimination in health care to include questions of gender identity.
The old rule would have imposed nearly $3 billion in costs on the economy, the Department of Health and Human Services said in announcing the change. Prompted by the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, the rule had not been implemented after being halted in court.
When Congress passed the Obamacare law in 2010, it included a section broadly prohibiting discrimination among health insurance plans.
The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>
Under the Obama administration, HHS tried to apply that provision to both abortion and gender identity in the 2016 rule. The rule defined gender identity as “one’s internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.”
The real-world effects of prioritizing gender identity in health care became clear after a 32-year-old pregnant woman went to the emergency room complaining of abdominal pains and claiming to be a man.
The attending nurse treated the patient as a man, based on the electronic medical record, and the end result was a stillborn baby in a case first reported by The New England Journal of Medicine in May 2019.
“That’s one example where confusion over what the meaning of sex is—whether it’s based on biology or based on gender identity—can have some real-world and in this case tragic consequences. That’s why clarity is so important,” Roger Severino, director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights, told The Daily Signal.
“This [new] rule will establish clarity over the confusion that was unleashed by the Obama administration’s previous definition, which included male, female, neither, both or some combination, which is very difficult to administer in a health care setting.”
The new rule will enforce the provision by returning to the government’s interpretation of sexual discrimination according to the plain meaning of the word “sex” as male or female and as determined by biology, HHS said.
The 2016 regulation did not recognize sexual orientation as a protected characteristic, and the Trump administration’s rule doesn’t change that.
“The Obama administration itself thought that was a bridge too far. And this final rule leaves undisturbed that judgment from the Obama era,” Severino said. “So if people take issue with that, they should also take issue with the Obama administration as well.”
The Trump administration’s HHS says it will continue to enforce federal civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in health care on the basis of race, color, national origin, disability, age, and sex.
The final rule keeps a section that ensures physical access for individuals with disabilities to health care facilities, as well as communication technology to assist those who have impaired vision or hearing.
Regulated entities still will have to provide written assurances of compliance to HHS.
“Truth matters and words have meaning,” said Ryan T. Anderson, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, asserting in a written statement that the Trump administration was right to rescind the previous rules:
In addition to being an unlawful abuse of agency power, these rules would have caused serious harm. They would have required doctors, hospitals, and health care organizations to act in ways contrary to their best medical judgments, their consciences, and the physical realities of their patients, or face steep fines and become easy targets for unreasonable and costly lawsuits.
All people should be treated with dignity and respect. Therefore, federal law should not outlaw reasonable disagreements about the best medical care for gender dysphoria. Nor should federal law force anyone to violate their pro-life conscience or the privacy and safety of others in the name of political correctness.
The revised rule provides protections for non-English speakers, including the provision of translators and interpreters.
However, the final rule relieves Americans of approximately $2.9 billion in regulatory costs over five years by eliminating a mandate for regulated health care entities to insert “notice and taglines” to patients and other consumers in 15 or more languages in almost every mailing. Those costs got passed down to consumers.
In December 2016, a federal court preliminarily enjoined the Obama administration’s attempt to redefine sex-based discrimination. The court said the provision likely contradicted existing civil rights law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.
In October 2019, a second federal court agreed. That same month, the initial federal court vacated the Obama HHS rule and remanded the provisions it found unlawful back to the department.
The court action stemmed in part from an Obama administration rule regarding abortion. Existing laws said doctors and nurses can’t be compelled to perform an abortion if it would violate thier religious beliefs or conscience.
“Other federal laws prohibit discrimination against health care providers who refuse to participate in abortion,” Severino said. “If not performing abortion is sex discrimination, then of course you have clear conflicts of federal law protecting conscience.”
Also Friday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development began to undo an Obama administration regulation by proposing a rule to allow men’s and women’s shelters to make their own sex-specific housing policies.
“The Trump administration is also correct to unwind an Obama-era housing regulation that imposed a gender identity mandate at the expense of privacy and safety,” Anderson said. “The proposed HUD rule allows shelters to determine their own policy on single-sex housing, thus protecting female-only spaces.”
With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.
However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.
If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.
This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.
We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.
A new FX documentary, AKA Jane Roe, raises many questions about the real Jane Roe.
Jane Roe, who pseudonymously sought an abortion in Texas, was at the heart of the infamous 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade. She claimed she had been impregnated in a gang-rape.
In the mid-1980s, Roe was revealed to be Norma McCorvey.
In the mid-1990s, she stunned the world by professing to have become a Christian and an opponent of abortion. She then claimed she had never been raped at all.
And now comes a documentary in which she, in the final year of her life, apparently claims that her switch to the pro-life position was all an act, for which she was paid.
It should be noted she was paid to appear in the FX documentary. Nick Sweeney, the documentary producer, has made movies about sex robots and girls becoming “boys.”
The Daily Beast reports on perhaps the most critical scene in the FX documentary:
“This is my deathbed confession,” [McCorvey] chuckles, sitting in a chair in her nursing home room, on oxygen. Sweeney asks McCorvey, “Did [the evangelicals] use you as a trophy?” “Of course,” she replies. “I was the Big Fish.” “Do you think you would say that you used them?” Sweeney responds. “Well,” says McCorvey, “I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say. That’s what I’d say.” She even gives an example of her scripted anti-abortion lines. “I’m a good actress,” she points out. “Of course, I’m not acting now.”
In addition, she is alleged to have said that she didn’t really care if a woman got an abortion. This doesn’t seem to fit the picture of the reborn Norma. However, in the big picture of things, the preview appears to contradict the vast majority of her words and deeds, from the time of her conversion in 1995 to her death in 2017. She even unsuccessfully sought to have the Supreme Court overturn Roe since it was all based on lies.
As reports came out last week about this disturbing new documentary, many prolife leaders that knew Norma McCorvey personally have spoken out to say that this is not the Norma McCorvey they have known all these years—nor does it represent who she truly was.
Cheryl Sullenger is the Senior Policy Advisor for the activist pro-life group, Operation Rescue—a group that played a critical role in McCorvey’s stated conversions to Christianity and to the pro-life position.
Cheryl told me: “I knew Norma personally….I have seen her in unguarded moments. She was a person that was a bit rough around the edges, but that never bothered me. If she was in a mood, she could say things that were controversial or even shocking, but I can attest that she was always pro-life.”
On my radio show, Sullenger added that the claim McCorvey received money from the prolife movement proves nothing. Receiving honoraria for speaking engagements is a common practice, no matter one’s politics.
Furthermore, Norma claims in the FX documentary that they (pro-lifers/the evangelicals/the Catholics) told her what to say. That can sound worse than it was. Sullenger noted that Norma had little education and she was not a polished public speaker. Thus, in various venues in which she spoke, speech writers crafted the copy she read. That type of thing happens all the time, again, no matter one’s politics.
Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, knew Norma McCorvey for 22 years. He said about her, “Her desire to protect children in the womb was no act.” On my radio show, Father Pavone noted that the documentary interview was in May 2016, but she died in February 2017. This was no “deathbed confession.” He also noted that Norma was unpredictable. You never knew what would come out of her mouth.
He notes that the producers of the FX film never asked him for an interview, despite how close he was to Norma. Father Pavone, who preached her funeral, even spoke with Norma on the day she died (by phone), and he says she told him to keep up the fight on behalf of the unborn.
I also spoke with Abby Johnson, former Planned Parenthood abortion clinic director, whose dramatic pro-life conversion is described in her book (with Cindy Lambert) and movie, Unplanned. She said pro-lifers should not be distracted by this recent controversy: “Stay focused on the goal—abortion is wrong no matter what.”
Only God knows the heart. Norma McCorvey was a fiery, unpredictable woman with rough edges. But regardless of who was telling the truth between the Norma of 1995 and the Norma of 2016 (in that one interview), the realities of abortion, legalized in her court case, do not change. Abortion unjustly takes an innocent human life, and does incredible damage to the mother. That’s not a matter of changing opinions or the passage of time. That’s a fact.
Dear American Family. For decades, my black family and friends have viewed me as the weirdo who votes for Republicans.
At our annual family Christmas gathering a few years before he died, my dad, Dr. Rev Lloyd E. Marcus, instructed them to follow me as the new leader. I heard through the grapevine that most of them disapprove of my politics. At family events, I am pleasant and keep conversations non-political. Still, they read my articles posted on social media and the internet.
The vast majority of my family and friends profess Christianity. And yet, everything I have written and told them on occasion about Democrats’ anti-biblical agenda has not broken their loyalty to the party.
They ignore the fact that their party worships Planned Parenthood which targets black babies and profits greatly from selling dead-baby body parts. Recently, Democrats have been pushing legislation to abort healthy babies after they are born.
They ignore that fact the Democrats want open borders for illegals who take jobs from blacks. They ignore the fact that Democrats are cramming the LGBTQ agenda down our throats. Democrats want schools to orchestrate sex-change surgery and abortions without parental knowledge or consent. They ignore the fact that Democrats seek to legalize 12 new perversions which include pedophilia and bestiality. How can anyone who professes Christianity support Democrats’ anti-biblical agenda? Remember the convention at which Democrats banned God from their platform?
I learned that relatives are posting propaganda on Facebook in support of the George Floyd rioters. Despite living successful racism-free lives, they have bought Democrats’ and fake news medias’ absurd lie that America is a hellhole of racism where blacks are routinely murdered by police. This made me sad and a bit lonely.
At the root of my sadness is the fact that my black family and friends are disciples of the Gospel of Democrats and Fake News Media. Whatever these two wicked entities tell them, they believe. God says allowing someone or something to trump His word is idolatry.
Eagles fly alone. “…all that will live godly in Christ Jesus suffer persecution.” (2 Timothy 3:12) Christians are martyred around the world. Therefore, complaining about deceived fellow blacks disapproving of my politics is hardly worth mentioning.
Still, it is extremely frustrating that facts nor commonsense seem to penetrate my family and friends blind loyalty to the far-left-extremist, hate-generating, anti-Christian, and anti-American Democratic Party.
They perceive everything they see and hear on TV from Democrats and fake news media as the gospel truth. For example. They believed the lie that catching covid-19 was a death sentence. They stayed at home, wore masks, and trashed anyone who did not. I told them that covid-19 has a 98% recovery rate. Once again, I was viewed as an Uncle Tom, siding with mean Republicans who want to reopen America which will cause a Ga-zillion Americans, mostly black, to die. By the way, a 65-year-old relative recovered from covid-19.
Democrats and fake news media are exploiting the tragic death of George Floyd in an attempt to stop Trump’s reelection. Insidiously, they are overwhelming the airwaves with lies about Trump, white America, and police. My family and friends are embracing every lie as a gospel. Presenting them with facts and data has had no effect in changing their minds. The Bible speaks of those who prefer to believe lies rather than truth.
Families across America are dealing with the same frustrating situation that I am challenged with. Their kids have been indoctrinated by extreme leftist, anti-American, and anti-Christian Hollywood celebs and fake news media. How do you break their brain-dead zombie control of young idealistic minds? I believe the answer is prayer and faithfully continuing to tell youths the truth about issues.
God’s word promises, “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap if we faint not. As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all.” (Galatians 6:9)
Outrageously, ANTIFA terrorists are demanding that whites kneel in worship to Black Lives Matter, begging forgiveness for being born white. Folks, this is evil beyond belief.
We must stand together as Americans while praying for God’s strength to be like Daniel in the Bible. Tell the Democrats, fake news media, ANTIFA, and Black Lives Matter that we “ain’t” kneeling nor worshiping their vile false gods of social-justice, socialism and communism.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Lloyd Marcushttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngLloyd Marcus2020-06-06 07:09:112020-06-06 07:15:00Disciples of the Gospel of Democrats and Fake News Media
Among states that reopened their economies about a month ago, most logged about the same number of COVID-19 cases, though some had more cases and others saw a decline.
The closest thing to a discernible pattern is that Western and Midwestern states performed better than Southern states in terms of fewer new cases of the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
Even there, though, some Southern states saw a decline or remained steady in the number of COVID-19 cases, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The increase in new diagnosed cases offers only a glimpse of how each state is doing.
The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>
What’s the best way for America to reopen and return to business? The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission, a project of The Heritage Foundation, assembled America’s top thinkers to figure that out. So far, it has made more than 260 recommendations. Learn more here>>.
In 47 states, hospitalization for COVID-19 either has been flat or has decreased, said Dr. Lee Gross, president of Docs 4 Patient Care, a health care advocacy group.
As testing expands, the number of confirmed cases will increase, Gross said, and the most notable measurement is of serious cases.
“The key is not to focus on just the number of cases, but how seriously ill people are,” Gross, who practices family medicine in North Port, Florida, told The Daily Signal. “There are many diseases that don’t shut down the economy for months.”
The only three states with increasing hospitalization rates for COVID-19 are Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, he said.
Wisconsin reopened its economy May 8 and Rhode Island reopened May 13. Hawaii didn’t do so until May 31, so there may not be a clear pattern.
Wisconsin, which came back the earliest of the three, had the biggest increase, Gross said.
‘Different Trends After Reopening’
The states seeing patients test positive for the coronavirus at a rate of 10% or higher are Alabama, Nebraska, and Virginia, Gross said, adding that hospitalization rates are flat.
It is difficult to say why some states appear to be doing better than others, said Jennifer Tolbert, director of state health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“We are definitely seeing different trends after reopening for about a month in different locations,” Tolbert told The Daily Signal. “I’m not sure we know the why.”
A dozen states began phased reopenings in late April, according to Stateline, a project of the Pew Research Center that monitors state governments.
Montana, with 523 total cases and 17 deaths, followed the next day. Then Colorado.
Mississippi was the first Southern state to reopen, on April 27. Three days later, it was followed by Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia, according to Pew.
Kaiser Family Foundation measured new cases in states based on a seven-day rolling average on May 5, by which time a significant number of states had reopened, and May 28, close to the end of the month.
Colorado and Georgia, two of the most permissive states in their reopenings, were widely criticized for taking a far less cautious approach than many other state governments.
Noting again how every state has different dynamics, Kaiser’s Tolbert noted that many of the early cases in Colorado began at ski resorts that later were closed down.
On May 5, Colorado had 436 new cases using the seven-day rolling average. By May 28, that number had declined to 274 new cases, according to Kaiser. In all, Colorado has had about 26,000 cases and 1,458 deaths.
Georgia had a more nominal dip, with 710 new cases May 5 and 658 new cases May 28. Georgia has had about 48,000 total cases and just over 2,000 total deaths, according to the CDC.
‘So Much Hype’
“These governors who uncaged free people and enterprise were wisely acting to not endanger so many livelihoods while still working to protect the most vulnerable,” George Allen, a former governor and U.S. senator of Virginia, told The Daily Signal.
Allen said 100,000 deaths from the new coronavirus were tragic. However, the doomsday predictions for states that reopened didn’t come true, indicating a problem with computer models on the virus, he said.
“There was so much hype,” said Allen, who is also a member of The Heritage Foundation’s National Coronavirus Recovery Commission. “The fact that so many states opened and cases declined shows how wrong many of the forecasts and models were.”
Allen said he hopes to see more governors and state legislatures provide liability protections for businesses in reopening and work to recruit pharmaceutical manufacturers so that America is less reliant on China.
For the state of Texas, new cases of COVID-19 were about the same in early May—1,079—as in late May—1,049—except for a spike in mid-May of 1,305 that was followed by a decline. Texas, the second most populous state, has had about 65,000 total cases and 1,678 deaths, according to the CDC.
In Alabama, however, new cases nearly doubled from 241 to 463 over that time period, according to Kaiser. Alabama has had 18,438 cases and 648 deaths in all.
Mississippi also had a spike from 266 new cases to 307 new cases in the three weeks from May 5 to May 28. The state has had more than 16,000 cases and 768 deaths, according to the CDC.
Tennessee, however, saw a decrease from 520 new cases in early May to 388 new cases in late May, according to Kaiser. In all, Tennessee has had 23,709 cases and 369 deaths.
West Virginia saw its already tiny number of new cases, 22, more than double to 49 from early to late May. West Virginia was the last state with zero cases early in the pandemic. In all, it has had about 2,000 cases and 76 deaths.
More Testing, Tracing
Other states remained steady after reopening.
On some level, an increase in new COVID-19 cases was expected whenever Americans came out of isolation, Kaiser’s Tolbert said:
As states reopen, the hope is that while, yes, there will be an increase in cases, states will also increase the testing and contact tracing. The whole reason we went into lockdown was never eradication of the virus, but it was to flatten the curve to give the health care system time to respond and not be overwhelmed.
Utah did a partial reopening May 1, and Missouri followed May 3. Utah has had more than 10,000 total cases and 114 deaths. Missouri has had 13,327 cases and 773 deaths.
The states of Florida, Indiana, and South Carolina began their phased reopenings May 4.
On May 8, Rhode Island, which has had about 15,000 cases and 720 deaths, became the first Northeastern state to reopen. Wisconsin began opening May 13.
Utah remained about the same, with 158 new cases May 5, just a few days after its reopening, and 150 new cases May 28, according to Kaiser.
Indiana had 635 new cases after a seven-day average May 5, one day after reopening. That dropped to 445 new cases May 28. Indiana has had a total of 34,830 cases and 2,142 deaths.
Florida, with the nation’s third-largest population, was almost flat with 656 new cases the day after it reopened May 4 and 659 as of May 28. In all, Florida has had 55,415 cases and 2,460 deaths.
South Carolina had an increase in new cases from 158 on May 5 to 201 new cases May 28. South Carolina has had 12,148 total cases and about 500 deaths.
As an aside, neighboring North Carolina, which didn’t reopen until May 21 according to Stateline, saw a big spike before and after—going from 394 cases May 5 to 755 cases May 28. North Carolina has had 29,263 total cases and about 900 deaths.
In Wisconsin, a week before the May 13 reopening, the number of new cases was 325 on May 5. That increased to 441 by May 28, according to Kaiser. Wisconsin has had about 18,500 cases and 600 deaths.
Staying Open
Seven other states didn’t force closure of their economies but issued strong guidelines to businesses and individuals. These states were Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming, according to Stateline.
For the most part, there was no significant difference for these seven states over the period measured. But Arkansas had an increase from 57 new cases in early May to 182 new cases by late May, according to Kaiser. Arkansas has had 7,443 total cases and 133 deaths.
Nebraska saw a decline from 408 new cases May 5 to 260 new cases May 28. The state has had 14,345 total cases and 178 deaths.
Keeping with the Midwestern trend, Iowa saw a decline from 534 new cases in the seven-day average May 5 to 345 new cases May 28. In all, Iowa has had almost 20,000 cases and about 550 deaths.
Oklahoma was steady, with 102 new cases dipping to 100 over that same period. The state has had about 6,300 total cases and 338 deaths.
For other states, it may be too early to measure the potential effect of reopening.
States that had phased reopenings in mid-May include Arizona, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland, Nevada, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Ohio, Vermont, and Virginia, according to Stateline.
Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Washington, and the District of Columbia reopened in late May.
What’s Next?
Pennsylvania opens Thursday, June 4, followed by Michigan on June 12.
The state of New York, which has had the largest number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the nation, will open June 13.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention measures New York state and New York City separately in logging coronavirus cases. In all, New York City has had more than 200,000 cases and almost 22,000 deaths. The rest of New York state has had about 168,000 cases and 8,159 deaths.
Six states have not yet set a date to reopen. They include the nation’s most populous state, California, which has had 113,000 total cases and about 4,250 deaths.
The others are Kentucky, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Oregon.
With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.
However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.
If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.
This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.
We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Signalhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Signal2020-06-04 05:13:372020-06-04 05:24:52These States Reopened a Month Ago After COVID-19 Shutdowns. Here’s What Happened.
