WATCH: An anti-abortion activist testifies against Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination. Eleanor McCullen, an anti-abortion activist, delivered testimony in opposition of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination, on the final day of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
With a bang of a gavel in 1973, 63 million fellow Americans were condemned to die. And the number keeps growing.
Now if the Senate confirms Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, another pro-abortion justice will be added to the Supreme Court.
Last week, Judge Jackson, nominated by Biden to the Supreme Court, faced four days of hearings in the Senate. South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham raised an intriguing point to her: “Every group that wants to pack the court, that believes the court is a bunch of right-wing nuts who are going to destroy America, that considers the Constitution ‘trash’—all wanted you picked. That is all I can say. That so many of these left-wing radical groups who would destroy the law as we know it…supported you is problematic for me.”
Jon Schweppe of the American Principles Project noted, “On abortion and religious liberty, it’s clear where she stands. Jackson co-authored an amicus brief for the Massachusetts NARAL chapter characterizing pro-life sidewalk counselors as ‘indisputably harmful’ and supporting the notion that they should not be allowed anywhere near an abortion clinic.”
He adds, “Why would leftist groups like American Atheists, the Human Rights Campaign, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, the National Education Association and the Southern Poverty Law Center push the White House to nominate Jackson and the Senate to confirm?….Ketanji Brown Jackson is a woke Trojan horse, as the preponderance of evidence suggests.”
When asked to define what a woman is, Judge Jackson declined, claiming she’s “not a biologist.” When asked when human life begins, she said to Louisiana Senator John Kennedy: “Senator, um… I don’t know.”
Gary Bauer responded to her answer: “Of course, this well-educated, Harvard graduate knows life begins at conception. The problem is that she’s all in on abortion on demand.”
The Supreme Court decisions Roe v. Wade (1973) and Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992) established by judicial fiat a right to abortion. Thus abortion, said Judge Jackson, is “settled law of the Supreme Court concerning the right to terminate a pregnancy. They established a framework the court has reaffirmed.”
One Constitutional authority had some criticisms of Roe v. Wade as a legal opinion. She said that Roe “tried to do too much, too fast—it essentially made every abortion restriction in the country at the time illegal in one fell swoop—leaving it open to fierce attacks. ‘Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped…may prove unstable.’”
Who was this radical anti-abortion activist that would dare criticize the left’s most beloved decision? It was Ruth Bader Ginsburg–before she became a justice on the high court who did everything in her power to preserve Roe v. Wade.
Writing for Lifenews.com, Micaiah Bilger observes that Judge Jackson has called peaceful pro-life sidewalk counselors at abortion clinics “hostile, noisy and in your face” people.
Bilger added, “Jackson has the support of NARAL Pro-Choice America, which advocates for abortions without limits up to birth…She also ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to defund the billion-dollar abortion chain Planned Parenthood, and she clerked for pro-abortion Justice Stephen Breyer when he issued an opinion against the partial-birth abortion ban.”
I believe abortion is the single most important political issue of our time. It’s not complicated. Abortion takes a human life every time.
When judges rule in favor of abortion, they are playing God. I find it amazing that the left constantly decries bullying, yet they favor abortion rights. What could be more bullying than dismembering a defenseless, unborn child limb by limb because it is perceived as somehow inconvenient?
Some critics on the left, like Bill Maher, say that the only reason conservatives oppose Judge Jackson is because she’s black. But people need to remember that the founder of the nation’s leading abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, was Margaret Sanger, who spoke at a Ku Klux Klan meeting. She wrote a letter to one of her board members (Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, 12/10/1939): “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” No wonder the majority of abortion facilities are in urban areas—to this day.
In our nation’s birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence, our founders said that our rights come from the Creator—and first among these rights is the “right to life.” Indeed, if you’re dead, how can you enjoy any other right?
The Constitution, which is predicated on the Declaration, notes in the preamble that one of its purposes is: “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Our posterity? That is, the yet to be born.
To paraphrase Dr. D. James Kennedy, Judge Jackson should get down on her knees and thank God that her mother wasn’t “pro-choice.”
If you get abortion wrong, you tend to get everything else wrong too.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jerry Newcombe, D. Min.http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJerry Newcombe, D. Min.2022-03-30 18:46:302022-03-30 18:46:30Abortion and Biden’s SCOTUS Nominee
Disney vowed to keep fighting Florida’s new parental rights law that prevents the sexualization of very young children in public schools. It gets worse. Disney’s president of entertainment said she supports having “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories” and wants at least 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities. An executive producer at Disney said it’s no secret the company is regularly “adding queerness” to children’s programming. [More at Dr. Rich Swier] In fact, Disney is creating a new task force to make more LGBT-aware content for what it calls ‘family entertainment’. Oh, and I don’t know if you caught this: Disney employees were arrested in a prostitution, human trafficking, and child predator sting in Florida not too far from Orlando.
This company has gone off the rails. The problems go back decades when Disney animators started making pornographic versions of Disney cartoons on the sly. I don’t know why any parent would invite Disney into their living room now that Disney’s political agenda to sexualize young children is out in the open for all to see. My advice is: don’t. There are plenty of wholesome entertainment alternatives out there. One alternative is Angel Studios, creators of the Tuttle Twins animated series. Another is Sony’s Affirm division which makes faith-based films. Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire is getting into entertainment, with the Run Hide Fight thriller set in a high school.
Daily Wire is also one of the news sites in the thriving ecosphere of new outlets on the political Right set up as an alternative to the corrupt big media sites which have no problem, for example, hiding the Hunter Biden laptop story to swing the election. Rumble is a credible alternative to YouTube which censors conservative speech.
I ask people on the Left whether it’s important to get both sides of the story and they invariably say ‘yes’. I ask them what sources on the Right they consult to get the other side of the story, and they tell me ‘none’ because they’re all ‘fascistic and reactionary’. Then I confound them by recommending Just the News, which they’ve never heard of and can’t criticize. Just the News will give you stories you won’t see in the Left-wing media and begin to reverse the damage the Left has done by manipulating half of America into disregarding out of hand everything the Right says, like this was the Soviet Union, or something.
There are alternatives to Amazon for buying books. I like the independent book sellers on eBay who almost always have everything I want. Of course there’s Barnes & Noble, and I’ve just discovered World of Books at wob.com. No reason to give your money to Jeff Bezos who keeps the insufferably liberal Washington Post on life support.
Back to Ben Shapiro for a moment. Harry’s Razors stopped advertising on the Daily Wire because the publication dared to tell the truth about transgenderism. So they fought back, starting their own razor company to compete with Harry’s. The introductory video is a scream, with Jeremy of the new company Jeremy’s Razors taking a blowtorch to Harry’s products. Over 10 million people have seen the video, so far.
Bye-bye, Harry’s. Go Woke, Go Broke.
Finally, there’s no reason to keep giving your money to Big Charities like the United Way that funds the abortion business, or the Girl Scouts which supports transgenderism. The best answer is to contribute to local charities you know don’t have a political axe to grind, but there are some national charities suggested on my Potomac Tea Party website. A couple of them run guide dog schools for the blind, and there are several others to choose from.
So if you’re tired of giving your money to people who hate you – who hate America and are trying to destroy your children – vote with your pocketbook and try the alternatives I’ve suggested here today. If you discover more, please let me know at tips@liberato.us and I will publicize them. We can do this thing, and make the likes of Twitter – which has canceled me – come groveling back to us.
ANN ARBOR, MI — The Thomas More Law Center (“TMLC”), a national nonprofit public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, representing over 400 Physicians, Surgeons, Nurses, and Medical Professionals, filed a brief last week in the U.S. Supreme Court opposing New York’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers. From the beginning COVID-19 pandemic, these healthcare workers courageously manned the front lines.
Nevertheless, an ungrateful state government, which permits secular exemptions from the vaccine mandate, disallows any consideration for religious accommodations. These healthcare workers share sincerely held religious beliefs that prevent them from obtaining the presently available COVID-19 vaccines. Many have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies to the illness. All have faced persecution and scorn for their religious beliefs on this issue.
Erin Mersino, TMLC’s Chief of Supreme Court and Appellate Practice authored the brief. She highlighted the precarious position of New York’s Governor Hochul—who instructed New Yorkers that “God wants” everyone to use these vaccines, and that individuals who have decided not to undergo COVID-19 vaccination “aren’t listening to God and what God wants.” Governor Hochul published these statements on New York’s official state website. (https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/rush-transcript-governor-hochul-attends-service-christian-cultural-center).
Since the Governor claims to be the authority on what God wants, she removed all religious accommodations from the vaccine mandate. However, many individuals sincerely hold religious beliefs that prohibit them from using the three COVID-19 vaccines on the market today and call for alternatives that have no connection to aborted fetal cell lines. The Governor failed to consider the spectrum of diverse religious views allowed under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The brief explains that such an exercise of authority from the State endangers the principle of pluralism upon which our nation is built and ignores our constitutionally protected autonomy to make such religious determinations for ourselves. TMLC explains in the brief that “The mandate is premised on the false presupposition that the Governor can use the powers of the State to answer theological questions pertaining to religious conscience.”
TMLC also highlights the unequal and punitive nature of New York’s mandate. New York decided to exempt individuals from its vaccine mandate for secular purposes, but intentionally left off an exemption for a religious purpose. TMLC contends this double standard violates the Constitution. Lastly, the brief addresses New York’s decision to withhold unemployment benefits to healthcare workers who lose their jobs due to their religious opposition with New York’s mandate. This additional punishment adds insult to injury.
In the brief, TMLC remarks, “The severity with which New York’s vaccine mandate treats religious objectors is so extreme that it almost seems implausible. The undisputed record, however, presents statement after statement from [New York’s Governor] establishing that no cause for such denial exists—it really is as bad as it seems.”
TMLC’s Amicus Curiae brief, which urges the U.S. Supreme Court to accept the case at the earliest possible time to protect the religious freedom of New York’s healthcare workers and to prevent other states from enacting similar mandates, can be found here.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Thomas More Law Centerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThomas More Law Center2022-03-30 08:42:252022-03-30 08:42:25Thomas More Law Center to U.S. Supreme Court—Stop NY Governor From Dictating Which Religious Beliefs Are Allowed
The ‘New York Times’ has finally admitted that the laptop’s emails were genuine.
It is well known that Twitter makes a sport of censorship. There’s even a Wikipedia page dedicated to the topic.
Typical of previous years, the 2022 log of Twitter suspensions is mostly a list of conservative commentators and Republican politicians — though refreshingly, a deranged Middle East dictator, one Ali Khamenei of Iran also made the cut this year.
Sharing “Covid-19 misinformation” (or at least what is presently considered such) is one of the more likely sins to get you banned in 2022, as is — gasp — calling male swimmers “men”.
What Twitter deems a transgression changes slightly from year to year but the themes and the political partisanship is consistent.
In 2020, what really put a bee in Twitter’s bonnet was sharing factual stories that threatened Joe Biden’s entry into the White House. Yes, Twitter interfered in the 2020 election. Egregiously.
The New York Times’s recent, glaring admission that Hunter Biden’s laptop is authentic, though 18 months late, has brought this fact to the fore once again.
We are yet to fully come to terms with Twitter’s misdeeds in those closing weeks of the 2020 contest, and the precedent they have set for public discourse in the West.
But first some background, if you are unfamiliar with what happened.
With all of America on seat’s edge and the world tuned in to the Trump-Biden contest, the New York Post broke a bombshell report on October 14, 2020.
Through intriguing circumstances, a laptop belonging to Joe’s son Hunter had made its way to the Post. On that hard drive were emails indicating that when the senior Biden was Vice President, he massaged US foreign policy in Ukraine to the benefit of his son’s business ventures there.
A follow-up story intimated that Joe Biden himself was making a ten percent cut from Hunter’s overseas dealings, despite Joe previously denying any knowledge of what his son was up to abroad.
The evidence strongly suggested that the millions in profit flowing to the Biden family estate from Ukraine, China and Russia were only made possible by the exclusive White House access it granted Hunter’s contacts in those countries.
Additionally, the laptop harboured a trove of debauched images and videos revealing Hunter’s prostitute- and drug-fuelled lifestyle — factors that made the Biden family more vulnerable to blackmail and other clandestine political influence.
So much for the story — what of the censorship?
Infamously, Twitter immediately locked two accounts: the New York Post’s, and that of Trump’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, who had tweeted out the report. Anyone else who tried to share the story were either suspended or unable to tweet the link, myself included. As Brendan O’Neill of Spiked has described that “truly extraordinary moment“:
Here we had the spokesperson for the democratically elected president of the United States and the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in America being cast out of social media for the crime of sharing a story that was true.
Not only was the story true — revelations of endemic Biden family corruption would doubtless have swung many undecided voters back to Trump in those dying days of the 2020 race, had they had access to it. This is a hypothesis made even more likely by poll after poll unearthing post-election Biden voter regret.
Twitter was the most flagrant partisan operative in the Hunter laptop saga, but far from the only one.
Facebook limited sharing of the New YorkPost’s piece until its “fact checkers” had a chance to assess the report. They never did. And they never apologised. In the years previous, however, Facebook did give free rein to flat-out lies about a Trump “pee-pee” tape and his being a Russian asset.
The conspiracy of the corporate press was one of silence. Had the same revelations emerged about Donald Trump Jr, there is no question the media would have reigned fire and brimstone on the Trump family.
But even a generous bribe wouldn’t have tempted most media outlets to report accurately on Hunter’s toxic laptop with a presidential election just around the corner. “The media world has largely ignored the Post’s Hunter Biden story,” one CNN reporter bragged at the time. “We don’t waste our time on stories that are not really stories,” taxpayer-funded NPR likewise scoffed.
Then came 50 former intelligence officials to denounce Hunter’s laptop as a Russian plant, part of a disinformation campaign to get Trump re-elected. They didn’t have any evidence for this, they admitted, just the feels. Now the media had its angle, one they amplified endlessly until Biden’s victory was secured.
With Hunter’s laptop now authenticated, the New York Post recently chased down every one of those 50 intelligence figures for a retraction. Most didn’t respond. A few couldn’t be reached. Several dug their heals in. Not one walked back their perfidious story. “Intelligence”?
Now, with the Russia-Ukraine war in full swing, even more Biden family misdeeds are coming to light. The Daily Mail reported just this week that, per emails on his laptop, Hunter helped secure millions in funding for a US contractor specialising in deadly pathogen research in Ukraine biolabs. The same company has also partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, now acknowledged as the most likely source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
What else don’t we know about the Bidens? What else are we about to find out?
Most importantly, what is the future of political discourse in the West? Our democracies are rendered hollow if elites in Silicon Valley and on America’s coasts decide before an election what information can and cannot be seen by the public.
There has never been a more pressing need for regulation that will rein in Big Tech’s political partisanship and election interference. And never have everyday people needed more discernment as they assess the news stories put before them.
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
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Parents need to monitor how their kids use the world’s #1 most downloaded app and the #1 most visited website.
How much do you know about TikTok? Maybe you’ve heard of it but haven’t used it. Or if you have used TikTok, you may think of it as an app for sharing videos of teens doing funny dances or cute pets doing tricks, which it is. But it is more than that.
For starters, TikTok is now the world’s most downloaded app and the world’s #1 most visited website, ahead of Google (#2) and Facebook (#3). Every day, more than one billion different videos are viewed on TikTok. Experts agree that the key to its success is its unique algorithm. When you join TikTok, you are asked some questions about your interests and what sort of things you’d like to see. TikTok then offers you some of the most popular videos that match your interests and starts monitoring what you do. It takes note of which videos you watch and—crucially—how much time you spend watching them, and which videos you watch more than once. The algorithm then hones your preferences. Within hours, or even minutes, your videos become more specific, more customized to your interests.
The results are uncanny. “TikTok can read my mind” is a common refrain among young people, as the app soon starts serving up videos that are precisely what the viewer was hoping to see: whether it’s a funny cat video, or a video of synchronized swimming, or one about applying glitter make-up, or a video of a pretty girl dancing in a way that appeals to a particular teen boy and wearing precisely the outfit that boy finds most arousing, doing exactly the moves that the boy finds most irresistible. And the same is true of sexual variations. “TikTok knew I was bisexual (or gay, or trans) before I did” is a common trope online.
Is TikTok Harmful?
TikTok is customized. It can be addictive. But is it truly harmful to teens?
That depends on how a teen uses it.
Adolescence can be confusing. Young people are struggling to figure out who they are. Increasingly, they are looking online for clues and for guidance. Doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital used to see one, maybe two teenagers a year presenting with new-onset Tourette syndrome. Between spring 2020 and autumn 2021, that number skyrocketed to about 60. Psychiatrists worldwide—from the South Atlantic island of St Helena, to New Caledonia in the South Pacific, to almost anywhere on the planet where kids have access to the Internet—began reporting a surge of teenage girls self-diagnosing with Tourette syndrome. Many of these girls are shouting out “beans!” at unpredictable intervals. Psychiatrists in England call these girls “Evies” because their behavior resembles that of Evie Meg Field, whose TikTok videos have earned her more than 14 million followers and more than 500 million likes. In a characteristic video, Evie shouts out “beans” uncontrollably. In an earlier era, the sudden appearance of myriad teenage girls shouting out “beans” might have been called mass hysteria. Today, the preferred term is “social media induced illness.”
Other issues can lead quickly down a rabbit hole. Go to TikTok and type “how can I lose weight?” and it will offer many options. The TikTok hashtag #diet has had over 11 billion views. There, you will find videos encouraging viewers that simply doing some planks and leg lifts will result in becoming slim in just 16 days (that particular video has had over 32 million views). Scrolling through the videos, it’s easy to be drawn into a spiral of more videos that speak directly to an individual situation. Alyssa Moukheiber, a dietitian at a residential treatment center for eating disorders in northern Illinois, says, “The TikTok algorithm is just too freaking strong.” The algorithm sucks girls into a world that promises physical perfection for just trying a little harder.
Girls who post videos on TikTok soon discover that their online popularity is linked to their sexuality. Newport Academy is an Atlanta-based treatment center for eating disorders. Crystal Burwell, the program’s director of outpatient services, recently noted that 60% of the girls treated since last summer have posted “sexually inappropriate” videos on TikTok. A similar observation comes from Paul Sunseri, director of the New Horizons Child and Family Institute in El Dorado Hills, California, who is concerned about the growing number of girls who are posting sexualized videos on TikTok. “For a young girl who’s developing her identity, to be swept up into a sexual world like that is hugely destructive,” he says. “When teen girls are rewarded for their sexuality, they come to believe that their value is in how they look.” Sunseri estimates that about one-quarter of the girls at his clinic have posted sexualized content on TikTok.
Boys are not immune. A growing number of teen boys are getting sucked into TikTok’s algorithm, which often means they are seeing TikTok videos of young men who are bigger, more muscular, than they are. That can lead to “bigorexia,” boys becoming obsessed with acquiring the muscle-bound look exemplified by The Rock and the entire cinematic Marvel universe of he-men.
Advice for parents
So, what’s a parent to do about TikTok?
The first step is for parents to have a frank conversation with their daughters—and their sons—about the dangers of TikTok. I have heard teen girls say, “I saw it on TikTok” with the same air of authority as a middle-aged woman a few years back might have said, “I heard it on Dr. Oz.” In both cases, the speaker is citing an authority they believe to be unchallengeable. Parents, make sure your kids understand that a TikTok video is not authoritative, even it has 10 million likes.
At what age should a child be allowed to be on TikTok? Jean Twenge, our nation’s leading researcher on how social media impacts child and adolescent development, recommends that no child under 13 should be on any social media, including TikTok. And I would add that many 13-year-olds aren’t ready. TikTok offers a curated version of their app for under-13s. Don’t use it. That watered-down version is designed to fuel interest in the grown-up version. Twelve-year-olds don’t like to be on the kiddie version of anything. And tweens quickly figure out that if they lie about their age, they can easily access the full version.
As with any social media, the parent must limit, govern, and guide their teen’s use. At this time, we don’t have evidence that 10 or 15 minutes a day on TikTok, or social media in general, is harmful. One study of more than 220,000 teens found that the risk of bad outcomes began to increase after more than 30 minutes of social media a day, on average (see, for example, Figure 3). However, that study was published in 2019, based on data gathered before TikTok became the most-viewed social media for teens. An hour a day on TikTok is definitely too much. Kids have better things to do with their time than spending an hour a day on TikTok. So I advise parents to install parental monitoring apps to limit how much time kids are spending on TikTok.
That’s where many parents push back. One parent told me: “I think it’s important to show my daughter that I trust her. Installing a monitoring app implies that I don’t trust her. Besides, I already use the TikTok Family Pairing option, so that I can see what my daughter is doing in the app.” I remind parents that I see many teens who have created two TikTok accounts. One is the “clean” account which they show to their parents and which their parents follow on the Family Pairing option. The other is the real account, where the daughter is watching, or posting, the videos she doesn’t want her parents to see.
Then the parent says: “My daughter would never create a secret account just to deceive me.” I explain that if all the girl’s friends are doing it and advising her to do it, what is that girl supposed to say to her friends? It’s not reasonable to expect a modern American girl to say, “I know all you guys are doing it, but I won’t do it because I don’t want to deceive my parents.” The parent needs to allow the daughter to tell her friends, “I can’t do that, because my parents have installed this evil monitoring app that sees everything I do!”
Anne Sena is Director of Technology at St David’s School in Raleigh, North Carolina. She recently told me that she uses the Bark parental monitoring app to monitor and limit her teen’s online activities across social media, email, web browsers, and YouTube. She likes that Bark installs a VPN so that the controls are in place when her teen is outside of the home network, for example at a friend’s house or using a network provided by a cell phone. In Sena’s own home, she uses the Circle Home Plus device as well as the Apple’s screen time controls and Microsoft Family Safety to enforce time limits and provide an added layer of search protection on the family’s home computers. There are other similar monitoring and filtering programs out there, including the Canopy app, for parents to choose from.
“That sounds like a lot of work,” one mother told me the other day when I suggested that she follow Sena’s example. And it may be, especially for those of us who are not as knowledgeable about VPNs and screen time controls. But if taking these steps decreases the risk of more teens becoming anxious and/or depressed, I think the extra effort is worth it.
I recently spoke with a young woman who is a senior in college. She admits that she used to spend up to four hours a day on TikTok. But one of her professors inspired her to take control of her time, and she now spends 5 minutes a day, or less, on the app. She says she has reconfigured TikTok to show her only those videos that are closely related to her professional interests. She gives her professor the credit for inspiring her to cut back. I am inclined to give her the credit for finding the courage to govern herself—even when many of her peers can’t, or won’t.
Dr. Leonard Sax MD PhD attended public schools in Shaker Heights Ohio from kindergarten through grade 12. He enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge Massachusetts in the… More by Leonard Sax
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UPDATE: Governor Ron DeSantis questions Disney’s activism against a new law protecting elementary school children:
“To have transgenderism injected into kindergarten classrooms? Or woke gender ideology injected into second grade classrooms? Why is this the hill [for Disney] to die on?”
Now we have Disney corporate president Karey Burke says she supports having “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories.” And Burke wants 50% of Disney characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities.
SCOOP: Disney corporate president Karey Burke says, "as the mother [of] one transgender child and one pansexual child," she supports having "many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories" and wants a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities. pic.twitter.com/oFRUiuu9JG
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022
It also appears that Disney doesn’t care for certain pronouns like: ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls. No know those ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls that go to Disney parks. I wonder if Disney can define what a woman is???
Disney has eliminated all mentions of ‘ladies,’ ‘gentlemen,’ ‘boys,’ and ‘girls’ in its theme parks https://t.co/cUrweZrQdJ
Lifelong family-oriented supporters of the Walt Disney Company will be sad to learn that Disney is no ally to traditional social values. 2ndVote currently scores the Walt Disney Company at a measly 1.67 — and we’re not optimistic about that score improving in light of the company’s brainwashing of little children with an episode of their famed Muppet Babies television show promoting gender confusion.
There are several problems with Disney’s decision. First, biologically, there are just two sexes. Second, Disney should focus on wholesome entertainment, not overtly political social activism. Third, Disney has actively engaged on the issue of gender identity in a way which attempted to restrict the rights of millions of Americans.
We’ve been tracking Disney’s actions against traditional American values for years. In 2016, the company stood against North Carolina bill HB2, claiming that allowing business owners to choose their own bathroom policies was bigotry. Disney canceled events, costing local business owners a lot of money. More recently, Disney endorsed the Equality Act – a bill that has nothing to do with equality, and everything to do with pushing a very specific cultural agenda. Religious organizations would be under threat because of the Equality Act – a clear violation of Basic Freedoms found in the First Amendment.
When Disney puts its financial resources behind movements that seek to compel anti-American values, Americans suffer. These movements are potentially harmful to everything from freedom of speech to religious liberty. The next time you’re looking to enjoy some family-style entertainment, consider an alternative to Disney which won’t play against your traditional values.
The trick to the entertainment industry is that Hollywood Studios (owned by Disney), Universal Pictures (1.00), Netflix (2.29), and other top entities also rank poorly on the 2ndVote scale. They simply don’t support America’s constitutional and human freedoms of religion, speech, firearms, etc. Therefore, we encourage you to support regional theme parks like Kentucky Kingdom (3.00) and Six Flags (3.00) instead. As for digital entertainment, organizations like PureFlix (3.73) have the kind of wholesome, fun entertainment that Disney used to prioritize. We urge you to spend your hard-earned money with those organizations, and contact Disney and urge them to return to entertainment, not left-wing politics.
Now we learn that the Disney Company has made it their mission to push the radical LGBTQ+ agenda in their films and products.
We have written about how Disney has been grooming your children to be gay. Now we have videos of key Disney staff members discussing “adding queerness” to their films, like “Lightyear.”
Disney CEO Bob Chapek initially said his company would not take sides in the [Parental Rights in Education Bill] controversy. Then came the loud, expected rhetoric from the rabid LGBTQ left, with their nasty accusations that Disney was anti-gay and hateful for not vocally opposing the law.
Again, the Florida law is simply designed to protect the youngest grade-school children from being taught lies, such as their birth gender might possibly be a freak of nature and that they can change it.
As a result, Disney quickly abandoned its neutral position for one of total surrender. Chapek apologized to his employees in a letter, telling them, “You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down. I am sorry.”
As a result, and to the delight of homosexual activists everywhere, Disney has announced it will restore a previously cut lesbian kissing scene in its June Pixar release of the kid’s movie “Lightyear.”
Disney doesn’t think you will care, nor does it think Christian parents and grandparents will take a stand for their children and grandchildren. I think you will.
I encourage you to join with me and other parents in telling Disney you’re not buying what they are selling.
Watch this series of video discussions from Disney’s All-Hands meeting between Disney executive producer Latoya Raveneau, Equality Florida and Disney’s activism partner Nadine Smith:
SCOOP: I've obtained video from inside Disney's all-hands meeting about the Florida parental rights bill, in which executive producer Latoya Raveneau says her team has implemented a "not-at-all-secret gay agenda" and is regularly "adding queerness" to children's programming. pic.twitter.com/eJnZMpKIXT
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022
SCOOP: Disney's activism partner Nadine Smith of Equality Florida tells LGBTQ employees that @GovRonDeSantis and @ChristinaPushaw want to "erase you, "criminalize your existence," and "take your kids"—a wild conspiracy theory that Republicans want to kidnap gay people's children. pic.twitter.com/Ger3a2xekI
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022
SCOOP: Disney's activism partner Nadine Smith of Equality Florida tells LGBTQ employees that @GovRonDeSantis and @ChristinaPushaw want to "erase you, "criminalize your existence," and "take your kids"—a wild conspiracy theory that Republicans want to kidnap gay people's children. pic.twitter.com/Ger3a2xekI
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022
Here’s a response to all of this insanity from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis:
Businesses profiting from China’s slave labor shouldn’t be lecturing Florida about protecting children. They seem to have amnesia when it comes to their own actions. pic.twitter.com/DDdf6UUqDp
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2022-03-30 06:40:442022-03-31 07:14:52VIDEOS: Warning — Disney Now Adding ‘Queerness’ to It’s Films like ‘Lightyear’
U.S. drug regulators have directed health care workers in eight states to stop using a COVID-19 treatment because it may not be effective against an Omicron coronavirus subvariant that’s rising in prevalence.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said stotrovimab, a monoclonal antibody used to treat COVID-19, can no longer be used in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Providers in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands also have been told to stop using stotrovimab.
Regulators believe that the treatment, which was given emergency use authorization in May 2021, “is unlikely to be effective against the BA.2 subvariant,” the FDA said in a statement.
According to genomic surveillance conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, BA.2 was responsible for 12.6 percent of COVID-19 cases in the United States in the week ending on March 5. But the agency projected an increase to 35 percent in the week ending on March 19, and the subvariant was pegged as circulating widely in the northeast.
Based on the estimates, BA.2 is responsible for the majority of the cases in the states where the administration of sotrovimab is now limited.
Several studies have indicated that sotrovimab doesn’t perform well against BA.2, including one published in Nature Medicine.
But GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology, the makers of the drug, have said that testing suggested that the treatment retained neutralizing activity against BA.2.
The companies said on March 25 that they were aware of the FDA’s move and are preparing to send a data package to the agency and other regulatory authorities that show a higher dose of sotrovimab works against BA.2……read the rest.
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http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2022-03-30 06:05:062022-03-30 06:08:56FDA Tells Doctors in 8 States to Stop Using COVID-19 Treatment
President Biden’s trip to Poland was one of the most disastrous foreign trips we have ever seen by a POTUS. Biden denies making his numerous gaffes, despite the video evidence. Once again, the Biden Administration is a dangerous joke. Watch below.
Today in a disaster of a press conference, Joe Biden played dumb about his administration's scramble to walk back several of his own comments.
Much of President Biden’s speech in Warsaw, Poland, on Saturday was strong and forcefully delivered, certainly by his standards. But the major headline takeaway, quite literally, was an ad-lib remark, injected on the fly by the president near the very end of his address. He effectively called for regime change in Moscow, asserting that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.” In uttering just a few unplanned words, Biden made enormous geopolitical news:
Will many people agree that the world would be better off if Putin – a brutal thug – and his band of kleptocrats were no longer running Russia? Of course. People arguing that Biden was right to say what he said are appealing to this widely-shared sentiment. But the words of the president of the United States carry substantial weight, and statements that are tantamount to calls for regime change in a foreign government cannot be unleashed flippantly.
Quick note: Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here. We will not waver. We will not tire. We will not falter, and we will not fail. Freedom will prevail. Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.
In doing so, she accused the government of all sorts of ethics and human rights violations. While there is no reason why the clueless and corrupt military and intelligence establishment couldn’t have committed these misdeeds, Jackson was just working from knee-jerk Leftist anti-Americanism. That reflex should have no place on the Supreme Court.
President Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court represented suspected terrorists when she was a federal public defender, going well beyond a bare-bones defense to lambaste the U.S. government for some if its counterterrorism policies and broader approach to the War on Terror.
Biden on Friday nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson, currently a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court….
During her time in the federal public defender’s office, Jackson represented Guantanamo detainees who challenged their imprisonment in a federal court in Washington, D.C.
One of the most prominent cases involved Jackson representing Khiali-Gul, who the Defense Department said was a Taliban intelligence officer in charge of a terrorist cell planning to attack a U.S. base in Afghanistan in 2002. He may have also met with Osama bin Laden in November 2001, according to government documents.
The Defense Department assessed that if released Gul would immediately “seek out prior associates and reengage in hostilities and extremist support activities.”
Gul said he was innocent, claiming he had a job in the Afghan government and helped Americans.
During Jackson’s confirmation hearings for her current position last year and to be a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2012, Republican senators grilled the nominee on her work for Guantanamo Bay detainees. Jackson, whose brother served in Iraq, responded she was just doing her job and public duty.
“In all of those situations, the views that were expressed were the views of my clients that I represented them in that capacity, and the briefs did not necessarily represent my personal views with regard to the War on Terror or anything else,” she said in 2012.
Nine years later, as part of her appeals court confirmation process, Jackson told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she was “keenly and personally mindful of the tragic and deplorable circumstances that gave rise to the U.S. government’s apprehension and detention of the persons who were secured at Guantanamo Bay.”
However, in the Gul case, Jackson went beyond simply defending her client against terrorism charges and attacked the conduct of the U.S. government, accusing it of torturing prisoners while condemning the George W. Bush administration’s War on Terror policies.
For example, Jackson claimed Gul was treated inhumanely at Guantanamo, arguing the military treated Guantanamo detainees the same as prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where U.S. government personnel abused and humiliated some of the inmates.
“Many of the most egregious interrogation techniques used in the Abu Ghraib detention center and other detention facilities in Iraq — such as the use of aggressive dogs to intimidate detainees, sexual humiliation, stress positions, and sensory deprivation — were pioneered at Guantanamo,” Jackson wrote in a petition she filed in 2005 on Gul’s behalf.
However, as the Washington Free Beacon noted, a Pentagon inspector general report from 2005 rejected that assessment, as did Vice Admiral Albert Church in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee….
While defending Gul, Jackson also accused government lawyers of ethical breaches, and in 2006 she asked the judge presiding over the case to sanction Justice Department attorneys over the government’s response to detainee suicides….
Jackson accused the government of violating detainees’ rights and suggested it tried to hide the seizure from the court. She asked a federal judge to impose sanctions.
In response, Justice Department lawyers wrote, “Petitioners’ filings reflect a penchant for ignoring or dismissing as lies any fact or matter inconsistent with a preconceived ‘torture narrative’ concerning Guantanamo.”
The judge rejected Jackson’s request for sanctions and said the NCIS acted appropriately.
Ultimately, Gul was repatriated to his native Afghanistan in 2014. It’s unclear whether he returned to extremism as the Pentagon warned he would if released from Guantanamo.
When Jackson left the government for private practice in 2007, she continued to advocate on behalf of Guantanamo detainees.
In 2008, Jackson was a lawyer at Morrison & Foerster and got involved in the highly controversial Supreme Court case, Boumediene v. Bush, which had profound legal implications for the War on Terror.
“Do we treat terrorism with a war paradigm of justice or a criminal paradigm: Do we treat terrorists like war criminals or bank robbers?” That, according to Burlingame, was the central question of the case, in which Guantanamo detainees asserted a constitutional right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court.
The Supreme Court chose bank robbers: In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that Guantanamo prisoners had a right to the writ of habeus corpus under the U.S. Constitution.
Jackson and two other lawyers filed an amicus brief on behalf of retired federal judges who backed the Guantanamo prisoners. In the brief, Jackson argued that some decisions to detain individuals were based on statements extracted under torture and that efforts by the U.S. government to review these decisions weren’t sufficient to stop the problem….
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 Watch2022-03-30 05:35:332022-03-30 05:35:33Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson got hardened jihadis released from Guantánamo
Hating America is de rigueur on the Left these days. Everyone’s doing it. Why shouldn’t the VOA join in? But this rot in the very institutions that should be protecting and defending the nation will one day eat its way all the way through.
In light of Voice of America News’ (VOA) failure to respond to dozens of FOIA requests over alleged pro-Islamic bias in its Persian reporting, the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) filed a lawsuit last week accusing VOA of withholding communications that demonstrate the broadcasting service’s role in disseminating “messages opposed to American interest.”
The American Accountability Foundation (AAF), a political watchdog group that investigates and reports on bureaucratic overreach that impacts constitutional liberties, shared its complaint against the U.S. government-funded international radio broadcaster and news outlet with Breitbart News on Sunday.
In it, Voice of America (VOA), an independent arm of the U.S. government, is accused of failing to respond to nearly 60 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests throughout an investigation into allegations that VOA was “amplifying anti-American and pro-Islamist reporting” targeting both Iranians in the region as well as Iranian-Americans.
“Voice of America and the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) have a history of pushing partisan propaganda and manipulating the visa system to benefit shady foreign nationals,” said AAF founder Tom Jones in a statement to Breitbart News.
“Now, while using American taxpayer dollars, they are openly violating FOIA rules to shield their bad behavior from the public,” he added….
AAF alleges in its lawsuit that locals in the Middle East have raised concerns that “VOA has been infiltrated by anti-American, pro-Islamic state interests, and that the message of VOA had been compromised in a manner that was biased toward the Islamic state factions in Iran.”…
In a statement to Breitbart News, Iranian advocacy group Iranian Americans for Liberty (IAL) threw its support behind the lawsuit….
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2022-03-30 05:21:092022-03-30 05:22:51Watchdog sues Voice of America for ‘amplifying anti-American and pro-Islamist reporting’
Jailbreak organizations with financial ties to leftwing billionaires George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg are lobbying New York lawmakers to preserve the state’s “bail reform” policies that help keep accused criminals out of jail, according to Breitbart News.
Disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into state law measures that allow suspects accused of second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, child sex crimes, and making threats of terrorism to walk free from jail without ever having to post bail.
Coinciding with the state law is New York City’s Supervised Release Program, which allows thousands of criminal suspects to be released following their arrests without having to post bail or be monitored by social workers.
As a result, crime in New York City has skyrocketed. Statistics show that although murders are down compared to the same time last year, rapes have increased 24 percent, robberies 46 percent, grand larceny nearly 60 percent, grand larceny auto 85 percent, and transit crimes more than 70 percent.
“The most important city on the globe has become the laughingstock of the globe. And the dysfunctionality of our city has cascaded throughout the entire country,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) told a crowd of hundreds of New York Police officers this week.
Polling released this week shows that about 56 percent of New Yorkers believe the bail reform law has been bad for the state while just 3 in 10 said it is good policy. Nearly 64 percent said the law has increased crime across the state.
On July 13, 2020, OSF, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and its allies, pledged to donate $220 million into initiatives designed to help “build power in Black communities, promote bold new anti-racist policies in U.S. cities, and help first-time activists stay engaged.” The pledge earmarked $150 million in five-year grants for black-led “racial justice” organizations, and $70 million for a range of initiatives such as helping city governments reform policing and criminal justice by implementing a new approach to public safety that includes “moving beyond the culture of criminalization and incarceration.” “This is the time for urgent and bold action to address racial injustice in America,” said OSF deputy chair Alex Soros, George Soros’s son. “These investments will empower proven leaders in the Black community to reimagine policing, end mass incarceration, and eliminate the barriers to opportunity that have been the source of inequity for too long.” Tom Perriello, executive director of Open Society-U.S., said: “The success of this movement, the largest in U.S. history, will be measured over years, not weeks, and we cannot say that Black lives matter and not make a multi-year commitment to a strategy set by and centering Black leaders and organizations who changed America’s sense of what is possible.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Discover The Networkshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDiscover The Networks2022-03-30 04:59:582022-03-30 04:59:58Groups Linked to Zuckerberg, Soros Lobby to Keep Accused NY Criminals Out of Jail
Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) pressed FBI Assistant Director for the Cyber Division Bryan Vorndran in a Tuesday committee meeting on whether the laptop created cyber vulnerabilities for the country. After Vorndran stone walled Rep. Gaetz the Congressman announced that he had uploaded to contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop into the Congressional Record.
Moments ago, I successfully entered the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s laptop into the Congressional Record.
BOMBSHELL: Matt Gaetz officially enters Hunter Biden’s laptop from HELL into the CONGRESSIONAL RECORD as Democrats literally SCREAM pic.twitter.com/n7RHyco4cd
Rep. Gaetz, “What now you’re telling me right here is that as the Assistant Director of FBI Cyber, you don’t know where this is, after it was turned over to you three years ago?”
Gaetz announced he would introduce legislation, called the “Spook Who Cried Wolf Resolution,” to indefinitely bar security clearances for 51 former U.S. intelligence officials who signed what he called “a letter decrying the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation.”
Growing evidence Joe Biden benefitted from Hunter’s overseas ‘business grift’
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2022-03-30 04:30:282022-03-30 04:45:55Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz enters Hunter Biden’s laptop into the Congressional Record
Earlier this year and to the delight of parents everywhere, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the state legislature passed the “Parental Rights in Education Bill,” which prohibits public schools from indoctrinating children grades K-3 with pro-gay, pro-transgender propaganda.
Disney CEO Bob Chapek initially said his company would not take sides in the controversy. Then came the loud, expected rhetoric from the rabid LGBTQ left, with their nasty accusations that Disney was anti-gay and hateful for not vocally opposing the law.
Again, the Florida law is simply designed to protect the youngest grade-school children from being taught lies, such as their birth gender might possibly be a freak of nature and that they can change it.
As a result, Disney quickly abandoned its neutral position for one of total surrender. Chapek apologized to his employees in a letter, telling them, “You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down. I am sorry.”
As a result, and to the delight of homosexual activists everywhere, Disney has announced it will restore a previously cut lesbian kissing scene in its June Pixar release of the kid’s movie “Lightyear.”
Disney doesn’t think you will care, nor does it think Christian parents and grandparents will take a stand for their children and grandchildren. I think you will.
TAKE ACTION
I encourage you to join with me and other parents in telling Disney you’re not buying what they are selling.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00American Family Associationhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngAmerican Family Association2022-03-29 16:04:302022-03-29 16:04:30TAKE ACTION: Christians should boycott Disney’s new move ‘Lightyear’
The pattern here is clear. Americans are fleeing highly-regulated, highly taxed areas and flocking to freer states.
America’s largest metro areas saw massive declines in population, new US Census Bureau data show.
Three of the top five metros that saw sharp declines between July 1, 2020, and July 1, 2021 were in California. Leading the way was the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area, which lost 176,000 residents, a 1.3 percent drop. Next was the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metro, which saw a decline of 116,000 residents (2.5 percent decline), followed by San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, which shed some 43,000 residents (2.2 percent drop).
“We are in this new demographic era for California of very slow or maybe even negative growth,” Hans Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California, told the Los Angeles Times. “And it does have implications for everything in our state — from how we live our lives to which schools are getting closed down to how much capacity we might need for transportation networks, and eventually to housing.”
California metros had company, however.
The New York-Newark-New Jersey metropolitan area saw a decline of 328,000 residents, the highest in the nation in raw numbers. The Chicago area, meanwhile, saw a decline of some 92,000 residents.
When people talk about "the Great Reset," I'm not sure this is what they had in mind. pic.twitter.com/1xv1bpKIkm
The reasons people choose to migrate are complex and varied. The Times points out that many people who left California were seeking job opportunities and affordable housing, citing the skyrocketing costs of homes in the Golden State because of NIMBYism and other regulations. Other articles point out that harsh lockdowns drove many young people out of cities during the pandemic. And then there is the rise of remote work, which has allowed many workers to leave metropolitan areas without losing their job.
Jena Lords and her husband were among the 262,000 California residents who gave up on the state. She and her husband had talked about leaving Bakersfield for years before finally pulling the trigger in early 2021 for a variety of reasons.
“The top reason was 2nd Amendment rights,” Lords, 39, told the Times. “There’s also the high cost of living, tax fees, regulations.”
After living for months in an RV, the couple eventually purchased a $140,000 home on a half-acre of land in Idaho, about one hour south of Idaho Falls.
“The hardest thing was leaving our friends and family — and the beach, of course,” Lords said. “It’s amazing, the difference in culture. It’s a real small-town feel.”
Voting With Your Feet
Again, the reasons people choose to migrate tend to be complex and varied, as the Lords’ story shows. However, we can see the US flight from its largest metropolitan is part of a bigger trend.
North American Van Lines (NAVL), a trucking company based in Indiana, puts out an annual report that tracks migration patterns in the United States. The states with the most inbound migration in 2021 were South Carolina, Idaho, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida. The leading outbound states were Illinois, California, New Jersey, Michigan, and New York.
The pattern here is clear. Americans are fleeing highly-regulated, highly taxed states. They are flocking to freer states.
“States with a lower cost of living and lower taxes continued to pull Americans from more expensive states in 2021,” the report authors state. “With a major shift toward remote work for several occupations, along with continually rising housing costs, people are rapidly moving from the coasts and Midwest to the South and Southwest.”
This is one of the great strengths of the American system. In his book, Free to Move legal scholar Ilya Somin argues that one of the reasons the United States is in crisis is that citizens can no longer keep track of all the activities governments perform, as politicians and bureaucrats serve narrow interest groups.
Unfortunately, Somin points out that changing this culture is difficult. The reality is, citizens have very little power to change government through the ballot box; the odds of a voter changing the outcome of an election with a ballot are astronomically low, even in most state and local elections. Things, however, are much different when citizens “vote with their feet.”
“When you decide what jurisdiction to live in, that’s a decision over which you have real control,” Somin pointed out. “That in turn creates strong incentives to seek out relevant information and evaluate it in an unbiased way. You wouldn’t move to a new neighborhood, let alone a new state, without knowing what it’s like.”
Americans are making conscious, deliberate decisions to abandon metropolitan areas that are increasingly expensive, confiscatory, and in some cases increasingly violent, filthy, and dysfunctional.
We heard a great deal about “the Great Reset” during the pandemic. It may be that the reset is something much different than the people using that phrase had in mind.
It may be that “the reset” involves Americans abandoning high-tax, high-regulatory cities and states for freer ones. That’s a reset Americans should welcome.
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.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2022-03-29 15:52:562022-03-29 15:53:32The Exodus From U.S. Cities Is Gaining Speed, New Census Data Show
On May 30, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted: “anyways yel3an el yahood [curse the Jews].”
On June 3, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted: “It’s my little sisters first day of first grade and I asked her what she learned today and she said “yel3an el yahood [Curse the Jews]” nah where was this curriculum when i was in school …”
The U.S. State Department adopted the IHRA’s working definition of anti-Semitism in 2016. Twenty-eight European countries, as well as Canada, Australia, Israel and Argentina, have also adopted the definition.
Violent Hatred of Zionists
On October 25, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted: “Oh no how horrifying that I want to kill my colonizer!!” Mashayekh’s tweet was in response to a Canary Mission tweet that read: “It is HORRIFYING that the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Senator from @USCViterbi Yasmeen Mashayekh tweeted: ‘I want to kill every motherf**king zionist.’”
On May 9, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted: “I want to kill every motherf**king zionist.”
On May 11, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted: “Palestinian youth set settlers on fire in Haifa.” Mashayekh’s tweet included a video of the incident featuring superimposed Arabic text that read: “A Jew’s head was set ablaze in Haifa a while ago. Long live the heroes’ arms.”
On May 11, 2021, during Israel’s “Operation Guardian of the Walls(OGW)” against Hamas in Gaza, violent Arab riots broke out in Haifa and Lod, Israeli cities with large Arab populations. The rioters in Haifa reportedly “threw rocks, launched fireworks, and hurled bottles at the various demonstrations,” according to police. They also burned trash cans.
On May 12, 2021, a Twitter user responded to her tweet and wrote: “They should’ve filled it with gas and lit them zionists up” to which Mashayekh replied: “LMFAOOOOOO [Laughing my f**king a** off] THEY DID THOUGH.”
Ownership claims to lands in Silwan, a Palestinian-dominated community in East Jerusalem, have been hotly contested as many Jews and Palestinians possess conflicting deeds to the same properties, with Jews holding deeds that pre-date those held by Palestinians.Jews who have attempted to reclaim their properties and move into Silwan have been frequently met with Palestinian violence.
Mashayekh retweeted a June 27, 2021 tweet that read: “When we say free Palestine we mean ALL OF PALESTINE! We want all of 48 back.”
On June 21, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted: “If you are not for the complete destruction of Israel and the occupation forces then you’re anti-Palestinian.”
On May 8, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted: “Yes I f**king love hamas now stfu [shut the f**k up].”
Hamas is a designated terrorist organizationby the United States, the European Union, Britain, Canada, Australia, Japan and Israel. Since the 1990s, Hamas has been carrying out suicide bombings and rocket attacks against civilian targets, wounding and killing thousands of Israelis.
On May 13, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted: “We ask everyone to stop filming/sharing footage of the firing of rockets towards the Zionist state because it will negatively affect our resistance. Not sharing will stop [Israel’s] ability to pinpoint where the rockets are being fired from. We are all responsible.”
On May 29, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted a photo of a Hamas militant walking alongside a child with his arm perched on the child’s shoulder and captioned it: “I love this picture so much.”
Hamas’s founding charter called for the murder of Jews, while the terror group’s “summer camps” have taught children how to wage war.
On June 25, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted: “I thirst over NOBODY except Abu Obaida ofc [of course].”
The tweet included a photo of a physical copy of the terrorist organization, the PFLP’s, official manifesto, Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, that she had received from anti-Israel activist Shatha Ayman.
The U.S. State Department has listed the PFLP as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) since 1997, given its history of attacks against civilians, airplane hijackings and suicide bombings. In 2014, two PFLP terrorists murdered five Jewish men in prayer and one Druze police officer in a Jerusalem synagogue with an ax and gun.
The group’s manifesto lists [p.4-10] the PFLP’s enemies as Israel, “World Zionist Movement,” the U.S. and “World Imperialism” and claims [p.62] that the liberation of Palestine cannot be achieved “except through armed struggle and a protracted popular liberation war.”
On September 23, 2020, Mashayekh posted a renowned photo of Leila Khaled to Instagram and captioned it: “LEILA KHALED: PALESTINIAN LIBERATION ICON.”
Khaled has said that the second intifada failed because it was not violent enough, advocated for the use of children in terror activities and compared Zionists to Nazis.
Mashayekh retweeted a June 29, 2021 tweet from the PYM that read: “KHADER ADNAN ENDS 25-DAY HUNGER STRIKE AND IS FREE! Palestinian political prisoner, Khader Adnan, ends his historic 25-day Hunger Strike & is free from Zionist detention after his abduction from a checkpoint near Nablus on May 30th.FREE ALL OUR POLITICAL PRISONERS! .”
Khader Adnan is a senior member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist organization. A 2007 YouTube video showed Adnan praising and encouraging suicide bombings: “Who among you will carry the next explosive belt? Who among you will fire the next bullets? Who among you will have his body parts blown all over?”
Mashayekh retweeted a July 4, 2021 tweet that read: “Ooooof free Yasmine [Jaber]! Israel jails East Jerusalem woman for aiding Lebanon’s Hezbollah.”
Yasmine Jaber was reportedly recruited by “Hezbollah operatives at a conference in 2015 and asked to recruit others in east Jerusalem.… and communicated with them via social media.” An Israeli court reportedly sentenced Jaber to 30 months in prison, probation and a fine in a plea bargain, after Jaber acknowledged aiding Hezbollah over several years.
Promoting Incitement
On May 11, 2021, during Israel’s OGW in Gaza, Mashayekh tweeted: “LONG LIVE THE INTIFADA.”
Since the early 2000’s, the term “intifada” has carried the connotation of violence.
On May 7-10, 2021, violent clashes broke out between Palestinian worshippers and Israeli police at the Al Aqsa compound, following claims the Al Aqsa mosque was in danger.
The allegation that Jews “threaten” to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque has been a traditional pretext for Arab attacks on Jews long before the existence of the modern Jewish state.
Mashayekh retweeted a June 24, 2021 tweet that read: “#photo Israeli settlers stormed the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque this morning, protected by the occupation forces.”
Demonizing Israel
On June 27, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted: “oppose occupation oppose apartheid oppose colonialism oppose ethnic cleansing #SaveSilwan.”
On June 26, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted: “Israel has no history, just a criminal record.”
In 2017, JVP launched the “Deadly Exchange” campaign that accused American Jewish organizations of promoting human rights abuses. JVP also released a video that blamed [00:04:04] U.S.-based Jewish organizations for violence that occurs against Black and Brown communities, immigrants and activists in the U.S.”
Endorsing an Anti-Israel Agitator
Mashayekh retweeted a June 26, 2021 tweet by anti-Israel agitator Mohammed El-Kurd that read: “Israeli terrorist forces arresting people left and right in Sheikh Jarrah, making our families’ lives a living hell… sick of these fascists #SaveSheikhJarrah.”
In May 2021, Palestinian violence erupted in anticipation of an Israel High Court ruling on eviction proceedings concerning over 70 Palestinian tenants illegally residing in Jewish-owned properties in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
El-Kurd was one of the Palestinian tenants whose family was illegally residing in Jewish-owned properties in Sheikh Jarrah. In May 2021, El-Kurd returned from the United States to his family home, following a February 16, 2021 Israeli District Court ruling to evict over 70 Palestinian tenants.
Mashayekh retweeted a June 21, 2021 tweet from El-Kurd that read: “Israeli occupation soldiers are rabid terrorists.”
Anti-Israel Activism
On June 9, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted: “Thank you everyone who placed an order! 100% of profits have been donated to PCRF [Palestine Children’s Relief Fund]. Please please please continue to support us by spreading awareness.”
On May 12, 2021, Mashayekh tweeted: “HI!!! I HAVE SOMETHING TO PROMOTE! PLEASE FOLLOW @palyouthmvmt FOR UPDATES FROM PALESTINE AND INFORMATION REGARDING PROTESTS AND SUCH ❤️.”
On May 8, 2021, Mashayekh promoted to Twitter a May 15, 2021 “LA RALLY & PROTEST” titled “Nakba 73 – Resistance Until Liberation Rally.”
Nakba is generally translated as “catastrophe” in Arabic, referring to the outcome of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It is a term often used to delegitimize the creation of the State of Israel by defining it as a catastrophe.
Mashayekh shared the event flyer to Twitter and captioned it: “LOS ANGELES!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Also, on May 8, 2021, Mashayekh promoted another May 15, 2021 “RALLY & PROTEST” in Houston. The event was titled “Nakba 73: We Will Return” and was co-organized by the PYM. Mashayekh captioned the post: “HOUSTON !!!!!!!!!!!”
Supporting BDS
Mashayekh retweeted a June 29, 2021 tweet that read: “Also now more than ever it’s SO IMPORTANT to boycott boycott BOYCOTT… #SaveSilwan.”
On June 8, 2021, Mashayekh responded to a tweet and wrote: “This is what I use but you might wanna double check if it’s bds friendly .”
Mashayekh retweeted a June 6, 2021 tweet that read: “boycott zionist twitter. i dont wanna see anyone engage anymore.”
BDS
The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 as an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement” to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.”
In 2015, Barghouti was quoted saying that “BDS aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was, and to isolate its regime of oppression in order to achieve our UN-stipulated rights.”
The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas.
BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel and anti-Israel rallies and protests.
The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments, backed by anti-Israel affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of — or divestment from — Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.
These boycott resolutions, although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.
BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. In 2013, when the student government of the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats and the spitting on a student wearing a Star of David necklace.
“We ask everyone to stop filming/sharing footage of the firing of rockets towards the Zionist state because it will negatively affect our resistance.” Yasmeen Mashayekh, Twitter, May 13 2021
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nah where was this curriculum when i was in school 
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