The Charlie Kirk Show published this video of Hunter Biden claiming that Russians stole his laptop computer.
Warning: Graphic content.
©The Charlie Kirk Show. All rights reserved.
This is an act of war.
By Joseph Lord, The Epoch Times, August 11, 2021 Updated: August 11, 2021
On Aug. 11, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) publicly released the full text of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) $3.5 trillion budget proposal. A few hours later, the Senate narrowly confirmed the budget 50-49. Now, the budget must win approval from the House of Representatives after they return from their recess.
The outline is expected to be the first step in the Democrats’ ambitious plans for increased Federal spending on “human infrastructure,” including education, health care, and housing initiatives. However, the resolution does not include an increase to the debt ceiling, setting the stage for another political battle when Congress returns.
On Aug. 9, Sanders discussed the components of this ambitious plan on the Senate floor, saying that that the $3.5 trillion budget proposal and reconciliation bill would be “the most consequential and comprehensive piece of legislation for working people… that [the Senate] has addressed since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
Some of the expenses in Sanders’ budget are nothing new—around $800 billion annually for national defense, $70 billion annually for international affairs and foreign aid, $45 billion for research, NASA, and other scientific pursuits, and $20 billion in subsidies for farmers. Still, many of the expenses listed here are new and ambitious.
Citizenship for Illegal Immigrants
Sanders began his speech unveiling the budget by saying that the time “is long overdue for comprehensive immigration reform and a path toward citizenship for millions of undocumented workers and families in this country.”
Giving citizenship to illegal immigrants has been a top priority for the Democratic Party since 2016. As part of this proposal, the party is doubling down on that by allowing for up to $107 billion in spending by the Judiciary Committee.
Free Child Care and Secondary Education
A large portion of the budget is devoted to education, with over $726 billion slated to go toward various programs like childcare, pre-K, and tuition-free community college.
Sanders criticized the state of childcare in the country and asserted that the legislation would ensure that “no working family in this country should be paying more than 7 percent for their childcare.” Sanders said this would be accomplished through providing subsidies to parents to help them afford childcare and by providing higher wages to childcare workers.
The legislation would also provide free pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds. “God didn’t create an education system that begins in Kindergarten,” Sanders explained.
Finally, the Democrats have no intention of forgiving student debt or making all public colleges and universities free, but the plan does provide for tuition-free two-year community college.
Federal Housing
The budget also allocates $332 billion toward government subsidies for low-income and affordable housing. Sanders criticized the high number of homeless people in the country, and this budget resolution paves the way for the Democrats in Congress to pass more comprehensive housing reform laws.
New Healthcare Reforms and Funding
Another huge focus of the budget is expansion of the Federal Government’s role in health care. As with child care workers, Democrats hope to increase health care worker wages. Sanders criticized the lack of paid leave in the United States, and said that with the new budget the party also plans to legislate paid family and sick leave.
Additionally, the proposal would devote $18 billion to the Veterans Affairs Committee in order to upgrade VA facilities.
‘Extremely Aggressive’ Policies to Move US Away From Fossil Fuels
The budget allocates $198 billion to the Energy and Natural Resources Committee with an additional $67 billion directed toward the Environment and Public Works Committee. With this funding, Democrats plan to “transform [the U.S.] energy system away from fossil fuels … in an extremely aggressive way” through research and deployment of alternative energy and increased spending for regulatory agencies like the EPA.
Sanders also proposed that Democrats would create a “Civilian Climate Corps,” which he said would give young people the opportunity “to get decent pay and to roll up their sleeves … in order to combat climate change.” Sanders implied that this “Climate Corps” would help in the “extremely aggressive” transformation away from fossil fuels, but he did not elaborate on the way that the group would help achieve that.
Democrats are looking to further move the nation away from fossil fuels by providing incentives to businesses for reducing carbon emissions and by fining polluters.
New Tax Rules
Given the huge $3.5 trillion price tag on this resolution, there are also plans to change tax rules to finance it.
The budget proposes expansion of IRS tax collection without raising taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year; instead, the party will focus on raising taxes on the very wealthy and corporations.
On top of this, the party plans to increase the child tax credit.
Deficit, National Debt to Skyrocket
With such an expensive price tag, and despite new tax rules, the national debt and the deficit would climb as a result of the budget. According to estimates in the bill, the deficit would increase from $1.3 billion in 2022 up to $1.8 trillion in 2031. Because of this deficit, the national debt would be $45 trillion by 2031.
What’s Next for the Budget Resolution
With its passage by the Senate, Sanders’ budget proposal will go to the House of Representatives.
In a letter to legislators, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) stated that the August recess would be interrupted in order to consider the proposal; the House is now set to return to session Aug. 23.
Even then, the party may have a tough battle to pass a final budget. Progressives in the House are adamant that the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the budget reconciliation proposal be considered together or not at all. At the same time, some moderates have shown hesitance to approve the huge price tag of the budget but support the bipartisan bill. In a letter to Nancy Pelosi, a few of these moderate elements wrote: “As soon as the Senate completes its work, we must bring this bipartisan infrastructure bill to the House floor for a standalone vote. This once-in-a-century investment deserves its own consideration, without regard to other legislation.”
Because of this internal disagreement, the final fate of the Senate’s budget proposal is unclear.
EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
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Resist! It’s the only thing that will save you. Mass non-0compliance.
The DC Patriot, August 12, 2021:
Bikers, motorcycle enthusiasts, tourists and onlookers have descended on South Dakota’s Black Hills for the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Law enforcement officials say the first few days of this year’s rally has been among the busiest they’ve seen.
Some 700,000 people are predicted to celebrate the 81st iteration of the event, and their enthusiasm for motorcycles at the 10-day event that kicked off on Friday in Sturgis, the western South Dakota city.
The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally has a solid track record when it comes to large turnouts. Average rally attendance each year has totaled about 485,000 rallygoers for the past two decades. Despite the social limitations of the coronavirus pandemic, last year’s rally brought in roughly 460,000 attendees.
“There are more people here in the 31 years I’ve been doing this,” Meade County Sheriff Ron Merwin told the Rapid City Journal on Saturday. Law enforcement in Sturgis and Meade County are reporting their calls for service during the first few days are up dramatically compared to previous years. Sturgis Police Chief Geody VanDewater said officers have issued 207 violations for open containers of alcohol since Friday.
Last year’s rally drew widespread criticism, as maskless attendees gathered, even while most in-person events across the country were canceled. This year, vaccines have made more gatherings possible, but Sturgis still stands out.
Again, even to the chagrin of Fauci and the CDC, health precautions are optional at Sturgis. Officials said the rally offers attendees access to coronavirus test, face masks and hand sanitizer stations, in addition to doses of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. And the city also allowed rallygoers to drink on public property, with the hope of preventing indoor crowding. But there are no testing or vaccine requirements to attend.
Republican Gov. Kristi Noem has given the rally her blessing and will appear in a charity ride. The event is a boon for tourism, powering over $800 million in sales, according to the state Department of Tourism. Also, the state’s Department of Health said the rally can be conducted safely.
The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally runs through Aug. 15 and will also feature musical performances from artists such as Kid Rock, Stone Temple Pilots and ZZ Top.
Republican Gov. Kristi Noem has given the rally her blessing and will appear in a charity ride. The event is a boon for tourism, powering over $800 million in sales, according to the state Department of Tourism.
EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
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Vile, horrible racism — but worse, child abuse.
By Taylor Penley, The Western Journal, August 12, 2021:
Judging people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin is too simple to the progressive left these days.
We’ve seen this mindset exemplified in critical race theory, which teaches students that the past determines their future and that they are born with an inherent potential (or lack of potential) for success on the basis of skin color.
It’s a fatalistic and unfair take on the world that encourages racial minorities to believe they are somehow inherently less qualified than and suppressed by their white counterparts.
It’s a segregating mentality that says it’s okay to draw distinctions between people based on something outside of their control — even if it means reviving an unfair practice outlawed over half a century ago.
On that note, a shocking story came out of Georgia earlier this week, proving these reinvigorated racial divisions have gone way too far.
Principal Sharyn Briscoe is taking heat from parents for allegedly racially segregating students at Mary Lin Elementary School in Atlanta.
EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly using a small regional airport in central Texas to disperse large groups of illegal immigrants throughout the U.S. after releasing them from detention facilities in other parts of the state, city and federal sources confirm. Local authorities in the city where this is occurring, Abilene, are being kept in the dark and a federal lawmaker is demanding an end to the “reckless and irresponsible practice” as well as answers from DHS after a series of local news reports exposed the covert operation.
Abilene is located about 180 miles west of Dallas and has a population of around 120,000. The area’s airport is run by the city and its transportation director reveals in a news story that local officials are not aware of what exactly is going on with the illegal immigrant flights. The airport is only given 24 to 48 hours of notice before flights arrive, according to Abilene Director of Transportation Don Green, who verifies the planes are private charters from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the DHS agency in charge. The Texas news conglomerate, which also publishes reports in Spanish, writes that it “shot video of strange activity at the airport” and includes the footage on its website. It shows immigrants exiting unmarked planes, getting frisked, then boarding buses. Some footage includes buses arriving at the airport where immigrants are seen getting off and boarding planes to different parts of the U.S.
Republican Jodey Arrington, who represents the area in the U.S. House, says the flights have been coming into Abilene Airport for some time and his office has contacted ICE for more information but the agency has essentially blown him off. The congressman also reveals that he has called numerous local officials and not one has been notified by the federal government of the covert ICE operations at Abilene Airport. That includes county commissioners, judges, city mayors and state legislators who are being kept in the dark by ICE and DHS about the activity. In response to the news organization’s inquiry, ICE issued a statement saying that Abilene Airport is used to facilitate detainee transfers in accordance with operational needs and assures the agency is “committed to ensuring that all those in our custody reside in safe, secure, and humane environments and under appropriate conditions of confinement.” The DHS agency also writes that detainees in transit will be transported in a safe and humane manner under the supervision of trained and experienced personnel.
ICE also stresses that detainees’ medical and other special needs are prioritized before any transfer and that accommodations are made during transfer for detainees with disabilities. For those concerned about where the relocated illegal immigrants will end up, the agency offers this reassuring information in its statement to the Texas media outlet: “ICE is coordinating with non-governmental organizations to ensure individuals have immediate needs such as temporary shelter upon their release, as well as food, water, clothing, and transportation services to help mitigate strains placed on resources in the local community.” Custody determinations are made daily by the agency, the ICE statement reads, on a case-by-case basis in accordance with U.S. law and DHS policy considering the “merits and factors of each case.”
Congressman Arrington is calling on the Biden administration to immediately end the reckless “catch and release” operations and blasts the administration for the unacceptable lack of communication and transparency surrounding the process. In a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Arrington trashes Biden’s disastrous policies for encouraging illegal immigration, emboldening drug cartels and jeopardizing the safety of the American people. “Under your leadership and as a result of the Biden Administration’s policies, the United States has ceded control of our southern border to narco-terrorist cartels, which in turn, has created an unprecedented humanitarian and security crisis,” the congressman writes to the DHS secretary. The legislator also asks Mayorkas several questions, including how many illegal immigrants have been released from local detention facilities and transported to Abilene, if DHS is conducting criminal background checks on them, and if the illegal immigrants are tested for COVID-19 before being released into the community.
A few months ago Judicial Watch reported on a similar Biden administration scheme in which planeloads of illegal immigrant minors were relocated around the country in the middle of the night to avoid public scrutiny. In that case the Department of Defense (DOD) contracted big tour buses to take the migrants to cities throughout the southeast. A Tennessee news outlet captured video of planes arriving at a Chattanooga private jet terminal and adolescents who appear to be in their early teens are seen deboarding the planes carrying matching bags then boarding large tour busses parked on the runway. Federal lawmakers representing the area as well as local officials were also kept in the dark.
EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
Time to change your frequent flier miles airline.
By: Red State | Jennifer Oliver O’Connell | August 11, 2021:
In a surprising move, the CEOs of Delta Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and American Airlines have decided they will not require existing employees to get the COVID-19 vaccination
From CNN:
The CEOs of Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines say they are not requiring unvaccinated employees to receive the shot, breaking with United Airlines’ mandate that workers get vaccinated by October 25 or face getting fired.
In an internal memo obtained by CNN, Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly said the airline will “continue to strongly encourage” that workers get vaccinated, but the airline’s stance has not shifted.
“Obviously, I am very concerned about the latest Delta variant, and the effect on the health and Safety of our Employees and our operation, but nothing has changed,” Kelly said.
United, on the other hand, issued its own mandate requiring all 67,000 of its U.S. employees to become vaccinated against COVID-19 by October 25, or face termination. Frontier and Hawaiian Airlines have followed in the footsteps of United, mandating all employees receive the vaccine or lose their jobs.
Both Southwest and Delta rushed to reassure its employees that it had no plans of changing its policy, even after the United decision.
The New York Daily News reported,
In a memo, Southwest made it clear to employees that its stance has not changed despite United’s decision, according to CNN. American also will not be changing its vaccine requirements.
In May, Delta began requiring new employees to get vaccinated, but allowed current employees to remain unjabbed. The company’s CEO told CNBC it was difficult to require shots without full Food and Drug Administration approval.
The Delta CEO went on “Good Day New York” with the news that 75 percent of its workforce had already been vaccinated, even without a company-wide mandate.
New employees for Delta and United will be required to obtain the COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of employment. American and Southwest Airlines have not made any new employment changes.
In a statement, American Airlines said there was “no update at this time” to its vaccination policy. “We are strongly encouraging our team members to get vaccinated, and we are offering an incentive for those who do.”
EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
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“Once a country accepts censorship of speech, then nothing can be won without violence. This is the life and death issue in this country.” – Ayn Rand
Every change in practical politics has been preceded by a cultural change – – that is, a change in the philosophy dominating the culture.
Establishment gaslighting and threats from the Biden regime’s increasingly unhinged national security surrogates is itself becoming a radicalizing agent.
By: Max Morton, The Federalist, August 11, 2021:
Recently, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced the White House is working with various social media companies to flag and remove alleged COVID-19 misinformation. Psaki went so far as to suggest that if distributors of “misinformation”—as defined by the administration—were censored from one platform, they should be censored from all platforms. The Biden regime is getting serious about removing your access to the public square—all for your safety and security.
Likewise, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and their big-tech enablers are on the hunt for domestic extremists and general all-around infidels from the church of neo-Marxist globalism. So far they’ve had a fairly easy go of it, rounding up the January 6 protesters, deplatforming the distributors of so-called extremist misinformation, and blacklisting individual citizens who publicly speak against the Biden regime’s ideologies. All of this was made easy because the offending citizens, thinking they had constitutional rights, used digital platforms to challenge questionable claims from our ruling elites, their duplicitous medical “experts,” and the courtesans in the White House and Congress.
ust so we’re on the same sheet of music, because there’s a bunch of protesters sitting in solitary in a DC jail who didn’t get the message: The government is using the social media postings and digital communications of American citizens to target them for speaking against the establishment.
You are now the target of the enormous and deadly mass surveillance and security state you voted for back when you couldn’t have imagined that neo-Marxist elites would gain control of the government. Consider using digital countermeasures to protect yourself. For pointers, see here, here, and here.
Blacklisting for Sport and Profit
Last week, PayPal announced it is partnering with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to investigate and close accounts the ADL has deemed as belonging to extremists. In February, PayPal had already begun closing accounts flagged by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for allegedly being associated with “extremists” and “hate” groups. This is the same SPLC that runs a giant hate-grift that funnels donations to private Cayman Islands accounts and blacklists conservative organizations like the Family Research Council and media personalities like Tucker Carlson.
It appears PayPal is setting up a blacklist to deny banking and commercial payment services to individuals and businesses that fall outside woke culture. In an essay by PayPal co-founder David Sacks on Bari Weiss’s Substack, Sacks details the dangers of financial institutions blacklisting businesses and individuals who have been labeled as “extremist” by unaccountable and often partisan private organizations, like the ADL and SPLC. In Sacks’s foreboding words, “Silenced voices and empty stomachs are fuel for the very extremism you claim to oppose.”
In the digital public square, giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google have begun working with The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) to identify and remove what they consider extremist online content. Since 2017, the GIFCT has served as a private database of extremist and terrorist online content.
Like many of the post-9/11 NGOs that monitored online terrorist activity, GIFCT started out documenting content created by, or supportive of, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban. The GIFCT is now shifting its focus to U.S. domestic extremists and white supremacists—as identified by activist groups like the SPLC. GIFCT is also working with Amazon, Dropbox, Mailchimp, and LinkedIn, to name just a few. What could possibly go wrong here?
Hanlon’s Razor
Those in Washington, DC, whether at the White House or the Capitol building, continuously bombard Americans with scary talk about domestic terrorism and extremism, as if we were living in 2006 Iraq. Last month the White House even unveiled a new domestic counterterrorism strategy to deal with this epidemic of uncooperative subjects. However, these “experts” in DC seem to have forgotten one of the maxims of counterterrorism strategy: Counterterrorism strategy should not produce more terrorism than existed before the strategy was implemented.
Calling the 1/6 non-surrection an attack worse than 9/11 is idiotic. The vast majority of those arrested are charged with misdemeanors yet rotting in jail for months under extreme conditions.
Placing hundreds of sad-sack Trump supporters in pre-trial solitary confinement for misdemeanor trespassing charges, denying access to exculpatory evidence, then delaying their show trials for 12-24 months is not exactly what the Founders had in mind when they ratified the Bill of Rights that contains the Sixth Amendment guarantee to a speedy trial and the ability to face your accuser and the evidence against you. I’m sure the DC judges and federal prosecutors got a good chuckle out of their manipulation of habeus corpus, but we see what they did there.
The FBI instigating and amplifying terror plots, which allows them to ride to the rescue, bag some promotions, justify their enormous budget, and provide their political benefactors scary stories to frighten the public—well, we see that too. Like with arsonist firefighters, however, if you start the fire, it doesn’t count.
Establishment gaslighting and threatening wonky-talk from the Biden regime’s increasingly unhinged national security surrogates is itself becoming a radicalizing agent across much of America. But to the likes of Biden’s Domestic Policy Advisor Susan Rice, is that a bug or a feature?
Hanlon’s Razor states to never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, and Rice has a long tradition of, well, flawed judgement. Perhaps there is more at play here than Hanlon can account for.
Afraid of Americans
Our national security apparatus—namely, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, their partners in law enforcement, the U.S. Postal Service (again, why?) and big tech—are busy monitoring social media looking for the next III% patch-wearing dupe they can peg as a dangerous Hawaiian shirt-clad terrorist. This seems like a waste of time.
I doubt a real terrorist is going to publicize his evil plots or conduct operational planning on Instagram or Facebook Messenger. As we plainly saw with the Gov. Gretchen Witmer faux-kidnapping plot, most people on social media talking about violence are LARPers, foreign influence operations, and government informants.
I’m not saying there are not dangerous men and women in America. Absolutely there are. After all, America was founded and made the world’s greatest superpower through the sacrifice of dangerous men and women, but modern versions of these dangerous men and women aren’t on social media jabbering about violence or overthrowing the government.
These dangerous men and women have jobs, they have families to support and mortgages to pay. They’re focused on trying to pay for their kid’s braces or college tuition while keeping an increasingly woke and hostile mob at bay.
They are hard men and women, many of them combat veterans, who are not afraid to do what it takes to protect what is theirs. More importantly, they are not a threat—unless someone makes them one.
The establishment elites are now moving to do exactly that by depriving Americans of their employment, access to financial services, free speech, liberty, and their way of life. You won’t hear these dangerous men and women whining about it or talking tough on social media, but rest assured, they see what these elites are doing.
Targeting Political Opponents
In this country of 330 million people, actual political violence is a statistical anomaly. There just isn’t enough white supremacy or extremist activity to justify the entire bloated domestic terrorism industry of Joint Terrorism Task Forces, Fusion Centers, and “Countering Violent Extremism” NGO contracts. In post-9/11 fear, we incentivized a national security apparatus that now sees traditional Americans as the greatest threat to establishment power—and that’s a problem.
Our national security apparatus desperately needs a threat to justify its existence. The Biden administration has promised them one: dissident America.
Corporate media and various Biden regime surrogates are openly discussing making second-class citizens of the vaccine wary, effectively establishing a medical caste system. Companies are putting on unemployment lines people who won’t take an experimental medical therapy. Others are advocating vaccine mandates for employment, government benefits, and medical care. All while government, corporations, and nonprofits are working to remove citizens’ access to financial, e-commerce, and internet services because of their political beliefs.
If one wanted to create a particularly ferocious enemy out of a normally respectful and amenable segment of the population—an enemy that would aggressively fight back in response to maltreatment, thus providing a pretext for all manner of draconian security measures, budget increases, and “emergency” powers, I can think of no better way than to make them hungry, broke, powerless, and persecuted second-class citizens. One might label this method intentional radicalization.
Radicalization. Sometimes it’s more than just a word. Sometimes, for the tyrant, it’s a strategy.
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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My latest in PJ Media:
Basheer Jones is a Cleveland city councilman and a candidate for mayor of Cleveland in the upcoming September 14 primary election. He is also unusually forthright, even for a twenty-first-century Democratic politician, about his contempt for the land in which he seeks elected office.
Jones is a devout, observant Muslim, and already, according to CleveScene, his “personal religious beliefs and organizational ties have become linked with his campaign. Jones made a number of questionable campaign expenditures in 2020 to international Muslim organizations and figures, including expenses likely related to his December travels in Egypt and the sponsorship of a Muslim orphanage there and a Quranic school in Senegal.”
What’s more, “a recent controversial video shows Jones saying, ‘women are not our leaders.’” Jones, like Muslim spokesmen all over the Western world when confronted with statements that are politically inconvenient, insists that his words were “taken out of context.”
But that is not remotely the worst of it. On Sunday, the RAIR Foundation published an exposé on Jones that contained audio of Jones speaking on January 3, 2016, and making fun of Muslim immigrants who were thankful to be in the United States, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.
“Before 9/11,” Jones asserts, “our people, our brothers and sisters from the immigrant communities, like, ‘America is a great place. Oh, it’s the land of the free, home of the brave.’ You’d see the imams, big imams, on the stage, singin’, you know.” Here the crowd starts to laugh softly; Jones chuckles a bit along with them and continues: “‘I pledge allegiance to the flag,’ you know, ‘this is the greatest place in the world.’ And we were tellin’ you, ‘Ah, no it’s not. Ah, we know about this place. This place, we know, we know that guy, somethin’ about him.’ And then 9/11 hit. Everybody started comin’ to us. ‘Brothers, please, come, come march with us, stand –’ Brother, we been tellin’ you, that they’ll change on you just like that, man.”’
Jones was apparently referring to American authorities supposedly turning on Muslim communities after 9/11 and subjecting them to “Islamophobic” counter-terror measures. In any case, his contempt for the grateful immigrants, and I-told-you-so implication that he had somehow been vindicated after 9/11, when America proved to be not so great a place after all, ought to have raised eyebrows among those who backed Jones for Cleveland City Council and are now supporting his mayoral ambitions.
There is no indication, however, that anyone was concerned in the slightest with their candidate’s anti-Americanism. We are, after all, talking about the Democratic Party. This is the party that stood by and did nothing when Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Kabul) tweeted: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. I asked [Secretary of State Antony Blinken] where people are supposed to go for justice.”
There is more. Read the rest here.
EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
My latest in PJ Media:
Ariel Bradley wasn’t even the only Islamic jihadi from Chattanooga, Tennessee. On July 17, 2015, a fellow resident of the Chattanooga suburb of Hixson, Mohammad Abdulazeez, murdered four Marines at a Navy base in Chattanooga. This delighted Bradley, who wrote: “Gifted this morning not only with Eid but w/ the news of a brother puttin fear n the heart of kufar [non-believers] n the city of my birth. Alhamdullilah [thanks be to Allah].” By that time, Bradley was far from Chattanooga; she was living in the domains of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria, and was calling herself Umm Aminah, that is, Aminah’s mother, after her two-year-old daughter, Aminah Mohamad. Six years later, Ariel Bradley is dead, and Aminah is being brought back to a United States that is even more riven now by the divisions and confusions that drove her mother’s life so wildly off course than it was when her mother made her fateful choices.
Ariel Bradley grew up in Chattanooga as a member of the Pentecostal Church of God, and according to a man with whom she shared a home much later, her parents zealously endeavored to “keep her away from materials that would make her question Christianity,” even to the point of not teaching her to read until she was almost a teenager. Not unexpectedly, Ariel rebelled, running away from home when she was 15 or 16. Like so many Americans today, she ended up adrift, searching for an identity and a purpose. A friend characterized Ariel’s life as “a solar system without a star, without a sun.” She got pregnant and had an abortion. She got a lot of tattoos. She did a lot of drugs. She studied for her GED but never got it.
Ultimately she found the Left, and dived in wholeheartedly. According to a 2015 BuzzFeed profile, “When she wasn’t working, she was active in many social justice groups in Chattanooga, protesting and raising awareness of issues facing the city’s working poor and often traveling out of state to march in rallies for teachers’ rights or protests against America’s overseas military actions. In the biography of the Twitter account @LadyAppleSeed, which she created in May 2009, Ariel describes herself as an ‘activist,’ and friends say she considered that a huge part of her identity; they also said she called herself a feminist.” A photo of Ariel at a demonstration survives; she is holding up a sign emblazoned with the slogan “SYSTEM CHANGE NOT CLIMATE CHANGE.”
There is more. Read the rest here.
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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
Has there ever been a time in history when the public has been asked to “trust the science” more?
This week the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report which UN Secretary General António Guterres described as “a code red for humanity”. It predicts catastrophic climate change unless nations make draconian cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly a hundred scientists were listed as the authors of the report.
At the same time, most of the world is being advised to take vaccines against Covid-19 and submit to onerous lockdowns and social distancing. Epidemiologists announce guidelines flanked by politicians.
Critics of climate change science and Covid-19 vaccines are fighting back with their own studies. Some is science; some is pseudoscience. US President Joe Biden has savagely criticised social media companies for allowing “fake news” to reinforce anti-vaxxers. “They’re killing people,” he said last month.
Fake news is putting the mantra of “trust the science” through a fearful stress test. Is it possible to create a vaccine against this blizzard of misinformation?
Some social science researchers have experimented with “cognitive vaccines” in the hope of getting people to examine the evidence and make rational decisions, rather than relying on advice from their cousins or Instagram influencers.
But says an article in the leading science journal PNAS, “researchers have found that this is not as simple as providing people with correct information and hoping it will supplant false beliefs”.
One disturbing feature of fake news is that a willingness to “trust the science” does not necessarily inoculate people against the allure of pseudoscience.
In a recent article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that the mantra “trust the science” does not work.
Paradoxically, they found that people who trusted science could be more vulnerable to being duped:
We identify two critical determinants of vulnerability to pseudoscience. First, participants who trust science are more likely to believe and disseminate false claims that contain scientific references than false claims that do not.
Second, reminding participants of the value of critical evaluation reduces belief in false claims, whereas reminders of the value of trusting science do not. We conclude that trust in science, although desirable in many ways, makes people vulnerable to pseudoscience.
As the researchers lamented, this is “paradoxical”. People who trust science, who are presumably reasonably well educated, are supposed to spurn “fake news”. However, they found that “the mere presence of scientific labels in the article facilitated belief in the misinformation and increased the probability of dissemination”. In other words, a gloss of scientific credibility actually increased people’s vulnerability to pseudoscience.
And this seemed to be true even for many people with higher degrees.
The authors of the study conclude that public officials need to urge people to be curious and critical – to think for themselves, in other words – rather than swallow the recommendations of scientists (or pseudoscientists) uncritically.
As the astronomer and popular science writer Carl Sagan said: “One of the great commandments of science is, ‘Mistrust arguments from authority.’ … Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.”
COLUMN BY
Administration orders “shields down” in the midst of numerous foreign threats.
With just about all attention focused on the crisis on the U.S./Mexican border, scant if any attention is being paid to the many other ways aliens may enter the United States in violation of our immigration laws.
I have frequently written about the irrefutable fact that the United States has 50 border states and not just the four border states that abut with the Mexican border.
In addition to the four “border states” that everyone is well aware of, any state that lies along our nation’s northern border, lies along our nation’s 95,000 miles of coastline or has an international airport are all “border states.”
Aliens who run our nation’s borders are entering the United States without inspection, but then so do aliens who stow away on ships and then sneak off those ships. Boats undoubtedly make landfall along our 95,000 mile coastline and enable aliens to also evade the inspections process that is mandated by immigration laws and protect the United States from the entry and presence of aliens who may pose a threat to national security, public safety, public health and the jobs and wages of Americans.
On June 6, 1993 a dilapidated and vermin-infested boat, the Golden Venture ran aground in the Rockaways, a coastal neighborhood in Queens, New York. On board were some 300 illegal aliens from China who had paid alien smugglers thousands of dollars to enter the United States without inspection and they hoped, without detection.
On June 7, 2018 a local newspaper, The Rockaway Times, published a detailed report about that event, The Golden Venture: 25 Years Later.
Authorities only became aware of that aliens smuggling / human trafficking criminal enterprise because it failed. The obvious question is how many such efforts have been successful? As the saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
Numerous reports prepared by the GAO also point to another means by which aliens enter the United States in violation of our immigration laws. These aliens enter the United States and violate their immigration status. All too frequently such aliens are referred to as “Visa Overstays.” This tends to sound less ominous that the reality. The notion that aliens remain past their authorized period of admission does not sound particularly worrisome, after all, we have all had houseguests who stay too late and ruin our nights sleep.
Why then should we be concerned about aliens who don’t leave when they are supposed to?
The more accurate way of describing aliens who violate the terms to their admission is “Visa Violators.” They not only remain beyond their authorized period of admission but likely violate other terms of their admission into the United States by, perhaps, accepting illegal employment or by committing serious crimes.
Many visa violators also lie on their applications for visas that they file at U.S. embassies and consulates around the world and also lie to the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) inspectors at ports of entry.
For the first four years of my thirty year career with the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) I was an Immigration Inspector assigned to John F. Kennedy International Airport before I became an INS Special Agent. The frustrations of that job were constant and enormous.
Inspectors are generally expected to take about one minute to complete the inspection of an alien seeking entry into the United States. On a limited basis when there are serious doubts about the alien’s admissibility into the United States that alien may be sent for a more in-depth “Secondary” inspection. However, with CBP’s limited resources many aliens are simply admitted into the United States and they simply go hiding in plain sight.
Biden’s edict that illegal aliens not be arrested by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents unless they not only have outstanding Warrants of Removal (Deportation) but must also have convictions for serious crimes meant that aliens who can game the legal entry process at ports of entry and then violate our immigration laws have nothing to fear- but Americans most certainly do!
In fact, on May 11, 2006 I testified before a hearing conducted by the House Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on the topic, Visa Overstays: Can We Bar The Terrorist Door? That hearing was convened because of serious concerns about how terrorists were able to easily game the immigration system to supposedly enter the United States legally, embed themselves in communities around the United States and go about their deadly preparations.
The preface of the official government report, “9/11 and Terrorist Travel – Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” begins with the following paragraph:
It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.
Page 54 of above-noted report contained this excerpt under the title, “Terrorist Travel Tactics by Plot”-
Although there is evidence that some land and sea border entries (of terrorists) without inspection occurred, these conspirators mainly subverted the legal entry system by entering at airports.
In doing so, they relied on a wide variety of fraudulent documents, on aliases, and on government corruption. Because terrorist operations were not suicide missions in the early to mid-1990s, once in the United States terrorists and their supporters tried to get legal immigration status that would permit them to remain here, primarily by committing serial, or repeated, immigration fraud, by claiming political asylum, and by marrying Americans. Many of these tactics would remain largely unchanged and undetected throughout the 1990s and up to the 9/11 attack.
Thus, abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were unwittingly working together to support terrorist activity. It would remain largely unknown, since no agency of the United States government analyzed terrorist travel patterns until after 9/11. This lack of attention meant that critical opportunities to disrupt terrorist travel and, therefore, deadly terrorist operations were missed.
Last month my article, Alleged Iranian Kidnap Plot Targeted Iranian/American Dissident In Brooklyn Connecting the immigration dots Biden ignores, focused on how an Iranian woman was able to enter the United States to participate in what was a foiled plot to kidnap a naturalized American citizen who had been born in Iran and has been writing articles critical of the Iranian regime.
On July 22, 2021 the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a press release, Nine Individuals Charged in Superseding Indictment with Conspiring to Act as Illegal Agents of the People’s Republic of China. The subtitle stated, “PRC Prosecutor Allegedly Traveled to the United States, Directed Stalking of U.S. Residents, and Obstructed Criminal Investigation.”
Here is the salient excerpt from that press release:
According to court documents, Tu Lan, 50, and Zhai Yongqiang, 46, both of China, are the latest two of nine charged in the superseding indictment. Co-defendants Hu Ji, 46 and Li Minjun, 65, both of China; Zhu Feng, 34, a Chinese national residing in Queens, New York; Michael McMahon, 53, of Mahwah, New Jersey; Zheng Congying, 24, of Brooklyn, New York; and Zhu Yong, aka Jason Zhu, 64, of Norwich, Connecticut, were previously charged in a related criminal complaint issued in October 2020 and a related indictment in May 2021. The name of the ninth defendant remains under seal.
According to court documents, the defendants allegedly acted at the direction and under the control of PRC government officials, conducted surveillance of and engaged in a campaign to harass, stalk and coerce certain residents of the United States to return to the PRC as part of a global, concerted and extralegal repatriation effort known as “Operation Fox Hunt.” The superseding indictment also alleges that Tu Lan, a new defendant who was employed as a prosecutor with the Hanyang People’s Procuratorate, traveled to the United States, directed the harassment campaign and ordered a co-conspirator to destroy evidence to obstruct the criminal investigation.
There was no mention of how the alleged Chinese prosecutor procured a visa to enter the United States, to allegedly oversee the operation.
This case was the subject of an earlier DOJ press release, dated October 28, 2020, Eight Individuals Charged With Conspiring to Act as Illegal Agents of the People’s Republic of China. That press release also included a link to the initial Criminal Compaint which disclosed that most of the defendants in the case were either lawfully admitted permanent resident, aliens of the United States or a naturalized United States citizen.
In both of the above noted Iranian and Chinese cases, governments that are hostile to the United States were able to insert their operatives into the United States by potentially committing immigration and visa fraud. Nevertheless, a review of DOJ press releases shows that no attention is being given to visa fraud by the Biden administration. Indeed, as I noted in a recent report in which I addressed another case involving alleged Chinese espionage, Biden Dept. of Justice Drops Criminal Charges Lodged Against Five Chinese Spies.
America’s adversaries are having a field day while America’s national security and public safety are undermined by the Biden administration, even as the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks of 9/11 looms large on the horizon.
©Michael Cutler. All rights reserved.
RELATED ARTICLE: Under ‘Biden’, Enough Illegal Aliens Have Crossed the Border In 2021 to Create the 10th-Largest City in the U.S.
Records obtained by Just the News provide unprecedented glimpse into human adjudication of thousands of ballots, where marks for candidates like Trump were sometimes removed so ballots could count for Biden.
By: John Solomon, Daniel Payne and Natalia Mittelstadt, JTN, August 9, 2021:
A day after the November election, as Donald Trump and other Republican candidates clung to evaporating leads in Georgia, vote counters in Atlanta were confronted by a paper ballot known only by its anonymizing number 5150-232-18.
A Dominion Voting machine had rejected the ballot on election night because the voter had filled in boxes for both Trump and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, an error known as an “overvote.” The machine determined neither candidate should get a tally, and the ballot was referred for human review.
The image of the ballot, obtained by Just the News, shows the voter messily scribbled a large blob in the box to select Trump as president while also putting a thinner check mark next to Biden’s name.
At 6:10 p.m. ET on Nov. 4, 24 hours after the ballot was first scanned and rejected by Machine 5150, a panel of humans decided the vote should be awarded to Biden, with the notation “mark removed for Donald J. Trump.” You can see that ballot here:
Scores of additional ballots that same day had checks manually removed next to Trump’s name as well as many other candidates up and down the ticket — Libertarians, Democrats and write-ins alike — and the votes awarded instead to other candidates.
Welcome to the arcane process known as adjudication, where human judgment is substituted for machine scanning in cases where voters incorrectly filled out a paper ballot. Election officials and official observers have dealt with it for years, with everyday citizens mostly oblivious to the process.
But in 2020, adjudication played a much larger role in states like Georgia, which allowed hundreds of thousands of additional citizens to vote absentee for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In all, more than 5,000 of the 148,000 absentee ballots cast — or about 3% — in Georgia’s largest county required some form of human intervention, according to logs obtained from Fulton County by Just the News under an open records act request.
The adjudication ballots alone are not enough to change a Georgia election in which Biden and Trump were separated by less than 13,000 votes. However, they reveal an imperfect system vulnerable to chaos, subjectivity, or political dirty tricks, especially in a county like Fulton where state officials documented widespread irregularities and misconduct and now want to take over election counting.
Just the News reviewed 1,604 pages of adjudication logs from Fulton County and reviewed 4820 of the 5064 ballot images where human vote counters reviewed or overrode the Dominion Voting machines. The JTN review provided an unprecedented window into the extraordinary discretion accorded adjudication judges to interpret a voter’s intent on a flawed ballot.
It also raised another troubling question, at least in Georgia, where election regulations create two conflicting imperatives. One regulation, which is quoted on each absentee ballot, emphatically declares that a paper ballot should be deemed “spoiled” and uncountable if a voter makes any mistakes or unauthorized marks.
“If you make a mistake or change your mind or change your mind on a selection do not attempt to mark through the selection or attempt to erase. Write ‘Spoiled’ across the ballot and across the return envelope” and get a new ballot, language on each ballot reads.
Just the News reviewed hundreds of ballots that met the “spoiled” definition — ballots that voters had in some way altered, defaced, or corrected — that were still allowed to count after adjudication. The reason? Another Georgia regulation gives election officials broad discretion to try to determine the intent of a confused voter, and actually encourages them to find a way to make flawed ballots count.
The Georgia code stipulates that voting tabulators must be programmed to “reject any ballot, including absentee ballots, on which an overvote is detected,” with those ballots to be “manually reviewed” by a review panel following their rejection.
If a voter “has marked his or her ballot in such a manner that he or she has indicated clearly and without question the candidate for whom he or she desires to cast his or her vote,” the state code says elsewhere, then the ballot “shall be counted and such candidate shall receive his or her vote.”
Yet state law also directs that a ballot should be considered “spoiled” if, in part, a voter has used it to “cast more than the permitted number of votes.” A spoiled ballot “shall not be reinstated,” the code states, suggesting that any ballots deemed as such should not be counted.
RELATED ARTICLE: See the Ballots Election Workers Removed Mark for Trump, Gave Vote to Biden
EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
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During a pre-election prayer session in support of Black Lives Matter, the pastor of St. Xavier Catholic Church in New York City instructed white congregants that they must renounce their white privilege to help “transform the church culture.” Using the noble cause of racial equality as a fig leaf, Black Lives Matter is in fact a violent political organization whose Marxist ideology is anti-American—anti-Christian—in the most profound meaning of those terms. In many churches across America, cultural Marxists in the pulpit are quietly supplanting traditional Christian values with those of the hammer and sickle.
“Cultural Marxism” is the gradual process of grinding down western democracies by subverting the pillars of their culture, the structures and institutions of family, religion, education, politics, law, the arts and the media, as they provide the social cohesion necessary to a functioning society. Challenge the legitimacy of these institutions, and a capitalist society can be overthrown from within without firing a shot. Known as the father of cultural Marxism, 20th century Italian communist Antonio Gramsci summarized his stratagem for dismantling Christian nations thusly:
“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
Gramsci referred to his stratagem as “the long march through the institutions,” i.e. infiltrating a society’s cultural institutions and gradually supplanting their traditional values and principles with those of communism. Operating via stealth and deception, Gramsci’s disciples in this country have diligently labored to grind down every cultural institution in America, including its predominant religion, Christianity.
Communism cannot flourish in a society with a strong religious footing. In his best-selling book, “The Naked Communist,”former FBI Special Agent Cleon Skousen listed 45 communist goals to subvert America from within. Two of those goals pertain to diminishing Christianity:
Goal No. 27 calls on communist warriors to infiltrate churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Revealed religion is based on Scripture; the communist concept of social religion teaches citizens to look to government, rather than God, for their daily salvation. Scriptural religion is about individual salvation; social religion is about collective salvation, a concept that does not exist in Christianity. In many churches on the religious left, the communist goal of replacing revealed religion with social religion has largely been accomplished, as evidenced by the constant refrain of religious-left pastors who sermonize about their undying commitment to the cause of “social justice.” The term refers to justice within a society that allocates wealth according to Marxism’s foremost command: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Goal No. 28 calls on communist warriors to infiltrate schools and eliminate prayer and every type of religious expression on the grounds that it violates the principle of separation of church and state.
Cultural Marxism has a simple message to Christians: sit down and shut up. In attempting to drive Christianity from the public square, cultural Marxists in our midst, nearly all of whom vote Democrat, routinely mock and ridicule Christianity and its believers. The following sacrileges were carried out by members of the entertainment industry:
The above instances are but the tip of a massive iceberg aimed squarely at driving every vestige of Christianity from the public arena.
Disciples of Antonio Gramsci have infiltrated top leadership positions of every major branch of the Christian religion, including the Catholic Church. In February 2020, Pope Francis announced his support for the Global Education Pact, a United Nations-backed initiative that will usher in a “new humanism,” under which God “withdraws” so all of humankind can be “free.” Under the Pact, children of the world will be indoctrinated with social justice (Marxist) propaganda designed to pave the way for a New World Order under the banner of global communism. Operating by stealth and deception, Marxists have seized control of the Vatican in a way that went virtually unnoticed by most Catholics until after the fact, just as Gramsci planned. While pretending to do God’s bidding, Marxists in the Vatican hiding under the ecclesiastical robes of the Christian faith are knowingly subverting their professed religion from within.
To understand the importance of religion to a free society, please consider watching and sharing the brief presentation below by Harvard Business School professor, Clay Christensen.
©John Eidson. All rights reserved.
By all accounts, J. D. Vance, author of the critically acclaimed book Hillbilly Elegy, is a mild-mannered, soft-spoken, affable sort. But he just sparked a firestorm of resentment from the empire’s chattering class – and ensured his enshrinement as deplorable first-class, by those-who-know-better-than-the-rest-of-us.
Vance’s life trajectory thus far is the all-American Horatio Alger story. From a hardscrabble Appalachian childhood, he joined the Marines after high school. Next stops were university and an Ivy League law school, then high finance. But to his credit, he never forgot where he came from. His book Hillbilly Elegy offers a glimmer of insight into his origin and into the lives of forgotten Americans resident in “flyover country.”
Now Vance is running for the US Senate in Ohio – as an unabashed family values guy. Being the fearless and outspoken sort that he is, it’s clear that Vance is altogether different from the lightweight invertebrate politicos who ceaselessly invoke “family values” while posturing and pandering for votes.
But, why the firestorm? It happened because J.D. voiced an opinion publicly that, although shared by millions, is viewed as deplorableif not outright criminal. And his enemies want him to pay dearly for it.
What did Vance say?
At a forum on the “Future of American Political Economy,” sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) on July 23, 2021, while discussing the up-and-coming leaders of the Democrat Party, he said this:
They’re well-known people. Kamala Harris; Mayor Pete Buttigieg; who’s now the secretary of transportation; Cory Booker; AOC… What is the one thing that unites every single one of them? Not a single one of them has any children.
Why is that? Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life? That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?
With those words, J.D. hit a nerve. New York Magazine called him “homophobic.” The Washington Post said his ideas were “bizarre and obviously indefensible.” Paul Krugman of the New York Times said his comments were “a sign of intellectual and perhaps moral bankruptcy.” Tom Nichol, a writer for the left-wing Atlantic, called Vance “a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown.”
Chasten Buttigieg complained that Vance was heartless while pointing out that he and husband Pete were looking to adopt. An op-ed in the People’s World, a publication of the Communist Party, called Vance the “hillbilly Trump.” And former Democratic Senator from Missouri Claire McCaskill, now with MSNBC, called Vance a “jerk.”
There’s more, but you get the idea. J. D. probably didn’t get invited to Obama’s birthday bash on Martha’s Vineyard. Glad all this happened after publication of Hillbilly Elegy. Otherwise we’d have never heard of J. D. Vance.
To many of these wizards of wokedom, not procreating is a badge of honor. They tell themselves they are protecting the environment and shrinking the carbon footprint. If being childless enables them to enjoy a more upscale lifestyle (travel, $5 lattes, etc.), then so be it.
The fact is, having children or not having children does influence how people think about things on an intensely personal and political level. Merely calling attention to it is impolitic, and it cuts to the quick on how folks look at the world. Now if the Hillbilly Elegy guy had left it at that, things would have riled up those-who-know-better-than-the-rest-of-us enough. But there’s more:
It’s one thing to recognize that there are people who don’t have children through no fault or choice of their own. But it’s something else to build a political movement, invested theoretically in the future of this country, when not a single one of them actually has any physical commitment to the future of this country.
…what society has built its entire civilization, the flow of information, the leaders of its country, political and governmental, and also corporate, around completely childless adults? It’s never happened. This is a new thing in American life, but I think probably a new thing in world history.
It’s not good. It’s not healthy.
And Vance didn’t stop there. He further compounded his deplorable cred in the eyes of the Woke a few days later when he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News TV program. That’s when he repeated to millions of viewers some nice things he told the ISI confab about Hungary and its president, Viktor Orbán.
Now regular MercatorNet readers will recall that praising Hungary and Orbán is akin these days to praising Hitler. But Vance, brave and forthright fellow that he is, continued on:
…they [the government of Hungary] offer loans to new married couples that are forgiven at some point later if those couples eventually stay together and have children.
Why can’t we do that here?…Why can’t we give resources to parents who tell us the only reason they’re not having kids is because they can’t afford it?
This is a civilizational crisis…. We should give resources to parents who are going to have kids. We should make it easier to raise American families. And we should send the signal to the culture that we are the pro-family party and we’re going to back it up with real policy.
Finally, to cap it all off, when most aspiring politicians would have long ago given it a rest, Vance actually proposed an old idea whose time is nigh:
The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to sixteen-year olds. But let’s do this instead: let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country, as a parent, you should have more power. You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.
Now people will say, and I’m sure the Atlantic and the Washington Post and all the usual suspects will criticize me about this in the coming days. “Well, doesn’t this mean that non-parents don’t have as much of a voice as parents? Doesn’t this mean that parents get a bigger say in how our democracy functions?” Yes. Absolutely.
How about that? A thinking man running for the US Senate. I hear he even has a shot at getting elected. Let’s keep our eyes on that Ohio Senate race.
COLUMN BY
Louis T. March has a background in government, business and philanthropy. A former talk show host, author and public speaker, he is a dedicated student of history and genealogy. Louis lives with his family… More by Louis T. March
EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
Now that the Democrats have stolen the presidential election and consolidated their power across every branch of government, they are going for the kill – ensuring one party rule for time for the foreseeable future through pro-election fraud, anti-integrity bill.
They had to steal the Senate. This is why.
Sen. Merkley says the bill will include a ‘national set of standards’ for voting in elections
By Nicholas Ballasy, August 6, 2021:
Senate Democratic leaders are planning to hold a procedural vote on new election reform bill before the August recess begins, a senator close to the process said Friday.
“We anticipate that we will again try to move a bill to the floor before we leave here sometime this coming week,” Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley said during a press conference with Texas state representatives who fled Texas for D.C. last month in protest of state GOP voting legislation. “You never know with the U.S. Senate how long things will take.”
Merkley described the legislation as “Manchin 2.0,” referring to the proposal West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin supported as a replacement to the Democrats’ “For the People Act.” He said the new proposal will include a “national set of standards” for voting.
“It takes on dark money. It takes on gerrymandering by setting standards for redrawing districts. It takes on early voting, vote by mail protections, registration protections, polling day protections, so standards that will ensure a clean, clear path for every American to cast their ballot,” Merkley said.
Merkley said the Democrats must “find a way” to pass national voting legislation if the latest proposal fails to garner enough votes in the Senate.
He was asked if Democrats will add voting provisions to the $3.5 trillion filibuster-proof reconciliation bill
“I am going to defer to the majority leader to lay out how that vote will be held,” he replied.
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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Remember, YOU make the work possible. If you can, please contribute to Geller Report.