August 15th, 2022: 926th Anniversary of the 1st Crusade to take Holy Land from Islamic rule…Time to do it Again?

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The First Crusade, 15 August 1096 – 12 August 1099, was the first of a series of religious wars, or Crusades, initiated, supported and at times directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The objective was the recovery of the Holy Land from Islamic rule. — Wikipedia

We have been writing about the Middle East for decades. It appears we are now at a tipping point where Jews, Christians, Muslims and the state of Israel are under siege. What we are facing is a global war against those who do not follow the teachings of Mohammed.

On August 10th, 2022 The Daily Caller’s Shelby Talcott reported,

Iranian operative Shahram Poursafi has been charged in an alleged plot to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Wednesday.

The DOJ noted in a press release that Poursafi was a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and an Iranian national. The 45-year-old is accused of attempting “to arrange the murder of” Bolton, “likely in retaliation for the January 2020 death of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — Qods Force … commander Qasem Soleimani,” according to the department.

Read the full article.

In March 10th, 2022 related Daily Caller article Michael Ginsberg reported,

The Biden administration has forged ahead in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program despite reports that the country’s top leaders have ordered the assassinations of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khameni considers former national security adviser Bolton and ex-Secretary of State Pompeo responsible for the assassination of Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani, the Washington Examiner first reported. As a result, he reportedly ordered Soleimani’s successor, Esmail Qaani, to avenge the dead general.

Both Pompeo and Bolton have had their Secret Service protections extended by Congress over the threats, despite their returns to private life. Agents in marked vehicles were seen by neighbors outside of Bolton’s suburban Maryland home in late January. Prosecutors reportedly have enough evidence to bring charges against conspirators, but no arrests have been made.

Read the full article.

The Center for Security Policy (CFSP) believes Biden and Iran may be close to sealing new nuclear deal. On August 10th, 2022 CFSP’s Senior Editor Dalia Al-Aqidi wrote:

The escalation of global tensions as a result of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, China-Taiwan stand-off, the medical and economic crises, and the exchanges between the Israeli state and the militant Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement has overshadowed the Iran nuclear deal talks.

Is reviving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action still on the table? Maybe it is no longer a breaking news story, but the Iranian regime and the US administration are definitely still trying to resurrect the 2015 agreement. On Thursday, a sudden call was made to all the international negotiating parties to resume the nuclear talks with Iran.

In fact, the indirect Vienna talks between Tehran and Washington had already begun, with a meeting between Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani and the EU’s European External Action Service Deputy Secretary-General Enrique Mora. The latter returned to his shuttling between Bagheri Kani and US special envoy to Iran Robert Malley.

In an op-ed published by the Financial Times late last month, EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell revealed that he had presented a new framework to relaunch the JCPOA.

It may indeed be the happy ending that the leaders of Iran and the US wish for if what the BBC published is proven true. It reported that an anonymous European official stated that Tehran’s demand for Washington to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from its official blacklist of “foreign terrorist organizations” had been dropped from the discussions and would instead be dealt with “in the future.” The source also revealed to the BBC that Washington would guarantee that no future US president could withdraw from the new deal.

However, the government in Tehran must realize that the US is a democratic country whose president is elected by its citizens. Therefore, no law obliges any future president not to cancel any agreement reached by a former leader.

The Iranians are clever enough to be well aware of this fact, but it does not matter what happens in the future, as long as it receives billions of dollars once the sanctions against this rogue state are lifted. As long as the Democrats are in power, nothing terrible will ever happen to them.

In the meantime, Tehran would be able to equip the IRGC to become the most significant force in the region, which would destabilize the already fragile security of some of Washington’s major allies.

During a meeting in Tehran on Saturday, IRGC head Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami told Ziad Nakhaleh, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s general-secretary, that his country was committed to supporting the movement until the end. Salami said that “all the anti-Zionist” capabilities “are on the scene in a united formation working to liberate Jerusalem and uphold the rights of the Palestinian people.”

Read more.

It is time that the United States and its allies recognize the global red-green alliance threats and take proper action.

It is time for yet another Crusade to liberate the oppressed in the Middle Eastern dictatorships starting with Iran.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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Trans: A threat to my daughter, my family, and women’s healthcare

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“Not only has trans ideology taken my daughter, but now it is threatening my vocation and sense of self as a provider of women’s healthcare.”

“We will be examining our gendered naming conventions including the Women’s Clinics and Mother Baby Clinics in order to be inclusive of those who do not identify as women.”

As the Executive Medical Director for Women’s Services for my organization, the email landed like a punch to the gut.

I am an OBGYN and leader in my organization, where we take great pride in the respectful, high-quality care we provide patients.  We are especially proud of our partnership with community organizations in our efforts towards reducing disparities in birth outcomes.  Our efforts towards inclusivity include sensitivity to different family configurations and use of pronouns with our patients.  But now—will we no longer be identified as caring for women or mothers?

My sensitivity to issues involving transgender individuals started as these issues began to seep into the media. I wondered: Why are people fussing over what bathroom is used?  Don’t they have something more important to think about?  If a child’s path to self-acceptance is through transition to the other gender, why would we object? After all, it’s a rare situation.

This all changed when the gender storm hit my family.  My daughter was bright, and social with adults from an early age. She had always been a typical girl.  Her friends were virtually all girls. She begged for Cinderella dresses and preferred to wear purple and pink.  She ignored her older brother’s books and toys, instead preferring crafty activities. She never asked to wear his hand-me-downs.  In early high school, she started going by a gender-neutral name.  I laughed when I started receiving emails addressed to the mother of “X”.  I assumed it was just another one of my independent daughter’s quirky pranks.

This was followed by her hair getting shorter and shorter, finally culminating in a shaved head.   I know now that is a typical foreshadowing of what was to come but, at the time, I was naïve. It simply never occurred to me that this was anything beyond a teenager trying on different styles.  A year into the pandemic, her mental health deteriorated.  She would fly into rages easily, and became intolerant of any request or slightly negative comment. It became more difficult for her to attend on-line classes and she began missing commitments.  Finally came the statement: “Mom, I am a boy.”

My first response was a deep sigh as I braced myself for a shared struggle to figure this out. I took responsibility for communicating this news with my family. I reiterated my support for my daughter. Despite my initial affirming response, her anger at me only grew.

My husband and I met with an on-line support group for families of trans-identified kids.  There we heard similar stories of previously gender-conforming girls whose declining mental health was not reversed when they began testosterone.  One family of a 5-year-old natal male shared, “We are a gender expansive family.  We asked our child if they are a boy or a girl.  She said a girl and we are here to learn how to support her.” This announcement was met with accolades from the group. My husband and I got off the call and turned to each other.  What on earth is happening?  Are they really willing to engage in this social experiment with their child?

The 14 months since then have been a whirlwind of learning and crisis.  I have since immersed myself in understanding the literature as it relates to the care of gender dysphoric children and young adults. I now know the science doesn’t support transition as a path to well-being. I recognize the steps of my daughter’s journey into the cult of transgender ideology.  I see how her middle-school body dysmorphia and conflicted relationship with her dad set her up for this.  While I spent those years watching for signs of an eating disorder, I now see that I should have been on the lookout for the “new anorexia”, gender dysphoria.  As things became even stormier at home during these months after her announcement, my daughter moved out and into the home of a friend.  She has since graduated from high school, started college, dropped out of college and spent three weeks in a psychiatric facility.  I have periodically raged at her, raged at the world and always raged at myself.

My grief has been dominated by a deep fear for her future.  The 60 Minutes segment featuring detransitioners was aired in the same month she shared her news with me.  The tragedy of the detransitioners’ regret has always been front and center for me.  I grieve the loss of the beautiful young woman with a passion for singing that my daughter used to be, now replaced by this unkempt, angry, gravelly-voiced stranger.  Grief has often been mixed with self-hatred.  Why didn’t I catch this sooner?  How did I not protect her from the harm that put her at risk?  What kind of a woman am I that my daughter would want to be a man?  My grief has been tinged with a deep sense of betrayal.  How can you just quit the team?

Through all the turmoil and my great despair, I have had great support.  My husband is a rock.  My family has wrapped their arms around me and are bravely, persistently positive to my daughter.

And I have taken tremendous refuge in work.  As I berate myself for my apparent failure parenting a daughter, I take comfort that I am contributing to an organization that provides for women.  I take joy in the work, knowing that we support women as they grow into young adults, as some of them become mothers and throughout their lifespans.

Many times, in the depths of my anguish over my daughter’s wellbeing and our damaged relationship, I had been pulled into a position of equanimity by the sense of accomplishment or good that had been done as part of the woman’s health team I work with.

The afternoon the email arrived I had left the office for a haircut.  As I waited in the lobby, I quickly checked my phone for any needs that had arisen in the past hour, and my heart started pounding as I digested the message.  When my hairdresser called me back and I laid my head back into the sink, the shock of the email washed over me. Tears crept out of the corners of my eyes and mixed with the soapy water.  By the time I returned to my inbox, several colleagues had responded to the email with messages of support for the effort. I felt alienated from the team with whom I work so closely. I spent the evening in a new state of grief—not only has trans ideology taken my daughter, but now it is threatening my vocation and sense of self as a provider of women’s healthcare.

Subsequently, the team acquiesced to my plea that the needs of women to have sex-specific medical care should not be subjugated to the needs of men, even when those “men” have female reproductive parts. We are setting aside renaming our services for now and are instead considering sensitivity training to ensure our staff are well prepared to accommodate transmen in our care settings.

I was able to influence the direction for two reasons only: 1. I have a position of power and 2. my colleagues know the situation my daughter is in and are trying to treat me gently. But I have only kicked the can down the road.  Either I will ultimately decide I am not the right leader for the organization at this moment in time or, hopefully, others will see the pendulum has swung too far and attitudes will settle into a more moderate position. For the sake of the women we serve, I desperately wish for the latter.

This article first appeared on the blog of Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT) and has been republished with permission.

AUTHOR

In exceptional circumstances, MercatorNet allows contributors to publish articles anonymously. Sometimes the author’s privacy or safety might be at risk. More by Anonymous author

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

Reproductive choice is a choice to have children. Anything else is a fraud. Period.

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The most underreported story of the last 50 years.

Recently both Pope Francis and Elon Musk have warned of depopulation.

Speaking of the declining birth rate in Italy, the Pontiff said:

“This is a new poverty that scares me. It is the generative poverty of those who discount the desire for happiness in their hearts, of those who resign themselves to watering down their greatest aspirations [family], of those who are content with little and stop hoping for something great.”

And here’s billionaire Musk on Twitter: “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”

As expected, PC corporate media pushed back against both the pro-natalist Pontiff and the flaky father-of-nine world’s richest man.

In the midst of this comes yet another survey on the opinions of Americans about having children. The study in the journal Scientific Reports, “Prevalence, age of decision, and interpersonal warmth judgements of childfree adults,” is authored by Michigan State University professors Zachary P. Neal and Jennifer Watling Neal. It grabbed headlines.

The headline? “More than 1 in 5 US adults don’t want children.”

As the authors more accurately explain:

In a 2022 study of 1,500 adults in Michigan, we found that 21.64% of adults do not want to have children and therefore are choosing to be childfree. While our survey wasn’t nationally representative, the 2021 Census showed that Michigan is demographically similar to the United States in terms of age, race, education and income. If the pattern we have observed in Michigan reflects national trends, it would mean 50 million to 60 million American adults are childfree.

Given the times, this is not surprising. In many quarters it is considered thoroughly modern, environmentally conscious, and propitiously PC to foreswear progeny. While Pope Francis and Elon Musk see it differently, what do they know? (Sarcasm, OK?)

The authors describe those not wanting to have children as “childfree” and those unable to have children as “childless.” The semantic implications are obvious. Being “free” of something, as in debt-free or disease-free, is considered positive. “Childfree” carries a similar semantic connotation.

Some say that willfully not having children – aka “childfree” – is exercising “reproductive freedom.” The American Civil Liberties Union defines reproductive freedom as the right that “every person can make the best decision for themselves and their family about whether and when to have a child without undue political interference.”

Reproductive freedom is the right to have children. Let’s talk about that.

The globalist establishment’s colossal cash cow, the American middle class, is being milked dry. For generations the American family has been under all-out attack. Debased entertainment, a debilitating social welfare system, callous manipulation by big business, big government (including education) and big media are bad enough. Then there is “pride” propaganda celebrating practically any social arrangement other than the loving traditional nuclear family.

America’s families are ensnared in a real-life Big Squeeze: besieged by woke anti-family propaganda on one side and an exploitive, corrupt crony capitalism masquerading as a “free market economy” on the other. Brainwashed up-and-comers believe such a regime is “the free enterprise system.” In their blind naivety they happily condone wage slavery as vociferously as they would condemn chattel slavery.

Reproductive freedom? The problem is a profound one of social priorities. The family is no longer the focal point of life in America. Money and lifestyle are. Family values are supplanted by hedonism and greed, those glittering globalist assault weapons pounding the American family.

The family is by far the most battle-scarred victim of globalism’s fanatical philarguria (that’s Biblical Greek for greed on steroids). The days when a middle-class parent could stay home and care for children are long gone. Think that affects reproductive freedom?

Women may enjoy their work but work they must. Fine – but safeguard their reproductive freedom by not making it professionally ruinous to bring a child into this world.

Then there are the usual family pressures, such as the ever-present specter of unemployment, escalating debt and the demand for employee fealty to the point where supervisors come before spouses. Talk about skewed priorities! Any wonder that broken homes, broken lives, drug addiction and other social pathologies increase? How does that impact reproductive freedom?

Bottom line: Where do families most feel the pinch? They are being denied their reproductive freedom. The pernicious reality is that there is no specific law prohibiting procreation, but rather the circumstantial deprivation of that basic human right by a thousand cuts, driven by a fashionably materialistic anti-natalist worldview.

How so? Having children is (1) unaffordable — not enough money and (2) struggling to make ends meet, so not enough time for children. Plus, the relentless tsunami of PC negativity about our heritage, “antiracist” guilt propaganda, environmental scaremongering, etc. discourages legions of impressionable young people from aspiring to have a family.

Multitudes have borne the sadness and loss of being unable to have the children they desire – a wholesale robbery of reproductive freedom. That is the biggest and most underreported story of the last 50 years.

Pope Francis and Elon Musk understand this.

So the next time you hear folks yapping about reproductive freedom, remember that means the right to have children, and the deprivation of that basic human right in any way is viciously anti-family. Period.

We need to call a halt to this madness.

AUTHOR

Louis T. March has a background in government, business and philanthropy. A former talk show host, author and public speaker, he is a dedicated student of history and genealogy. Louis lives with his family… More by Louis T. March

RELATED ARTICLE: Fact-check: abortions bans in US will NOT increase maternal mortality

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

The Forgotten Epidemic: How Meth Addiction is Spreading Across America

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The meth epidemic is normally described as the concentrated spread of methamphetamine throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. But because of the advent of OxyContin in 1996, the opioid epidemic soon took a front seat in the discussion of drugs in America. It is common to assume that America has transitioned from a meth problem, then to an opioid problem, and now to a benzo problem. But did the meth epidemic ever go away? Here’s what you need to know about this forgotten epidemic and how meth addiction continues to spread across America.

Developed, Modified, and Regulated

The evolution of meth might have a deeper history than you think. Amphetamine was originally developed in Japan and used to heighten the alert of military soldiers. By the 1960s this drug found its way into widespread use across the globe and grew in popularity for another two decades. At that point, the problem exploded in size, as the chemical process to create meth from amphetamines was discovered. With this backdrop, the highly potent new drug was ready to hit the ground running, producing what is known as the meth epidemic between the 20th and 21st centuries.

Since then, regulations over the last two decades can attribute to the downward trend of meth. However, worldwide meth statistics show that this drug is anything but ‘old news’. It is a difficult battle to shut down a drug that is made from cold medicines found over the counter. In places like Mississippi, the plan of attack has been to require a prescription for the purchase of cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient to cook meth. While this has been an effective way to curb the spread of meth, that regulation in Mississippi was reversed just this month. Many are worried that this will rewind the clock of progress for meth decline in Mississippi, and across the country as new production sites begin to pop up again.

Epidemic 2.0

Despite the bad news that potential meth labs now have a strong footing to take hold of America and make up for lost time in places like Mississippi, there remains another important piece of information that signals a growing threat. One DEA chemist involved in numerous meth takedown operations around the world has noted that the chemical structure of meth today has changed from the last few decades. Now, chemists involved in black market meth production have found a way to make the drug more potent and decrease some of the adverse side effects.  However, this does not change the effects of meth as a deadly neurotoxin. In fact, some producers are moving away from ephedrine and using harsh chemicals such as those used in tanning oils, perfumes, and even racing fuels. But when people can get their hands on a drug that produces an intense high with less negative experience during the high, such as heart palpitations, they will likely not be concerning about what the ingredients are.

The silencing of such warning signs from our body only makes overdoses that much more likely. Many deaths attributed to meth overdose occur when people’s hearts suddently stop beating, but this normally occurs after users experience the repeated warning signs from the body that an overdose has occured. When these more potent forms of meth are taken, the intensity of the high and the silence of the body’s warning signs creates a fine line between drug use and drug overdose.

The Way Forward

Unfortunately, overdose rates are increasing severely, with recent numbers showing a 180% increased fatality rate from 2015-2019. The drug is also spreading at an alarming rate among Alaskan Native, African American and Native American communities. And while this can relate to the more potent form of meth being made, it also speaks to the growing problem of drug cutting. There is an ever-growing list of illicit drugs being cut with the deadly opioid fentanyl, and meth is no exception. Fentanyl is a deadly drug on its own because of its high potency and risk of overdose. But fentanyl (an opioid) mixed with meth (a stimulant) creates a perfect storm of destruction on the body, and this deadly mixture is being found more and more in the bodies of those dying from an overdose.

Meth use has not gone away. With new production innovations and varieties of the drug, meth is as dangerous and as accessible as ever. Drug cartels and dealers are not going to give up such a profitable industry, despite what laws and restrictions are in place. The way forward starts at the ground level. It starts with informing those who are interested in the drug about the widespread dangers and high potential for meth addiction. But it also starts with encouraging meth users to seek dedicated treatment, designed to help them get through the detoxing process in a safe and effective way. The day that this epidemic goes away will not come until enough people decide that the risk is not worth the fleeting reward.

As with anything you read on the internet, this article should not be construed as medical advice; please talk to your doctor or primary care provider before making any changes to your wellness routine.

Materials provided by:

Delphi Health Group. (n.d.). Opioid Addiction and Treatment. Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/opioids/

Delphi Health Group. (n.d.). Mixing Benzos and Opiates. Is it Safe? Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/benzodiazepines/and-opiates/

PBS. (n.d.). Meth Timeline. Retrieved https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/etc/cron.html

Delphi Health Group. (n.d.). Comparing Meth and Adderall: What’s the Difference? Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/methamphetamine/and-adderall/

National Institute on Drug Abuse (2019, October). What is Methamphetamine? Retrieved https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/methamphetamine/what-methamphetamine

Delphi Health Group. (n.d.). Meth Use Statistics Around the World (2019). Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/stimulants/methamphetamine/global-use-statistics/

Delphi Health Group. (n.d.). Meth Addiction Signs and Treatment. Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/stimulants/methamphetamine/

WCBI. (2021, October 18). The Main Ingredient for Meth will be More Accessible in January 2022. Retrieved https://www.wcbi.com/the-main-ingredient-for-meth-will-be-more-accessible-in-january-2022/

The Atlantic. (2021, October, 18). A New, Cheaper Form of Meth is Wreaking Havoc on America. Retrieved https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/

The Guardian. (2022, January 23). ‘The Deadliest Drug We’ve Ever Known’: Author Sam Quinones on How Fentanyl Saturated the US. Retrieved https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/22/fentanyl-methamphetamine-drugs-epidemic-us

Delphi Health Group. (n.d.). Quickly Recognize a Meth Overdose (Quality, Dosage & More). Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/drugs-and-sleep/meth/

NPR. (2021, September 22). Methamphetamine Deaths Soar, Hitting Black And Native Americans Especially Hard. Retrieved https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/09/22/1039094566/methamphetamine-opioids-overdose-deaths-black-native-american

Delphi Health Group. (n.d.). How Addictive is Meth Really? (And Why). Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/stimulants/methamphetamine/how-addictive/

Rockefeller Institute. (2020, July, 28). The Second Wave of the Methamphetamine Epidemic. Retrieved: https://rockinst.org/blog/the-second-wave-of-the-methamphetamine-epidemic/

Delphi Health Group. (n.d.). Stimulant Addiction. Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/stimulants/

EDITORS NOTE: This Delphi Behavioral Health Group column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Hydra-Headed Monster of Contemporary Censorship

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Week before last, I told you about a lawsuit brought by the state Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration for colluding with Big Tech to censor free speech on COVID, the 2020 election, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and mail-in voting, among other things.  The case is getting interesting because the judge is allowing the plaintiffs to proceed with discovery and because people who were censored – the Gateway Pundit and scientists and doctors who criticized the COVID lockdowns – have joined the suit.

So keep your eye on that one, but understand the move to silence the political Right in this country is not confined to the Biden administration.  Every corner of the Left is jumping in.

A professional Gay Gestapo group called for more censorship of information from the Right on social media and said the platform companies should become pronoun police.

A trans mafia group got a theater in Minneapolis to cancel a show by comedian Dave Chappelle whose jokes they didn’t like.   Twitter supports the trans mafia, suspending Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and a dozen others for poking holes in the phony transgender narrative.  Heck, Twitter even canceled me for posting Tea Party information a few years ago.

A Democrat Senate candidate in Iowa demanded a town mayor take down a ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ flag outside somebody’s house.  This guy is a real authoritarian because, when he was a Vice Admiral in the Navy, he banned Fox News at meal time, and wouldn’t let his sailors watch it.

A medical board threatened to decertify doctors for telling the truth about abortion; for example, how abortion is linked to breast cancer and infertility. Congressional Democrats and the New York Attorney General asked Google to hide information about pro-life pregnancy centers in its search results.

The Fairfax County school board in Virginia – professional left-wing activists all, and not a single parent among them – voted for mandatory speech guidelines and will now suspend any student as young as ten who misgenders another student or calls them by the name they had before they transitioned.

College administrators are using ‘bias reporting systems’ to punish the free speech rights of conservative students on campus.  Under these systems, students are asked to inform on each other and report supposed incidents of bias regarding race, sexual orientation, and even ‘smoker status’ and ‘intellectual perspective’. The threat to free speech is obvious even before you get to ‘intellectual perspective’.  Informing on your neighbor for saying ‘I don’t like the Democrats’ – are you kidding? Inform – that’s what they do in communist countries.

California Democrats introduced a bill to strip nonprofit groups on the Right – but not the Left – of their tax-exempt status if a claim can be made the groups endorse ‘insurrection’ or engage in ‘conspiracies’.  Sounds like a roadmap for political persecution to me.  I think they should throw in “conspiracy to undermine national integrity” while they’re at it.  That’s the phony charge the Sandinista regime just used to put an opposition figure in prison for 10 years.

NPR formed a ‘disinformation team’ which is rich because NPR covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story and claimed there was no evidence Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, among other fits of disinformation of its own.  In a recent speech, Barack Obama called on social media to “detoxify our discourse, particularly the scourge of ‘disinformation’.”  You can dress that up any way you want, but it’s still censorship and thought control.

Controlling the information environment is a cult technique.  Preventing information from coming in from the outside and telling members only to rely on what the cult leaders tell you is a cult technique.   You don’t want people to think you belong to a cult, do you?

Maybe you like belonging to a cult, but I’ll tell you this:  you’ll never shut me up until you pry this microphone out of my cold, dead fingers.  And there are many more just like me and we’re organized. Seventy-five of us grassroots writers and media hosts with sizeable platforms of our own have formed a group and you’ll never succeed in silencing us all.  If you start with me, I will sue you into oblivion and I have the trial experience to do it.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Bidenflation: Retirement Accounts Lose Trillions, Rips Through Savings

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The S&P 500, the broadest measure of U.S. stocks, is down 21%, the Nasdaq nearly 30% and the Dow 16% so far this year, and Americans are seeing the value of their retirement accounts dwindle along with the drops.

And the Democrats just passed a massive tax and spend bill that will  escalate it further. Democrats hate you.

Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, wrote in a blog post this week that retirement plans have collectively lost upwards of $3 trillion since the beginning of January.

According to Munnell’s latest data, 401(k) plan participants have lost about $1.4 trillion from their accounts and IRAs have lost $2 trillion since the end of 2021.

Retirement accounts lose trillions in stock rut

Americans are feeling the pain when they look at their 401(k)s

By Breck Dumas, Jon Michael Raasch Fox News

EVERYBODY GETTING ‘HURT’ BY INFLATION: INVESTMENT EXPERT

Main Street is feeling it, too.

One woman told FOX Business her 401(k) has “been decimated” to the point that she is now wondering if her plans for starting her golden years might need to be delayed.

“It’s horrible, I mean, I was thinking I might be retiring, you know, in the next year or two,” she said. “And now, I don’t know. I don’t know when I can do that.”

“They’re not doing too good right now,” another man said of his investments. “We’ve been losing a lot of money.”

Multiple people told FOX Business they are scared to even take a peek at where their accounts stand.
stock trader

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange NYSE in New York, the United States, June 16, 2022. (Photo by Michael Nagle/Xinhua via Getty Images / Getty Images)

“We’ve got a [Thrift Savings Plan], a 401, a 529,” a second woman explained. “I don’t want to look at it.” She said the last time she glanced at her husband’s TSP it was down $200,000.

The losses coupled with inflation sitting at a 40-year high, means Americans are hemorrhaging money. That has also caused some people to make tough decision regarding retirement.

“It’s been painful,” another person said. “I honestly had to take out some funds out of my 401(k) to, you know, support myself and my family with the inflation and everything else that’s happening.”

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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

Hate crime fizzle in New Mexico: Murderer of Shi’ite Muslims turns out to be a Sunni Muslim, not an ‘Islamophobe’

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Biden and Harris were so anxious for some confirmation of the Left’s bogus “Islamophobia” narrative that they condemned these murders as hate crimes before any suspect had been located; they wanted people to think an “Islamophobe” was the murderer no matter what the facts turned out to be. Will Biden and Harris now apologize for reinforcing a spurious victimhood narrative? Not on your life.

Hamas-linked CAIR was ready to make hay with these murders as well. But instead of a bonanza for Ibrahim Hooper and co., we get Sunni-Shi’ite jihad in the United States. And neither Biden nor Harris will utter even a whisper about that. Will CAIR come clean and note that Sunni-Shia hatred is responsible for far more violence and murder worldwide than “Islamophobia”? Sure, around the time they name me CAIR’s National Director.

51-year-old man Muhammed Syed charged with murdering 2 Muslim men in Albuquerque; additional charges possible, police say

by Sophie Reardon and Gina Martinez, CBS News, August 9, 2022 (thanks to Elizabeth)

A man has been detained and charged with murdering two Muslim men, Albuquerque police announced Tuesday. Four Muslim men have been killed in the city since November, and authorities believe the suspect may eventually be charged in the other two murders.

Muhammed Syed, 51, was identified as the “primary suspect in the recent murders of Muslim men,” police said Tuesday, and charged with murdering Aftab Hussein on July 26, and Muhammad Afzaal Hussian on Aug. 1. Detectives connected the two cases using bullet casings found at the two scenes.

They are still investigating Syed’s possible involvement in the murders of Naeem Hussain on Aug. 5 and Mohammed Zaher Ahmadi on Nov. 7….

Syed appears to have known his victims, police and the FBI said….

The string of murders has shaken the Muslim community in Albuquerque. Police on Sunday said it was too soon to know if the murders would be classified as hate crimes.

On Saturday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

In a Tuesday statement, CAIR thanked law enforcement for the arrest and wrote that it hopes “the news that this violence has been brought to an end will provide the New Mexico Muslim community some sense of relief and security.”

“Although we are waiting to learn more about these crimes, we are disturbed by early indications that the alleged killer may have been targeting particular members of the Shia community,” the statement read. “If this is true, it is completely unacceptable, and we encourage law enforcement to file any appropriate hate crime charges against the suspect.”

Law enforcement officials have not confirmed any specific motive for the killings.

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

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

5 Transportation Industries the U.S. Government Is Crushing With Regulations

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Transportation is essential to any economy.

In war, each side tries to cripple the other’s economy by targeting and destroying its transportation infrastructure: ports, airfields, roads, bridges, railroads, rivers, and canals. The United States, however, like many countries, wrecks its own transportation systems—not with bombs but with laws and regulations.

The American Henry George (1839-1897) once commented on this dismal state of affairs. “What protection teaches us,” he wrote, “is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.”

Let’s explore some examples of how this works.

The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), created in 1887; the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890; the Elkins Act (1903); the Hepburn Act (1906); the Mann-Elkins Act (1910); the Panama Canal Act of 1912; and the Valuation Act (1913) worked together and at cross purposes to ensure that the nation’s railroads could neither compete, cooperate, nor coordinate with each other. Routes, lading, and rates were all heavily regulated. The result was that even before the country entered World War I, its railroads were grinding to a halt, incapable of transporting steadily increasing amounts of war materiel to the nation’s seaports. As Marc Scribner explains:

Pooling equipment and facilities could have eased the traffic crunch in the short-run, but the Interstate Commerce Act explicitly prohibited the voluntary pooling of railroad resources. In 1917, railroads appealed to the ICC for a 15-percent rate increase to help offset some of the rising costs associated with wartime traffic and afford them the opportunity [to] raise revenue necessary to invest back into network enhancements. The ICC rejected their request.

Frustrated with the growing railroad network inefficiencies during the war, President Wilson nationalized the entire railroad industry. On December 28, 1917, the newly formed United States Railroad Administration took over American railway operations. The agency immediately pooled all railroad equipment and facilities, and six months later increased freight rates by 28 percent.

Scribner adds that partial deregulation in the 1970s saved the country’s railroads from “the brink of collapse.”

The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (“Jones Act”) prohibits transporting goods between American ports on ships that aren’t American built, owned, registered, and crewed. The Act significantly increases the cost of shipping American products between American cities. As a result, goods that could more efficiently be sent by water are sent by rail, truck, or air, wasting fuel and producing far more pollution and CO2 emissions than necessary. In addition, the high cost of shipping domestic products leads Americans to buy more from abroad. Finally, the Act has crippled America’s shipbuilding industry.

While Covid and Covid lockdowns exacerbated problems at America’s seaports, the issues have been building for decades:

  • Longshoremen’s unions are limiting automation and job flexibility
  • The Foreign Dredge Act of 1906 artificially increased the cost of the dredging that would allow our ports to service more and larger ships.
  • State and local laws prevent seaports from expanding their container storage facilities

During the four decades from 1938 to 1978, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) regulated passenger airlines engaged in interstate operations. It assigned routes, set fares, limited market entry, subsidized airlines, and regulated mergers. While the CAB prohibited price competition, it did allow airlines to compete on quality of service and frequency of flights. As a result, airlines became inefficient, overcapitalized, and overstaffed. Airlines profitably flew frequent, partially-booked flights, which, while convenient for customers, wasted fuel, labor, and equipment. Intrastate airlines – not subject to the CAB’s entry restrictions or price controls – could transport customers for half the cost of their CAB-certified rivals.

From 1935 to 1980, the ICC regulated the nation’s trucking industry. The agency controlled rates and routes and limited market entry. Applicants for operating rights had to prove that existing firms weren’t already providing the proposed service and that the firms wouldn’t be hurt by the additional competition.

When President Jimmy Carter signed the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which largely deregulated the trucking industry, he stated that the reforms would reduce “consumer costs by as much as $8 billion each year… and… conserve annually hundreds of millions of gallons of precious fuel.”

California’s AB5 law (also known as the “gig worker bill”) restricts companies’ ability to designate workers as contractors. Because over 60% of California’s independent owner-operators fall under the law’s definition of regular employees, AB5 will have a significant impact on the state’s trucking industry. By reducing or eliminating logistics companies’ ability to hire short-term trucking services and by driving some independent truckers to leave the state or the business, the law will further decrease the ability of the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports to clear their backlogs. Bottlenecks at these ports impact not just California but the entire nation.

Transportation is essential to any economy. Transportation expands the size of markets, market size determines the scope for the division of labor, and division of labor drives productivity. A nation’s transportation infrastructure is critical to its survival, but even the best infrastructure in the world cannot move people and products if laws and regulations create enough roadblocks.

AUTHOR

Richard Fulmer

Richard Fulmer worked as an engineer and a systems analyst, and is now retired and a free-lance writer. He has published some thirty articles and book reviews in free market magazines and blogs. With Robert L. Bradley Jr., Richard wrote the book, Energy: The Master Resource, which was required reading in classes at four different universities, including the University of Texas and the University of Toronto. He is currently working on another book, Caveman Economics: Basic Economics in 25 Prehistoric Tales.

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

Congress Is Supersizing the IRS. Here’s Why That’s Bad News for Everyday Americans

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The IRS would more than double its workforce under this legislation.

Americans love their fast-food supersized. But supersizing the Internal Revenue Service?

Probably not so popular.

That’s evidently of little concern to a majority of Congress. Lawmakers are poised to pass a large tax-and-spending bill, which Biden is eager to sign, that would increase IRS funding by an astounding $80 billion. The legislation “provides 14 times as much funding for ‘enforcement’—as in fishing expedition audits—than it does for ‘taxpayer services’ such as answering the phone,” according to Ben Susser of Americans for Tax Reform.

The IRS would more than double its workforce under this legislation, Joe Simonson reports for the Washington Free Beacon. In fact, the super-sized IRS will boast more employees than the State Department, the FBI, Border Patrol, and the Pentagon—combined.

Advocates of increased IRS funding argue that this will raise revenue for essential government spending projects and crack down on rich billionaire tax cheats who aren’t paying their “fair share.” But here are two reasons everyday Americans should be concerned by such a drastic expansion of the IRS.

The IRS has abused its power in recent years with little to no real accountability.

For example, under the Obama administration, the IRS specifically targeted conservative nonprofit groups in what was a massive scandal. More recently, IRS employees illegally leaked the private tax documents of wealthy private citizens—who weren’t breaking any laws—to the media in order to make a political, partisan point in favor of increasing taxes on the rich.

Nothing happened to Lois Lerner, who oversaw the IRS during the Obama-era scandal. And while the IRS says it is investigating the tax leaks, nothing has come out of that so far. (Shocker).

These are just two examples of the IRS’s many recent scandals and abuses of its power. Why on earth would we want to expand their resources and power with this track record and no real accountability?

Proponents say we have nothing to fear if we have nothing to hide.

But that bizarrely assumes benevolence and good faith from a rogue agency that has displayed the opposite in recent history.

Americans are struggling right now under the crushing weight of inflation, facing a shrinking economy and declining real wages. The last thing they need is a tax crackdown from their friendly neighborhood IRS agent. (Even if they’ve done nothing wrong and ultimately don’t have to pay up more in taxes, it’s a headache and a half that could involve many hours of paperwork and expensive legal/accounting assistance.)

Yet that’s what millions of Americans would face under this IRS expansion. It’s simply not the case, as proponents insist, that an increased crackdown would only target the rich.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, says that from 78% to 90% of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Only 4% to 9% would come from those making more than $500,000.”

When we consider these inconvenient realities, the inescapable conclusion is that the Democrats’ plan to supersize the IRS—or, as they put it, have the IRS “go beast mode”—is bad news.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

AUTHOR

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education.

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

McCarthy Vows Full Investigation Into AG Garland and Trump Raid

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House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) promised on Monday to launch a full investigation into Attorney General Merrick Garland and the FBI’s raid on former President Trump’s Florida home, Mar-A-Lago.

McCarthy tweeted, “I’ve seen enough. The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization. When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned. Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar,” he warned.

Indeed, , Should Republicans take back the House at the 2022 congressional midterms, they will acquire the ability to launch subpoenas into the raid. The House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Reform Committee can focus on the events and decision-making process that led to the search warrant against Trump.

The House Judiciary Republicans wrote, “This is what happens in third world countries. Not the United States. Doesn’t the FBI have better things to do than harass the former PRESIDENT?”

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel wrote, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Countless times we have examples of Democrats flaunting the law and abusing power with no recourse, including Hunter Biden. Democrats continually weaponize the bureaucracy against Republicans. This raid is outrageous.”

“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar- A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump wrote in a statement. “Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before.”

Merrick Garland

7 Known Connections

Garland Says “Domestic Terrorism” by “White Supremacists” Are Among America’s Leading Problems

On June 15, 2021, Garland announced the unveiling of the Biden administration’s new “First National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” an initiative designed to combat what Garland viewed as one of America’s most serious problems: “domestic terrorism” carried out mostly by conservative adherents to a doctrine of “white supremacism.” Below are some of Garland’s remarks from that day, remarks in which he: (a) cast the Trump supporters who had breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6 as uniquely evil; (b) warned of the allegedly enormous threat posed by violent white supremacists; (c) likened such people to genocidal Islamic terrorists; and (d) gave anecdotal examples of past terrorist incidents that had been perpetrated exclusively by whites…

To learn more about Merrick Garland, click here.

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

Judicial Watch Sues DOJ for ‘Russia Hoax’ Records Declassified and Ordered Released by President Trump

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(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for records ordered declassified and released by President Trump the day before he left office.  The records relate to “Crossfire Hurricane,” the controversial spy operation against President Trump, his 2016 presidential campaign, and other Trump associates, and have yet to be made public by the Biden administration (Judicial Watch, Inc. v U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:22-cv-02264)).

The lawsuit was filed after the DOJ failed to respond to a February 17, 2022, FOIA request for:

All records regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation that were provided to the White House by the Department of Justice on or about December 30, 2020. For purposes of clarification, the records sought are those described in a January 19, 2021 Presidential Memorandum (see https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-declassification-certain-materials-related-fbis-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/ ).

All records of communication between any official or employee of the Department of Justice and any official or employee of any other branch, department, agency, or office of the federal government regarding the declassification and release of the records described in part one of this request.

Trump’s memo authorized the declassification and release of the records:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby direct the following:

Section 1.  Declassification and Release.    At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation.  Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public.  I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.

I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible.  In response, and as part of the iterative process of the declassification review, under a cover letter dated January 17, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation noted its continuing objection to any further declassification of the materials in the binder and also, on the basis of a review that included Intelligence Community equities, identified the passages that it believed it was most crucial to keep from public disclosure.  I have determined to accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI in that January 17 submission.

I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder.  This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.

My decision to declassify materials within the binder is subject to the limits identified above and does not extend to materials that must be protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and does not require the disclosure of certain personally identifiable information or any other materials that must be protected from disclosure under applicable law. Accordingly, at my direction, the Attorney General has conducted an appropriate review to ensure that materials provided in the binder may be disclosed by the White House in accordance with applicable law.

A Just the News report details that the documents include “transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.”

“The Obama-Biden Administration and Deep State spying on Trump and his associates is the worst government corruption scandal in American history,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And to make matters worse, the Biden DOJ simply refuses to release smoking gun documents about this corruption that the American people have an absolute right to see!”

Judicial Watch has taken a leading role in uncovering the Obama/Deep State spying and other abuses targeting Trump world.

In May 2020, Judicial Watch litigation uncovered the “electronic communication” (EC) that officially launched the counterintelligence investigation, termed “Crossfire Hurricane,” of President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The document was written by Strzok.

In March 2019 Judicial Watch released heavily redacted records from the DOJ that reveal Bruce Ohr remained in regular contact with former British spy and Fusion GPS contractor Christopher Steele after Steele was terminated by the FBI in November 2016 for revealing to the media his position as an FBI confidential informant.

In August 2019, Judicial Watch uncovered “302” report material from FBI interviews with Bruce Ohr, showing that in November 2016, Ohr said that “reporting on Trump’s ties to Russia were going to the Clinton Campaign” and “Jon Winer at the U.S. State Department and the FBI.” The documents also showed that Ohr knew that Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson and others were “talking to Victoria Nuland at the U.S. State Department.” (A Form 302 is used by FBI agents to summarize the interviews that they conduct and contains information from the notes taken during the interview.)

In August 2018, the Justice Department (DOJ) admitted in a court filing that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held no hearings on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) spy warrant applications targeting Carter Page, a former Trump campaign part-time advisor who was the subject of four controversial FISA warrants. Judicial Watch litigation also uncovered the secret FISA warrants that confirmed the FBI and DOJ misled the courts in withholding the material information that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC were behind the “intelligence” used to persuade the courts to approve the FISA warrants that targeted the Trump team.

Also, in August of that year, Judicial Watch discovered FBI records about Christopher Steele, the former British spy, hired with Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee funds, who authored the infamous dossier targeting President Trump during the presidential campaign. The documents show that Steele was cut off as a “Confidential Human Source” (CHS) after he disclosed his relationship with the FBI to a third party. The documents show at least 11 FBI payments to Steele in 2016 and document that he was admonished for unspecified reasons in February 2016.

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

The Power of the Powerless

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Francis X. Maier: The U.S. is not a despotic state. . .but we are closer to it than ever before. Consider: hostility to religion; disregard for law; expansion of administrative power, and the rise of a biomedical security state. Can it end well? 

I started this column hoping to focus on Václav Havel’s great 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” collected here.  I’ll get to that.  But in the meantime, the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida, an action unprecedented in U.S. history.  So adjustments must be made.

Just four weeks ago in this space, I suggested that

The threat of impending “Fascism! Right around the corner!” – a treasured anxiety of the Trump Dark Ages – might oddly come true.  Just not from the direction you thought. Mr. Trump, with his vulgar style and legion of faults, nonetheless had the effect of a sun lamp or disagreeable medicine on a nasty boil: He drew all the hysteria, fanaticism, and arrogance of hardcore progressive thought to the skin’s surface, where the boil and its poison popped.

A ”fascist” in the vocabulary of today’s enlightened classes, includes just about anybody who questions the collapse of our border security, transgender rights, or unfettered access to abortion.  And this isn’t new.  Barack Obama let the rat out the bag with extraordinary condescension in 2008 when he complained about underclass voters who cling, stubbornly, to their “guns and religion.”

Enter Donald Trump, who admittedly has a surplus of negative qualities.  But he did, and still does, trigger in a revealing way, the dormant rage virus, the mental herpes simplex, in our nation’s preening elites.  Thanks to the fury directed at him – and through him, at all those who, for whatever reason, voted for him – Mr. Trump proves that hate clearly does “have a home here.”  It’s embedded in our patrician class and its wannabes.

But don’t take my word for it.  Read Christopher Lasch, distinguished historian and always a man of the populist left.  In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, Lasch notes (in 1995) that

The new [national and global] elites, which include not only corporate managers but all those professions that produce and manipulate information – the lifeblood of the global market – are far more cosmopolitan, or at least more restless and migratory, than their predecessors. . . .Theirs is essentially a tourist’s view of the world – not a perspective likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy.

Lasch argues that in our time, the chief threat to the civilizing traditions of Western culture comes “from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses.”  And he notes that the “course of recent history no longer favors the leveling of social distinctions, but runs more and more in the direction of a two-class society in which the favored few monopolize the advantages of money, education and power.”  He adds, finally, that

In the United States, “Middle America” – a term that has both geographical and social implications – has come to symbolize everything that stands in the way of progress: “family values,” mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, [and] retrograde views of women.  Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial. . .at once absurd and vaguely menacing.

What Lasch correctly describes is the arrogance of America’s leadership class.  This has fully ripened and congealed in the Democratic Party since his 1995 book.  And along with it goes an elitist derision and fear toward America’s underclass.  Trump read this reality like a cheat sheet and used it like a judo master.  The very people who loathe Donald Trump helped to ensure his 2016 election, and their continuing, vindictive hysteria makes him vigorous in the popular imagination. Our nominally Catholic President and Speaker of the House deserve at least a thank-you note from the former president for keeping his looming shadow alive. . .though given his track record, Mr. Trump may be cool to such niceties.

But let’s get back to Václav Havel.

Havel wrote “The Power of the Powerless” in Czechoslovakia during the postwar years of East Bloc repression.  Like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other dissidents, Havel was a forceful voice for truth in a Soviet-style, Marxist-Leninist political system built on deceit, fear, and repression.

In such a system, Havel writes, government by bureaucracy is called popular government.  The working class is enslaved in the name of the working class.  The complete degradation of the individual is presented as his or her own ultimate liberation.  Depriving people of information is called making it available.  The use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power.  The arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code.  The repression of culture is called its development.  The lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom.

Farcical elections become the highest form of democracy.  And banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views.  In Havel’s words, “Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything.  It falsifies the past.  It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future.  It falsifies statistics. . .[and it] pretends to pretend nothing.”

Given such a system, open political resistance in Havel’s day was impossible.  The “power of the powerless” resided instead in those citizens who simply refused to cooperate with the lies; citizens who insisted on speaking and living the truth, no matter the cost.  Over the decades, this gradually eroded the system’s credibility and led to a national reawakening.  But it required two virtues: courage and perseverance.

The United States is a long way from 1978 Czechoslovakia. . .but not so far as it was four decades ago.  The growing hostility to religion in this country, the disregard for law and its enforcement, the expansion of federal administrative power, the rise of what author Aaron Kheriaty, M.D., calls “the biomedical security state.”  These things don’t end well.  And the only way we change them, the only “power of the powerless,” is by refusing to cooperate with the lies.

To live instead in the truth, despite the cost.

You may also enjoy:

Thomas Farr’s Chinese Totalitarianism and Catholic Witness

Brad Miner’s Do Not Be Confirmed

AUTHOR

Francis X. Maier

Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2022 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

VIDEO REACTIONS: Mar-a-Lago is a Despotic State Attack on an American Family

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“Always remember, they are coming after me because I’m fighting for you.” — President Donald J. Trump

“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force.” — George Orwell, 1984

What Americans witnessed in Mar-a-Lago is an unprecedented attack on our Republic by the federal government. The home invasion of a former President of these United States have never ever happened before.

We are witnessing the abuse of power in the U.S. like that seen in the 57 dictatorships across the world in Russia, Venezuela, in communist regimes like North Korea, China, Cuba and in Islamic supremist nations like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan.

We can now add America under Biden and the Democrat Party as the 58th dictatorship. 

We are a truly nation in decline.

Below are members of the Trump family and other commentators expressing both outrage and a dire warning on what Biden and the Democrats have done—taken away equal justice under the law and replaced it with social justice empowered bureaucrats who seek total power and control over we the people from the school house to the White House.

It’s time to drain the swamp of these bolshevist bureaucrats and their leaders.

Jim Jordan put it best.

Watch, listen and understand

Eric Trump: No family in American history has taken ‘more arrows in the back’ than mine

Lara Trump: Trump raid should shock Americans ‘to their core’

TRUMP AT CPAC: ‘Drain the Swamp Once and For All’

LEVIN ON MAR-A-LAGO RAID: “This is the worst attack on this Republic in Modern History”

Bongino: ‘This Is Some Third World Bulls*&% Right Here’

Sen. Rick Scott: FBI Mar-A-Lago Raid ‘Makes You Mad; We Need Answers’

Newt Gingrich: FBI’s Mar-A-Lago Raid ‘Is a Very Scary Step Towards a Police State

What you are seeing is an abuse of power: Gregg Jarrett

RELATED ARTICLE: Former NYPD Commissioner: Democrats May Try To Orchestrate Trump’s ‘Assassination’ After FBI Raid

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

Was the FBI Mar-a-Largo Raid a ‘Setup’ to Keep President Trump Off of The 2024 Ballot?

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UPDATE: Trump attorney speaks out following FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago

The FBI raided the Trump families’ private residence at Mar-a-Lago in search of documents that the Department of Archives believes should be in its care. This is after Trump had already provided the Department of Archives all the documents that it requested every time that it made a request. President Trump followed the law.

Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH 4th District) in an email stated,

First, Attorney General Merrick Garland abused his power to weaponize the federal government against parents who spoke up about what their children are being taught in schools.

Now, we are witnessing, for the first time in American history, an FBI raid of a former president’s home. Again, this has NEVER happened before in American history. NEVER.

Why Trump and why now?

Is it because President Trump is so successful in his endorsements for the midterm elections? Is it just a distraction from the horrible social and economic policies of Biden and his administration? Is it to focus on anything but the current disastrous economy and that America is in a recession with no end in sight?

This is Democrat long-term get Trump pattern:

Russiagate ⇒ Accused of Quid Pro Quo ⇒ Impeachment ⇒ J6 Committee Hearings ⇒ Raid a former President’s home. 

As journalists we are looking at the: who (the FBI), what (looking for classified documents in the possession of DJT), where (Mar-a-Lago, FL), when (in the dark of night) and most importantly the why—yet to be determined.

Questions:

  1. So why the raid now?
  2. Why did the FBI obtain the warrant from a magistrate instead of from a judge?
  3. Why did the FBI invade the Trump residence in the dark of night?
  4. What is the long term objective?

Why Raid Mar-a-Lago Now?

First and foremost we know that the Democrat Party does not want President Donald J. Trump on the midterm election campaign trail endorsing candidates that can and will take over governorships, turn some state legislatures red and change the balance of power in both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.

We also know the Democrat Party definitely does not want Donald J. Trump to have a second term in the White House.

Clearly this raid has drawn national media attention. While Democrats applaud it, Republicans are using this to show just how out of control the DOJ, FBI and Biden administration are.

The lower Biden and Democrats sink in the polls the more radical they become. Why?

George Orwell explained it when he wrote, ”

Warrant from a Magistrate with links to Epstein

On October 23rd, 2007, as federal prosecutors in South Florida were in the midst of negotiations to finalize a plea deal with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a senior prosecutor in their office was quietly laying out plans to leave the U.S. Attorney’s office after 11 years.

On that date, as emails were being exchanged between Epstein’s lawyers and federal prosecutors, Bruce E. Reinhart, now a federal magistrate in Florida, opened a limited liability company (LLC) in Florida that established what would become his new criminal defense practice.

The stated address, according to Florida state corporate records, was 250 South Australian Avenue which was the same location and identical suite number of Epstein’s lead attorney Jack Goldberger.

By the end of the year Reinhart resigned his post in the Southern District of Florida and on January 2nd, 2008 was hired to represent several of Epstein’s accused accomplices, who would later, like Epstein, receive federal immunity for trafficking underaged girls to be used and abused by the rich and famous.

Natalie Winters from The National Pulse reported,

Judge Bruce Reinhart – who is reportedly the most likely judge behind the warrant authorizing a raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar A Lago estate – is a former attorney who represented employees of convicted sex offender and notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, The National Pulse can reveal.

The National Pulse can also reveal that Judge Reinhart has donated to the campaigns of former President Barack Obama and to the establishment opponents of Donald J. Trump during the 2016 election, including Jeb Bush.

Politico – the news outlet closest linked to the establishment in Washington, D.C. – named Reinhart in their morning playbook e-mail on Tuesday, 9th August 2022.

BTW, the New York Post’s ,  and  reported,

Reinhart was later named in a civil lawsuit by two of Epstein’s victims that accused him of violating Justice Department policies by switching sides in the middle of the Epstein investigation, suggesting he had spilled inside information about the probe to build favor with the notorious defendant, the Herald reported in 2018.

The Florida federal magistrate judge who signed off on a search warrant authorizing the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort donated to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign — months after he left the local US Attorney’s office to rep employees of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein who had received immunity in the long-running sex-trafficking investigation of the financier.

So, it was Bruce E. Reinhart who issued the warrant to search the Trump home in Mar-a-Lago.

What is the Long Term Objective?

Fox News’ Gregg Jarrett wrote in an article titled “FBI raid of Trump home shows that ‘equal justice’ is a farce“,

“Equal Justice Under Law” is engraved on the ornate pediment above the entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Department of Justice and the FBI continue to hurl eggs at it.

Monday’s pre-dawn raid by a battalion of FBI agents on former President Donald Trump’s Florida home represents an abandonment of the cherished principle embedded in our Constitution that the law will be equally applied to all of its citizens.

Instead, political status now dictates whether a person receives fair treatment in a supposedly fair justice system.

If you check the box marked “Republican” on a political affiliation form, brace yourself for persecution and prosecution. If you check “Democrat,” you’ll be granted special elevated status. You’re untouchable. Just ask Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden.

The idea is to demonize not only President Donald J. Trump but also anyone and everyone who supports him publicly, via donations and at the ballot box.

This tweet offers another possible long term objective of this FBI raid. Keep Trump off the 2024 ballot at all costs.

While there’s much speculation on this raid one thing is clear—all of the 3 letter agencies are after Trump and those who support him. Why? Because 4 out of 5 government employees voted for Biden in 2020.

The end game is to keep control of the levers of power. Democrats, the media, social media and the feds will do what ever it takes to stop Trump.

This is why we the people must stop them and re-elect Trump in 2024. If we fail, so too does our Constitutional Republican form of government.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: Trump Supporters Outside Mar-a-Lago post Raid

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Why Karl Marx Supported Gun Rights—but Marxists Don’t

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Karl Marx didn’t support the right of workers to bear arms because he saw it as an inalienable right. He supported gun rights because they were a means to an end.

For just $10.77, people can go on Amazon and buy wall art of Ronald Reagan apparently defending the Second Amendment.

“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered,” the text reads next to a picture of Reagan; “any attempts to disarm the people must be stopped, by force if necessary.”

There are a few problems with the quote, but the biggest one is that Reagan never said it.

As numerous fact checkers have noted—including Reuters, Snopes, Factcheck.org, and Politifact—the author of the quote is none other than Karl Marx, the German philosopher and author of The Communist Manifesto who used language nearly verbatim to this in an 1850 address in London.

“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary,” Marx said in his “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League.”

In fairness to the many internet users duped by the fake Reagan meme, the quote sounds a bit like something Reagan could have said (though it’s highly unlikely the Gipper, a skilled and careful orator, would have ever said “by force if necessary”).

Reagan, after all, generally—though not universally—supported gun rights and was skeptical of efforts to restrict firearms.

“You won’t get gun control by disarming law-abiding citizens,” Reagan famously noted in a 1983 speech.

Some might be surprised that Marx and Reagan had similar views on gun control. Marx was of course the father of communism, whereas Reagan was famously anti-communist. Moreover, Marx’s modern disciples are staunch supporters of gun control, whether they identify as socialists or progressives.

“Guns in the United States pose a real threat to public health and safety and disproportionately impact communities of color,” Nivedita Majumdar, an associate professor of English at John Jay College, wrote in the Marxist magazine Jacobin. “Their preponderance only serves corporate interests, a corrupt political establishment, and an alienated capitalist culture.”

This distaste for guns goes beyond socialist magazines. As The Atlantic reported during the last presidential election cycle, progressive politicians are increasingly embracing more stringent federal gun control laws.

“No longer are primary candidates merely calling for tighter background checks and a ban on assault weapons,” journalist Russell Berman wrote in 2020; “in 2019, contenders like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas were calling for national licensing requirements and gun-buyback programs.”

The point here is not to disparage politicians like O’Rourke and Booker as “Marxists,” a label they’d almost certainly object to. The point is that progressive politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) might channel Marx in their class rhetoric, but they are not embracing his messaging when it comes to the proletariat’s access to firearms.

As it happens, this is a common theme with Marxists throughout history.

Some may find it odd that Marxists don’t support gun rights when Marx himself did, but there’s an explanation as to why, and it stems in part from Marx’s conception of rights.

Classical liberals of the American founding saw human rights as inviolable because because they are natural rights “endowed by their Creator.” As Thomas Jefferson explained in an 1824 letter, rights—including the right to bear arms—are “inherent in the people,” which makes them inalienable.

Unlike the American Founders (and Reagan for that matter), Marx didn’t see the right to bear arms as a natural, individual right. In fact, Marx didn’t believe in individual rights at all. Instead, Marx saw firearms as a means to an end, and the end was revolution.

“The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition,” he explained, “and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed.”

Marx continued:

“Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising.”

We see here that Marx supported the right of workers to bear arms not because of some inalienable right, but because firearms were necessary tools in his revolution against the despised bourgeoisie.

We can surmise from this that Marx likely would have supported the peoples’ right to bear arms—right up until the point it no longer served his revolutionary purpose, at which point his support for gun rights would be jettisoned. And this is precisely what Marx’s followers did.

In his essay Letters from Afar, the infamous Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin called for an armed proletariat militia, writing that organizers should “arm all the poor, exploited sections of the population in order that they themselves should take the organs of state power directly into their own hands.”

Once Lenin achieved power, however, he immediately turned to a proven method of oppression: gun confiscation. On Decc 10, 1918, less than six months after the Bolsheviks butchered Tsar Nicholas II and his family at a house in Yekaterinburg, Soviet citizens were ordered by the Council of People’s Commissar to turn their firearms over to the state.

The penalty for refusal was ten years in prison.

Lenin was hardly an outlier. Marxists who followed in his footsteps, including Mao in China and Castro in Cuba, also turned to gun confiscation shortly after gaining power.

Marx was not wrong that firearms were the path to power, but his followers came to realize an obvious truth: firearms were also a threat to their own power.

“Political power,” Mao famously observed, “grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Mao, in a twisted way, was right. An armed citizenry was a double-edged sword. While it served the masses as a bulwark against political oppression, it also threatened the vehicle socialists used to usher in the people’s utopia: the state. And this explains why modern Marxists tend to despise gun rights.

“There’s a reason you never see a Communist, a Marxist, or even a Socialist politician support the right of common people to keep and bear arms,” US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) recently said. “Those forms of government require more submission to the state than armed citizens would tolerate.”

Massie is not wrong, and it helps explain why so many Marxists part ways with Marx on gun rights.

It’s also an important reminder that rights are not really rights at all if they can be discarded once they have served the ends one seeks.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

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

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