The Atlantic Claims ‘More People Carrying Guns Tends to Result in More Shootings.’ Decades of Data Show They’re Wrong

The Atlantic recently suggested the surge of violence in 2020 was the result of the increase in firearms sales in 2020. The claim is pure fiction.


A couple of months ago, The Atlantic published an article written by staff writer David A. Graham that explores the surge of violence the United States experienced in 2020.

Overall the article, which analyzes findings from the FBI’s “Uniform Crime Report,” is quite good. It effectively breaks down what we know and—more importantly—what we don’t know about the latest crime trends in America, which in 2020 saw a record surge in the murder rate amid a broader rise of violence.

On one particular point, however, Graham is simply wrong.

Graham notes that sales of firearms jumped in 2020, as did police confiscation of illegal guns, and he attempts to tie this to the surge in violence.

“You can ask law-abiding people or you can ask people who do not abide by the law, ‘Why are you armed with a firearm?’ ‘I need to protect myself,’” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, tells Graham.

Precisely what Rosenfeld meant by this statement is unclear, but Graham’s next sentence is clear.

“That creates a vicious cycle: More people carrying guns tends to result in more shootings, which in turn heightens the desire to carry a weapon for protection,” Graham writes. “When crime is decreasing, this dynamic helps it continue to fall, but once it begins to rise, the feedback loop turns ugly.”

Whether this claim is Graham’s or Rosenfield’s is unclear. No link or citation is offered to support the assertion. What we do know is the claim that “more people carrying guns tends to result in more shootings” is simply untrue.

As economist Mark Perry pointed out several years ago, the US saw gun violence steadily decrease over multiple decades as gun ownership surged.

“According to data retrieved from the Centers for Disease Control, there were 7 firearm-related homicides for every 100,000 Americans in 1993 (see light blue line in chart),” Perry wrote. “By 2013…the gun homicide rate had fallen by nearly 50% to only 3.6 homicides per 100,000 population. ”

This decline, Perry points out, occurred as the number of privately owned firearms in America surged from about 185 million in 1993 to 357 million in 2013.

And in case you’re wondering, non-fatal shootings followed a similar decline as fatal shootings, as Vox reported at the time. This is part of a larger decline in gun violence that saw “a 39 percent decline in gun homicides between 1993 and 2011 and a staggering 69 percent decline in non-fatal firearms crimes.”

Mr. Graham, who has also reported for Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal, is no doubt a fine writer and reporter. (Many of his points in the article on the FBI’s recent crime report are insightful.) But he’s simply wrong that more people possessing guns “tends to result in more shootings.” The data simply do not support this claim. During this “staggering” decades-long trend of falling firearms crimes, gun ownership steadily increased the entire time.

None of this is to say that gun ownership caused the decline in gun violence. It very well may have, but that’s a more difficult question to answer. For instance, Max Ehrenfreund, a Harvard scientist, has posited that the decline in gun violence may have stemmed from a decline in alcoholism, more police working the streets, the bullish economy of the Reagan years, and even less lead exposure.

Ehrenfreund says researchers don’t really know for certain why the decline in violence happened, but he said one thing is clear: “America has become a much less violent place.”

The decline in gun violence was no doubt linked to many factors, but it’s certainly possible the rise of gun ownership was one of them.

As Lawrence Reed has pointed out, compelling research shows guns prevent some 2.5 million crimes a year in America—6,849 every day—nearly a half million of which are of a life-threatening nature. And it’s not exactly hard to see why. After all, 60 percent of convicted felons told researchers that they avoided committing such crimes when they suspected the target was armed.

If you’re suspicious of these statistics, it’s worth noting that the Centers for Disease Control, in a report commissioned by President Obama following the 2012 Sandy Hook Massacre, estimated that crimes prevented by guns may be even higher: up to 3 million annually (8,200 per day).

Again, we don’t know for certain. These are estimates. What we do know is that guns aren’t just used to commit crimes; they are also used to stop and deter crimes.

In his famous essay That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen, the great economist Frédéric Bastiat noted there is a pervasive tendency for people to focus on the visible effects of a given policy or action and miss the unseen consequences.

Gun control proponents often make this mistake. They focus on crimes committed with guns (the seen)—some of which are truly the things of nightmares—but ignore all the unseen, all of the crimes prevented by firearms.

Some may not be prepared to accept the idea that guns prevent thousands of crimes in America every single day. That’s ok.

But The Atlantic should correct its claim that “more people carrying guns tends to result in more shootings.” It’s pure fiction.

COLUMN BY

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

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

DC Librarian Who Made Children Reenact Holocaust Is Failed Dem Candidate, Convicted Fraudster and Animal Abuser

The Democrats elevate these scumbags to positions of influence and power. Evil, pure evil.

DC Librarian Who Made Children Reenact Holocaust Is Failed Dem Candidate, Convicted Fraudster, and Animal Abuser

Kimberlynn Jurkowski defrauded New Jersey of $24k, abused dogs

By: Matthew Foldi • Washington Free Beacon December 21, 2021 3:25 pm

The Washington, D.C., public school librarian who made third graders reenact graphic scenes from the Holocaust is a Democrat who claims she ran for office in New Jersey, where she was convicted of defrauding the state through a tutoring scam and charged with several counts of animal abuse.

Kimberlynn Jurkowski was placed on leave this week after parents complained to Watkins Elementary School that she made students role-play the Holocaust, assigning students to be Jews and pretend to die in gas chambers and dig mass graves, according to the Washington Post. One student was assigned to be Adolf Hitler, who carried out the Holocaust, Jurkowski told the students, “because the Jews ruined Christmas.” A Washington Free Beacon investigation found that Jurkowski was hired by the D.C. public school after a scandalous tenure as a librarian in New Jersey, where she ran in 2010 for a local school board as a Democrat, according to an image posted to her Twitter account.

There is no record of Jurkowski serving on the school board for Hamilton Township in Atlantic County, where she says she ran for office. There is record, however, of New Jersey catching Jurkowski bilking taxpayers out of approximately $24,000 through a program designed to help the children of the state’s educators. The Hamilton Township district paid for Jurkowski’s two children to receive tutoring—but she continued to bill the district for reimbursements once the tutoring stopped. She was convicted of fraud and forced to forfeit her librarian job, according to court records.

Jurkowski’s legal problems continued in 2019 when she faced four charges of animal cruelty for leaving her dogs out in the cold. According to coverage at the time from Pet Rescue Report, Jurkowski left five dogs behind to survive frigid temperatures in a dilapidated environment. Body camera footage from police officers called to the site shows “the entire property was completely run down,” with “dogs in pens with sheets of plywood leaning against a fence to act as shelter.”

One of the dogs, an older Rottweiler named Poseidon, could barely walk, and was found dead and frozen solid to the ground in one of the pens. The dog’s death prompted animal rights activists to launch a #JusticeForPoseidon campaign.

The principal of Watkins Elementary School, Scott Berkowitz, did not return a request for comment on Jurkowski. D.C. Public Schools did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including about whether it was familiar with Jurkowski’s criminal record prior to hiring her.

Since working in D.C. Public Schools, Jurkowski has struck an ultra-partisan combative tone online. Her Twitter account is filled with retweets of calls to abolish the police and defend Palestinian terrorism. One Al Jazeera post she shared claims that a Palestinian terrorist named Ahmad Erekat was killed by Israeli police but fails to mention that he was shot after ramming his car into Israelis.

Watkins Elementary School is located just outside a city ward represented by a Democratic lawmaker who claimed that Jews control the weather.

RELATED ARTICLE: DC teacher is put on leave after making kids aged 8 and 9 re-enact the HOLOCAUST, with Jewish boy chosen to play Hitler

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

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VIDEO: A Courageous Marine asks Mandate Questions of the Commandant

This courageous Marine Lieutenant Colonel Wade Brown puts his career on the line to ask the Commandant of the USMC “a few relevant questions” about the mandatory COVID 19 Jab which go unanswered.

He acknowledges his Oath of Office to support and defend the Constitution and not some administrative government sycophants.

So what will happen to him now?  Probably confinement to quarters and a Court Martial.  This is totally wrong.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Commandant: Many Unvaccinated Marines Swayed by Disinformation

Thousands of Sailors, Marines Remain Unvaccinated After Deadline

Army Commanders Relieved Over Vaccine Refusal

RELATED VIDEO: COVID-19 vaccine mandate: On its legitimacy, on being exempt and on informed consent.

©Royal A. Brown, III. All rights reserved.

Left’s Guns Falling Silent in War on Christmas

The Left is losing the war on Christmas – badly – so now it’s trying to convince you it never happened.  That’s a laugh.

There are the usual atheist groups flying ‘religious freedom’ banners doing their usual thing this year – protesting Christmas wreaths on military graves and installing yet another boring Satanic display in a state capitol building.  These people are violating Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the most important of which is ‘don’t repeat your stunts, don’t be boring.’

But the rest of the Left is mostly missing in action this year.  Things have definitely changed from just a few years ago.  (These links are old and may not work.)

In 2015 alone:

  • a VA hospital in Virginia banned Christmas trees. Washington Times 
  • Starbucks moved to plain red holiday cups.  Gateway Pundit
  • the University of Tennessee told employees to “ensure your holiday party is not a Christmas party in disguise” and no more “Secret Santa”.  The Tennesseean
  • a city councilwoman resigned to protest her town’s Christmas tree lighting.  She was later reinstated and appointed to head a newly-created diversity committee.  Washington Post
  • The ‘Killing Jesus’ mini-series drew the largest audience in National Geographic cable channel history. Truth Revolt
  • And a Kentucky school district purged scripture references from a ‘Charlie Brown Christmas’ program. Daily Signal

Ah, the good old days.  But, according to the Left, these things never happened, there never was a war on Christmas.  It doesn’t exist.  Conservatives made the whole thing up.

“There is not, and there never has been, a widespread campaign to harass, exclude, or persecute anyone who dares to wish a stranger a ‘Merry Christmas,’ as the Christmas warriors would have it,” an atheist recently wrote in Politico.  According to this writer, the Left’s war on Christmas is just a “conflict invented to fill right-wing cable airtime,” a creation of the “grievance-industrial complex”, and an “effort by activist Christians to retain their cultural supremacy.”

And, of course, it’s all Donald Trump’s fault for appointing himself General Patton to fight the war on Christmas.  Trump said recently, “When I started campaigning, I said, ‘You’re going to say “Merry Christmas” again,’ and now, people are saying it.” What left-wing article would be complete or even get published without bashing Trump?

But I digress.  In the upside down world of this writer, the Left never tried to embarrass everyone out of saying “Merry Christmas”.   No, it was the Right that started the whole thing by turning the phrase into a political weapon to pound on the Left.  Sure, and I’m Santa Claus.    The author’s bottom line:  the Right should give up its phony claims there ever was a war on Christmas and just go away.

That’s ridiculous.  This is gaslighting of the highest order.  It presupposes the atheist groups never made an issue out of Christmas without anyone asking them to.  Even today, you can go to the Freedom From Religion Foundation website and read all about how Christmas is just a relic of sun worship.  The phony narrative presupposes there never was an endless parade of legal challenges to nativity scenes at the Supreme Court.  So many we now have the reindeer rule requiring jurisdictions to mix in other symbols with their nativity scenes to pass constitutional muster.  And it presupposes that the University of Tennessee, the National Geographic cable channel, and all the other anti-Christmas warriors didn’t have guns blazing in 2015, as noted above.

Here’s what’s going on.  The Left is losing the war on Christmas, just like it’s losing the abortion fight and the war on parents.  So the Left is trying to get you to believe it was all in your head and you’re delusional for thinking they’ve been up to no good and trying to destroy Christmas.  Don’t fall for this line.  They’re known liars – Trump/Russia collusion hoax, anyone? – and, what’s more, they think it’s their duty to lie to you because truth doesn’t matter; winning is the only thing.

So now I wish you all – gay, straight, Christian, Jewish, atheist – a Merry Christmas.  I love saying that because it drives the Left nuts.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

How Do We Stop the Cancel Culture’s Formula — Diversity, Inclusion, Equity = DIE?

“No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” – Plato


Cancel culture or “call-out culture” is a nuevo form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles – whether it be online, on social media, or in person. Those subject to this nuevo ostracism has then, by definition, been “cancelled.”

If you want to cancel a culture you must be ready to do everything you can to first destroy it by ostracizing those who you fear most. You use words that on the surface seem to be innocuous like: diversity, inclusion and equity to ostracize others. These seemly innocuous words become nasty labels like: homophobic, Islamophobic, white supremacist, racist, capitalist, rich and unvaxxed. To be labeled using one or more of these words is death by cancellation.

QUESTION: Who are the cancel culture’s enemies?

ANSWER: Those who speak truth to power.

George Orwell, in his dystopian novel 1984, wrote,

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” 

To cancel means to put human minds together in a new dystopian (undesirable or frightening) shape. A new cancel culture society where war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

To cancel is to destroy the mind and with it the body politic.

Build Back Better is code for ostracize, cancel and then destroy those who do not obey.

When you embrace the cancel culture then at some point you are on the road to your own self-destruction and that of your culture. At some point the cancel culture turns on those who created it. At some point the cancel culture ideologues do not merely destroy their enemies, they fundamentally change them into automatons.

As George Orwell wrote,

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

The tools of the cancel culture are: terrorism, oppression, torture and murder. The goal of the cancel culture is that we DIE!

Now do you understand?

What Does America Think About the Cancel Culture?

On November 9th, 2021 Gabriela Schulte in a column titled “Poll: 69 percent say cancel culture unfairly punishes people for past actions, statements” reported:

A new Hill-HarrisX poll finds most voters think that “cancel culture” is unfairly punishing people over their past actions.

The survey used the Merriam-Webster definition to define the term as “the practice or tendency of engaging in mass canceling as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure.”

Sixty-nine percent of registered voters in the Nov. 2-3 survey said cancel culture unfairly punishes people for their past actions or statements, while 31 percent said it does not.

The survey found majorities of Republicans, Democrats and Independents saying it unfairly punished people, with Republicans being the most likely of the three groups to answer “yes.”

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE HILL HARRISX CHART – WHAT AMERICA’S THINKING

Seventy-nine percent of Republican voters along with 65 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents, specifically, said that cancel culture unfairly punishes people for their past actions or statements.

The poll also found 71 percent of registered voters said they strongly or somewhat believe that cancel culture has gone too far while 29 percent of respondents said they believe a little or not at all.

The most recent Hill-HarrisX poll was conducted online among 930 registered voters between Nov. 2 and 3. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.

Read the full article.

No one wants to be cancelled because they said, tweeted, posted or published something that offended members of the cancel culture. It’s called the First Amendment right to free speech. Without free speech we have nothing – no freedom of religion, no freedom to assemble, no freedom to petition our elected officials and no freedom to speak the truth.

How to Cancel the Cancel Culture

Howard Rotberg wrote, Any strong ideological belief carries with it a risk of denying those facts that do not support the ideology.”

QUESTION: What do we do to cancel the cancel culture?

ANSWER: Tell the truth using indisputable facts.

Kay C. James in a June 2nd, 2021 column titled “Seven Steps to Surviving Cancel Culture” wrote:

As someone who has been a public figure now for four decades, I have learned to navigate both that kind of cancel culture and the “woke” cancel culture that pervades society today.

Here are seven lessons I’ve learned:

  1. First and foremost, don’t give a damn about cancel culture. If you do, you’re giving small-minded people control over you that they don’t deserve. Realize that these are often people who want to silence your ideas because they’re afraid if others hear them, they might agree.
  2. Always be honest. The best defense is always the truth. Moreover, make sure you have your facts straight before you speak and that you can back up what you say.
  3. When you’re wrong, have the courage to admit you’re wrong. But when you’re right and taking a principled stand, have the courage to stand up for those principles, even in the face of withering criticism. Others will see your strength and be encouraged by it. But if you’re right and you give in, you have only served to embolden cancel culture. You have fed its voracious appetite and made it stronger, giving it more energy to seek out its next victim. You have made it harder for others to stand up for the truth, and as a result, many will continue to cower in silence.
  4. Don’t try to cancel others. There’s no need to be cruel and adopt the tactics of cancellation. Here is where I go back to my faith-based roots. We all fall far short of perfection. We need to show grace and forgiveness toward others, especially if we hope for the same mercy from others when we inevitably stumble ourselves.
  5. Be principled and don’t be a hypocrite. Hypocrites make easy targets for canceling and are fun for everyone to take down a few pegs.
  6. Expect that anything you write or anything that you say in front of a camera (even your friend’s cell phone) could end up trending on social media or landing on the front page of a newspaper. If you’re not okay with that, think twice about saying or doing it.
  7. There are an awful lot of people who are willing to deliberately take things out of context to make other people look bad. So always include context with what you say and write publicly, even if it means writing a slightly longer tweet or taking an extra 30 seconds to more fully explain your point. People may still take you out of context, but you will always “have the receipts,” as they say.

Read the full article.

The Bottom Line

John F. Kennedy said,

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

The cancel culture’s myths are Diversity, Inclusion and Equity. It is a myth that one can be diverse and equal at the same time. Inclusion is a myth as well. For you see equal people are not free and free people are not equal. Diversity is not a condition, it is a tool for the cancel culturalists to gain power over others.

Diversity, inclusion and equity are unrealistic myths in a free society. These can only be imposed by edict in a totalitarian state.

It is critical for the anti-cancel culture warriors to never give up, never surrender. When they go low, we keep the high ground. When they want to fundamentally change our God given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we must live free or die.

You will be banned on social media, lose friends, be attacked by others in public and even physically attacked on the streets during a peaceful protest.

This is war! A war of lies vs. truth. A war of good against pure evil.

America is now in a battle between freedom of individual choice or living under the boot of big government for ever.

The opposite of Diversity, Inclusion, Equity = DIE is Liberty, Integrity, Valor, Earnestness = LIVE!

Think about that as we enter 2022 and the new year.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ARTICLES ABOUT THE CANCEL CULTURE

RELATED VIDEO: Watch this music video titled “March of a Progressive” by Agustin Blazquez’s Independent Productions.

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OXFORD STUDY SHOCKER: 1 in 100 Vaccinated Individuals Were Admitted to Hospital or Died with Arrhythmia During Study Period

Drugs with less dangerous side effects have been removed from the market. Or at the very least paused, but in the current mad state of the world, it is mandatory. And anyone who thinks for themselves is part of a new underclass of the despised and marginalized.

OXFORD STUDY SHOCKER: 1 in 100 Vaccinated Individuals Were Admitted to Hospital or Died with Arrhythmia During Study Period

By: Jim Hoft, Gateway Pundit, December 21, 2021:

The Oxford researchers reveal that 1 in 100 or 1% of all vaccinated individuals were admitted to the hospital or died with arrhythmia or irregular heartbeat.

Of the 38,615,491 vaccinated individuals included in our study, 385,508 (1.0%) were admitted to hospital with or died from cardiac arrhythmia at any time in the study period (either before or after vaccination); 86,754 (0.2%) of these occurred in the 1-28 days after any dose of vaccine. Of those who were admitted or died 39,897 (10.3%) had a SARS-CoV-2 positive test, with 29,694 (7.7%) having a positive test before vaccination. There were 7,795 deaths with cardiac arrhythmia recorded as the cause of death (1,108 had a SARS-CoV-2 positive test).

So 1 in 100 of the vaccinated individuals are going to the hospital with irregular heart beat and this isn’t international headlines?

This is a shocking number.

James Cintolo has more on this study.

RELATED ARTICLES:

New York Schools telling parents to get ready for the cardiac arrest in students from k-12 when they get the vax

The Lancet journal SKEWERS “Pandemic of the Unvaxxed” narrative as noxious propaganda garbage

US Army is set to announce it has developed a single vaccine that protects against ALL variants of COVID and SARS

For more information on Covid-19 vaccines click here.

RELATED TWEET:

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

Quick note: Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here. We will not waver. We will not tire. We will not falter, and we will not fail. Freedom will prevail.

Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.

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Why California’s Move to Ban Gas-Powered Generators [and Lawn Equipment] Could Leave Californians in the Dark

California legislators have not only cut ties with reality—failing to see that they’re heading for ever more blackouts—they also want to cut their citizens’ last lifeline to reliable power when blackouts inevitably occur.


“Excuse me,” says your landscaper. “The mower’s out of juice. Mind if I plug in?” You look from the immobile machine to your half-cut lawn. “Outlet’s over there,” you tell him. “But let’s knock $20 off your fee? What are we up to now, 25 cents a kilowatt-hour?”

Welcome to the future. Welcome to California.

The state, committed to net-zero emissions by 2045, is moving to ban sales of gas-powered landscaping equipment as early as 2024. This is not the first attempt. Politicians tried and failed to do the same in 2003. Since then, though, more than half of homeowners in the state have swapped out their consumer-grade equipment for “zero emission equipment” (ZEE), meaning, battery-powered weed whackers, leaf blowers, hedge clippers, chainsaws, and even lawn mowers.

Many make the switch because, although lower-powered and less reliable (do batteries ever die at the right time?), battery-powered equipment is less noisy. That’s what prompted Mayor Stewart Welch of Mountain Brook, Alabama to begin switching his town’s tools over to electric. The bellow of leaf blowers disturbed his tennis game with a friend who, as chance would have it, had previously complained about the town’s noisy equipment. The city has spent $18,000 over the last year outfitting its public works crew with electric trimmers, blowers, and more.

According to Stanley Black & Decker, sales of the company’s electric yard equipment jumped 75 percent between 2015 and 2020. But, although lots of people are making the switch of their own accord, they’re not doing it fast enough, according to California’s legislative assembly.

The biggest holdouts are those who do landscaping for a living, and for good reason. I searched Husqavarna’s site high and low for battery run time info for its 550iBTX, which one landscaper reviewed as “The best electric blower on the market.” For $469? Not bad, I thought. After lots of web searching about the battery, I gave up and contacted support. Turns out, it does not come with one. The lowest-priced option will cost landscapers an extra $300 and lasts between thirty and sixty minutes. The one the associate recommended, though, costs $969 (yes, more than double the cost of the blower) and “lasts up to 3.5 hours,” he told me. That’s if you run it in “normal” mode, which is half the power of Husqavarna’s $459 gas blower; boost mode saps the power faster and is about 33 percent less powerful than the gas blower.

Some landscapers make electric work, and not just those whose equipment is paid for by taxpayers, as in Mountain Brook. Chris Regis, owner of Florida-based lawn care company Suntek, is able to charge customers between 10 and 20 percent more for all-electric lawn care. He says, “There are people who don’t care and say, ‘I just don’t want the noise.’” All power to them. That’s exactly how free markets work.

Given the numbers above, though, it would take a lot of lawns to make up one’s initial investment with only a 10 or 20 percent upcharge. But Regis’s investment is far greater. He has outfitted the company’s vans with solar panels for recharging batteries on the go—each van costing about $100,000. Reflecting on how much longer the same work now takes him, Jimi Layne of Mountain Brook’s crew asked, “Are we looking at dollars and cents?”

That’s an even more pertinent question in California, where energy prices are the highest in the continental US. (23.11 cents per kilowatt-hour, as of June 2021). Gas is more expensive there, too, in large part because of penalizing policies, but researchers predict electricity prices can only rise in the golden state, thanks to a host of factors. Prices are high, in part, because the size of the state increases transmission costs, as do wildfires on mismanaged public lands that have knocked out critical infrastructure, requiring replacement.

But the biggest contributor to high prices is the state’s push to adopt wind and solar, which require big upfront investments but nonetheless necessitate a reliable backup for when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing.

This problem came to the fore in 2020 when, for two days, California’s three big energy companies instituted rolling blackouts across the state because the grid could not meet demand. It was a self-inflicted wound. Given the state’s environmental restrictions, many coal-fired power plants are being decommissioned, and thanks to irrational fears, they’re not being replaced with clean, reliable nuclear energy, either.

Instead, taxpayers are being forced to subsidize massive investments in “renewables,” and power companies make up much of the state’s inevitable shortfalls by buying energy from more reliable, fossil-fuel plants in neighboring states. Unfortunately for Californians, on August 14, 2020, when the sun set and solar farms went offline, these companies realized they had miscalculated how big that shortfall would be. Western states were in the grip of a heat wave, and as Californians reached for the AC dials, they lost power altogether.

Losing power is no minor inconvenience, particularly when you live in what is naturally a desert, and especially when it’s more than 100 degrees outside. It’s not just that people can’t charge their Teslas or their ZEE mowers. One 2020 study concluded that more than 5,500 Americans lose their lives due to extreme heat annually. Climate-related deaths are a key indicator of low climate resilience, the ability of a locale to deal with extreme temperatures and weather. And, of course, climate resilience is directly dependent on plentiful, affordable, reliable energy.

But, increasingly, that is what California is doing away with in favor of expensive, unreliable energy. Unsurprisingly, the poor suffer the most. Research done in 2020 shows that many in Los Angeles can’t afford air conditioners, and many who have them can’t afford to run them because electricity prices are so high. In fact, accounting for cost of living, California has the highest poverty rate in the country, in large part because energy prices are so high. This, not in spite of the state’s adoption of “cheap” and “reliable” renewables, but because of it—because solar and wind are not cheap nor reliable and require a backup that is.

Yet, with startling shortsightedness, the state assembly has sent Governor Gavin Newsom a bill that will effectively eliminate a go-to backup: gas-powered generators. The bill (AB-1346) lumps gas-powered generators in with the offending landscaping equipment and all other “small off-road engines,” referring to them as SOREs. It “encourages” the California Air Resources Board (the state’s own sort of EPA) to “adopt cost-effective and technologically feasible regulations to prohibit engine exhaust and evaporative emissions from new small off-road engines” and to consider “expected availability of zero-emission generators.”

Such generators do exist, but they are far more expensive, generate far less power, and most need to be recharged after just a few hours. Consider the GOAL ZERO YETI 3000X. It costs $3,400, and an additional $250 kit enables you to use it as a battery backup for your home. After all that, you can power a single refrigerator for less than 2.5 days, and that of course drops if you want to power, say, a few lightbulbs. By contrast, a Duromax XP10000HX can power your whole home—lights, appliances, and A/C system—continuously, running on either gasoline or propane, and it costs $1,400.

When the power went out last August, says Collin Blackwell of Eldorado Hills, California, “We went out and bought an $800 generator, so that way we could have the fridge powered up in the garage at least and be able to have food and everything in the house.” Mark Galloway of Cameron Park said he lives in a mountain community where losing power is fairly common. “You should have something, so having the backup generator and things like that—I think it’s on you to really take care of that,” he said. “It’s not like it’s something that you can’t plan for.”

But, if AB-1346 is signed into law, going out and buying an $800 generator will no longer be an option.

California legislators have not only cut ties with reality—failing to see that they’re heading for ever more blackouts—they also want to cut their citizens’ last lifeline to reliable power when these blackouts inevitably occur. California is committing energy suicide, and given that people rely on energy for just about everything, we shouldn’t be surprised by the toll this will take on human life.

COLUMN BY

Jon Hersey

Jon Hersey is managing editor of The Objective Standard, fellow and instructor at Objective Standard Institute, and Hazlitt fellow at Foundation for Economic Education.

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

Biden Weaponizes Healthcare: Will deploy 1,000 military vaccinators to ‘isolate’ the non-vaxxed

QUESTION: Who, what, where, why and how will the unvaxxed be isolated?


DemoCast @DemoCast posted in a Tweet:

Biden to deploy 100’s of FEDERAL VACCINATORS! “the virus is IN CHARGE & WE need to TAKE BACK CONTROL & the only way to do that as a society is to test & ISOLATE…” said @MaraAspinall  an expert in med diagnostics at ASU”

Isolate who, how, & where, please?

Using our military to enforce getting vaxxed or face isolation?

In a New York Times article titled “To Fight Omicron, Biden Plans Aid From Military and 500 Million TestsSheryl Gay Stolberg reports:

WASHINGTON — President Biden will announce new steps on Tuesday to confront a staggering surge in coronavirus cases, including readying 1,000 military medical professionals to help at overburdened hospitals, setting up new federal testing sites, deploying hundreds of federal vaccinators and buying 500 million rapid tests to distribute free to the public.

The measures, outlined to reporters Monday night by two senior administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, come as coronavirus caseloads are rapidly rising around the country, particularly in the Northeast, fueled by the highly infectious new Omicron variant — just as Americans prepare to gather for Christmas.

The 500 million tests that the administration intends to purchase will not be available until January, the senior officials said, adding that the government intends to create a website where people can request that tests be sent to their homes, free of charge. It was not immediately clear where the tests would come from.

The plan for new federal testing sites will debut in New York City, where several new sites will be running before Christmas. And Mr. Biden intends to invoke the Defense Production Act, officials said, to accelerate production of tests. [Emphasis added]

Read the full article.

Defense Production Act? Really? Shouldn’t we be producing jobs and not jabs? Doesn’t it hurt our military and their family if they take away their military doctors and nurses?

Does this make any sense? It only makes sense if the next step is to send the unvaxxed into concentration camps for their own good.

Turning Our Doctors Against Us

Aaron Sibarium from The Free Beacon reports:

The Biden administration will offer bonuses to doctors who “create and implement an anti-racism plan” under new rules from the Department of Health and Human Services, a move meant to update Medicare payments to “reflect changes in medical practice.”

Effective Jan. 1, Medicare doctors can boost their reimbursement rates by conducting “a clinic-wide review” of their practice’s “commitment to anti-racism.” The plan should cover “value statements” and “clinical practice guidelines,” according to HHS, and define race as “a political and social construct, not a physiological one”—a dichotomy many doctors say will discourage genetic testing and worsen racial health disparities.

The “rationale” for the bonus, the new rules read, is that “it is important to acknowledge systemic racism as a root cause for differences in health outcomes between socially-defined racial groups.”

Such premises have found a receptive ear in the Oval Office, which has taken steps to institutionalize them throughout the federal bureaucracy. Hours after his inauguration, President Joe Biden signed an executive order launching a “whole-of-government equity agenda,” one plank of which was the “equitable delivery of government benefits.”

The new bonus scheme, HHS stresses, is “consistent with” this order. It follows a series of steps by the Biden administration to integrate “anti-racism” into government policy: in November, for example, the Department of Homeland Security listed “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as one of its top two priorities, ahead of “cybersecurity.”

Read the full article.

Biden’s Grim Winter

Here’s a very grim White House tweet about the virus and getting vaxxed.

But Omicron has mild cold like symptoms and to date there has been one person who has died from it. This person was fully vaccinated and had a booster shot.

Why the gloom and doom?

Is it a myth used to create an atmosphere of fear?

We are already seeing law enforcement officers being used to harass and even arrest the unvaxxed and those without a vaxx passport. Watch what happens in New York:

If the Brooklyn, New York police are focused on arresting someone ordering food at Panera Bread, who is going after robbers, rapists, murderers and other criminals?

The Bottom Line

Biden has now escalated his “War Against the Un-VAXXED.”

It’s obey or lose your job. It’s obey or be arrested. Now it’s obey or we will isolate you and your family.

Americans are indeed facing a dark winter of persecution by Biden and his minions. Evil has come to America and it’s name is mandate.

First they came after those who voted for Trump, but I did not vote in 2016.

Then they came for those who posted on social media about Biden, but I was not on social media.

Then they came after those who held a rally in Washington, D.C. on January 6th, 2021, but I was not in Washington on January 6th.

Then they came after the unvaxxed, but I was vaxxed.

Then they came after me and there was no-one left to defend me.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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Mazoola Protects Kids’ Privacy

Payment apps and online payment options through social media platforms are used to enable child and adult sexual exploitation. These digital payment options give easier access to sexual predators to groom young users. Direct service providers serving child sex trafficking victims have called NCOSE to ask our assistance in advocating that Square, CashApp, and Venmo make changes to their platforms to reduce the ease with which predators can send money to young kids. Georgia First Lady Marty Kemp and online child safety group Bark have found similar trends—predators using these online payment systems to groom and exploit children.

Child sex trafficking survivors have shown NCOSE their phones, explaining that $50 would suddenly show up in their account and they would know their sex trafficker just sold them to a sex buyer.

NCOSE listed Snapchat on the 2017 Dirty Dozen List in large part due to their app feature Snapcash, which was largely used to pay for filmed and in-person sex acts, including those with children. Gratefully, Snapchat disabled the feature, however the trend continues with the #snapcash hashtag still in-use, and Venmo and Square increasingly used as the payment processor. While Instagram remains a hotspot for grooming and soliciting sex from youth, the platform recently announced an upcoming subscription feature (just like exploitative OnlyFans) enabling users to pay and receive money for content on their platform, which is likely to be abused by child predators (we are already in talks with them to ensure exploitation remains prohibited).

In addition to the ease with which online payments are given and received directly to youth to facilitate child sexual exploitation, predators are also known to track the behavior of youth online and then use that knowledge to push kids to do what they want. The lack of privacy for youth online is deeply troubling. This is why our public policy team is advocating to raise the digital age of adulthood from the current 13 to 18 with legislation pending before Congress. Take action below.

In light of these increasing dangers facing youth online, we are especially excited about a new tool that gives parents “digital superpowers” to help navigate their child’s path to earning, learning, and developing essential money management skills, while protecting their financial privacy and providing essential armor against victimization and exploitation online.


We are pleased to recognize REGO and its super app digital wallet platform, MazoolaSM with the Dignity Defense Alert!

Mazoola helps kids earn, learn, and develop essential money management skills, while protecting against victimization and exploitation online. #DignityDefenseAlert

CLICK TO TWEET


Why Mazoola is So Necessary

We all know the threat that social networking sites can pose to children and the ways predators can use data exposed on social media. However, the misuse of data collected during a child’s financial transactions online or in-person via debit cards, digital wallets, and smartcard apps can be just as damaging.

Data thieves are more likely to capitalize on kids’ data. Criminals can often open more fraudulent accounts using a child’s personal information before getting caught than when using an adult’s. In 2017, among people notified that their information was included in a data breach, 39% of minors became victims of fraud compared to only 19% of adults. Over 1 million kids are victims of identity theft each year and children are 51 times more likely to be a victim of identity theft than adults.

That kind of information is rocket fuel for abusers and predators who thrive on grooming, manipulation, and “social engineering” of young children. Personal data about a child’s online and in-person transactions would open massive new avenues to earn trust and break through child’s defenses and instincts.

The proliferation of contactless payments in the COVID-19 era continues to grow rapidly and debit cards and digital wallets are a significant tool that children can use. However, most parents are not aware of the potential threat these new financial payment mechanisms can create. For example, parents may sign up to allow their child to save or make easy, digital payments, without realizing this technology also creates an avenue for predators to anonymously transfer money into their child’s digital wallet. Services like this that don’t provide clear and easy parental visibility create unsafe spaces for children without even realizing it.

Mazoola, as the only COPPA-certified mobile family wallet, is a walled garden that offers parents much-needed reassurance that their children’s financial information is safe while shopping with their favorite retailers online or in-store from their mobile device. Parents get the immediate visibility into every one of their child’s transactions, while helping them build financial independence in a safe, step-by-step way.

A Cycle of Exploitation: Online Harms Facing Youth

The brave whistleblower Frances Haugen has shown how Facebook targets kids with harmful and toxic messages and ads, driving a cycle of exploitation and harm that has victimized thousands. Congress is rightly considering a host of reforms to create a safer, more accountable Internet—including limiting tech platforms’ overbroad Section 230 immunity and even more focused legislation like the KIDS Act that would limit online manipulation and amplification of the most destructive messages.

But overlooked in the debate is an even simpler, more immediate step legislators can take to protect our kids from technology platforms run amok—modernize and strengthen our privacy laws to cut off the data fuel that powers algorithmic abuse and exploitative microtargeting in the first place.

Right now, the federal COPPA law requires companies to get opt-in consent before collecting personal information from children who are 12 and under.  But these new fintech digital wallet companies that are targeting kids, like Greenlight and goHenry, can collect personal data from all children at will unless their parents affirmatively “opt-out”—which often requires running an obstacle course of click-throughs and consent forms that even a determined adult would have trouble navigating. Obviously, very few parents have opted their kids out.

The resulting FinTech Child Privacy Protection (FTCPP) gap is bad enough when our kids are just surfing the web or uploading their personal information to TikTok. But the harm gets supercharged when kids start using non-COPPA compliant payment apps and digital wallets.

Children’s Privacy is Not Prioritized

recent VICE investigation found the largest kid-targeting payment companies “are willfully stretching the bounds of the Federal Trade Commission’s rules” and reserve the right to collect and share “a shocking amount of data” about our kids—including “names, birthdates, email addresses, GPS location history, purchase history, and behavioral profiles.”  The power to collect and sell the individual financial transaction history of a child to data brokers, which can then be aggregated and combined with the broader universe of data collected on that child from the rest of their online activity poses a clear and present danger to our kids.

Which brings us right back to the Facebook Files—and the risk that all this personal information will end up feeding the abusive ad targeting and addictive engagement tools that are causing so much damage to our kids online. A teenager who buys diet soda or starts visiting the gym shouldn’t find themselves bombarded with manipulative ads and sponsored influencer content promoting extreme weight loss or other unhealthy messages about body image and their lives. Access to this kind of data (or targeting based on it) would let predators refine their approach to potential victims based on an intimate knowledge of the things they like and how they spend their money and time.

If the data were to be breached or leak onto the dark web, it would give a global community of predators an inside track to manipulate and exploit our children.

New Legislation to Improve Child Online Privacy

Senator Ed Markey, (the original author of the COPPA legislation), has proposed bi-partisan critical legislation to close the FTCPP gap—ensuring all kids younger than 16 receive full COPPA-level opt-in protections and banning certain forms of targeting and similar data abuses, and creating a digital data “eraser” button to put families in control of kids’ data. Representative Kathy Castor has also introduced landmark legislation, the Kids PRIVCY Act, to strengthen COPPA and keep children safe online.

This legislation is especially critical to strengthen the security and safety of digital wallets and spending apps, especially as we emerge from a global pandemic that has skyrocketed the use of contactless payment systems—including for in-person sales. And existing products in the market like the Mazoola payment app have already proven it’s possible to provide full COPPA-level protection to older kids and seamless digital payment online or in stores without collecting any personal data at all about children.

Moving forward with privacy legislation as the first step in addressing the crisis of weaponized data and online harm is also smart because Congress has been working on core privacy issues and developing vetted legislative proposals for years. Both Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Protection Act already provide similar strong protections for younger users, offering real-world proof this path is safe and feasible.

We know a lot about the harm too much data can do in the hands of massive online platforms that do nothing. Congress must act to protect our kids.

But in the meantime, smart tech like Mazoola can protect our kids now and let them benefit from the online world without falling prey to it.

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

Manchin’s NO on “mammoth” “Build Back Better” bill

Senator Joe Manchin drove President Biden’s “mammoth” spending bill over a cliff this weekend, sparing the nation a massive increase in new spending and ill-conceived policies it cannot afford.

The West Virginia Senator appeared on Fox News Sunday where he said, “I had my reservations from the beginning… The inflation I was concerned about is real, it is not transitory.  If I cannot go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I cannot vote for it.”

Watch now at CFACT.org.

The climate-Left is having a conniption.

“What Senator Manchin did yesterday represents an egregious breach of the trust of the President,” said AOC.

“Joe Manchin pretends to have a problem with the cost of a $1.75T investment over 10 years in the American people, but has no problem with giving $9T to weapons makers and the military,” tweeted Rep. Rasida Tlaib.

Marc Morano reported in a “Morano Minute” that “climate activists say Manchin’s opposition to Biden’s climate bill will be so harmful you’ll be able to see the effects on Earth’s geologic record.”  “The Jurassic, Holocene, and now….Manchin-cene?” Marc asked.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki released a harsh statement in which she vowed to neither “relent,” nor “give up.”  Read Psaki’s statement at CFACT.org.

Biden’s “Build Back Better” is laden with bad policy, including over $570 billion in climate spending.  AOC reported during UN COP 26 that the bill still contains funding for her “Civilian Climate Corps” — a Brave New World-ish plan to enlist and brainwash thousands of young people to shame and hector the rest of us into climate compliance   That would have been as much fun as the 50,000 new IRS agents Biden wants to loose to shake more taxes out of the rest of us.

Environmentalist Michael Shellenberger wrote, “Build Back Better would have undermined electricity reliability, raised energy prices, and made the U.S. more dependent on foreign energy imports.”

“Build Back Better” is a massive mistake.  Now that it’s dead we should drive a stake through its heart, cut off it’s head and smother it in garlic.

Biden’s monstrous spending must never find a new incarnation from which to rise from its crypt.

COLUMN BY

Craig Rucker

Craig Rucker is a co-founder of CFACT and currently serves as its president.

RELATED ARTICLE: POLL: Biden’s Economic Ratings Are So Bad They’re Worse Than Jimmy Carter’s In 1977

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

Levin: ‘Modern-Day Stalinist’ Pelosi ‘Failed’ to Protect Capitol

Sunday on the Fox News Channel’s Life, Liberty & Levin, host Mark Levin delivered a monologue blasting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for failing to protect the Capitol Building on January 6.

“We have a lot of problems in this country,” Levin rightfully began. “One of them is something called January 6 committee. And the January 6 committee — you can see that the propaganda, Democrat Party media, the propagandists at the White House, the propagandists that control Congress want to turn January 6 into some kind of an event, an event to use against conservatives, against Donald Trump, against anyone who disagrees with them

“They took this straight out of the old Soviet playbook, and that’s what I want to talk about — January 6,” Levin continued. “What are the differences between the January 6 committee and their so-called investigation and the kind of investigations that Joseph Stalin used to conduct? Not a lot. Nancy Pelosi, who is basically a modern-day Stalinist, in many respects, the way she controls Congress, the way she absolutely crushes the minority, the way she abuses House rules and House traditions, whether it’s impeachment, whether it’s hearings, whether it’s committee assignments and so forth.”

He added, “The issue is how was the Capitol building breached? How was it breached? And that is a subject that Congress should be very, very interested in so it doesn’t happen again, but they are not interested in it. This committee, having been appointed by Nancy Pelosi, is a cover-up job. It is a cover-up job because she can assure that all these loyalists, and the two unhinged… Never Trumpers, are never going to turn their sights on her and try and figure out why she didn’t call up more Capitol Police. She is in charge of the Capitol Police.”

Levin concluded, “Nancy Pelosi was in charge of protecting that building, and she failed. And yet, we have a committee that’s looking into a so-called insurrection that has no interest in Nancy Pelosi’s testimony. They have no interest in Nancy Pelosi’s emails, text messages, correspondence of any kind, which is absolutely shameful.”


Nancy Pelosi

137 Known Connections

Pelosi Touts the “Transformative Nature” of Massive Spending Bill

On October 12, 2021, Pelosi spoke about the fact that some Democrats wished to lower the cost of their party’s ten-year, $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” spending bill. She indicated that the legislation’s price tag would be negotiated down, most likely by reducing the number of years it would cover. “We ha[ve] some important decisions to make in the next few days so that we can proceed,” said Pelosi. “I’m very disappointed that we’re not going with the original $3.5 trillion, which was very transformative, but in whatever we do, we’ll make decisions that will continue to be transformative about women in the workplace.” Any changes, Pelosi elaborated, “only would be [made] in such a way that does not undermine the transformative nature of it.”

To learn more about Nancy Pelosi, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden Administration to Give Bonuses to Doctors Who ‘Implement an Anti-Racism Plan’

The Democrats have destroyed our once unfailing trust in our medical institutions by destroying them.

COVID lockdowns and ineffective vaccines broke the trust. This is the death blow.

Biden Administration to Give Bonuses to Doctors Who “Implement an Anti-Racism Plan”

Biden Administration Offers Bonuses to Doctors Who Implement ‘Anti-Racism Plans’

New Medicare rules also reward ‘trauma-informed care’

By: Aaron Sibarium • Free Beacon  December 16, 2021:

The Biden administration will offer bonuses to doctors who “create and implement an anti-racism plan” under new rules from the Department of Health and Human Services, a move meant to update Medicare payments to “reflect changes in medical practice.”

Effective Jan. 1, Medicare doctors can boost their reimbursement rates by conducting “a clinic-wide review” of their practice’s “commitment to anti-racism.” The plan should cover “value statements” and “clinical practice guidelines,” according to HHS, and define race as “a political and social construct, not a physiological one”—a dichotomy many doctors say will discourage genetic testing and worsen racial health disparities.

The “rationale” for the bonus, the new rules read, is that “it is important to acknowledge systemic racism as a root cause for differences in health outcomes between socially-defined racial groups.”

Such premises have found a receptive ear in the Oval Office, which has taken steps to institutionalize them throughout the federal bureaucracy. Hours after his inauguration, President Joe Biden signed an executive order launching a “whole-of-government equity agenda,” one plank of which was the “equitable delivery of government benefits.”

The new bonus scheme, HHS stresses, is “consistent with” this order. It follows a series of steps by the Biden administration to integrate “anti-racism” into government policy: in November, for example, the Department of Homeland Security listed “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as one of its top two priorities, ahead of “cybersecurity.”

HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The new rules update Medicare’s Merit-Based Incentive Payment System, a scoring rubric that determines eligible doctors’ reimbursement rates. Congress set up that system in 2015 to reward clinicians for high-quality, cost-effective medical care—and to penalize them for providing unnecessary, costly services.

Doctors had been billing Medicare for services “regardless of how necessary they were,” said Chris Pope, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute who worked on the legislation as a Hill fellow. Sold as a way of controlling costs, the payment reform passed with broad bipartisan support.

“Republicans who voted for [the scoring system] weren’t voting for this,” Pope explained. “The idea that this would be used as a tool of racial policy never came up.”

But the scoring system did reward “improvement activities” that advance “health equity,” creating a mechanism for HHS to inject ideology into medical compensation. The new rules add “anti-racism” plans to the list of such activities, which are broken up into “medium” and “high-weighted” categories. “Anti-racism” plans will fall into the second weighting, giving doctors extra incentive to implement them. Under the complicated scoring system, the highest possible bonus is 1.79 percent of a doctor’s Medicare reimbursements.

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

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Powerful Backlash Building Against Woke Anti-Americanism as World Marks 30th Anniversary of Disintegration of USSR

But can the global left be stopped?

Powerful Backlash Building Against Woke Anti-Americanism as World Marks 30th Anniversary of Disintegration of USSR

By Conrad Black, Special to the Sun | December 19, 2021

December 26 will mark the 30th anniversary of the disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and with it, the collapse of international communism. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama spoke for many when he said that we were “at the end of history” and that there would be no political evolution beyond what appeared to be the total triumph of liberal democracy.

This can clearly be seen now as a hopeful view inflated by triumphalism. China has risen to take the place of the Soviet Union, which itself replaced the Nazi German Third Reich as the principal rival to western democracy. One could easily imagine, looking at the feeble and inadequate regime now in office in Washington and imagine that the West, haltingly led by the United States and infested by appeasers and defeatists, was once again under severe challenge by a transoceanic, totalitarian power.

Showing unsuspected powers of improvisation, the international left that was completely defeated in the Cold War vanished into the undergrowth, but almost spontaneously returned as champions of environmentalism. If capitalism could not be defeated by a competitive economic system, Marxism, it shortly found itself in mortal combat with the old left now in alliance with the authentic, if often tedious, conservationists in a holy assault on capitalism as an environmental threat to the future of the planet itself.

We appear to be in a more dangerous confrontation with China and other countries conniving with it — especially Russia, Iran and North Korea — than we really are. China is aggressively posturing and claiming international waters as its own and threatening to accelerate reunification with Taiwan. Russia, having lost nearly half its population in the fall of the Soviet Union, is openly threatening to annex at least the predominantly Russian parts of Ukraine.

The enfeeblement of the American administration invites the inference that America is in irreversible decline. In fact, while China has enjoyed astonishing success as a development story, bootstrapping itself up from the socioeconomic depths, its institutions are untrustworthy, its government still maintains a high degree of control over the economy and the country’s largest businesses, and it is run by an odious and corrupt dictatorship. It is a country with few natural resources and an aging population due to its long-standing previous one-child policy.

All this obscures the fact that the Cold War and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. were the greatest and most bloodless strategic victories in the history of the world. The greatest consequence of them is the triumph of capitalism in the world, in particular in China and Russia. It is the best system because it is the only one that is aligned with the almost universal human ambition to have more.

Because it incentivizes competition, it inevitably leads to an overheated and potentially self-destructive economic frenzy, but since the Second World War, capitalism has demonstrated its ability to lift countries out of poverty and make advanced economies more prosperous, including formerly communist China, formerly fascist Spain, almost all of central and western Europe, South Korea, Israel, Chile, Singapore and much of Latin America. India is making unprecedented progress.

This is the triumph of capitalism: the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War and the demonstration of the absolute superiority of the American over the Soviet system as the Americans outdistanced the Soviet Union militarily while spending far less on military matters. The triumph of capitalism was earned, even if pure capitalism is not for everybody.

The waffling generated by a sharp change in prevailing currents of public policy in the United States should not be mistaken for a reversal in the fortunes of capitalism, whose benefits are sweeping over almost all the world.

The United States is in the midst of a complicated process of renovation. Six years ago, Donald Trump was practically the only prominent American who saw how disillusioned people were over being mired in fruitless Middle Eastern wars, seeing the steady exportation of American jobs to cheap labour markets and the importation of the resulting unemployment, and the fact that those in the middle class had seen virtually no increase in the purchasing power of their incomes for decades.

Mr. Trump led an assault on the complacent bipartisan governing political class. Despite being harassed by false allegations of colluding with Russia to rig the 2016 election and a spurious impeachment trial over an unexceptionable conversation with the president of Ukraine, he effectively eliminated unemployment, increased domestic oil production while reducing foreign imports and cracked down on illegal immigration.

Only the coronavirus gave the Democrats the opportunity they needed to terrorize the population and deprive Trump of what appeared to be his probable re-election.

The Biden administration has made an almost complete shambles of every policy area: immigration, inflation, Covid, crime, and the unprecedented and shameful debacle in Afghanistan. It is increasingly obvious that either Mr. Trump or a candidate supported by him and endorsing most of his policies will be elected in 2024, and the renovation of America will resume.

There will be a new and more purposeful political elite and a powerful backlash against woke anti-Americanism in the schools and universities, the self-serving hypocrisy of limousine liberals on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, and the narcissistic hypocrisy of Hollywood and Big Sport. In these circumstances, the status of the United States as the world’s most important and influential country will be re-established.

China is fundamentally not remotely as strong a country as the United States. Its institutions are not credible and are universally mistrusted; it has the political instability of dictatorships where succession is always uncertain. Russia has a smaller GDP than Canada and is desperately trying to regain shards of its former empire after the sudden secession of nearly half the Soviet population.

The West can accommodate Russian ambitions up to a point. The key is to avoid driving a truncated and demoralized Russia into the arms of China and effectively giving the Chinese the right to develop the vast territory of Russian Siberia. As long as this can be avoided, the resumption of American national renovation will re-establish the unambiguous superiority of American influence in the world, and particularly its economic model. Capitalism is imperfect, but it is invincible, as was demonstrated 30 years ago.

RELATED ARTICLE: Retired Generals plotting to use the military against US citizens

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

Quick note: Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here. We will not waver. We will not tire. We will not falter, and we will not fail. Freedom will prevail.

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The turning tide of intellectual atheism

A growing number of leading serious intellectuals are recognising the need for Christianity’s resurrection but can’t quite bring the faith to life in themselves.


Recently, I spent some time on the phone with Niall Ferguson, the Scottish historian and Milbank Family Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, for a review I was writing of his latest book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. In the first chapter, Ferguson refers several times to religion as “magical thinking,” and I asked him if he had his own metaphysical framework for understanding events, or, if he did not, which one he preferred people to have. His response was fascinating.

“I was brought up an atheist—I didn’t become one,” he said. “I regard atheism as the religious faith I happened to be brought up in. It is, of course, as much a faith as Christianity or Islam—and I have the Calvinist brand, because my parents left the Church of Scotland. I was brought up, essentially, in a Calvinist ethical framework but with no God. This had its benefits—I was encouraged to think in a very critical way about religion and also about science, but I’ve come to see as a historian that you can’t base a society on that. Indeed, atheism, particularly in its militant forms, is really a very dangerous metaphysical framework for a society.”

“I know I can’t achieve religious faith,” he went on, “but I do think we should go to church. We don’t have, I don’t think, an evolved ethical system. I don’t buy the idea that evolution alone gets us to be moral. It can modify behaviour, but there’s just too much evidence that in the raw, when the constraints of civilisation fall away, we behave in the most savage way to one another. I’m a big believer that with the inherited wisdom of a two-millennia old religion, we’ve got a pretty good framework to work with.”

For one of the most prominent historians in the world—himself an agnostic—to say that we should go to church is rather startling, but Ferguson’s sentiments also appear to be part of a growing trend. The late philosopher Sir Roger Scruton began attending church himself despite struggling with belief, regularly playing the organ at All Saints’ in Garsdon. His secular friends say his faith remained cultural; other friends were not so sure. What we do know is that he thought Christianity was in many ways the soul of Western civilisation, and that the uniquely Christian concept of forgiveness was utterly indispensable to its survival.

Scruton’s friend Douglas Murray, the conservative writer who was raised in the Church before leaving it as an adult, has occasionally referred to himself as a “Christian atheist.” In a recent discussion with theologian N.T. Wright, he described himself as “an uncomfortable agnostic who recognises the virtues and the values the Christian faith has brought,” and noted that he is actually irritated by the way the Church of England is fleeing from its inheritance, “giving up its jewels” such as “the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer” in exchange for progressive pieties.

“My fear is that the Church is not doing what so many of us on the outside want it to do, which is preaching its gospel, asserting its truths and its claims,” he said. “When one sees it falling into all the latest tropes one thinks well, that’s another thing gone, just like absolutely everything else in the era. I’m a disappointed non-adherent.”

Murray believes that Christianity is essential because secularists have been thus far totally incapable of creating an ethic of equality that matches the concept that all human beings are created in the image of God. In a column in The Spectator, he noted that post-Christian society has three options. The first is to abandon the idea that all human life is precious. “Another is to work furiously to nail down an atheist version of the sanctity of the individual.” And if that doesn’t work? “Then there is only one other place to go. Which is back to faith, whether we like it or not.”

On a recent podcast, he was more blunt: “The sanctity of human life is a Judeo-Christian notion which might very easily not survive [the disappearance of] Judeo-Christian civilisation.”

The American social scientist and agnostic Charles Murray, too, told me in an interview that he believes the American republic is unlikely to survive without a resurgence of Christianity. Echoing John Adams, he noted that the Constitution of the United States and the liberties it upholds can only govern a religious people.

Historian Tom Holland’s magnificent Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, published in 2019, makes a similar case. For years, Holland—an agnostic—wrote compelling histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans, but he observed that their societies were rife with casual, socially-accepted cruelty towards the weak, rape, and sexual abuse towards the massive slave class as an unquestioned way of life, and the mass extermination of enemies as a matter of course. These peoples and their ethics, Hollands writes, seemed utterly foreign to him.

It was Christianity, Holland concluded, that changed all that in a revolution so complete that even critiques of Christianity must borrow precepts from Christianity to do so. (Without Christianity, he writes, “no one would have gotten woke.”) He defended this thesis brilliantly in a debate on the subject “Did Christianity give us our human values?” with atheist philosopher A.C. Grayling, who seemed actively irritated by the idea. Not so long ago, unbelievers like the late Christopher Hitchens claimed that “religion poisons everything”—a sentiment that appears to be retreating as we advance further into the post-Christian era.

Hitchens frequently claimed to be not an atheist, but an “anti-theist”—he didn’t believe in God, and he was glad that he did not. It is fascinating to see intellectuals come forward with precisely the opposite sentiment—they do not believe, but they somehow want to believe. The psychologist Jordan Peterson, who speaks about Christianity often, is a good example of this. Discussing the historicity of the Christian story with Jonathan Pageau, he said, fighting back tears: “I probably believe that, but I’m amazed at my own belief and I don’t understand that.”

He went on:

[I]n some sense, I believe it’s undeniable. You know, we have narrative sense of the world. For me that’s been the world of morality, that’s the world that tells us how to act. It’s real, we treat it like it’s real. It’s not the objective world, but the narrative and the objective world touch. And the ultimate example of that in principle is supposed to be Christ. But I don’t know what to do with that – it seems to me to be oddly plausible. But I still don’t know what to make of it. Partly because it’s too terrifying a reality to fully believe. I don’t even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it.

Not so long ago, the atheists who retreated to their Darwinian towers and bricked themselves up to fire arrows at the faithful wanted to be there. Their intellectual silos were a refuge from faith because they didn’t want Christianity to be true. They hated it and thought we’d be better off without it. Like Hitchens, they were thrilled to find arguments that permitted them to reject it. Increasingly, some intellectuals from across the disciplines—history, literature, psychology, philosophy—are gazing out of what was once a refuge and wishing that, some how, they could believe it. They have understood that Christianity is both indispensable and beautiful, but their intellectual constraints prevent many of them from embracing it as true.

Viewing Western civilisation with its Christian soul cut out, many are now willing to say: “We need Christ.” What they are unable, thus far, to say, is: “I need Christ.” But the political must become personal. Peterson appears to understand that—and is awestruck by the reality of it.

For now, historians like Niall Ferguson recognise that Christianity is a fundamental bulwark of the fragile civilisation we inhabit.

“I think the notion that we can deal with these arrows of outrageous fortune without some kind of established and time-honoured set of consolations is almost certainly wrong,” he told me. “I’m one of these people who didn’t come to atheism by choice, and I’ve almost come out of it on the basis of historical study. The biggest disasters that we likely face are actually related to totalitarianism, because that’s the lesson of the 20th century. Pandemics killed a lot of people in the 20th century, but totalitarianism killed more.”

“It disturbs me that in so many ways, totalitarianism is gaining ground today,” Ferguson said. “Totalitarianism was bad for many reasons, and one of the manifestations of its badness was its attack on religion. When I see totalitarianism gaining ground not only in China but in subtle ways in our own society, that seems to be the disaster we really need to ward off. Why am I a conservative and not just a classical liberal? Because classical liberalism won’t stop wokeism and totalitarianism. It’s not strong enough. Ultimately, we need the inherited ideas of a civilisation and defences against that particular form of disaster.”

The survival of Christianity is essential for the survival of the West. The bad news is that this realisation comes when the day is far spent. The Good News is simpler. “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each of them Christianity has died,” G.K. Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man. “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

Originally published at Convivium. Republished with permission.

COLUMN BY

Jonathon Van Maren

Jonathon Van Maren is a freelance writer and communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform. His work has appeared in National Review, The Federalist, National Post, and elsewhere…. More by Jonathon Van Maren

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

Who needs the Stasi? We’ve already got Google

The cancelling of Gina Carano foreshadows more sinister developments.


The Force is no longer with Gina Carano, one of the stars of The Mandalorian, the wildly popular spin-off from the Star Wars films. She has been cancelled. Twitter erupted with #FireGinaCarano and Lucasfilm dutifully complied.

Carano, a 38-year-old mixed-martial arts expert who has moved into acting, became so popular after playing Cara Dune, a battle-hardened mercenary and marshal, that at one point she was being considered for her own show. But last year’s election brought about her downfall. She was allegedly transphobic, supported anti-vaxxers, spread “misinformation” about Covid-19 and supported Trump. Lucasfilm was probably hungry for an excuse to erase this scabrous blot of political incorrectness.

Carano obliged. In a recent Instagram post she wrote:

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbours… even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realise that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbours hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views.”

There are two ways of interpreting this. Lucasfilm chose the negative one: “her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.” Apparently Lucasfilm believes that Carano was equating the suffering of Republicans under Biden with the suffering of Jews under Hitler. This is preposterous.

The positive interpretation is that ordinary folks can become haters and bigots if their prejudices are whipped up by government-controlled media.

And that is what happened in the 1930s. In the words of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum: “Individual citizens chose to be involved when, out of a sense of duty, or prejudice, or some opportunity for business or other personal gain, they voluntarily denounced their co-workers and neighbors to the police because of their alleged wrongdoings as Jews, anti-Hitlerites, or gays.”

Isn’t something similar is happening in the United States today? Anonymous accusers are denouncing incorrect attitudes to the “authorities”. Gina Carano is right, although she was dumb to compare the situation with Nazi Germany. More apposite is East Germany under the Communists.

From 1950 to 1990 the Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi, enforced political correctness through police spying and a vast network of informers. The Oscar-winning film The Secret Lives of Others portrays the dehumanising world in which East Germans had to live. But it still failed to convey the enormity of the totalitarian surveillance. The Stasi even collected jars of the body odour of people it had under observation.

To deal with trouble-makers the Stasi had a policy called, in German, Zersetzung. It’s a difficult word to translate. Originally it meant “decomposition”. But in the context of the East German police state, it meant destroying dissidents. “The goal,” according to German historian Hubertus Knabe, “was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships.” Sound familiar?

A striking feature of Stasi control was how cooperative ordinary citizens were. In 1989, in a population of about 16 million, the Stasi employed about 200,000 informers. Between 1950 and 1989, about 620,000 people are believed to have been informers at some stage or other. It appears that young men between 25 and 40 were over-represented. So much for the idealism of youth.

It doesn’t take much imagination to appreciate that in the age of internet shaming, deplatforming, cancelling and Google monitoring we are recapitulating the surveillance state of East Germany.

Consider what happened after the Capitol Hill riot. The videos which have been screened in President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate are horrifying. The frenzied mob violence was terrifying. There can be no doubt that hundreds of people deserve to face criminal charges.

Everyone wanted to know who these barbarians were.

An army of “online sleuths” went to work to identify and profile the rioters. The FBI appealed for digital information about the day’s tragic events. “This kind of crowdsourcing is not the same thing as a formal investigation. It’s certainly not a replacement for the investigations done by the judicial system,” says John Scott-Railton, from Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. But “it’s an excellent mechanism for surfacing clues.”

One result of this internet detective work was an impressive feature in the New York Times which aggregated data about 175 rioters who had been charged, along with his or her photo, and a brief profile. It was a jaw-dropping revelation of how easy it is for pyjama-clad detectives to nab criminals. A number of these people were summarily fired by their employers after this information became public.

Spadework done by other organisations shows the power of online sleuthing. Bellingcat, “an independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists using open source and social media investigation to probe a variety of subjects” created an impressively researched profile of Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old woman who was shot and killed by Capitol Police, based upon her social media posts.

In the age of Google, criminal profiling by ordinary citizens almost seems like a patriotic duty. But actors with fewer scruples can do this as well.

Consider the website of Rose City Antifa, which contributed to the detective work. Its mission is collecting information about “fascists” – pictures, addresses, cars and licence plates, physical features like height, build, hair/eye/skin colour, hair length, tattoos and piercings – so that it can doxx them.

Doxxing is the practice of publishing private information about a person to discredit and shame them. “It’s only when their privately held hate is made public that they face repercussions,” according to the website. “As it turns out, a lot of people don’t want to work with or live near a nazi. Go figure!”

It’s not difficult to imagine how destructive the work of online sleuths can be for people who don’t deserve to be called Nazis.

Which is something that retired Chicago firefighter David Quintavalle discovered after the riots. One of the army of online sleuths matched his face with the face of the suspect who hurled a fire extinguisher at a Capitol policeman who later died. He was bombarded with hundreds of tweets calling him a cop killer and with phone messages like this: “Hey Dave you’re a murderer and a traitor. And I can’t believe you killed a cop and your son is a cop. Wow. Good luck in Prison.” He needed police protection. But Quintavalle had been at home all the time.

But only ignorant scumbags would do stuff like this, right?

Wrong. New York Times reporters are being paid to do something similar, as independent journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a recent column. “The tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel) — devote the bulk of their ‘journalism’ to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention),” he wrote.

No doubt these reporters are more scrupulous about checking their sources than those ignorant scumbags. But they’re more devious and dangerous. They search out private communications and betray them to the raving mobs of Twitter. It’s both “infantile and despotic”, says Greenwald.

Greenwald is not a rustbucket MAGA zealot. He worked for The Guardian; he is a free speech advocate, an animal rights supporter, a supporter of Julian Assange, and a human rights activist. He is openly gay and is married to a Brazilian congressman. But he writes in his column:

“The overarching rule of liberal media circles and liberal politics is that you are free to accuse anyone who deviates from liberal orthodoxy of any kind of bigotry that casually crosses your mind — just smear them as a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, etc. without the slightest need for evidence — and it will be regarded as completely acceptable.”

Which brings us back to the Stasi.

Thanks to the internet, the United States is moving dangerously close to East Germany’s surveillance society. It may be open source, decentralised, and anarchic — but high tech Zersetzung crushes people like Gina Carano just as effectively as the Stasi’s blackmail. Greenwald calls the online sleuths “tattletales”, “voluntary hall monitors” and “speech police”. Or perhaps the truth is even more sinister. In the Newspeak lingo of the Stasi, they are inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, unofficial colleagues, informants.

A true democracy respects privacy, confidentiality and intimacy. But social media are hollowing out those values. Gina Carano’s cancelling should remind us that the tyranny depicted in The Secret Lives of Others took place in the German Democratic Republic.

COLUMN BY

Michael Cook

Michael Cook is the editor of MercatorNet. More by Michael Cook

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.