Mind Blowing: CDC Forced to Tell How Deadly the COVID Jab Is

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CDC Aware of Hundreds of Safety Signals for COVID Jab.

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • In September 2022, The Epoch Times asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining results. The CDC refused. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has now forced the release of these data, and they are stunning
  • The CDC’s PRR monitoring has identified several hundred safety signals, including for Bell’s palsy, blood clots, pulmonary embolism and death. In individuals aged 18 and older, there are 770 safety signals for different adverse events, and more than 500 of them have a stronger safety signal than myocarditis and pericarditis
  • In the 12- to 17-year-old age group there are 96 safety signals, and in the 5- to 11-year-old group there are 66, including myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction, cardiac valve incompetency, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis and appendectomies, Kawasaki’s disease and vitiligo
  • The proportions of deaths, which were only provided for the 18-plus age group, was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines
  • The FDA is also required to perform safety monitoring, using empirical Bayesian data mining. The Epoch Times asked the FDA to release its monitoring results in July 2022 but, like the CDC, the FDA refused, only to admit in December 2022 they’d confirmed the Pfizer shot was linked to pulmonary embolism

In September 2022, The Epoch Times asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining results. PRR1 measures how common an adverse event is for a specific drug compared to all the other drugs in the database.

According to the standard operating procedures2,3 for the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is run jointly by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC is required to perform these data mining analyses.

Not only did the CDC refuse to release the data, but it also provided false information — twice — in response to The Epoch Times’ questions about the monitoring being performed. As reported by The Epoch Times back in September 2022,4 the CDC initially claimed PRR analyses were “outside the agency’s purview” and that no monitoring was being done by them.

Eventually, the agency admitted it was doing PRRs, starting in February 2021, only to later claim they didn’t perform any PRRs until March 2022. The Epoch Times also cited several papers in which the FDA and/or CDC claimed their data mining efforts had come up empty handed.5 Now, we find that was all a pack of lies.

CDC Monitoring Reveals Hundreds of Safety Signals

In reality, the CDC’s PRR monitoring reveals HUNDREDS of safety signals, including Bell’s palsy, blood clots, pulmonary embolism and death — all of which, according to the rules, require thorough investigation to either confirm or rule out a possible link to the shots. As reported by The Epoch Times in early January 2023:6

“The CDC analysis was conducted on adverse events reported from Dec. 14, 2020, to July 29, 2022. The Epoch Times obtained the results through a Freedom of Information Act request after the CDC refused to make the results public …

PRR involves comparing the incidence of a specific adverse event after a specific vaccine to the incidence after all other vaccines. A signal is triggered when three thresholds are met, according to the CDC: a PRR of at least 2, a chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and three or more cases of the event following receipt of the vaccine being analyzed. Chi-squared tests are a form of statistical analysis used to examine data.

The results obtained by The Epoch Times show that there are hundreds of adverse events (AEs) that meet the definition, including serious conditions such as blood clotting in the lungs, intermenstrual bleeding, a lack of oxygen to the heart, and even death. The high numbers, particularly the chi-squared figures, concerned experts.

For many of the events, ‘the chi-squared is so high that, from a Bayesian perspective, the probability that the true rate of the AE of the COVID vaccines is not higher than that of the non-COVID vaccines is essentially zero,’ Norman Fenton, a professor of risk management at Queen Mary University of London, told The Epoch Times in an email after running the numbers through a Bayesian model that provides probabilities based on available information.”

Myopericarditis Is Far From the Only Problem

One of the few side effects of the COVID jabs that the CDC has actually acknowledged is myocarditis (heart inflammation), and a related condition called pericarditis (inflammation of the heart sack). Alas, the PRR monitoring results reveal there are more than 500 other adverse events that have stronger warning signals than either of those conditions.

Josh Guetzkow, an Israeli professor trained in statistics at Princeton University told The Epoch Times:7

“We know that the signal for myocarditis is associated with something that is caused by the mRNA vaccines, so it’s more than reasonable to say that anything with a signal larger than myocarditis/pericarditis should be taken seriously and investigated.”

Guetzkow expanded on his commentary in a January 4, 2023, Substack article.8 Below is a summary list of some of the key findings from the CDC’s PRR analysis. Guetzkow goes deeper in his article, so for more details, I suggest reading it in its entirety.

For even more analyses and commentary, see Fenton’s Substack article, “The CDC’s Data on COVID Vaccine Safety Signals.”9 If you want to investigate the PRR data for yourself, you can download them from The Epoch Times’ January 3, 2023, article.10 You can also find them here.11

In individuals aged 18 and older, there are safety signals for 770 different adverse events, and two-thirds of them (more than 500) have a stronger safety signal than myocarditis and pericarditis. Of those 770 signals, 12 are brand-new conditions that have not been reported following other vaccines.

Topping the list of safety signals are cardiovascular conditions, followed by neurological conditions. In third and fourth place are thromboembolic conditions and pulmonary conditions. Death is sixth on the list and cancer is 11th. Considering the uptick we’ve seen in aggressive cancers, the fact that death tops cancer really says something.
The number of serious adverse events reported between mid-December 2020 and the end of July 2022 (just over 19 months) for the COVID jabs is 5.5 times greater than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the U.S. over the last 13 years (approximately 73,000 versus 13,000).
Twice as many COVID jab reports were classified as serious compared to all other vaccines given to adults (11% vs. 5.5%), which meets the definition of a safety signal.
The proportions of reported deaths, which was only provided for the 18+ age group, was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines. As noted by Fenton,12 “If the CDC wish [sic] to claim that the probability a COVID vaccine adverse event results in death is not significantly higher than that of other vaccines the onus is on them to come up with some other causal explanation for this difference.”
In the 12- to 17-year-old age group, there are 96 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, Bell’s Palsy, genital ulcerations, high blood pressure, menstrual irregularities, cardiac valve incompetency, pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrhythmia, thrombosis, pericardial and pleural effusion, appendicitis and perforated appendix, immune thrombocytopenia, chest pain and increased troponin levels (indicative of heart damage).
In the 5- to 11-year-old group, there are 66 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction, cardiac valve incompetency, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis and appendectomies, Kawasaki’s disease, menstrual irregularities and vitiligo.

It’s worth noting that the CDC didn’t perform its first safety signal analysis until March 25, 2022 — 15 months after the shots were rolled out. Why the long wait — especially since the CDC had announced it would begin monitoring in early 2021? Just consider, for a moment, how many lives have been lost because the CDC failed to properly monitor safety, and still drags its feet when it comes to warning people about the risks involved.

FDA Still Refuses to Share Safety Data

The FDA is also required to perform safety monitoring using another technique called Empirical Bayesian data mining. The Epoch Times first asked the FDA to release its monitoring results back in July 2022,13,14 but like the CDC, the FDA refused and insisted the data showed no evidence of serious adverse effects. In other words, “Just trust us. We’re experts.”

According to the FDA, the only potential signal they’d found through April 16, 2021, was for raised body temperature.15 Then, in mid-December 2022 — just four months after The Epoch Times tried to get these data — the FDA announced that pulmonary embolism (blood clots that block blood flow in the lungs) had met the threshold for a statistical signal, and continued to meet the criteria after in-depth evaluation, but it was only linked to the Pfizer jab.16

As noted by The Epoch Times,17 pulmonary embolism is also identified as a signal in the CDC’s PRR analysis for individuals as young as 12, which really ought to strengthen concerns.

The FDA also admitted it had already evaluated three other warning signals: lack of oxygen to the heart, immune thrombocytopenia (a blood platelet disorder) and intravascular coagulation (a type of blood clotting), but none of these continued to meet the threshold after analysis.

If the FDA was evaluating four warning signals, why did they tell The Epoch Times there was no evidence of ill effects, and why did they claim the only potential signal they’d found was slight fever? Are we to believe they discovered these signals after The Epoch Times asked for the monitoring results and then completed four in-depth investigations in four months?

Whatever the truth, it’s clear that both the CDC and FDA are not being transparent. Worse, they’ve hidden data, knowing it could mean the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands of people.

CDC Has Ignored Clear ‘Death’ Signal

The CDC ignoring a clear signal for death is probably the most egregious example of its failures as a public health institution. As early as July 2021, Matthew Crawford published a three-part series18,19,20 detailing how the CDC was hiding safety signals by using a flawed formula. In August that year, Steve Kirsch informed the agency of these problems, but was ignored.

Then, in an October 3, 2022, article,21 Kirsch went on to show how “death” should have triggered a signal even when using the CDC’s flawed formula (which is described in its VAERS standard operating procedures manual22). Here’s an excerpt:23

“The formula the CDC uses for generating safety signals is fundamentally flawed; a ‘bad’ vaccine with lots of adverse events will ‘mask’ large numbers of important safety signals … Let me summarize the key points for you in a nutshell: PRR [proportional reporting ratio] is defined on page 16 in the CDC document24 as follows … Table 4. Calculation of Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR)

A ‘safety signal’ is defined on page 16 in the CDC document as a PRR of at least 2, chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and 3 or more cases of the AE [adverse event] following receipt of the specific vaccine of interest. This is the famous ‘and clause.’ Here it is from the document: 2.3.1 Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR)

Only someone who is incompetent or is deliberately trying to make the vaccines look safe would use the word ‘and’ in the definition of a safety signal.

Using ‘and’ means that if any one of the conditions isn’t satisfied, no safety signal will be generated. As noted below, the PRR will rarely trigger which virtually guarantees that most events generated by an unsafe vaccine will never get flagged.

The PRR value for the COVID vaccines will rarely exceed 1 because there are so many adverse events from the COVID vaccine because it is so dangerous (i.e., B in the formula is a huge number) so the numerator is always near zero. Hence, the ‘safety signal’ is rarely triggered because the vaccine is so dangerous.”

A Fictitious Example

Using a fictitious vaccine as the example, Kirsch explained how an exceptionally dangerous vaccine will fly under the radar and not get flagged, thanks to this flawed formula:25

“Suppose we have the world’s most dangerous vaccine that causes adverse events in everyone who gets it and generates 25,000 different adverse events, and each adverse event has 1,000 instances.

That means that the numerator is 1,000/25,000,000 which is just 40 events per million reported events. Now let’s look at actuals for something like deaths. For all other vaccines, there are 6,200 deaths and 1 million adverse events total.

Since 40 per million is less than 6,200 deaths per million, we are not even close to generating a safety signal for deaths from our hypothetical vaccine which killed 1,000 people in a year … The point is that a dangerous vaccine can look very ‘safe’ using the PRR formula.”

Calculating Death Signal for the COVID Jab

Next, Kirsch calculates the PRR for death for the COVID jab — using VAERS data and the CDC’s definitions and formula. As of December 31, 2019, there were 6,157 deaths and 918,717 adverse events total for all vaccines other than the COVID shot. As of September 23, 2022, there were 31,214 deaths and 1.4 million adverse events total for the COVID jabs. Here’s the formula as explained by Kirsch:26

“PRR = (31,214/1.4e6) / (6,157/918,717) = 3.32, which exceeds the required threshold of 2. In other words, the COVID vaccine is so deadly that even with all the adverse events generated by the vaccine, the death signal did not get drowned out!

But there is still the chi-square test. Chi-square test results were 18,549 for ‘death,’ which greatly exceeds the required threshold of 4. The CDC chi-square test is clearly satisfied for the COVID vaccine. Because the death signal is so huge, it even survived the PRR test.

This means that even using the CDCs own erroneous … formula, all three criteria were satisfied:

  1. PRR>2 [PRR greater than 2]: It was 3.32
  2. Chi-square>2 [Chi-square greater than 2]: It was 18,549
  3. 3 or more reports: There were over 31,214 death reports received by VAERS … which is more than 3

A safety signal should have been generated but wasn’t. Why not? … Hundreds of thousands of American lives have been lost due to the inability of the CDC to deploy their own flawed safety signal analysis … It’s been known since at least 2004 that using reporting odds ratio (ROR) is a better estimate of relative risk than PRR.27 I don’t know why the CDC doesn’t use it.”

The CDC is also hiding the severity of side effects in other ways. As explained by Fenton,28 the way side effects are categorized by the CDC help obfuscate the scale of certain problems. For example, “cardiac failure acute,” “cardiac failure,” “infarction,” “myocardial strain” and “myocardial fibrosis” are listed as separate categories, even though in real life they’re all potential effects of myocarditis.

By separating them, you end up with fewer frequency counts per category, thereby giving you an underpowered chi-square test so that a warning signal is not triggered. If related categories were merged, far stronger safety signals would likely emerge.

CDC Has No Reasonable Defense

The CDC is responsible for monitoring both VAERS and V-Safe, and between these two databases, there’s no possible way they could ever say they didn’t know the shots were harming and killing millions of Americans.

The CDC also has access to other databases, including the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), which (before it was intentionally altered29) showed massive increases in debilitating and lethal conditions, including a tripling of cancer cases.30

The findings in these databases have never been brought forward during any of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meetings or the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meetings, at which members have repeatedly voted to authorize the jabs to people of all ages, including infants and pregnant women.

They even added these toxic shots to the childhood vaccine schedule — which allows states to mandate them for school attendance — without addressing any of the 66 safety signals found in the CDC’s PRR analysis. The fact of the matter is that the CDC has known about these risks all along, and there’s no excuse for not sharing and acting on these data.

Help Spread the Word

Mainstream media are ignoring all of this, so help spread the word. Everyone needs to know what the CDC’s safety data reveal. To that end, here are a few suggestions for how you can help:

  • Write or call your members of Congress and ask them to investigate the CDC’s safety monitoring — We cannot have a public safety agency that is incapable of monitoring safety and taking appropriate action when problems are found, be it correcting a flawed formula or announcing that a safety signal has been detected. Of course, they must also publish their findings once an investigation has been made.
  • Contact your local newspaper and urge them to investigate and report on the CDC’s failure to act on safety signals.
  • Share the data on social media and ask why no one in the media, Congress, academia or medical community is investigating these matters.
  • Share this information with your doctor and members of the medical community.
  • Also share it with university administrators, and ask them to explain how and why, in light of these data, they are still mandating COVID shots.

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

The Cancer that is Public Health

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“Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.” — Vladimir Lenin, Russian politician, communist theorist and the founder of the Soviet Union

There’s no doubt why Obama and the Democrats pushed so hard to get it passed and nationalize the greatest medical institution in the world. The barbarians took a wrecking ball to it.

First part of an incredible story that shows just how broken our public “health” apparatus is — very, very broken.

The Cancer that is Public Health

By David Bell, January 17, 2023:

Sometimes an institution or movement turns on the society that supports it, harming the whole for its own benefit. A public bureaucracy can forget its underlying purpose and focus on perpetuating itself, or an organization comes to believe that the rest of society owes it special privileges. When an organ within the body of society becomes thus corrupted, and proves itself unwilling to reform, society must excise the diseased tissue before it spreads.

Cancer and its causes

Cancer starts when cells within an organ begin to operate outside the strictures and rules that the body’s cells were programmed to follow. This can be triggered by environmental factors such as chemicals, radiation, or viral infections. It can also occur due to structural errors in the DNA that determine the body’s growth and function.

Immune mechanisms often control and eliminate early cancerous change, with the person remaining unaware that there was even a threat. Sometimes however, the cancerous change is too great for these inbuilt checks to overcome. Its growth is beyond what the body was designed to address, or the body has become so sickened by age, attack or neglect that it can no longer mount an adequate defense.

As a cancer grows, it slowly corrupts the organ it arose within, impairing or changing its function. Demanding more nourishment to support its own rapid growth, it saps the body’s ability to support the rest of its billions of cells. In time the whole body deteriorates, though the cancer continues to grow and extract nourishment to the end, effectively repurposing the body solely towards its own support.

Death may be averted by removing the offending cancer, or even the entire organ from which it arose. But if the organ is vital to survival or the cancer has infiltrated other vital organs, excision is not possible. Sometimes the cancer may be poisoned or killed with radiation or immunotherapy without killing the entire body. But if it cannot be so dealt with, it takes the entire body down with it. This is a relatively common way to die.

Society is in many ways like the human body. Its various organs perform their functions to support the whole, all interdependent for survival. Corruption of one organ will, if left unchecked, corrupt the whole body. Most societal organs have rules that keep them in line with society’s needs. When external influences poison or degrade them and these rules are broken, the organ grows to the detriment of the whole. If society is healthy, it may be able to reform or replace the offending organ. If it is not, or if the corruption has infiltrated too deeply, society will become increasingly sick as its lifeblood is sucked away, and in time it may die.

A cancer on society

The international public health sector comprises the World Health Organization (WHO), a growing bevy of other international health agencies and numerous non-governmental organizations and foundations. Ostensibly its role is to support global society in maintaining overall health. By WHO’s definition, health is the ‘physical, mental and social wellbeing’ of all people, in equal measure. For reasons of promoting equality and human rights, the sector focuses on populations in low-income countries where life expectancies are lower and resources most limited. Various rules on conflict of interest, together with the traditional unprofitability of poor people’s healthcare, had once kept the private sector mostly uninvolved and uninterested. WHO’s lifeblood funding was restricted to assessed national contributions of its Member States.

Over the past two decades, the growth of mass vaccination has provided a viable way to extract profit from the healthcare of these low-income populations. Reflecting this, private interests and corporations have become keen to fund WHO’s work. These sources follow a ‘directed funding’ model through which they specify how and where their sponsorship will be used. Private money and corporate direction also heavily influence new organizations set up in parallel including Gavi and CEPI, focused on supplying commodities from which these sponsors profit. This has changed international health from a horizontal, country- and community-driven approach to a vertically-driven commodity-based model.

While the international public health sector is still heavily dependent on taxpayer funding, the funding of corporations and their investors has won them great influence over this increasingly commoditized agenda. Public funding thereby shifts wealth from the average taxpayer to the wealthy who have invested in these goods. An organ nourished by and designed to support the whole has been repurposed by these external influences into acting like a cancer on society, still fed by the body but directed to its own benefit.

Cancerous growths sicken the body

If this cancer analogy seems a stretch when applied to the ‘humanitarian’ sector, it is instructive to review recent history. In 2019, after a structured process laid out for guideline development, WHO published their guidelines for pandemic influenza. These specifically state that contact tracing, border closures and quarantining of well individuals should not occur during an established pandemic. At most, sick people could be confined at home for 7-10 days. School closures, if used, should be short-term. Restrictive measures, as WHO noted, would not significantly reduce mortality but would disproportionately harm low-income people and raise major ethical and human rights concerns.

A few months after publishing these guidelines, senior WHO executives recommended restrictive measures far beyond those that their own guidelines had warned against. To appreciate the gravity of the harms inflicted on the billions of people in low-income countries, we must understand that those orchestrating them knew that these populations were at very low risk from Covid-19 itself.

The massive skewing of Covid mortality towards old age was published in the Lancet in early 2020. More than half of the 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa are under 20 years of age and therefore at near-zero risk, whilst less than 1% are over 75 years. The average age of Covid-associated deaths in Western countries is about 80 years.

The WHO, CEPI, Gavi and other public health organizations knew that rapid health service access and good nutrition are fundamental to reducing child mortality. They knew that infant mortality in low-income countries is strongly tied to gross domestic product (GDP) and therefore harming economies would kill millions (which it is, with UNICEF noting over 200,000 lockdown deaths in South Asia in 2020 alone).

In advocating for measures to restrict health service access and disrupt supply lines, they knowingly caused an immediate and sustained increase in malaria, pneumonia and other acute infectious disease. By restricting access to tuberculosis and HIV care, the death rate of those already infected would increase whilst also promoting transmission, locking in greater future mortality. These diseases kill at a far younger average age than Covid.

Recommendations to close workplaces in cities left millions of workers in the same crowded living conditions as before, but with no income to buy food and medicine for their families. Closure of markets further reduced access to nutrition, whilst also reducing farm earnings. Knowing the importance of tourism to the service and retail industries that support millions of women’s education and independence, advocacy to block international travel further impoverished these people.

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Orwellian Spy Tools Alert: The ‘Convenience’ Is a Trap

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Big Data, Transhumanism and Why the Singularity May Be Faked.

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • Silicon Valley is essentially fused with the national security state. Silicon Valley is now also entering into joint ventures with medical companies, and many of these ventures are financed by groups like In-Q-Tel, which is the CIA’s venture capital arm
  • There’s a concerted effort to frame transhumanism — which is really the new eugenics — as health care. Joint ventures involving Big Tech, Big Pharma and the security state typically focus on products and services that normalize and further the transhumanist agenda
  • Food and agriculture are also being tossed into the mix. The U.S. government has launched a “Food is Medicine” program, which is yet another way for the government to seize control of the population. Food as medicine will be used to get you into their control system, and keep you there
  • In 2023 and 2024, watch for the rollout of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). It’s crucial that as many people as possible refuse the system during the initial voluntary phase. Once it becomes mandatory, it cannot be stopped and all freedoms will be lost
  • If the singularity cannot be achieved, technocrats may end up faking it, because if they can blame eugenics, depopulation and other unethical decisions on artificial intelligence running the government, they can do whatever they want, with no repercussions

I recently interviewed investigative journalist Whitney Webb about her two-volume book series, “One Nation Under Blackmail.” She’s been on tour, promoting the books in dozens of interviews.

Here, we discuss some of her experiences since the release of her books, and delve deeper into the disturbing merger of the intelligence state, Silicon Valley and medicine, and how transhumanism — eugenics rebranded — is being rolled out under the guise of health care.

We also talk about censorship and other tactics used to mold public perception, and how artificial intelligence may be overhyped to give technocrats and eugenicists carte blanche to do whatever they want without having any accountability.

The Encroaching Surveillance State

Her book tour brought her back to the U.S. for the first time in eight years. When asked about her first impressions after being gone for such a long time, she expresses surprise at how willing Americans have become to embrace spy tools like Ring cameras on their front doors.

“This is actually troubling,” she says, “because a lot of those tech companies, Google included, are contractors for the military and for intelligence. I think it would be naive to assume they don’t have backdoor access to those devices, knowing when you’re home and when you’re not and all of that.

I think it’s interesting, the willingness of so many people, so many households, to invite that type of technology into their homes. I didn’t see inside people’s homes much, but a lot of people, as I understand it, have things like Amazon’s Alexa. Numerous stories have come out that they’re recording you without your consent, even though they say they’re not.

But people still continue to use the product, and I really wish people would wise up about inviting that type of technology into your house. So much of what we’re being sold today is being marketed as convenience, but really a lot of it is really just the building blocks for the infrastructure of a very dangerous and Orwellian system of control.”

How the Transhumanist System Is Being Pushed Forward

As a former contributor to Mint Print Press News, which provides a lot of great coverage on the encroaching surveillance state, Webb knows a thing or two about Orwellian systems of control. Much of her work there focused on the intersection of intelligence agencies and Silicon Valley.

“Even after I left and started to do my own thing, I maintained a lot of that focus,” she says. “I guess a theme of my work would be the structure of power and how it really works. If you’re looking at Silicon Valley today, it’s very clear that it’s essentially fused with the national security state …

One thing we’ve seen happen, specifically during the COVID era, is that Big Pharma is now getting in this mix. There’s a lot of merging happening between Big Pharma and Silicon Valley. You’re seeing this with a lot of joint ventures into the health care space of Silicon Valley companies. A lot of it’s through wearables and these efforts to normalize technology like CRISPR or nanotechnology injectables.

You’re seeing them all come together, and a lot of these joint ventures or companies in this particular space that’s spanning big pharma in Silicon Valley tend to have a lot of funding from groups like In-Q-Tel, which is the CIA’s venture capital arm.

I think we’re seeing, in the effort to push through this technocratic transhumanist system, a lot more overlap between the power structure of the national security state in Silicon Valley with Big Pharma. And that’s very, very bad. I don’t know how else to put that.

It’s awful. I think more people should be paying a lot more attention to that specifically … [There’s] an effort to frame transhumanism — which is really the new eugenics — as health care, and that’s what a lot of this is about.”

The Coming Food Coup

Food and agriculture are also being tossed into the mix. In early December 2022, I wrote about how John Rockefeller eliminated food from medicine 112 years ago and how, now, The Rockefeller Foundation is working with the White House to bring nutrition back in. While it sounds like a great idea, the real purpose is the same now as it was a century ago. It’s all about controlling the population. As noted by Webb:

“If these people take over the food supply, they’ll be framing it as a return to ‘food is medicine,’ but it’s not. Well, it’s not exactly food as medicine as people would think of it when someone like you talks about that concept …

This idea, for example, of putting vaccines in your food, like in tomatoes. Eating one of these GMO tomatoes is the equivalent of taking a vaccine and stuff like that … It’s taking this age-old adage and twisting it to fit their purposes. Food as medicine is only convenient to them when it’s not something that actually heals you, but [rather] something that keeps you in this new system they’re creating.”

Predictions for 2023

As we record this in late November 2022, we seem to be in a bit of a lull, in terms of tyrannical overreaches. It’s a bit like being in the eye of a hurricane. You know the storm will be upon you yet, again, it’s only a matter of time. The question is, what comes next?

“I think there’s a couple things to watch really closely in the next year,” Webb says. “One is how this World Health Organization Pandemic Treaty, which tries to [supersede] the Constitution, not just of the U.S. but pretty much every country that signs it.

That’s definitely something to pay close attention to, because if that does get passed, I think it’s likely we’ll see an effort to repeat a lot of what we saw during COVID 19 from these particular groups. And if it’s not signed, I think they’re going to wait …

They’re waiting to get that type of new authority so they don’t have to deal with so much dissent, whether it’s from nation states or from particular domestic populations that have had enough and are unlikely to believe all of this a second time.

I think they’re really counting on having that WHO super-national authority in order to go forward with the biosecurity agenda, in terms of a repeat of what we saw in recent years.

The other thing I think is really important is the central bank digital currency (CBDC) agenda. Almost every country in the world at this point — there are exceptions, but I think it’s a majority — have some sort of CBDC pilot program going on right now. In the U.S., they’ve even announced they’re doing pilots of [CBDCs] with commercial banks like JP Morgan and some of the big financial giants of Wall Street.

I would say that either 2023 or 2024 is likely to be the year of the CBDC. In countries where they’ve already launched a CBDC, or have a very advanced pilot program, it’s framed first as voluntary, and then of course, once enough people start using it, it becomes the only form of legal tender in use. At least that’s the end game for CBDCs in any particular country.”

Programmable CBDCs Mean Someone Else Controls Your Money

As explained by Webb, CBDCs are programmable money. The Central Bank will decide when, where and on what you’re allowed to spend your money. You also cannot save when and however much you want, because some of the CBDCs have expiration dates. Use it or lose it. You don’t get to decide when you spend your money, the state does.

CBDCs can also be programmed to only work for certain types of items, including certain types of food. If your health records indicate you have a health problem, your CBDCs can be programmed such that you cannot buy foods deemed unhealthy for you. Purchases can also be blocked based on your carbon footprint score, and they can be blocked based on geofencing parameters.

“If they declare a lockdown, for example, and you’re not allowed to go five miles beyond your home, your money won’t work five miles beyond your home. That’s basically why CBDCs are attractive to the powers that be. But they’re going to frame it as voluntary first, before it moves into involuntary.

We’re going to see it pop up in a lot more countries over the next two years. And obviously, that is the phase to mass reject CBDCs in any way you can … I’ll go back to COVID for a second to explain where I’m trying to go here.

I understand and have empathy for people that didn’t want to lose their jobs and were worried about being thrown into a position of poverty, so they took the vaccine because of the mandates. But the more steps you take down that path of, ‘It’s convenient,’ the harder it will be to go on the alternative path later on.

For people that were in that situation with COVID 19, that should have been a huge wake up call to start doing something different and think about how to get off that path …

… if you went down that path, and then go down the CBDC path just because it’s more convenient for now, there’s going to come a point where, if you make enough compromises, it’s going to be almost impossible, if not entirely impossible, to redirect and go towards a different outcome.

These are things that are very important for people to pay attention to right now, in terms of developments, and plan how to keep your family independent of these types of systems and resilient in the face of all the shocks to the system that we already see coming.”

The Poor Will Be Squeezed First

As noted by Webb, those who will feel the squeeze of tyranny first are the poor and lower-middle class. We’re already seeing how they’re planning to encourage mass adoption of CBDCs through various assistance programs such as food stamps.

As food and energy prices continue to soar, more and more people will qualify for government assistance and be forced into those systems. Webb also suspects that any future stimulus checks, if there are additional long-term lockdowns, may be paid out only in CBDCs.

“It’s a very insidious plan,” Webb says. “They’re trying to reduce the standard of living of people, and then in order for them to maintain their standard of living, they’re forcing them to adopt a control system disguised as a monetary system …

They’re going to frame it as voluntary before it becomes involuntary. That stage where it’s voluntary is when it’s critical for people to act [and reject it] … I don’t think we can prevent them from implementing it, but you can prevent yourself, your family and your community from adopting that system, and use a parallel economic system [instead].”

While some have speculated that decentralized digital currencies such as Bitcoin might work as a parallel economic system, the problem with that idea is that government could easily make it illegal. They’ve already promised to implement new regulations of that space.

The safest alternatives are those that government cannot regulate or make illegal (at least not easily). This includes trading and bartering of goods and services, without any type of currency, with the exception perhaps of physical gold and silver.

“So, so we have to think about these sorts of things when countering the CBDC agenda,” Webb says. “That voluntary stage is the time to make those plans so you don’t get swept up when it moves from voluntary to involuntary, which they are definitely going to do, or attempt to do.

But it will only be successful if there’s mass adoption. The more people who opt out and do some sort of parallel system for their economic activity at the neighborhood or community level, the less successful that agenda will be.”

People Are Waking Up to the Social Media Manipulation

While it seems we’re headed into a dystopian future that cannot be avoided, and with no clear means of escape, Webb feels there is still reason to be optimistic. Importantly, more people than ever before are now getting wise to the globalists’ agenda, and are hungry for explanations about what’s really going on.

People who want the truth are more likely to search for it, and are ready to take it in. They’re less likely to stick their head in the sand and write everything off as a baseless conspiracy theory.

“I think a lot of people on a visceral level know something is really wrong. And I think that’s why there are so many efforts to censor that type of information. I also think there is a major investment by the state in efforts to make us think we are a minority when we are not.

More than anything else, what social media is used for by the powers that be is to make us think certain ideas are more popular than they really are. [Take] the bot situation on Twitter … a lot of those bots serve to promote ideas that many people don’t necessarily have, or make certain figures or ideas look more popular than they are …

When you combine that with the censorship, removing ideas that otherwise would be popular with real authentic accounts … you’re manipulating people’s perception of how the rest of the country feels … A lot of what’s going on right now on social media is to completely change how we perceive a particular situation or agenda, in the hopes that change in perception will cause a change in behavior.

If you’re censoring an idea, you’re trying to take it out of the public mind and have it just not be part of the discourse anymore. That obviously causes a change in perception, because you’re only having one idea, or a very small spectrum of opinion about a particular idea, out there.

That’s all people are going to engage with if you censor all the other takes. The idea is to completely wipe out dissent so that everyone has a rather homogenous perception of events, people, ideas and agendas, and then from there, behavior will be molded to the benefit of these particular powers.”

Is Elon Musk Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes?

When it comes to Twitter, with Elon Musk now at the helm many are hoping it will become a bastion of free-speech. Webb, however, is skeptical. She suspects Musk is promoting free speech and reinstating banned accounts because he wants to turn Twitter into a U.S. version of WeChat, an “everything app” that’s connected to digital ID, CBDCs and the social credit system. The more users he has, the more people will be lured into the digital prison system.

“We’re in this paradigm shift, where we’re going from an oil-based economy to a data-based economy. Data is the new oil, and whoever owns the ‘everything app’ in this new system is going to be the king of the castle of the new economy. They’re going to be the Rockefellers of the data age,” she says.

“There’s nothing good about that. I think what we’re seeing right now is an effort to coax people back Twitter, and there might be some benefits to that. But ultimately, what Elon Musk is interested in is the data and getting more people on Twitter than before, with the goal of turning it into WeChat, which is a segue to this ‘everything app.’

And it’s worth pointing out that the company behind WeChat, Tencent, is one of the most active advisors to Tesla and a major shareholder in Tesla. There is a relationship there.”

Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of ‘Smart Dictatorship’

Webb and I also discuss the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI), and the role of social media in feeding AI with data for programs relating to pandemic outbreak detection and pre-crime. But while AI and its successor, artificial general intelligence (AGI), has impressive capabilities, Webb believes there’s a lot of false hype, and that this hype will be used to shield human powerbrokers from accountability.

“A lot has been said about the role of AI in our lives once it reaches a particular point referred to as the singularity, which is where AI intelligence allegedly outpaces human intelligence so extensively and so rapidly that it’ll basically take over. If you ask me, based on everything I’ve seen, I don’t think the singularity is actually possible. Or if it is possible, I think it’s very far away.

But if you are the people behind … this agenda — people like Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger who just put out their ‘New Age of AI’ book, which has a lot about AI and its role in government, basically having AI become the government — all you really need to do is convince people … that the singularity is here and … that it’s so far superior to human intelligence that we should outsource all our decision-making to it.

Then, there’s a Wizard of Oz type guy … behind the curtain who makes the decisions. If you look at what Schmidt and Kissinger and these guys say about AI and government, they say it’s going to be so far above our intelligence that there’s no way for the AI to explain its decision-making. It’ll just be ‘The computer says this.’

And if you’re basically organized crime, running the government, which I would argue is the situation today, and you don’t want to have to explain the reasons for your policy because it’s a horrible reason that no one would agree with, what a great curtain, what a great facade to have for your smart dictatorship.

They just have to say that it was the AI’s decision. They have plausible deniability about everything, don’t they? And a lot of the stuff they say in that context is very unsettling. Stuff like, AI may decide to sacrifice hundreds of thousands, if not millions of their own population to win.

If the goal given is winning, then AI is willing to make all sorts of sacrifices that humans wouldn’t make. But if you look at people like Kissinger and Eric Schmidt, they’d be very happy to kill a bunch of people and then blame it on AI for the decision.

They don’t care about killing millions of people. They care about expanding their money and power infinitely. How do you have plausible deniability about that and get away with mass murder, eugenics programs and population control? You say ‘There’s this new super intelligence thing that’s going to take over government because it’s so superior. It’s going to churn out policies and we’re just going to follow them.’

It’s the new god basically. It’s superior to us and it can’t explain how it got to this conclusion because it thinks so differently from us. So, we just have to follow what it says, but we’re not responsible for what it says at the same time …

People like Ray Kurzweil said the singularity was going to happen a long time ago and it didn’t happen. And if you look at programs like Welcome Leap … where they’re trying to map baby brains and child brains by forcing kids to use very invasive, biometric technology … because they think that will create the singularity — that, to me, says they are grasping at straws.

They have no way of producing something equivalent to the human brain. They can mimic stuff very successfully with AI and they have done so, but in terms of creating consciousness? These are the most unconscious people on the entire planet trying to recreate consciousness in their image. Good luck … I think they’re going to try and fake it.

And, here’s the other thing. This whole inevitability of AI narrative is a major marketing narrative necessary to get transhumanist technologies widely adopted … The super intelligent singularity stuff is most likely a PSYOP to get you into the transhumanist box that you’re not going to get out of. Once you get a brain chip, there’s no going back.”

What You Can Do to Prepare

Clearly, we all face enormous challenges in the years ahead, regardless of where we live, as this is a global takeover. So, what can you do to prepare? Here are some of Webb’s recommendations:

  • Build community and local parallel economies.
  • Build your knowledgebase on how to grow and raise food, even if you’re not in a position to grow food right now. There are many free videos online that you can peruse. Ideally, download them so you can watch them offline, even if the internet goes down. Books on homesteading and basic survival skills are also a valuable investment. “Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills” is one option. As a general rule going forward, you’ll want hard copies or copies on external hard drives of any information that you want to have access to in the future, as the internet is becoming increasingly scrubbed of important information. If using an external hard drive, make sure you store it in a faraday bag to protect the information from electromagnetic weapons.
  • Stock up on backup supplies such as food and energy generators. Also have a plan for how to secure potable water. Since the economy is collapsing and inflation skyrocketing, your money is not doing you much good in the bank. You’re losing purchasing power with each passing month, and a bank bail-in could wipe you out completely. So, if you need survival items, buying them now might be one of the better investment strategies out there.
  • Do everything you can to avoid entering the CBDC system when it rolls out.
  • Go back to using more cash if you don’t do that already. Also, consider cutting back on your online usage, social media in particular. “If things get really bad and the war on domestic terror gets underway and there’s all this profiling going on, I would stay as far away from the online world as you can,” Webb says.

More Information

In closing, Webb is now investigating the FTX scandal. Could we end up seeing a Volume 3 in her “One Nation Under Blackmail” series? Perhaps, but she’s not making any promises. She’s also working on an investigative series with Ian Davis about the United Nations sustainable development goals, showing point by point “the agenda under the hood.”

To stay abreast of Webb’s work, sign up for her newsletter at Unlimited Hangout. There you will also get the best price for her two-volume series “One Nation Under Blackmail.” I couldn’t recommend her site more strongly. She’s a world-class investigator, and is willing to take deep dives into crucial topics few others dare to touch.

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

South Dakota’s ‘Help Not Harm’ Bill Protecting Minors from Gender Transition Procedures Introduced

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A bill to protect minors from gender transition procedures was introduced in the South Dakota legislature on Tuesday. South Dakota Representative Bethany Soye (R) and South Dakota Senator Al Novstrup (R) filed H.B. 1080, nicknamed the “Help Not Harm” legislation, along with 23 House cosponsors and six Senate cosponsors. Republicans hold supermajorities in both chambers: 63-7 in the state House and 31-4 in the state Senate.

The “Help Not Harm” bill prohibits the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgery “for the purpose of attempting to alter the appearance of, or to validate a minor’s perception of, the minor’s sex, if that appearance or perception is inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” It instructs licensing boards that if they find that any health care professional has violated this provision, “the board must revoke any professional or occupational license or certificate held by the healthcare professional.” It also creates a private cause of action, whereby the child can recover damages for the malpractice inflicted upon him or her.

“It’s time for us to stop experimenting on kids’ bodies,” said Norman Woods, executive director of the South Dakota-based Family Heritage Alliance. “We have been perpetuating the dangerous lie that through medical intervention, we can change a person’s sex. This harmful idea, and the industry profiting from it, are leaving a trail of broken bodies in their wake.”

Conservative legislators introduced a similar bill in the South Dakota House during the previous legislative session (2020-2021), the Vulnerable Child Protection Act. After sailing through the House (46-23), the Senate Health and Human Services Committee voted it down (5-2). The move bewildered onlookers at the time, but a recent investigation by National Review’s Nate Hochman tracked the bill’s failure back to heavy lobbying by Sanford Health, a health care conglomerate based in Sioux Falls, with 15 hospital locations across the state. “When it failed, that was all Sanford,” lamented State Rep. John Mills (R), a cosponsor on the bill. “That might be explained at least in part by the fact that Sanford sells puberty blockers and performs gender-reassignment surgery,” reported Hochman.

But Soye expressed optimism that this time will be different. “There are just so many more people behind it this time,” she said on “Washington Watch.” She anticipated opposition “from the normal activist groups and then also from the hospital,” but added, “we’re really

A bill to protect minors from gender transition procedures was introduced in the South Dakota legislature on Tuesday. South Dakota Representative Bethany Soye (R) and South Dakota Senator Al Novstrup (R) filed H.B. 1080, tagged as the “Help Not Harm” legislation, along with 23 House cosponsors and six Senate cosponsors. Republicans hold supermajorities in both chambers: 63-7 in the state House and 31-4 in the state Senate.

The “Help Not Harm” bill prohibits the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgery “for the purpose of attempting to alter the appearance of, or to validate a minor’s perception of, the minor’s sex, if that appearance or perception is inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” It instructs licensing boards that if they find that any health care professional has violated this provision, “the board must revoke any professional or occupational license or certificate held by the healthcare professional.” It also creates a private cause of action, whereby the child can recover damages for the malpractice inflicted upon him or her.

“It’s time for us to stop experimenting on kids’ bodies,” said Norman Woods, executive director of the South Dakota-based Family Heritage Alliance. “We have been perpetuating the dangerous lie that through medical intervention, we can change a person’s sex. This harmful idea, and the industry profiting from it, are leaving a trail of broken bodies in their wake.”

Conservative legislators introduced a similar bill in the South Dakota House during the previous legislative session (2020-2021), the Vulnerable Child Protection Act. After sailing through the House (46-23), the Senate Health and Human Services Committee voted it down (5-2). The move bewildered onlookers at the time, but a recent investigation by National Review’s Nate Hochman tracked the bill’s failure back to heavy lobbying by Sanford Health, a health care conglomerate based in Sioux Falls, with 15 hospital locations across the state. “When it failed, that was all Sanford,” lamented State Rep. John Mills (R), a cosponsor on the bill. “That might be explained at least in part by the fact that Sanford sells puberty blockers and performs gender-reassignment surgery,” reported Hochman.

But Soye expressed optimism that this time will be different. “There are just so many more people behind it this time,” she said on “Washington Watch.” She anticipated opposition “from the normal activist groups and then also from the hospital,” but added, “we’re really gaining momentum with House sponsorship and with citizens who are contacting their legislators.”

The “Help Not Harm” legislation already enjoys the support of 24 out of 70 members of the South Dakota House, two-thirds of the way to a majority; a similar bill passed last session with 46 votes. If the bill passes, it will proceed to the 35-member state Senate, where it already has the support of seven members, but where a similar bill failed in committee during the last session. “The problem in South Dakota is usually more on the Senate side,” admitted Soye. If it passes both houses, the bill will head to Governor Kristi Noem (R), who signaled support for the bill on Wednesday despite having close ties to lobbyists for Sanford Health. In 2021, she promised to sign a bill to protect women’s sports before she vetoed the bill later that month.

Soye believes the increased visibility of gender transition procedures on children will help the bill’s chances, too. “The argument was, ‘Oh, it’s not happening in South Dakota.’ But now you really can’t deny [it] because Sanford is just being so up front with what they’re doing.”

Sanford Health is proud to provide gender transition services; it announced that it had “invest[ed]” in attaining “Healthcare Equality Index” (HEI) accreditation, “a national LGBTQ+ benchmarking tool that evaluates health care facilities’ policies and practices related to the equity and inclusion of their LGBTQ+ patients, visitors and employees.” The weekend prior to the bill’s introduction, beginning on January 13, Sanford Health hosted “The Third Annual Midwest Gender Identity Summit.”

Dozens of South Dakotans, who had recently learned about Sanford’s gender transition practices, gathered in the snow outside the Summit to protest. “That really started to build especially the local media momentum,” said Soye. “And we have several groups across the state that are really getting fired up.”

Similar legislation to protect children from gender transition procedures has been introduced this month in both of South Dakota’s North Plains neighbors, North Dakota and Nebraska.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Let Them Grow Act’ Introduced to Protect Minors from Gender Transition Procedures

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

Life, By the Numbers, Revisited

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Note: This column first appeared on January 24, 2020, before the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson last year, which reversed the Court’s finding in Roe v. Wade that there was a federal right to abortion – and returned questions about abortion to the individual States. Three years later, as the debates continue in many States, there is still a refusal to come to grips with the stark numbers indicated below. And as the national Pro-Life March takes place in Washington D.C. today, the World Economic Forum (currently meeting in Davos, Switzerland) seems to take it for granted that global access to abortion is an integral part of a better human future – though better for whom and at what moral cost doesn’t enter into the economic calculus.   

Robert Royal: Despite the pro-life victory in Dobbs, and as we march in Washington today, we need to redouble efforts to end modernity’s murderous, sinister, anti-life ideologies.

As a thought experiment, let’s assume something I would never accuse TCT readers of being: that you are materialist and utilitarian. You believe that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” in tangible, physical measures, is the pre-eminent moral principle. What might you have to consider today, when hundreds of thousands of Americans will be marching to protect life in the womb? (And people in various countries conduct their own pro-life marches?)

Well, to begin with, though all such numbers are a bit uncertain, roughly 55 million people die, globally, every year. And numerous public health organizations intensely scrutinize the slightest increase or decrease in mortality, in a laudable effort to identify what factors may be harming or helping the health of diverse peoples around the world.

That number does not include the number of babies killed by elective abortions, however, which at one time would have been thought a rare, emergency measure. The Guttmacher Institute, an advocate for abortion, estimates that there are roughly 56 million abortions around the world every year. So allowing for the statistical uncertainties, we can say in broad terms that as many innocents are slaughtered every year in the womb as there are deaths from all other causes in the entire world.

That’s the kind of mayhem you associate with murderous ideologies like Nazism and Communism, not “reproductive health.”

Because of an ill-advised accord with China, the Vatican refrains from speaking about that government’s persecution, brainwashing, organ harvesting, and interference with the internal life of religious groups, including Catholics. But how about the more than 300 million abortions there since the 1970s, many forced – a number about equal to the entire population of the United States?

Or the more than 60 million abortions in America since Roe v. Wade? That’s more or less the population of the United Kingdom or France or Italy; much larger than Spain; a figure close to the populations of Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Hungary, and Poland combined.

Would even a materialist/utilitarian believe that such prodigal slaughter of the innocents has not and will not have enormous consequences?

At their annual meeting last November [2019], the American bishops, recognizing the moral questions in play during this year’s presidential campaign, tangled over whether abortion was the “pre-eminent” issue.

Or not.

Chicago’s Cardinal Cupich and San Diego’s Bishop McElroy, staunch partisans of Pope Francis, argued that the pontiff considers other life issues equally urgent. Nonetheless, two-thirds of the bishops voted to keep abortion “pre-eminent.”

Couldn’t the bishops, or at least some bishop, somewhere, do a little painting by the numbers? And speak out about the enormity that goes on unnoticed in the world, year after year now. Indeed, there’s a creepy current in international bodies seeking to define this slaughter as a universal human right.

The controversy among the bishops was cast in the media as the usual debate over Pope Francis. But Francis is not, as we have learned, in entire agreement with his champions.

Archbishop Joseph Naumann, who heads the USCCB’s Committee for Pro-Life Activities, met just a few days ago with the pope, along with other Midwestern bishops on their scheduled ad limina visits. He asked whether abortion is pre-eminent. Francis replied, “Of course, it is. It’s the most fundamental right. . . .This is not first a religious issue; it’s a human-rights issue.”

Francis is notorious for saying one thing to one group and the opposite to another. And as Archbishop Viganò has documented recently, we can’t be sure how much he’s permitted to know by those around him. So it may very well be that he wasn’t aware that “pre-eminent” is a term that, in America, is also a tripwire.

Many of us have suspected, going all the way back to then-Cardinal McCarrick’s misrepresentation of Cardinal Ratzinger’s 2004 letter to the American bishops, that efforts to make abortion just one of many “life” issues is really an effort to preserve the “political viability” of pro-choice Catholic politicians, almost all Democrats.

Still, Francis has, at least in one mood, spoken of abortion as “hiring a hit man” to solve a problem. He has not, however, shown anything like the urgency towards the tens of millions of deaths via abortion that he has towards the much smaller numbers of refugees, illegals, etc. who die every year.

The world desperately needs a sense of proportion about the evils we experience. For example, officials of various stripes warn against “hate crimes,” which, from their rhetoric, you might think constitute a vast epidemic, threatening the moral tone and very existence of civic life, especially in the “age of Trump,” who somehow is blamed for them, even though they largely predate his presidency.

Numbers? The FBI says in 2018 there was a “bump up” in incidents against Hispanics – from 430 to 485. Muslims? 270 – the fewest, by the way, since 2014.

Numbers, of course – even if minuscule – are not the only factor worth considering. Every human life is infinitely valuable, and injustice of any kind must constantly be fought. Catholics and other Christians realize this – quite contrary to the anti-Christian slurs, pro-life Christians seek to preserve all human life – from conception to natural death.

Still, numbers cannot be ignored. If millions, tens of millions, were dying crossing into America at the Rio Grande, or into Europe across the Mediterranean, or from the Middle East to refuge in Europe, there would be non-stop outrage around the globe – and rightly so.

So if the Catholic Church and others believe that abortion is the destruction of innocent human life, why do many – even within the Church – treat it like just one in a list of problems, and often far down the list?

The world looks at that relative passivity and asks, with some justice: So do these pro-lifers really think abortion takes a human life?

We do, of course. And as we march in Washington today and engage in other pro-life activities throughout the year, we all need to redouble efforts, both to defend the millions who are dying and to dispel yet another of modernity’s murderous, sinister, anti-life – and unrecognized – ideologies.

AUTHOR

Robert Royal

Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are Columbus and the Crisis of the West and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2023 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Tomorrow’s March for Life in Washington D.C. Has Something to Celebrate

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The US Supreme Court has called life ‘the most basic human right’

I’m grateful that the majority of the US Supreme Court in its 2022 Dobbs case overturned the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision (and the 1992 Casey decision) that had declared the existence of a constitutional right to elective abortion.

Some of my friends are disappointed, however, that the Supreme Court left the abortion question up to state and federal law, rather than recognizing the unborn child as a fellow human being with his or her own constitutional right to life. This disappointment is understandable.

But it’s important that we also take note of some strikingly pro-life aspects of the Dobbs majority’s opinion, and even of the opinion of the pro-choice dissent.

It is true that Justice Alito’s majority opinion does not explicitly recognize that the unborn child has rights under our Constitution. But it provides future legislators and courts with quite useful arguments in favor of prenatal protection.

First of all, the opinion recites the pro-life findings and conclusions of the Mississippi legislature, without questioning their accuracy. Here are those legislative determinations as described in the majority decision:

The legislature . . . found that at 5 or 6 weeks’ gestational age an “unborn human being’s heart begins beating”; at 8 weeks the “unborn human being begins to move about in the womb”; at 9 weeks “all basic physiological functions are present”; at 10 weeks “vital organs begin to function,” and “[h]air, fingernails, and toenails . . . begin to form”; at 11 weeks “an unborn human being’s diaphragm is developing,” and he or she may “move about freely in the womb”; and at 12 weeks the “unborn human being” has “taken on ‘the human form’ in all relevant respects.”

It found that most abortions after 15 weeks employ “dilation and evacuation procedures which involve the use of surgical instruments to crush and tear the unborn child,” and it concluded that the “intentional commitment of such acts for nontherapeutic or elective reasons is a barbaric practice, dangerous for the maternal patient, and demeaning to the medical profession.”

Indeed, at the end of the majority opinion, the Court clearly validates similar sorts of claims, by saying that they constitute a “rational basis” for laws against abortion, as required by the due process clause of the Constitution. The majority affirms that the state’s

legitimate interests include respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development; the protection of maternal health and safety; the elimination of particularly gruesome or barbaric medical procedures; the preservation of the integrity of the medical profession; the mitigation of fetal pain; and the prevention of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or disability.

Even the dissent does not attempt to cast doubt on the majority’s affirmation of the continuous dignity of prenatal life throughout pregnancy. Indeed, in opposing the overturning of Roe, it readily acknowledges that “Roe and Casey [themselves] invoked powerful state interests [in ‘protecting prenatal life’] operative at every stage of the pregnancy and overriding the woman’s liberty after viability.”

The dissent goes on to argue, however, that those two cases found that, prior to viability, a pregnant woman’s liberty interests override the state’s interests in protecting prenatal life, a conclusion to which the Dobbs dissent adheres, over many pages and with great emotion.

The majority opinion counters that, by letting maternal liberty override life prior to fetal viability, the dissent thus

would impose on the people a particular theory about when the rights of personhood begin. According to the dissent, the Constitution requires [emphasis in original] the States to regard a fetus as lacking even the most basic human right—to live—at least until an arbitrary point in a pregnancy has passed.

These brief lines are the spearhead of the entire Dobbs decision. The majority here makes three or four striking affirmations central to understanding the scope of the permission the Dobbs Court gives to the states to forbid abortion.

It calls Roe’s viability line “arbitrary,” thus presumably forbidding any state or federal “codification” of Roe, since the due process clause of the Constitution requires a “rational basis” for all laws. It further avers that states may recognize the rights of “personhood” in the unborn child prior to viability. Among the “human” rights that a fetus may have, the Court explicitly declares the right “to live” to be “the most basic human right,” thus responding decisively to the dissent’s insistence that, prior to viability, states must treat a mother’s freedom as more important than a child’s life.

Moreover, although the Dobbs majority does not explicitly find that a child enjoys federal constitutional protection prior to birth, it does provide a strong argument against those who claim the fetus is not worthy of protection because it doesn’t yet count as a “person”:

Some have argued that a fetus should not be entitled to legal protection until it acquires the characteristics that they regard as defining what it means to be a “person.” Among the characteristics that have been offered as essential attributes of “personhood” are sentience, self-awareness, the ability to reason, or some combination thereof. By this logic, it would be an open question whether even born individuals, including young children or those afflicted with certain developmental or medical conditions, merit protection as “persons.”

There’s something else the majority’s language provides to pro-lifers. It gives them a solid counter to folks who might call them “woman haters” in light of the dissent’s passionate elaboration of abortion’s alleged benefits to women. The Court reaffirms a finding, originally made in 1993, that “the ‘goal of preventing abortion’ does not constitute ‘invidiously discriminatory animus’ against women.”

Perhaps its greatest gift to pro-life people, however, is Dobbs’s complete lack of interest in the subject of religion. None of the opinions treats as even worthy of debate the common suggestion in the media that abortion involves a war between religious theocrats and secular democrats.

Nowhere in the majority opinion, the concurring opinions, or the lengthy dissenting opinion is there any allegation that opposition to abortion arises simply from religious doctrine, rather than from a rational understanding of the universally acknowledged facts of human gestation.

The opinions as a group and the case as a whole bespeak not a battle of faiths but a straightforward struggle between liberty and life, with life now favored by law to win.

AUTHOR

Richard Stith

Richard Stith is a professor emeritus of law at Valparaiso University. He is active in the Consistent Life Network, although the positions taken in his essays are not necessarily those of the CLN or its… More by Richard Stith

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

If This Happens, 99% of Us Will Be Disposable

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Divide and Rule: The Plan to Make You Disposable.

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., details how the elite 1% intend to “divide and rule” in order to achieve their exploitative goals
  • The world’s top 1% — the ultra-wealthy elite — and the modern empires they control — Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Ag — are responsible for destroying the planet and sending most of humanity into financial and health crises
  • We’re at an unprecedented point in history when the “civilizing mission for humanity” is technology — technology owned by the 1%
  • It’s an illusion that technology companies are “creating” these systems that will supposedly make our world a better place — they’re largely extracting, using data mining, including mining your mind
  • Divide and rule is a necessity for the 1% to continue to hold on to power as protests and unrest increase
  • Pay attention to the economic policies being pushed while people are divided — that’s really the agenda

The world’s top 0.001% — the ultra-wealthy elite — and the modern empires they control — Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Ag — are not only responsible for destroying the planet and sending most of humanity into financial and health crises, they’re intent on attaining ultimate control. If and when that happens, 99% of people will become disposable.

Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., founder of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in India, details how globalists are exploiting the masses in her book, “Oneness Vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom.” In the video above by After Skool, she expands on how the 0.001% intend to “divide and rule” in order to achieve their exploitative goals.1

A Lesson From Quantum Theory

Shiva is trained as a physicist and initially planned to study atomic energy. But as she grasped the devastation it had caused worldwide, she gave up her idea of being a nuclear physicist and instead went looking for knowledge as a whole. She studied on her own, finding quantum theory,2 which formed the basis of her life’s work:3

“The way you design the world in your mind is the way you relate to it. When you design it as dead matter just to be exploited, you will exploit it. When you design it without any understanding of limits, you will violate the planetary limits.

When you design it with deep recognition of interconnectedness, you will nurture those relationships. And this basic recognition is what I drew from my learnings in quantum theory — that nonlocality, nonseparation, interconnectedness … is the nature of reality.”

However, she explains, within the paradigm of mechanistic thought, there’s a design that didn’t evolve. As such, mechanistic thought is based on the following assumptions:4

  • We are separate from nature
  • Nature is constituted of discrete particles separate from each other, which can only relate through violence, force and action by contact

But in the quantum world, Shiva explains, “There is no separability. My thesis was on nonlocality in quantum theory. Everything is interconnected. There are no fixed essentialized qualities that have been built into the way people are looked at, nature is looked at. Potential is the defining quality in the quantum world, and because it’s about potential, it’s also about uncertainty.”5

Shiva states that the mechanistic world is based on a false illusion of determinateness, or a quality of being highly predictable. “In the quantum world, we know we cannot get rid of uncertainty,” she says, citing the uncertainty principle created by German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927.

Referring to atoms and subatomic particles, the uncertainty principle maintains that the position and velocity of an object cannot be measured at the same time. “The very concepts of exact position and exact velocity together, in fact, have no meaning in nature,” Britannica notes.6

Further, while in the mechanistic world things are either/or — “you can either be a wave or a particle,” Shiva says — “in the quantum world, you have potential to be both and they’re complementary.” She continues, “When you realize that the world is one interconnected whole you also realize that what appears different is actually different expressions of an interconnected reality.”7

Billionaires’ Technology Has Become the New ‘Mission’

We’re at an unprecedented point in history when the “civilizing mission for humanity” is technology — technology owned by the 1%. It’s an illusion, however, that technology companies are “creating” or inventing these systems that will supposedly make our world a better place.

“They extract,” Shiva says, “They don’t create anything … software programmers create the platforms that they use. Even Bill Gates didn’t really write his basic program. It was two math professors in Dartmouth College.”8

She uses Gates’ Ag One9 as an example, which is basically the idea to make one type of agriculture for the whole world, which will be owned and controlled by Gates from the top down. It’s headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, where Monsanto, acquired by Bayer in 2018,10 Bayer is also headquartered.

This includes digital farming, in which farmers are surveilled and mined for their agricultural data, which is then repackaged and sold back to them. There are parallels throughout society. Shiva explains:11

“We watched what’s going on in India and we pieced it together. So basically he’s financing a lot of data mining from farmers, which will then be packaged as Big Data and sold back to farmers. This is exactly what happened in your 2016 elections. Facebook sold data to Cambridge Analytica.

So when you think of, ‘What are the kind of leaders that we have getting created?’ it’s very important to remember that in these 25 years of corporate deregulation of commerce you basically have a lot of money in the hands of very few people.

And they then are the ones investing in all the companies. The companies are not independent companies anymore. They’re basically billionaire money managed by the investment funds like Blackrock and Vanguard.”

Divide and Rule Is the Plan

Protests and unrest are increasing throughout the world as people grow tired of being controlled and downtrodden by the 1%. Demands for change are surging, so the 1% has rolled out a plan to overcome it — divide and rule.

Shiva believes the East India Company in 1857 set the historic precedence. A revolt occurred that year against oppressive company rule, and the company was taken over by the British state. Up until that point, Hindus and Muslims in India had stood together to defend their land, livelihoods and freedoms.

They identified primarily with their occupations and communities; religion was secondary. But when the crown took over, Shiva says, “They established a policy called divide and rule … it took from about 1857 to about 1920” to essentially divide the population against each other based on their religion. She explains:12

“That partition is still being played out. It’s an incomplete project. So, divide and rule becomes a necessity for the 0.001% to continue to hold on to power. What are the economic policies being pushed while people are divided? Because that’s really the agenda.”

The Duty of Truth

The refusal to cooperate with unjust law was termed a duty of truth by Gandhi. Shiva describes apartheid in 1906, when the British attempted to turn Indians in South Africa into second-class citizens. Indians had to register their race and carry identification. Police officers could enter homes and demand papers, and people were restricted from local trade and certain professions based on their race. “The people said we would rather die,” Shiva says.

Others inspired by Gandhi and the duty of truth include Martin Luther King. “But … when King started to take up economic justice and economic equality issues, that’s when he was assassinated,” Shiva says, “because … you can talk in very sweet ways about civil liberties but you don’t touch economic justice and the economy.”13

The word economy comes from oeconomia, or the art of living. But when this got changed into the art of money-making, it brought on violence. “When you turn the art of living into the art of money-making, which Aristotle called chrematistics, then you have to practice violence against the Earth and violence against others — destroy their livelihoods, destroy their freedoms, take away their resources.”14

Sowing the Seeds of Earth Democracy

With the convergence of Big Tech and artificial intelligence, Shiva fears mechanical work, from radiography to law, will be made redundant, and 99% of people will become disposable. The solution lies in activating our sense of oneness or interconnectedness with all life and sowing the seeds of what Shiva calls Earth democracy:15

“You can either share this beautiful planet with love and abundance and sustainability, or say it’s all mine — every bit of land, every seed, every mind. Because what’s being mined is our mind now, and if we don’t defend the freedoms of all species and the freedoms of all human beings we could see, within 20 to 30 years, a level of disposability built into the structures that humanity will not be able to respond to.”

Currently, democracy has shifted to being “of the corporations by the corporations for the corporations.” Earth democracy calls for a restoration of democracy “of the people by the people for the people,” not only for humans but also for nature.16 According to the ancient Vedas, the universe is divine, and everything therein — even the smallest grass — is an expression of the divine.

The universe exists for the well-being of all, but her gifts must be enjoyed without greed. Taking more than your share is theft, and will only backfire. The solution to true sustainability doesn’t lie with new technology but in relying on the natural “technology” that is the universe.17 Shiva says:18

“This is the time to make oneness and interconnectedness, as one humanity on one planet, the political project of our time. We have to remember we are one humanity. We are part of one Earth, and whatever we do we will not let this basic recognition divide us, either from the Earth or from each other … together we are strong.”

Sources and References

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

3 Out of 4 Women Support Stronger Pro-Life Legislation, Poll Finds

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A strong majority of Americans support stronger pro-life laws, according to a new poll released just days before the annual March for Life. More than two-thirds of Americans (69%) would support ending all abortion no later than the first trimester, including nearly three out of four women (72%) and nearly half (49%) of all surveyed Democrats.

The poll found 44% of people want increased abortion restrictions, including not allowing abortion at all (8%), allowing abortion only to save the life of the mother (10%), or in the case of rape or incest (26%). Only one in five voters believe abortion should be available at any point in pregnancy, without restriction.

The Marist poll, sponsored in partnership with the Knights of Columbus, shows a strong pro-life majority more in line with recent Republican pro-life legislation than the Democratic Party platform, which calls for taxpayer-funded abortion until birth. Additionally, the survey, conducted earlier this month, found:

  • 78% of Americans oppose forcing taxpayers to fund abortion overseas;
  • 60% of Americans oppose forcing taxpayers to fund abortion in the United States;
  • 94% oppose sex-selective abortions (because of the child’s sex);
  • 77% say people with religious objections should not be legally required to carry out abortions
  • 60% of Americans oppose aborting a child because the child has been diagnosed with Down syndrome;
  • 55% say employers with religious objections should not be forced to pay for abortion coverage in their employees’ insurance; and
  • 91% of Americans, including 88% of Democrats, support the work of pro-life pregnancy resource centers.

Those results show a Republican legislative agenda is in the mainstream, or perhaps slightly behind, public opinion.

For instance, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act (H.R. 7) which restricts federal funds from going to “any abortion” (except in the cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother), stops taxpayer dollars from funding health benefits that cover abortion, and bars doctors who work for the federal government from carrying out abortions. The House had been poised to vote on the bill — which has attracted 113 co-sponsors, all Republicans — in its first two weeks in session. The vote on the bill has yet to be rescheduled, as of this writing.

On the other hand, nearly all House Democrats voted against the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (H.R. 26), which would compel abortionists to offer lifesaving care to newborn babies born alive during botched abortions. It passed the House 220-210 on January 11.

The same day, the GOP-controlled House also passed a resolution condemning violence against pro-life churches and pregnancy resource centers 222-209. The Family Research Council has documented 101 such attacks since last May. Only three Democrats voted for the measure, which merely expressed the consensus of the body against violence.

“Life is winning in the Dobbs era. The American people overwhelmingly reject the extreme abortion lobby-Democratic Party agenda of abortion on demand until birth, paid for by taxpayers,” said SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser. “The pro-life movement will fight for the strongest protections possible, in legislatures across the land and in our nation’s capital. We will continue to grow the pro-life safety net, which includes nearly 3,000 pregnancy centers and maternity homes nationwide. We will hold elected leaders and candidates to a high standard, urging them to cast a clear and ambitious pro-life vision and to go on offense.”

The poll found active faith, participation in college, and party registration to be the most important factors in whether one supports abortion-on-demand or protects life in the womb. Those who practice a religion oppose abortion 61% to 39%, while the irreligious describe themselves as pro-choice by a margin of 70% to 21%. Two-thirds of practicing Roman Catholics oppose abortion (67% to 33%), while non-practicing Catholics describe their views as pro-choice 83% to 17%.

The groups most likely to identify as “pro-choice” included registered Democrats (88%), non-practicing Catholics (83%), and college-educated white people (72%). No other faith was surveyed by the poll, which was sponsored by the Catholic fraternal organization. Rural voters were twice as likely to be pro-life as those who live in large urban areas (62% to 31%). White Americans were modestly more likely (42%) to describe themselves as pro-life than non-white Americans (34%).

The Marist poll came out the same day as a separate poll, conducted by WPA Intelligence, showed that 60% of self-described pro-choice likely voters in Virginia supported a bill that protects unborn babies from abortion after 15 weeks. Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) supports legislation codifying these pro-life protections.

“In the face of pro-abortion extremism, we are more expectant than ever before that we will protect our victories, advance our leaders, and make new gains that will save countless lives,” said Dannenfelser.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

Report: U.S. Is ‘Most Permissive Country’ for Minor Gender Transition

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UPDATE:

”The United States is the most permissive country when it comes to the legal and medical gender transition of children,” according to a 12-country policy review by medical advocacy group Do No Harm. The group compared “different legal requirements for gender change-related treatments and actions” among the U.S. and the 11 countries of Northern and Western Europe. These countries — Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Finland, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom — “share the United States’ broad support for transgenderism” yet “reject the gender-affirming care model for children.”

Do No Harm explained that America has adopted a “gender affirmation” policy for children, which “assumes that gender incongruence can manifest as early as age four and that questioning a minor’s gender self-definition is harmful and unethical. The American Academy of Pediatrics has embraced an affirm-only/affirm-early policy since 2018, and most states abide by its guidance despite withering medical and scientific criticism.” By contrast, some European countries “have explicitly abandoned” the gender-affirming care model and “now discourage automatic deference to a child’s self-declaration on the grounds that the risks outweigh the benefits.” They also recommend “months-long psychotherapy sessions to address co-occurring mental health problems.”

The report proceeded with a country-by-country comparison of requirements for the medical and legal gender transition of children.

American restrictions on puberty blockers vary by state, but “the most permissive states do not impose restrictions,” and blockers have been prescribed “as early as age eight.” Oregonians “are legally entitled” to blockers “from age 15,” with Medicaid assistance and without parental consent. In Iceland, there is “no minimum age” except as a “matter of clinical judgment.” The U.K. permits blockers “from the earliest stages of puberty,” while Belgium, France, and Norway permit blockers from Tanner Stage II, or “once physiological signs of puberty manifest.” Denmark, Netherlands, and Sweden allow puberty blockers “from age 12.” Finland allows them “about age 13.” Ireland allows them “under 16 years old.” In tiny Luxembourg, “no official guidance exists,” but “in practice, adolescents almost always receive blockers in a neighboring country.”

Restrictions on prescribing cross-sex hormones (estrogen and testosterone) to minors also vary state by state across the U.S., but “the practice has been documented with parental consent in children under the age of 13.” In Oregon, minors may “access cross-sex hormones from age 15 without consent and with Medicaid assistance.” France has “no age restrictions” on cross-sex hormones, but “clinicians generally will not administer them before Tanner Stage II.” Again, Luxembourg has “no official guidance,” but “Patients almost always receive hormones in a neighboring Country.” In every other European country studied, cross-sex hormones were available “from age 16,” although the U.K. requires that “individuals must have been receiving puberty blockers for at least one year.”

Do No Harm provided few specifics regarding the status of parental consent for these chemical gender transition procedures. They do say that, besides Oregon, “in most states, puberty blockers cannot be administered before age 18 without parental consent,” but they provide no insight on cross-sex hormones. However, California passed a bill in September effectively removing any parental consent requirement.

By contrast, children may not access gender transition chemical treatments until age 16 or 18 in nearly every country. Denmark is the most permissive, allowing children without parental consent to access puberty blockers at 15. In the U.K., “instances of children under 16 receiving blockers without consent are reportedly rare,” although such consent is not required. To access cross-sex hormones without consent in either country, children must be 16. In Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, and Norway, children must be 16 to access either puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, although Norway raises the age for cross-sex hormones to 18 “if the treatment is considered irreversible.” Sweden also allows cross-sex hormones without consent at 16, “so long as the individual is deemed sufficiently mature,” while it bars puberty blockers without consent until age 18. In Belgium, Finland, and France, neither treatment is available without parental consent until a person turns 18.

The report also compared the number of youth gender clinics in the various countries. The U.S. led by far, with “more than 60 pediatric gender clinics and 300 clinics” that “provide hormonal interventions to minors.” France also has many locations because “care is decentralized,” and “any doctor can prescribe treatment for medical transition.”

But after that the number quickly dwindles. Sweden administers all gender transition procedures through four hospitals, of which three provide surgery. Denmark administers gender transition hormones at only three locations. There are only two hospitals or clinics providing medical gender transitions in Belgium, Finland, and soon the U.K., which currently has one. Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Norway have one gender transition facility apiece. Granted, the United States is far larger than many of these countries. But the U.S. has a population 2.5 times larger than all the countries except France, while it has 20 times as many clinics providing hormonal interventions to minors.

Do No Harm also compared the minimum age at which countries allow persons to legally change their gender in civil registries. In the U.S., “there is no minimum age” for federal documentation, such as passports or Social Security cards, but such changes require the consent of both parents. There is more variation in state documentation, such as ID cards and birth certificates, but at least seven states “permit minors to change their birth certificate gender markers with parental consent.”

Three European countries, Iceland, Luxembourg, and the U.K., have policies similar to the U.S. federal government in that there is no age limit, but children under the age of 18 need parental consent to change legally recognized gender. In Norway, gender markers can be changed, with parental permission, from age six, and from age 16 without parental permission. Netherlands also allows 16-year-olds to legally change their gender without parental permission. In Belgium and Ireland, 16-year-olds may change their legal gender identity with parental consent, and 18-year-olds may change it without parental consent. Denmark, Finland, France, and Sweden do not allow minors under the age of 18 to legally change their gender identity.

The U.S. also exceeds most European countries in legally recognizing genders other than male or female. Federal “passports offer an X gender option,” and a sizable number of states allow a gender marker of “X” on identification documents (22 states plus D.C. on driver’s licenses, and 16 states plus D.C. on birth certificates). Only Iceland permits gender variation, allowing “third gender and/or nonbinary designations” on official documents. Denmark and Ireland allow a third gender option on IDs and passports respectively, but their “civil registry is binary.” In the Netherlands, a person may only obtain a gender neutral designation through a court. In the other seven countries, Belgium, Finland, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, and the U.K., “male and female are the only recognized genders.”

“The United States is the most permissive country when it comes to the legal and medical gender transition of children,” concluded the review. “Only France comes close, yet unlike the U.S., France’s medical authorities have recognized the uncertainties involved in transgender medical care for children and have urged ‘great caution’ in its use.”

“Given the growing body of evidence and the European consensus, which is grounded in medical science and common sense,” pleaded Do No Harm, “the United States should reconsider the gender-affirming care model to protect the youngest and most vulnerable patients.”

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand.

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

Joe Biden: The Bull Connor of the Pro-Abortion Movement

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For a man who ran for president to save the soul of America from racism, former segregationists’ buddy Joe Biden resembles few people more than the infamously abusive police chief Bull Connor. Both allowed domestic terrorists aligned with the Democratic Party to vandalize, bomb, and set fire to their opponents’ churches with impunity while using maximum force to arrest peaceful, Christian, protesters.

Sixty years later, little more than the names and faces have changed: Connor’s allies rallied behind the banner of white supremacy, while Biden’s supporters mobilize around “abortion on demand without apology.” The Biden administration’s refusal to protect pro-life Christians bears an eerie resemblance to Bull Connor’s collusion and selective prosecution. Imagine how civil rights protesters would have fared if George Wallace won the 1964 presidential election, and you get a sense of Biden’s treatment of peaceful, prayerful, pro-life advocates.

‘We’re Going to Allow You 15 Minutes….’

The Freedom Riders, who tested Southern segregation laws from Virginia to New Orleans, planned to stop in Birmingham on May 14, 1961. The Ku Klux Klan — and the Alabama lawman they helped elect Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor — had other plans. The KKK plotted a series of coordinated strikes against the protesters spanning multiple cities. Klansmen knew the details of the demonstrators’ travel itinerary, because the Birmingham sheriff’s department told them — and the sheriff’s department knew, because the FBI told them. As the protesters departed Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr. warned the Freedom Riders, “You will never make it through Alabama.”

In the days leading up to their arrival, Bull Connor personally gave the Klan the green light to rough up Yankee “meddlers.” Connor’s right-hand man, Birmingham Police Department Sgt. Thomas H. Cook, arranged for a meeting with a man named Gary Thomas Rowe, a member of a violent chapter of the Klan — but also an FBI informant. Historian Raymond Arsenault recounts the scene:

Unaware that Rowe planned to relay his words to the Birmingham FBI office, Cook laid out an elaborate plot to bring the Freedom Ride to a halt in Birmingham. He assured Rowe that other members of the Birmingham Police Department, as well as officials of the Alabama Highway Patrol, were privy to the plan and could be counted on to cooperate. “You will work with me and I will work with you on the Freedom Riders,” he promised. “We’re going to allow you 15 minutes. …You can beat ‘em, bomb ‘em, maim ‘em, kill ‘em. I don’t give a s***. There will be absolutely no arrests. You can assure every Klansman in the country that no one will be arrested in Alabama for that fifteen minutes.”

“By God, if you’re going to do this thing,” Cook later told the Imperial Wizard of the Alabama Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Robert Shelton, “do it right.” Similarly, Bull Connor instructed the Klan to “make them look like a bulldog got a hold of them.”

The Klan didn’t have to be told twice; they planned to strike twice. They swarmed the first of the two vehicles, a Greyhound bus, when it arrived in nearby Anniston, breaking its windows and slashing its tires. Police escorted the protesters as far as the city limits … where the Klansmen were waiting. One Klansman threw an explosive device into the back of the bus and, as protesters scurried out of the door for their lives, the mob beat them savagely. “Then, God Almighty intervened,” remembered Hank Thomas: The bus’s gas tank exploded in two bursts, frightening the crowd away. “A miracle happened in Anniston.”

Klansmen posed as passengers of the Trailways bus carrying the other group of Freedom Riders. In Anniston, the Klan insisted the riders segregate the bus and pummeled several passengers — including Walter Bergman, then age 61 — to make their point. Although Bergman would remained partially paralyzed for the rest of his life and have to learn to feed himself again, a local policeman told his assailants, “Don’t worry about no lawsuits. I ain’t seen a thing.”

Unfortunately, the real violence awaited in Birmingham. Confident they would face no repercussions, the Klan invited CBS News reporter Howard K. Smith to witness the violence as the bloodied protesters descended the bus stairs to desegregate the terminal’s lunch counters. A mob of Klansmen (including the FBI informant, Rowe) and members of the National States Rights Party swarmed, sometimes beating protesters 12-on-one. The melee continued until one of Connor’s detectives, Red Self, told the Klansmen: “Get the boys out of here. I’m ready to give the signal for the police to move in.”

Faced with local intransigence, the FBI would soon arrest the four people responsible for firebombing the Greyhound, but it would be far from the last act of unpunished violence. A tragic 40 unsolved bombings over two decades earned the city the nickname “Bombingham.”

Not content to outsource his brutality to the Klan, Bull Connor ordered his police to use all means necessary to quash the message of Christian civil rights protesters.

Release the Guilty, Jail the Innocent

Bull Connor’s police proved more likely to arrest peaceful protesters than the Klansmen perpetrators. In April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” courtesy of Connor’s constabulary. As King and his supporters went to jail for “parading without a permit” (holding unauthorized demonstrations), Connor said:

[W]e are not going to stand for this in Birmingham. And if necessary we will fill the jail full, and we don’t care whose toes we step on. I am saying now to these meddlers from out of our city, the best thing for them to do is stay out if they don’t want to get slapped in jail. … I’ve never seen anyone yet look for trouble who wasn’t able to find it.

Volunteers evaporated from the desegregation campaign. King’s group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), responded with “The Children’s Crusade,” recruiting more than 1,000 schoolchildren to march through Birmingham on May 2 and 3, 1963. As the youngsters left the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church carrying signs with such messages as, “Segregation is a sin,” Connor’s men arrested 959 the first night. But they did not merely apprehend the marchers: Police blasted young children with high-powered firehoses, beat them with batons, and sicced police dogs on them.

The cruelty was the point. The pretense of law masked ruthless hatred, as segregationists used overwhelming force to discourage them from ever again publicly voicing views disfavored by the powerful.

As the French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Joe Biden Bull-ies the Pro-Life Movement

Fast forward 60 years, and violent hatemongers with powerful political allies have again received free rein to terrorize their nonviolent, Christian foes. But Jane’s Revenge has enjoyed more than a 15-minute reign of terror. Since the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling last May 2, pro-abortion fanatics have launched a wave of arsons, vandalism, and death threats against at least 101 pro-life churches or pregnancy resource centers. Abortion activists firebombed pro-life pregnancy resource centers in the same way Bull Connor let the Klan firebomb Freedom Riders’ buses — with the same number of arrests: zero. Leftist extremists perpetrated 52 attacks before the FBI even announced its investigation.

This wave of violence, like most cowardly violence, targets the powerless — unborn babies, their desperate mothers, and the nonviolent Christian churches and nonprofits that serve them — but this wave also victimized the powerful with impunity. On June 13, two people threw a lit flare into the offices of Washington State Rep. Andy Barkis (R). Eight days later, vandals smashed the windows at the local office of U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.). Like the Klan in Alabama, pro-abortion fanatics feel confident enough to leave their calling card — often scrawling, “If abortion isn’t safe, neither are you” on pro-life women’s centers and churches — and to alert the media they will take “increasingly drastic measures.”

Biden’s nonfeasance embodies the administration’s defiant message that its ideological opponents enjoy no legal protection — a far cry from the promise Biden made the day after the media declared him winner of the 2020 election: “I will work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did.” The atmosphere of hatred has resulted in an 84-year-old pro-life woman being shot. (The male suspect said he shot her by accident.)

At least one congressman has connected the dots. The wave of anti-life terrorism represents “the death cult’s echo of the KKK’s burning cross — brazen, violent intimidation,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.). “But the federal government responded to the KKK. Where is the Biden Justice Department amid this violent campaign of national scope?” The administration, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), instead aim to “put a stop” to pro-life pregnancy resource centers.

“To my knowledge, no one — no one — has been prosecuted under the FACE Act,” noted Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) as House Republicans passed a resolution condemning violence against pregnancy resource centers on January 11. J. Edgar Hoover, who shared the racial views of his time, arrested the Anniston bombers in a matter of days. In a world of high-definition security cameras and facial recognition software, Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland have apparently arrested no one in eight months.

At least, no one who shares the administration’s extreme commitment to abortion. “But if you’re a pro-life activist, and you’re praying outside of an abortion clinic like Mark Houck, guess what happens to you?” asked Jordan. “The FBI kicks in your door, arrests you, puts you in handcuffs, and does it in front of your wife and seven children,” using dozens of heavily armed agents. Biden’s DOJ meted out similar treatment to Paul Vaughn, a 55-year-old father of 11. Just as black-and-white footage of Bull Connor unleashing his dogs on children inspired national revulsion of segregation, Biden’s overreach should inspire outrage at federal collusion with the abortion industry.

As pregnancy resource centers burned, in July Biden’s Justice Department established the Reproductive Rights Task Force to take “proactive and defensive legal action” to protect the abortion industry (and punish its foes) — and tapped as its leader Vanita Gupta, who as a “civil rights” officer in Obama’s DOJ tried to force all public schools to allow men to use women’s restrooms, showers, and overnight accommodations or lose all federal funding. She applied her ideological fervor equally well to abortion. Biden’s Justice Department arrested 26 pro-life advocates by last October, with more following, including:

  • Franciscan friar Fr. Fidelius Mocinski (whose birth name was Christopher), just as local New Jersey prosecutors dropped charges for conducting his “Red Rose Rescues”: entering abortion facilities and giving mothers red roses. In this case, he lay down in front of an abortion facility’s entrance, just as protesters in the ‘60s laid down in front of Lyndon Johnson’s presidential limousine. (“If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car,” cracked segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama (D) during the 1968 presidential campaign, “it’ll be the last car he’ll ever lay down in front of.”);
  • Nine defendants who entered a Washington, D.C., abortion facility and sang “let there be peace” (as a live-stream of the event shows) in October 2020. At least one of the women had participated in Rose Rescues;
  • Eleven defendants who entered an abortion facility in Tennessee in March 2021. If convicted, some of the defendants stand to serve up to 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars;
  • Pastor Daniel Courney of Enfield, N.J., one month after it wrung an agreement out of him not to commit “future FACE Act violations” — which, out of fear, would effectively cause him to end his presence outside abortion facilities; and
  • Bevelyn Williams and Edmee Chavannes, who happen to be black women from the South, for allegedly violating the FACE Act as far back as June 2020. (Curiously, their indictment begins with peaceful pro-life activity in 2019.) In one alleged violation in the indictment, Chavannes told an abortion facility employee, “Do not touch me.”

The arrest total seems all the more lopsided, since pro-life women’s centers are 22 times more likely to be attacked than abortion facilities. Both Gupta and Garland touted their work prosecuting pro-life advocates at a civil rights assembly last December. Both invoked Martin Luther King Jr.

As noted, in many cases the Biden administration presses pro-life advocates to sign agreements not to protest any more — a similar tactic employed by the Obama-Biden administration. A federal judge questioned whether the Obama-Biden administration’s prosecution of Mary Susan Pine “was the product of a concerted effort between the Government and the [abortion provider], which began well before the date of the incident at issue, to quell Ms. Pine’s activities.” (Ultimately, the DOJ paid Pine $120,000 in legal fees.) One could be forgiven for asking the same question of these cases.

A trial may conclude some of these acts violated the law, just as civil rights protesters violated the law of their day — the law their peaceful, prayerful actions aimed to change. But today’s prayerful pro-life advocates see their homes raided, not aided, by the federal government led by a vice president who raised bail money for the BLM’s “mostly peaceful” rioters. They face enormous legal bills, a criminal record, huge fines, and perhaps more than a decade in prison.

Despite these pressures, the pro-life movement has not buckled, as the terrorists and their federal government enablers wished. When bombed, they have rebuilt. When denied protection, they have secured their ministries of mercy. When denied justice, they hired their own private investigators. They have suffered long and done good. They have emerged from the fiery crucible of persecution with a stronger resolve to help the weak and save the innocent. The pro-life movement is “hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed — always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body” … And, one day, manifested in our laws.

We shall overcome.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

Social Determinants of Health: A Trojan Horse

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Yesterday, I told you how government healthcare programs are getting bigger and how this is the wrong direction for the country.  I also mentioned a relatively new theory from the Left – social determinants of health [SDOH] – that is about to make government healthcare programs even bigger.

Social determinants of health is the idea that social factors like housing, income, and employment have more to do with a person’s health than do individual risk factors like behavior and genetics.  So, if you give poor people free housing, free food, free employment services, free education, free transportation, other free services, and guarantee their income, their health will get better.  This will reduce hospital admissions, as well as overall health spending, the theory goes.  At least that’s the cover story.  The real agenda is radical egalitarian redistribution of income.  But the theory sounds good.  It sounds right.  It sounds plausible.  However, there’s just one problem.  There’s very little evidence for this happy-face assertion.  Billions have already spent on the theory, but the track record of real-world results is not good.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped the government from rushing pell-mell into social determinants of health and into the arms of the people pushing it.  The Biden administration recently announced it is giving states discretion to cover social services under their Medicaid programs.

No one is asking how much this is going to cost.  The federal deficit is already $421 billion for the current fiscal year which began in October.  Sorry, but Uncle Sugar doesn’t have unlimited pots of money.  If the true agenda is redistribution, how much more do you think there is to get with a deficit like that?   Would we even be talking about spending money on social determinants of health if we had to balance our budget?    Also, no one is asking about the downsides.  Nothing in life is perfect.  Shouldn’t lawmakers be informed of the negative consequences before being asked to vote on such a thing?  And speaking of Congress, this sounds like a major change that cannot be done by agency regulation alone under recent Supreme Court jurisprudence.  So where is Congress on this?  Are they falling down on the job again by not reining in agencies from committing us to huge new expenditures without congressional authorization?  Why am I the only one asking these questions?

Tax-exempt hospitals spent $2.5 billion on social determinants of health – housing, employment, education, and food security – from 2017 to 2019.  They are obligated to provide community benefit in exchange for their tax exemptions.  But their spending on social determinants initiatives has fallen off more recently because the evidence such initiatives are effective is limited, a study found.  Another study found social spending reduces unnecessary healthcare use but the costs outweigh the benefits.  Other researchers found no association between overall community benefit spending and hospital readmission rates.  These researchers concluded “the evidence for health outcome improvements from interventions focused on social determinants is thin…. This is very little evidence on which to base billions in investment….”  The study concluding the costs outweighed the benefits found $3.4 million in healthcare savings after $22.4 million was spent on a social determinants case management program.  Costs running seven times bigger than the savings – doesn’t sound like a smart investment to me.

This begs the question: if the evidence is so thin and even counter to what proponents claim, why proceed?  Why is the federal government itching to spend more money on social determinants of health?  Especially when social determinants theory has been criticized for ignoring the importance on health outcomes of personal choices and responsibility regarding alcohol, tobacco, junk food, drugs, and gambling.  Moreover, in a previous commentary, I criticized social determinants theory for ignoring the magnet effect of free stuff from the government drawing ever-larger numbers of people into government dependency.  Wrong direction.

The current administration has made no bones about working towards ‘equity’, ensuring equal outcomes, and redistribution.  Social determinants of health theory – which comes from the redistributionist World Health Organization – is tailor-made for the Biden administration’s goals, whether the theory makes any sense or not.

In making its announcement states can add social determinants to their Medicaid programs, the administration said it will require states to show their social outlays are cost-effective, something the research has failed to show convincingly, so far.  Whether the administration really means it is anybody’s guess, but Republicans on Capitol Hill need to police this to make sure the analysis is on the up and up and to shut the initiative down if it turns out it’s just another redistributionist boondoggle without any real benefit, aside from making redistributionists feel good about being so virtuous in giving away other people’s money.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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

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Tentacles of Government Healthcare Extending Their Reach

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Government healthcare programs are getting bigger, and we are not better off for it.  Things are trending in the wrong direction.

First, we have recent news nearly 100 million Americans – one in three – are now on Medicaid.  Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion for childless able-bodied adults transformed Medicaid from a poverty program into a middle-class entitlement.  Build it and they will come.  In my own state of Virginia, for example, Democrats promised Medicaid expansion enrollment would never exceed 400,000.  It now stands at more than 700,000 – 75 percent over worst-case projections.  In other states, enrollment was double or even quadruple estimates – 110 percent beyond estimates overall.  Another reason Medicaid rolls have ballooned is the COVID emergency that never ends.  The federal government told states ‘we’ll throw a bunch of money at you for Medicaid during the pandemic but, oh, by the way, you can’t take anybody off your rolls, even if they become ineligible.’  Joe Biden just extended the COVID emergency declaration to April, so this state of affairs will persist at least a while longer, leaving an estimated 20 million ineligible people on the rolls.  You are paying for them.

Second, U.S. government healthcare is also getting bigger because Obamacare subsidies got super-sized some months ago.  The jumbo subsidies have lured more people to sign up for Obamacare, understandably.  More on that on another day.

Third, the so-called Obamacare ‘family glitch’ was addressed, making five million more Americans on employer-based coverage eligible for Obamacare.

The growth of government-run healthcare shows up in the smaller share consumers actually pay out of pocket for healthcare expenses.  Between private insurance and government healthcare programs, people directly pay in aggregate only 10 percent of the cost of the medical services they consume.  It’s 90 percent a third-party payer system, now, which is too bad, because being insulated from true costs incentivizes consumers to over-consume, distorting the market.  Another distortion is the growth in the number of administrators – all the people needed to administer third-party payments and deal with red tape – which far exceeds the growth in the number of physicians.

These inefficiencies are only the start of why all of this is the wrong direction.  Hate to break it to you but, contrary to what Democrats would have you believe, government-run healthcare is not all it’s cracked up to be.

The growth in government healthcare imposes enormous costs.  Annual Medicaid spending increased by $198 billion during the pandemic, about as much Medicaid spending grew from 2012 to 2019.  Jumbo Obamacare subsidies were initially estimated to cost $22 billion for two years, but the figure is actually $50 billion.

Medicare dragged its feet on providing drug coverage even though private insurers had long since discovered such coverage, in general, gives more bang for the buck than doctor or hospital therapies.  Among other problems with Medicare include paying for small expenses while leaving seniors exposed to catastrophic costs, and sticking it to seniors with high drug costs while subsidizing those with low drug costs.

People who believe in government healthcare like it was a religion or something should look at the latest sins of the VA.

A VA hospital in Florida denied treatment to a veteran dying of heart failure because first responders could not verify his military service, in violation of federal law.  The VA hospital in Spokane injured 148 veterans when its computer system failed to deliver 11,000 orders for specialty care, lab work, and other services and, further, failed to alert staff the orders had been lost.  Despite all the publicity about long wait times at VA hospitals, the problem is growing worse after initially improving.  An Inspector General report found $4 billion in employee or contractor embezzlement, kickbacks, theft, and other wrongdoing.  There were 104 arrests and 500 administrative actions taken to address these problems in just the first half of 2022 alone.  One kickback scheme involved 17 doctors, two executives, and millions of dollars in penalties.

Unfortunately, too many people still love government healthcare and it’s poised to get even bigger under a left-wing theory called ‘social determinants of health’.  More on that tomorrow.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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

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If I Wanted To Reshape The World To Have Fewer People →

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It occurs to me that our failings in the past decades all have one thing in common. We consistently and with a flawless record, fail to think as big as the people creating the problems facing us. That is to say, when we oppose a line of effort against us, we always treat the problem or issue as presented. When in fact it’s larger, and part of a much bigger planed assault on ourselves.

Take Global Warming.

There are a few layers of opposition. Those who know the science is fabricated and argue the science and try and get people to understand that Global Warming by man’s actions simply isn’t a real thing. That has nearly no chance of succeeding, but its one level of activism people can do.

Then, there are those who think Global Warming is a dialectic device to take control of especially Western industrial man using control of CO2 production as a means of ending productivity, or at least being in full control of it. One may notice that no alternatives to create of energy, such as nuclear or other means can be allowed. Only the problem of CO2 must remain in the forefront as a means to shape the future. Even when there are multiple ways to create the needed energy without producing it. Bad solutions, like electric cars are encouraged. Sorry, not bad solutions, things that kinda sorta look like solutions but actually make no difference or add to the problem and create new ones.

But a real psychopath might take it to the next level.

Imagine being so committed to the idea that the world has too many people on it that you needed to embark on a serious plan to reduce the world’s population.

Imagine that you had convinced enough people that the world was warming, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to the point that no one would interfere with a plan to geo-engineer the atmosphere to block out solar radiation for a time that would significantly cool the Earth.

Imagine that you had managed to get millions of people from warm parts of the Earth to move to cooler parts, even though it would multiply their carbon footprint by a factor of FOUR and the resources needed for life are far greater for each individual in say, Canada than in Namibia.

Imagine that the people doing the geo-engineering to “solve Global Warming” know damn well it isn’t happening. They would also then know that a warmer Earth means more food and more plant life and more animal life. Especially if the level of CO2 goes up a few more parts per billion.

So what would happen to the available food supply if the temperature of the Earth’s most productive growing regions fell by a few degrees?

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Oops! Democratic ‘Oversights’ Would Legalize Polygamy, Infanticide

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One of the most famous illustrations in all of literature comes from “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” when Sherlock Holmes notes “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”: the dog that did not bark. The canine’s silence revealed the watchdog’s familiarity and comfort with the criminal. “Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well,” remarks Holmes.

Voters can glean the inner disposition of our lawmakers, learning which issues they consider vital and which never enter their minds, through a similar device: the “errors,” omissions, and oversights politicians make when drafting legislation. Allegedly inadvertent “oversights” and “drafting errors” by Democratic lawmakers over the last year alone would have decriminalized infanticide, legalized polygamy, and suppressed sacred religious liberty rights enshrined in the First Amendment.

Lest I be accused of overstatement, let’s look at the record:

1. Infanticide

En route to becoming an “abortion sanctuary,” California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 2223, introduced by Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks. The original draft forbade law enforcement from prosecuting or investigating any mother for the death of her child through “miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion, or perinatal death.” Pro-life legal scholars noted that California state law extends the term “perinatal death” up to 30 or “60 days following delivery,” essentially decriminalizing infanticide. Wicks retorted that her law could never be construed to support child murder, because “one of the tools judges would use in that case is legislative intent.” (Then again, if judges valued original intent, Roe v. Wade would never have been written.) Wicks called pro-life concerns “absurd and disingenuous” … but then the Assembly’s overwhelmingly Democratic Judiciary Committee released its official analysis, which put the matter as gently as possible:

[T]he “perinatal death” language could lead to an unintended and undesirable conclusion. As currently in print, it may not be sufficiently clear that “perinatal death” is intended to be the consequence of a pregnancy complication. Thus, the bill could be interpreted to immunize a pregnant person from all criminal penalties for all pregnancy outcomes, including the death of a newborn for any reason during the “perinatal” period after birth, including a cause of death which is not attributable to pregnancy complications, which clearly is not the author’s intent.

That is, pro-life critics were right all along: The language of her bill would legalize the murder of newborns. Wicks amended the “perinatal death due to a pregnancy-related cause.” Despite this change, the law “still prevents law enforcement from investigating ‘perinatal death,’ and the amendments Ms. Wicks” added proved “woefully inadequate,” Jonathan Keller, president of California Family Council, told me at the time.

Nonetheless, Governor Gavin Newsom (D), an undeclared 2024 presidential hopeful, signed the amended bill into law alongside a pack of 12 other abortion-promoting bills. These bills underscore the need for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives on January 11: national lawmakers must correct the “oversights” of far-left state legislators. Unfortunately, they must also correct their own.

2. Legalizing Polygamy Nationwide

After then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hustled the drastically misnamed Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA) through the House of Representatives in one day, U.S. senators noted something curious: The original draft of the bill did not limit marriage to two people. While one provision mentioned “2 individuals,” another section of the bill would have amended federal law to say simply “an individual shall be considered married if that individual’s marriage is valid in the State where the marriage was entered into,” with no numerical limit.

The bill’s chief Republican sponsor, Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), chalked the oversight up to a “drafting error,” though she admitted “the language needs to be clarified” that the bill does not permit polygamy/polyandry. The authors said, in effect, they intended to redefine the most fundamental institution in human society, just not quite that far. Again, legal scholars say the new legislative patch sewn into the old garment of the RFMA failed to fix the problem. The “clarified” final draft of “the bill leaves open the possibility that one person can be in multiple two-person marriages at the same time, which would trigger federal recognition if a state legally were to recognize such consensual, bigamous unions as separate family units,” noted the Heritage Foundation’s Roger Severino. Nonetheless, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (R-N.Y.) exclaimed “Praise God!” as President Joe Biden signed the bill into law last December 13. That would not be the bill’s only oversight.

3. Erasing Religious Liberty

The Respect for Marriage Act makes a second appearance, as the bill’s authors also ignored all concerns about religious liberty. Despite years of litigation aimed at bringing Bible-believing Christians to heel, and warnings that the bill will usher in “a new era of oppression” of Christians like Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips, Senate Democrats only entertained the notion of a religious protection amendment as a fig leaf for wavering Republicans. They insisted they did not mean to wage culture war against believers; they just crushed your religious freedom all accidental-like. Once again, the “cure” proved inadequate, as the Senate rejected Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) amendment in favor of an irrelevant and legally ambiguous substitute.

Like Holmes, we can deduce from these silences that when social liberals ponder transforming life, marriage, and society, they give not one thought to the lives of newborn children, the nuclear family, or a Higher Power (Who, in His sovereignty, might restrain and hold them accountable for their actions). Their ideological fever to revolutionize everything from marriage to human nature blinds them to any negative consequences — or convinces them these results will be tolerable, even desirable.

That analysis would explain how Democrats omitted the word “God” from their 2012 platform and then booed when His Name was restored. It might make clear why candidate Joe Biden referred to the benevolent Creator as “you know, The Thing,” apparently likening Jehovah to a 1950s monster movie — much as the man most responsible for inflicting Biden on the nation, Barack Obama, regularly elided the Almighty from his quotations of our founding documents (which Obama demeaned as “the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day”).

A platform that doubles as a photographic negative of God’s Word might offer some insight into why the Left “did not like to retain God in their knowledge” (Romans 1:28).

Such hostility to the God of the Bible has led liberals into the legislative wilderness for two more years. One of the most overlooked upgrades the Republican congressional majority will have over previous management has gone unappreciated: Even the quality of legislative errors will improve.

The Democrats’ radical “oversights” should also warn every thoughtful statesman against hastily voting for any bill promoted by social liberals, lest they risk placing their own stamp of approval on polygamy, atheism, infanticide, or other evils they cannot see while blinded by left-wing bias.

Finally, the fact that many of these oversights come as news, even to well-informed conservatives, serves as an eloquent indictment of the nation’s Christians. It is not merely Sherlock’s dog that held its peace. The prophet Isaiah condemned the inert watchmen of his day as “blind,” “ignorant,” “greedy,” and “dumb dogs [who] cannot bark; Sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.” They “have no understanding” and look only unto their “own gain” (Isaiah 56:9-12; compare with John 10:11-12).

Like the self-serving shepherds of Isaiah’s day, too many people who know better did not expose the implications of these bills for the sake of political favoritism, for fear of offending the Facebook algorithm (and its sweet, remunerative traffic), or sheer timidity. Some modern evangelicals also love dreams — fantasizing of being hailed as the “reasonable” and “winsome” Christian, of their leftist overlords granting their children a safe haven from endless culture wars, even of being invited to “a seat at the table” to carve out their rights as an ideological minority. They may have even been promised these things — but then, empty promises were the one thing the devil never lacked.

The other side’s silences show their fealty to their masterplan. Let our speech prove our fidelity to our Master’s plan. Now is no time to remain silent.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

Noem’s Pro-Trans Ties Spark Protests, 2024 Skepticism

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Even the frigid temperatures couldn’t keep angry South Dakotans away. Despite the blistering, nine-degree cold, as many as 150 people gathered in the snow outside the 2023 Midwest Gender Identity Summit in Sioux Falls Friday morning to protest Sanford Health’s unwelcome presence in their state. Standing by snow drifts, with a long convoy of cars heading to join them, organizer Adam Broin insisted, “This is NOT South Dakota!” But according to a bombshell report by NRO reporter Nate Hochman, it may already be South Dakota, thanks to the transgender movement’s unlikely ally: Republican Governor Kristi Noem.

For Noem, who’s been trying to rehabilitate her image for 2024 after a series of conservative betrayals, the timing of Hochman’s piece couldn’t be worse. Two years removed from her shocking veto on a girls’ sports bill — and three from her behind-the-scenes death blow to a ban on child-mutilating surgery — Noem was hoping she could put the questions about her bona-fides behind her. Instead, she’s staring down another career-crushing controversy over her cozy relationship to one of the largest providers of puberty blockers and sex change surgeries in the Midwest.

Of course, the ties between Sanford Health and the state’s establishment Republicans haven’t exactly been a secret in South Dakota. What has come as a surprise is just how deep those political tentacles run — often, as Hochman points out, dictating policies at complete odds with the states’ social conservative roots.

“I think it’s impossible to understate or to overstate how powerful Sanford Health is in South Dakota,” Hochman told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” Thursday. “It’s a $7.5 billion company.” They employ almost seven times more people than the second largest employer in South Dakota, he explained. “And they fund the campaigns of a lot of Republican leaders in the state, including a bunch of the Republicans who sit on the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, which is the committee that killed the bill” protecting minors from gender transition procedures.

As for Noem, Hochman explained, “She has a very close relationship with Sanford Health. It’s her top career donor.” In exchange, she’s bowed to their demands on LGBT issues, even when it’s in direct conflict with her state’s wishes or her party’s agenda. In a state where the number of self-identified conservatives outweigh liberals by more than 30 points, it’s not a place “where one would expect to find a major trade conference for transgender medical specialists,” he wrote.

But unfortunately, Sanford Health’s influence runs deep — so deep, the country learned in 2020, that Noem was willing to do their bidding on a profoundly popular policy to protect kids. At her behest, the bill’s sponsors said, the committee voted to sink a measure that would give teenagers and their families more time to weigh a decision that could destroy them forever. It’s a “pause button” on transgender surgery, Rep. Fred Deutsch (R) called it. “Nobody is saying that kids can’t pursue these treatments later on — but surely, we can all agree that children who can’t even drive shouldn’t be steering themselves into permanent medical procedures.” Despite having the committee majority, Republicans voted 5-2 to sink the only hope South Dakota parents had.

That was the first inkling that the “most conservative governor in the country,” as Noem likes to call herself, wasn’t as advertised. The second shoe dropped in 2021, when the fight to protect women’s sports started to break out in state legislatures. Buoyed by Idaho’s momentum, both chambers of the South Dakota legislature rushed a bill to the governor’s desk to make biology the determining factor of any athlete’s team.

It wasn’t a heavy lift. As Perkins pointed out, “Almost every state that’s even pink has embraced that.” Noem herself seemed to be on board with the idea at first, tweeting that she was “excited to sign this bill very soon.” Two weeks later, after meetings with left-wing activists (including, Hochman writes, Sanford Health), the governor abruptly changed her mind. On a Friday afternoon, to the astonishment of Americans everywhere, she announced she was vetoing HB 1217 — caving to the mob in spectacular fashion and reaping a whirlwind of backlash so intense that people wondered if her career would recover.

Noem went on a face-saving media tour to try to mitigate the damage, but it was too late. She was tagged as a phony, a squish, a sellout to the liberal interests of the state. Her cowardice was helpful in one way, conservatives would say later. More than a dozen leaders raced to sign sports bills into law, hoping to avoid the wrath the South Dakota governor endured for capitulating.

In the months since, Noem has tried to rebuild her status as a GOP firebrand — an effort that’s fizzled with every failed bill. As Hochman points out, “Conservative lawmakers have struggled to get any number of social-conservative bills, particularly as they pertain to transgender issues, across the finish line” — including more conscience rights for medical practitioners (HB 1247), a ban on sex change surgeries and drugs for children (HB 1057), a ban on changing South Dakotans’ sex on birth certificates (HB 1076), a requirement for teachers to inform parents if their child is struggling with gender identity issues (SB 88), a requirement that students use bathrooms and locker rooms that matches their biology (HB 1005), and the establishment of the “fundamental” parental right “to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education and care of a child” (HB 1246). As of February 2021, there had also been seven failed attempts to protect women’s sports, according to the ACLU.

By all rights, South Dakota has become a state where conservative bills go to die. That’s been incredibly frustrating to the state’s grassroots organizations. Norman Woods, director of South Dakota’s Family Heritage Alliance, told Hochman, “We see [Sanford] attack good social conservative ideas all the time.”

It’s no wonder, Hochman told Perkins, since plenty of Sanford Health employees are either South Dakota legislators themselves or lobbyists — or both. “One thing that I found through a lot of digging through old … legislative hearing files is that Sanford lobbyists show up often, literally in lab coats, to effectively lobby against a lot of these bills that are on the record as testifying and lobbying against things like the ban on the chemical castration of children. And they’ve lobbied against a variety of other social conservative bills, almost all of which have died.”

Sounds like “an enormous conflict of interest,” Perkins shook his head. “And did they recuse themselves,” Perkins asked, “from voting on issues of interest to Sanford?” “Not only do they not recuse themselves,” Hochman replied, “but they actually actively champion the efforts to kill a lot of these bills.”

Meanwhile, for Woods, Noem’s alliance with the far-Left is personal. After South Dakota State University hosted a “kid-friendly” drag show on state property, he dashed off a December 20 letter to the governor, urging her to act.

“Considering you have the power to hold the South Dakota Board of Regents accountable and fire at will, I am greatly disappointed you and your administration have taken no action to rectify this situation or to ensure that drag shows for children never happen again on South Dakota soil. The only answer we have seen from your office is for South Dakotans to reach out to the Attorney General. Our children deserve our protection, and as Governor, you have not only the duty, but the responsibility to act.”

Noem flew into a rage, publicly calling for Woods’s head if the Family Heritage Alliance ever wanted to work with her again. The disproportional response to Woods’s run-of-the-mill call to action was a stunning, over-the-top display.

“I am disappointed in Mr. Woods’ decision to attack me publicly by sending this letter out of the blue and releasing it to the media at the same time, instead of reaching out to my office to have a productive conversation about how we can work together. This behavior is both counterproductive and unbecoming of the executive director of your organization, but unfortunately, it has become a pattern in recent years,” Noem wrote.

“As a result, my office will no longer work with the Alliance until and unless its executive director chooses to act professionally.” She goes on to claim that she shares the Alliance’s goals of “faith, family, and freedom” (despite a checkered record to that effect) and expresses “disappoint[ment]” that the Alliance’s Woods “has made it impossible for us to work together to accomplish our shared goals.”

“I’d encourage the Family Heritage Alliance to evaluate the purpose of your organization. Is it to promote family values—or is it to attack the most conservative governor in the country? I believe it is the former and urge you to focus your efforts on bringing our shared pro-family message to the people of South Dakota. I suggest you find an executive director who agrees.”

Shocked, Woods told reporters, “As an organization exclusively lobbying on behalf of South Dakota families, we naïvely thought we could engage America’s ‘most conservative governor’ (her words) in an effort to put an end to the explicit sexualization of children on our public university campuses. Sadly, she misconstrued our efforts. Regardless, just like Protecting South Dakota Kids was successful this fall, so will we be when it comes to putting an end to these grooming events.”

As for the governor’s insistence that the Alliance should have reached out to her privately, conservative organizations understand firsthand how futile that would have been. At the height of the debate over gender transitions for minors in 2020, Family Research Council’s Perkins requested a phone call with Noem to discuss the bill. In a letter obtained by The Washington Stand, FRC’s president outlined the urgency of the conversation, writing, “I would love to talk to you as soon as possible, to alleviate any concerns you may have about this bill and to receive your assurance that you will do everything possible to protect vulnerable children in South Dakota.”

The governor never responded, despite a follow-up call to then-General Counsel Tom Hart. The only time she did reach out to FRC, ironically, was a year later when she needed help cleaning up the PR mess of her girls’ sports veto.

Unfortunately, Noem’s vindictive streak toward Woods won’t come as a surprise to the state’s conservatives, many of whom found themselves primaried in 2022 for upholding true South Dakota values. The Blaze’s Daniel Horowitz was “shocked” to discover that the governor was “declar[ing] war” on social conservatives like Fred Deutsch, who wrote the child protection bill. Together with Sanford Health, who Hochman explained had “dumped a really significant amount of money into efforts to [unseat] all of the conservatives … who got in their way,” Noem began openly campaigning against several solid Republicans in the midterms.

“All of the people on her target list are true Christian conservatives, and those are the people she wants gone,” Rep. Rhonda Milstead, the lead sponsor of the girls’ sports bill told The Blaze. Noem aligned with “liberal leader of the Senate,” Republican legislators warned, working to purge incumbents with a 90%+ rating from the Family Heritage Alliance.

Less than two months later, the same governor was on Fox News, angling for a spot on the 2024 ticket and insisting her state is “thriving because we put forward and put in place conservative policies.” If those “conservative policies” include rolling out the red carpet to dangerous transgender extremism, count voters out. As Hochman explained to Perkins, he’s been “inundated” with emails and messages from South Dakotans saying they had no idea this was happening in their state — and they’re appalled.

“You know, South Dakotans are a good, solid conservative people. This does not represent their interests or their views, but … a lot of it has been sort of happening under clandestine circumstances. And the Republicans who lead the state aren’t broadcasting that. … The average South Dakotan often isn’t aware. And I think they would be horrified — and they are horrified — when they find out that it is.”

Broin, who organized the event outside of Sanford’s transgender conference Friday, talked about the passion of the protestors who showed up “at the crack of dawn,” shoveling the snow-covered sidewalks outside the event to make room for more. “A lot — a lot — of people want to stand up [to this agenda],” he told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice, including freshman state Representative John Sjaarda (R), who joined the crowd.

“We wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing as a group if the political folks of South Dakota would truly represent the people,” Broin said. “But unfortunately, even though there’s great people in our in our state … [who] say a lot of really nice things, the most important conservative legislation seems to always fall through the cracks, not make it through committee, get vetoed for mysterious reasons …”

That’s why, he believes, more groups are springing up to fight the “secrecy” and duplicity of the state’s Republican leaders. “With everything in the national media,” Broin said, “we’ve really started to pay attention and realize that our party isn’t doing what they should be doing. … [W]e are pushing back” on anyone urging the GOP to “cleave itself from grassroots engagement,” he insisted. “And hopefully, we can get our party to represent the third most conservative voting population in the nation.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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