Sunday [July 4th] on Twitter, prominent Democrats chose to honor the anniversary of our nation’s birth by trashing the Declaration of Independence as a racist document because it was written almost 250 years ago, when there was slavery in the United States.
Unhinged demagogue Rep. Maxine Waters predictably tweeted, “July 4th… & so, the Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal. Equal to what? What men? Only white men? Isn’t it something that they wrote this in 1776 when African Americans were enslaved? They weren’t thinking about us then, but we’re thinking about us now!”
Rep. Cori Bush, one of Congress’ most hateful radicals, wrote, “When they say that the 4th of July is about American freedom, remember this: the freedom they’re referring to is for white people. This land is stolen land and Black people still aren’t free.”
Black people still aren’t free, and yet somehow Cori Bush managed to get elected to Congress. How do demagogues like this get away with making such blatantly false statements?
Rep. Jamaal Bowman, another leftist radical, tweeted, “Let us reflect on the full story of America today. Black people were not freed in 1776. Despite a system stacked against us, we must continue to use our collective power to change that system.”
What shameful, distorted anti-Americanism from some of our nation’s leaders. This should be considered treasonous.
Calling for “More Confrontational” Street Protests if Officer Chauvin Is Not Convicted of Murdering George Floyd
On April 17, 2021, Waters joined demonstrators outside the police station in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota — the city where, ten days earlier, a white female police officer had accidentally shot and killed Daunte Wright, a young black man with a criminal record, when he resisted arrest and attempted to flee. Participants in this demonstration repeatedly shouted: “ACAB! All Cops Are Bastards!” With the expectation that a jury verdict in the trial of Officer Derek Chauvin, who had been involved in the May 2020 death of George Floyd, would soon be announced, the congresswoman issued a political call-to-arms: “We’re looking for a guilty verdict. And we’re looking to see if all of the talk that took place and has been taking place after they saw what happened to George Floyd, if nothing does not happen, then we know that we’ve got to not only stay in the street, but we have got to fight for justice. But I am very hopeful, and I hope that we are going to get a verdict that will say ‘Guilty, guilty, guilty.’ And if you don’t, we cannot go away.” The three charges facing Chauvin were: second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. Waters said that a conviction for manslaughter would be insufficient, and that the charge actually should have been first-degree murder. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s first-degree murder,” she stated. When asked what protesters should do in the event of a not-guilty verdict, Waters replied: “We’ve got to stay on the streets. And we’ve got to get more active. We’ve got to get more confrontational.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Discover The Networkshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDiscover The Networks2021-07-06 08:45:502021-10-07 20:23:35Waters, Other Dems Celebrate 4th of July by Trashing Declaration of Independence
I have been leaving off writing the story of this racist woman, Olympian Gwen Berry, mainly due to the fact I was so incensed at her actions I knew I couldn’t write an article that did not resort to words and language I would never usually write.
My disgust for this woman runs deep. Her history of racism is long. Her history of bringing her evil brand of activism to the world of sport is long. Her main sponsor is an organization called “ Color of Change.” This is the largest online racial justice group founded by Van Jones, a member of the Obama administration and a director of Move On. They are also a huge sponsor of the defund the police movement. The German corporation PUMA is also a sponsor of her. I suggest an immediate boycott of Puma.
She outdid herself when she came in third, grabbing the last place on the US Olympic Team in the hammer throwing team. This vile woman turned her back on the flag as the national anthem was played and then draped her head in some black power type t shirt with the words “ Activist Athlete”.
What a disgrace. I would rather we pulled out of that event that allowed her anywhere near it as a representative of the United States of America. She does not represent this country or the majority of its citizens. She is disgusting and vile. She is pushing for a race war along with all her fellow extremists.
She has doubled down on her hatred of America since that event saying that the anthem does not mean anything to her but hatred. It does not represent her or her kind! Her kind? Black racist anti America militants who blame America for everything but do not know what they are talking about. They do not know how well off they are here in America. How great they have it. They are ignorant. Filled with hatred and anger and their souls are dead as they belong to the devil.
I was listening to an interview with a North Korean defector, Yeonmi Park, when she spoke about Gwen Berry. Her words were prophetic and I only wish people like Gwen would have heard, listened and learnt. I know, however, their souls and minds are closed. They are mostly lost souls.
Miss Park was astonished that anyone could do what this Gwen woman did. Snubbing the National Anthem was unthinkable to her. These were her words copied directly.
“In North Korea, people who are actually oppressed don’t even know they’re oppressed,” Park explained. “The fact that she’s complaining about oppression and systemic racism — she does not understand that she’s so privileged.”
“If she was North Korean, not only herself will be executed, but also eight generations of her family can be sent to political prison camp and execution.”
Yeomni Parks was herself sold as a slave to China at the age of 13. She knows what slavery is. Gwen does not. She never will. She is a spoilt woman with a life style most people in socialist, communist or dictatorial countries wouldn’t even dare to dream about. They couldn’t dream of.
She and her ilk talk about white privilege but I say all Americans, of all colors, are privileged, including this evil woman with a talent for throwing a hammer that has enriched her and given her a life of privilege.
Here are more words from this North Korean brave incredible woman.
“The fact that she’s complaining about this country, the most tolerant country, she doesn’t really understand history,” she said. “I was a slave … I was sold in China in 2007 as a child at 13 years old. The people actually called slavery under Chinese Communist Party in North Korea. There is actual injustice.” Park continued saying “that while Berry is taking her freedom as an American for granted, there are “people dying to come to America at this very moment.”
When she says dying she means it literally. They lose their lives to risk it all to come to America.
She suggested Berry go live in a country such as North Korea so she could truly learn what oppression really looks like. Maybe then she could understand how great America has been to her and maybe, just maybe, understand what liberty and freedom she has here. I am not holding my breath here!
By the way her net worth is listed between $1M – 5M! She had a child out of wedlock from a relationship in high school at the age of 15. She calls herself a Christian. She has a degree from Southern Illinois University in psychology and criminal justice. The WH, by the way, supports her protest! Shocked? No, neither am I. Does she sound like she has led an oppressed life? Not to me nor most people in America. Kinda sounds like the American Dream.
As an immigrant myself, I have been constantly sickened by these so called protest groups like professional sports players, politicians, BLM, Antifa, MSM, New Black Panthers among others who have disrespected our flag, our pledge, our religion, our military, our law enforcement, our babies right to life, our constitution, our freedoms, our liberties and our Founding Fathers.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Save America Foundationhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngSave America Foundation2021-07-06 08:36:152021-10-07 20:23:35Gwen Berry. You ingrate, you better thank God you live in America.
A new NBER paper titled “Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News?” shows how US media fanned the flames of public panic.
n February 18, the Oxford Mail published an article headlined “Scientists working on a coronavirus vaccine in Oxford.”
The article explained that Sarah Gilbert, a British vaccinologist and professor at the University of Oxford, was leading a team of scientists at Oxford’s Jenner Institute in rapid development of a vaccine.
The article was short (less than 200 words), featured a quote from Gilbert, and was reported without any predictions on possible death tolls.
For months, Gilbert’s research was not covered in the US. And when US media did cover it months later, the successful track record of the Oxford researchers was downplayed, as was the possibility of getting a vaccine developed quickly.
“The earliest available (major outlet) U.S. story is from CNN on April 23rd and begins with a quote from England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty saying that the probability of having a vaccine or treatment ‘anytime in the next calendar year’ is ‘incredibly small,’” authors of a new National Bureau of Economic Research paper explain.
Why all the Bad News?
The authors of the NBER paper—titled “Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News?”—use media coverage of Gilbert’s vaccine research as a case study to highlight a larger trend: the unique way US media covered the coronavirus pandemic.
The authors of the paper—Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal, and Molly Cook, who hail from Dartmouth College and Brown University—analyzed the tone of COVID-19 related news articles written since January 1 and found a striking difference in the way US media covered the pandemic compared to media in other countries.
“Ninety one percent of stories by U.S. major media outlets are negative in tone versus fifty four percent for non-U.S. major sources and sixty five percent for scientific journals,” the authors concluded.
To be sure, pandemics are hardly a cheerful topic. We’re not talking about a firefighter rescuing a kitten from a tree or a local man winning the lottery. But that wouldn’t explain the discrepancy in media coverage or the fact that positive developments do occur in pandemics.
This invites an important question: how did US media respond to positive developments?
“The negativity of the U.S. major media is notable even in areas with positive scientific developments including school re-openings and vaccine trials,” the authors found. “Stories of increasing COVID-19 cases outnumber stories of decreasing cases by a factor of 5.5 even during periods when new cases are declining.” (emphasis added)
A new @nberpubs paper shows how US media created a climate of #COVID19 fear.
“Ninety one percent of stories by US major media outlets are negative in tone versus fifty four percent for non-U.S. major sources and sixty five percent for scientific journals,” the authors concluded. pic.twitter.com/wIXRQYiuKw
The trend toward pessimistic news coverage was so acute, James Freeman noted in the Wall Street Journal, that the media mostly missed the amazing vaccine development story that took place right under their nose.
As the NBER report states, US media stories discussing President Donald Trump and hydroxychloroquine alone outnumber all the stories on vaccine R&D media produced during the pandemic.
The Mind Killer
In his classic book Dune, Frank Herbert wrote about the power of fear.
“Fear is the mind-killer,” wrote Herbert. “Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.”
For many, 2020 has been the most fearful year of their lives. The coronavirus pandemic has brought uncertainty, change, and deadly risk. A certain amount of fear during a pandemic is warranted, of course. But there are rational ways to respond to threats and irrational ways, and that is a line America crossed in 2020.
Indeed, new research developed by scientists working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests the virus appears to have arrived in the US in December 2019. This would mean the coronavirus was in the US for months and Americans didn’t even know it.
But once the media caught wind of the disease and fanned the flames of public panic, the fear took on a life of its own. Americans and, worse, lawmakers, began to respond to the virus in irrational ways. Basic virology went out the window as 15 days to flatten the curve devolved into a mad idea that we must close down society and shelter from the virus, unleashing unprecedented restrictions on economic freedom and destroying untold numbers of lives and livelihoods in the process.
This is the power of fear. It caused many rational people, such as Rich Lowry of National Review who in April called opponents of lockdowns “absurd,” to suddenly view the sacrifice of timeless civil liberties as entirely reasonable because they believed it would save lives.
Today, of course, we know the lockdowns were worse than useless. While they did little to nothing to slow the spread of the virus, their collateral damage speaks for itself. A global collapse in economic output. A projected 150 million people falling into extreme poverty. A historic surge in depression and social isolation that will have consequences that reverberate for decades. Millions of children thrust into learning environments that appear to be even worse than their previous situations, despite the fact that health officials have for months said closing schools is not an effective way to curb the spread of the virus.
Again, this is the power of fear, and it caused Lowry and lockdown proponents to forget an age-old truism from Benjamin Franklin.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” Franklin once observed.
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)2021-07-06 08:16:122021-10-07 20:23:36Ivy League Study Shows How U.S. Media Created a Climate of Fear Over COVID-19
Phil Kerpen is the Founder and President of American Commitment AND he is also President of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. Kerpen is also a nationally syndicated columnist.
TOPIC: Wild spending by Biden and the Democratic Congress!
DAN GAINOR
Dan Gainor is the Vice President for Tech Watch, Business and Culture for the Media Research Center and a veteran editor whose work has been published or cited in most of the nation’s top publications and broadcast programs.
TOPIC: New election integrity law passed in Georgia and how the Left and the Media are lying about its provisions.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Conservative Commandos Radio Showhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngConservative Commandos Radio Show2021-07-06 07:57:012021-10-07 20:23:36PODCAST: Biden and the Democratic Congress’ Wild Spending & Georgia’s New Election Integrity Law
Sometime ago, I asked my blog readers to take a simple quiz regarding American government and history. I wanted to see just how well we knew some of the basics, such as our governing docs and some historical events. Nothing elaborate, I just wanted to take a pulse of our knowledge in general. 134 brave souls took the quiz for which I give my thanks. I didn’t want the quiz to be complicated which is why I tried to keep it as simple as possible. I could have asked for such things as age and political party affiliation, but I didn’t want to muddy the waters and turn people off.
Out of those who took the test, probably 25 people got a perfect score. I was not surprised by this as I didn’t try to invent a complicated quiz, just something that could give us some fundamental idea of what we know and what we don’t.
The quiz was far from scientific, yet I believe I can draw some conclusions from it based on the input. But first, let’s review the responses to each question. I’ll show both the number of responses and the percentage of the total, followed by my comments.
PLEASE ANSWER ALL 10 QUESTIONS – AMERICAN CITIZENS ONLY
1. Signed in 1620, it is the first governing document of Plymouth Colony as written by the colonists, later known to history as the Pilgrims. It was in essence a social contract in which the settlers consented to follow the document’s rules and regulations for the sake of survival.
Comment: I considered this a tricky question as most people are unaware of any American history prior to 1776. I was pleasantly surprised to see how many people got it right. Those that answered “Magna Carta” disappointed me; even though it is an important document that influenced others, it was still developed in England, not America. I consider it significant that people recognized its name though. By the way, the last three, Pilgrim Declaration, Plymouth Compact, and Standish Consent and Degree were figments of my imagination.
2. How many “separate but equal” branches are there in the U.S. Federal Government?
Comment: People may have gotten other parts of the quiz wrong, but somehow the concept of “three separate but equal branches of government” representing the checks and balances of government has been successfully stamped into our brains. Only three people missed this.
3. What is the following quote from? “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
27 – 20% – Bill of Rights
94 – 70% – Declaration of Independence (CORRECT)
06 – 05% – Gettysburg Address
00 – 00% – Oath of Office
07 – 05% – US Constitution
Comment: The lion’s share of answers went correctly to the Declaration of Independence, but I was surprised to see how many people picked the Bill of Rights. As an aside, many of us had to memorize this section of the Declaration in elementary school.
4. Which U.S. President was NOT impeached?
34 – 25% – Bill Clinton
20 – 15% – Andrew Johnson
80 – 60% – Richard Nixon (CORRECT)
Comment: I expected this kind of response to the question. Richard Nixon resigned before impeachment proceedings could begin. The other two were impeached, meaning to hold trial in the Senate, yet were found not guilty. No U.S. President has ever been forcibly removed from office through peaceful means (assassination is another matter altogether).
5. What is the following quote from? “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,…”>
04 – 03% – Bill of Rights
32 – 24% – Declaration of Independence
02 – 01% – Gettysburg Address
00 – 00% – Oath of Office
96 – 72% – US Constitution (CORRECT)
Comment: Most people got this correct, but notice how many confused it for the Declaration of Independence. This particular quote is from the Preamble of the Constitution. Like the Declaration, many of us had to memorize this in grade school, but I don’t think they do so anymore.
6. What U.S. President served as commander-in-chief during World War I?
Comment: I expected this question to be a little tougher as a lot of us have forgotten the events of nearly 100 years ago. Baby boomers may still be familiar with World War II, but I thought they would surely have problems with the first war, “The War to end all Wars.” I wasn’t surprised that Teddy Roosevelt captured the number of responses that he did simply because of his strong name recognition. By the way, William Howard Taft was the only President who also became Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (and the first to throw out a baseball on opening day).
7. What is the following quote from? “…and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
001 – 01% – Bill of Rights
000 – 00% – Declaration of Independence
000 – 00% – Gettysburg Address
127 – 95% – Oath of Office (CORRECT)
006 – 04% – US Constitution
Comment: I was flabbergasted that anyone got this wrong. The six who answered “US Constitution” should have read the question more carefully.
8. What is the following quote from? “…that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
005 – 04% – Bill of Rights
002 – 01% – Declaration of Independence
122 – 91% – Gettysburg Address (CORRECT)
000 – 00% – Oath of Office
005 – 04% – US Constitution
Comment: I was pleased to see most people remembered Lincoln’s speech. Interestingly, Lincoln was not the keynote speaker that day and, because of this, his words were almost overlooked by reporters in attendance. Thank God somebody was paying attention.
9. It stated that further efforts by European countries to colonize land or interfere with states in the Americas would be viewed as acts of aggression requiring U.S. intervention. It asserted that the Western Hemisphere was not to be further colonized by European countries but that the United States would neither interfere with existing European colonies nor meddle in the internal concerns of European countries.
Comment: I was pleasantly surprised by this one as I had assumed many people had forgotten about the Monroe doctrine, an important document which, to this day, is still in effect. I wonder if those who answered “Emancipation Proclamation” really understood the significance of that document. Probably not.
10. Which U.S. President was NOT directly involved with the Vietnam War?
81 – 60% – Dwight Eisenhower (CORRECT)
49 – 27% – Gerald Ford
01 – 01% – Lyndon Johnson
03 – 02% – John Kennedy
00 – 00% – Richard Nixon
Comment: This was perhaps my most controversial question as some of you argued that Eisenhower sent advisers to Viet Nam. True, but we send advisors to a lot of places. Viet Nam was Kennedy’s “line in the sand” to stop the proliferation of Communism. As to Ford, he inherited the Paris Peace talks from Nixon following his resignation and was in charge when we finally pulled out in 1975. Interestingly, I find younger people have no clue about this war whatsoever.
Conclusion
A few things occurred to me as I was compiling the results. First, the Gettysburg Address is better known than the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The Gettysburg Address is a moving speech but it certainly doesn’t bear the significance of our governing documents.
Second, it seemed to me that a lot of people cannot distinguish between the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. They view them as synonymous documents. For what it’s worth, the Declaration was used to sever Britain’s authority over its American colonies. The U.S. Constitution specifies how the government is to operate. The Bill of Rights is an attachment to the Constitution and specifies the basic rights of the citizens, specifically the first ten amendments. It was greatly influenced by such documents as the “Magna Carta.” All three documents, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, are important reads that all citizens should be familiar with, not just students in grade school.
Finally, here are the number of correct answers versus incorrect answers submitted on the quiz:
In most schools, a 77% would represent a “C” which is probably not as bad as we think. Actually, this number is probably higher than the national average as I like to believe my readers are smarter than most.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Tim Brycehttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngTim Bryce2021-07-06 07:43:042021-10-07 20:23:36PODCAST: My American History Quiz
This is no longer a Republic by the people for the people. It is an autocracy seized in an election coup in the year 2020. The Democrats know what they did. The Democrats know how many votes they stole and how many votes President Donald J. Trump actually got. Why do you think they turned the Capitol into a militarized zone – even now, even still?
Patriots are in solitary confinement for the crime of freedom of assembly and freedom of expression. Casus belli.
Nearly 500 people have been charged in cases related to the breach of the Capitol on January 6, with more charges expected. Some of dozens detained in federal prison awaiting trail, say they are being subject to Third World treatment, including solitary confinement, lack of required medical care, and restricted access to defense counsel.
We hear from two of their lawyers—John Pierce and Steven Metcalf II—and Ned Lang, the father of a defendant who is receiving particularly harsh treatment.
In America Q&A we ask people across the country if they think it’s possible to have a truly nonpartisan January 6 Commission.
Then switching gears, on this Fourth of July weekend, we turn to why so many people want to make a life in America. We’re joined by Tibi Czentye, a very determined man who risked everything to escape communist Romania to live the American Dream.
And in a special 2-part America Q&A we ask what the American Dream means and what makes America special.
Quick note: Tech giants are snuffing us out. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense permanently banned us. Facebook, Twitter, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here. Help us fight. Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW more than ever. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Help us fight the great fight.
And if you can, please contribute to Geller Report. YOU make the work possible.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2021-07-06 07:25:132021-10-07 20:23:37DEMOCRAT POLICE STATE: Jan. 6 Detainees Confined 23 hrs. Risking All for American Dream
Around 1:30am last Thursday, June 24, about two-thirds of the thirteen-story Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside, Florida crashed to the ground. At this writing (Sunday morning), five bodies have been recovered, but there are 156 people still unaccounted for. As recovery efforts have been hampered by hazardous conditions and persistent fires in the rubble, it may take weeks for rescue and recovery workers to pick through the remaining debris.
This tragedy not only took the lives of many unsuspecting people, most of whom were asleep in their beds, but has raised a host of questions that may not be definitively answered for months. At this point, all we can do is examine the logical possibilities that could explain what happened.
The building was erected in 1981, and was constructed of reinforced concrete. The reinforcing bars (“rebars”) in reinforced concrete must be protected from corrosion, especially in a humid salt-water environment such as the Miami area.
The condominium was sited on the Atlantic Ocean, and some news reports have indicated that subsidence of a few millimetres a year was occurring for some time before the collapse. While building a secure foundation on a beach is an engineering challenge, the fact that hundreds of similar structures have stood for many decades on beachfront properties shows that it is a challenge that competent engineers can easily overcome.
At least one video exists of the collapse. It shows the building viewed from the south, on the inside of the roughly L-shaped structure. The collapse has already commenced at the start of the video, and it is fairly obvious that the entire central tower is moving downward. This conflicts with some reports that the collapse began near the top and transferred downward in a pancake-type fashion.
There are lights on in a few condo units near the top, and as the electric service connections are sheared, the lights go out and the entire central tower plunges to the ground, leaving the east tower to its right standing for a few seconds. Then it topples to the west as well, leaving only the western tower standing.
An inspection report from more than two years ago indicated that concrete supports in the parking garage underneath one of the towers were showing cracks and spalling (flaking), exposing bare rebar in some cases. This by itself is not necessarily a sign that serious structural problems are present, because superficial spalling and cracking can occur without affecting the load-bearing capability of a supporting member.
However, reinforced-concrete structures are unforgiving of failure of even one load-bearing member. For example, suppose for whatever reason (uneven construction of the foundation, for example), one of the support pillars in the garage underneath the central tower began to receive much more than its fair share of the load of the floors above it.
While concrete will withstand a great deal of force in compression (squeezing), it is intolerant of tensile force (pulling) and will come to pieces with just a slight tensile force. That is why rebars are installed, to take up the tensile stress that is present in any complicated structure.
Imagine making a squat cylinder of clay with your hands, setting it on its end, and squeezing down on the top. It’s going to get shorter and the middle will bulge out. The top and bottom will mainly be in compression, but the middle part is in tension.
Rebar is supposed to handle all the tensile forces that arise in reinforced-concrete structures. But suppose the rebar in this overloaded column was rusty or weak for some other reason, and let go? The column would then be free to bulge outward and fail.
Once even one column at the bottom of the structure fails, and the floor above it fails, everything above that column is probably doomed. Floors pull columns out of alignment, those columns fail, and you get the kind of collapse we see on the video.
This pattern is familiar to demolition experts who use explosives to “implode” reinforced-concrete buildings. Taking out the central support columns at the bottom with properly-sized explosive charges will typically cause the structure to collapse inward on itself, which superficially looks like an implosion.
Another possibility is that the roof of the central tower, which was being worked on, was overloaded by construction equipment and failed. Too much heavy construction equipment played a critical role in the collapse of the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis in 2007. However, this type of failure would have caused a sequential top-to-bottom collapse as the upper floors collided with the lower ones, and that pattern was not evident in the video referred to above.
A possibility that no one has mentioned, but should be considered at least as a logical possibility, is sabotage. Many residents of the condominium were presumably wealthy and included Jews and other ethnic minorities. Someone familiar enough with explosives and building demolition techniques could have managed to breach whatever security safeguards were in place to keep unauthorised people out of the basement parking garage, installed the explosive charge, vacated, and set it off remotely. If this was done, the evidence lies beneath tons of fractured concrete and will eventually come to light, but not for quite a while.
One survivor recalled first feeling the building shake, then hearing a boom and seeing two-thirds of the building coming down. This is consistent with an explosive event whose vibrations would be transmitted through the solid structure faster than the speed of sound in air. But abrupt failures of large stressed structural elements often sound like explosions, so this account should not be treated as definitive.
Our sympathy and prayers are with those who lost relatives and loved ones in this tragedy, especially as the long process of recovery continues. The same process will eventually answer the question of what happened last Thursday, but the wait may be a long one.
This article has been republished with permission from Engineering Ethics.
Karl D. Stephan received the B. S. in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1976. Following a year of graduate study at Cornell, he received the Master of Engineering degree in 1977… More by Karl D. Stephan
EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2021-07-06 07:13:132021-10-07 20:23:37VIDEO: Why did the Champlain Towers South in Surfside collapse?
The role Catholics played in America’s formative struggles is often overlooked.
America’s “sweet land of liberty” of “pilgrims’ pride” and Plymouth Rock has historically had a Protestant-majority understanding of “our father’s God.” But Catholics also revered this “author of liberty.”
These “noble free” made leading contributions to “freedom’s holy light” in the American Revolution, as Catholic author Dan LeRoy reveals in an important new book, Liberty’s Lions: The Catholic Revolutionaries Who Established America.
Catholics were a small minority in colonial America. “Common estimates suggest between 1.2 and 1.6 percent of colonists were Catholic,” LeRoy notes. “In a nation of 2.5 million people, that amounted to between 30,000 and 40,000 Catholics.”
Nonetheless, LeRoy documents that this tiny minority attracted “vehement anti-Catholicism” amid a Protestant majority shaped by Britain’s wars of religion and empire. Take the example of Maryland.
Founded in 1634 under a charter given by the Anglican king Charles I to the Catholic Lord Baltimore, the colony “was an experiment in religious tolerance.” Given a mixed Catholic-Protestant population, the Maryland assembly in 1649 passed the Act Concerning Religion, or Toleration Act, in 1649. This “guaranteed freedom of conscience to all Christians, the first legal promise of tolerance in American or British history.”
Yet the Protestant tide ultimately turned against Catholics even in Maryland in 1704 with laws like the Act to Prevent the Growth of Popery. The legislation forbade “priests from offering Mass or baptizing anyone who is not Catholic—i.e., conversions are forbidden. ‘Papists’ are barred from teaching—even their own children,’” LeRoy writes. In 1718, Catholics also lost voting rights.
Catholics’ taste of freedom in Maryland nevertheless made a lasting impact. The Toleration Act had briefly guaranteed Catholics freedoms they had not legally enjoyed in Britain. “It forever put Maryland on a separate path from the Crown,” LeRoy observes. “One day, that path would lead to revolution—not just in Maryland, but throughout the colonies.”
In Maryland, the center of American colonial Catholicism, LeRoy focuses on the patriots of the Carroll family, particularly Charles Carroll who “[f]or many years was the most prominent and influential Catholic in America. He was certainly the richest—possibly the richest man in the colonies, period,” and “the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence.”
On July 4, 1776, this document proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” yet Carroll “usually owned between three hundred and four hundred slaves, who worked on his plantations and in the family ironworks in Baltimore,” LeRoy notes. Like other Founding Fathers, Carroll embodied America’s original sin of slavery, which also was a “particular, and particularly shameful, failing of Catholics,” a flagrant violation of Catholic Magisterium teaching on human dignity. LeRoy observes:
The history of American Catholicism, which is rooted in places such as Maryland and Louisiana, is inextricably tied to slavery. From the Jesuit plantations to the estates of the landed gentry, slaves played a major role in advancing the fortunes of Catholics in the South.
Like other Founding Fathers, Carroll’s conscience struggled with slavery. “As a Maryland legislator, Carroll made multiple, unsuccessful attempts to gradually emancipate all slaves in the state,” LeRoy notes. Additionally, Carroll’s “record as a slave owner is relatively humane and consistent with his ideals,” but he still left largely unfulfilled his various proposals to use his enormous wealth to free his slaves.
Conflicts over freedom and slavery concerned not just America, but the wider world, in which most allies of the American Revolution were Catholic. LeRoy in his extensive analysis of the revolution’s often underappreciated international dimensions delves deep into the biographies of famous foreigners like the French general, the Marquis de Lafayette. He “had been deeply moved by the plight of the slaves he saw in America and bought a plantation in Cayenne, French Guiana, with the goal of freeing its slaves,” LeRoy notes.
Poles like Casimir Pulaski, who revolutionized the American cavalry, similarly fought for American freedom while losing their own homeland to European empires. Like Lafayette, Thaddeus Kościuszko, whose engineering brilliance shone at the decisive 1777 Battle of Saratoga, could not forget the slaves in the United States after securing its independence. He wanted to use backpay owed him by the new American government to free as many slaves as possible of Thomas Jefferson, the declaration’s lead author.
One of America’s greatest allies, Marshal Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, the Comte de Rochambeau, almost became a priest before, at age 15, his older brother died, leaving Rochambeau to carry on the family’s military legacy.
This commander of the expeditionary force France dispatched to America after France entered the war against Britain in 1778 “had been training faithfully for the priesthood since he was six,” LeRoy writes. “After turning his sights from the priesthood to the battlefield, Rochambeau assembled a distinguished thirty-year military career” and became an “international hero.”
Rochambeau’s religious training showed, LeRoy notes, for “while many upper-class Frenchmen, like Lafayette, paid only lip service to Catholicism, Rochambeau apparently took his faith far more seriously. …
“Like George Washington, he made it a point to insist on regular church services for his men. Both men believed this was important not only for instilling discipline but also as a way of ensuring God’s favor,” LeRoy adds. Moreover, Rochambeau’s “simple but effective principles—troops needed to be both well-trained and well-supplied—won him the loyalty of his men, who affectionately called him ‘Papa.’”
Washington’s behavior both as wartime commander and president reflected the outlook of this Anglican on faith in a free society. “Washington believed government could, and sometimes should, support religion—if there was a legitimate civic reason to do so,” namely the “need for encouraging moral behavior,” LeRoy notes. Washington’s “latitudinarianism” brooked no prejudice, as demonstrated by his prohibition among his soldiers of Pope’s Night, where pope effigies were burned in the American version of England’s Guy Fawkes Day. “Catholics would remember well Washington’s leadership,” LeRoy observes, for Washington “welcomed troops of all races and faiths.”
The same principle yielded enormous dividends when George Rogers Clark led a small militia force to take Illinois from the British in 1778-1779. Britain had won the territory from France at the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1763, and reports indicated to Clark that the region’s few French settlers had little love for the British.
After taking Kaskaskia in what is now Illinois on July 5, 1778, Clark told Father Pierre Gibault, a Montreal-born priest who served frontier Catholic communities, that the “United States makes no war on any man’s religion.” Thus assured, the French Catholics followed Gibault in pledging allegiance to America and gave Clark a largely bloodless victory.
LeRoy’s broad cast of characters bring to life the significant yet often overlooked role that Catholics played in America’s formative struggles. On his pages overlapping conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, blacks and whites, slaves and masters, play out as patriots fight for freedom in America and Europe while rival empires intrigue.
Yet, miraculously, a mustard seed of freedom took root and grew in American soil, which makes LeRoy’s book all the more worthwhile to read.
Andrew E. Harrod
Andrew E. Harrod is an independent researcher and writer who has published over 500 articles online and in print. His writings have appeared at the American Spectator, American Thinker, Breitbart, the… More by Andrew E. Harrod
Should we congratulate the Chinese Communist Party for killing more human beings than anybody else in history?
Finally, here we are. The party for the Party starts, and what Chinese media have called the most memorable celebration in modern history hails the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Even some Western leaders are congratulating the Party. They offer as an excuse that the CCP achieved remarkable successes in the struggle against poverty or, as they said, “lifted millions of Chinese out of hunger.” Scholars have proved that statistics on the wonderful successes of China in eradicating poverty are largely false or inflated. Nobody denies the economic progresses in China, but other countries have obtained similar or better results without killing a large number of their own citizens in the process.
There is only one world record the CCP holds without dispute, one we should all remember today in our meditations and prayers. No organisation in human history killed more human beings than the CCP. Not Nazi Germany, nor Soviet Russia, not even the Mongol Invasions.
The table above is based on averages obtained by comparing estimates by leading scholars of different genocides and “democides” (i.e., the extermination by a regime of a part of its own populations). They include executions, massacres, civilian victims of wars of conquest, deaths for exhaustion in labour camps, human-provoked famines and epidemics.
We have used averages from three or more leading scholars for each organisation or event, have included scholars skeptical of higher figures, and have not been shy in mentioning the sins of the West. By using this method, in the United States and Canada 10 million native Americans were exterminated, including those who died because of epidemics and famines that could have been prevented and were generated by their encounters with colonisers (we are aware mainline figures are contested as inflated by some revisionist authors). And 12 million (although many documents have been destroyed, and statistics are difficult) died when King Leopold II of Belgium ruled Congo Free State as a private possession and tortured, executed, and led millions of its inhabitants to death by overwork and starvation.
We are also aware of the ongoing debate about the 1997 French Black Book of Communism (which was published in English in 1999 by Harvard University Press), and criticism that certain figures may have been overestimated as part of the authors’ effort to come to the round figure of 100 million.
We have compared the Black Book data with other sources. However, we disagree with the criticism that victims of human-made famines such as the Holodomor in the Soviet Union or the Great Leap Forward should not be counted. These famines would not have happened if not for the criminal behaviour of the regimes that caused them.
For China, our estimate of 50 million victims is extremely conservative. Others believe the figure to be closer to 80 million. During the Civil War, the Communist killed some 3 million civilians, often for the sole reason that they were perceived as “class enemies.” (The Nationalists also killed many civilians, of course). In the immediate years after seizing the power, the CCP under Chairman Mao executed at least one million Chinese labelled as “class enemies” or “counter-revolutionaries.”
There were also human-created famines before 1958, which made another 500,000 victims. The Great Leap Forward and its consequence, the Great Chinese Famine, happened in 1958–1962, and are widely regarded as the greatest human-made disasters in history.
Again, victim estimates vary, and by using our method of finding an average between different reliable scholars, we counted 38.5 million (others believe the number to be much higher).
A less controversial figure indicates that 1.5 million were executed during the Great Leap Forward to get rid of opponents and whistleblowers. 2 million is a conservative estimate of those killed during the Cultural Revolution. Scholars believe that excluding the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) periods, victims from 1950 to Tiananmen (1989) who were either executed, killed extrajudicially, killed during the repression of protests, and starved or exhausted to death in labour camps were at least 3 million. By counting 500,000 victims of the post-Tiananmen era, we consider some scholarly “minimalist” accounts of deaths in Tibet and Xinjiang to remain true to our method, although we suspect that the CCP in recent years has been much more lethal.
We are aware that the total result, 50 million, is a very conservative estimate. The late Rudolph J. Rummel, whom the CCP and some Western historians like to criticise but who was a respected American scholar with an unimpeachable academic career, originally estimated victims of the CCP up to the year 1987 (obviously, the CCP continued to kill after that date) to 38.7 million but, as new documents surfaced, particularly about the Great Leap Forward, revised his estimate to 76.7 million.
50 or 76.7 million, each unit in this statistic refers to a human being, who lived, loved, hoped, had relatives and friends, and believed in a future that the CCP cruelly destroyed. If we should celebrate something on July 1, we should celebrate the victims.
Bitter Winter did it on June 11, when we offered a laurel wreath at the Washington DC monument to the Victims of Communism in memory of those murdered by the CCP, during an international ceremony organised by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an organisation authorised by a unanimous act of the U.S. Congress in 1993.
Physically or metaphorically, please have your laurel wreath ready, and shed a tear for the (at least) 50 million victims of the most criminal organisation that ever devoted itself to mass murder in human history.
This article has been republished with permission from Bitter Winter.
Massimo Introvigne is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new… More by Massimo Introvigne
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Today at Mount Rushmore. Another freedom lover rescued from California! Welcome to South Dakota. pic.twitter.com/9G8zwatuKU
— Governor Kristi Noem (@govkristinoem) July 6, 2021
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2021-07-06 06:38:382021-10-07 20:23:38CCP: 100th Anniversary of The Party that Killed 50 Million
Robert Royal: If a civil public square is to exist for us, especially now, it will take a rediscovered gratitude for the foundations that made American life exceptional in human history.
On the Fourth of July (even “as celebrated” on the 5th, as today), we all ought to be grateful for the freedoms of our American Revolution, imperfect though our history has been. Those freedoms have a certain shape: religion, speech, property, assembly, equality before the law, the right to bear arms – the stuff of the first Constitutional amendments and of older high-school civics classes. They made this country great, and can again.
The Founders were no fools, however, and warned frequently, lest “liberty” degenerate into “license.” Given human nature, that has happened over time, and to no small degree. But recently we’ve witnessed a shift to something much more subtle and radical. It’s not only ideologies like Critical Race Theory (CRT). We’ve replaced the old focal points of liberty – personal integrity, faith, family, community – with a trinity of postmodern substitutes: race, class, and gender.
Why, you might ask, did the Supreme Court in Fulton have to get involved a few weeks ago in a Catholic adoption agency’s following its own moral principles instead of bowing to LGBT dogma? After all, religious liberty appears in the First Amendment. It’s because many people now have been indoctrinated into thinking that sexual self-assertion is more fundamental than religious liberty, i.e., than beliefs about our duties to the Creator.
Or that a “woman’s right to choose” is more sacred than human life. Viewed clearly, such pretensions are implausible, to say the least. Their widespread acceptance reveals how powerful and pervasive the indoctrination has been while most of us were not paying attention.
Even some Christians, including quite a few religious, priests, bishops, and cardinals, seem to believe that God’s mercy means basically indulging human wishes. They’ve all but erased the specific indications in the Gospels of just why God needs to be merciful towards us. You get the impression that many people now, if they could go back in time, would tell Jesus not to bother with all those hard sayings and that Crucifixion thing. God already forgives everyone anyway. No need to go to all that trouble.
I’ve been trying for decades to follow efforts to establish a basis for our rights other than the straightforward words of the Declaration:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness .—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.[Emphasis added.]
John Adams famously explained later: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Even Jefferson, least orthodox among the Founders, said: “no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be.”
Modern and postmodern philosophers have been quite intrepid in seeking a credible alternative to such plain statements. But they haven’t found one. Because there isn’t one. Our president said the other day that you have rights simply by being born. True in a way, but only in societies firmly under the sacred canopy of the Bible, where we are all made in the image and likeness and God, and therefore get such respect. That wasn’t true of the Middle Eastern Empires surrounding ancient Israel, or the Greco-Roman culture into which early Christianity was born.
As real Christianity recedes, the old pagan ways of dealing with commoners, unwanted pregnancies, the elderly, and the incapacitated are clearly reasserting themselves.
Tom Holland, a non-believer and author of the powerful book Dominion, has rightly said of our civilization: “When we condemn what Charlemagne’s soldiers did to the Saxons, or what the Spanish Conquistadors did in the New World, or what English slavers did when they were taking people from Africa to the New World – when we see that, by our standards, these are all crimes, we are judging them as Christians would. Earlier civilisations would have seen nothing wrong with this behaviour.”
In the 1960s, Fr. John Courtney Murray could argue that, though the natural law element in America’s self-understanding was incomplete, the words of the Declaration quoted above express important principles, especially in modern times: there are truths, we can know them, and we – we Americans – hold them – i.e., we’re committed to them.
More recently, Patrick Deneen, Michael Hanby, and others have argued that the Founding was fundamentally flawed and, therefore, our decline into the current chaos was basically inevitable. Our sometime contributor Robert Reilly in America on Trial has offered a powerful rebuttal.
That debate is worth having, particularly at this moment, when the poet’s words were never truer:
we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
But so is the effort to make the America we have work, whatever its flaws. There’s even a place for debating race, class, and gender (in the proper sense of how men and women relate). The problem with ideologies like Critical Race Theory is not only that they view social complexity through a single lens – whatever their intentions – but as Tom Holland discovered, they don’t appreciate their debt to Christian and American traditions. And the dangers – to CRT theorists as much as anyone else – in attacking the very foundations of our moral and social life. Earlier civil rights leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. knew better.
I’ve been on the road lately in unfamiliar places. I found a great deal of the old America still lives: basic friendliness, respect between races, help for someone lost. Troubled cities dominate the news and our thinking. But the older, basic liberties are still instinctive for most Americans.
If a civil public square is to exist for us, especially now, it will take a rediscovered gratitude for the foundations that made life here exceptional in human history – and, for ever more of us, reasonably good.
“In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.” ― Leon Trotsky
A dependent nation is an enslaved nation. What do you call someone taken care of by the government by the cradle to the grave? A slave.
This is the Democrat plot to destroy this nation. Individual rights and property rights, the basic pillars of our Constitutional republic, will be a thing of the past.
Analysts predict that President Biden’s American Families Plan would add 21 million Americans to federal benefit programs.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Hoover Institution fellows John F. Cogan and Daniel Heil unpacked their recent analysis, which discovered that the Biden administration’s $1.8 trillion omnibus bill would drastically expand the welfare state.
The federal government’s system of entitlements is the largest money-shuffling machine in human history, and President Biden intends to make it a lot bigger… For the first time in U.S. history — except possibly for the pandemic years 2020 and 2021, for which we don’t yet have data — more than half of working-age households would be on the entitlement rolls if the plan were enacted in its current form.
The academics note that families earning six figures would be eligible for generous handouts. Indeed, “most” of President Biden’s spending would benefit middle-income and upper-income households.
Two-parent households with two preschool-age children and incomes up to $130,000 would qualify for federal cash assistance for daycare. Single parents with two preschoolers and incomes up to $113,000 would qualify. And some families with incomes over $200,000 would be eligible for health-insurance subsidies. Other parts of the plan, such as paid leave and free community college, have no income limits at all.
Under the American Families Plan, 57% of all married-couple children would receive handouts, while over 80% of single-parent households would enter the entitlement rolls. Noting that the legislation has a number of “gimmicks” that hide the extent of its revenue proposals, the report forecasts that President Biden’s proposal would add $1 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade.
Other economists have expressed similar concerns with the American Families Plan. Analysts from the Penn Wharton Budget Model — a nonpartisan think tank at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School that examines the impacts of major legislation — concluded that the American Families Plan would slow long-term economic growth.
By increasing income taxes for wealthier Americans, introducing $2.3 trillion in federal expenditures, and spending with borrowed money, the legislation would slash output by 0.4% within the next three decades. The bill would also decrease the capital stock — the total amount of machinery, buildings, and other productive equipment in the American economy — by 1.2% over the same period.
In essence, long-term economic growth would be hindered by greater demand for federal debt financing, which would cause investors to direct money into loans for the government rather than ventures in the private sector. Such a phenomenon would restrict innovation and productivity, inhibiting American economic vitality for decades to come.
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Krytocracy: A government by judges; the governmental rule of judges in which they reach “desirable results” that fit some particular social philosophy.
This ruling is not a surprise. Left-wing judges abject contempt for the Constitution and our G-d given rights.
The judge who blocked Florida’s “Big Tech” law is a Clinton-appointed judge. Fortunately, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is not give up this fight. Governor DeSantis’s office plans to immediately appeal the ruling, to the more conservative Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. #DeSantis2024!
Judge blocks Florida ‘Big Tech’ law that would fine social media companies for banning politicians
A federal judge blocked a Florida law designed to penalize large social media companies that ban politicians over First Amendment concerns.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle granted a preliminary injunction against Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Big Tech” law after NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which represent multiple Big Tech companies, filed a lawsuit earlier in the month. The lawsuit argued the law violates the First Amendment’s free speech clause, is vague in violation of the 14th Amendment, and stands in opposition to equal protection clauses.
“The plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits of their claim that these statutes violate the First Amendment,” Hinkle wrote. “There is nothing that could be severed and survive.”
NetChoice praised the ruling on Wednesday and said the motion protects “private businesses.”
“We’re pleased the court ensured that social media can remain family friendly by delaying Florida’s law from taking effect on July 1,” the group’s president Steve DelBianco said in a statement. “This order protects private businesses against the State’s demand that social media carry user posts that are against their community standards. Even better, it lets social media provide high-quality services to their users while keeping them safe from the worst content posted by irresponsible users.”
DeSantis’s office plans to appeal the ruling, and it expects the 11th Circuit to make the final verdict on the matter.
“We are disappointed by Judge Hinkle’s ruling and disagree with his determination that the U.S. Constitution protects Big Tech’s censorship of certain individuals and content over others,” a spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “We plan to immediately appeal to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.”
“As Judge Hinkle seemed to indicate during this week’s hearing on preliminary injunction, this case was always bound for the Eleventh Circuit and the appeals court will ultimately make its own decision on legal conclusions,” the statement continued. “Governor DeSantis continues to fight for freedom of speech and against Big Tech’s discriminatory censorship.”
DeSantis, a Republican widely seen as a 2024 presidential contender, signed Florida’s Big Tech Bill in late May alongside James O’Keefe, a conservative activist and founder of Project Veritas who was removed from Twitter earlier this year and later sued the platform over the ban.
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A federal judge has ruled that a provision in President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 relief bill limiting state tax cuts is unconstitutional, handing a victory to Republicans.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost had filed a federal lawsuit against the Treasury Department and its secretary, Janet Yellen, alleging that a provision in the $1.9 trillion Democratic spending package that prohibits states from using relief funds to offset tax cuts or credits “directly or indirectly” is unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Douglas Cole issued the permanent injunction against what Yost dubbed the “tax mandate” on Thursday, ruling that the provision exceeds the federal government’s power over states.
“The federal government has to stay in their lane, and if they don’t, we’re prepared to bump them up against the guardrail and keep them where they belong,” Yost told the Washington Examiner in a Friday morning phone call.
Cole ruled that the tax mandate “falls short of the clarity” that Supreme Court precedent requires for the Constitution’s spending clause as it relates to conditional grants to states. The judge also rejected Yellen’s argument that Treasury Department regulations clear up the ambiguity of the provision.
“Accordingly, the Court finds that the Tax Mandate exceeds Congress’s power under the Constitution,” Cole concluded. “The Court further finds that Ohio has met the conditions for injunctive relief to prevent the ongoing harm that this constitutional violation is causing.”
It is likely that the federal government will appeal the ruling. A spokesperson with the Treasury Department told the Washington Examiner after the decision that the department disagrees with Cole’s opinion and is exploring options regarding the next steps.
“We are confident that the act is constitutional and Treasury is committed to implementing it in a manner consistent with Congress’s direction so we can continue to promote a robust and equitable recovery,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Yost touted the ruling as “a huge win for our federalist system” and pointed out that while Democrats might be disappointed with the decision, they might see it differently in the future. He said he sees the judgment as having broader implications than just this one provision.
“The progressives are going to be howling right now because they don’t like the idea that the federal government can’t tell Ohio what to do with its tax policy, but they’ll be quoting this decision soon enough to a Republican president who might want to tell a blue state how to run their state,” Yost said.
While Ohio was the first to sue the Biden administration over the tax mandate, it is not alone in its litigation on the matter.
Several other states have joined another federal lawsuit contending that the mandate violates the 10th Amendment, the conditional spending doctrine, and the anti-commandeering doctrine. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich also filed a lawsuit attacking the provision.
Yost said that while the ruling in his case won’t directly affect the other lawsuits, he thinks that Cole’s ruling will be closely examined by judges across the country.
“It’s a really well-reasoned opinion by Judge Cole, and I think other federal judges will read it and find it well reasoned,” he said. “So, it doesn’t have any direct power, but it is very persuasive.”
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When Donald Trump had the Yemeni Shi’ite Houthis, a client group of the Islamic Republic of Iran, designated as foreign terrorists, the Leftist political and media establishment was (as always regarding anything and everything Trump did) outraged. No fewer than twenty-two aid groups that were operating in Yemen demanded that the designation be revoked “immediately,” and when his handlers gained control of the presidency of the United States, Old Joe Biden did just that. But in this case as in so many others, Trump turns out to have been right again. If any group deserves to be considered foreign terrorists, it’s the Houthis.
In May, the U.S. Navy seized thousands of assault weapons, machine guns, and sniper rifles from a ship that appeared to have been heading to Yemen to aid the Houthis. Those were likely intended to be used against Saudi Arabia, but two weeks after Biden’s handlers revoked the terror designation, Yemeni political analyst Salim Al-Muntaser made it clear that the Houthis (who call themselves Ansar Allah, or Helpers of Allah) had another goal in mind as well: the end of the American presence in the Middle East. Al-Muntaser boasted that “Ansar Allah’s strikes have worn Saudi Arabia down, and have turned their American weapons into scrap metal. The advanced American Patriot missiles cannot intercept drones and ballistic missiles that are considered primitive. Therefore, there is no longer any significance to American presence in the Middle East. Soon we will witness a complete American withdrawal.”
This would, he said, lead to the destruction of Israel: “After that, there is no doubt that the Zionist entity will not be strong enough to face the resistance axis. I will not be surprised, and I expect that missiles will be launched from Saada and Sanaa in Yemen towards the so-called ‘Tel-Aviv’ and the Zionist entity will be destroyed.” Turning his attention to the Houthis’ patrons in Tehran, he added: “The Islamic Republic does not need the nuclear agreement. It does not need to sit at the negotiating table. It is the Americans and the Zionists who needs this. They are terrified by the thought that the Islamic Republic would produce nuclear weapons and exterminate the Zionist entity.”
There may be very good reasons for the U.S. to reduce its presence in the Middle East, and for our new woke military to give up both Wilsonian adventurism in the Islamic world and social engineering among the troops, and concentrate instead on actually defending the United States. However, Al-Muntaser made it clear that the Houthis were an entity that is hostile to the United States. For Old Joe’s bosses to take them off the foreign terrorist list was just as wrongheaded as their relentless appeasement of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and, in fact, was another manifestation of that appeasement.
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