David Carlin:Evangelical Protestants do not feel they had to prove that they were good Americans. Catholics do.
By making San Diego’s bishop, Robert McElroy, a cardinal, many pro-life Catholics feel Pope Francis has added significantly to America’s many “soft-on-abortion” bishops. To be fair to our Catholic bishops, it must be acknowledged that they took an emphatic stand against abortion when the Roe v. Wade ruling of the Supreme Court was handed down in January of 1973.
Protestants, in 1973, waffled. The more liberal Protestants had no real objection to the ruling. The more conservative were not sure what they should say. A few years later, however, conservative Protestants (those calling themselves Evangelical) came to realize that the Court’s endorsement of abortion was one more blow – a very great blow – struck against Christianity, and they soon became leaders in the struggle against abortion.
In the meantime, however, Catholic opposition to abortion grew weaker. It is instructive that states in which Catholics make up a large percentage of the population (e.g., NY, NJ, IL, CA, MA, CT, RI) tend to send pro-abortion members of Congress. By contrast, states in which Evangelical Protestants make up a great percentage of the population tend to send pro-life members to Congress.
No doubt there are many reasons for this. One of the most important, however, is that American Catholics have a long tradition of trying to “fit in,” trying to prove to the world of non-Catholic Americans that they too are “good Americans.”
For centuries, Catholics have been trying to overcome the old anti-Catholic myth that they cannot be true patriots. This began in England in the 1600s, when it was widely believed that Catholics could not be good Englishmen because their first loyalty was not to the King but to a “foreign prince” (the pope).
English Protestants carried this myth with them when they crossed the ocean; and when Catholics from Ireland and other Catholic places migrated to the United States, they were confronted with this myth. So they did their best to prove it wrong, which they did by conforming (within limits) to prevailing American morals, manners, and ideas.
In the 1960s and 1970s, more and more Americans were accepting, if not enthusiastically embracing, the sexual revolution, including abortion. Many Catholics, though far from all, true to their tradition of conformity to American ways, said: “Look at us. We’re just as American as you are. And so we too will accept the sexual revolution, including abortion.”
By contrast, Evangelical Protestants did not feel they had to prove that they were good Americans. They felt that they already were good Americans, and always had been. Among Americans living in the middle of the 20th century, was there anybody who bore a greater religious resemblance to the old-fashioned Protestants who settled America and built the new nation? “If anybody is a true American,” they said to themselves, “it’s we Evangelicals.”
And so when it came to the sexual revolution, including abortion, they didn’t feel they had to conform; no, they felt they had to resist, since conformity was tantamount to drifting away both from true Christianity and from true Americanism.
Besides, the Evangelical tradition in America derived historically from the English tradition of Protestant Dissent, and in England Dissenters had always had the feeling – a warranted feeling – that they were victims of discrimination that amounted to a kind of semi-persecution.
American Evangelicals, then, were hardly surprised when the American “Establishment” – by the 1970s a highly secularized establishment – subjected them to a new kind of semi-persecution.
When the secular establishment told them that they must endorse the sexual revolution, including abortion, they declined to do so. Evangelical opposition to abortion is a continuation of the English tradition of Dissent or Nonconformity.
In the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, Evangelical voters by a very large majority (between 80 and 90 percent) voted for Donald Trump. They have been called “hypocrites” for doing this. Their leftist critics (secular humanists and liberal Christians) argue that in supporting Trump they are being unfaithful to the Christianity they profess to believe in.
A true Christian, the critics say, would not support so un-Christian a man as Trump, a man who quite obviously has committed many sins of a sexual and financial nature, a man lacking the great Christian virtue of humility, a man devoid of piety and spirituality, a man who is to all appearances a ruthless and greedy egomaniac.
This criticism, by the way, is a curious phenomenon that one frequently comes across nowadays – atheists and near-atheists who believe that they have a better understanding of the nature of “true Christianity” than do the people who declare themselves to be Christians.
But to this criticism a pro-Trump Evangelical (or a pro-Trump Catholic for that matter) can reply:
Were it not for my strong commitment to Jesus Christ I would never be able to support Donald Trump. If these were ordinary times, Trump, an obviously un-Christian man, is the last person in the world I would vote for. But these are not ordinary times. No, we are living in a time when Christianity is under strong attack in America. It is under attack from a very powerful force made up of atheists and their morally and intellectually corrupt allies – enthusiasts for murder (abortion), perversion (homosexuality), and lunacy (transgenderism). We Christians have no choice but to fight back if we are to be true to our Christianity.
And the political conclusion they will draw from this reality is equally clear: “If an effective defender of Christianity (Trump) comes along, even if he is not much of a Christian himself, even if he defends Christianity from less-than-Christian motives, we cannot refuse to support him on the grounds that he is less than ideal, less than a knight in shining armor. These are desperate times for us Christians, and desperate times call for desperate measures. You cannot expect a drowning man to refuse help because the lifeguard happens not to be a replica of Francis of Assisi or George Washington.”
Last night Joe Biden incited violence against Republicans with his pounding dehumanization of conservatives.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” — Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
Nothing to lower inflation. Nothing to reduce crime. Nothing to secure the southern border. Nothing on skyrocketing crime. Nothing on energy independence. Nothing on stopping human trafficking and drug cartels. Nothing on the skyrocketing costs to families because of his endless mandates.
Nothing on his record at all!
As he spoke, he was occasionally distracted by hecklers who shouted “fuck Joe Biden” through a bullhorn.
Something to remember when Scarecrow Joe calls non-leftists “terrorists.”
Footage from DC on the day of Trump's inauguration.
This happened all around the country. For four years.
In a prime-time speech explicitly designed to demonize half of the country and criminalize the conservative agenda ahead of the November midterms, President Joe Biden, positioned in front of a hellish background of red lights, accused former President Donald Trump and “MAGA Republicans” of being “a threat to the very soul of this country.”
But it’s Biden and Democrats, not the more than 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020, who are guilty of violating the Constitution, democracy, the rule of law, and the will of the people.
5 minutes in Biden attacks “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans” and their “extreme ideology” as a “threat to this country”&“clear and present danger to our democracy. [They] do not respect the Constitution… take the country backwards … fan the flames of political violence”
Joe Biden on Thursday evening declared war on Trump supporters in a divisive primetime speech on the ‘battle for the soul of America’ from Philadelphia.
Joe Biden called 75+ million Trump supporters “a clear and present danger to our democracy.”
“MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution, they do not believe in the rule of law … They promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence,” said Biden.
Classic projection from a senile and corrupt career politician.
EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
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What Mikhail Gorbachev tried to do with the Soviet Union is surprisingly relevant today.
Sometimes I joke that I lived through four currencies and three leaders of the Soviet Union. I was born in 1981, Brezhnev died in 1982, Andropov in 1984, and Chernenko in 1985. Compared to the previous Soviet Leaders who spent a lot of time in hospitals, some even chairing meetings via video link, Mikhail Gorbachev, who took the helm in 1985, seemed young, fresh, and a reformer.
Gorbachev, who died Tuesday in Moscow at age 91, to this day is regarded by many in the West as someone who could have reformed the Soviet Union. An overall impression among many is that things could have been much worse, had someone more bloodthirsty occupied the Kremlin at a time. Sure, he did not tear down the Berlin Wall like Reagan encouraged him to. But he also did not send in the tanks when Germans started tearing the wall down themselves.
Conversely, many in Russia, especially the ruling circles, lament that Gorbachev was too weak, did not send enough tanks, and thus allowed the Soviet Union to collapse.
Interestingly enough, what Gorbachev tried to do with the Soviet Union is surprisingly relevant today.
Communism Cannot Survive Without Totalitarian Oppression
Gorbachev introduced the policy of “Glasnost” or “Publicity,” which, in broad terms, allowed people to acknowledge that everything was not alright in the Soviet Union. Prior to Glasnost, even complaining about mundane issues (e.g. lack of meat in the supermarket) could get you in trouble for being a rabble-rouser, counter-revolutionary, or an “agent of imperialism.”
Even though Glasnost was not what one would call freedom of speech or freedom of press (you still could not criticize communism), it was a big step for regular Soviet citizens, who for the first time could complain that there was no meat on the shelves and not risk being jailed. Everyone started acknowledging that things were not just bad, but very bad. People started questioning whether they would be better off if they governed themselves.
This, combined with desire for national self-determination, created a situation where public dissatisfaction could not be contained; the voices of discontent were simply too loud to be silenced. There were attempts though. The Tbilisi massacre in 1989 (also known as the April 9 tragedy) saw Soviet soldiers hack Georgian demonstrators (mostly women) to death with field spades In Lithuania in 1991, hundreds of Lithuanians gathered in Vilnius in a bid to reclaim independence, prompting Soviets tanks to drive over peaceful protesters, killing more than a dozen people and injuring hundreds more.
After Gorbachev, surviving and aspiring tyrants concluded that in order to maintain power they had to curtail freedom of speech and freedom of press.
Many Politician Today Are as Socialist as Gorbachev
“Perestroika” (rebuilding) was another of Gorbachev’s policies. It recognized deficiencies in central planning, especially in the provision of consumer goods. It tried to inject some capitalism into the economy, and even allowed for limited private companies to be established. This was very significant because the entire Soviet central planning rested on the Marxist premise that private enterprises are inherently exploitative.
Of course, private enterprises were limited to consumer goods sectors. The general thinking was that if Soviet citizens want jeans and chewing gum—fine, let local small companies make jeans, maybe then people will stop complaining. The government, however, would retain complete control of all the so-called important industries—energy, manufacturing, mining, and the like—while the willing masses would be allowed to play in the little sandbox of consumer goods.
It is easy to spot a fault in Gorbachev’s thinking: if central planning does not work for consumer goods, it would not work for even more complex production. What is horrifying is how many politicians of the free world hold the same basic assumptions as Gorbachev. Even worse, how many Americans on the left (or even the centrist right) call for the government to regulate or nationalize a company whenever they decide that the thing they want costs too much?
Once again, the aspiring tyrants studied Gorbachev’s attempts carefully and concluded (perhaps correctly) that inherently faulty systems cannot be fixed. It is impossible to fix central planning without abolishing its central premise that the government, not consumers, know best what to produce and in what quantities. In order to maintain power, the governments have to control the entire economy, or at least most of it.
Hardliners Sow the Seeds of Their Own Destruction
As mentioned, those who wish that communism and the Soviet Union never collapsed like to blame Gorbachev. But what really finished off the Soviets was the attempted coup by the hardliners in August 1991. Gorbachev was put under house arrest, TV stations started showing Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”—a Soviet version of “everything is fine, nothing to see here,” and later a group of elderly men declared that they were taking things into their own hands to salvage the ideals of the Socialist revolution.
That did not go well with people who had had enough. The masses had turned against the continuation of the Soviet Union and socialism, which had wrought pain, poverty, and oppression. After the armed forces agreed to go with Yeltsin, the days of the Soviet Union were numbered. It dissolved on December 26th, 1991, giving the world the best Christmas present imaginable.
How does that apply to today’s America? You can’t have a free country without truly free speech. You cannot have empowered citizens if all aspects of economic life are decided by the government. And hardliners? They often overestimate how much support they really have.
Zilvinas Silenas became President of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in May 2019. He served from 2011-2019 as the President of the Lithuanian Free Market Institute (LFMI), bringing the organization and its free-market policy reform message to the forefront of Lithuanian public discourse.
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The 1932 election is perhaps the best example of the rule that prevails all too often in the political world: You get what you voted against.
With Labor Day upon us, the summer of 2022 is ebbing as the campaign season kicks into high gear. On November 8, American voters will decide the composition of the next Congress based largely upon what they hear over the next two months. Sadly, what candidates say when running often doesn’t look like what they do later when elected.
Such was the case 90 years ago in the year 1932, near the bottom of the Great Depression. All eyes focused on the presidential contest between incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover and Democrat challenger Franklin Roosevelt. When the smoke cleared, Roosevelt won in a landslide with 57.4 percent; Hoover trailed with 39.6 percent; Socialist Party nominee Norman Thomas came in third, drawing a scant 2.2 percent.
If you were a socialist (or a modern “liberal” or “progressive”) in 1932, you faced an embarrassment of riches at the ballot box. You could go for Norman Thomas. Or perhaps Verne Reynolds of the Socialist Labor Party. Or William Foster of the Communist Party. Maybe Jacob Coxey of the Farmer-Labor Party or even William Upshaw of the Prohibition Party. You could have voted for Hoover who, after all, had delivered sky-high tax rates, big deficits, lots of debt, higher spending, and trade-choking tariffs in his four-year term. Roosevelt’s own running mate, John Nance Garner of Texas, declared that Republican Hoover was “taking the country down the path to socialism.”
Journalist H. L. Mencken famously noted that “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” If you agreed with Mencken and preferred a non-socialist candidate who promised to get government off your back and out of your pocket in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt was your man—that is, until March 1933 when he assumed office and took a sharp turn in the other direction.
The platform on which Roosevelt ran that year denounced the incumbent administration for its reckless growth of government. The Democrats promised no less than a 25 percent reduction in federal spending if elected.
Roosevelt accused Hoover of governing as though, in FDR’s words, “we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible.” On September 29 in Iowa, the Democrat presidential nominee blasted Hooverism in these terms:
I accuse the present Administration of being the greatest spending Administration in peace times in all our history. It is an Administration that has piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission, and has failed to anticipate the dire needs and the reduced earning power of the people. Bureaus and bureaucrats, commissions and commissioners have been retained at the expense of the taxpayer.
Now, I read in the past few days in the newspapers that the President is at work on a plan to consolidate and simplify the Federal bureaucracy. My friends, four long years ago, in the campaign of 1928, he, as a candidate, proposed to do this same thing. And today, once more a candidate, he is still proposing, and I leave you to draw your own inferences. And on my part, I ask you very simply to assign to me the task of reducing the annual operating expenses of your national government.
Once in the White House, he did no such thing. He doubled federal spending in his first term. New “alphabet agencies” were added to the bureaucracy. Nothing of any consequence in the budget was either cut or made more efficient. He gave us our booze back by ending Prohibition, but then embarked upon a spending spree that any drunk with your wallet would envy. Taxes went up in FDR’s administration, not down as he had promised.
For every thousand books written, perhaps one may come to enjoy the appellation “classic.” That label is reserved for a volume that through the force of its originality and thoroughness, shifts paradigms and serves as a timeless, indispensable source of insight.
Such a book is The Roosevelt Myth. First published in 1948, Flynn’s definitive analysis of America’s 32nd president is arguably the best and most thoroughly documented chronicle of the person and politics of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Flynn’s 1944 book, As We Go Marching, focuses on the fascist-style economic planning during World War II and is very illuminating as well.
John T. Flynn was a successful and influential journalist with a reputation for candor and first-rate research. He was neither a shill for Big Government nor a puppet of Big Business. He railed against both when they conspired to undermine the Constitution, erode our freedoms, or suck the nation into foreign entanglements. He saw right through the public relations job depicting FDR as a valiant crusader for noble causes.
Was FDR a man of principles, a man guided in his thinking by a fixed set of lofty and non-contradictory ideas? Far from it, Flynn proves, in what is an important theme of the book. FDR’s thinking and behavior show him to be a real-life exemplar of an old Groucho Marx wisecrack: “Those are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others!”
FDR was less of an ideologue than he was a shallow opportunist capitalizing on the public’s demand for “action.” With the gift of an orator’s tongue, he could sell just about anything to a desperate public. As a candidate in 1932, he sold the antidote to the poison he later injected. Usually, these things are done in reverse order.
The depression that FDR inherited was still very much with us after two terms in the White House. He zigged and zagged from one Rube Goldberg policy contraption to the next. His elitist brain-trusters covered for his failures and cooked up new schemes, in what Flynn called “the dance of the crackpots.”
H. L. Mencken saw the events of the 1930s in similar fashion and could be even more sarcastic. He described FDR’s New Deal as “a political racket,” a “series of stupendous bogus miracles” with its “constant appeals to class envy and hatred,” promoting government as “a milch-cow with 125 million teats” and marked by “frequent repudiations of categorical pledges.”
Flynn’s critique of the Mussolini-inspired New Deal’s two main hallmarks—the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA)—remains one of the most devastating ever penned. The “crazy antics” of the NRA put a New York tailor behind bars for pressing a suit of clothes for 35 instead of 40 cents. With the AAA, “we had men burning oats when we were importing oats from abroad on a huge scale, killing pigs while increasing our imports of lard, cutting corn production and importing 30 million bushels of corn from abroad.”
Flynn’s view of FDR’s coterie of planners was right on target, each “a kind of little man who will tell you that he can’t hit a nail straight with a hammer, but who loves to spread a big country like the United States out before him on top of a table, pull up a chair and sit down to rearrange the whole thing to suit his heart’s content.” The result of all his interventions was to lengthen the Great Depression by seven years, according to economists Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian.
In 1939, Roosevelt was well into his second term when his Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau let something slip that no historian should forget:
We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong … somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot.
Flynn’s As We Go Marching and The Roosevelt Myth leave the reader with a sense of distaste that the liberties and the pocketbooks of a nation were placed in the hands of so beguiling a schemer as Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Given the lingering deification of FDR, John T. Flynn’s two books are relevant and necessary today as they were so many decades ago. Americans who prefer their history not be twisted to serve statist ends or sanitized by the politically correct should be sure to stock their libraries with these classics. No one who reads them with an open mind will ever think of Roosevelt the same way again.
As a final note, another fascinating book on the same subject is Hell-Bent For Election by FDR’s financial advisor James Warburg, who regarded the president poorly in hindsight. Warburg observed that FDR was “undeniably and shockingly superficial about anything that relates to finance.” He was driven not by logic, facts, or humility but by “his emotional desires, predilections, and prejudices.”
In the world of economics and free exchange, the rule is that you get what you pay for. The 1932 election is perhaps the best example of the rule that prevails all too often in the political world: You get what you voted against.
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Going somewhere for the holiday weekend? Not if you live in California and drive an electric vehicle, you’re not. California issued an emergency alert asking people not to charge their EVs because the power grid can’t handle the demand. This from a state that is moving to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles. So how’s this going to work when the internal combustion engine is gone, natural gas appliances are banned, and everyone has to rely on electricity for getting around, heating their homes, and washing their clothes. The short answer is: it’s not. The numbers don’t add up. But that’s the bright green energy future into which your insane leaders want to take you.
Here’s one thing that will happen in that future. Everyone will have smart meters and the government will simply order the power cut off whenever it feels like it. Don’t believe me? It’s already happening. How did you like the story out of Denver this week, where 22,000 households were locked out of their thermostats and couldn’t adjust their air conditioning when it got hot? No car, no A/C, no appliances, whenever the government decides it’s time to control your behavior.
Colorado and California are among the states that have adopted green energy mandates. Hate to break it to you, folks, but green energy is just not up to the job. The numbers don’t add up. That’s why Illinois is already looking for ways to adjust its green energy mandates and escape the trap. They figure they can’t attract business to the state without being able to demonstrate they will have reliable energy supplies in the future. That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard out of Illinois politicians for a long time.
Since I’m the skunk at the garden party, let me ask this: What is all this sackcloth and ashes supposed to accomplish? If I were a cynic, I would say the goal is wealth and power for a tiny elite that is personally heavily invested in green energy stocks, something I’ve reported on before. I could also say it’s about controlling the people, reducing their standard of living to make them poor, cutting America down to size in the world, waging Marxist war on capitalism, putting the globalists in control of your happiness, and degrowth and depopulation.
I’ve heard all these things and they sound plausible to me. But let’s take the entire exercise at face value, shall we? Leaving fossil fuels in the ground and making the transition to green energy will stop climate change and keep the planet from burning up, right?
There’s only one problem. Over 1,100 scientists and professionals from around the world just signed a declaration stating in no uncertain terms there is no climate emergency. “Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” they said. “Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming.” So, anyone who tells you ‘the science is settled’ and the planet is burning up is lying to you for their own selfish purposes. There are real costs to green energy policies, the scientists went on, and the cure – getting rid of fossil fuels – will be worse than the disease. They criticize the unfounded beliefs that dominate media narratives and call for getting back to real science.
Emergency directives and smart meter shut-offs aside, let’s suppose you do manage to get your EV out of your garage this weekend. You have some other things to worry about. Your EV could explode at any moment. Hyundai and Kia just issued warnings. They recommend parking your EV outside so it doesn’t burn your house down. The town in Connecticut with the electric bus fire this summer has gone back to diesel-powered buses.
If you’re on the road, good luck finding a charging station, and hope it works when you find one. A police department in England is finding its EVs can’t reach some emergencies because the emergencies are too far away and the batteries run down before they can get there. In 2019, a police officer in California could not pursue a suspect because the officer’s EV ran down. The suspect got away.
If you’re driving an EV because you feel guilty about damaging the environment with fossil fuels, here’s something else to feel guilty about: pulling lithium out of the ground for your EV battery generates lots of carbon emissions, toxic wastewater, and other environmental damage. Indigenous peoples and governments in Latin America are wising up to this and are moving to clamp down on lithium mining. How will the numbers add up when more people in producing areas revolt?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for progress. I had halogens for years, but I love my LED lamps. But here’s what I’m not for: chasing unicorns and rainbows, turning everything upside down just because some people take it on faith the planet is burning up. And I’m not for blindly pursuing supposed solutions without ever giving a thought to what they will really cost or what new problems they will create. And I’m not for financially self-interested government officials telling us we have to ‘press the accelerator’ on the green energy transition when the numbers obviously don’t add up. I’m not for the inmates running the asylum. Take your romanticism and shove it! Get real and keep your hands off my thermostat and my life. Kapish?
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The Taliban are getting rich from the immigration business. And we’re paying for it.
Ariana Afghan Airlines used to fly Al Qaeda terrorists from Afghanistan to the Middle East. As a sideline, it also flew guns and drugs on behalf of the Islamic terrorist organization. While Ariana was controlled by Osama bin Laden, it was allegedly coordinated by Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer whom Biden has offered to trade for pothead WNBA player Brittney Griner.
But these days Ariana has a new mission and we’re the ones paying for it.
The Biden administration is buying bulk tickets on the Taliban airline, according to a congressional report, and paying “approximately $300,000 per flight to a Taliban controlled airline in order to allow U.S. citizens and Afghan allies to continue evacuating.”
Taliban Air flies Afghans to Qatar, a close ally and state sponsor of Islamic terrorists, and then they go on to America. With tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand Afghans in the pipeline, the Taliban could see over $100 million in payments from Biden for its airline.
Ariana Afghan Airlines, notorious for its terrorist connections and its poor safety record (the Europeans banned it some years back and it’s ranked as one of the most dangerous airlines in the world although face masks and probably burkas are compulsory), is once again under the control of the Taliban. And it’s a crucial part of the Taliban business model.
The Taliban sabotaged Biden’s retreat, keeping Americans and Afghans with visas trapped behind enemy lines to profit from their evacuation. And they’ve been doing just that. While the media has been shy about covering what’s going on, the Taliban have been quite open.
Taliban officials have boasted of handing out over 700,000 passports to collect $50 million.
“We are issuing up to 4,000 passports daily and we aim to increase the number to 10,000,” Shirshah Quraishi, deputy director of Afghanistan’s passport department, bragged.
It’s a myth that the Taliban are not allowing Afghans to leave. They’re happy to facilitate the trip for the right price. They’re also willing to let Americans and other foreigners visit since “the Taliban leadership also made more than $1 million in visa fees paid by more than 4,100 foreign nationals who have visited Afghanistan over the past year.” Many if not most of those visitors are involved in humanitarian aid organizations which the United States is also financing.
The Taliban profit from the Biden administration buying bulk tickets on its terrorist airline, they profit from issuing the visas to Afghans leaving the country and they profit from them once they come to America. A Los Angeles Times profile of a family of Afghan refugees describes them getting welfare payments and then sending money back home to Afghanistan.
Such remittances are a commonplace reality among immigrants and a major incentive for mass migration. A number of Latin American economies depend on remittances leading them to encourage mass migration to America. The Taliban have done the same thing in Afghanistan.
In 2020, total Afghan international remittances were estimated at $780 million making up 4% of the failed state’s GDP. Between the mass migration and the collapse of Afghanistan’s economy, the numbers fell, but will likely rebound to become much higher in the coming years.
Much of this money is sent through the Islamic ‘Hawala’ system often used by terrorists.
The Biden administration deliberately insulated remittances from sanctions on the Taliban and Al Qaeda’s Haqqani network going so far as “authorizing transactions involving the U.S.-blacklisted Taliban or Haqqani Network that are incident and necessary to the transfer of noncommercial, personal remittances to Afghanistan.”
Biden had created a massive loophole for funding Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Afghans in America are collecting welfare and sending cash back home. Some of it may be going to their family members while other payments may end up in the hands of the terrorists. Either way, the Taliban and Al Qaeda will take their cut.
And the flow of remittances will make the Taliban Air flights and the visa payoffs seem minute.
Taliban financial institutions break up remittances into installments, thereby potentially profiting from interest rates (despite the formal Islamic stricture against it), charge fees and peg payments to their artificial exchange rate against the dollar which has little connection to reality.
The Taliban profit in three separate ways from just the payments alone, and will profit in many more ways as the money is injected into an economy that they control. That’s why they want to hand out 10,000 visas a day if they can. The more Afghans come to America, the more money the terrorists make when they send payments back home. It’s also why so many of the Afghan migrants are young military-age men. They were never refugees, but guest workers meant to move to America, get jobs, collect aid and send the money back to the Taliban terror state.
The flow of military-age men also helps disguise a terrorist infrastructure allowing Taliban, ISIS and Al Qaeda to inflitrate America, build criminal and terror cells to provide more cash and plot attacks among the huge number of undocumented migrants flown out by Biden in the last days.
The Afghanistan refugee crisis is actually a deliberate effort by the Taliban to create a sustainable funding model for their failed terrorist state through humanitarian aid, passports, flights and remittances. And Americans are footing the bill at every stage of the scam.
Under Osama bin Laden, Ariana Afghan Airlines was a system for transporting terrorists. Under the Taliban, it will play that role once again. Even the Clinton administration had sanctioned Ariana, while Biden is funding Ariana flights, allowing the terror airline to maintain its legitimacy and finance its operations. On September 11, Al Qaeda infiltrated our nation and flew airplanes into our buildings. Now, the terrorists are inflitrating their cash cows and terrorists into America.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2022-09-02 07:05:542022-09-02 07:07:47Biden is Paying Osama bin Laden’s Old Airline to Fly Out Afghans
Co-host Steve Doocy said, “The White House is making President Biden’s take on Trump voters very clear by labeling MAGA Republicans as a threat to democracy.”
Co-host Brian Kilmeade asked, “I’m stunned by this approach. I’m stunned by trying to marginalize people and say every one of the people that considers himself a MAGA Republican is supporting January 6th and riots. Is that what they’re trying to do?”
McCarthy said, “He is trying to distract from the disasters that he is created in the country. The problem with Joe Biden is he does not understand the soul of America. The tens of millions of hard-working, law-abiding citizens that he vilifies that simply want to have a say in their kids’ education, to go to a school board meeting, want a gasoline price that they can afford, no longer wants inflation to continue to rise. Afraid to go out in their streets, to be safe again. They want a stronger, safer, more prosperous America, and all that he does is vilify them to distract from the disasters and no plan he has to save America from where we are today.”
On a related note, ahead of the president’s Thursday speech focusing on threats to American democracy, many New Yorkers told Fox News that America is more divided than ever.
“He’s the most divisive president in the history of the United States, at least in my lifetime,” a union worker and registered Democrat, Jimmy, told Fox News.
“I think we’re more divided than we ever were,” one woman told Fox News.
Jamal said: “The country has never been unified. Whatever Biden said he was going to do hasn’t been done.”
And a Vietnam War veteran, Mike, told Fox News that the current political divide makes the 1960s “look like a cocktail party.”
Jimmy said “we’ll be here for a while” if he listed all the reasons why he felt the divide was deepening.
A lifelong New Yorker, “Jimmy,” said Biden is the most divisive president he’s seen in his lifetime. “We can start with the economy. The porous border. The double standard for vaccinations here in our country. Crime at an all-time high in Democratic supermajority cities,” Jimmy told Fox News.
Biden recently said “MAGA philosophy” is “like semi-fascism.” Earlier this year, he said Republicans were pushing an “ultra MAGA” agenda.
“This is not a fascist country,” Mike told Fox News. “Too many people gave too much to make sure that it’s not.”
One man, “Bill,” said Biden likening Republican ideology to “semi-facism” is “a most unhelpful and ignorant statement. The Republicans that I know are far from being any fraction of fascism.”
Dismissing the Notion That China Presented a Threat to America
In 2019 Biden dismissed the notion that China could challenge American supremacy on the international stage. He said at an Iowa campaign rally: “China is going to eat out lunch? Come on, man. They can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west. They can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what. they’re not competition for us.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Discover The Networkshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDiscover The Networks2022-09-02 06:52:042022-09-02 06:53:35Rep. McCarthy: Biden ‘Does Not Understand the Soul of America’
Jennifer Norris, who is employed by Trinity School NYC as its Director of Student Activities, was recorded admitting how her current leadership role facilitates her goal of promoting politics in the classroom.
Here are some of the highlights from today’s video:
Jennifer Norris, Director of Student Activities, Trinity School NYC: “I just keep trying to disrupt wherever I can. And now that I’m in this position, I have so many opportunities to do that.”
Norris: “I don’t hide how I feel, but I can’t pretend I’m [not] promoting an agenda even though I clearly am with all the stuff I’m doing.”
Norris: “There’s always groups of teachers who want to do these [activist] things, but the administration just wouldn’t let us. So, we’ve been just sneaking things in [through] the cracks.”
Norris: “When I first started there [at Trinity School NYC], I hid my whole life. I felt like a double agent or something.”
Norris: Trinity School NYC is “definitely a school where conservatives would not feel comfortable.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00O'Keefe Media Grouphttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngO'Keefe Media Group2022-09-02 06:06:492022-09-07 06:30:51Watch Prestigious NYC School Director Touts ‘Sneaking’ Her Political ‘Agenda’ into Classrooms
Emerging statistics on excess mortality rates paint an alarming picture. Far more people died in 2021, after the rollout of the COVID shots, and in 2022, than during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020
Mainstream media are trying to divert your attention from the elephant in the room — mass injection with experimental gene transfer technology — to anything and everything but that
The Telegraph blames the unexplained excess deaths on lockdown effects. Many didn’t have access to routine medical care during lockdowns, and are now dying from chronic diseases that went untreated
U.K. Office for National Statistics (ONS) data released August 16, 2022, show excess deaths in England and Wales were, as of August 5, 14.4% higher than the five-year average, which works out to 1,350 more deaths per week than normal. A majority of these excess deaths were cardiovascular in nature — a primary adverse effect of the COVID jabs
In the U.S., we lost 349,000 younger Americans to something besides COVID and non-natural death between April 3, 2021 and August 13, 2022, and that’s not counting the tens of thousands of death records that the CDC has inexplicably deleted. As much as 15% to 25% of the death reports that could indicate a COVID jab death are missing. Other data show that during the fall of 2021, Millennials, aged 25 to 44, had an 84% increase in excess deaths
Emerging statistics on excess mortality rates paint an alarming picture. Far more people died in 2021, after the rollout of the COVID shots, and in 2022, than during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020. I will review some of those shocking statistics — which are mirrored around the world — in a moment.
But while rational people look at these figures and ask themselves what the most apparent and likely cause behind this sudden rise in deaths of working-age adults and younger people might be, mainstream media are trying to divert your attention from the elephant in the room — mass injection with experimental gene transfer technology — to anything and everything but that.
Lockdowns Blamed for Excess Deaths
In an August 18, 2022, article,1 Telegraph science editor Sarah Knapton blames the “unexplained excess deaths” on “the effects of lockdown.” She writes:2
“Figures for excess deaths from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that around 1,000 more people than usual are currently dying each week from conditions other than the virus.
The … Department of Health has ordered an investigation into the figures amid concern that the deaths are linked to delays to and deferment of treatment for conditions such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Over the past two months, the number of excess deaths not from Covid dwarfs the number linked to the virus …
Dr. Charles Levinson, the chief executive of Doctorcall, a private GP service, said his company was seeing ‘far too many’ cases of undetected cancers and cardiac problems, as well as ‘disturbing’ numbers of mental health conditions.
‘Hundreds and hundreds of people dying every week — what is going on?’ he said. ‘Delays in seeking and receiving healthcare are no doubt the driving force, in my view.’”
Cardiovascular Problems Kill in Record Numbers
ONS data released August 16, 2022, show excess deaths in England and Wales were, as of August 5, 14.4% higher than the five-year average, which works out to 1,350 more deaths per week than normal, Knapton reports.3 As you can see in the graph4 below, COVID is only involved in a small number of those deaths.
In all, non-COVID deaths are now more than three times that of COVID-related deaths. According to the U.K. Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, a majority of these excess deaths were “preventable heart and stroke and diabetes-related conditions.”
However, while lack of routine health care — people avoiding seeing their doctors for fear of COVID or due to various restrictions — may well have played a role, cardiovascular problems such as heart attacks and strokes are the primary side effects of the jab as well.
A Look at US Mortality Data
The identical trend is also seen in the U.S. In Part 1 of a three-part series,5 The Ethical Skeptic — self-described as a former intelligence officer and strategies for nations facing corruption challenges — reviews data from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics showing “stark increase trends beginning in the first week of April 2021.”
“This date of inception is no coincidence, in that it also happens to coincide with a key inflection point regarding a specific body-system intervention in most of the U.S. population,” The Ethical Skeptic notes.
He describes how, at the very end of May 2021, an “odd signal” developed in his COVID tracking models. This odd signal came in the form of an ICD death code (International Classification of Diseases code) called R00-R99, which stands for “Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified.” In other words, deaths from undetermined causes.
As a result of this odd signal, he started tracking these R00-R99 deaths, along with 11 other ICD-10 (the 10 stands for 10th revision, which is the most recent), such as suicides and overdoses, as well as a statistic called “Excess non-COVID natural cause deaths.” The data The Ethical Skeptic used for his models were derived from three primary databases:
The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention: Weekly Counts of Deaths by State and Select Causes, 2014-20196
The CDC’s Weekly Provisional Counts of Deaths by State and Select Causes, 2020-20227
The CDC’s Wonder: Provisional Mortality Statistics, 2018 through Last Month – Query by Constraint Engine8
CDC Is Scrubbing Death Records
Non-COVID mortality saw a mild uptick in October 2020, an effect The Ethical Skeptic attributes to “the systemic damage which the SARS-CoV-2 infection and virus spike protein can produce in the human body. An erstwhile COVID delayed death if you will.”
The noticeable explosion of non-COVID deaths didn’t occur until Week 14, 2021, and “by the end of 2021 it had become abundantly clear that U.S. citizens were not just dying of COVID-19 to the excess, they were also now dying of something else, and at a rate which eventually became higher than that of COVID itself,” he writes.
Disturbingly, he discovered that death records were inexplicably being redacted and deleted during a very crucial time period — Weeks 4 through 20 in 2022. “It is hard to envision a scenario explaining this 52,000-record data tampering across the most at-risk weeks … of 2022, as not constituting malicious obfuscation of U.S. citizen mortality data,” he writes.
Deep Dive Into US Death Statistics
His article is chockfull of charts for those who want to take a deeper dive into the statistics, but here are some extracts of his findings:
“The charts of particular concern … include the charts featuring stark post MMWR Week 14, 2021 rises in mortality. Specifically, they are
Excess non-COVID natural cause, 5+ sigma
Cancer and lymphomas, 9+ sigma
Other respiratory conditions, 2 sigma
Nephritis/Nephrotic syndrome, 4 sigma
Septicemia, 2 sigma
Heart diseases and ailments, 2 sigma
All other ICD-10 tracked natural cause deaths, 4 sigma
… While there are indeed increases in deaths incumbent inside the other ICD-10 codes, those increases appeared to plausibly conform to their same arrival patterns for 2020 as well. In other words, they appeared to be heavily Covid-related in their dynamics, both before and after the Week 14 2021 inflection.
Of particular concern, are those deaths which relate to body-wide regulatory systems as opposed to specific organs or causes. In other words, cancer and lymphomas, heart, autonomous myocarditis/pericarditis/conductive disorders, injuries to the liver and kidneys, etc.
These are not only the canaries in the coal mine in terms of pathology, but may serve to indicate as well that a pervasive systemic disruption is at play inside the average U.S. citizen human physiology, especially over the last 71 weeks. These are the death groups which exhibit the most stark trend of increase post MMWR Week 14, 2021 …
[Let] us for a moment also review the compelling rationale behind the MMWR Week 14 2021 inflection date. This date is a critical matter of concern for no small reason. Its derivation is no coincidence. The ‘Doses and Deaths Comparison Chart’, Exhibit B below, outlines why.
Exhibit B — The MMWR Week 14, 2021 inflection date also happens to correspond to the fastest velocity in administered vaccine doses inside the U.S. population. The red line is Excess Non-COVID Natural Cause Mortality extracted from the data behind Exhibit E below.”
According to The Ethical Skeptic, three types of death record codes in particular are signaling “population-wide systemic health disruption,” and those are: “Excess malignant neoplasm and lymphoma” deaths (coded C00-C97), “Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified” deaths (R00-R99) and “Excess non-COVID natural cause” deaths. All three trend very sharply against historical baselines.
For example, cancer and lymphoma deaths are now at a 9+ Sigma level, although it could potentially be higher. According to The Ethical Skeptic, 43,935 death records relating to “potential myocarditis, cancer, pericarditis, conductive, nephrosis, liver, and/or lymphoma deaths” have been removed from the CDC data sets, and as of his writing of that article had not been put back in or reassigned to another ICD code.
“That is 7% of the total deaths for the period in question, and possibly 15 to 25% of these highly concerning death ICD-10 groups’ trend data — missing. Even absent this data however, the entailed trends are alarming,” he writes.9
US Excess Non-COVID Natural Cause Deaths
The Ethical Skeptic continues:10
“Finally, we end with the most important chart of all — the chart which indicates deaths which are not from accidents, suicide, addiction, assault, abuse, despair, disruption, nor COVID-19. The Excess Non-COVID Natural Cause Mortality chart which we began monitoring on May 29th 2021. What I called then, the ‘What the hell is this?’ chart.
As one can see, we have lost 349,000 younger Americans to something besides COVID and non-natural death, during the period from 3 April 2021 to 13 August 2022.
The current rate of mortality in this ICD categorization, is around 5,000 – 8,000 per week … which exceeds most weeks of the COVID pandemic itself (save for the absolute peak periods). By now, if all these mortality excesses were indeed a holdover from COVID-19 itself, they should have already begun to tail off. Unfortunately, they are not only not tailing off, in many cases they are still increasing.
Exhibit E — Excess Non-COVID Natural Cause Deaths are at an all time high as of MMWR Week 32 of 2022. 349,000 U.S. citizens have died of some additional factor since MMWR Week 14 of 2021. The current rate of excess mortality represents a five-week average of 5+ sigma in excess (hedging conservatively for lag).
Accordingly, and without a shadow of a doubt, we have established that right now there exists a problem in terms of U.S. citizen health and mortality. One which is differentiated from COVID-19 itself, and began in earnest MMWR Week 14 of 2021.”
COVID Jabs Impair Immune Function
Kenji Yamamoto with the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at the Okamura Memorial Hospital in Japan has also sounded the alarm, specifically highlighting the COVID jabs’ ability to impair your immune function. In a commentary published in the Virology Journal June 5, 2022, Yamamoto noted:11
“Recently, The Lancet published a study12 on the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and the waning of immunity with time. The study showed that immune function among vaccinated individuals 8 months after the administration of two doses of COVID-19 vaccine was lower than that among the unvaccinated individuals …
The decrease in immunity can be caused by several factors such as N1-methylpseudouridine, the spike protein, lipid nanoparticles, antibody-dependent enhancement, and the original antigenic stimulus …
As a safety measure, further booster vaccinations should be discontinued. In addition, the date of vaccination should be recorded in the medical record of patients … In conclusion, COVID-19 vaccination is a major risk factor for infections in critically ill patients.”
It’s important to understand that when your immune function is impaired, you become vulnerable to all kinds of infections and disease, including cancer. As such, the COVID jab may well be responsible for any number of diseases resulting in death.
A Not-so-Comforting Fact Check by Reuters
A recent Thai study13 found teenagers, aged 13 through 18, who received two doses of Pfizer’s mRNA jab suffered a variety of heart problems. A Reuters “fact check” notes:14
“A study of 301 teens in Thailand found mild and temporary heart rhythm changes after a second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine among one in six teenagers, not one-third as social media posts claim. The study also saw possible signs of heart inflammation in just seven of those teens with rhythm changes and confirmed myocarditis in only one of the seven.”
Should we throw a victory parade over the fact that the jab causes heart problems in JUST 1 in 6 teens? Really?! Whether it’s 1 in 3 or 1 in 6, this is not “good news” and surely not worthy of the dismissive tone used by Reuters. As reported directly from the study in question:15
“The most common cardiovascular effects were tachycardia (7.64%), shortness of breath (6.64%), palpitation (4.32%), chest pain (4.32%), and hypertension (3.99%). Seven participants (2.33%) exhibited at least one elevated cardiac biomarker or positive lab assessments.
Cardiovascular effects were found in 29.24% of patients, ranging from tachycardia, palpitation, and myopericarditis. Myopericarditis was confirmed in one patient after vaccination. Two patients had suspected pericarditis and four patients had suspected subclinical myocarditis. Conclusion: Cardiovascular effects in adolescents after BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccination included tachycardia, palpitation, and myocarditis.”
Millennials Died at Staggering Rates in Late 2021
I recently interviewed Ed Dowd, a former equity portfolio manager for BlackRock and hedge fund “guru,”16 but have not yet posted it. In early March 2022 he shared disturbing CDC mortality statistics by age group on Steve Bannon’s War Room.17
During the fall of 2021, Millennials, aged 25 to 44, had an 84% increase in excess mortality. “It’s the worst-ever excess mortality, I think, in history,” Dowd told Bannon. Between the summer and fall of 2021, 61,000 Millennials died who otherwise wouldn’t. To quote Dowd:18
“Basically, Millennials experienced a Vietnam War in the second half of 2021. 58,000 people died in the Vietnam War, U.S. troops [over the course of 10 years], so this generation just experienced a Vietnam War [in 6 months] …
We’ve had 1.1 million excess deaths since the pandemic began, many of which occurred in the second half of [2021] …
I think this is the smoking gun: that the vaccines are causing excess mortality in all age groups … So, I’m going to put a word out there. It’s an old word but it should be re-introduced into the conversation. It’s called democide: Death by government. So the government, through the mandates has killed people …
If you’re on Wall Street and you still think Pfizer and Moderna are good buys, I’ve got news for you: there’s some catalysts coming that are probably not going to be good for holding those stocks.”
The following pdf was posted on Dowd’s GETTR account, March 11, 2022.19 (A GETTR user called MiloMac also reproduced Dowd’s findings using public CDC data, creating additional graphs.20)
In a March 15, 2022, commentary and follow-up on Dowd’s revelations, Steve Kirsch wrote:21
“I called Ed to clarify where he got the chart and then looked for verification of this. I found the verification. Then I verified that the deaths couldn’t be explained by the COVID delta variant. OK, so what caused all the deaths? The only explanation is the vaccine because the deaths are so massive.”
Kirsch posted a WhatsApp conversation with Marc Girardot, a French-American biotech innovator, who believes the COVID jab may, in some people, age their arteries by as much as 50 years in just a few months. If true, that could certainly trigger rapid onset of cardiovascular disease leading to early death.
Teens and Young Adults Die at Higher Rates in New Zealand
In an August 16, 2022, Substack article,22 independent journalist Alex Berenson (a former New York Times reporter and novelist) highlighted COVID jab statistics from New Zealand,23 which includes observed post-jab deaths. He explained:
“New Zealand’s Ministry of Health publishes regular and detailed reports on COVID vaccine safety, including specific lists of adverse events it has received. As part of the reports, the ministry also counts all deaths of people who have received the jabs in the previous 21 days …
New Zealand has a national COVID immunization registry and a national death registry, so the records and matching should largely be accurate … The ministry breaks down the deaths by age, ranging from 0-9 through over 80.
It then compares the actual number of people who died in the three weeks after the shots to the ‘expected’ number. That figure is simply the number of deaths demographers would have expected over a random three-week period based on actuarial tables estimating mortality …”
In summary, between February 19 and April 30, 2022, people over the age of 30 had lower than normal death rates in the 21 days’ post-jab, but people younger than 30 (ages 10 to 29) for some reason died at higher rates. (The lack of observed deaths in the under-10 age group is likely due to reporting lag.)
According to the health ministry, the slightly elevated deaths in the under-30 group is likely due to “chance.” And as noted by Berenson, “the ministry does not provide any information on the causes of death in any age range, so it is impossible to determine whether myocarditis or other cardiac conditions played a major role in the higher-than-expected figures.”
While these data are nowhere near as alarming as some others, it’s still a red flag that something odd is happening. Young people who should have decades of life left are dying.
And it’s worth noting that New Zealand, just like the U.S. claims there are NO potential safety issues with the jabs — not a single one — despite thousands of serious injury reports.24 Considering the age group that is dying at a higher than normal rate — teenagers and young adults in their 20s — even a small increase ought to be taken very seriously, but is not.
To end where we started, which is the more likely culprit in these deaths? Past lockdowns temporarily preventing routine medical care, resulting in chronic diseases that kill even young people within a couple of years? Or the mass injection of experimental gene transfer shots that have never been used in humans before?
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MERCOLA Take Control of Your Healthhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMERCOLA Take Control of Your Health2022-09-02 05:52:352022-09-02 05:52:35‘Mystery Deaths’ Now Killing 3x More People Than COVID
U.S. experts have published six bold policy ideas.
Is social media harmful to kids? Some people are still sceptical about this: a few experts, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Big Tech itself, of course. Put a smart little device in the hands of teenagers, hook them up to platforms they find irresistible, and what could go wrong?
A lot. Boys become addicted to online games and YouTube, girls to chat and photo-sharing platforms. They spend less time with their friends in person. Girls in particular spend more time in their bedrooms scrolling through their Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram accounts, looking for likes, comparing themselves to other kids, celebrities and influencers, and getting sadder all the time. Occasionally one commits suicide.
It’s four years since Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at the University of San Diego, showed how the arrival of the smartphone (the first iPhone was launched in 2007) coincided with a sharp rise in depression, self-harm, suicide attempts and actual suicide among the generation of Americans born after 1995.
The US public health agency, the CDC, found that by 2019 an alarming 37 percent of US high school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” – a 40 percent increase between 2009 and 2019. This trend has been accentuated by Covid-19, but it was there before the pandemic.
There has been a lot of pushback against Twenge’s work, not least from the big guns of social media themselves. However, a year ago a former employee of Facebook/Meta turned whistleblower revealed that the company’s own research in 2020 showed that its Instagram platform causes anxiety about body image among girls.
Unbelievably, Facebook sat on this information and went on planning a new “service” for preteens called Instagram Kids. “They are coming for your kids” seems true in this instance; Big Tech is out to hook youngsters, and Meta, for one, doesn’t want parents to get in the way. It insists on teens granting permission for parental controls to be enabled – and teens can revoke them at any time.
What does Meta care if young girls are miserable about how they look, or are stealing time from their sleep and increasing their risk of depression? Does ByteDance take seriously the possible link between the insanity of its TikTok platform and the outbreak of strange, nervous tics among girls?
This is what parents are up against and the resources they have are woefully inadequate. Some manage to keep their own kids smartphone free but the social pressures for adolescents are very strong when most of their peers are networking by phone and following the latest fads.
Strangely, legislators who are keen to protect teens by banning everything from smoking to “conversion therapy” are hanging back when it comes to a far more prevalent threat. It’s high time they acted.
Six policy ideas for protecting teens
And they can, says a group of US experts (see endnote) in a legislative brief published last week and containing six policy ideas for states – including one very bold proposal.
In America, the authors point out, US Supreme Court decisions have limited the power of Congress to pass effective legislation to protect children even from sexually explicit content, and its historical focus on indecent material misses “the unique disruption to children’s psychological development that social media’s pervasive presence appears to cause.”
(Australia has recently tweaked its laws to clamp down on “cyber-abuse” of adults, and New Zealand has approved a voluntary code by which Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon and Twitter will take down abusive content, “misinformation and disinformation” – again, focused on adults.)
What’s needed, the authors of the brief say, is for states to take over, using their legislative power to protect children from platforms that promote anxiety, envy, pornography, loneliness, sleeplessness, and suicide. Here is a brief summary of their proposals based on their article in The Deseret News:
1. Enact age-verification laws so that no minors under the age of 13 can create social media accounts. Although that is already the de facto legal age for social media, children younger than 13 are gaining access, and these younger children are more vulnerable to the harmful mental health effects.
2. Require parental consent for minors to open a social media account. When individuals join social media websites or use most commercial websites, they agree to terms of service, which are binding contracts, so it is a reasonable regulation that parental consent would be required for anyone under 18.
3. Mandate full parental access to minors’ (ages 13 to 17) social media accounts. Full access would ensure that parents have control of their minor child’s account settings so they can restrict its privacy, review friend requests and know exactly what their child is doing online.
While parents can currently utilize various for-purchase parental control apps, certain platforms, like TikTok, are not able to be covered, or parents are unable to fully monitor all aspects of the account. Government intervention is needed to provide full access, and to empower all parents, not just those able to afford a private option.
4. Enact a complete shutdown of social media platforms at night for minors. This would align with usual night-time sleep hours, for example, 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., and eliminate teens’ temptation to stay up late on social media. This is an important step to take because technologically induced lack of sleep is a primary driver of depression among teens.
5. Create causes of action for parents to seek legal remedies with presumed damages. Any law that a state passes to protect kids online should include a private cause of action to enable parents to bring lawsuits on behalf of their children for any violation of the law. These companies aim to maximize profit, so there must be a sizable enough threat in order for them to correct their behaviour.
6. Enact a complete ban on social media for those under age 18. This is the boldest proposal of them all, but not unprecedented. Many states already place age restrictions on numerous behaviours known to be dangerous or inappropriate for children, such as driving, smoking, drinking, getting a tattoo and enlisting in the military. Similarly, a state could recognize social media as a prohibited activity for minors.
Of course, such a ban on social media for kids would be controversial. Big Tech would fight it tooth and nail. Kids would hate it. The liberal establishment would throw up their hands in horror. But parents might welcome a step that would lighten the burden of fighting the new media barons virtually single-handed.
As the authors of the brief point out, the problem of social media is no longer a private one:
“Social media use by even a few children in a school or organization creates a “network effect,” so even those who do not use social media are affected by how it changes the entire social environment. A collective solution is needed. An across-the-board age ban would place the burden where it belongs: back on the social media companies that designed their platforms to be addictive, especially to the most vulnerable: children.”
“One day,” they add, “we will look back at social media companies like ByteDance (Tiktok) and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and compare them to tobacco companies like Philip Morris (Marlboro) and R.J. Reynolds (Camel).”
Big Tobacco enjoyed immense profits and popularity while obscuring the science about their harm, and even pitching deceptive advertising to children. But eventually it became known and they were held accountable.
Now it is the turn of Big Tech to face an accounting for its “baleful influence on our children,” the report concludes. Before it’s too late.
Protecting Teens from Big Tech: Five Policy Ideas for States, is the work of the following authors: Clare Morell, who is a policy analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she works on the Technology and Human Flourishing Project. Adam Candeub, who is a Professor of Law at Michigan State University, where he directs its IP, Information and Communication Law Program, and Senior Fellow at the Center for Renewing America. Jean M. Twenge, who is a Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University and is the author of iGen. Brad Wilcox, who is the Future of Freedom fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2022-09-02 05:29:332022-09-02 05:31:46They Threw The Book at Big Tobacco and it Worked. Let’s Try it with Big Tech to Stop Harmful Social Media Use
Is binary sexuality really a way of subjugating women?
Sexual dimorphism—one of the most fundamental concepts in human biology—is a myth invented by 18th century bigots.
That is the wild claim made by Scientific American last week in a tweet thread promoting its new documentary series, “A Question of Sex”.
“Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex—the male—and considered the female body an inferior version of it,” read the sixth tweet in the thread. “The shift historians call the ‘two-sex model’ served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.”
Sex is always complex, medical anthropologist @Karkazis says. “It's not just complex in the context of intersex … Our bodies are far more variable than our categories. Part of what's happened is people become slotted into this binary framework.” (5/7) pic.twitter.com/LE98mX5qGT
The same claim was repeated in the documentary episode linked to in the tweet, but without historical evidence to substantiate it.
To be sure, there are academics who support junk science with junk history. Karen Harvey, now at the University of Birmingham, has argued that male and female are political categories invented as part of a patriarchal plot to suppress women. “As political theorists were increasingly invoking a potentially egalitarian language of natural rights in the 18th century,” she wrote in The Historical Journal, “’woman’ had to be defined as qualitatively different from men in order that political power would be kept out of women’s reach. Science mediated a political debate over people’s rights, demonstrating that there were indissoluble differences within the human race which justified inequitable access to power.”
In fact, sexual dimorphism has been a fundamental assumption of Western civilisation from time immemorial, not least because of the Bible’s binary portrayal of sex from Genesis to Revelation. “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them,” the Bible’s first chapter reads.
Call the Bible’s authors and its medieval custodians “bigots” too, if you like—but the West’s notion of sexual dimorphism long predates the 1700s.
Scientific American’s absurd claim is the latest, greatest example of junk science. It is a stark reminder that empiricism and wokeism cannot coexist in the same universe.
Justifiably, the outlet became an object of scorn and derision online for its efforts to wokeify the field of biology.
Excuse the metaphor, but Scientific American’s agenda is as subtle as dogs’ balls.
They have zero interest in the scientific outlook of Georgian-era Europeans. Their documentary episode had one goal: to displace science and common sense with transgender talking points.
Their article included the oft-repeated claim that 1.7 per cent of the population is intersex—that is, have sexual characteristics that are both male and female.
Of course, intersex people should be included in, not ostracised by, society. They deserve protection from medically unnecessary “corrective” cosmetic surgeries, which has not always been the case.
But it’s also true that intersex people should not be co-opted to validate transgenderism, as Scientific America is here attempting. Intersex is a medical condition that in the vast majority of cases has nothing to do with LGBT identities, rainbows, flags or pride marches. Sadly, people with this genetic deformity are all too often used as a battering ram for wokeness.
Moreover, the 1.7 percent figure—said to be “as common as red hair”—is wildly inflated. If true, it would mean that half a million Australians are intersex. It would mean that six million Americans are confused when they look between their legs.
According to evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, intersex people actually comprise 0.018% of the population. The 1.7% estimate comes from Anne Fausto-Sterling, a sexologist with an ideological axe to grind. She defines intersex as anything that deviates from a supposed “Platonic ideal” of sex—which even includes, for example, a penis that falls outside of a 2.5cm and 4.5cm range at birth.
Many reviewers are not aware that this [1.7%] figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. If the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female.
Even without these helpful insights, we know that there is no “spectrum” of gametes. Every person is born with either small gametes (sperm) or large gametes (ova). Sexual dimorphism lies at the basis of human reproduction because of this single, immovable, irrefutable fact.
But who cares about stuffy old science? There are woke points to be scored, and Scientific American is on the leaderboard.
Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2022-09-02 05:18:062022-09-03 06:16:48Junk Science Alert: Scientific American Claims that Male/Female is a Myth Invented by Enlightenment Bigots
The Democrat Party has come up with a unique political motto for their 2022 midterm elections, which we expect will carry them into the 2024 presidential primary and general election—”Don’t Vote For Us!”
This “I don’t want your vote” motto was first used by Charlie Crist in Florida. Watch:
Crist: "Those who support DeSantis should stay with him and vote for him and I don't want your vote. If you have that hate in your heart, keep it there." pic.twitter.com/S0B93bw52i
Crist the former republican, then independent and now democrat believes Republicans have “hate in their heart!”
Well Charlie’s I don’t want your vote or “don’t vote for me” motto is catching on.
We believe that every Democrat has the right to be stupid, it’s just that some of them tend to abuse their white privilege to be very very stupid like Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
After fully analyzing and reviewing their new “Don’t Vote For Us!” motto, we came to the conclusion that they truly don’t want us to vote for them.
Also, note that Crist is using the same tactics against Governor Ron DeSantis as Biden is using against President Donald J. Trump.
This appears to be the Democrat long term strategy for both 2022 and then 2024.
Here are some examples:
Here is White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre labeling supporters of former President Donald Trump “an extremist threat to our democracy” at Wednesday’s press briefing.
Karine Jean-Pierre goes on to say,
“The president thinks that there is an extremist threat to our democracy. The president has been clear as he can be on that particular piece when we talk about our democracy, when we talk about our freedoms. The way that he sees the MAGA Republicans are the most energized part of the Republican Party. This is an extreme threat to our democracy, to our freedom, to our rights. They just don’t respect the rule of law.”
Jean-Pierre also used the word “democracy” when the United States is in fact a Constitutional Republic where the federal government has limited powers and the states and individual citizens have plenary or absolute or unqualified powers.
Jean-Pierre also labels the threat those who wants to make America great again, hence “MAGA Republicans.”
If Democrats don’t want to make America great then they obviously want to make America and Americans poor, weak and voiceless.
Here’s Biden calling Republicans threat to democracy and semi-fascists:
Remember when President John Adams stated,
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Well it appears the the democrat party and its democracy is committing political suicide.
Don’t Vote For Us—We Agree
Hence it makes perfect sense when their motto is “Don’t Vote For Us!” or DVFU.
BTW. Does the “FU” in “DVFU” stand for what they think of the American voters? Just asking for a MAGA friend.
We just want to help Democrats by doing what they truly want—not voting for them.
Therefore, in the interest of listening to Democrats like Christ, Biden, Pelosi, Schumer and of course Karine Jean-Pierre we won’t vote for them, at all.
I just read an interesting article titled Why Are So Many Bad Things Happening To America In 2022? by Michael Snyder, posted on Prophecy News Watch and found his conclusion, that we are witnessing many destructive events tied to Bible prophecy unfolding around the world, to be spot on. The article begs a question: Are these events the result of God’s judgement on wicked nations and people, or are they the result of evil and stupid decisions made by those nations and the people in control of their various governments?
Stupidity versus Evil
Stupidity
Right upfront I want to make a distinction between stupidity and evil, even though the difference between the two sometimes seems negligible. By its definition, stupidity generally indicates ‘a lack of intelligence’, and admittedly, most of the people I have known who did stupid things truly exhibited a lower than average level of intelligence, at least for short periods of time. I thought at the time that their stupidity was an attempt to be cute, or funny, even though the result of their actions sometimes had the opposite effect, causing discomfort in those around them.
Having lived on this earth almost eighty years, I have witnessed many acts of human stupidity, most having seemed insignificant early on, but with increasing significance as time passed. Many of the acts I witnessed took place locally and seemed to have a negligible effect on people in the areas where they occurred, so they were likely given little attention.
Now, the visible level of stupidity has ramped up to a point where nearly every person on earth has been, and is constantly being, affected greatly by stupidity that can be witnessed in every nation.
I have joked at times about the world “being possessed by a spirit of stupid”, but when persons act stupidly, in my opinion, it makes them more easily susceptible to potentially deadly deception from evil sources, indicating that the situation is not one to be taken lightly.
Evil
Evil, on the other hand, is defined as being ‘morally reprehensible, sinful and wicked’, putting those who commit evil acts in the same category as those who directly oppose God and everything He is. Evil usually arises out of, or sometimes causes, bad behavior in those who commit evil acts. Dictionary.com calls evil, “the force in nature that governs and gives rise to wickedness and sin”. In the Bible, that force is clearly attributed to Satan.
In that same time period of nearly eighty years, I have also witnessed some truly evil acts, acts that were deliberately intended to cause harm or loss to people. Based on the raising I had from Godly parents, I learned the differences between evil and mere stupidity. The reaction to witnessing evil was one of a cringing conscience, realizing just how abhorrent real evil is, while witnessing stupidity only made one feel sorry for the stupid ones. Admittedly, I struggled much more with the evil acts than I did the stupid ones.
Even though some stupid acts can produce results that cause harm and loss, they usually lack the intent that make them evil in nature.
Stupidity and Evil in Government
Even though there are different definitions of ‘evil’ and ‘stupidity’ in the various dictionaries, there is one place where both appear regularly and cause extreme harm and loss, and that place is politics and governments. Though I have visited several other countries, I have only lived in the United States, so any knowledge I have of governments other than the US has come from other people or various news sources.
I have followed politics in general, and presidential politics in particular, for many years. As a child of 9 or 10 years of age, I was fascinated by ‘people in power’, their actions and ideologies, wondering why they acted as they did in many situations. Had I been more mature, I might have understood whether their acts and the motives for them were evil in nature, or only ‘stupid’. At that time, I had no in-depth knowledge of ‘evil’, what it was or how it worked, and I had not lived long enough to even define ‘stupid’.
Now, after so many years, the difference between evil and stupid are much easier to distinguish, and though that makes them easier to understand, it does not make either of them easier to accept.
I find it impossible to contemplate that our nation’s founders would readily accept either as desirable elements in our government.
Stupidity in Politicians
We are now seeing exactly what would have made the Founders cringe in disbelief, shock and concern. The US government, every part of it, from the Executive to the Legislative to the Judicial branches, and especially the out-of-control bureaucracies, appears to be completely possessed by the aforementioned ‘spirit of stupid’ and have become deceived by the force of evil. I say ‘appears’ and offer several possible explanations for this: 1) Their deception has rendered them oblivious to the harm they are doing, not only to the credibility of their offices but to nearly every American citizen who previously looked to them all for leadership and accountability, or 2) They are not stupid but are evil, and possibly evilly stupid all at the same time. If they ARE aware of the harm they cause, then they are likely way beyond stupid and are truly evil.
With the world having ‘shrunken’ due to instant communications, both audibly and visually and the ability to witness events anywhere in the world while they are occurring, I would have to surmise that the other governments of the world are making the same evil and/or stupid mistakes we see here in the US.
Anyone who is aware of the unbelievably stupid decisions they make must wonder what has happened to our once-great nation.
What Happened to TRUE Government?
Anyone who has read any of my articles know what value I place on the true meaning of words.
The word ‘govern’ is a verb which, according to Dictionary.com, means: 1a: “to exercise continuous sovereign authority over (as exercised by a king); especially to control and direct the making and administration of policy” , and 2b: “to rule without sovereign power usually without having the authority to determine basic policy” and 2a: archaic manipulate. The best definition of ‘manipulate’ in this instance is from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and read thus: “to control or ‘play upon’ by artful, unfair, or insidious means especially to one’s own advantage”. The definition of the word ‘artful’, also per Merriam-Webster, is “adroit in attaining an end usually by insinuating or indirect means”, : wily. The Merriam-Webster definition of ‘insidious’ is , “awaiting a chance to entrap : treacherous.
The word ‘government’, derived from the word ‘govern’, is a noun meaning 1) “the political direction and control exercised over the actions of the members, citizens, or inhabitants of communities, societies, and states”; “direction of the affairs of a state, community, etc.; political administration”, and 2), “the form or system of rule by which a state, community, etc., is governed”.
‘True human government’ was instituted by Almighty God and provided to the human race when He placed Adam and Eve in their original positions as the ones to whom He gave ‘dominion’ of the world’ (Genesis 1:26 KJV). God’s decision to allow man to govern himself was meant to create a government that was righteous in nature, as was man before he sinned.
All well and good so far, but that dominion did not last long before it was given away to the liar and the father of all lies. That ‘giveaway’ launched the ‘system of politics’ which has been used to dominate and control the world ever since. Had mankind remained in the condition in which they were created, human government would likely still be working quite well.
All human government, based on various political systems, e.g. a Constitutional Republic (United States), a parliamentary democracy (United Kingdom), a theocracy (Iran), or an empire (Babylon, Greece, Rome, etc.) is, to a certain extent, under the direct or indirect control of Satan who received that control as a ‘gift of disobedience’ from Adam. Using his own political system, he has maintained a great degree of control over these governments for several thousand years, and in ALL of them, politics play a major role.
Politics: The Most Evil and Stupid System
We are told that Lucifer was the highest of God’s angelic creation, who was described as the ‘morning star’ and the ‘light bringer’, the archangel who had a high position in the heaven lies and was actually given a throne on the pre-Adamic earth. He rebelled against God, being jealous of God’s power and authority and convinced many of God’s angelic beings to follow him in a war to unseat God and institute the worship of Lucifer.
The war failed and Lucifer and his followers were banned from heaven. Even though we are not told in the Bible, many believe the fact that the earth was “without form and void” (Hebrew to’-hu va bo’-hu, meaning chaos) in the Genesis 1:2 KJV account of creation, was the condition of the planet caused by God’s wrath against Lucifer. In any case. Lucifer lost his majestic standing. He obviously decided he would retaliate against God through God’s greatest creation; Adam and Eve.
All believers who have read and understand the prophecies against evil in general, and Satan in particular, especially those in the Book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ, know that Satan’s rebellion has a decided end, and that end is the casting of Satan and all other created beings who follow him and rebel against God into the eternal Lake of Fire.
Satan’s existence and his prophesied end should convince all who have ‘understanding’, of the utter foolishness of rebelling against, and going to war against, the Being Who created everything. To even consider such an undertaking indicates a serious act of stupidity, indicating that evil IS stupid and all who decide to accept evil as their modus operandi are BOTH evil AND stupid.
Conclusion
My conclusion is that in most cases, evil and stupid cannot be separated and that opinion seems to be borne out by the political decisions that have, for the most part, caused the events we are now witnessing. Satan’s plan to unseat God from His throne has brought an untold level of pain, grief, loss and death to untold millions of humans throughout history.
We know that there are specific events prophesied to unfold in what we know as the ‘End Times’, the ‘Last Days’, the ‘70th week of Daniel’, and the ‘Time of Jacob’s Trouble’, more commonly called the Tribulation Period. But are there events that we can expect to see before the catching away of the Body of Christ which will precede the start of the tribulation? There are those who believe all the prophesied terrible events are reserved for the seven year Tribulation Period. But bear in mind that God has exercised His sovereign right to pronounce and execute judgment on nations and individuals many times throughout recorded history. The history of the Jewish people bears out this fact.
What we believe many times to be an act of stupidity might as easily be an act of abject evil, designed to accomplish Satan’s goal of ‘stealing, killing and destroying’ (John 10:10 KJV). We should all know by now that the ‘act of governing’, which should be the act of becoming, and being, responsible for the welfare of the citizens of any state, is now an act designed specifically to enrich those who are placed in the ‘governing bodies of all governments’, whether by election, or appointment; the enrichment of these individuals is attained through the corrupted political system that controls all governments, a system based on The Love of Money.
We are witnessing the time and events described by Paul in his letter to Timothy wherein he spoke of the result of such a corrupt system: “being pierced through with many sorrows” (1 Timothy 6:10 KJV). The best advice I can give to anyone who thinks being a politician in the current state of the world’s governments is a good thing is this: think long and hard and understand how that decision might affect you and the lives of your family.
I have come to the conclusion that no man will be able to make either America, or any other nation, great again in this evil age, and the very best we can hope for and expect is, through faith and steadfastness, to remain true to our Father and be with the Lord when He returns to this earth to eliminate politics and set up a true and righteous kingdom, the only one that will last eternally.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Bud Hancockhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngBud Hancock2022-09-01 13:21:492022-09-01 13:25:13The Increasing Destruction By Human Government
Joe Biden will wrap himself in the flag tonight and deliver a primetime address to the nation on how we must restore our rights, our freedoms, and our democracy. As you listen to what undoubtedly will be a masterpiece of group-produced propaganda, just remember what his policies and the policies of the Democrat Party and its ideological masters on the hard Left really do to people.
The 15 percent minimum corporate tax in Joe Biden’s so-called ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ will wipe out the low income housing tax credit which has helped build and rehabilitate millions of homes for low income Americans. Way to go.
Home prices are at record levels and apartment rents have spiked. You can blame Democrat policies for driving up costs. Government mortgage subsidies raise home prices just like government student grants and loans have made college tuition rates go sky-high. The Fed buys mortgage-backed securities, artificially increasing the amount of capital available for the residential market, hurting affordability. Government has cut the supply of new rental housing with density restrictions and environmental regulations that tack on 30 percent to the cost of new apartments, and with rent control laws which cut incentives for new construction and upkeep. Leftist Utopia better come quick because people can’t afford to live here anymore.
The homeless problem created by Democrats is so bad in Portland homeowners are moving away because homeless people are camping out in their back yards with impunity. When L.A. tried to rein in the homeless camps near schools and parks, a Leftist mob descended on City Hall. We didn’t have such big problems with homelessness until Democrats and Leftists started romanticizing the subject and encouraging it.
Democrat-captured Oregon decriminalized heroin and cocaine, and overdose deaths rose 41 percent, two-and-a-half times faster than in the rest of the country. I’ll go out on a limb, here, and predict that putting the government stamp of approval on drug use and giving addicts free needles, free crack pipes, and safe places to shoot up in the name of ‘harm reduction’ will produce more drug use, not less. Society will be worse off for it. That’s just common sense.
Elsewhere on the Left coast, California passed a law restricting independent contractors who must now, in many circumstances, be considered employees and given employee benefits. Sounds great, right? Well, it means gig workers lose their autonomy to set their own hours and it also means higher prices for the rest of us. The trucking industry is especially hard hit, as many logistics companies primarily use truck drivers who own their own rigs. These drivers will now become employees, meaning fewer people will own their own businesses and become wage slaves. It’s all part of the Left’s master plan to attack freedom and drum out independent-minded people who want to be captains of their own fate in what has been, up to this point, the land of the free and the home of the brave.
The attacks on gig workers and low cost housing follow a familiar Democrat-Leftist pattern: things are just no darn good unless they’re perfect, unless we have Utopia. We saw it with Obamacare. Cheap catastrophic insurance that satisfied millions of people’s needs for decade became the enemy of the people because it didn’t cover everything. Now, gold-plated Obamacare policies force men to have pregnancy coverage and mandate essential health benefits, preexisting condition coverage, and restrictions on true risk calculation for aging, driving up costs enormously. The drive for perfection and Utopia pushed the cost of insurance policies northwards of $20,000 a year. Then they turn around and say, ‘Oh, but we’ll HELP you,’ first with subsidies, now with jumbo subsidies – subsidies that drive up costs further just like with tuition.
Obamacare is another insidious Democrat-Leftist dependency machine – the Democrats and the Left create the problem in the first place, then make it so you can’t function without the assistance of the federal government. It’s not supposed to be this way, and it’s not healthy because it produces perpetual children incapable of running their own lives, weaklings content to have the government take over all responsibility.
So, when you listen to Joe Biden’s fine words at Independence Hall tonight, just remember, he wants to put y’all in chains. They might be golden chains, but you will no longer be free if his side wins what Biden calls the ‘battle for the soul of the nation’. Take the chains – lose your soul, it’s that simple.
President Joe Biden’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) gave a huge number of prison inmates at least $1.3 billion in COVID-19 stimulus checks, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
There are more than 1.1 million incarcerated individuals who took in the stimulus money, according to IRS data provided to the Free Beacon, as part of Biden’s $1.4 trillion American Rescue Plan. Those incarcerated who received the stimulus money includes roughly 163,000 people serving life sentences without parole, the IRS told Republican Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon in a letter obtained by the outlet.
“Democrats had every opportunity to stop taxpayer dollars from going to convicted criminals,” Mike Palicz, federal affairs manager for Americans for Tax Reform, a group seeking to lower federal spending, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Instead, Democrats blocked a Republican amendment that would’ve prevented inmates from receiving stimulus payments and sent up to $1,400 checks to more than one million incarcerated criminals.”
The American Rescue Plan was signed by Biden in March 2021 in order to provide relief to Americans amid the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Americans earning $75,000 or less per year were eligible for a $1,400 stimulus check under the plan and married couples filing jointly earning $150,000 or less were eligible for a $2,800 check.
Republicans overwhelmingly opposed the stimulus package, claiming its price tag was far too high. Republican senators backed an amendment put forth by Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy in March 2021, which Democrats rejected, that would have blocked prisoners from getting stimulus checks.
“Individuals were not denied Economic Impact Payments solely because they were incarcerated,” the IRS says on its website under a frequently asked questions page about The American Rescue Plan, explaining that inmates may have received funds if they filed a tax return in 2019 and 2020.
It is unclear how many inmates facing the death penalty received stimulus checks.
A spokesman for the IRS told the DCNF the agency “does not track the information related to incarcerated individual’s sentences” and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told the Free Beacon he does not have data on the matter.
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton had raised concerns in 2021 about the fact that under the plan prisoners would receive money, slamming the idea that someone like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber, would get $1,400. Tsarnaev ended up raking in $1,400 in connection to the plan, the Boston Herald reported in January 2022.
“The Democratic Party is drunk with power, and their reckless billions in spending continue to funnel out of the United States Treasury with little to no guidance,” Republican Florida Rep. Byron Donalds told the DCNF upon learning of the IRS payments to prisoners.
The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment nor did The White House.
