A guy who lost a presidential election but made a fortune has some thoughts on the political system.
Gore, in an interview with Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd that will air Sunday, said that public sentiment is changing in regards to climate change but that “democracy is broken,”
The only people who think “democracy is broken” want to eliminate it.
Much like “the Supreme Court is broken” or “the Constitution is broken.”
The former vice president also called for the filibuster to be eliminated, saying that “we have a minority government….we have big money playing much too large a role in our politics.”
Gore, who went from an estimated $1.7 million to over $200 million knows all about “big money” and where to get it.
The environmentalist scam has been adopted by green investors who want to hijack our entire economy, as they have already hijacked the economies of entire states, like California, and countries, like those of much of Europe, and they insist on destroying anyone who stands in their way.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2022-07-26 05:38:412022-07-26 05:38:59Gore: Eliminate Democracy to Save Planet
There he goes again. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said again last week the border “is secure”. Sure, and I’m the tooth fairy. This is gas-lighting of the highest order. How do I know? Let me count the ways.
Border agents called Mayorkas a liar for saying it. Hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens have poured across the border in recent months and the number of border stops is at an all-time high. A new DHS report shows about a third of those released failed to check in with ICE within 60 days as required. The government failed to collect many of their U.S. addresses and has no idea where many of them are. More illegal aliens are headed our way. One day last week, 3,000 migrants stormed the Mexican border with Guatemala, pushing their way past the Mexican National Guard on their way to the U.S. Watch the video if you want to see pure chaos.
Things are so bad the Biden administration has stopped releasing the numbers of people who die illegally crossing into the U.S. Things are so bad, even Democrat big city mayors are complaining. New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said too many migrants are finding their way to these cities and are straining public resources. But they have only themselves to blame. The New York City website proclaims for all to see, “Many services and benefits are available to all New Yorkers, regardless of immigration status.” If you’re an illegal alien, not to worry. The website promises, “The City of New York has confidentiality protections in place for all New Yorkers, regardless of immigration status, who are accessing important City services.” Washington, D.C. has been a sanctuary city for years, with Bowser trumpeting in 2016, “We celebrate our diversity and respect all DC residents no matter their immigration status.” But now that the problem is in their face, she and Adams want the federal government to bail them out and let them escape the consequences of their own bad policies.
The feds are busy enacting bad policies of their own. In previous commentaries, I’ve listed numerous policy changes the Biden administration has made to deliberately open the border. Here are half a dozen more to add to the list:
The administration wanted to reduce the number of deportations where there was no immediate public safety risk, but the Supreme Court has blocked this for now, pending litigation. The number of prosecutions for illegal border crossings is down 80 percent, and that’s by design. The federal government just gave a contract worth at least $171 million to a left-wing group to help unaccompanied alien children avoid deportation. The administration reinterpreted federal law to allow people with Temporary Protected Status to leave the country and return even if they had come here unlawfully at the outset. Deported illegal aliens used to have to wait years before being allowed to reenter the U.S. legally but now they can come back in the next day without prejudicing their eventual application for legal status. Finally, the administration is instituting a new system to allow aliens to apply for asylum online from anywhere in the world.
Alejandro Mayorkas and Joe Biden hate America and they’re trying to destroy it by replacing who lives here. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: they should be impeached for refusing to faithfully execute the laws.
Interesting – As you will recall many of us attended PCSD SB meetings and spoke out against the current Reproductive Health Curriculum which is supposed to be under review by a committee this summer.
If Superintendent Heid and his Staff do like they did in choosing a left leaning committee to review the 16 pornographic/age inappropriate books it would not portend well to remove the age inappropriate and/or Florida statute violating material we objected to from this curriculum or perhaps they will take the opt-in/opt-out approach which really still violates the law in my view.
MIAMI – The school board of Florida’s largest school district reversed its decision to adopt a new sex education book, with some in the majority saying the material is not age appropriate for students in middle and high school.
The 5-4 vote followed an emotionally charged Miami-Dade School Board meeting Wednesday, with some members of the public being escorted from the room, the Miami Herald reported.
It’s not clear how the nation’s fourth-largest public school system, with 334,000 students, will comply with state law requiring students to receive sexual education. Choosing, ordering and distributing a new textbook could take months.
‘Comprehensive Health Skills,’ published by Goodheart-Willcox in Illinois, comes in different versions for middle and high schools, with topics including nutrition, physical activity and sexually transmitted diseases, as required under the district’s units of study for Human Reproduction and Disease Education.
Neither the publisher nor the school district immediately responded to inquiries from The Associated Press regarding content deemed objectionable by the board’s majority.
The board adopted the textbook in April on a 5-3 vote, but then its material was challenged by some parents who cited the parental rights law Gov. Ron DeSantis in March.
Critics call it the ‘don’t say gay’ law because it prohibits instruction related to gender identity or sexual orientation in grades K through 3, ‘or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.’
In adopting the book in April, the board voted to ask the publisher to remove a chapter called ‘Understanding Sexuality,’ which covers gender and sexual orientation among other topics.
Still, critics filed 278 objections. Opponents of vaccines challenged the book’s references to how vaccinations can prevent viral infections. Others objected to content about contraception and abortion.
Miami-Dade Superintendent José Dotres asked a third-party reviewer to conduct a public hearing to review their concerns. That hearing officer ultimately recommended adopting the book, leading to Wednesday’s meeting.
Board member Luisa Santos, who voted in favor of the book, noted that the district enables parents to opt out of material they don’t want their children to learn about sexual health and pregnancy and disease prevention.
‘We will be opting out everyone in the following school year. Including all the people who have come here and told us that they want this,’ Santos said, according to WLRN-TV.
Thirty-eight of the 40 speakers Wednesday asked to keep the textbook, Vice Chair Steve Gallon III said.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Royal A. Brown IIIhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRoyal A. Brown III2022-07-26 05:15:142022-07-26 05:44:27Under Pressure Florida School Board Rejects Sex-Ed Textbook
I am reliably informed by some dedicated people I work with daily that this is a superb document on the events of January 6th. I myself have not watched past the first few minutes yet. But I do plan to over the next day or so. Recording events and editing them, takes up a lot of time. But this is supposed to be really good. After watching, some commentary may be added from the particular viewpoint of this site and its authors. But then again, it may not be needed.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Vlad Tepes Bloghttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngVlad Tepes Blog2022-07-25 11:11:392022-07-26 05:09:20Documentary: The Real Story of January 6th
Statistics from 2021 found the highest share of Americans who are “not too happy” ever measured.
The last two years have been hard on everyone, with numerous disruptions to life of many kinds leading many of us to feel, as the General Social Survey (GSS) might put it, “not too happy.” Pandemic disease, lockdowns, protests, riots, crime, divisive politics, shootings, deaths of despair, an epidemic of loneliness—the list of reasons for being “not-too-happy” seem to be legion.
Since 1972, the GSS has been asking Americans how happy they are, with three options: very happy, somewhat happy, and not too happy. That lowest option captures all those Americans who just don’t feel good about the world and their own place in it. Perhaps it is no surprise that the 2021 GSS round found the highest share of Americans who are “not too happy” ever measured.
From 1972 to 2018, no more than 18% of Americans ages 35 and over had ever claimed to be “not too happy,” and no more than 16% of Americans under 35 had done so. In every year ever measured, people over and under age 35 had similar levels of unhappiness.
But in 2021, unhappiness rocketed upwards for both groups, to 22% for those 35 and over, and a whopping 30% for those under age 35. These are both historic highs for each age demographic, but the unusually sharp increase for those under 35 points to a unique burden of unhappiness among young adults over the last few years. American young adults have begun to take an extraordinarily dim view of the world and their own lives. The path to understanding why unhappiness has risen so much more among young Americans begins by understanding the groups among whom it has risen the most.
Unhappiness by groups
Among young adults, different groups had different levels of unhappiness even before COVID. Thus, for example, only about 6% of married people said they were “not too happy,” versus 16% of unmarried young adults. However, the better question is how has happiness changed within various groups: did married people and unmarried people see the same spike in unhappiness in 2021? What about men and women, or liberals and conservatives? The GSS contains a wide variety of control variables, making it possible to compare the typical prevalence of unhappiness for a given group of young adults before COVID (in this case, 2012-2018) and after it (2021). Figure 2 below shows the share of each group who were “not too happy” before and after COVID, after controlling for each of the other variables listed.
Several things immediately stand out. First, unhappiness rose for almost every group: the red bars are higher than the light blue bars in almost every case. Thus, group-level traits mostly did not shield individuals from the unhappiness spike around COVID. Having kids or a college degree didn’t spare people from the difficulties of the last few years.
Secondly, the exact amount that unhappiness increased in 2021 varied. Social class didn’t protect people very much: unhappiness rose about 16% for people with highly prestigious jobs, and 15% for other people. People who attended college saw their unhappiness prevalence rise by about 16 percentage points, versus about 15 points for those who did not attend college. Being educated and having a prestigious career simply didn’t provide any buffer to peoples’ sense of well-being in the face of a huge social disruption.
Some demographic traits did matter more: men saw their unhappiness rise 18%, versus just 12% for women. Unhappiness rose about 17% for non-Hispanic whites, versus about 12% for racial and ethnic minorities. But these differences are not statistically significant; they could have arisen just from random noise.
For most people, family forms the core of their social support system. And this leads to one of the most important findings of this analysis: unhappiness rose just 8 percentage points for married young adults, versus 18 percentage points for the unmarried. In fact, given the sample sizes involved, the confidence intervals for married people before and after the pandemic actually overlap: it’s not certain that unhappiness actually rose for married people at all, after controlling for their other traits.
Marriage, then, served as a valuable buffer against unhappiness. Children, on the other hand, did not: childless young adults and parents saw similar increases in unhappiness (16 and 14 percentage points, respectively).
Finally, happiness changes varied in important ways across religiosity and politics. Among people who attended religious services at least two times per month, unhappiness rose only 4 percentage points, the smallest increase of any group. Among those who attended less often, unhappiness rose 15 percentage points. This difference was highly statistically significant, suggesting that participation in religious community may serve as a useful buffer against adverse events in life.
Relatedly, liberal Americans saw the largest increase in unhappiness of any group, at 19 percentage points. For moderates, it was just 15 percentage points, and for conservatives, 13 points. However, given the sample sizes involved, these differences are not statistically significant.
Conclusion
The COVID pandemic has made virtually everyone less happy. This effect is especially pronounced among younger Americans under 35. For young adults, the rise in unhappiness has been sharply felt, with pronounced rises across all socioeconomic and demographic groups, and throughout the ideological spectrum. The only factors that appear meaningfully protective against the post-COVID unhappiness spike are marriage and religious attendance. Married church-attenders are markedly happier than other young adults. Some of this may be selection bias, but some of it may also be causal effects of deeper social ties providing material and psychological resources for dealing with life’s challenges.
Unfortunately for the happiness of young Americans, whereas in 1972 about 24% of people under 35 were married churchgoers, in 2021 just 7% were, leaving more and more young adults exposed to life’s troubles with little help, as shown in Figure 3.
Meanwhile, more and more young Americans inhabit the unhappiest subgroup for their age: unmarried and not religious. Today, 60% of people under 35 fit this category. One possible result of this change, as we have seen these last few years, is that more young people lack the vital support of a spouse and a religious community, and thus new forms of adversity can rapidly lead to astonishingly severe levels of unhappiness.
Lyman Stone is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, Chief Information Officer of the population research firm Demographic Intelligence, and an Adjunct Fellow at the American Enterprise… More by Lyman Stone
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - A Compass for Common Sensehttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - A Compass for Common Sense2022-07-25 10:47:432022-07-25 10:47:43After Covid: Unhappiness is Worse Among Single and Non-Religious Americans
Sound economic thinking is vital for a prosperous future.
Economics is the study of human action—the choices people make in a world of scarcity. Scarcity means that people have unlimited wants but we live in a world of limited resources. Because of this fact people have to make choices, and choices imply trade-offs. The choices people make are influenced by the incentives they face and those incentives are shaped by the institutions—rules of the game—under which people live and interact with others.
In this essay, I will explain eight ideas and give examples of the economic way of thinking.
1. TANSTAAFL: Know the Difference Between Price and Cost
We often hear how wonderful certain countries are because they provide “free healthcare” or “free education.” Many will also say “I got it for free” because they didn’t pay with money.
The error lies in not understanding the difference between price and cost. For example, people usually say, “The Starbucks latte cost me five dollars” or, “The movie ticket cost me fifteen dollars.” Cost in economics means what you give up or sacrifice. In these examples, the prices were $5 and $15. But the cost of the latte was perhaps the sandwich one could have purchased instead with that same $5, and the cost of the movie was perhaps the three lattes one could have purchased instead with that same $15.
Labeling healthcare and education “free” is not just wrong—”there’s no such thing as a free lunch”—it’s also misleading. As my former professor Walter E. Williams would say, “Unless you believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, the money has to come from somewhere.” You might not get a medical bill in those countries but you have more taken out of your paycheck (i.e., taxes) and you might have to wait much longer to get that test or have that “minor” (from the bureaucrats’ perspective) surgery. You pay with either money or time, but either way, you pay! Taxes are also used to pay for public schools, which is yet another example of how people call something “free” when it is not.
There’s a difference between zero price and zero cost. There could be a zero price ($0), but there’s never a zero cost. Therefore, don’t swear anymore by using the “F” word!
2. Actions Matter More Than Statements
“Actions speak louder than words,” is a well-known idiom. Humans act, and the act of choice tells us something. Consider this example: A person walks into an Apple store and sees the price of the latest iPhone and angrily mumbles, “What a rip off” but still proceeds to purchase that phone.
When one does something voluntarily, it demonstrates their true preference at the time. Assuming that individuals are self-interested and will ex ante (looking forward in time) subjectively weigh the cost and benefit of an action, and, also assuming it’s not a right to have the private property of another (i.e., Apple’s iPhone), then when a person walks into an Apple store and buys the new iPhone, the individual obviously expects to be better off in some way at that moment. To say that Apple “took advantage” of the willing customer would be nonsense since Apple, or any private business, cannot force people to buy their product. It’s one thing to say something, but the proof is in the act of choice.
3. Sunk Cost Fallacy: Don’t Cry Over Spilt Milk
“Don’t cry over spilt milk” means what’s done is done. The only costs that should come into our decision-making are future opportunity costs. Past costs are “sunk.” The typical example to explain the sunk cost fallacy is the movie example. You spend $15 to see a movie and an hour into this three-hour movie you realize that it’s horrible and will only get worse. However, your feeling is that you should stay and get your money’s worth. That is bad economic thinking. The $15 is gone so don’t lose the next two hours of your valuable time—get up and leave.
Most of us know people who were (are) in a horrible relationship or dating the wrong type of person (perhaps this applies to you). But the feeling of “I’ve already spent two years of my life with this person” can lead to a bad decision. Many end up marrying the person in order to justify the investment of time.
No offense to Beyoncé, but if you like yourself, then perhaps don’t let that person “put a ring on it”! Don’t lose the next two years of precious time. It’s better to be single than in a bad relationship (but that’s for another essay).
4. Tradeoffs: Learn to Think at the Margin
The optimal or efficient level of pollution is not zero. The optimal number of traffic deaths or sports injuries also is probably not zero. The optimal number of people getting a virus is not zero. The optimal level of safety is not perfect safety. Does this sound strange or harsh? Well, if you want to do a cross country road trip and not walk or ride a bike, or if you want to enjoy playing or watching sports, and if you want to physically interact with others, then it is clear that the optimal level of pollution, deaths, injuries, and people getting a virus is actually greater than zero. The optimal level of safety is less than perfect safety. Nothing is free including more safety—trade-offs are always involved because there is always an opportunity cost when we do something, even things like travel, play sports, or interact with others.
Incremental decision-making is what economists call thinking at the margin. Marginal means the one additional or extra unit. Every time we make a decision it’s as if we are calculating the marginal benefit (the benefit of one more unit) and the marginal cost (what would be given up to acquire one more unit) of the action. The economic way of thinking says something should be done until the marginal benefit (MB) equals the marginal cost (MC). There’s also a concept known as the law of diminishing marginal utility—each additional unit gives less and less utility or benefit.
We want clean air so that our eyes aren’t irritated when we go outside and our lungs don’t burn when we take a breath. However, if the desire is perfectly clean air this would mean no more cars, no planes, no boats or ships, and no trains (some would actually desire this situation, at least theoretically). This would impose tremendous costs on society.
Let’s look at it another way. If I snapped my fingers and made the Pacific Ocean perfectly clean but then put one drop of oil somewhere in the ocean unbeknownst to everyone else, would it be worth it to spend money, time and other resources to hunt down that one drop of oil? The marginal benefit of finding and removing one drop of oil in the quintillions of gallons of water would be less than the marginal cost. In plain English, it’s not worth it. Again, the optimal level of pollution is some, not zero.
When it comes to studying, practicing a sport or musical instrument, or dating someone before marrying them, you might think, “The more time, the better.” I am a literal person so if I told my students, “The more you study the better,” this would mean they would never eat, drink, sleep, or spend time with family and friends. But common sense says that after studying for a certain amount of time most students will say, “I get it” or simply “time to move on.” Why waste more time studying?
Also, if you are in a place in your life where you are considering marriage, then the point of dating is to acquire information about the other person so that you can make a good decision. Ultimately, you come to a point where you have enough information to propose, accept a proposal, or break up with this person. When I proposed to my wife, I did not have perfect information about her, but my information was good enough. Sure, one more month of dating would have given me some marginal benefit in terms of additional information about her, but I came to a point where I had enough information—where MB=MC.
“Good enough is good enough” is what economists mean by doing something until the marginal benefit equals the marginal cost. The MB=MC rule implies that the “more is better” thinking is not optimal. One aspirin from the bottle can help your headache but it’s dangerous to think, “Well, if one is good, the whole bottle is better.” Yes, your headache will be gone but so will you.
5. Comparative Advantage: Ability to Do Something Does Not Mean One Should
In a standard economics class, students are taught absolute advantage and comparative advantage. The former means being able to produce more than another with the same amount of resources or using fewer resources to produce an output. The latter means being able to do something at a lower opportunity cost than another.
Because there’s always an opportunity cost when doing something, sometimes it is advantageous to pay someone else to do something even if we have the knowledge and skills to do it ourselves. This also has applications to trade policy. Just because the United States (actually individuals in the United States) can produce certain products does not mean we should. It’s ok if not everything we buy says “Made in USA” because if the government tries to “protect American jobs” and begins imposing tariffs and quotas, we are not actually saving American jobs. It’s more correct to say we are saving particular jobs at the expense of other American jobs. Of course, good politics and good economics often go in different directions.
6. Supply and Demand: Understand How Prices Work
The complaint that businesses can charge “whatever they want” is nonsense. For example, why is it that movie theaters only charge $8 for popcorn and not $8,000 or $8,000,000 if they can supposedly charge whatever they want? There are two sides to a market transaction, and it’s this interaction of sellers and buyers that determines the price. What’s interesting is that many times the same people complaining are the ones making noise eating that popcorn during the movie.
7. Fixed Pie Fallacy: Voluntary Exchange Is Win-Win That Creates a Bigger Pie
Entrepreneurs become wealthy if they create a product or service that provides value for a large number of people. Unless the entrepreneurs received special privileges from the government, they didn’t forcibly take money from their customers.
The anger directed at “the rich” is based on the fallacy of thinking the economy is a fixed-size pie. In other words, those who criticize the “filthy rich” believe that they took a piece that was too big, leaving less pie for the rest of us regular folks. The reality is that these entrepreneurs baked a bigger pie. They benefited, but so did we!
In a business transaction, exchanges are voluntary, and voluntary trade is a win-win situation. The entrepreneur wins (as well as the employees he or she hires) and the customers win.
8. Good Intentions Fallacy: Don’t Forget about Unseen Costs
Intentions and results are not always the same thing. The economic way of thinking teaches us to consider possible unintended consequences of our own actions or the actions of politicians. Just because something sounds good or feels right does not mean a certain goal will be achieved. In fact, the very problem that is being addressed can become worse.
Sound economic thinking also removes one’s blinders. The effects of a policy on all groups are considered, not just one group. This helps individuals to see through politicians’ claims that a policy will save American jobs when in reality only some special-interest group will benefit at the expense of other Americans. When politicians confiscate money (i.e., taxes) to build sports stadiums using the “it will create jobs” argument, the mistake is to focus on the jobs seen and neglecting the unseen—the opportunity cost of those tax dollars.
Conclusion
There is so much more to say about this subject called economics and there are many more examples of the economic way of thinking that I could have included. Some characterize economics as applied common sense; yet, economics also gives us counterintuitive insights.
Ninos P. Malek is an Economics professor at De Anza College in Cupertino, California and a Lecturer at San Jose State University in San Jose, California. He teaches principles of macroeconomics, principles of microeconomics, economics of social issues, and intermediate microeconomics. His previous experience also includes teaching introductory economics at George Mason University.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2022-07-25 10:31:442022-07-25 10:31:448 Ideas That Will Teach You to Think Like an Economist
On Monday, Dutch reforestation company Land Life started what has become a 35,000 acre forest fire in Spain.
These things happen. And happen.
This is the second forest fire started by Land Life in a month.
I’m starting to think that environmentalists and the rest of us have very different definitions of saving the planet.
Here’s what Land Life claims that it does.
Land Life is a tech-driven reforestation company planting trees at scale. We use a holistic approach and all of the wonderful minds of our employees, partners, and customers to create projects that remove CO2 from the atmosphere, rebuild ecosystems and work in collaboration with local communities.
Here’s what it does
“The fire started while one of our contractors was using a retro-spider excavator to prepare the soil to plant trees later this winter,” Land Life said in a statement on Thursday. “The operators alerted the emergency services. The emergency teams are working non-stop to control the fire and have fortunately established the fire perimeter. Nonetheless, we are devastated by the latest estimate that the damage will be around 14,000 hectares,” or roughly 35,000 acres.”
How many acres of trees did Land Life even plant?
It’s not clear how many acres Land Life has actually planted trees in—one blog post suggested the company aimed to plant around 20,000 acres between 2020-2021.
This is like the time that Bernie Sanders got kicked out of the Kibbutz.
The fire has forced authorities to order the evacuation of five neighboring towns, as well as a nursing home. In total, around 2,000 people had to be evacuated. Javier Lambán, the president of Aragon, said the incident is “serious and concerning,” according to local media.
Sometimes you have to break a lot of eggs to make an omelet. Or burn a lot of trees to make a forest. Or crash a lot of computers to make an OS.
As of January 1, 2021 Ernst-Jan Stigter, general manager of Microsoft in the Netherlands, will join Land Life Company as the new CEO.
This explains too much.
I’m in favor of planting trees. Personally. We just probably shouldn’t let environmentalists do it. Or much of anything else. Like at the end of Rainbow Six, take everything, leave them in the jungle knowing that while they might all get eaten by anacondas and fire ants, at least that will remove their carbon emissions from the planet.
EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2022-07-25 05:48:082022-07-25 05:48:08Environmentalists Promising to Save Planet by Planting Trees Keep Starting Forest Fires
How the COVID Vaccines May Act as a Depopulation Weapon.
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
The first COVID shots rolled out in December 2020, and it didn’t take long before doctors and scientists started warning of possible reproductive effects, as the jab may cross-react with syncytin and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that might impair reproduction
According to one recent investigation, 42% of women with regular menstrual cycles said they bled more heavily than usual after vaccination; 39% of those on gender-affirming hormone treatments reported breakthrough bleeding, as did 71% of women on long-acting contraceptives and 66% of postmenopausal women
Other recent research has found the Pfizer COVID jab impairs semen concentration and motile count in men for about three months
Miscarriages, fetal deaths and stillbirths have also risen after the rollout of the COVID shots. In November 2021, Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), delivered 13 stillborn babies in a 24-hour period, and all of the mothers had received the COVID jab
Many countries are now reporting sudden declines in live birth rates, including Germany, the U.K., Taiwan, Hungary and Sweden. In the five countries with the highest COVID jab uptake, fertility has dropped by an average of 15.2%, whereas the five countries with the lowest COVID jab uptake have seen an average decline of just 4.66%
The first COVID shots rolled out in December 2020, and it didn’t take long before doctors and scientists started warning of possible reproductive effects.
Among them were Janci Chunn Lindsay, Ph.D., director of toxicology and molecular biology for Toxicology Support Services LLC, who in April 2021 submitted a public comment1 to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), highlighting the high potential for adverse effects on fertility.
I previously interviewed Lindsay in 2021. That article is not updated with the new information, but the interview (above) is a good primer for the information she shares below. In many ways, she predicted what we are now observing.
She stressed there’s credible evidence that the COVID shots may cross-react with syncytin and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that might impair reproductive outcomes. “We could potentially be sterilizing an entire generation,” she warned.
Lindsay also pointed out that reports of significant menstrual irregularities and vaginal hemorrhaging in women who received the injections by then already numbered in the thousands, and that this too was a safety signal that should not be ignored.
4 in 10 COVID-Jabbed Women Report Menstrual Irregularities
As it turns out, early reports of menstrual irregularities were not a fluke. More recent investigations have confirmed that, indeed, many women experience menstrual irregularities after the shots. As reported by NBC News in mid-July 2022:2
“An analysis3 published Friday in the journal Science Advances found that 42% of people with regular menstrual cycles said they bled more heavily than usual after vaccination. Meanwhile, 44% reported no change and around 14% reported a lighter period.
Among nonmenstruating people — those post-menopause or who use certain long-term contraceptives, for example — the study suggests many experienced breakthrough or unexpected bleeding after their COVID shots.”
Other categories of people reporting abnormal breakthrough bleeding included 39% of those on gender-affirming hormone treatments, 71% of women on long-acting contraceptives and 66% of postmenopausal women.4
Older women, those who used hormonal contraception, had been pregnant previously, or had diagnoses of endometriosis, fibroids or polycystic ovarian syndrome were more likely to experience heavier bleeding than normal after their shots.
Are Menstrual Irregularities Inconsequential?
It’s worth noting that the COVID trials did not ask female participants about their menses, and didn’t collect any data on reproductive impacts. Yet, despite this clear lack of data collection, the official narrative is that everything is fine — the shots are safe and won’t impact fertility.
Just how do they know? They don’t, and that’s what makes such claims so egregious. Making matters worse, media reporting these findings continue to insist that post-jab menstrual irregularities are “normal” and not a sign that reproductive capacity is being impacted. For example, Science writes:5
“Clarifying the issue is vital. ‘It’s important to know about,’ says Victoria Male, a reproductive immunologist at Imperial College London. ‘Let’s say you got the vaccine and the next day you felt really dreadful the way some people do.’
If you hadn’t been informed of the chance of fever, muscle aches, and other effects that quickly dissipate, ‘you would be really worried,’ she said. Illuminating the chance of menstrual irregularities and confirming they aren’t a health risk also helps combat widespread misinformation that COVID-19 vaccines impair fertility, Male and others say.”
Again, no one knows whether the shots affect fertility or not for the simple fact that it hasn’t been studied. No study means no data, which means no knowledge. It’s that simple. Any claims to the contrary are based on pure guesswork, and guessing is not science.
And, while a woman’s menstrual cycle can fluctuate, abrupt changes have historically not been brushed off as inconsequential. On the contrary, suddenly abnormal menses has been listed as a potential sign of things like:6,7,8
Uterine and/or cervical cancer
Bleeding disorders
Thyroid dysfunction and/or pituitary disorders affecting your hormonal balance
Infection and/or disease
Perimenopause
Menstrual Cycle Length Is Also Affected
Research9 published April 1, 2022, in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, also found an association between the COVID jab and changes in menstrual cycle length. The change was small — about one day shorter than pre-injection after the second dose — and was not deemed to be of any great concern. Still, in my mind, the change indicates that something is happening. The question is what?
Infection Can Suppress Ovarian Function
Some investigators have suggested the menstrual irregularities seen in female COVID patients and the COVID-jabbed alike may be attributed to an immune response to the spike protein.
Back in January 2021, a Chinese study10 published in Reproductive BioMedicine Online found that 28% of unvaccinated women of reproductive age diagnosed with COVID-19 had a change in the length of their cycle, 19% had prolonged cycles and 25% had a change in menstrual blood volume.
The researchers hypothesized that “the menstruation changes of these patients might be the consequence of transient sex hormone changes” caused by a temporary suppression of ovarian function during infection.
Dr. Natalie Crawford, a fertility specialist, has suggested that the menstrual irregularities seen in female COVID-19 patients may be linked to a cellular immunity response, and since the COVID shot instructs your body to make the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which your immune system then responds to, the effects of the jab may be similar to the natural infection.11 In a 2021 BMJ editorial, Male, quoted by Science above, presented a similar view:12
“Menstrual changes have been reported after both mRNA and adenovirus vectored COVID-19 vaccines, suggesting that, if there is a connection, it is likely to be a result of the immune response to vaccination rather than a specific vaccine component. Vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV) has also been associated with menstrual changes.
… Biologically plausible mechanisms linking immune stimulation with menstrual changes include immunological influences on the hormones driving the menstrual cycle or effects mediated by immune cells in the lining of the uterus, which are involved in the cyclical build-up and breakdown of this tissue. Research exploring a possible association between COVID-19 vaccines and menstrual changes may also help understand the mechanism.”
That doesn’t mean menstrual irregularities are of no consequence, though. After all, it appears we’re dealing with a manmade virus, and the mRNA in the shot that programs for spike protein production is genetically engineered on top of that.
Perhaps this is why a greater percentage of women report menstrual irregularities following the COVID jab, compared to the percentage of women who experience irregularities following natural infection?
It may also be worth looking into the parallels between the blood clotting disorders reported — both in some COVID-19 cases and post-COVID-19 jab — and Von Willebrand disease,13 a chronic condition that prevents normal blood clotting, thus resulting in excessively heavy periods.
Miscarriages, Fetal Deaths and Stillbirths Have Skyrocketed
Menstrual irregularities aren’t the only safety signal. Miscarriages, fetal deaths and stillbirths have also risen after the rollout of the COVID shots. In November 2021, Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), delivered an astonishing 13 stillborn babies in a 24-hour period, and all of the mothers had received the COVID jab.14
In a typical month, there may be one stillborn baby at the hospital, making 13 stillbirths in 24 hours highly unusual. Scotland has also experienced an unusual rise in infant death rates. During September 2021, at least 21 babies under 4 weeks old died — a rate of 4.9 per 1,000 births. Historically, the average death rate among newborns in Scotland is about 2 per 1,000 births.15
Yet, despite stillbirths going up after the introduction of the COVID jabs — as opposed to rising beforehand — studies linking stillbirths to SARS-CoV-2 infection have been used to encourage pregnant women to get the shot.16
So, basically, it’s been discovered that the infection itself can cause stillbirth (and we know the spike protein of the virus is the part that causes most of the problems), yet they want you to believe that the spike protein produced by the shot will somehow have a protective impact on pregnancy.
This line of reasoning falls apart even further when you consider that scientists are now saying post-jab menstrual irregularities are likely due to immune responses that arise in response to both the virus and the jab. If that’s true, then why would the COVID shot not also be able to cause stillbirths to the same or greater degree than the virus?
There Are No Data to Support COVID Jab for Pregnant Women
Health officials are adamant that pregnant women get a COVID-19 injection, but the data don’t support its safety. The CDC-sponsored study17 published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that was widely used to support the U.S. recommendation for pregnant women to get injected was corrected in October 2021, with the correction stating:18
“In the table footnotes, the following content should have been appended to the double dagger footnote:
‘No denominator was available to calculate a risk estimate for spontaneous abortions, because at the time of this report, follow-up through 20 weeks was not yet available for 905 of the 1224 participants vaccinated within 30 days before the first day of the last menstrual period or in the first trimester. Furthermore, any risk estimate would need to account for gestational week-specific risk of spontaneous abortion.'”
COVID Jab Affects Male Fertility Too
Other recent research19,20 has found the Pfizer COVID jab also “temporarily impairs semen concentration and motile count” in men. As noted by the authors:21
“The development of COVID-19 vaccinations represents a notable scientific achievement. Nevertheless, concerns have been raised regarding their possible detrimental impact on male fertility …
Thirty-seven SD [semen donors] from three sperm banks that provided 216 samples were included in that retrospective longitudinal multicenter cohort study. BNT162b2 vaccination included two doses, and vaccination completion was scheduled 7 days after the second dose.
The study included four phases: T0 — pre-vaccination baseline control, which encompassed 1–2 initial samples per SD; T1, T2 and T3 — short, intermediate, and long terms evaluations, respectively. Each included 1-3 semen samples per donor provided 15-45, 75-125 and over 145 days after vaccination completion, respectively …
Repetitive measurements revealed −15.4% sperm concentration decrease on T2 (CI −25.5%-3.9%, p = 0.01) leading to total motile count 22.1% reduction (CI −35% – −6.6%, p = 0.007) compared to T0.
Similarly, analysis of first semen sample only and samples’ mean per donor resulted in concentration and total motile count (TMC) reductions on T2 compared to T0 — median decline of 12 million/ml and 31.2 million motile spermatozoa, respectively … on first sample evaluation and median decline of 9.5 × 106 and 27.3 million motile spermatozoa … on samples’ mean examination. T3 evaluation demonstrated overall recovery without …
This longitudinal study focused on SD demonstrates selective temporary sperm concentration and TMC deterioration 3 months after vaccination followed by later recovery verified by diverse statistical analyses.”
As with women’s menstrual problems, the authors blame these adverse effects in men on a “systemic immune response” to the COVID shot. However, while they claim men’s’ reproductive capacity will recover in about three months, this could still be a tremendous problem.
Remember, the mRNA shots are recommended at three-month intervals for the original series, and boosters are now being recommended at varying intervals thereafter. If you destroy a man’s sperm for three months every time he gets a COVID shot, you’re significantly reducing the probability of him fathering a child for a good part of any given year.
Massive Depopulation Underway
Whether accidental or intentional, the fact of the matter is that we’re now seeing an abrupt drop in live births along with an equally sudden rise in excess deaths among adults. The end result will be a reduction in the global population.
Other countries are also seeing unexpected birth rate reductions, nine months after the start of the mass vaccination campaign against COVID. Between January and April 2022, Switzerland’s birth rate was 15% lower than expected, the U.K.’s was down by 10% and Taiwan’s was down 23%.25,26,27
In a July 5, 2022, Counter Signal article, Mike Campbell reported concerns expressed by Hungarian MP Dúró Dóra during a Parliamentary speech:28
“In January this year, something happened that has not happened for decades. The birth rate fell by 20% compared to the same period last year. And what is even more worrying is that the fertility has also fallen — something not seen since 2011 …
[A] researcher at the KRTK Institute of Economics points out that this drastic decline came just nine months after the COVID mass vaccinations began in Hungary.”
After looking into further, Campbell discovered that in the five countries with the highest COVID jab uptake, fertility has dropped by an average of 15.2%, whereas the five countries with the lowest COVID jab uptake have seen an average reduction of just 4.66%.
The U.S. is also showing signs of a drop in live births. Provisional data from North Dakota shows a 10% decline in February 2022, 13% reduction in March and an 11% reduction in April, compared to the corresponding months in 2021.29 Below is a chart from Birth Gauge30 on Twitter comparing live birth data for 2021 and 2022 in a large number of countries.
Take Responsibility for Your Health
At this time, women are not being warned about the risks for miscarriage, menstrual irregularities and the potential for fertility problems and stillbirths, even though all of these safety signals are glaringly obvious. As obstetrician-gynecologist specialist, Dr. James Thorp, told The Epoch Times in April 2022:31
“I’ve seen many, many, many complications in pregnant women, in moms and in fetuses, in children, offspring, fetal death, miscarriage, death of the fetus inside the mom… What I’ve seen in the last two years is unprecedented.”
Tragically, doctors are under a worldwide gag order. They steer patients away from the COVID shot at the risk of losing their medical license. This puts patients in an incredibly risky situation, as most rely on their doctors to tell them the truth. Few expect doctors to lie or hide life saving information from them simply to protect their own career. So, we’re in unprecedented times in more ways than one.
What this means is that you have no choice, really, but to do your own research and gauge the risks as best you can. There are tons of data out there — data that the mainstream media won’t touch, and if they do, they still insist adverse events aren’t a sign of danger. In such situations, you simply have to put on your thinking cap and think it through for yourself.
As of July 15, 2022, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) had logged 1,350,947 adverse event reports following the COVID jab, including 29,635 deaths,32 and there’s evidence that reports are being deleted from the system by the thousands. You can learn more about that in “Thousands of Deaths and Adverse Reactions Deleted From VAERS.”
The safety signals coming from the COVID jabs exceed anything else in medical history. No drug or vaccine has ever been associated with as many injuries and deaths, including harm to the unborn.
At this point, it appears we’re looking at a certain depopulation event. The question then is, are you willing to accept the risks? Are you willing to risk your fertility, even if only temporarily? Are you willing to risk the life of your baby? Are you willing to risk your own? If not, the answer is simple. Don’t take the jab, and if you’ve already taken one or two (or three), never take another.
EDITORS NOTE: This MERCOLA column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
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With the Biden Administration’s economic policies devastating the purchasing power of American consumers, home ownership has become out of reach for millions of Americans. What a tragedy.
Surging inflation and interest rates are hammering American consumers and weighing on the housing market.
Mortgage demand fell last week, hitting the lowest point since 2000, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
Buyers have lost considerable purchasing power as rates have almost doubled since earlier this year.
The pain in the mortgage market is only getting worse as higher interest rates and inflation hammer American consumers.
Mortgage demand fell more than 6% last week compared with the previous week, hitting the lowest level since 2000, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s seasonally adjusted index.
Of course. The people don’t matter. The party of misery spreads misery and suffering. ‘Let them eat electric cars.’ If you hate America, you support the Democrats. If you love America, you’re a Republican. How is co-existence sustainable?
The new New York Times poll is bad news for Biden and bad for America.
It’s not just the 33% approval rating that’s truly worrying. Biden has hit a new polling low, but he hits new polling lows every week. 70% of Democrats still claim to approve of Biden, much as they would a diseased cat, the propped up corpse of Osama bin Laden, or small piece of dried spaghetti as long as it was a Democrat. But only a quarter of the party wants Biden to run again.
Biden’s few remaining brain cells aren’t worried about the 2024 election. They’re worried about the Democrat primaries that he barely survived last time around. And isn’t likely to this time.
64% of Democrats want someone, anyone, other than Biden to run in 2024.
As Biden’s poll numbers have slid down the slopes faster than a falling skier, he hasn’t moved to the center, but to the fringes. Like most of his party, the primary threat comes from the Left. And the more unpopular Biden becomes, the harder he pivots leftward to protect his primary options.
Even if they’re mostly imaginary.
That’s why the poor poll numbers are nothing to celebrate. Biden pretended to run from the center, but never governed from the center. And his growing unpopularity has only made his administration more extreme. Biden doesn’t need America and doesn’t have it anyway.
He needs the Left.
Leftists and Americans wanted opposite things from the Biden administration. Americans wanted stability, sensible policies and an end to the chaos. Leftists wanted endless spending on their agendas, identity politics and a perpetual state of crisis. Biden took office in a locked down city with a heavily military presence, appointed an attorney general bitter at having a Supreme Court seat taken from him and tasked with pursuing partisan grievances. Gargantuan spending bills aggravated the already unstable economy and pushed the country to the brink.
Everything else followed from that.
Biden locked his administration into a leftist worldview that alienated most of the country. The more the rest of the country shuns him, the harder he clings to the “one that brought” him.
Barack Obama.
Biden isn’t popular, but he never was. He first got to the White House riding leftist coattails. He certainly wasn’t elected based on his own popularity, but because the Left waged a scorched earth campaign. The only reason someone so corrupt and inept ever ended up in the White House was as a beneficiary of the outpouring of rabid leftist hatred against conservatives.
The 2020 strategy of lying low and letting the Left rage got him in the White House. And Biden knows that his only shot of getting back in is once again letting the Left do its worst.
Biden’s national poll numbers don’t matter because he didn’t win a popularity contest.
It doesn’t matter if he’s at 41% or 33% or 6%. Biden’s gambit will be once again lying low and letting the Left shape the battlefield. Faced with the likelihood of being a one-termer, his staffers are leftists who aren’t in it for the money or the career development, but are true believers in the “cause”. And he needs leftist donors who aren’t invested in personalities, but in ideology.
Much like Xi, Biden understands that the ‘party’ matters and the public doesn’t. And ‘party’ doesn’t mean the official one with a donkey on the box, but the ideological leftist movement that cares about the things he’s vigorously promoting from critical race theory to gender identity to modern monetary theory and all the theories that in their sum add up to Marxist theory.
Joe Biden likely doesn’t believe any of it, but just as Hunter didn’t have to read Mao’s Little Red Book to cut business deals in China, Biden doesn’t have to understand what he’s promoting.
Biden came into office after outsourcing much of his administration’s policy apparatus to the Bernie and Warren people. The “Big Guy” doesn’t care much about policy. Biden has been anti and pro-abortion, pro and anti-terrorism, and pro and anti-racism depending on the moment.
What Biden cares about is having the big job and whatever benefits flow from it. An egomaniac who kept on lying about his college grades while running for president, he accidentally landed in a position commensurate with his inflated self-image. And one that offers plenty of rewards.
Much as Hillary, another compulsive liar, wrecked her own party and then the country while trying to cling to power no one thought she should have, Biden, even in his diminished state, is not going to let go. In that, Biden is no different than the rest of a gerontocratic oligarchy, men and women like Speaker Pelosi and Senator Bernie Sanders, claiming to speak for the youth.
After generations in power, none of them are eager to let go and accept the inevitable. Especially since the inevitable is no longer as inevitable as it once used to be.
It’s inevitable to most that Biden won’t run and won’t win if he does. And in the normal state of things, that would be true. But we are in a post-polling world in which public opinion is no longer just a reaction to events, but can be directly shaped by manufacturing a series of crises.
And if Biden works hard enough for the Left, perhaps the Left will work to keep him in office.
Some race riots, lockdowns, and crises yet to be unleashed can do wonders for changing people’s perspective. It likely won’t work and may not even be tried, but Biden doesn’t have any other cards to play. And he never did. Biden can’t win elections on his own. So he won’t try.
The more unpopular he becomes, the less likely he is to even bother going through the motions.
Biden may sit in the White House (when he’s not vacationing in Delaware), but he doesn’t work for the American people. He works for the Left. And he may not remember much of anything else, but that is the one thing he has never forgotten. It’s the only reason why he’s here.
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Donald Trump has plans to purge the so-called ‘deep state’ beyond what any president has done before if he runs for and wins the presidency in 2024
As many as 50,000 government workers could be on the chopping block
He would clean house of mid-level staffers at the Pentagon, Justice Department, State Department and beyond and bring in ‘America First’ candidates
The order would reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants who were deemed to have some influence over policy as ‘Schedule F’ employees
This would strip them of their employment protections and make them political appointees
By Morgan Phillips, Politics Reporter For Dailymail.Com, 22 July 2022
Donald Trump has plans to purge the so-called ‘deep state’ beyond what any president has done before if he runs for and wins the presidency in 2024 and as many as 50,000 government workers could find themselves on the chopping block.
The former president, if elected again, would move in with a plan being drawn up now to ‘drain the swamp’ and cut tens of thousands of civil servants from what are typically apolitical roles, according to an Axios report.
He would clean house of mid-level staffers at the Pentagon, Justice Department, State Department and beyond and bring in thoroughly vetted candidates who were found to be more closely aligned with his ‘America First’ agenda.
After interviews with over a dozen Trump-world insiders the outlet’s investigation found that Trump is planning to use an executive order called ‘Schedule F,’ which he issued in October 2020 and Biden later rescinded.
The order would reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants who were deemed to have some influence over policy as ‘Schedule F’ employees, which would strip them of their employment protections.
New presidents typically replace about 4,000 political appointees to align agencies with their new agenda, but below them are a mass of federal workers who have strong employment protections and typically continue in their role from one administration to the next.
The Trump official who came up with the Schedule F order said it could apply to as many as 50,000 of the some-two million federal workers. Other Trump allies say the figure will not be nearly that high because firing a smaller segment of anti-Trump ‘bad apples’ would be enough to trigger ‘behavior change.’
Doing so could strip mid-level government staffers of any sense of job stability and set a new precedent forcing future new presidents to seek out and install their own loyalists throughout the bureaucracy.
Russ Vought, the former head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, is reportedly working on plans to make the security clearance process less onerous so that more government workers could be made political appointees.
‘We are consciously bringing on the toughest and most courageous fighters with the know-how and credibility to crush the deep state,’ Vought told Axios.
Donald Trump has plans to purge the so-called ‘deep state’ beyond what any president has done before if he runs for and wins the presidency in 2024 and as many as 50,000 government workers could find themselves on the chopping block
Donald Trump has plans to purge the so-called ‘deep state’ beyond what any president has done before if he runs for and wins the presidency in 2024 and as many as 50,000 government workers could find themselves on the chopping block
While Trump and many of his former top aides and allies are no longer on speaking terms, the former president is relying on a close cadre of still-trusted former advisors who are working with conservative organizations to line up talent. It’s also thought that for top jobs, Trump will bring in only those who most actively supported his 2020 election fraud claims.
Jeffrey Clark, a controversial lawyer who advocated for a plan to contest the election results and now finds himself in the crosshairs of the Jan. 6 committee and the FBI, is thought to be in line for attorney general.
Sources close to the former president said that Ric Grenell has a decent shot at a secretary of State nomination. As acting director of national intelligence, Grenell was one of Trump’s favorite officials toward the end, as he worked to declassify material from the Trump-Russia investigation. Grenell, who now works on Newsmax, said on the network earlier this year: ‘I’m not going to stop until we prosecute [Trump’s former FBI director] Jim Comey.’
Kash Patel, the chief of staff to Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller at the time of the attack on the Capitol, would likely be in line for a top national security job at the White House. If he could make it through a Senate confirmation, he could even be appointed CIA or FBI director, according to Trump allies.
Patel was a key author behind former Rep. Devin Nunes’ memo accusing the Department of Justice and FBI of abusing surveillance laws in a politically motivated effort to take down Trump.
The former president, if elected again, would move in with a plan being drawn up now to ‘drain the swamp’ and cut tens of thousands of civil servants from what are typically apolitical roles
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In depth analysis of the left’s catastrophic practices …
“A technique the Left uses to increase control through public anxiety is to “set multiple fires along the ridgeline.” The public notices that the flames are spreading. Which fire does one run to first? What must be sacrificed and allowed to burn?”
The objective of the militant political Left—whether in Hungary, at the European Union (EU), or in the United States—is to keep the public in a state of perpetual, acute, neurotic anxiety. They employ this form of psychological conditioning as a means of control. In the last century, socialists—National Socialists but particularly Communists—specialized in the technique to impose totalitarian control over whole societies.
Their goal is to manipulate the population into a series of fear-based decisions that disconnect people from their traditions, history, and values—and from each other. Separation from reality, inducing neurotic behavior and developing disordered environments—while simultaneously extinguishing individual independent thought and behavior—work together to create ‘learned helplessness,’ leaving a vacuum for government to step in and ‘save the day.’
This type of strategic psychological combat, aimed at directing and swaying public attitudes, is not new, nor is it merely the product of the last 100 years. Sun Tzu also stressed the importance of destroying the enemy’s will to fight in his 5th-century BC writings on military affairs. Lenin’s 1920 “Conditions for Admission to the Communist International” discusses this technique as “demoralization”—the far-stronger German term is Zersetzung—meaning break-up, decomposition, and disintegration. In the late 1920s the German communist party had specific operational detachments, referred to as Apparat, specifically for Zersetzung and Terror, working together in powerful combination. The German communist cells took orders from Moscow, agitated for class warfare, deconstructed society for political advantage, and subverted the authority of the Weimar constitution. You are the modern-day target for this exact same treatment.
The mind has always been one of the most important battlegrounds—this is especially seen in Lenin’s dogmatic interpretation of Marxism. Lenin stresses throughout his writing that there can only be one right belief and that any dissent is a threat meriting terrorism at home and aggression abroad. This ideology has given, and continues to give, the militant Left license to deploy its full arsenal of techniques to destroy its opposition. The Left wants you to give up and comply.
As disconnection and dependance contribute to the breakdown of family, community, and national identity, the general population is to be driven into the arms of an all-knowing, all-providing, homogenizing global society. Global citizens will find rest, comfort, and direction through compliance and in their ruling parties.
Balázs Orbán, political director to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, details a compelling case for how the EU seeks to impose and enforce cultural structures, as well as moral and legal norms, across all of Europe without dialogue or debate. He discusses the phenomenon of “universalist thinking” demanding fetish compliance, in the context of the EU operating as a 21st-century empire, in the Winter 2021 edition of The European Conservative. The elite rule, and all subjects must comply. Dissent is often punished. Disagreement is barely tolerated and frequently sanctioned economically. The essence of sovereignty—representative government—is dismissed as a quaint relic inconsistent with the rigid orthodoxies of Leftist ideology.
As Balázs Orbán points out, “only 8% of the EU’s senior officials come from Central and Eastern European states, though those states make up 40% and 20% of the EU’s population, respectively.” When the EU leadership criticizes and sanctions Hungary for wanting to enforce (Schengen) border security or for affirming the God-given right of Hungarian parents to decide what their children are taught in school, then something is very wrong. Political intimidation and economic coercion are the tools of fear leveraged against a nation in an international campaign to compel universal compliance.
The Left seeks to destroy and reshape national consciousness so that life is reduced to an obsessive list of things that are either ‘forbidden’ or ‘mandatory’—and are enforced by either subsidized or punitive state control.
Furthermore, eager compliance with state diktats is encouraged and rewarded with privilege and status. Virtue posturing and social demonstrations promoting state-sponsored group-think are ironically promoted as being bestowed with a keen awareness meriting the now-tired trope ‘Woke.’ In the United States, Hollywood stars posture while American cities burn and 2 million illegal aliens cross the southern border. Citizens are reduced from being the sovereign authority to a state resource that funds their own destruction.
Militant Leftist attacks—both ideological and physical—are launched against history and facts. Traditions and foundations are besieged and undermined. Most recently in the United States, that effort has manifested in the so-called ‘1619 Project,’ which seeks to rewrite America’s founding, and everything that comes from it, as based on slavery and racism. It is not merely a social commentary—it is an attempt to destroy our Constitution.
Beyond the ideological and physical attacks, society is also subjected to political and social group psychoanalysis that, in a perverted way, allows for the mass production of complexes and traumas. The counterfactual and increasingly hysterical claims of America’s ‘systemic racism’ is an example of the tactic. Again, the American public is attacked with the goal of inculcating feelings of error, guilt, shame, and fear, as well as desires (by some) for repentance and revenge.
Another technique the Left uses to increase control through public anxiety is to manufacture crises or “set multiple fires along the ridgeline.” The fires represent crises and controversies that are presented to the public via compliant media as urgent and threatening. The public (down in the ‘valley’) notices that up above them, on the hillside and ridgeline, there are multiple ‘fires’ burning at different spots, and the flames are spreading—sweeping across the terrain. Which fire does one run to first? How many can be put out? What must be sacrificed and allowed to burn? How can the public sustain these challenges and losses? Who will save us all from burning? The ‘firemen’ of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 set fires to destroy outlawed books. This ridgeline scenario is merely a variation on a theme. Control, compulsion, threats, and crises all dominate the public’s psyche.
Let us review a partial list of the cascading crises of the Biden administration: COVID pandemic, vaccine mandates and ultimatums, business shutdowns, 40-year high inflation, labor shortages, supply chain crisis, record illegal immigration and drug smuggling, the collapse of border security, record high fuel prices, return to foreign energy dependance, Ukraine, Afghanistan, FBI and Justice Department targeting parents, record homicide rates across 16 major US cities, Fentanyl as the number one killer of Americans aged 18-45, renegotiating the Iran nuclear “deal” with Russia at the table, radical promotion of pro-transgender agenda at the expense of women’s rights and protections for women in sports, hysterical ‘insurrection’ claims of the January 6th Commission, baby formula shortages, the complete collapse of the Democrat’s sweeping climate and social spending agenda, Monkeypox, Biden’s multiple verbal gaffes and apparent diminished mental acuity. This list is not exhaustive. It goes on and on.
More crises are sure to come. Guaranteed. Some domestic, some international, some imposed, some initiated, some clandestine, some overt. The point is that they exist, and they are hyped and manipulated and presented to the public as imminent threats. Not solutions, not victories, not ways to overcome adversity. Threats. Each one is a brick of fear in the fortress of terror in which we are to be imprisoned.
One of the most disturbing examples of America’s new state-sponsored punitive tactics is the politicization of the justice system. America now has a two-tiered system of justice. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has, without exaggeration, become the ‘secret police’ of the Democratic Party. Brief examples will illustrate the FBI’s disparity of treatment between conservatives and leftists. Compare and contrast the FBI’s treatment of conservatives: Presidential Advisor Dr. Peter Navarro, Project Veritas journalist James O’Keefe, and political consultant Roger Stone against the treatment of Democrat operatives: former Attorney General Eric Holder, who was held in contempt of Congress by a bipartisan majority; and the serial lies of former FBI Director James Comey, FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe, and senior intelligence officials James Clapper and John Brennan. The public’s loss of confidence in the justice system gravely undermines democracy. Polling suggests a steady decline in public trust of both career and politically appointed government officials.
There are several other tactics and techniques the Left uses against the people to push them to abandon hope and faith. Once the people are broken through engineered crises, then the Left pounces to implement the radical, ‘fundamental transformation’ that makes things ‘better.’ Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven of the Columbia University School of Social Work outlined this strategy in an article in The Nation magazine in 1966, entitled: “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” The Cloward-Piven strategy looks to deliberately “break the system” in order to create an opportunity for even greater centralized control. Obama presidential advisor Rahm Emanuel summed it up best when he said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” How many times have we seen this? Yet there seems to be recurring, generational amnesia concerning the brutality of this process and the deadly consequences.
EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2022-07-24 05:52:282022-07-24 05:52:46How the Militant Left Uses Fear
This didn’t stop her from getting work with the BBC or being brought on board by the Anne Frank Trust UK to train the “youth” in the arts of tolerance.
Despite the name of the murdered Jewish girl, the Anne Frank Trust UK was seeking trustees with “lived experiences” of “anti-black racism, disabilism, homophobia and transphobia” and was “particularly keen to address anti-black racism as a priority” as “highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement”. Those merely concerned about matter of anti-Semitism need not apply.
Organizations with Anne Frank’s name, but having nothing to do with her, Holocaust victims or the Jewish community have proliferated around the world. These organizations, generally not even Jewish, have instead served as incubators of antisemitism in exactly this sort of way.
The Anne Frank Foundation in Switzerland funds BDS hate groups. An Anne Frank center in Frankfurt Germany compared ISIS terrorists to Jews. At the Anne Frank Center in Berlin, a Muslim guide compared Israel to Nazi Germany. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam removed references to Anne’s Jewishness, banned a guide from wearing Jewish clothing and attacked Israel. An exhibit placed a photo of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon side by side with one of Hitler.
And yet this may be the first time an Anne Frank organization invited a speaker who had called for the murder of Jews. So many Anne Frank groups had tiptoed around it, but the Anne Frank Trust UK actually went out and did it.
“We are excited to welcome performance poet, producer and creative practitioner, Nasima Begum, to our special workshop this evening.” the Anne Frank Trust UK announced.
Begum’s job was “youth empowerment”.
Not surprising when the Assistant Director for Youth Empowerment at the Anne Frank Trust is Amna Abdullatif who tweets enthusiastic support for antisemitic politician Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Under pressure, the British organization announced that Begum “may have views that are not consistent with our values” and promised that it would launch an investigation even though controversies over Begum had already been aired in the past and would have been known to it.
There is a reason that this keeps happening at organizations named after Anne Frank.
Anne’s story was hijacked early on with a play, The Diary of Anne Frank, by Lillan Hellman, a Hollywood Stalinist, who turned it over to Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, the Communist-linked married couple who purged most of the Jewish references.
Since then, Anne Frank has been reinvented in the form of various races, most recently as an illegal alien hiding from ICE, and another production which sought a “multi-racial cast representing many heritages.” The elimination of Anne’s Jewishness, much like the universalization of the Holocaust, presages antisemitism. Once the Jews have been replaced in their historical role, it becomes all too easy for antisemites to turn Jews into the new Nazis.
And their killers, whether the PLO, Hamas or ISIS, into the new Jews.
Nasima Begum claimed that Israel’s resistance to Islamic terrorism was “the Holocaust all over again” with “Palestinians” as the victims and “Zionism scum” as the perpetrators.
The Anne Frank Trust UK may find this sort of explicit wording vulgar, but it’s no coincidence that the same ideas have manifested themselves at the Anne Frank centers in Berlin and Frankfurt, at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and now in the UK. It’s what happens when the story of the Holocaust is reframed in terms of general principles detached from the Jews.
Or as the Communists who rewrote Anne’s story had her say in the play, “We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer.” The fictionalized version of a dead Jewish girl declares to applause. “Sometimes one race, sometimes another.”
Transforming the Holocaust into a general story about intolerance and prejudice all too easily becomes a partisan story whose broader lesson is the moral supremacy of leftist virtues.
And those virtues are routinely used to call for the death of Israel and the murder of Jews.
Rewriting the Holocaust as a struggle between the Left and the Right is itself Holocaust revisionism because it ignores the Soviet mass murder of Jews, the Hitler-Stalin pact and the collaboration of western Communists, including Lillian Hellman, in that Communist crime.
Hellman, had defended the Hitler-Stalin Pact and participated in the Communist-front “Keep America Out of War Committee”, making her a Nazi collaborator, and yet was allowed to play a role in transforming the story of a murdered Jewish girl into leftist agitprop.
While Hellman was suppressing Anne’s Jewishness, the Soviet Union was suppressing the Jewish elements of the Holocaust. True Jewish commemorations of the Holocaust were banned in the Soviet Union. Any discussion about the mass murder of Jews was tightly controlled. Even while it was covering up the Holocaust, the Soviet Union launched a propaganda campaign against the newly reborn State of Israel whose key elements, including the apartheid smear, are still widely in use among leftists, including those operating at Anne Frank centers, today.
Before Islamists were shouting, “Death to you Zionist scum”, Communists were shouting it.
The Soviet regime’s favorite taunt though was slurring Zionists as “fascists” or “Nazis”. A Communist regime that had massacred Jews and collaborated with the Nazis originated the smearing of Israel, of Zionists, and of Jews as Nazis. The latest such incident at an Anne Frank Center is the long legacy of the leftist hijacking of the Holocaust to justify the murder of Jews.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2022-07-24 05:39:272022-08-04 06:34:50Anne Frank Trust Invited Islamist Who Called for Murder of Jews
“All technologies will be directly embedded into our bodies by 2030.” — Nokia boss, Pekka Lundmark at WEF
“Irrational thinking and the embracing of absurdity as a way of life has spread to every corner of the globe—way beyond the first-world countries to the most remote islands in the world. There is no normal anymore, anywhere. Insanity has infected the entire human population.” — Dr. Peter McCullough
“To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.” – Klaus Schwab
“Totalitarianism strives not to despotic dominion over the people, but to establish such a system in which people are completely unnecessary.” — Hannah Arendt
“If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Great Reset is caused by government manipulation, with the guidance of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations, and other elites, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, etc., who believe they have the right to steer nations and economies into a new “totalitarian world order.” All of this is being fueled by green energy policy lies. The Greta Thunberg fools of the world are so propagandized with fear, it is impossible to reach them with truth. Unfortunately, many Americans have fallen prey to these lies.
The very core of the evil we’re seeing is a hatred of God and His Creation and a desire by those promoting this evil to be in control of humanity and become gods themselves. They belong to their father, the devil, and like those before them, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Ceaușescu and so many others, their time is short.
Too many Americans surrendered their God-given freedoms out of fear of a lie, a lie promoted by evil entities throughout the world. “Protocols” were installed and millions were murdered in hospitals because we were told there was nothing that could save them except a vaccine! Millions have died and many more are disabled from the dangerous C-19 inoculations. Newstarget recently reported that Pfizers own documents admit that mRNA covid vaccines will result in mass depopulation.
The FDA has now approved these injections for children under five, roughly 18 million youngsters.
Our citizens have lost their ability to think logically and to reason for themselves that governments rarely have good intentions for their subjects.
The First Seeds of Terror and Totalitarianism
Holocaust survivor, political philosopher and author, Hannah Arendt, published her first book in 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her work describes what we are seeing in America today. She discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the non-totalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.
Terror regimes use isolation as a weapon of oppression, and terror arrived in America in 2020 via the mainstream media’s fear propaganda. Even the conservative stations segregated all their hosts and spoke of nothing else but COVID. Anthony Fauci struck even more trepidation in Americans with his constant updates and statements of how dangerous the Wuhan virus would be to everyone. Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield echoed Fauci’s doctrine of lies.
Families were kept apart, children were kept from grandparents, nursing home elderly were sequestered from their loved ones, people were locked in their homes for months, and fearful mothers masked their toddlers. We were kept from each other, kept from standing close, kept from hugging others, kept from coffee and conversation. We were alone out of fear. We stood six feet or more from each other and mask Nazis raged at those who didn’t comply with face diapers. Fear promoted loneliness.
Hannah Arendt spoke of loneliness as the capacity to think and to know ourselves, even when in isolation, depends, in part, by making meaningful connections with others. How much has technology, the internet, smart phones and social media affected how we relate to others? It is obvious when you see people out to dinner or at a gathering, and instead of being engaged in conversation, they are looking at their phones.
Ms. Arendt believed that totalitarianism was able to institute a regime of total terror because modern individuals had lost the ability to trust their very selves since they had abandoned any sense of relation to one another.
She stated, “Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pre-totalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together…; isolated men are powerless by definition.”
In John Miltimore’s March 2018 article, Hannah Arendt on How Loneliness Breeds Terror, he states, “What we see here is that, according to Arendt, loneliness is not the absence of people but an absence of self-identity, which is attained through companionship and community. But loneliness is preceded by social isolation, and it is in this first stage of isolation where the first seeds of terror and totalitarianism are sewn.”
Two years of living hell for Americans did much to cement fear and compliance, even with those of us who saw through the lies…even though we saw the dangers. Fear and loneliness had embedded itself in our loved ones, friends and neighbors. “Don’t forget your mask,” was the call with the wave from neighbors in their yards.
What does the Lord say? That fear is NOT from Him.
But whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and be quiet from fear of evil. Proverbs 1:33
For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. 2 Timothy 1:7
Remembering History
Nazi Germany, in the 1930s and 1940s, promoted fear to rule the people, and that fear was directed at another group of people, a group who meant nothing to the hierarchy in charge. Men and women were used as slaves until they became too weak to work and then they were murdered, cremated and gone. Babies were bludgeoned or shot with their families and dumped into huge burial plots, plots they were forced to dig before being shot. Mothers tried to shield their infants to no avail.
Millions of Jews died, I am convinced far more than the common tally of six million. Yes, the Germans kept excellent records, but they hired townspeople to round up the Jewish citizenry and murder them, many were never recorded. Millions more died, Romany (gypsies), homosexuals, dissenters, one of the most famous being anti-Nazi Lutheran preacher, Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was hanged by Hitler only days before liberation of Flossenburg.
It is so necessary to remember the Holocaust when speaking of the events of the last two years with the COVID Plandemic. Americans no longer know our own or world history. Revisionists write what they want us to believe and the statues and heroes of the past are destroyed. The very memory of the Holocaust should cause us to avoid future human tragedies, yet we find ourselves in the throes of a new and horrible worldwide tyranny that is gaining speed every day.
Build Back Better, aka The Great Reset
Now we have our dementia ridden illegitimate president writing Executive Orders that are dictatorial edicts. EOs are only for administrative purposes, but the executive branch now ignores that fact which makes the president the most powerful person in the land…certainly not what our founders had in mind. Joe’s Special Envoy, John Kerry, has let the world know that, “The notion of a reset is more important now than ever before.” Kerry thinks this will be an exciting time. It sounds potentially lethal for most of humanity.
Ahh, the lovely state of our world. Good ole’ Joe, he’s been on the New World Order bandwagon all his life. And now, WEF member Joe Biden is the puppet in charge of this country with his “Build Back Better.” Our fate is sealed unless we fight. The BBB slogan isn’t even his. Of course not, Joe is an infamous plagiarist. It’s the mantra for “The Great Reset” a la Schwab, Harari, WHO, the world’s leaders, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, Fauci, the Democrat Party and the majority of the Republican Party. Those who defy the globalists are destroyed or eliminated.
Schwab’s Advisor, Yuval Noah Harari
Klaus Schwab tells us that we will never return to normal after COVID. He states, “Nothing will ever return to the ‘broken’ sense of normalcy that prevailed prior to the crisis because the coronavirus pandemic marks a fundamental inflection point in our global trajectory.” I highly doubt most patriotic Americans felt we lived in a “broken” America before the Wuhan virus hit, and what if we don’t want to go on Schwab’s Orwellian chosen course?
All these globalists, including their counterparts in China want to “Reset” the entire world and they call it the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” but how many people will be left after their depopulation schemes? Far too many died with the fraudulent hospital “protocols,” and now many more are dying from the COVID injections, jabs that didn’t protect anyone from contracting or dying from C-19.
Pfizer CEO, Albert Bourla, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel, and Johnson and Johnson’s Alex Gorsky are all members of the World Economic Forum. Albert Bourla tells Klaus Schwab that he wants compliance of the populations for his inoculations.
Schwab tells us we’ll never return to normal, but his top advisor, WEF and UN spokesperson, Yuval Noah Harari, tells us in his book, Homo Deus (man god), “The era of free will is over.” Yuval is praised by Klaus Schwab, Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, who reviewed his book on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. And Bill Gates, who wants to depopulate the world is funding and running the vaccine industry. If this doesn’t make you back away from every needle, I don’t know what will.
Yuval Harari is considered by Klaus Schwab to be a brilliant futurist. Both claim that by 2030, “You will own nothing and be happy!” Mr. Harari says the Bible and thousands of years of faith in God and Jesus is fake news. He is openly gay and married to Itzic Yahav, who is also his personal manager. They married in a civil ceremony in Toronto, Canada.
Harari’s website homepage states, “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.” Harari believes in massive surveillance, even surveillance inside our bodies. In fact, under the skin surveillance, and even surveillance via ingestible medications that will alert authorities when the medication has been taken.
Old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but then the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish. Whereas in the past human had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than exploited.
Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new “useless class” – people who are useless not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.
The AI revolution might create unprecedented inequality not just between classes but also between countries.
There’s that word again… “useless.” Unless we fit into the slave mentality of these globalists, we are expendable.
The global elite are obsessed with over population and want six billion people to die. If their dreams come true, it is a return to feudalism.
Most of us just want to be left alone, to raise our families, make our own choices, and live our lives in peace.
Conclusion
Men Who Just Want to be Left Alone — Soviet Dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
“The most terrifying force of death, comes from the hands of Men who wanted to be left Alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love.
They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know, that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over.
The moment the Men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be. Which is why, when forced to take up violence, these Men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play-acting at politics and terror. TRUE TERROR will arrive at these people’s door, and they will cry, scream, and beg for mercy… but it will fall upon the deaf ears of the Men who just wanted to be left alone
And having done all, we must STAND as ONE against the onslaught of evil.
On Sunday evening—July 17, 2022—at the Greenwood Park Mall in Indiana, a gunman opened fire in a food court. He killed three people and wounded two others. He might have murdered many more but for the quick work of a man named Elisjsha Dicken, who pulled out his own gun and blew away the assailant.
Dicken, who was legally carrying a firearm under the state’s constitutional carry law, was hailed as a “Good Samaritan” for saving lives. The next day, the Greenwood police chief added, “Many more people would have died last night if not for the responsible armed citizen.”
Gun control advocates immediately condemned the police chief for his “Good Samaritan” reference, drawn from a famous parable told by Jesus Christ. A local reporter exclaimed,
The term, ‘Good Samaritan’ came from a Bible passage of a man from Samaria who stopped on the side of the road to help a man who was injured and ignored. I cannot believe we live in a world where the term can equally apply to someone killing someone.
Who is correct here, the police chief or the reporter? A related question is, Did Jesus support self-defense, or the taking of a guilty life to save the lives of innocents?
In Chapter 10 of the Book of Luke in the New Testament, Jesus tells his parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan is judged “good” because when he came upon a man who was beaten and robbed, he chose of his own free will to help the injured man with his own resources. As I wrote in my 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist?, if the Samaritan had ignored the man or expected the government to help him, we would likely know him today as the “Good-for-Nothing” Samaritan.
The Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable did not commit a violent act himself. The injured man’s assailants were presumably long gone. He stepped in to assist the assailed. So strictly speaking, the Greenwood police chief’s reference was not entirely analogous to Elisjsha Dicken’s action in taking down the shooter at the shopping mall.
For centuries, many people have employed the term “Good Samaritan” to describe anyone who isn’t compelled to come to the aid of the innocent but takes the initiative to do so anyway. A Good Samaritan takes charge of a bad situation, improves it as best he can, and prevents further harm. That is exactly what Elisjsha Dicken did in Greenwood.
Undoubtedly, the critical reporter in this instance is a person of good intent. He can’t imagine Jesus endorsing Dicken’s action because Jesus was a man of peace. He might even cite Matthew, chapter five, in which Jesus urges us to “turn the other cheek” if someone insults us or physically slaps us in the face.
“The question of rendering insult for insult, however, is a far cry from defending oneself against a mugger or a rapist,” writes Lars Larson in Does Jesus Christ Support Self-Defense?. To “turn the other cheek” means to refrain from a needless escalation of a problematic situation. Elisjsha Dicken did not escalate anything; in fact, he dramatically and decisively de-escalated it in the only possible way, given the circumstances.
The reporter likely shares the widely-held, radically pacifist or “namby-pamby” view of Jesus—the view that he would never endorse an act of violence for any purpose, even if it’s necessary to save lives. It implies that Elisjsha Dicken should have run for cover and allowed the Greenwood shooter to kill another dozen or two people. That’s wrong, if not downright blasphemous.
When Jesus dined at The Last Supper, he gave his disciples specific instructions, including this one (Luke 22:36):
He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.
Note that he did not advise anyone, then or at any other time, to stand idly by and allow wanton slaughter of innocents. And he offered support for the threat of force to prevent the theft of property as well. In Luke 11:21, Jesus said:
When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are safe. But when someone stronger attacks and overpowers him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted, and divides up his plunder.
This is the same Jesus who, in Luke 12:39, says, “If the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into.” It’s the same Jesus who never criticized anyone for possessing a lethal weapon such as a sword, though he certainly condemned the initiation of force or the impetuous and unnecessary use of it.
In Jesus, Guns and Self-Defense: What Does the Bible Say?, Gary DeMar maintains that
Being armed and willing to defend ourselves, our family, and our neighbors is not being unchristian or even unloving. Self-defense can go a long way to protect the innocent from people who are intent on murder for whatever reason.
The Greenwood reporter’s errant perspective is not untypical of people who think they know Jesus and Christianity but spend more time criticizing them than learning about them. I see evidence of this all the time, most recently from a speaker at an April 2022 conference in Prague, Czech Republic.
“When it comes to the source of individual rights,” the speaker pontificated with misplaced confidence, “there are only three possibilities.” One, he said, is a Creator (God), which he summarily dismissed as a ridiculous, untenable proposition. The second is government, which he ruled out as equally ridiculous and untenable. The only logical option, he said, was “nature”—something which he suggested evolved out of nothing from nobody. As I listened with the largely student audience, I thought to myself, “This supposed expert hasn’t even considered a fourth option, namely, a combination of the first and third—which is to say that God, as the author of nature, is in fact the author of individual rights as well.”
The speaker added another uninformed dig at Christianity by claiming it was stupid for Jesus to ever suggest you should love your neighbor. “What if your neighbor is an axe-murderer? How much sense would that make?” he asked derisively. If he had known of the passages I cite above, he would have been embarrassed by his own ignorance. As a general principle, Jesus argued, you should love your neighbor but the same Jesus would urge you to arm yourself if your neighbor threatens your life or property.
To permit murder when one could have prevented it is morally wrong. To allow a rape when one could have hindered it is evil. To watch an act of cruelty to children without trying to intervene is morally inexcusable. In brief, not resisting evil is an evil of omission, and an evil of omission can be just as evil as an evil of commission. Any man who refuses to protect his wife and children against a violent intruder fails them morally.
When Elisjsha Dicken pulled out his gun to stop a shooting spree, he had every reason to believe he might attract the shooter’s aim and be killed himself. Fortunately, he was not, and he is among the living whose lives he saved.
If Elisjsha Dicken had been killed, the rest of us could at least take comfort in the words of Jesus as quoted in John 15:13. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
Elisjsha Dicken is not only a Good Samaritan. He’s a very good one. Give him a medal.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2022-07-23 12:28:422022-08-01 15:01:59Yes, Elisjsha Dicken Is a Good Samaritan—and He Deserves a Medal
