Remember it was McConnell who endorsed Charlie Crist for the U.S. Senate — Vote for Judge Roy Moore

Senator Mitch McConnell has endorsed candidates that follow the swamp’s agenda, not the will of the people. We in Florida remember when, on the same day that Charlie Crist announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell endorsed him.

McConnell did not want the people of Florida to choose their senator, rather he wanted the people of Florida to elect his pick.

CNN’s Mark Preston and Peter Hamby in May 2009 reported:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, endorsed Florida Gov. Charlie Crist for Senate Tuesday, yet another sign that national Republicans are looking to avoid a GOP primary in the Sunshine State.

Crist announced earlier in the day that he would not seek another term as governor, opting instead for a senatorial bid. National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn immediately announced that he was backing Crist over former state House Speaker Marco Rubio in the GOP primary.

[ … ]

“Decisions are being made every day in Washington that have a direct impact upon the lives of all Americans and we need Charlie Crist in the U.S. Senate to ensure that those decisions will benefit the citizens of Florida,” McConnell said in a statement released by Crist’s campaign. [Emphasis added]

We all know now that Charlie Crist, once a Republican, is now a Democrat member of Congress. So much for the political savvy of Mitch McConnell.

Now we have the very same McConnell supporting another Charlie Crist republican in the state of Alabama.

Constitution.com reports:

“President Donald Trump admitted to Alabama voters Friday that he might have made a mistake by endorsing appointed Alabama Senator Luther Strange in the Republican primary.

“’We have to be loyal in life,’ Trump said. ‘There is something called loyalty, and I might have made a mistake and I’ll be honest, I might have made a mistake.’

“Trump appeared in Alabama for a campaign rally for Strange, despite polling showing him still lagging behind his primary challenger conservative Judge Roy Moore.

“Trump predicted that if Strange lost, his political opponents and the media would cite it as a big loss for Trump, but that he wanted to repay the appointed senator for his loyal support in the Senate.

“’Both are good men,’ Trump said, referring to Strange and Moore.

“He specified that his decision was about loyalty and picking a candidate that could win in a general election.

“’Luther will definitely win … Roy has a very good chance of not winning in the general election,’ Trump said.

“But he promised that if Moore won the primary, he would be ‘campaigning like hell’ for him in the general election.”

Watch this video to understand that its deja vu all over again:

Judge Roy Moore is the right man at the right time. He will work to make Alabama and America great again.

Please support Judge Roy Moore to represent the great state of Alabama in the U.S. Senate.

The Next Scandal in the Church?

William Kilpatrick writes that the Church, because of its endorsement of unlimited immigration, is complicit in the rise of Muslim sex abuse in Europe.

In a recent article, Fr. James Schall, S.J. argues that “The only real way to eliminate the historic aggressiveness of Islam is to convert its believers.”  Yet if you had to bet, “the conversion of the world to Islam is, in the long run, more likely than its conversion to Christianity.”

From a purely human perspective, the conversion of Muslims is a tall order. It’s not just that Islam is a tough nut to crack, it’s also that some today – usually Catholics – have an aversion to conversion. (Even the pope had denounced “proselytism.”)  In good multicultural fashion, they don’t want to fiddle with the unique cultural identity of the “other.”

These fashionable ideas won’t attract many Muslims, and it has an alienating effect on Christians as well. The Church in the West has been losing members as a result of the impression it gives that other faiths are just as valid as our own. So before undertaking the conversion of the Muslim world, the Church needs first to do something about the deconversion of Christians.

Ironically, one of the factors that is driving people out of the Church is its response to Islamic terror. After every terrorist attack, the Vatican (or some prominent bishop) assures us that the violence has nothing to do with Islam, which we are told is a “religion of peace” – a response not a whit different from the politically correct, secular liberal response.

In fact, Church leaders often put secular leaders to shame in their advocacy for Islam. The Obama administration called for the admittance of 10,000 Syrian refugees; the USCCB called for 100,000. When European leaders began to admit that Muslim migration should be restricted for the sake of national security, Pope Francis responded by insisting that the safety of migrants was more important than national security.

There are no statistics about how many Catholics are leaving the Church because of its welcoming attitude towards Islam, but there is anecdotal evidence.

Click here to read the rest of Mr. Kilpatrick’s column . . .

Why Americans Hate the Media

I’ll make this quick and easy. The mainstream media is not trusted by a large part of the country because they have an entrenched liberal worldview bias they refuse to acknowledge or make any attempts to ameliorate.

The mainstream media is hated by an also large part of the country because of the sharply different ways it covers Republicans and Democrats and now how it covers President Trump and everyone else…and a heavy dose of disconnected arrogance. This has resulted in abysmal trust ratings among Americans.

A recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found fully 37 percent said they trust the media “not at all.” Another 31 percent said they have “not very much” trust in the news media. But more telling is the worldview breakdown on “How much do you trust the media?”:

Worldview                    A great deal   A good amount   Not very much   Not at all

Very liberal – Liberal               15%               40%                 27%                   17%

Moderate                                   5%                25%                 40%                   28%

Conservative –                           5%                9%                   28%                   57%
Very conservative

So the more liberal a person, the more they trust the media and the more conservative the less they trust the media. Among moderates, more distrust than trust.

This trust goes to the brink of absurdity in this strange poll question by Fox News Poll, which was largely negative about Trump — so hardly biased. When asked who was a bigger threat to the country, white supremacists or the media, 47 percent of respondents said white supremacists, while 40% said the media and 9 percent said they were the same. So half of Americans say the media is an equal or bigger threat to America than white supremacists. That is absurdly close, and even 24 percent of non-whites said the media.

Yet, when you break it down by Republican and Democrat, 12% of Democrats said the media while 69 percent of Republicans said the media. Independents were split evenly, within the margin of error — about half with an opinion said it was the media. See the chart below for more

(Apologies for the stupid small chart.)

And yet, with these straightforward, shocking numbers staring them right in the face, the media still does not see it’s liberal media bias as a problem — or even a real thing!

This plays out obviously in news coverage — obvious unless you are liberal, as the data shows. So liberal media consumers — and journalists — are the only two groups that see no obvious issue. It’s like the final scales should be falling, and yet the media remains utterly blind.

Here’s how it looks in coverage during Obama

In the eight years of President Obama’s presidency, we saw:

  • North Korea miniaturized its nuclear weapons and reached the point of delivering them on ICBMs, meaning they can reach at least half of the United States with nuclear weapons. Media yawned.
  • The creation of the worst treaty since Munich with the signing of the Iran nuclear accords and providing the avowed enemy of the United States with billions of dollars in cash — flown to them on an airplane! Media covered glowingly.
  • The precipitous and disastrous pullout from Iraq and red-line waffling in Syria that opened the door to the world scourge that is ISIS and the cleansing of Christians and Yazidis from the region. Media pointed out George W. Bush started the Iraq War and ISIS is really bad. Was Obama president then?
  • The weakening of the United States military through funding cuts and the emboldenment of Russian aggression in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria, leaving the free West in an overall weaker position. Media reported that Russia is bad!
  • The worst economy since the end of World War II, a “recovery” that was so weak that virtually no one could feel it as wages were stagnant, jobs below population growth and a sharp rise in income disparity. Media reminded us how terrible things were when Obama took office and that Republicans blocked all these good ideas.
  • The ruination of the healthcare system in the country to the point that even Democrats know that Obamacare has failed and needs dramatic changes. Media reported how hard it was for people to get good healthcare. The system’s broken! Was Obama president then?
  • Scandals such as the IRS targeting conservative groups, a la Richard Nixon; Obama’s knowing about Hillary’s private and unprotected email server; Obama seizing AP reporters’ phone records; Benghazi; gun-running Operation Fast and Furious; and so many more were big yawners to the media. Nothing to see here.

For eight years, the coverage was soft and largely positive. Many press conferences were downright fawning.

Here’s how it looks in coverage during Trump

But almost overnight, the media found its fangs again. Compare the Obama coverage to just the first few months of the Trump presidency.

  • Protest! Protest! Protest! Protest! Protest! But the unending protests and favorable coverage seem to have one point: Undermine the President. The obvious agenda and funding behind the protests go unreported in the mainstream media. But any similar protests of an Obama presidency would have been greeted with racism, racism, racism. In fact, that is what the media turned the Tea Party image into: Racists.
  • Russia! Russia! Russia! Russia! Russia! Hysterical coverage of the longed for collusion between Trump and Russia has come up empty. Months of coverage and wild, irresponsible speculation meant to undermine the President has resulted in…the equivalent of finding Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster. Lots of nothing.
  • Nazi! Nazi! Nazi! Nazi! Nazi! And of course the media hyper-focuses on a few hundred white supremacist Nazis and does everything possible to tie Trump to them, then all Trump supporters to them, then all Republicans. The media makes the overt attempt to delegitimize the President, his supporters and the Republican Party. At the same time, they call the violent, masked mix of Marxists and anarchists that make up Antifa the good guys. Why? Because they oppose Trump and his supporters. The fact that Antifa was being violent against conservatives long before Charlottesville, and before Trump goes largely unreported. The media only noticed them at Charlottesville and called them merely “counter-protesters.”

The media has played the biggest role in polarizing Americans and breaking our ability to communicate with each other — more than the two parties and even the protesters. And for that, a very large chunk of Americans hate them or simply dismiss them as untrustworthy.

Few options to the deep media damage

Major Garrett, now with CNN, recently said on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that his colleagues need to cover the president straightforward and honest. Just report what he says and does, and avoid all of the opinionating and pontificating that has erupted since January.

Good for him. That’s true…as far as it goes. But the media needs to step back much further and choose to cover the same types of stories with the same news judgment as it did with, say, Barak Obama. Otherwise, the above comparisons show that even following Major Garrett’s recommendation, coverage would still be terribly slanted.

The traditional media may well have passed the point of no return on this front with their deeply entrenched biases, incapable of seeing both the error of their way and the damage it has done to their industry. (See poll results above.)

The hatred and distrust of the mainstream media will just continue to feed the division between a left-leaning media establishment and a right-leaning media establishment and Americans choosing which meal they will dine on.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The Revolutionary Act.

Destroying Monuments and Lies About Race

While in Baltimore visiting my 89 year old black dad, I thanked him for filling me and my four younger siblings with the Word of God. I told Dad how I would hear a minister on TV begin reciting a verse from the Bible and find myself reciting the verse along with him. I wondered how I knew that verse from the Bible. Then, it dawned on me, Dad filled us with the Word of God when we were kids. Dad chuckled and told me a story.

Aunt Nee asked Dad to deliver a payment to the Christian book store for a book she ordered. While browsing the store, a thick book of Bible stories with beautiful illustrations caught Dad’s eye. An older white woman saw Dad’s interest in the book. She approached Dad and asked him questions about himself.

The book cost $5.95. Dad asked if he could put the book on lay-a-way. Overhearing Dad’s conversation with the store clerk, the white woman offered to pay for the book. Dad said back then, he was not much of a reader, only comic books. Dad’s voice cracked and his eyes welled up when he told me this next part of his story. He told the white woman, “If you’re kind enough to buy me this book, I promise to read it.”

Dad read his five kids bedtime stories from that book which filled us with the Word of God. Dad said that book turned him into an avid reader which led to him becoming Dr. Reverend Lloyd E. Marcus, author and pastor of numerous churches. Dad also became Baltimore City Fire Department’s first black Chaplin. Dad’s encounter with the kind white woman in the Christian book store happened over 50 years ago. Seeing him get emotional while telling me about the incident surprised me.

In the early 1960’s, our school bus of black students from neighboring Pumphrey was the first to integrate Brooklyn Park Jr/Sr High School in Maryland. At my 50th high school reunion, I learned that white coach Mangum regularly brought black athletics to his home on weekends for his family’s cookouts and mentoring. I never knew blacks and whites socialized outside of school.

I am confident most of you could share wonderful tales of interracial friendships, acts of kindness and people overcoming their differences. Leftists are the ones who seek to keep the racial divide going.

Leftists love to promote rare incidents of racism while purposely ignoring the normalcy of Americans getting along.

By voting for Obama, white America clearly hoped to end our racial divide and apologize for slavery. Meanwhile, Leftists relentlessly promote their lie that America has not changed racially since the 1950s. Leftists say the only way to make things right (fair) in America is for government to control every aspect of our lives, get rid of the Constitution and force us to behave according to their socialist/progressive beliefs (anti-Christian, anti-America and anything goes morally). This is why Leftists cheered every time Obama overrode the Constitution with an illegal executive order that repealed another of our Constitutional rights.

During my Baltimore visit with Dad, several relatives stopped in to say hello. They were sympathetic to Colin Kaepernick who started the movement to dis our flag. They also sided with the thugs who are destroying Confederate monuments. Every black relative I spoke with was doing well, living their American dream. And yet, their anti-America and anti-Trump mindsets felt like an impermeable black cultural thing. Fake news media feeds their negative views of America and Trump. All my truths in defense of America and Trump fell on deaf ears. I felt like a stranger in a strange land, a voice of truth crying in the wilderness.

Jesus instructed his disciples,

“If any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.”

This is the approach I’ve taken with my relatives who refuse to believe the truth about the greatness of America and Trump striving to make her great for all Americans. I move on spreading truth elsewhere.

Unfortunately, I am hearing news reports of more American institutions, churches and so on getting rid of confederate symbols and monuments. All this mayhem over historical monuments is bought and paid for by George Soros. I hate seeing Americans surrendering to Soros’ hired evil hit squads. Leftists have launched their minions to wreck havoc in our streets because they cannot tolerate having a president in the White House who has America’s best interest at heart. Pure and simple.

I long to see a John Wayne American who will say, “Screw you, we’re not taking down historical monuments.” Bullies are typically cowards. All we need is people willing to stand up to them.

Clorox Company lies to defend ads on Huffington Post — Take Action by sending them an email.

Clorox blatantly lies to defend its advertising at Huffingtonpost.com.

Florida Family Association sent out email alerts the week of September 18, 2017 which reported that Clorox was a top advertiser at Huffingtonpost.com.  Thousands of people sent emails to encourage Clorox to stop supporting HuffPost’s propaganda with its advertising dollars.

Denise Hahn, Clorox Consumer Affairs Operations Manager responded to the emails it received with the following email message:

Thank you for reaching out to The Clorox Company about our advertising. We appreciate receiving feedback from our consumers and want to thank you for taking the time to share your opinions. The Clorox Company and our Family of Brands set strict criteria and standards around where our ads are placed to ensure that the media environment and corresponding content reflect our standards. For example, we do not advertise in or on politically focused programs, publications or websites, etc. While we do advertise on Huffington Post, we don’t place our ads in any of the political sections. But in this digital age, it can be difficult to track where our ads may appear. We would welcome you letting us know if you do see one of our ads in an inappropriate context.

However, Clorox is LYING to the public about placement of its ads at Huffingtonpost.com.  The following photos of Huffingtonpost.com on a mobile device prove it.

This photo of a cell phone taken on September 21, 2017  8:57 PM shows Clorox’s Liquidplumr at the top of the home page which includes ALL of Huffingtonpost.com’s political trash and social propaganda.

And this cell phone photo was taken two minutes later in the middle of the home page just above a political attack article.

There were several more Clorox ads posted on the home page that were not photographed.

Furthermore, AdChoices does not give advertisers the flexibility to choose to opt out of articles with specific content.

Clorox’s above statement is a blatant lie.

Seventeen examples of Huffington Post’s Islamist propaganda articles are posted at the bottom of this article.

Clorox certainly has the right to advertise in whatever forum it chooses.  You have the same right to voice concern regarding the content on such forums and choose to spend your money elsewhere

Florida Family Association has prepared an email for you to send to urge Clorox directors to stop supporting  Huffingtonpost.com propaganda with its advertising dollars.

Click here to send your email to Clorox.

This email will open in your email browser unlike most email campaigns.  This is because Clorox is blocking emails from Florida Family Association’s email delivery server. If the above link does not open in your email browser or if the email is returned to you please prepare an email using the suggested subject line, content and email addresses provided below.

Cannot believe that Clorox is lying to defend advertising support of Huffingtonpost.com propaganda.

Suggested content:

I was very disappointed to learn that Clorox is blatantly lying about its advertising at Huffingtonpost.com who calls American military racists, fundraises for CAIR, defends the Muslim Brotherhood and publishes Islamist propaganda.

Please stop supporting Huffington Post propaganda with Clorox advertising dollars.

Email addresses:

Officers

Benno Dorer, Chairman and CEO
benno.dorer@clorox.com

Stephen Robb, CFO
steve.robb@clorox.com

Eric Reynolds, CMO
eric.reynolds@clorox.com

Directors

Richard H. Carmona, M.D., M.P.H., F.A.C.S.
Vice Chairman, Canyon Ranch
richardcarmona@canyonranchinstitute.org

Spencer C. Fleischer
Managing Partner, FFL Partners
sfleischer@fflpartners.com

Esther Lee
Executive Vice President – Global Chief Marketing Officer, MetLife, Inc.
estherlee@metlife.com

Russell J. Weiner
President, Domino’s USA
russell.weiner@dominos.com

What happens when an ordinary American stands up to the global jihad?

Canada is now discussing criminal penalties for “Islamophobia.” Facebook’s Vice President went to Pakistan in July to assure the Pakistani government that Facebook would remove content critical of Islam. American columnists seriously call for the denial of free speech rights to those who warn about the jihad threat. That call was directed at me, for the crime of  “falsely constructing a divide between Islam and the West.”

“Falsely”? Really?

Clearly there are some very powerful people who are desperately afraid of what they call “Islamophobia,” and are now cracking down on it hard. For years I have been sounding the alarm about the threat of jihad terror and the human rights abuses that Sharia enables, and increasingly the West, instead of heeding these warnings, is turning against those who have been sounding them.

In my forthcoming book Confessions of an Islamophobe, I make my case. Is there really a threat to the free world from jihad terror and Sharia oppression, or is such concern all just paranoid fear-mongering, xenophobia, racism, bigotry, paranoia, profiteering — in a word, “Islamophobia”?

I’ve always found such accusations bewildering and baseless, and still do. I began this work because I was an ordinary American — a believer in the freedom of speech and free society and the equality of rights of all before the law — who saw problems that weren’t being addressed adequately. In the intervening years, those problems have only gotten worse, although the ruling elites still generally do not admit there are any problems at all.

So: are they right, or am I? You be the judge: in Confessions of an Islamophobe, I discuss the real threat women, gays, Jews, Christians, secular liberals and secular Muslims face, and reveal what happens to those ordinary citizens who dare to tell the truth about that threat.

Pre-order Confessions of an Islamophobe here.

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Students Rake in Extra Credit After Taking Quiz on Their White Privilege

Students at San Diego State University can earn extra credit by taking a quiz that gauges their level of “white privilege,” according to a Tuesday report.

Professor Dae Elliott offers this extra credit in a sociology class, reported The College Fix. Her “White Privilege Checklist” asks students to peruse a list of 20 statements and check the ones that they think apply to them.

dcnf-logo

“The following are examples of ways white individuals have privilege because they are white,” states the quiz, which goes on to assert that white people have privilege because they can be around people of their race the majority of the time, can see people of their race “widely represented” in the newspaper or on TV, and can find “music of [their] race” in a music shop.

“I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk with the ‘person in charge,’ I will be facing a person of my race” reads one statement on the quiz. Another says, “I can take a job or enroll in a college with an affirmative action policy without having my co-workers or peers assume I got it because of my race.”

After responding to the statements, the quiz informed students of other alleged privileges of class, religion, sexual orientation, and gender and asked students to respond to a series of reflection questions.

“[The quiz] asks my students to step out of their subjectivity, extend their understanding, and begin to be a conscious part of understanding and hence gaining more power and agency to effect change,” Elliott told The College Fix. “In a society that values fairness, our injustices that are institutionalized are often made invisible.”

“This is another attempt by the left, and professor Elliott, to divide America,” Brandon Jones, president of the university’s College Republicans, told The College Fix. “The left’s political goal is to ensure that minorities in America perpetuate that their primary problem is white racism.”

Racial curriculum at San Diego State University also came under scrutiny earlier in September with media discovery of the school’s “Black Minds Matter” course, which trained future educators to teach Black Lives Matter ideology.

“[The quiz] is an excellent prompt to get the students discussing issues around how institutions work,” Elliott told The Daily Caller News Foundation. She noted that the seemingly objective, authoritative phrasing of the concept of “white privilege” “is for the students to broach in the discussion.”

“[My class] is actually listed as one of the favorites as the ensuing discussions do exactly as intended and help my students see things from multiple perspectives,” said the professor. “I have no intention of censoring liberal or conservative thought in my class but encouraging engagement using reason and evidence.”

San Diego State University did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Caller News Foundation in time for publication.

Rob Shimshock

Rob Shimshock is a reporter for The Daily Caller News Foundation. Twitter: @ShimshockAndAwe

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities for this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

A Note for our Readers:

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RELATED ARTICLE: Anne Hathaway denounces white privilege in award speech

EDITORS NOTE: “[The quiz] is an excellent prompt to get the students discussing issues around how institutions work,” a professor says of a “white privilege” quiz her students take. (Photo: iStock Photos)

UK: Growing Support for Arming More Police

The UK’s fear of firearms, and potential weapons of all kinds, is well-documented. Subjects are urged not to carry any item, such as pepper spray, that might be adapted for self-defense. Officers take to social media to boast of “weapons sweeps” that turn up old kitchen knivesbaseball bats, and sharpened sticks. In 2009, the Home Office even contemplated replacing traditional glass pint glasses out of fears about their use in barroom brawls. However, a recent report from the Wall Street Journal reveals that there is growing sentiment in the UK to abandon one of the clearest representations of their antipathy towards arms and equip more police officers with guns.

Since the Metropolitan Police Service was founded in 1829, most officers have conducted their duties unarmed. In order to carry a firearm on duty, an officer must volunteer and be trained as an Authorised Firearms Officer (AFOs). According to the WSJ, today a mere five percent of officers in England and Wales carry firearms. A March 2017 report by NBC News indicated that even in London, less than 10 percent of officers carry a gun.  Data from the Home Office shows that from 2009 to 2016, the number of AFOs in England and Wales dropped 18 percent, part of an overall reduction in the police force. Further, citing this data, the Independent pointed out that the number of AFOs as a percentage of the overall police force fell from 2010 to 2016.

The shift in mindset has taken place amidst a string of terrorist attacks and an increase in violent crimes perpetrated with guns and knives. In what will be seen by some as a blow to the efficacy of UK gun law, the WSJ reported that “London’s Metropolitan Police says the number of guns being smuggled into the U.K. is ‘worrying,’ and there are fears terrorists might use them to carry out marauding attacks.”

Showing just how much opinion has turned, the WSJ article quoted Open University Professor of History and Criminology Clive Emsley, who stated, “There is a much stronger movement for arming the ordinary bobby than I can ever remember.”

Moreover, the article shared the story of Constable Damon Blackman, who was on hand for one of London’s recent terror attacks,

A police medic trained to carry a Taser, he responded to the June 3 terrorist attack at London Bridge that left eight people dead. He said he believed more lives could have been saved if the first responders had been able to shoot the attackers before they rampaged through nearby Borough Market.

“If you’re dealing with someone with a knife, [Tasers don’t] give the same level of security as a firearm,” Mr. Blackman said.

Some high-profile officials have also called for a change. For the past several months, former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party and Member of the European Parliament Nigel Farage has used his radio program to advocate for an armed police force. Following the London Bridge attack, Colonel Richard Kemp, who worked for the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee, issued a statement where he advocated for a number of measures to combat terrorist violence. In it, he noted, “We also need to have every cop in this country armed, which gives us a greater chance of having an immediate response.”

The evidence of a change in sentiment is more than anecdotal. A 2006 poll of officers conducted by the Police Federation of England and Wales found that 82 percent “[did] not want all officers to be routinely armed on duty.” A Police Federation fact sheet accompanying the results noted that “there has been almost no change in police officers’ opinions since we conducted the previous surveys in 2003 and 1995, and this despite the massive rise in gun related crime.” A September 2017 version of the poll found, “34% of all Federated Rank officers responding to the survey are in favour of officers being routinely armed both on or off duty, or just on duty;” a 16 point shift in favor of arming officers.

The UK government has already taken some measures to arm more officers. Following the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France, the government allocated funding to train 1,500 new AFOs. However, recruiting new AFOs has proved difficult and the allotment has not been filled. Additionally, the National Police Chiefs’ Council is in the midst of a review of armed policing in the UK. A July 13 press release from the organization stated that the group “will carefully consider whether there is a need to further increase the number of highly specialist officers working in armed response vehicles, whether some currently unarmed officers in key locations should be armed and more Tasers for front line officers.”

It is encouraging that a growing number of British subjects are coming to the realization that firearms are an effective means of confronting criminal violence. While recent debate on this matter has almost exclusively concerned firearms for police, the UK would do well to rediscover that all law-abiding individuals have the right to access the tools of self-defense.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Reuniting The United States With Reciprocity

Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll Throws Wrench in Anti-gun Agenda

Anti-Gun Politicians: Blocking Out The Facts About Suppressors

Washington Post Employs Deceptive Tactic on ‘Children’ and Guns

The Washington Post has surpassed the Brady Campaign and Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety to take a place alongside the New York Times as the premier anti-gun propagandists in the country. While those gun control groups have been known to pervert the facts to fit their agenda, a recent Post article and accompanying editorial go where even the most hardline gun control groups no longer tread.

On September 15, the Washington Post published an article with the sensationalist headline “Children under fire,” which carried the subtitle, “Almost two dozen kids are shot every day in the U.S. This 4-year-old was one of them.” In it, the author used the tragic shooting of a 4-year-old Cleveland boy as a jumping-off point to discuss the number “children” shot in the U.S. each day. Throughout the article, the author referred to his subjects as “children,” contending, “On average, 23 children were shot each day in the United States in 2015.” Accompanied by extensive artwork of the boy and his injuries, the author’s obvious intent was to give the impression that such incidents involving young children are common.

Using a well-worn anti-gun tactic, the author came to the deceptive 23 “children” a day figures by combining the annual number of firearms-related injuries among those properly identified as children (0-14) with firearms-related injuries among juveniles (15-17) and labeling the entire group “children.” As one might expect, juveniles, rather than children, account for the vast majority of firearms-related injuries.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2015 there were 8,369 firearms injuries among those ages 0-17. Juveniles ages 15-17 accounted for 6,476, or 77 percent, of those injuries. Excluding these individuals from the measurement, the average number of children who sustained a firearm injury each day drops from 23 to 5.

Not content to let the article alone mislead the public, on September 18 the Post’s editorial board weighed in. The online version of the Post editorial carried the headline “Twenty-three children are shot every day in America,” just above a picture of the 4-year-old featured in the article. Once again, the Post’s intent was obvious; to portray young children as suffering gunshot wounds 23 times each day.

Such deceptive tactics place the Post at odds with even the institutional gun control lobby. After using this approach throughout the 1990s (sometimes using ages 0-19), the Brady Campaign (formerly Handgun Control Inc.) now refers to this age group as “children and teens” in their materials. Everytown also uses the term “children and teens” to refer to those ages 0-19. Unlike the Post, Everytown grants some additional context to the statistic, admitting on its website, “Rates of firearm injury death increase rapidly after age 12.”

If this NRA-ILA Grassroots Alert article seems familiar, that is because there has been a recent resurgence in the use of the misleading method employed by the Post. While Americans’ trust in the media is already near a historic low, the Post’s use of a deceptive tactic that even the gun control lobby has abandoned should further inform readers as to the “quality” of journalism to expect from the publication.

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Anti-Gun Politicians: Blocking Out The Facts About Suppressors

Gun Control Lobby Seeks to Thwart SHARE Act with Hysteria, Fear Mongering

Earlier this month we reported on the introduction of H.R. 3668, the Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement (SHARE) ActWithin weeks of its introduction, the bill had a hearing before the House Natural Resource Subcommittee on Federal Lands and passed out of the full Committee on Natural Resources. The panic is now starting to set in amongst the gun control lobby, which is desperately searching for ways to smear a bill that has been around for years in various forms without attracting much attention from the usual anti-gun extremists.

The true reason for their discontent is not so much the bill’s content – concerned as it is with hunting, land access, and law-abiding gun owners – but with how the bill’s success threatens to expose as lies the narratives they’re pushing about the current administration and America’s attitude toward guns. Trump has been a disaster for the gun industry, they crow. The NRA is a paper tiger, they insist. America is over guns, they exclaim.

None of it, of course, is true. 

Nor is most of what the media has said about the bill’s content accurate or enlightening.

As is typical when pro-gun legislation is on the move, newspaper writers who in many cases have never owned or shot a firearm conjure up indignant talking points about subject matter of which they have no understanding.

That’s why, for example, you had Dana Milbank of the Washington Point making claims about suppressors that the fact-checker of the very paper that employs him had already contradicted. And it’s why Gail Collins of the New York Times is shocked that long gun ammunition with non-lead projectile components (which she refers to as “armor piercing bullets”) is already on the market.

Even people who should know better are displaying their ignorance … or maybe just their opportunism to latch onto lucrative anti-gun consulting agreements.

A former ATF agent turned gun control lobbyist insisted at the bill’s recent hearing that several provisions of the SHARE Act would endanger law enforcement officers. Some of the same policy initiatives that he cited, however, were endorsed by ATF’s current second ranking official as opportunities to reduce regulatory burdens “without significantly hindering ATFs mission or adversely affecting public safety.”

A writer who claims to have been a park ranger also criticized a portion of the bill that seeks to standardize rules for carrying firearms on certain federal waterfront recreational areas with those already in place at national parks and national forests, among other federal lands. “Why does a hunter need to carry a firearm on Hoover Dam or Lake Mead, which gets 7 million visitors a year?” he asks. “Are there really good hunting opportunities on a lake filled with thousands of recreational boaters?”

The provisions in question, however, are aimed at carrying for self-defense, not hunting, which is already allowed on many of the areas that would be affected by this portion of the bill. That’s why the title he cites (and apparently didn’t bother to read) is captioned, “RECREATIONAL LANDS SELF-DEFENSE ACT.”

The same writer goes on to claim: “And then there are the provisions eliminating all restrictions on the purchase of silencers, eliminating restrictions on armor-piercing bullets, and eliminating restrictions on carrying firearms across state lines.”

The bill doesn’t do any of these things. Under the SHARE Act, the purchase of suppressors would remain subject to the same federal regulations as firearms themselves. Regulations on “armor-piercing bullets” would remain on the books but focus more clearly on the handgun ammunition that most threatens law-enforcement officers. And the bill does nothing to change rules about “carrying” firearms across state lines. It merely makes a current law protecting the transport of secured, unloaded firearms enforceable against anti-gun states and localities that have openly defied it.

But the primary concern of pro-gun Americans should not be the usual elites who are predictably criticizing legislation they don’t understand, but members of Congress who need to understand that law-abiding gun owners support it.

Please contact your U.S. Representative NOW and ask him or her to vote YES on H.R. 3668, the SHARE Act. You can call the Congressional Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask to be connected to your representative’s office, or you can send an email using our Take Action tool.

Your representative needs to hear from you TODAY to ensure the momentum building behind this historic legislation continues to grow.

Ask Your U.S. Representative to co-sponsor H.R. 3668, the SHARE Act.

Please contact your U.S. Representative NOW and ask him or her to co-sponsor H.R. 3668, the SHARE Act. You can call the Congressional Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask to be connected to your representative’s office.

TAKE ACTION TODAY

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City Abruptly Eliminates Police Chief Finalist for Supporting Immigration Enforcement

A highly qualified and respected veteran law enforcement official with impressive credentials was precipitously eliminated as a finalist to be police chief in a U.S. city after officials discovered he endorsed immigration enforcement. Judicial Watch is investigating and has filed a public records request to obtain details about the troublesome case in which the support for the rule of law served as a disqualifier for a candidate hired to enforce the rule of law. It also marks yet another example nationwide of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness and the negative impact illegal immigration is having on taxpayers.

The unbelievable story involves the northern Colorado city of Ft. Collins’ search for a new police chief. Steve Henry, a former chief deputy for the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO) in central Arizona applied for the position. The 55-year-old law enforcement veteran spent nearly two decades at PCSO, an agency with a $39 million budget that patrols a county the size of Connecticut. Henry is a U.S. Army veteran who obtained his undergraduate degree at Arizona State University and graduate degree at Northern Arizona University. He also holds a degree from the Harvard JFK School of Government and attended the Federal Bureau of Investigation National Academy. He has 23 years of continuous and stellar law enforcement service.

Henry was among 65 applicants for the Ft. Collins police chief job and was recently notified that he was one of six finalists. He was invited to travel to Ft. Collins to interview with city officials, specifically the city manager, who oversees the police chief. Henry’s offer was abruptly rescinded, according to a source closely involved with the selection process, because he publicly supported an Arizona law (SB1070) that makes it a state crime to be in the U.S. without proper documentation and bans “sanctuary city” policies. The measure also allows local law enforcement officers throughout the state to inquire about suspects’ immigration status. “Three of the top six candidates were dumped for a public stance on one issue or another,” Judicial Watch’s source said. “Political correctness is destroying America when a city government does not want a chief who supports the rule of law.” Judicial Watch reached out to Ft. Collins City Manager Darin Atteberry for comment but an assistant named Rachel left Judicial Watch a voice message saying Atteberry had “back-to-back meetings” for days and would not be available. Judicial Watch also sent Atteberry questions via electronic mail to his official city address (datteberry@fcgov.com) but he did not return them.

A California-based company called Ralph Anderson and Associates that provides cities, counties and state agencies with executive search and consulting services is handling the search for Ft. Collins police chief. The city hired the firm after its police chief resigned in May following a series of scandals, including the use of excessive force in several instances and a $425,000 settlement to two officers who claimed the department discriminated against them based on their race. The Ft. Collins Police Department has 327 employees, 213 of them sworn officers and an annual budget of $46.5 million. Nestled against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Ft. Collins is the state’s fourth largest city with a population of about 157,000. It’s home to Colorado State University, the state’s flagship public college, and local government supports offering illegal immigrants sanctuary. Ft. Collins Mayor Wade Troxell said in a local newspaper report that the city is an open, inclusive and friendly community and that “all people matter.” Members of the city council have consistently said they support diversity and want the city to be a welcoming place for all people.

Henry was informed by a Ralph Anderson and Associates official that he was eliminated as a candidate after the discovery of two news stories in which Henry was quoted supporting Arizona’s immigration control measure, SB1070. The Anderson and Associates official said the articles made Atteberry, the Ft. Collins city manager, leery about hiring Henry because, among other things, the city is a university town. With the city refusing to explain what happened, the chain of events indicates that a highly qualified candidate got eliminated from the final six police chief applicants due to his support for the rule of law. There was no crime, misconduct or character flaw on his part, just support in his capacity at Pinal County for Arizona’s commitment to assist federal law enforcement in an effort to secure borders and implement federal trespassing statutes. As for the Ft. Collins public officials, it never looks good when they dodge the hard questions involving questionable decisions.

Totalitarianism, Anarchism and Our Growing Discontents

David Carlin on the rising forces of the American Left: they begin as Democrats, then become anarchists, and, as history proves, will end up as totalitarians.

Given the history of Communism in Russia, China, and elsewhere, we have good reason to fear that political leftism will have totalitarian tendencies, even when the leftists in question happen to be Americans. That’s so, but there’s a further danger beyond the threat of tyranny. Please bear with me as I try to explain.

There’s an odor of totalitarianism in the many efforts being made by leftists nowadays to repress certain manifestations of free speech and freedom of conscience. We are told that “hate speech” doesn’t deserve the protections that are normally given to all other kinds of speech. For hate speech, unlike scientific speech and pornography (allegedly), does harm.

We are also told that when somebody engages in racist hate speech, this does serious harm, both direct and indirect, to African-Americans and other “persons of color.” And this harm is more serious than the harm done by, let’s say, pickpockets.  The same goes for homophobic hate speech. If we can ban pickpocketing, why can’t we ban hate speech?

Our leftists would agree, at least as an abstract proposition, that freedom of conscience is an excellent thing. But if your conscience tells you, a member of the KKK, to beat up a black man, should the rest of us, should the law, respect your freedom of conscience? Of course not.

But if your conscience tells you not to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding celebration, is that any different?

Some of us (myself, for example) think we detect embryonic forms of totalitarianism in this leftist crusade against hate speech and freedom of conscience. Others (leftists) think people like me are moral dinosaurs, trying to block a wonderful movement that is “on the right side of history.”

Allow me to suggest, however, that totalitarianism isn’t the ultimate leftist aim. The ultimate aim is anarchism. Totalitarianism is an intermediate step between the dreadful present and the anarchist ideal of total freedom.

Click here to read the rest of Professor Carlin’s column . . .

David Carlin

David Carlin

David Carlin is professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Anarchists shopping in Seattle. © 2017 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.orgThe Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

 

Frictional Characters Threaten GOP Repeal

There’s no such thing as a perfect piece of legislation. And for Republicans like Senator Rand Paul (Ky.), that’s been a hard reality to swallow. Like a lot of us, he wants nothing more than to scrap Obamacare completely and start over with a competitive, pro-life, free market system. But unfortunately, that’s no longer an option at this moment for the GOP after a summer of misfires and wasted opportunities. The clock is ticking. And the only thing Republicans have less of than time is voters’ patience. And both demand leaders act now.

In the plan from Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Republicans have a choice. They can vote “yes” and gut a significant portion of Obamacare and Planned Parenthood funding, or they can vote “no” and keep 100 percent of it. Apparently, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) prefers the latter, tweeting that he’s prepared to kill the GOP’s repeal a second time because it isn’t the product of “regular order.” (Neither, conservatives are quick to point out, was Obamacare.) “I think most of us are trying to figure out what the logic is,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said. “We all know that some folks would rather have a bill that’s perfect. But I guess if we can’t have a bill that’s perfect, I’d rather have a bill that’s much better than what [the law] is today.”

And for a lot of Americans, this debate is about a lot more than dollars and cents. It’s about actual human lives, whose fate will literally be decided by what the Senate does in seven days. If the Graham-Cassidy bill fails, so does the GOP’s best shot at defunding Planned Parenthood. At a rally outside Senator Paul’s Kentucky office, Students for Life did their best to drive that urgency home. “The disastrous status quo that is Obamacare is harming families, using our taxpayer dollars to fund abortion and line the pockets of Planned Parenthood’s billion-dollar abortion industry,” said President Kristan Hawkins. Vice President Mike Pence agrees. “The president and I consider Senator Paul a friend,” he made clear. “He’s a good man, but he’s wrong about this.” And unless he changes his mind, thousands of future Americans will pay the price.

Meanwhile, in pockets across the country, the Left’s opposition “is again reaching jet-aircraft decibels of outrage,” the Wall Street Journal jokes. Armed with the usual misinformation, liberals are taking to the airwaves and social media to bash the effort, which they claim would leave 18 million uninsured. (Of course, they neglect to mention that at least half of those would be willfully uninsured after the bill scraps Obama’s individual mandate.)

Liberals are also making a big deal about voting on a bill without a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score. But what good was a CBO score for Obamacare? If you want a good laugh, read its prediction for the 2009 law – which, among other things, claimed Obamacare would reduce the U.S. deficit. Besides, “CBO forecasts are often wrong,” the Wall Street Journal editors point out. “In this case, they’d also be meaningless. The point of Graham-Cassidy is to allow states to experiment and tailor approaches to local populations. Some might try to expand Medicaid’s reach or even go single-payer. Others might tinker with reinsurance. The budget office can’t possibly know what 50 states would do or how that would affect coverage.”

While the two sides snipe back and forth, the issue is also starting to bleed into the Alabama Senate primary. Senator Luther Strange and Judge Roy Moore are locked in a heated runoff for Jeff Sessions’s old seat, and health care is front and center. In some press reports, the media is trying to paint Moore as an opponent of the Graham-Cassidy bill. But that’s absolutely not true. I spoke with him last night, and although he would prefer a full repeal of Obamacare, he sees the importance of in ending the forced partnership between taxpayers and Planned Parenthood. As far as he’s concerned, the GOP plan is a good first step.

For now, though, the focus will be on the senators who already have a vote. Make sure they cast the right one!

Contact your senators and urge them to start freeing America from the grip of Obama’s failed law.


Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.


Also in the September 22 Washington Update:

Religious Liberty Is Abbott Forming

A Boston Massacre of the First Amendment


Previous Washington Update Articles »

New Ambassador Course: “How to Have Constructive Conversations About Energy” [Video]

I’m excited to announce that you can now sign up for my universal and comprehensive training program for employees in the moral case for fossil fuels and the art of constructive conversation. “How to Have Constructive Conversations About Energy” is the best method I know of for creating motivated, effective ambassadors.

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The program is available online and in-person. Visit the sign up page for more information including the full curriculum, pricing, and a sample video.

Sample video: 1.0 From frustrating fights to constructive conversations

1.0 From frustrating fights to constructive conversations from Alex Epstein on Vimeo

RELATED VIDEO: How to Talk to Anyone About Energy by Alex Epstein

Bernie Sanders’s 1960s worldview makes bad foreign policy

Bernie Sanders is exactly the type of Socialist Donald Trump had in mind when he explained the reasons for Venezuela’s failure at the United Nations earlier this week.

“The problem in Venezuela,” the president said, “is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented.”

In a major foreign policy speech delivered from the same Westminster College campus where Winston Churchill gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech more than 70 years ago, Sanders trotted out just about every shibboleth of the tired old Socialist left, with surprisingly little inventiveness or variation.

It was a speech of anti-militarist and anti-capitalist diatribe, sprinkled with attacks on President Trump and his supporters — just the type of thing that has made Sanders the darling of liberal arts college students.

Iraq was a disaster that left tens of thousands of Americans “wounded in body and spirit from a war we should never have started” Applause.

The U.S. “spend(s) more on defense than the next 12 nations combined, … (at the same time) they want to throw 32 million Americans off of the health insurance they currently have.” Applause.

Income inequality is the scourge of the past, present and future, in the world according to Sanders. “This planet will not be secure or peaceful when so few have so much, and so many have so little.” Applause.

With the exception of his insistence on the “crisis” of climate change, there was little in this speech that could not have been uttered in the 1960s, either by outgoing U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (whose famous “military-industrial complex” speech Sanders quoted at length) or by Timothy Leary.

You want to know America’s biggest problem? In the world according to Sanders, it’s America’s success.

To Sanders, our military power is a problem, a really big problem. “Partnership, rather than dominance,” should direct U.S. policy toward the world, not U.S. military solutions to problems. “We must rethink the old Washington mindset that judges “seriousness” according to the willingness to use force.”

Sanders believes that America’s unparalleled economic success is not just a problem, but a threat to the rest of the world. “There is no moral or economic justification for the six wealthiest people in the world having as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population – 3.7 billion people.”

But hey, don’t worry, Bernie will take care of that. He’ll just confiscate their wealth and redistribute it to the less fortunate so we can all be poor and miserable together.

Sanders really doesn’t like Donald Trump, in case anyone didn’t notice. Just like his friends in the national media, the senator thinks that Trump should give up on threatening Kim Jong un, and offer him more carrots than John Kerry offered the Iranians.

And just like that wonderfully successful Iran deal, that “advanced the security of the US and its partners, and it did this at a cost of no blood and zero treasure,” surely Rocket Man will see how generous and kind we are and will volunteer to give up his nuclear weapons and his ballistic missiles, because we promise to give him goodies.

To those of us brought up in the 1960s, it’s all depressingly familiar. Blame America first, abandon U.S. power and might and kowtow to a consortium of nations that despise us and seek our destruction — otherwise known as the United Nations — and the world will become a wonderful place.

While Bernie likes to contrast the Iraq war to the Iran deal — and no contrast better illustrates his worldview — it’s precisely here that his 1960s socialist vision breaks down.

The United States tried to woo Saddam Hussein. In 1989, under President George H.W. Bush, the United States was set to shower the Iraqi dictatorwith billions of dollars of U.S. high technology, most of it to be delivered on credits financed with taxpayer dollars.

But like any true dictator, Saddam wanted more. When he invaded Kuwait, even Bush 41 said enough was enough.

After another 12 years of crippling sanctions and the toughest arms control regime ever devised by the United States and its partners, Saddam still wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. Despite 17 UN Security Council resolutions condemning him, including multiple authorizations of force under Chapter 7 of the UN charter, it still took U.S. leadership and military might to force Saddam’s hand.

And even then, just as U.S. and allied forces were crossing the borders into Iraq, he had still been manufacturing outlawed ballistic missiles (Al-Samoud 2 missiles), according to the chief United Nations arms inspector, Hans Blix.

The lesson is simple, but it’s a tough one to accept if you’re a 20-year-old liberal arts major who might be subject to the draft: Some national security threats to our nation must be dealt with by force, and by force alone.

When Iran finally tests its first nuclear weapon — developed thanks to the Iran deal — Senator Sanders and his ilk will predictably blame the U.S. military-industrial complex and militarists in Congress for angering the Iranians.

Once again, it will be our fault.

And that is what’s fundamentally wrong with Bernie’s 1960s vision of the world. Far from being the source of all evil in the world, as Bernie thinks, America remains the world’s last bulwark against evil.

Who will you want to call when things go desperately wrong? Something tells me, for most Americans, it won’t be Bernie.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Hill.