‘It’s Not Right’: Blue City Struggles To Keep Up With Homeless, Migrant Crises

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  • The city of Portland, Maine, is scrambling to keep up with a homeless crisis, along with arrivals of migrants in need of city services.
  • The city continues to open up new shelter space and move migrants out to other areas, as well.
  • “The influx of asylum seekers has grown every year since Portland became a sanctuary city and currently the homeless shelter is full of asylum seekers,” Carol Waig, who runs nonprofit My Fathers Hands, which helps the homeless population in Portland, told the DCNF.

PORTLAND, Maine — What’s happening at the border isn’t staying at the border. Thousands of miles north, Maine’s largest city faces a two-pronged crisis as a crush of illegal immigrants has overcrowded homeless shelters and created sprawling tent cities where crime and open drug use run rampant.

The city received more than 1,000 migrants between January and April, according to the city, many of which receive housing and public resources. There are currently around 225 tents making up Portland’s homeless encampments, and individuals inside the encampments, as well as an advocate for the homeless, told the DCNF that there aren’t enough resources to address both problems.

“The influx of asylum seekers has grown every year since Portland became a sanctuary city and currently the homeless shelter is full of asylum seekers,” Carol Waig, who runs nonprofit My Fathers Hands, which helps the homeless population in Portland, told the DCNF.

There were roughly 4,400 homeless individuals in the state of Maine as of January 2022, compared to roughly 2,000 in 2021, according to the Maine State Housing Authority, which says the sharp increase is “likely reflective of a surge in asylum seeking immigrants.”

The city recently created a new emergency shelter to free up 100 to 125 beds, according to its website. It also began busing migrants out of Portland in August, sending them from a temporary emergency shelter in a basketball arena to motels in other areas of the state, Lewiston and Freeport, according to the Associated Press.

“Our staff have been completely at capacity in terms of who they’re able to shelter and assist,” Jessica Grondin, city spokesperson, told the AP at the time.

“People from other countries come here, automatically get housing, get free care, free everything, it’s not right,” Bryce, who said he is homeless in Portland and that he came to the U.S. legally and went through a 10-year citizenship process, told the DCNF of the influx of migrants.

One large homeless encampment in Portland is filled with needles, naloxone used to reverse overdoses and needle disposal containers, the DCNF observed. Drug use is rampant among the camp, one of its residents, who went by Harold, told the DCNF.

“We’re human beings, we don’t want to be here, we really don’t want to be here, we don’t want to live outside, we don’t want to freeze the fuck out every night. Winter time on the Atlantic Ocean in Maine, do you think that’s comfortable when it’s below zero?” Harold said.

Some of Portland’s homeless have been offered shelter and haven’t taken the offers, Grondin told the DCNF.

“Through our [Encampment Crisis Response Team] process we have offered more than 150 shelter beds to people who are in encampments, but have not had overwhelming success in getting people into the shelter,” she said.

“We have expanded our outreach by using our own shelter staff and hiring outreach workers in order to get people into shelter as our focus is on getting people inside,” she continued. “It is our hope that our outreach efforts are successful so we can get people into shelter beds and other resources given that cold weather is now here.”

The migrant arrivals are also expected to continue given Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills’ August order to create an “Office of New Americans” and bring in 75,000 new workers by 2029.

The city continues offering assistance to both migrants and the homeless, Grondin said in a statement to the DCNF. Both migrants and homeless qualify for the state’s General Assistance program that provides help paying for housing, fuel, utilities, medical care and burial costs.

City shelters housed an average of 1,200 individuals every night as of June, according to the city website. Some families are also being housed in a contracted hotel.

The city also opened a shelter, the Homeless Service Center (HSC), in March for 208 single individuals, in addition to the city’s family shelter, according to Grondin, who added that the city council in Portland recently “approved expanding capacity at the HSC by 50 beds.”

It is working to provide 120 beds at the HSC that the homeless in Portland’s encampments will have priority to take, Grondin said.

“Our goal is to connect those in encampments with those beds,” she said.

A spokesperson for Mills didn’t respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

AUTHOR

JENNIE TAER

Investigative reporter.

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The State of Abortion Across the States

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Since the U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade was dismantled last summer, the fight against abortion has largely moved to the state level. Although many in the pro-life movement argue that there is a strong case to be made for the federal government’s duty to protect the lives of unborn children, leftists have shifted their focus to campaigning for abortion on a state-by-state basis, with a particular emphasis on constitutional amendments declaring abortion a “right” under state law.

For example, California, Michigan, Ohio, and Vermont have all voted to declare abortion a constitutional “right,” while Kansas and Kentucky rejected proposals to bar abortion from being enshrined in the state constitution. Most of these measures have been adopted via referendum, and abortion activists are relying on the same tactic in other states.

In Nebraska, a proposal has already been submitted to election authorities to declare abortion a state constitutional “right.” The group Protect Our Rights, which is endorsed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Nebraska and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Nebraska, introduced a ballot initiative to constitutionally protect abortion up to the point of “fetal viability,” which would be determined by individual doctors on a case-by-case basis.

Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen (R) signed a law in May protecting the unborn after 12 weeks. In South Dakota, a group called Dakotans for Health is collecting signatures to introduce a ballot initiative barring the state government from protecting unborn lives until the third trimester. Abortion is currently illegal in South Dakota — the state’s last Planned Parenthood abortion facility committed its final (legal) abortion last June.

The Missouri Women and Family Research Fund is also collecting signatures for pro-abortion ballot initiatives, although the proposed language is currently under litigation after Republican Jamie Corley argued pro-life Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s ballot initiative summaries relied on partisan language critical of abortion. Led by Corley, the Missouri Women and Family Research Fund is seeking to add numerous exemptions to the state’s current law, which protects the unborn in all cases except when a mother’s life is in danger. If adopted, the ballot initiative would make it a “fundamental right” to “choose to have an abortion” during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and would block criminal or civil penalties for abortionists.

Leftists in the Sunshine State have formed a coalition called Floridians Protecting Freedom which includes Florida’s ACLU branch and the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates (FAPPA) and are pushing pro-abortion ballot initiatives. According to FAPPA’s website, the proposals aim to “constitutionally protect Floridians’ freedom to access abortion.” The proposed language states, “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed a six-week protection bill into law earlier this year, superseding the state’s 15-week law. The 15-week law is currently under review by the Florida Supreme Court but, if it is allowed to go into effect, will be replaced by the six-week law. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (R) and other pro-life leaders and groups have asked the state Supreme Court to intervene and prevent the initiative from appearing on the ballot.

A coalition in the Grand Canyon State, called Arizona for Abortion Access, is pushing a ballot initiative to include a “fundamental right” to abortion in the state’s constitution. The organization includes the ACLU of Arizona, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona, and NARAL Arizona. Abortion is currently illegal in Arizona past 15 weeks, but the state Supreme Court could allow almost total protections for the unborn from 1864 to go back into effect.

In Maryland, voters will decide next year whether to enshrine abortion in their state’s constitution. Lawmakers agreed in March to put the constitutional amendment up for referendum. The amendment states that “every person, as a central component of an individual’s rights to liberty and equality, has the fundamental right to reproductive freedom, including but not limited to the ability to make and effectuate decision to prevent, continue, or end one’s own pregnancy.” Abortion is currently unrestricted in Maryland.

In New York, leftist groups are funneling millions of dollars into efforts to enshrine abortion in the state constitution. Planned Parenthood Action and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) of New York, among others, have pledged a combined $20 million to promote the measure in digital and broadcast advertisements, as well as to back canvassers. The constitutional amendment would make “reproductive healthcare and autonomy” a protected civil rights category. Abortion is currently legal in New York up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, and permitted after 24 weeks if the mother’s life is in danger.

The Colorado Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice Coalition is pushing a similar amendment in the Rocky Mountain State. Backed by organizations like the ACLU of Colorado and Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, the coalition is collecting signatures for an amendment to not only ensconce abortion in the state constitution but to also undo an existing measure which bars the state from funding abortion. That law also ensures that abortion is not covered by government-provided health insurance programs. Abortion in Colorado is currently unrestricted and state legislators have repeatedly passed pro-abortion laws over the past two years.

Although mainstream media outlets predicted pro-abortion efforts in Nevada would “likely” be successful, a judge has shot down a leftist-led ballot initiative. Abortion during the first 24 weeks of pregnancy was already codified into Nevada’s constitution in 1990, but Planned Parenthood-allied Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom launched an attempt to constitutionally allow abortion at any point throughout pregnancy. District court judge James Russell blocked the effort earlier this month, ruling that the proposed language was too broad. The proposed language would have ensured a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” which would include “all matters relating to pregnancy.” Russell ruled that the proposed language was “logrolling,” violating a Nevada law which prohibits combining unrelated subjects in a single ballot initiative.

He wrote, “This Court agrees … that the Petition embraces a multitude of subjects that amount to logrolling. Subsection 1, alone, embraces the following subjects: prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, vasectomy, tubal ligation, abortion, abortion care, management of a miscarriage, and infertility care.” He added that “it is unclear how a vasectomy relates to infertility care or postpartum care. Likewise, it is unclear how postpartum care is related to abortions or birth control.” Russel concluded, “Thus, it is improper to characterize these broad categories as a ‘single subject’ because there is no explanation as to how these provisions are functionally related.”

The South Carolina Supreme Court also handed pro-lifers a recent victory, rejecting Planned Parenthood’s attempt to block the state’s heartbeat law. After the court upheld the heartbeat law in August, Planned Parenthood asked the justices to block the law, arguing that the legislation’s definition of a “fetal heartbeat” was ambiguous. Earlier this month, the court declined to hear Planned Parenthood’s challenge. This follows Georgia’s Supreme Court upholding the Peach State’s own heartbeat law last month, originally passed in 2019 and enacted once Roe was overturned.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

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

RELATED ARTICLE: U.S. Abortion Numbers, Rate, and Ratio Increased in 2021: CDC’s Abortion Surveillance

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

The Legal Making of Orphans

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John D. Grondelski: Surrogacy deliberately sets out to make offspring orphans – in the name of assuaging somebody’s felt want to be a “parent.”

Michigan, which in 2022 ensconced a right to abortion-on-demand into its state constitution, may be on the verge of another adaptation to the sexual revolution: adopting commercial surrogacy.

The Great Lake State, along with Nebraska and to some degree Louisiana, are the three states that still outlaw commercial surrogacy.  “Commercial” surrogacy is distinguished from “altruistic” surrogacy, where the latter is nominally a volunteer undertaking.  I say “nominally” because (a) how does one really monitor financial exchanges in such quasi-private contexts and (b) when does “compensation for care” (e.g., medical “expenses”) blur into pay?

Are you surprised that the vast majority of states allow trafficking in children?  If you are, you’re soooo 1987, when New Jersey’s “Baby M” case was decided.  As bioethics activist Jennifer Lahl has observed, America is the “Wild West” when it comes to artificial reproduction.

Amid the controversies over abortion from the 1970s-90s, many state legislators decided to steer clear of any involvement in the emerging field of artificial reproduction, including surrogacy.  And Roe fostered a perspective of treating childbearing as an “individual liberty interest” with which states should not interfere, a mindset that has perdured in the various post-Dobbs state constitutional amendments enshrining abortion-on-demand.

So, while those pushing commercial surrogacy in Michigan would like simply to suggest the state is catching up with all the others, in fact, the legislation advancing in Lansing is extreme.

Just as Obergefell redefined marriage to eliminate sexual difference, Michigan’s proposed surrogacy law redefines parenthood to eliminate genetics and the bodily.  The only “parent” in law in Michigan would be the person(s) commissioning the baby.

If there are two, they wouldn’t even need to live together or have any formal relationship to be listed as “Parent One” and “Parent Two.”  (Yeah, sexual differentiation in parentage goes away, too).  Parenthood becomes a state of mind.

We need to make ourselves fully aware of what that means.

For a child to come into existence requires genetics, gestation, and upbringing, what Catholicism once used to call procreatio et educatio.  You need a man for sperm; a woman to provide an ovum.  You need a woman – who may or may not be the woman who provided the ovum – to bear that fertilized ovum for nine months.  And you need somebody to raise that newborn.

That used to be understood as what mothers and fathers do.

Technology has allowed the genetics, gestation, and social dimensions of parenthood to be separated into unrelated components.  Surrogacy laws have decided that the only legally valued component is raising the child.  All the other elements are deemed sub-personal and legally irrelevant to what constitutes a “parent.”

Sperm and egg are not essential to parenthood: they are parts to be obtained.  A female body is just a biological incubator, necessary only insofar as our technology has not (yet) found an artificial substitute for the interval between Petri dish and viability.

Of course, if gametes become mere “parts,” one should be able to customize.  Just as car buyers may like red over black, sedan over convertible, or leather upholstery over plastic, so baby buyers might prefer blue eyes over brown, boys over girls, hirsute over smooth.  De gustibus non disputandum est.

And if female bodies simply become a temporary domicile at her “choice,” why shouldn’t we have wombs for rent?  That, of course, is the raw theoretical argument.  We know that’s not how it is in fact.

Since the woman providing the ovum also provides a permanent genetic definition to the child, she’s going to command a higher price: physically attractive, college-educated co-eds (especially Ivies) don’t come cheap.

But if all you need is a temporary dwelling, poorer women will do.  As Lahl observes, no small number of military wives, initially attracted by “helping a woman have a baby,” also decide surrogacy is supplemental income, especially with long-deployed husbands on low enlisted salaries.  And, if you can offshore the job to a woman overseas, so much the better: labor costs are cheaper abroad.

Let’s be honest about the exploitative element.  A typical American commercial surrogacy arrangement runs about $60-70,000.  That’s for 24/7 “work” for nine months, i.e., about 6,500 hours.  That comes at best to about $10.80/hour, with no overtime, below current hourly minimum wages in 24 states.

Now, let’s stop and take a step back: how have we, in 2023, come to the point of talking about the choice between getting paid to make a human being or maybe making more money flippin’ burgers?

Because that is, in fact, what the “intended parent” is commissioning.  (S)he has placed an order for a custom-made child. As Michel Aupetit, the former Archbishop of Paris once remarked, the “parental project” – the treatment of a child as a “want” rather than a gift – must inevitably turn that child into a product.  Reification is unavoidable.

Indeed, what the “intended parent” has asked of us as a society is that we make an orphan.  We are to create a child who will be cut off from his genetic parents.  Michigan says the child’s genetic mother and father do not matter. 

The child’s family and ancestry are irrelevant.  Any siblings the child might have through this man or woman are biological accidents that have no inherent value.  The physical contact of a child with his mother’s body – before as well as after birth – is merely a biological necessity of no further significance in surrogacy.  Any woman/child bonding is purely coincidental.

We are making orphans but pretend otherwise because we deliver them to “adoptive” parents.

In the Biblical world, widows and orphans receive special care because circumstances beyond their control have made them particularly vulnerable.  But surrogacy sets out to make them orphans deliberately, in the name of assuaging somebody’s felt want to be a “parent.”

One can feel for such persons. . .but is that a reason to make an orphan?

You may also enjoy:

Fr. Paul D. Scalia’s The Impious Public Square

Ines A. Murzaku’s Surrogacy: A problem of human dignity

AUTHOR

John M. Grondelski

John Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is a former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. All views herein are exclusively his.

EDITORS NOTE: This 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.

Action Action Action: Stop the Biden-WHO takeover of our Healthcare!

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Urgent! Please read this note from Mat Staver! I have been reporting on this for quite some time. Biden just gave control of the internet to the UN. Healthcare is next. This is the set up for the One World Government controlled by the United Nations. No Borders, no Elections, No Money, No Private Property, No Healthcare.

A vote is scheduled this week on language that would block funding to the World Health Organization (WHO). Congress urgently needs to hear from you to vote against the WHO. Why? Because in almost every measure of global health care, Ethiopia ranks near last. Yet Joe Biden is RACING to give Ethiopia’s former disgraced health minister control over our U.S. health care. Over your health. This is not about health care … this is about tyranny and control.

The head of the WHO is under a cloud of suspicion because of hundreds of accusations that he is guilty of crimes against humanity. And unless Congress steps in NOW, Joe Biden will sign away our sovereignty and our freedom. Biden will put a failed Third World health director in complete control of our American medical system. I’ll share below just how bad this is.

A vote on a bill to defund the WHO has been moved to this week. With the new U.S. House Speaker, my friend, Mike Johnson, we have an excellent opportunity to stop the Biden-WHO takeover. — Mat

Call Mike Johnson: (202) 225 2777 / (318) 840 0309 / (337) 423 4232

“The United States must defund the WHO and exit this organization”

The WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus should NOT be in a position of power over anyone.

Ethiopia’s then-public health minister, Tedros, was forced to admit he publicly lied about his government’s role in killing more than 700 peaceful harvest festival attendees in 2016.

Tedros’ party caused controversy when armed soldiers stormed the stage of an opposing tribe’s harvest festival, firing tear gas and machine guns at festival goers. Then-Foreign Minister Tedros declared that there was “no shooting” and that his party’s “police” were “unarmed,” despite videos and pictures of the event that showed civilian bodies riddled with bullets.

This was only one of many acts of the party that Tedros oversaw, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a U.S. State Department-designated terror group.

Beginning in 1991, the TPLF ruled Ethiopia for the better part of three decades with a bloody and iron fist. But when the Ethiopian people found out the truth, they revolted shortly after the festival massacre, forcing Tedros and his cronies from power.

Now Biden is fighting to put this same person, Tedros, in power over the whole world and all of our resources. This is like turning over a herd of lambs to the wolves themselves!

Demand that Congress STOP Biden’s efforts to abandon American freedom and give WHO the power to demand Vaccine Passports, declare emergencies and how long they will last, control lockdowns and even control what goes on inside your own body! Send your critical faxes now!

As public health minister, Tedros claimed to have eradicated cholera from Ethiopia, a highly treatable bacterial infection of the intestines. However, it was later found that the disease had not been wiped out at all. In fact, cholera wreaked havoc on Ethiopia’s population, killing thousands during outbreaks in 2006, 2008, and 2011, among others, all of which occurred during Tedros’ oversight.

Tedros had not eradicated cholera at all. Instead, he ordered Ethiopian health officials to LIE, renaming the disease by classifying cholera deaths simply as death from “watery diarrhea,” even when tests proved that the “watery diarrhea” was caused by cholera.

Even today Ethiopia continues to be riddled with cholera, despite the fact the disease is easily treatable with simple rehydration and antibiotics.

The man with scant medical training, who lied about cholera, and lied about attempted genocide somehow managed to become the director-general of the United Nations’ World Health Organization.

Some, including French diplomats involved in the process, claim Tedros’ appointment to the WHO was a direct result of Bill Gates and his foundation lobbying on behalf of the Ethiopian tyrant. That allegation may have merit, considering the vast amounts of “investment” money Gates gave Tedros to implement Gates’ health initiatives in Ethiopia.

But Tedros’ compulsion for lies and disease cover-ups did not end when he left Africa for Geneva, Switzerland. As director-general of the WHO, Tedros regularly spread propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including a 2020 social media post in which Tedros’ WHO claimed that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of novel Coronavirus 19.”

Just a few months later, millions worldwide would be dead, thanks to Tedros’ lies and refusal to endorse effective treatments like ivermectin against COVID. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is a serial liar and a member of an internationally recognized terror organization.

If Joe Biden signs the WHO’s upcoming Pandemic Treaty and revised International Health Regulations, the man whose lies killed thousands of Ethiopians and millions of people around the world will be fully in charge of AMERICA’s health system!

We must not allow WHO to control our health care decisions and everything else they have placed in this Pandemic Treaty. Tell members of Congress to do everything in their power to stop Joe Biden’s subversion of our sovereignty and block the “NEW WORLD ORDER”!

Ethiopia ranks near last in every measure of the World Health Organization’s analysis of global health care systems. Of the 194 WHO member nations, Ethiopia ranks 180 in overall health system performance, according to the WHO data.

Other data from sources as disparate as Brittanica, UNICEF, and even the U.S. State Department and Central Intelligence Agency paint an even more vivid picture of severely flawed Ethiopian health care.

  • One in 20 children born in Ethiopia will not live past 5 years old — a number, according to Brittanica, which is nearly double the world average and more than eight times higher than the U.S. child mortality rate.
  • About 65% of Ethiopian girls are forced to undergo “Female Genital Mutilation” (FGM), a barbaric practice of partial or total removal of the female external genitalia with no anesthesia or topical anesthetic.
  • The average life expectancy of the average Ethiopian is under 65 years of age.
  • Leading causes of death among all ages are bronchitis and diarrhea, both of which are highly treatable in western countries.

Given these appalling statistics, few if any would want the Ethiopian health minister making our health care decisions. But Joe Biden is working to put the entirety of U.S. health care under Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Ethiopia’s former health minister who is now the WHO director-general.

If we don’t stop him, Biden will be successful. But we must stop this coup from happening to our medical field and our constitutional rights — all at the same time. Send your urgent faxes to Congress to oppose this WHO takeover.

Please also consider helping Liberty Counsel Action. Our staff has boots on the ground on Capitol Hill right now doing everything in our power to protect freedom and stop the WHO. Give today to have a hand in helping fight this tyranny. Even a small recurring monthly donation would help so much!

Mat Staver, Chairman

Liberty Counsel Action

Army Tries to Bring Back Soldiers Booted for Refusing the COVID Vaccine

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In August of 2021, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made the COVID vaccination shot a requirement for all U.S. servicemembers. President Joe Biden released a statement revealing his strong support before it went into effect. As a result, Politico reported that over “8,400 troops were kicked out of the military for refusing the vaccine.” About a year later, Biden signed a defense bill that repealed the vaccine mandate.

This month, news broke that the Army has sent letters to many of the troops who were ousted, which explains that soldiers can correct their records and reenter the service. The reversal has been met with tremendous backlash.

Retired Army Major Chase Spears wrote about the mistreatment servicemembers faced while the vaccine mandate was in effect. He shared, “The Army requires several immunizations and checkups throughout the year to maintain one’s medical readiness. Not one of those came with the coercive force of the COVID mandate. … It became the primary marker of human worth.” For Spears, the Army officials who heavily enforced the mandate seem to have no remorse for their actions. He added, “Hearkening back to biblical language, you were clean or unclean based on your shot status.”

Spears described the policy reversal as “a step toward sanity,” but concluded “it is far from enough.” “The question is whether those who made such un-American policy decisions can be trusted going forward.” He believes they cannot. Those affected by the military’s course of action have insisted this is a matter of trust and warn the military is about to get a wake-up call from the soldiers who no longer have confidence in the current leadership.

Many of the soldiers affected by the vaccine mandate were deprived of pay and benefits. According to Breitbart, retired attorney Dale Saran and attorneys Andy Meyer and Brandon Johnson are representing former troops who were kicked out “in three separate lawsuits they plan to turn into a class action lawsuit.” Saran estimated roughly “80,000 to 100,000 service members — both active-duty and reservists — who were impacted by the mandate.”

Mike Berry, vice president of External Affairs, director of Military Affairs, and senior counsel for First Liberty Institute, commented to The Washington Stand, “The only way an all-volunteer military works is with trust. But these past few years, the Pentagon has done nothing but shatter the trust of our servicemembers and veterans with lies, broken promises, and incompetence.” He explained that when First Liberty first “sued the Navy over its COVID vaccine mandate,” they warned them that the “unlawful manner in which the DOD was enforcing the mandate would result in a recruiting crisis.”

On Tuesday’s episode of “Washington Watch,” Berry unpacked the mandate’s rollback more. As far as he’s concerned, the problem with the letter is that it “doesn’t say anything about accountability.” He added, “It’s not about accomplishing the mission. And in this case, it’s not about protecting religious freedom, which is one of the things that our military exists to do.” He concluded, “They know what this is all about. This is all about just trying to save face, trying to make sure that on paper, our military is meeting its recruiting and retention numbers.”

Travis Weber, vice president for Policy and Government Affairs at Family Research Council and a Navy veteran, also commented to TWS, “The military never should have coerced its servicemembers to get the vaccine to begin with.” For Weber and all those witnessing the unfolding of the military’s actions, we “are dealing with the fallout as they try to woo back the thousands that they kicked out for refusing to violate their consciences and get the vaccine.”

Weber shared that it’s not surprising that servicemembers would be hesitant to return “to an institution that so easily thrust them aside in the face of public pressure” during COVID, which “the military bowed to along with much of the rest of society.” He concluded, “May this sad episode never be repeated, and may our nation’s military and civilian leadership be on guard to ensure they actually lead and not simply follow the blowing winds of public sentiment.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

Thousands Sign Petition to Boycott Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade over Trans Agenda

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‘Tis the season to boycott. At least that’s what 40,000 petitioners have signed up to do with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Dating back to 1924, the parade has been a beloved kickoff to the holidays. As New York City streets are filled with floats, costumes, dancing, music, and all kinds of talent, the event has traditionally been designed for family fun. But One Million Moms (OMM), an organization of Christians, have launched a campaign against the parade for its “liberal nonsense.”

This year, two performances will be featured from the Broadway musicals “& Juliet” and “Shucked,” which both have key actors who identify as either transgender or non-binary. OMM and those participating in the protest are concerned with the LGBT agenda being so heavily promoted at an event geared toward the family. As the group stated, “Shame on Macy’s for promoting and sponsoring this type of entertainment. … It is clear that Macy’s does not have our children’s best interests in mind.” The statement concluded, “Macy’s needs to know that trust must be earned, and once trust is lost, it is difficult to get back.”

Kristen Waggoner, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), also added to the criticism, insisting, “Macy’s inclusion of a non-binary transgender character in a parade is just another example of an ideological war that’s being waged on families, and customers are saying they’ve had enough. But it seems that corporate brands that were once trusted just still aren’t getting the message.”

This isn’t the first time the parade has featured LGBT content. In 2018, there was a same-sex kiss that was broadcasted for thousands to see. And in 2021, Kim Petras, a man who identifies as a woman, performed. Petras recently said in an interview that his “goal” is for his fans to engage in sex during his performances.

The protest is geared toward two non-binary identifying actors who will be featured in the performances during the parade. The musicals being showcased are “& Juliet” and “Shucked.” The actor, Alex Newell, uses all pronouns and plays the character, Lulu, in “Shucked.” The other actor, Justin David Sullivan, also identifies as all pronouns. He plays the non-binary character, May, in “& Juliet,” the reimagined Shakespearean classic where Romeo dies, but Juliet goes on to experience love and life “her way.”

OMM’s petition has received pushback, and the organization is now considered a “hate group” by The Southern Poverty Law Center, a controversial leftist group with their own internal scandals. The New York Times’ Stefanos Chen wrote that this boycott is “the latest attempt to force companies to reverse course on social issues that some far-right groups consider too liberal.”

But despite opposition, Waggoner said what we are seeing is “parents stand up” against woke ideology to keep events such as these “family friendly and not teach our children values that we object to.” Ultimately, OMM, ADF, and those who are speaking out have made it clear that families just want to be able to enjoy events without worrying about what they or their kids will be exposed to.

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, commented to The Washington Stand, “I hope there is a dog show or something else possibly appropriate for family viewing on broadcast television that day.” She explained how moms “are busy making delicious Thanksgiving meals for their families and friends to enjoy” and serving their communities, and that “it would be nice if Hollywood or Broadway could show their appreciation for families by not forcing a sexual agenda into what seems like every kind of entertainment.”

Kilgannon concluded, “The innocence of childhood and the excitement of the Thanksgiving Day parades should not be mutually exclusive. It’s important to keep this kind of activity family friendly for the other participants in the parade as well, since high school marching bands, community dance troupes, and other family organizations have traditionally participated in the parade.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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PODCAST: Thankfulness vs. Gratitude: Is Thanksgiving a Christian Holiday?

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

OB-GYN Testifies Before Congress on Alarming Miscarriage Spike Among Vaxxed Women, ‘I’ve Never Seen This Before’

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The greatest medical crime in human history.

OB-GYN Testifies on Alarming Miscarriage Spike among Vaxxed Women

By: Frank Bergman, Slay News, November 14, 2023:

A leading American obstetrician-gynecologist, or OB-GYN, has testified before Congress regarding an alarming spike in miscarriages among women who have received Covid mRNA injections.

On Monday, Dr. Kimberly Biss, an OB-GYN who has been involved in 8,000 pregnancies, joined a panel of experts to testify before Congress in the “Injuries Caused by COVID-19 Vaccines” hearing on Capitol Hill.

“I’ve never seen this before,” Biss warned congressional lawmakers.

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who led the hearing, asked Biss:

“How many of your patients or pregnant women that you know of experience miscarriages after taking the COVID-19 vaccines — or injections?”

Biss first explained that the vaccination rate among her patient population was about 60%.

She revealed that most of the patients received three injections.

“Very few received four or more,” Biss noted.

Read more.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE RELATED COVID VACCCINE ARTICLES

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

COVID-19 Vaccine Reckoning is Coming

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Covid vaccine lawsuits are coming in numbers that will blow you away.

“No One Is Safe”

A QUARTER of Americans Say Someone They Know Died from COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects

Vaccine Injury Data Is Clear: COVID Vaccines Are Killing an Estimated 1 Person Per 1,000 Doses (676,000 Dead Americans)

A COVID-19 vaccine reckoning is coming for the DOJ over federal gov mandates

By: Miranda Devine, NY Post, Nov. 12, 2023:

The Justice Department has just posted a new jobs ad — it’s looking for eight new attorneys to defend the federal government in vaccine injury cases.

Presumably, the hiring spree is in anticipation of a surge in COVID vaccine lawsuits, as people who were forced by government mandates to take the jab, and suffered serious side effects as a result, try to extract compensation from a system that is stacked against them.

“The office is currently expanding to address workload created by an increase in cases filed under the Vaccine Act,” reads the ad posted by the Torts Branch of the DOJ on the USAJobs website.

The recruitment drive comes on the heels of a little-noticed lawsuit filed in Louisiana last month by six vaccine-injured plaintiffs against the federal government.

[…]

Mandates & misery

Meanwhile, almost 13,000 Americans who claim the COVID vaccine caused them or their dead loved ones adverse reactions —such as the life-threatening heart ailment myocarditis or the debilitating immune disorder Guillain-Barre Syndrome — remain in limbo after doing what they were told was “the right thing”: heeding government mandates to submit to the jab.

The unaccountable, understaffed government tribunal that presides over the so-called Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), for vaccines administered under emergency measures, is a “kangaroo court,” says the lawsuit filed by attorney Aaron Siri, partner at New York firm Siri & Glimstad.

“The CICP is akin to a Potemkin village . . . an elaborate façade designed to hide an undesirable reality.

“Claims are consistently lost, ignored, denied, or caught up in the years-long purgatory of government bureaucracy. The compensation, if any, is neither timely nor adequate.”

Just six people had been compensated by October this year, of more than 12,775 COVID injury claims submitted to the CICP since Jan. 31, 2020, when the Trump administration declared a public health emergency.

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED VIDEO: Congresswoman MTG Holds Hearing on Injuries Caused by COVID-19 Vaccines with Special Witnesses

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

Lose—Lose: Mike Johnson, Pornography, and the Scorn of the Left

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Pornography is one of the Left’s favorite political tools. It can be used to cudgel, browbeat, castigate, and shame conservatives into silence — a potential that leftists capitalize on every chance they get. The best part about it — for leftists, at any rate — is that it’s a double-edged sword, as the case of newly-minted speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) makes evident.

Most of the time, lefties berate conservative leaders who get busted using pornography. Look at Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) back in 2017: when Cruz’s Twitter account “liked” a pornographic tweet, leftist media outlets began their bullying, including trying to link Cruz’s political career and personal history to an obsession with the porn industry. It was later revealed that a staffer with access to the Twitter account liked the video, but the cudgeling, browbeating, castigating, and shaming had already begun.

This is the most effective use of porn as a political tool, as it not only isolates the outed conservative from his typically-not-fond-of-porn voter base, but also labels him a hypocrite, as the conservative ideology (and even the Republican Party platform) condemn porn use. But this time around, leftists are taking Johnson to task for… not watching porn.

That’s right, in a recently-resurfaced video clip, Johnson stated that he uses Covenant Eyes, an online filter and accountability program that blocks porn from laptops and cell phones and sends a designated accountability partner a regular update on websites visited. During a panel discussion entitled “War on Technology” hosted last year at Cypress Baptist Church in Benton, Louisiana, Johnson explained that Covenant Eyes had been suggested to him at a marriage conference called “Promise Keepers.” Conference speakers also suggested fathers sign up their sons once they hit the teenage years and serve as their sons’ accountability partners. Following this advice, Johnson signed up his teenage son for Covenant Eyes and the two have been one another’s accountability partners, receiving daily reports on what websites the other visited. He quipped, “I’m proud to tell you my son has got a clean slate.”

Left-wing media pundits and publications have, predictably, piled on Johnson for his position on porn. The vociferously pro-LGBT outlet “Pink News” wrote, “The revelation is yet another example of Johnson’s conservative views, which include him making a number of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion statements.” The online magazine also asked, “Should House Speaker Mike Johnson allow third-party surveillance apps on his personal devices?”

The far more mainstream Rolling Stone piled on, “Since he was elected Speaker of the House in October, Johnson’s history as a faith-obsessed, election-denying, far-right Christian nationalist has come under the microscope…” and referred to using porn-blocking and accountability software as “creepy Big Brother-ness…” The “Receipt Maven” Twitter account, which resurfaced the original clip, quipped, “[S]o basically don’t watch porn or your son/dad will know…”

Thus far, pornography has been declared a public health emergency in 16 different states: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia. The detriments of pornography are myriad — physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. This quadfecta affects practically every aspect of the human experience.

Physically, pornography has been shown to cause severe erectile dysfunction in men and reduce sexual activity among couples; coupled with psychological effects, which include depression, anxiety, irritability, decreased self-esteem, decreased motivation, neglect for responsibilities and deadlines, and the altering of the brain’s chemical makeup, these first two categories alone are enough to label pornography detrimental. The effects of pornography on emotions are equally alarming — if not more so. Increased aggression and violence, a deep sense of shame and guilt, and an inability to see other human beings as anything but objects are just a few examples of the emotional toll porn use can take.

As horrific as all of this is, pornography may be most destructive in the spiritual quadrant. Porn use dulls and dims the soul’s ability to see others as being made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-27) and instead encourages the soul to turn inward upon itself, consuming others as meat instead of giving of oneself lovingly. Porn use destroys discipline, which impacts everything from fulfilling one’s professional and household duties to making time regularly for prayer. The sense of shame and guilt which accompanies porn use may also drive a soul away from God, too ashamed to seek His forgiveness.

Scientists have often noted that porn use typically progresses into more and more depraved categories. Scientifically, this is because the brain has become so desensitized to the images it sees that, in order to produce the dopamine the porn addict seeks, more extreme imagery must be viewed. In his novel “That Hideous Strength,” the great Christian author C.S. Lewis described this depraved progression of lust:

“It is idle to point out to the perverted man the horror of his perversion: while the fierce fit is on, that horror is the very spice of his craving. It is ugliness itself that becomes, in the end, the goal of his lechery; beauty has long since grown too weak stimulant.”

Spiritually, this seeking out of the more and more depraved, the more and more perverse is even more startling. As most Christians know, virtue is the bending of one’s own will to align with God’s. Those whom we consider holiest, noblest, and most saintly are those whose wills are so in accord with God’s that there is little discernible difference. Cultivating such virtue, of course, is an arduous and even a lifelong task — it is no mere matter of wishing or wanting, and its demands are often high. The martyrs are prime examples of this: from Peter and Paul to Maximilian Kolbe and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the ardently virtuous offer their wills to God so completely that their very lives come along with them. Although all are, of course, made in the image and likeness of God, the virtuous are those who clarify that image and let it shine brightly and colorfully forth.

Conversely, those who live according to vice turn away from the image of God and remake themselves in the image of Hell. They bend their wills so far away from God’s own that they actually run in the opposite direction. Pornography is a horrifically illustrative example of this principle. God, of course, created sex. He made it to be something beautiful, intimate, loving, life-giving, and self-sacrificial. In fact, sex is itself also made in the image of God: God’s love is so great, so filled is He with love in each of His three persons, that He had to make that love flesh, it had to spill over into new life: mankind.

So also did God create sex to be a blessed marital act mirroring the love of the Trinity, a spilling over of a joyful, self-giving love that bears both spiritual fruit and, if God wills it, the physical fruit of a child. Porn warps and distorts this beauty, it takes the image of God out of sex and turns the whole act inwards upon itself, becoming a matter only of predatory self-satisfaction. No longer the giving of oneself in love and the openness to new life, porn is simply the consuming of others, stripping them of not just their clothes but their God-given dignity, their very humanity.

The progression of the pornographic perversion from one dehumanization to an even greater and more vile dehumanization is indicative of the soul’s turning away from God and remaking itself more and more nearly in the image of Hell, where, without sincerely repenting and accepting God’s grace and forgiveness, it will surely spend eternity.

Before his execution, Ted Bundy — the notorious serial killer who confessed to the kidnap, rape, and murder of 30 women — spoke to Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family about the link between his depraved crimes and pornography. Bundy told Dobson that between the ages of 10 and 13, he began a fascination with “soft-core” pornography. He explained, “I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of materials. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder, harder. Something which gives you a greater sense of excitement. Until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far.” Bundy stressed that, to all those around him, he was the image of a “normal person,” even the “All-American boy.” But, he said:

“I think people need to recognize that those of us who have been so much influenced by … pornographic violence are not some kinds of inherent monsters. We are your sons, and we are your husbands. And we grew up in regular families. And pornography can reach out and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home 20, 30 years ago, as diligent as my parents were, and they were diligent in protecting their children.”

Bundy was executed in 1989, back when pornography was only available in magazines and on VHS tapes bought at seedy downtown shops or smuggled from friend to friend at school. The pervasive nature and instant accessibility of internet pornography was something Bundy never witnessed. If pornography could “snatch a kid out of any house” in 1989, it now invades homes and devours children alive through their phones, tablets, and laptops. A recent survey by Common Sense Media found that 73% of teens reported they watch online pornography and over half reported that they had been exposed to pornography by the age of 13. Sadly, 15% admitted that they had seen porn before the age of 11.

As a devout Christian, Mike Johnson knows that it is his fatherly duty to protect his children from the soul-sucking scourge of pornography. Holding his son accountable through using Covenant Eyes in order to cultivate the virtue of chastity is not freakish, backwards, repressive, or controlling — it is noble, loving, caring, and truly masculine. What father would want to condemn his son to a life suffering from erectile dysfunction, emotional instability, an inability to experience emotional and sexual intimacy, a crippling addiction, exponentially-worsening depravity, and spiritual suicide?

It should be no surprise that the same mob which shows no concern for the blood of untold millions of unborn babies would deride a father for shielding his son from the horrors of pornography. Instead, leftists’ mockery of Johnson reveals their obsession with pornography. While they may take a flippant “lose-lose” approach to conservatives and porn — conservatives lose for getting caught looking at porn and lose for actively avoiding it — Johnson clearly takes the Christian approach: recognizing that both he and his son have lost if he doesn’t protect his son from the perverse cancer of pornography.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

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

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

The Left Wants Pro-Lifers to Despair after Tuesday’s Election. Don’t.

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Unlike a lot of things in life, losing doesn’t get any easier the more you do it. If anything, the sting turns to despair, as pro-lifers, who’ve slogged through seven bitter defeats since June of 2022, know well. Over the last several months, the jubilation of seeing Roe fall has been replaced by a sinking feeling that the cause of the unborn is doomed in the very place the justices have entrusted it: the states. But is that true — or are we just experiencing the pains of a battle we only just started fighting?

There had been real hope that Ohio, the first conservative state to weigh in on a radical abortion measure, would reverse the string of losses since Dobbs. When that didn’t happen, and Buckeyes voted 56-43% to let parents take their child’s life right up to the moment of birth, the media’s taunts that life is a political loser felt truer. Maybe, as notorious squishes like Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) are already saying, the movement should just give up. Stop talking about abortion.

But, as the editors of National Review so powerfully write, “In the mind of anyone who knows the truth that abortion deliberately kills an innocent human being, giving up on the most important human-rights cause of our time is unthinkable. After five decades of Roe and less than two years from Dobbs, the fight for life in the democratic arena has barely begun.”

Remember, they told discouraged readers, “Advocates of same-sex marriage suffered a string of 32 losses at the ballot box before succeeding for the first time, in the bluest of states, in 2012. … Their success serves as a reminder that a string of defeats at the ballot box is no reason to believe a cause is lost.”

For a half-century, pro-lifers have marched, prayed, volunteered, voted, suffered blows, and stepped right back into the ring — not because the cause was politically advantageous, but because it was morally right. That cause didn’t end when the Supreme Court righted one wrong. It ends when every square inch of this nation is a safe place for children in the womb. Anyone who thought that would be easy has quickly forgotten the lessons of the last 50 years.

We have to do what we’ve done since the beginning — stand up, dust ourselves off, and, as the NRO editors urge, “Take the long view on the fight on life.” “Do not despair,” pro-life scholar Michael New insists. “We were never promised a smooth glide path to victory. This is an important lesson. Because history tells us, when we persist, we win!”

Does that mean we don’t have things to learn? Absolutely not. We’re in a new and volatile political environment that Dobbs created, and if we’re going to turn the tide, it’ll take time. And while we don’t need to rethink our principles, we do need to rethink how we talk about them — if, in some cases, we even are.

In one of the more astonishing statistics from Tuesday night, a whopping 24% of self-described “white evangelical or born-again Christians” supported Ohio’s Issue 1, which not only puts the Buckeyes on par with California’s abortion extremism but gives the green light to minor transgender surgery — without parental consent. We’re expecting voters to act with moral clarity when the church won’t even speak to it. Until that changes, pro-lifers will have a much steeper hill to climb. If Christians have been complacent after the Dobbs victory, we need to ensure they’re no longer complicit after defeat.

Why would Christians be voting for abortion anyway? Family Research Council’s Joseph Backholm thinks the answer “could be the silence on these issues in many parts of the church. Many churches don’t want to be divisive, so they choose to say nothing, but when you say nothing you say something. Many Christians have been left with the impression that it doesn’t really matter what Christians think about abortion because the people they look to for guidance on these issues live and act like it doesn’t matter.”

Elsewhere, in Virginia, where abortion was the only messaging point Democrats had to run on, the media rushed to gloat that conservative agendas like Governor Glenn Youngkin’s had been rebuked. Among the more creative post-election name-calling was Fox Business’s Dagen McDowell, who labeled Youngkin a “damp Dorito” for putting so much emphasis on life.

But the reality is, NRO’s Jim Geraghty points out, “Virginia is shifting from narrow GOP control of the state House and narrow Democratic control of the state Senate, to narrow Democratic control of both chambers. Control of the state legislature is probably going to come down to a couple thousand votes in a handful of districts. It’s a frustrating result for the GOP, but not a sweeping rebuke.”

That step-away-from-the-ledge rationale was echoed by politicos like John McCormick, who noted that what happened Tuesday night isn’t all that different from what happened the year Youngkin won. “The House of Delegates went 52R-48D [to] 51D-49R house now.” And let’s not forget, he posted, Virginia is “a Biden +10 state,” and voters were still “evenly divided [46-47%] on a 15-week [abortion] limit.” Oh, and by the way, the damp Dorito has a 54-38% approval rating. Biden hasn’t sniffed a percentage like that since inauguration.

So losing the legislature by 1%, especially after Democrats banked their whole campaign on the outrageous lie that Republicans want to ban “all abortions without any exceptions” isn’t exactly a death knell for conservatism in the Commonwealth. And yet, McCormack shakes his head, “Twitter is treating it like a political earthquake.”

Even more encouraging, at least in the winning hearts and minds category, is that Americans believe the Democrats’ position on abortion is more extreme — by a two-to-one margin. Pro-lifers just have to figure out a way to continue driving that point home on the road to reasonable compromise.

In other words, Geraghty emphasizes, “The results last night are no reason to panic.” “The elections in the year before the presidential election are a little odd — much lower turnout, governors’ races in a trio of Southern states with their own quirky histories and dynamics, and intense waves of advertising in state legislative races that usually fly under the radar.”

But, he continues, “If you look back eight years to 2015, you see Republicans won two governors’ races (Kentucky, Mississippi) and lost one (Louisiana). This year, Republicans won two governors’ races (Louisiana, Mississippi) and lost one (Kentucky). (Jeff Landry won the Louisiana governor’s race in the first round in October, and everyone seems to have forgotten about that.)”

Tuesday night’s results were disappointing, to be sure, but they don’t negate all of 2023’s other victories. In a year that’s seen the beat-back of Pride, a surge of anti-woke boycotts, an education revolution, the repudiation of ESG, 19 signed SAFE Acts, a nationwide parents’ revolt, and the election of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), America is a long ways from writing social conservatives’ obituary. The cultural undercurrents continue to be strong on the Right, even if the electoral fruit doesn’t always bear that out.

The outcome in Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, and other states may not have been what we hoped for, worked for, or anticipated, but even in the midst of it, we shouldn’t once question what we did or what we stood for. In days like these, we have to keep an eternal perspective, remembering that, as Christians, we go from victory to victory. That doesn’t mean every election ends with a parade, because our battle is not temporal; it’s spiritual. Voters may reject the values that have sustained this nation for more than 240 years — but an election is not going to change the sovereignty of God.

Our charge is to not lose heart, to stay faithfully engaged in the struggle, and to pray. “In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus warned. “But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

“It took us 50 years to get here,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told TWS. “But the way forward is the same way we arrived at this point — continuing each and every day to win the hearts and minds of people by telling truth. Now, the volume has been ratcheted up where the lies are being fueled by millions of dollars, but that just means we need to speak the truth with more passion and more consistency to break through Left’s deception.” Even so, he insisted, “We’re not going to retreat. We’re not going anywhere.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

The Curious Case of Caster

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Caster Semenya, the “woman” runner who made waves years ago dusting female competition while appearing very male, is back in the news. The athlete has just written a new book, The Race to Be Myself; the problem is that most media reporting on Semenya either don’t know, or won’t say, what the runner’s physical “self” actually is.

Reporters may focus on Semenya’s “struggle” to compete — in 2019, rules took effect barring high-testosterone “female” athletes from running in certain events without suppressing their testosterone levels — as if the issue here is the allegedly unjust persecution of a minority. This leaves many observers with the impression that the runner is just another MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender”) individual. But here’s what the media don’t relate:

Leaked results of medical tests performed years ago informed that while Semenya apparently has external female genitalia, the runner has no womb or ovaries; moreover, Semenya does have an XY (male) genotype, internal testes and, consequently, male-range testosterone levels.

Thus is it clear to me that Semenya is a male who underwent abnormal intrauterine sexual development. Years ago, such a person was typically called a hermaphrodite.

So when claiming womanhood, Semenya probably isn’t trying to fool others (though the runner is likely being self-delusive; i.e., rationalizing). The larger issue, however, is that the controversy surrounding the athlete reflects how our society is fooling itself.

Unlike MUSS individuals, who clearly have psychological/spiritual issues, a biological condition does explain Semenya’s woes. It’s called 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency (5αR2D), a genetically induced problem that causes abnormal development in the womb and during puberty. It’s extremely rare and afflicts only males — or, as the establishment puts it, children “genetically male.” The condition causes a lack of dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which is necessary for the proper development of external male genitalia before birth.

This results in either ambiguous genitalia; poorly developed male genitalia; or frequently, genitalia that appear female at birth. Semenya apparently occupied the last category.

This means the runner’s family perhaps had every reason to believe, prior to puberty, that their child was a girl (except that Semenya was likely a “tomboy” to end all tomboys). At puberty, however, male characteristics began appearing (e.g., a deepening voice).

Whatever Semenya’s family might’ve suspected at that point, maybe deep in their minds’ recesses, it likely wouldn’t be anything with which they’d come to terms. So even during Semenya’s adolescence, they would’ve had a strong emotional vested interest in believing the runner was “just a girl” (though a bit different). Semenya clearly had, and has, the same overriding desire.

Because such an abnormality is a cross to bear, Semenya deserves compassion. For this reason, while I will studiously refer to a MUSS individual with pronouns reflecting his actual sex, I won’t reference the runner with either male pronouns or Semenya’s preferred female ones; I’ll just write “CS.”

But while sympathy is warranted, what CS doesn’t deserve is to compete with women. Understand that the runner is profoundly masculine. How much so? Well, many years ago, before CS’s medical evaluation, I predicted that an examination would show what one ultimately did: that CS had internal testes.

No, it wasn’t precognition, but that CS was not merely a muscular woman. It wasn’t just that the runner had the physique and voice of a teen boy and no mammary glands, either; rather, CS also exhibited male facial structure, mannerisms and behavior. As an example, take a look at the following video, of CS setting a South African national women’s record, paying particular attention to the 0:09 through 0:21 segment.

And below is an interview from mere days ago, in which CS’s masculine nature is also clear.

Personality and mannerisms are significant because, in reality, psychological sex differences may be even greater than the physical ones. The most extreme tomboys (and I’ve seen more than a few) may be athletic; may when young play sports with the boys, look for frogs with the boys and even fight with the boys; but they’ll still in significant ways have female personalities. The loudness, boisterousness and playful mischievousness characterizing small lads will, perhaps invariably, be absent.

Now, one commenter under the second above video wrote, “It’s not caster’s [sic] fault that she’s like this.” No, it’s not — but it’s not society’s fault, either. Nor is it society’s obligation to completely overturn its social norms to accommodate the rarest of problems. In our gratuitous focus on individuals and “rights,” we often forget that the “many” comprises individuals, too — and that the “good of the many outweighs the good of the few.”

This error occurs partially because the plight of an individual, as in CS’s case, will often become a human-interest story that tugs on heartstrings, as people’s emotions are manipulated; in contrast, the “many” are often left as a faceless collective, or mass, and are lumped into “society.” It then appears a matter of societal discrimination, of the many bullying the one, of a “brave soul” batting an oppressive, ossified “system” — despite the system being wholly on the anomalous individual’s side.

Yet to illustrate how silly this is in CS’s case, just consider how different this story would’ve been had CS had been born with poorly developed male external genitalia, which CS’s 5αR2D disorder could just as easily have induced:

We wouldn’t even be talking about CS — no one would even have heard of the athlete.

Yet the difference would be just superficial. In fact, it’s reasonable to conclude that a male MUSS individual who has had sexual-distortion surgery (sex glands removed) has less of an athletic advantage. After all, CS still has those testosterone-producing male sexual organs.

This said, none of this would mean as much were the issue just a matter of women losing some sporting titles and medals. Athletics is, after all, frivolity. The deeper problem is that whether it’s a CS-type situation or the MUSS agenda, the propaganda warps people’s sense of reality — and most egregiously, that of children.

CS can embrace the illusion, as the athlete does, of being a “different kind of woman” if CS wants. I’ll treat the runner kindly, too, given the cross CS bears. But legitimate compassion never extends to the deep societal indulgence of illusion, and a legitimate individual “right” never includes the requirement that everyone else must lie.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on MeWe or Gettr or log on to SelwynDuke.com

©2023. Selwyn Duke. All rights reserved.

WHO Furthers Effort to Establish Global Health Governance Apparatus

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On Monday, the World Health Organization (WHO) released the latest draft of its controversial International Health Regulations, with the purported aim to eventually establish a global accord on how to handle future pandemics. Expert observers are continuing to express concern with the regulations, saying that they are covertly designed to take away sovereignty from countries and push contentious issues such as abortion.

Jim Roguski, a member of the Law & Activism Committee at the World Council for Health, has been closely monitoring the WHO’s activities in the wake of the “serious failures” that the organization made since the COVID pandemic broke out in 2020. On Tuesday, he joined “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” to provide an update on where the accord currently stands.

“[T]he fact that it’s not referred to as a treaty is actually very important,” he explained. “What they are setting up is an ongoing series of what they call ‘the Conference of the Parties’ that would meet pretty much forever. And the idea is they’re trying to hash out an agreement just to have an agreement so that they can pat themselves on the back and say, ‘Look what great work we did.’”

Roguski continued, “I was actually a little bit surprised that from the last version, this version got smaller by about 12 pages. And so what they’re doing is trying to reach a basic, fundamental agreement to set up a bureaucracy that would meet on an ongoing basis, year after year after year, to impose protocols that we wouldn’t have any say over the matter, much like the Framework Convention for Climate Change that was agreed to by the United Nations back in 1992 — that ongoing system of forever unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats making decisions on our behalf without our input. It’s something that’s just absolutely not acceptable.”

Roguski went on to contend that the WHO’s true goal with the global accord is to force countries to make substantial financial investments into experimental and unproven vaccines.

“The thing to realize … is that it doesn’t have any resemblance to what people would think of as health,” he pointed out. “It’s really a financial venture capital prospectus to literally get developed nations to invest money in infrastructure, in developing nations, to build out more laboratories, more testing facilities, more mRNA manufacturing facilities. … [The] Global Preparedness Monitoring Board put out a report … tracking the mRNA manufacturing plants in Africa. [W]hat they’re really looking for is not an evaluation of the mistakes that happened over the last three or four years. They’re more than doubling down. They want to build the infrastructure to do more of what they did to us over the past four years.”

As the WHO considers amendments to the accord at its planned meeting in Geneva, Switzerland next week, Roguski strongly encouraged the public to contact their representatives and urge them to reject the amendments.

“[T]here’s an 18-month period for every nation on the planet to reject the amendments that the Biden administration shoved through on May 27, 2022,” he explained. “[We] put together a page, which is rejecttheamendments.com, where people can download a letter, sign it, and just mail it to your congressmen [and] your senators. … I really want the Senate to pay attention and submit H.R. 79, or at least a copy of it in the Senate, so those amendments can still be rejected.”

“I certainly feel that the senators and members of Congress should come together, understand this issue, and realize that they need to take action because their silence is viewed as consent,” Roguski underscored. “And that is just absolutely not acceptable.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: The Fundamental Transformation of the W.H.O. From Health Advisor to Global Dictator

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

Taxpayer-Funded Trans Procedures Lead Even Pioneers to Say Things Have ‘Gotten Out of Hand’

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U.S. taxpayers funded life-altering transgender surgeries, despite that fact that one of the global pioneers in the field says “gender transition has gotten out of hand” and likened it to the “recovered memory” craze that hurt vulnerable patients and tore families apart during the 1980s.

The hospital that opened the nation’s first pediatric gender transition facility, Boston Children’s Hospital, received $1.4 million from the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) of Massachusetts for inflicting “gender transition services” between January 2015 and May 2023. The hospital’s Center for Gender Surgery carried out 204 transgender surgeries between 2017 and 2020 — including 65 gender-conversion surgeries on minors. The controversial facility offers double-mastectomies to children as young as 15 and phalloplasty to girls at the age of 17.

Boston Children’s Hospital would not disclose whether state taxpayer funds paid for minors’ transgender surgeries, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation, which broke the story.

This is far from the only time politicians have compelled taxpayers to fund transgender procedures at the child-mutilating facility. Boston Children’s Hospital received a $3.3 million grant from the Biden administration’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) to build a website targeting young people in other states who identify as transgender, as well as to train the hospital’s staff. The hospital also took part in a five-year, NIH-funded study that monitored minors aged 12-20 who received cross-gender hormones; 240 of its 315 participants were underage. Two committed suicide, and 11 more contemplated ending their lives.

The negative outcomes trans-identifying youth suffer as a result of “gender-affirming care” matches the experience of Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a Finnish psychiatrist who established a gender transition clinic for minors in 2011. She has since participated in the evaluation of 500 children dealing with gender dysphoria.

“Soon after our hospital began offering hormonal interventions for these patients, we began to see that the miracle we had been promised was not happening,” she writes in an exposé in The Free Press. “The young people we were treating were not thriving.” Even when “young people insisted their lives had improved and they were happier,” the evidence belied their self-assessment. “They were withdrawing from all social activities. They were not making friends. They were not going to school.” And her colleagues across the continent “were seeing the same things.”

These patients, and the detransitioners who followed, are the “kind of patient who wasn’t supposed to exist.”

In 2015, the children visiting her changed from young men who had always identified as female. Now, the overwhelming majority of her patients were young women suffering from Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD): “90 percent of our patients were girls, mainly 15 to 17 years old, and instead of being high-functioning, the vast majority presented with severe psychiatric conditions.”

“Some came from families with multiple psychosocial problems. Most of them had challenging early childhoods marked by developmental difficulties, such as extreme temper tantrums and social isolation,” she writes. “In adolescence they were lonely and withdrawn. Some were no longer in school, instead spending all their time alone in their room. They had depression and anxiety, some had eating disorders, many engaged in self-harm, a few had experienced psychotic episodes.” One of their patients was mute, and “more than a quarter of our patients were on the autism spectrum.”

An American whistleblower, Jamie Reed, said the same conditions held at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, where she said clinicians regularly ignored their patients’ panoply of other psychological and social conditions.

Most of the Dutch patients had never presented any gender dysphoria before coming to Dr. Kaltiala, who says ROGD had become the dominant patient profile for everyone working in the pediatric transgender field. The patients’ stories shared so many similarities, “We realized they were networking and exchanging information about how to talk to us.”

Although she authored a 2015 study questioning some aspects of the transgender-industry orthodoxy, she and her colleagues around the world felt pressured to keep their concerns private. “Even during the first few years of the clinic, gender medicine was becoming rapidly politicized,” Dr. Kaltiala writes. Activists in psychologists’ poses promised that young people would find “all their mental health problems would be alleviated by these interventions. Of course, there is no mechanism by which high doses of hormones resolve autism or any other underlying mental health condition.”

The condition holds true in the United States, she affirms, where the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have refused to hear dissenting voices or read data that contradict their predetermined conclusions. Yet “one new study shows that nearly 30 percent of patients in the sample ceased filling their hormone prescription within four years.”

“Anyone, including physicians, researchers, academics, and writers, who raised concerns about the growing power of gender activists, and about the effects of medically transitioning young people, were subjected to organized campaigns of vilification and threats to their careers,” she states. “We were being told to intervene in healthy, functioning bodies simply on the basis of a young person’s shifting feelings about gender,” she writes. “Identity achievement is the outcome of successful adolescent development, not its starting point.”

The doctor finds the transgender industry’s high-pressure sales tactics, in which they falsely claim a child will commit suicide unless parents allow the industry to begin transgender procedures, disreputable. Research, she notes, showing transgender-related “suicide is very rare. It is dishonest and extremely unethical to pressure parents into approving gender medicalization by exaggerating the risk of suicide.” The U.K.’s Tavistock Institute, which until recently carried out transgender procedures on minors, reported only four out of 15,032 patients had ended their lives. “The proportion of individual patients who died by suicide was 0.03%,” reported a 2022 study. Although these deaths are tragic, “[t]he fact that deaths were so rare should provide some reassurance” to parents.

Dr. Kaltiala likens “[w]hat is happening to dysphoric children” to the “recovered memory craze of the 1980s and ’90s. During that period, many troubled women came to believe false memories, often suggested to them by their therapists, of nonexistent sexual abuse by their fathers or other family members.” The psychologist-guided lies tore families apart, as children falsely believed their family meant them harm.

“[L]ike recovered memory, gender transition has gotten out of hand,” writes Dr. Kaltiala. “When medical professionals start saying they have one answer that applies everywhere, or that they have a cure for all of life’s pains, that should be a warning to us all that something has gone very wrong,” she concludes.

Americans caught up in the transgender debate welcome the skepticism of Dr. Kaltiala and others across Europe, where nations have progressively changed their protocols to protect children and adolescents from these experimental interventions.

“Gender dysphoria is far more invasive than any other diagnosis in the DSM,” Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, director of the Center for Family Studies at Family Research Council, told FRC President Tony Perkins earlier this month. “Not only are we diagnosing early with something that would be considered a lifelong enduring pattern, but we’re also attaching interventions that are really dangerous and life-altering while a person is still a child.”

“Despite the popular spin, even the leading advocates of medically transitioning youth concede there are substantial research gaps and a lack of knowledge concerning long-term outcomes,” states “The Trans Youth Phenomenon: Critiques & Hard Questions,” a publication co-written by Bauwens as a collaboration between Family Research Council and the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.

Nationally, the transgender industry carried out transgender surgeries on 3,678 minors between 2016 and 2019 nationwide, and “405 patients (11.0%) aged 12 to 18 years underwent genital surgery,” according to a report from the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Network Open. More than one in four (25.3%) of the 48,019 people who underwent transgender surgeries during that time paid the bill with taxpayer-funded Medicaid. After the Obama-Biden administration swelled the ranks of Americans eligible for Medicaid, surging “Medicaid spending is ‘crowding out’ spending on other major state programs, most notably education and transportation infrastructure,” reported the Mercatus Center.

Transgender activists are advocating for Ohio’s Issue 1, which would make it illegal for the state to “directly or indirectly” burden any “individual” right to make “reproductive decisions,” language broad enough to require taxpayer-funded abortion and transgender surgeries for minors without parental notification — a position favored by several of Issue 1’s authors/sponsors.

Dr. Kaltiala’s decision to oppose transgender procedures for minors grew out of the reason she got into psychiatry in the first place: “My patients’ adult lives are still ahead of them, so it can make a huge difference to someone’s future to help a young person who is on a destructive track to find a more favorable course.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

BANNED VIDEOS: Plandemic — Indoctornation Parts 1 & 2

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STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • “Plandemic — Indoctornation” reveals the driving forces behind the vaccine agenda. It looks at the roles of the World Health Organization, Bill Gates, Tedros Adhanom, Dr. Anthony Fauci, mainstream media, Silicon Valley tech giants, Big Pharma and many others, connecting the dots between them
  • The U.S. CDC owns the patent for SARS-CoV (the virus responsible for SARS) isolated from humans. In 2007, the CDC filed a petition with the patent office to keep their coronavirus patent confidential. They also own patents for detection methods, and for a kit to measure the virus
  • By law, one cannot patent naturally-occurring DNA. If SARS-CoV is natural, then the patent is illegal. If the virus is manmade, the patent is legal, but the creation of the virus would be a violation of biological weapons treaties and laws. So, either way, the CDC has engaged in illegal activity
  • Because the CDC owns the patent on SARS-CoV, it controls who has the ability to make inquiries into it. Unless authorized, you cannot look at the virus, you cannot measure it or make tests for it, since they own all those patents. This means the CDC has a major profit motive

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill owns a patent describing methods for producing recombinant coronaviruses.

This article originally ran in 2020, but its contents are still highly relevant to what’s happening today. I encourage you to donate to the NVIC and support their goal in protecting consumer rights to vaccine informed consent. Every donation to this non-profit organization can surely make a difference

Late in May 2020, media producer Mikki Willis released the first part of his documentary “Plandemic,” featuring Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., a cellular and molecular biologist1 whose research revealed many vaccines are contaminated with gammaretroviruses, due to the viruses being grown in contaminated animal cell lines. The 26-minute film was banned on every social media platform after going viral.2 August 18, 2020, Part 2, titled “Plandemic — Indoctornation,” was released.

Plandemic — Indoctornation

Part 2 is a full-length feature, revealing the driving force behind the vaccine agenda. It looks at the roles of the World Health Organization, Bill Gates, Tedros Adhanom, Dr. Anthony Fauci, mainstream media, Silicon Valley tech giants, Big Pharma and many others, connecting the dots between them. Willis interviews a variety of individuals, including:

Activist and journalist Theo Wilson Researcher Dr. Aaron Lewis

Board-certified primary care physician Dr. Jeff Barke

 Attorney, science teacher and author Kent Heckenlively
Sherri Tenpenny, D.O. Dr. Rashid Buttar, medical director for the Centers for Advanced Medicine
Author Curtis Cost Attorney David J. Follin
Author and winner of the Doctors Who Rock Truth in Journalism Award 2017, Erin Elizabeth NJ state representative Jamel C. Holley
Dr. Colin Gonsalves, senior counsel, Supreme Court of India Legal researcher Travis Middleton
Mary Holland, vice chair and general counsel for the Children’s Health Defense Educator and activist Peggy Hall
Kevin Jenkins, CEO of Urban Global Health Alliance Professor John Oller, researcher in theoretical and experimental biosemiotics
Engineer and Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies Dr. George Zabrecky, physician, medical educator and researcher
Dr. Pamela Popper, president of Wellness Forum Health Scientist Denis Rancourt, Ph.D.
Dr. Meryl Nass, physician, researcher and writer Professor Dolores J. Cahill, Ph.D., a molecular biologist and immunologist
Professor Luc Montagnier, a Nobel Laureate, medical researcher and virologist

Free supplemental footage, including a follow-up interview with Mikovits, as well as links to additional resources provided by all of the interviewees are supposed to be available on the film’s website, plandemicseries.com.

Event 201

The film starts out by reviewing Event 201, a pandemic preparedness simulation hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in October 2019 — 10 weeks before the COVID-19 outbreak first began in Wuhan.

This scripted tabletop exercise included everything we now see playing out in real time, in the real world, from PPE shortages, lockdowns and removal of civil liberties to mandated vaccination campaigns, riots, economic turmoil and the breakdown of social cohesion. A highlight reel of the predictions put forth during this event is included in the documentary.

At the time, they spent a great deal of time discussing ways to limit and counter the spread of expected “misinformation” about the pandemic and the vaccines that would have to be developed. In addition to outright censorship, their plan included the use of “soft power,” a term referring to stealth influencing using celebrities and other social media influencers.

I discussed this in “The PR Firm Behind WHO’s Celeb Endorsements.” Just as in real life, one of the pieces of “misinformation” that had to be countered was rumors that the virus had been created and released from a bioweapons laboratory.

Operation Mockingbird Never Ended, It Just Got Privatized

The film also reveals how SARS-CoV-2 has been turned into a profit center, the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2, and how Silicon Valley tech giants are controlling the narrative, pushing fearmongering and censoring differing views.

What we’re seeing is straight out of the Operation Mockingbird playbook, a clandestine CIA media influencing campaign launched in the 1950s. During the Cold War, the CIA used it to spread propaganda. It recruited journalists to pen fake stories that disparaged communist ideologies.

Today, they’re doing the complete opposite, promoting radical socialist ideas that support their plan for a technocratic economic system.

Shockingly, the reason this shadow government — led by government contractors, privatized intelligence companies — are able to manipulate public opinion is because they’ve been illegally siphoning the data collected by the NSA from all Americans, and privatizing it.

All of our personal data, combined with artificial intelligence and so-called localization strategies, allows sophisticated computer programs to predict which action or public message will result in a particular outcome.

We’re in the midst of a social engineering project that poses a serious existential threat to our personal liberty and freedom. We’re all exposed to it daily, and have been for years. It’s just that now it’s become so pervasive, it’s blatantly obvious for anyone willing to see it. As you’d expect, “Plandemic — Indoctornation” also spends some time reviewing the role of Bill Gates and his foundation.

CDC Owns Coronavirus Patents

Willis interviews David E. Martin, Ph.D., a national intelligence analyst and founder of IQ100 Index, which developed linguistic genomics, a platform capable of determining the intent of communications. According to Martin, in 1999, IBM digitized 1 million U.S. patents, which allowed his company to conduct a review.

Using linguistic genomics technology, Martin made the “horrific assessment” that one-third of all patents filed in the U.S. were functional forgeries, meaning that “while they had linguistic variations, they covered the same subject matter.” In 1999, patents for coronavirus also started to appear, “and thus began the rabbit trail,” Martin says.

In 2003, Asia experienced an outbreak of SARS. Almost immediately, scientists began racing to patent the virus. Ultimately, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nabbed ownership of SARS-CoV (the virus responsible for SARS) isolated from humans.

The CDC actually owns the entire genetic content of that SARS virus. It’s patented under U.S. patent 7776521. They also own patents for detection methods, and for a kit to measure the virus.

U.S. patent 7279327,3 filed by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, describes methods for producing recombinant coronaviruses. Ralph Baric, Ph.D., a professor of microbiology and immunology who is famous for his chimeric coronavirus research, is listed as one of the three inventors, along with Kristopher Curtis and Boyd Yount.

According to Martin, Fauci, Baric and the CDC “are at the hub” of the COVID-19 story. “In 2002, coronaviruses were recognized as an exploitable mechanism for both good and ill,” Martin says, and “Between 2003 and 2017, they [Fauci, Baric and CDC] controlled 100% of the cash flow to build the empire around the industrial complex of coronavirus.”

CDC Has Broken the Law, One Way or Another

Now, here’s the key take-home message Martin delivers. There’s a distinct problem with the CDC’s patent on SARS-CoV isolated from humans, because, by law, naturally occurring DNA segments are prohibited from being patented.

The law clearly states that such segments are “not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated.” So, either SARS-CoV was manmade, which would render the patent legal, or it’s natural, thus rendering the patent on it illegal.

However, if the virus was manufactured, then it was created in violation of biological weapons treaties and laws. This includes the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, passed unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by George Bush Sr., which states:4

“Whoever knowingly develops, produces, stockpiles, transfers, acquires, retains, or possesses any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system for use as a weapon, or knowingly assists a foreign state or any organization to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both. There is extraterritorial Federal jurisdiction over an offense under this section committed by or against a national of the United States.”

So, as noted by Martin, regardless of which scenario turns out to be true, the CDC has broken the law one way or another, either by violating biological weapons laws, or by filing an illegal patent. Even more egregious, May 14, 2007, the CDC filed a petition with the patent office to keep their coronavirus patent confidential.

Now, because the CDC owns the patent on SARS-CoV, it has control over who had the ability to make inquiries into the coronavirus, Martin notes. Unless authorized, you cannot look at the virus, you cannot measure it or make tests for it, since they own the entire genome and all the rest.

“By obtaining the patents that restrained anyone from using it, they had the means, the motive, and most of all, they had the monetary gain from turning coronavirus from a pathogen to a profit,” Martin says.

Dangerous Gain-of-Function Research Was Permitted

Martin goes on to describe events occurring between 2012 and 2013. At that time, the National Institutes of Health decided to take another look at gain-of-function research, ultimately deciding that gain-of-function research on coronavirus was too risky to continue.

This led to the suspension of funding of such research in 2013. That included funding flowing into Harvard, Emery and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. However, while the NIH had moral and even legal reasons for suspending such research, they made the funding pause voluntary, not mandatory.

Then, in 2014, when the push-back against gain-of-function research into coronaviruses grew further, the NIH — under the leadership of Fauci — offshored that research to — you guessed it — the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

However, as detailed by Martin, the funding was not sent in a straight-forward way. Instead, it was funneled through front organizations such as the EcoHealth Alliance, led by its president, Peter Daszak, whose research, according to the EcoHealth Alliance website, “includes identifying the bat origin of SARS.”5

Between 2014 and 2019, EcoHealth Alliance received a long list of grants from the NIH to study “the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.” EcoHealth Alliance then subcontracted that work to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So, in the end, the U.S. could deny culpability, blaming the outbreak on China when, in fact, it was American research that had been outsourced.

Interestingly, in late-breaking news August 19, 2020, The Wall Street Journal6 reported that the NIH had notified EcoHealth that it wants “a sample of the new coronavirus that the Wuhan researchers used to determine its genetic sequence,” along with study details and other information.

Additionally, the NIH demanded that EcoHealth “arrange for an inspection of the Wuhan Institute of Virology by an outside team that would examine the facility’s lab and records ‘with specific attention to addressing the question of whether WIV staff had SARS-CoV-2 in their possession prior to December 2019.’”

The problem, Martin notes in “Indoctornation,” is that while the evidence is staring us right in the face, we’re told that so-called “fact-checkers” have a transcendent view of the situation, and they are the ultimate arbiters of truth. As a result, we have this very strange situation where facts and logic are being steamrolled and lambasted as good old-fashioned heresy.

Will Truth Prevail?

The film goes on to interview many other experts, many of whom are convinced the evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 being a manmade virus. Like Plandemic Part 1, Part 2 is well worth your time. As noted by Willis, in today’s fast-paced world, few have the time to do the necessary research to unveil what’s really going on.

The evidence is there, but you have to put it together. This is why documentaries such as “Plandemic” and “Shadowgate” are so useful. They weave the dots together so that you can see a fuller, more complete picture. Unfortunately, the picture at present is grim.

Yet, we must face it because it’s not going away or resolving in the near future. It is important to understand that we are all being subjected to a massive propaganda campaign to move us toward a very specific technocratic agenda. It is only by seeking alternative views that we can begin to understand the truth.

In the case of coronavirus, it should be clear that gain-of-function research is a dangerous game that should not be permitted. By giving researchers the go-ahead to continue this kind of research, even as the NIH publicly “paused” funding for it, the NIH failed to uphold its moral and legal responsibilities.

It’s also clear that the CDC has engaged in illegal activities relating to the patenting of the virus, and that they had ample motive and means to profit from a coronavirus pandemic. It’s hard to imagine a more corrupt system than what we currently have. The question is: When will something be done about it?

Sources and References

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

Is This Why They Couldn’t Force You to Take the Vax?

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Vaccine Awareness Week 2023

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • It’s been 15 years since I first made the commitment to support the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), which has fought for medical freedom for 41 years. During the COVID epidemic we came to see just how crucial this work really is. Freedom of choice and bodily autonomy when it comes to decision-making regarding vaccines can truly be a matter of life and death
  • In a special report shared with the U.S. House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, NVIC cofounder and president Barbara Loe Fisher explains how mandatory vaccination has been used as a tool to accumulate power and money
  • In 2023, NVIC tracked more than 1,000 legislative bills and posted more than 700 of them to the NVIC advocacy portal
  • No U.S. state was able to pass a COVID vaccine mandate, thanks to public pushback against such legislation. All minor consent bills that would have allowed doctors to persuade children to get vaccinated without their parents’ knowledge or consent were also successfully blocked
  • During our 14th Vaccine Awareness Week, I will match all donations made to the NVIC, so it’s a great time to contribute, as each dollar you give will be doubled

This week, we celebrate our 14th anniversary of Vaccine Awareness Week. In this video, Barbara Loe Fisher, cofounder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) — which celebrated its 41st anniversary as an organization in April 2023 — shares research on the censorship of vaccine information that she’s compiled for the U.S. House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

As usual, I will match all donations made to the NVIC during this week, so it’s a great time to contribute, as each dollar you give will be doubled.

It’s been 15 years since I first made the commitment to support this extraordinary organization that fights for medical freedom like no other, and during the COVID pandemic we came to see just how crucial this work really is. Consumer freedom of choice and bodily autonomy when it comes to decision-making regarding vaccines can truly be a matter of life and death.

The Why Behind 15 Years of Persecution

While the NVIC has worked against headwind since the beginning, the public attacks, persecution, demonization, discrimination and censorship really took on new dimensions during the COVID pandemic.

“I decided that I wanted to know exactly by whom, and why NVIC and my voice have been silenced online,” she says. “We knew, particularly in 2015, with the Disneyland measles outbreak, that the heat was on. Clearly, the goal by the pharmaceutical lobbyists that had joined with government was to have everyone take every federally recommended vaccine.

And they knew that our opposition — the work we … had been doing since 2010, to educate legislators about the fact that they need to have informed consent protections of vaccine laws — was a big obstacle. In my research, I realized that it was around 2009, when you lent your support to NVIC, that the persecution actually began.

Honestly, that’s what I realize now. In this report, I’ve gone in chronological order and I bring the reader along so they can see how, every step of the way, this was done.

Last night I said, ‘This reads like a crime novel.’ It’s unbelievable what has been done because a group of parents in 1982, whose children had been injured by DPT vaccine, decided to take on the pharmaceutical industry and big public health.

The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was a major piece of legislation that basically said vaccine safety should be a national priority; that vaccines do injure and kill, and that was the first time that had been acknowledged.

From that point on, the pharmaceutical industry knew that they had to do something to stop this. But it took them a long time. What I’ve done is, I’ve gone into the documents. What’s amazing to me is it’s all online. All you have to do is put it together.

This report is anchored by over 300 references, live linked. So as a reader, you are able to go in and read the documents yourself, and decide for yourself if what I have found here is one of the most incredible stories in the history of medicine.”

COVID Unmasked the Police State

Fisher goes on to review some of the most recent documents, such as a 2019 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report on “Combating Targeted Disinformation Campaigns, a Whole of Society Issue.”1 Part 2 of that DHS report came out in August 2021.2

Mind you, the first part of this report came out before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, clearly demonstrating that censoring the internet didn’t begin with the notion that people had to be protected from “misinformation” about COVID. They’ve been moving in the direction of controlling information online for a long time. The pandemic was just an excuse that allowed them to stop pretending that information control wasn’t a key goal.

“Who do we have meeting [here]? The FBI, Fannie Mae, the MITRE Corporation, National Oilwell Varco, Booz Hamilton, University of Florida, Levin College of Law, Northern California Regional Intelligence Center.

This is a meeting that is basically trying to say that the internet needs to be policed, that social media platforms need to be sure that information that is not officially blessed, if you will, is not on the internet.”

Then came a 2020 report by the Sabin-Aspen Vaccine Science & Policy Group, “Meeting the Challenge of Vaccination Hesitancy.”3 This report was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is massively invested in vaccines and vaccine development.

A Hate Group Doing What Hate Groups Do

In the summer of 2020, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) also published “The Anti-Vaxx Industry,”4 after which the demonization of those questioning the COVID jabs really took off.

That report was followed by “The Anti-Vaxx Playbook: Exposing Anti-Vaxxers’ Deadly Plan to Disrupt COVID Vaccines, and How We Can Stop Them,”5 published by the CCDH in December 2020, three months after the NVIC held its fifth international public conference on vaccination.

“That was really the all-out frontal assault on anybody that is branded an anti-vaxxer,” Fisher says. “And in that report, again, NVIC, myself, you [Dr. Mercola] and others who spoke at the NVIC conference are targeted and demonized in vicious language.

Imran Ahmed, who founded the Center for Countering Digital Hate, is a political operative out of England who now has come to the United States in the Washington, D.C., area to do his work, trying to discredit, demonize and stop anybody who does not conform with what the World Health Organization and U.S. government decides is the correct vaccine information.”

In a December 22, 2020, Twitter post,6 the CCDH stated that “Anti-vaxxers have been meeting secretly to plan how to stop the COVID vaccine. We were there. Today we’re exposing their playbook.” The report also claims to quote “leaked audio” from the conference.

The reality of the situation was that there was no audio to be “leaked” because it was a PUBLIC conference, open to absolutely anyone and everyone. It was about as far from a “secret meeting” as you could possibly get. Since the CCDH admitted “being there,” they must have paid the nominal attendance fee, as did thousands of others. So, the entire premise and context of that report was a lie.

CCDH Is the True Misinformation Superspreader

The CCDH also fabricated data to support a false narrative in it’s March 21, 2021, “Disinformation Dozen” report,7,8,9 in which Ahmed falsely claimed 12 people and/or organizations were responsible for 65% of all anti-vaccine content on social media and 73% of vaccine misinformation on Facebook.

In mid-August 2021, after conducting an internal investigation, Monika Bickert, vice president of Facebook content policy, publicly called out the falsehoods in “The Disinformation Dozen” report, stating:10

“There isn’t any evidence to support this claim … In fact, these 12 people are responsible for about just 0.05% of all views of vaccine-related content on Facebook. This includes all vaccine-related posts they’ve shared, whether true or false, as well as URLs associated with these people.”

Bickert highlighted the fact that Ahmed had preselected the 12 individuals listed in the report, and that his “faulty narrative” was based on nothing more than “a narrow set of 483 pieces of content over six weeks from only 30 groups, some of which are as small as 2,500 users.”

Despite that, a long list of officials continued to cite the CCDH’s fabricated claims. What’s more, even though Facebook admitted the CCDH’s claims were bogus, they still took action against accounts by applying penalties and/or bans.

The Rise of the Censorship Industrial Complex

In February 2021, the WHO issued the “WHO Public Health Research Agenda for Managing Infodemics.”11

“How they define ‘infodemic’ is basically ‘too much information.’ We have too much information. They’ve got to be the arbiters of what is truth; they’ve got to be the ones to tell everybody what to think,” Fisher says.

The following month, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health published “National Priorities to Combat Misinformation and Disinformation for COVID-19 and Future Public Health Threats: A Call for National Strategy,”12 and in June, the National Security Council issued “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.”13

The next month, July 2021, the U.S. surgeon general issued an advisory, “Confronting Health Misinformation,”14 which, like so many others, referenced the CCDH’s fabricated “Disinformation Dozen” report that targeted me, the NVIC and the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) — two of my Health Liberty partners — for destruction.

“Next you have ‘Memes, Magnets, and Microchips: Narrative Dynamics Around COVID-19 Vaccines,’15 by the Virality Project, put out by the Stanford International Observatory, the NYU Center for Social Media Politics, the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public and Graphika. It goes on and on …

And what is so unbelievable is that what it shows is that the federal government, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense and more, joined with businesses and institutions in society, particularly universities, to create what is known now, or is described by some, as ‘the censorship industrial complex,’ or ‘the disinformation industrial complex.’

It is an unbelievable story about how ordinary citizens in this country, particularly myself and NVIC, who have been working for 41 years with the federal government, with state governments, doing work in a civil and responsible way — the way we’re supposed to do it in this representative constitutional republic when we want to change something — we were targeted for elimination from the digital public square simply for trying to be good citizens.”

Government Has Been Weaponized Against Its People

As mentioned, Fisher’s report will be presented to the U.S. House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan.

“He’s a very courageous man,” Fisher says, “because he is digging down in the testimony that’s being submitted. One of my references is ‘The Weaponization of CISA: How a ‘Cybersecurity’ Agency Colluded With Big Tech and ‘Disinformation’ Partners to Censor Americans’16 [an interim staff report of the subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government].

[CISA] is the cybersecurity agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. The testimony that’s already been submitted to that committee is phenomenal, and that testimony is in these more than 300 references that I have in the report.

I’m very glad I did it, but it was a sobering experience. I’m still trying to deal with what I learned, and I feel like everyone needs to understand that this is a moment in history when we have a choice to make. We are either going to stand up … and fight for our right to freedom of thought, speech and conscience, or we will live as slaves for the rest of this century.

It reads like a crime novel, and I feel like I’ve lived through it. And, look … we’re still standing. We’re still here, we’re still able, at least right now … to communicate online with our followers, through your newsletter, through the NVIC websites.

How long that’s going to last, I don’t know … because our websites have dropped by half in terms of visitors. We’re off of Facebook, we’re off of Instagram, we’re off of YouTube. All my commentaries for more than a decade, completely gone. When Elon Musk purchased Twitter … NVIC was restored to that platform, but other than that major platform, we’re blocked [everywhere].

And on December 21, 2021, 18 members of the U.S. House of Representatives from one political party wrote a letter to PayPal and told them to take me and NVIC off that platform, so that nobody could donate to NVIC through PayPal. I mean, this is an all-out assault, trying to obliterate a small nonprofit charity.

We’re a small charity, but we were able to strike a chord within many Americans and many legislators who understood the importance of protecting informed consent rights when it comes to taking a medical risk, in this case, a vaccine risk.”

A Great Awakening Is Underway

Following Fisher’s report, Dawn Richardson’s report on the NVIC’s legislative efforts in 2023 will be released. The good news there is that NVIC has tracked more than 1,000 legislative bills and posted more than 700 of them on the NVIC advocacy portal, and not a single state ended up passing a COVID vaccine mandate.

Also, no state passed a minor consent bill that would allow doctors to persuade children without their parents’ knowledge or consent to get vaccinated.

“There has been an awakening in the state legislatures,” Fisher says. “So, there are two times as many positive vaccine bills, which we supported, than negative vaccine bills. It’s an incredible story … It’s a miracle, with everything they’ve thrown against us …

So, I urge everybody to please tune in on November 1, when we release this report. Read it, share it with your friends and family, and please, we’ve been ghosted and we do need donations. We need your support to continue to do this work that we’ve been doing for 41 years.”

Who Benefits From the ‘Greater Good’ Narrative?

At the end of the day, the censorship of negative vaccine information comes down to protecting profits — pharmaceutical profits — even though lives will be lost in the process. In this sense, the vaccine agenda is very similar to the war industry, which sacrifices the lives of young men and women to protect private central bank interests. Fisher notes:

“For many years, I said it’s about ideology, and my dear husband would say, ‘No, Barbara, it’s about business, it’s about the money.’ Well, you know what? It is about money.

At the end of the day, this is about a pharmaceutical industry and their partners, including academia, including a lot of other institutions in society, who have decided that there will be no opposition to the mass use of vaccines — every vaccine that the pharmaceutical industry creates.

But vaccination has been used as a political tool, no question. And that’s where ideology comes in, this idea that you do not have the right to protect your bodily integrity, or that of your minor child; that you must take the risk for the good of society. That’s the utilitarian rationale, ‘for the greater good.’

A minority of people can be sacrificed in service to the rest … Well, that’s a very convenient ideology to adopt when you want power, and when you want to profit from the exploitation of people.

And that’s, to me, what it all comes down to: power and profit, and the people are the victims of this hierarchy that has been established globally, this infrastructure that those who have the wealth of the world are operating in …

I have been very focused on that pseudo-ethic and defending informed consent. But when I did this report, I went, ‘Wait a minute, this is about the money. Pure and simple, it’s business.’ And that’s disturbing.

I’m disturbed by the fact that so many institutions in society, particularly academic institutions, have been co-opted by the money. It is very dangerous. And really, we’ve got a melding of government with big business, which is fascism. It’s frightening, really, and needs to stop.

Government money should not be used to try to demonize people and drive them out of the public square. The whole issue of freedom of thought, speech and conscience is such a fundamental freedom issue, and I really hope that the report I’ve written will help open some people’s eyes to how the issue of vaccination has been used to try to discriminate against and silence people in the public square … 

The other thing that just blows my mind is, they have all these behavioral psychologists trying to figure out how to change everybody. All of these papers published in the academic journals are about ‘How can we figure out ways to change the values and beliefs of people who are resisting vaccination?’

Is that the role of government, really? Is the role of government to come in and try to screw around with your mind and your personal beliefs so that you’ll do what they want you to do? That’s truly Orwellian.”

Of course, the reason government is trying to brainwash people into using certain products is because their interests are the same as the corporations’ interests, which, again, is the very definition of fascism.

Push for Vaccine Mandates Has Backfired Big-Time

A silver lining to the devastating fiasco of the mRNA COVID shots is that Americans have finally realized that not only do they not work, but they’re also incredibly dangerous. As of October 12, 2023, only 7 million Americans had rolled up their sleeves to receive the latest reformulated mRNA shot.

Assuming the U.S. population is 340.47 million people,17 7 million is only about 2.06%, and an October 2023 study18 tells us the reason for this drop-off — 54.9% of previously jabbed people are skipping further boosters due to fears about their safety.

Another 39.5% are skipping it because they’ve already had COVID, 28.6% doubt the booster will provide additional protection over the shots already received, and 23.1% don’t believe it’ll protect them from infection.

But people are not only waking up to the potential risks of mRNA shots. They’re also starting to question the safety and effectiveness of conventional vaccines as well, which is the exact opposite of what all this censorship was intended to achieve.

“The polls are showing a lessening of confidence in vaccination because of what they did with the COVID vaccine,” Fisher says. “So, a lot of people are just going to skip that flu shot this year.

There’s an uneasiness about vaccination right now, and I think it’s their own fault. It’s the fault of the federal agencies and the pharmaceutical companies that tried to oversell this product, tried to make everybody afraid that they were going to die if they didn’t get it.

There was like an 80% uptake in this country of one COVID shot. That’s a huge, huge uptake. However, now, on the fifth booster people are just saying, ‘I don’t think so.’ So, Pfizer announced this week that they’re having to cut $3 billion in expenses and in staff, et cetera, because they are not able to meet the projections for their stockholders of the uptake of the COVID booster.”

Consumer Advocacy Is Essential

In closing, it’s important to realize just how impactful the NVIC has been over the past 41 years, and why it’s so essential to support its continued work.

“If NVIC had not formed in 1982, if we had not gone into the states in 2010 and educated legislators on this issue and worked with families in the states, this country would’ve had a COVID vaccine mandate for children. I don’t have any question in my mind about that,” Fisher says.

“The combination of education and advocacy has absolutely changed the landscape of the mandatory vaccination infrastructure in this country. And it was done because parents of vaccine injured children decided that their children were not an acceptable sacrifice.

This is an important point, because all of the groups that have formed since 1982, particularly in the last 10 years, are riding on the back of the ground that we plowed. And I couldn’t be happier or more satisfied about that because our influence has allowed other groups to form and be bigger megaphones to warn people that this is a problem.

The mandatory vaccination system is not humane, it’s not something that should be allowed. You cannot throw people under the bus. You have to care and value every life. And despite all of this persecution and all of this ghosting and removal from online platforms, we are still standing. I feel very much that you, and all the people who have donated to us over the years, played a huge role in helping us survive.”

Help Us Protect Medical Freedom

Funds are tight for many right now; we understand that. But if you can make a donation, even if it’s only a dollar or two, please do. Every dollar counts, and I will match whatever you give. This is crucial work, and we cannot do it alone.

If you donated in the past, know that your generosity is ultimately what helped prevent COVID shot mandates in this country, and that is no small feat. It truly speaks to the power of consumer advocacy and education.

“It’s a truly grassroots movement, and it’s of ordinary people who are doing extraordinary things because they believe that in this country, we should have freedom of thought, speech, and conscience, and we should have the right to speak in the public square civilly, constructively.

That’s what America’s always been about. I believe this is a shameful, shameful era in U.S. history and I pray that it is consigned to the dustbin of history sooner than later. Like I say, we’re at a cross-roads in this country. These culture wars are tearing us apart. But hopefully, we can all agree on the Bill of Rights …

At the same time, you can’t do something about something you don’t understand, and that’s why I did this report. I wanted to understand, what exactly had happened and why. It’s clear to me now, and I hope it’ll be clear to other people, how the issue of mandatory vaccination was used as a tool to accumulate power and money.”

So, again, if you can, please make a donation to NVIC today, and be sure to sign up with the NVIC advocacy portal, so that you can stay abreast of legislative efforts involving medical freedom issues in your home state.

Resources Where You Can Learn More

NVIC Advocacy Portal — Become a registered user of this unique and free online communications network that connects you directly with your own legislators and emails you action alerts about vaccine-related bills moving in your state, so you can be an effective vaccine choice advocate and protect your rights.

You will only receive emails related to your own state but, as a registered Portal user, you also can stay up to date on vaccine-related bills being proposed in other states.

Use it to inform your legislators about why it is necessary to protect vaccine exemptions and your legal right to make voluntary vaccine decisions for yourself and your children.
Ask 8 Vaccine Information Kiosk — Download brochures and reports on vaccination and how to recognize vaccine reaction symptoms, as well as posters and web badges you can share with your family and friends. Access the illustrated and fully referenced “Guide to Reforming Vaccine Policy & Law” to educate your legislators when you advocate for vaccine informed consent rights.
State Law & Vaccine Requirements — On this NVIC.org page, you can easily obtain your state’s current vaccine policies and laws.
Vaccine Reaction Reporting — Search for and read descriptions of vaccine reaction reports made to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS).
Cry for Vaccine Freedom Wall — Read real stories from people who have been threatened, bullied and sanctioned for trying to make voluntary decisions about vaccination for themselves or their minor children. Post and share your own experience.
Guide to Flu & Flu Vaccines — The “Mini Guide to influenza & Flu Vaccines” summarizes facts about influenza and influenza vaccines.
Sources and References