America Needs a Formula for Reopening

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This week, President Donald Trump began openly considering at what point the American government ought to take steps to reopen the American economy.

He explained: “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. America will again and soon be open for business,” suggesting that the timeline will be weeks instead of months.

“If it were up to the doctors,” Trump said, “they’d say, ‘Let’s shut down the entire world.’ This could create a much bigger problem than the problem that you started with.”

Later, Trump optimistically proclaimed that he “would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.”

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Trump’s projections drew fire—as do all of his statements. These statements, however, caused inordinate faux heartburn among commentators, who shouted that Trump was weighing dollars against lives and deciding in favor of dollars.

The hashtag #NotDyingForWallStreet began trending on Twitter, followed by the hashtag #DieForTheDow.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted: “My mother is not expendable. Your mother is not expendable. We will not put a dollar figure on human life. … No one should be talking about social darwinism for the sake of the stock market.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden said, “I don’t agree with the notion that somehow it’s OK … to let people die.”

That, of course, was not Trump’s suggestion. Trump was merely pointing out—quite correctly—that since the federal government has now taken the unprecedented and justifiable action of completely shutting down the American economy, to the tune of millions of lost jobs and the greatest quarterly economic decline in recorded history, we must also have a plan to end this situation.

The economy cannot remain shuttered indefinitely; the federal government cannot engage in endless cash expenditures on the basis of treasuries nobody is buying. Nor is the economy merely Wall Street. The vast majority of those who will lose their jobs are not day traders but workers. Small companies are more likely to go under than large ones.

The economy isn’t an abstraction. It’s the real lives of hundreds of millions of American citizens, and costs to those Americans must be weighed in the balance.

That’s not controversial. That’s a simple fact. Public policy is the craft of weighing risks and rewards, and policymakers do it every day. It’s just that this time, the stakes are the highest they have ever been.

So, when do we reopen, and how?

The biggest problem is that we lack the data to answer the question.

How many lives will be lost if we take heavy social measures after how many weeks? Moderate social measures? What will be the concomitant economic gain or loss? How many additional ICU beds and ventilators will we need to make available in order to clear the flattened curve such that we do not experience excess deaths due to lack of equipment, a la Italy?

Our goal should be to move from the Chinese model—total lockdown—to the South Korean model—heavy testing, contact investigations, and social distancing. In order to accomplish that, we need to flatten the curve and stop the spread, allowing us to reset. How long will that take?

We’re not going to have answers until some time passes—until we test more, until the outcomes of cases are made certain. But we can certainly construct the formulas that should allow us to calculate possible outcomes as new data comes in, and that should allow us to collectively commit to actions directed at certain outcomes.

We require a formula from the government. That’s the transparency the markets need, that the American people need. And that, at least, should be attainable over the next two weeks.

COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM

COMMENTARY BY

Ben Shapiro

Ben Shapiro is host of “The Ben Shapiro Show” and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is The New York Times best-selling author of “Bullies.” He is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, and lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles. Twitter: .

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Problematic Women: Love, Sex, and COVID-19

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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

Live From New York, It’s the Coronavirus Jihad

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My latest in PJ Media:

In light of the fact that the Qur’an says: “Muhammad is the apostle of Allah. Those who follow him are ruthless to unbelievers, merciful to one another” (48:29), it is no surprise that at least one Muslim has issued a call to weaponize the coronavirus against non-Muslims – and he is right here in the United States.

Bahgat Saber, a Muslim Brotherhood activist based in New York, recently said in a video [below] that “whoever has flu-like symptoms – cold, fever, sneezing – should pay a visit to his ‘friends’ who work for Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s government.”

Al-Sisi toppled the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt in 2013, and Saber sees the coronavirus as an opportunity for Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt to get revenge: “The moment you get flu-like symptoms like a cold or a fever, go to the public prosecution office that is closest to your house. Go to any building where they might illegally incarcerate people. If you can, go to a building of the Security Investigations Service, and if you can’t, just wait for them and sneeze on their cars when they pass by.”

Saber let his imagination run wild, thinking of ways Muslim Brotherhood members could weaponize the coronavirus: “If you want the state to care about coronavirus and start dealing with this disease, whoever among you suffers from influenza, fever, or cold, should just casually walk into a police station, or go to an office of the public prosecution, or to a courthouse. If you are a soldier, you can go into the defense ministry, and shake hands with all the generals of the military and the police. The same is true with the justice system. [People should target] the businessmen and actors who support Sisi. He should go to Media Production City. If there are people who oppose the military coup and work in Media Production City, and who have contracted anything – cold, fever, anything… They should go there and shake hands with everybody.…If you have contracted coronavirus, you should exact revenge! Avenge yourself, avenge the honor of your women, avenge the people who are in prison, and avenge the oppressed people. Go there. Why die alone? When you die, why die alone?”

Allah might take al-Sisi out himself, Saber acknowledged, but encouraged Muslims to give the deity some help: “Perhaps coronavirus will topple Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi. Our Lord is capable of doing anything. But you have to make proper use of this.”

Nor did he limit his call for murder-by-coronavirus to Egypt alone: “People who are outside of Egypt should go to any consulate or embassy. They are all licentious villains and sons of bitches….Exact revenge!…If you know someone [sick], send him on a visit. You’ll be doing him a favor.…When you talk to people, they say to you: ‘We don’t have machine guns, we don’t have F-16 plans, we don’t have this and that…’ But now you have the coronavirus culture.”

There is much more. Read the rest here.

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Greece: “Palestinian” Muslim migrants set fire to refugee camp on Lesbos

Turkey Uses Hagia Sophia as Mosque for Islamic Prayer Again

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

‘Open by Easter’? Trump Wants Nation Shut by Coronavirus ‘Raring to Go’ [Video]

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EXCLUSIVE: Trump, Coronavirus task force participate in Fox News town hall.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday he wants the U.S. economy back up and running by Easter Sunday on April 12, as the economy has taken a major hit from the coronavirus pandemic.

“We are opening up this incredible country. I would love to have it open by Easter,” Trump said during a Fox News virtual town hall in the Rose Garden, sitting alongside host Bill Hemmer and taking questions remotely from Fox News host Harris Faulkner.

“I would love to have it open by Easter. I will tell you that right now. I would love to have that,” Trump said, repeating himself. “It’s such an important day for other reasons. But I’ll make it an important day for this, too. I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.”

Asked whether that was in fact possible, Trump said, “Absolutely.”

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

While the federal government has provided assistance to state and local governments and has issued guidelines about public health and social distancing, it has been state and local governments that have ordered lockdowns or restrictions on businesses and the closing of schools, businesses, and other public facilities.

However, as president, Trump has a bully pulpit to encourage businesses and state and local governments to reopen.

Trump stressed the consequences for keeping the economy shuttered are more dire than the present circumstances under the coronavirus.

“You are going to have suicides by the thousands” if the economy remains closed, Trump said, noting predictions of a 25% drop in gross domestic product would mean massive job losses, closed businesses, and personal depression resulting from personal isolation.

Trump said that doesn’t mean it will be the same as before when Americans do return to work.

“We can socially distance ourselves and go to work,” he said.

The president discussed how experts told him about the need to take strong action.

“They came in, and they said, ‘Sir, we’re going to have to close the country,’” Trump said. “Are you serious about this?”

He noted that the economy has never shut down to this degree for prior disease outbreaks.

“We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don’t turn the country off,” the president said. “We lose much more than that to automobile accidents. We didn’t call up the automobile companies and say, ‘Stop making cars.’ … We have to get back to work.”

Earlier in the day, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in the state where almost half of all U.S. coronavirus cases are located, complained about not getting enough ventilators from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“I look at actions, not words … FEMA says, ‘We’re sending 400 ventilators.’ Really?” Cuomo said. “What am I going to do with 400 ventilators when I need 30,000? You pick the 26,000 who are going to die because you only sent 400 ventilators.”

Early in the town hall event, Vice President Mike Pence addressed Cuomo’s remarks, saying that more ventilators are going out.

“We’re doing just that. We’re in the process of literally sending the entire national stockpile out. I want the people of New York to know we’re putting a priority on the state,” Pence said.

Trump responded later, somewhat differently. He said Cuomo had the chance to order 16,000 ventilators in 2015 for a pandemic response in the future, but declined to do so.

“We’re building them hospitals. We’re building them medical centers, and he was complaining about it,” the president said “We’re doing definitely more for them than anyone else. He was talking about the ventilators. But he should have ordered the ventilators.”

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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Virtue Signaling of Plastic Bag Ban Ends Quickly in a Pandemic

My Husband Is a First Responder. COVID-19 Hits Home for the Kids and Me.

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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

Chinese Bio-Warfare Causes Economic Destruction

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“A financial panic is a very bad thing, but a government panic can do far greater damage in a far shorter time.” –  Tom McClintock

“Panic is highly contagious, especially in situations when nothing is known and everything is in flux.” – Stephen King

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” –  Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels.

“No country can survive being ruled by people who hate it.” –  Tucker Carlson

Like many Americans, I am sick of hearing about Covid-19.  We want our normal lives back, no “sheltering in place,” no more containment or quarantine, no masks, no travel bans, no closed schools, restaurants, and stores, and an end to the media propaganda and brainwashing.  The Covid-19 bio-warfare virus is dangerous to everyone, but more so to our immune compromised elderly, yet the yearly flu is still far more hazardous to life than this fast spreading and highly contagious Chinese biolab virus.

The evil trait of COVID-19 is its ability to infect others by people who appear healthy. Those infected often manifest no symptoms for up to two weeks, yet can transmit the disease to any person who comes within six feet of them for that entire incubation period, indicating the virus was most likely made in a biolab. Our healthy young people still believe they’re immortal and the virus won’t touch them.  They fail to curb their activities, resulting in countless others being infected.  And driven by a social media craze, teens are purposely coughing on grocery store produce.

The Sinister Reality

What has this viral respiratory illness done?  It has instilled fear in large portions of our population, closed down our country’s entire economy, eliminated normal activities and probably changed our lives forever.  That is the definition of bio-terrorism.

The politicians look blameless and at the same time they’ll increase their power through new laws, just as was done after 9/11.  A long-time friend who has watched the government’s power grow exponentially over the years said, “What is actually happening Kelleigh, is the nationalization of all businesses. It is also happening in Europe. It is a big step toward more socialism. Trump has no choice in the matter.  Keep in mind he has to do what they want or he could end up like Kennedy.”

I’ve watched the look of horror on President Trump’s face as this nightmare unfolded.  He was not a happy camper, but he shouldered the burden and took control as much as he could. And thank God we have Trump, not Hillary and not Biden.

The communists in our government will do anything to sabotage this president, and I have no doubt they have gotten together with their Red Chinese friends to destroy our economy and the stock market and instill fear in Americans.

A new report from Horizon Advisory consultants details Beijing’s post-virus strategy—already operational—to leverage the pandemic to seize global market share in key industries, further global dependence on Chinese manufacturing, and reverse efforts in the United States and elsewhere to decouple from the People’s Republic.

Chicago’s former mayor, Rahm Emanuel said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” The democrats are using this virus as their last chance to oust President Trump in November.  The soaring economy he created is temporarily in the tank, and 401k’s have lost 25 to 30 percent of their previous gains. Since the Democrats own the banks and the media, they are utilizing everything they can to tear down President Trump’s legacy.  They are absolutely thrilled with the decimation our country is experiencing from Covid-19, and they are blaming our President just like Red China.  And now the increasingly unstable media is demanding blackouts of Trump’s Covid-19 briefings.

WHO, CDC, NIH and Dr. Fauci

As for the World Health Organization, Director Tedros Adhanom is the first Director without a medical degree. He is also a member of the Marxist-Leninist Tigray People’s Liberation Front which was founded as a communist revolutionary party that came to power in 1991.  It was listed as a terrorist group by America in the 90s.

Tedros was promoted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who financed many of the phony large-scale health operations in Ethiopia that Tedros had facilitated. The Director and Bill Gates should be tried for crimes against humanity.  Please watch this important 13 minute video expose of Tedros.

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is married to Lisa Barsoomian. She was exposed in Marilyn Barnewell’s article, Deep State Husbands. Up until 2011, she was the attorney for WHO.  She has represented the Clintons, the FBI and many other corrupt characters.

Nancy Messonnier, MD, is the Director of the Center for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) at the CDC.  She is also Rod Rosenstein’s sister.  Her initial statements about the extreme danger of Covid-19 are what the media is using as ammunition in their propaganda.

Interesting that the CDC started hiring quarantine program managers last November to cover quarantine centers in Texas, California, New York, Washington, Illinois, Massachusetts and more.  Was this advanced warning?

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has been called “the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases.”  He has increased Americans Covid-19 fear with his pessimistic statements. He actually contradicted the president on national TV and told him he shouldn’t be so hopeful.  He has stated that “Trump is coming at the virus from a layperson’s standpoint, I’m coming from a scientific standpoint.”

Careful observers have noted that after the almost daily White House news conferences with President Trump and members of the Coronavirus Task Force, Fauci, a regular attendee and the task force’s chief medical spokesman, often runs to Trump-hating media like CNN to contradict — usually with a degree of nuance that gives him plausible deniability — what the president has just said.  The Daily Mail of London noted this behavior in a March 20 article, “Dr Anthony Fauci caught rolling his eyes and smirking as President Trump rants about the ‘deep state’ during coronavirus press conference.”

Within the WikiLeaks Hillary Rodham Clinton email files there’s a letter from Fauci to Hillary Clinton through her aid/lawyer Cheryl Mills, “Please tell her that we all love her and are very proud to know her.” He wrote this to her after her Benghazi testimony. Fauci is just another Deep State Hillary-loving stooge.

Senators Dump Stocks

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and several of her Senate colleagues reported selling off stocks worth millions of dollars in the days before the coronavirus outbreak crashed the market, according to reports.  Republican senators Richard Burr, Kelly Loeffler, Ron Johnson and Jim Inhofe sold significant stock shares following a January 24th meeting on the coronavirus threat. Loeffler has claimed she is only informed of her stock transactions weeks after they occur.  Really? Doesn’t sound like a good stockbroker to me!

Before the stock market tanked, these politicians saved their own bacon because they had market knowledge.  Martha Stewart is probably wondering why they have not received the same punishment she received.

Second Amendment

Jim Kouri’s latest article at NewsWithViews exposes the massive gun and ammunition sales during this pandemic.  The largest sales are in states where the virus has spread.

Journalist Daniel Greenfield noted in Front Page Magazine that the CDC has focused on liberal causes du jour rather than their mandate of actually keeping Americans safe from legitimate public health crises.

Greenfield noted that one of the “social justice” causes that have been pushed by the CDC are unconstitutional gun control schemes.

Gun permits have been suspended in several states and counties due to the virus panic.

Covid-19 Treatments

Seattle’s nursing home lost a number of their patients from the virus, but one 90 year old gal survived and is doing well even though she had other health problems.

New York City cases of Covid-19 started multiplying when a 39 year old woman returned from Iran to Manhattan and tested positive for the disease on March 1st.  New York now has at least 5,000 cases.  Daniel Horowitz tweeted, “Nearly the entire outbreak in New York came from a traveler from Iran, a place that was supposed to have a travel ban, but thanks to lower courts continuing to militate against Scotus decision, it was rendered moot.”

A new study whose results were published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents has found early evidence that the combination of hydroxychloroquine, a popular anti-malaria drug known under the trade name Plaqenuil, and antibiotic azithromycin (aka Zithromax or Azithrocin) could be especially effective in treating the COVID-19 coronavirus and reducing the duration of the virus in patients.

Three international studies in China, Australia and France found that Chloroquine with Azithromycin shows a 100% success rate in treating coronavirus in six days! Hydroxychloroquine is an anti-malarial drug while azithromycin is an antibiotic.

President Trump has called for these drugs to be used immediately and has even sent them to New York City where there’s an explosion of the virus.  Dr. Fauci disagrees with him, but then that’s to be expected.  These drugs are producing strong results in trials involving hospitalized American patients.

President Trump said, “Nothing will stand in our way as we pursue any avenue to find what best works against this horrible virus.”

Conclusion

Managing a pandemic shouldn’t require tanking the economy.  The mainstream media created a worldwide panic and they did it on purpose to see how much power they can wield.  Unfortunately, as comrades of the socialist democrats, it is a huge amount.  Their goal is to damage President Trump beyond repair.

Americans from coast to coast understand this is a different sort of virus, but it hasn’t the numbers that yearly flus have shown regarding those who get sick and those who die.  Both federal and state governments have gone berserk destroying our civil rights, and the very rights of American business, whether small or large to keep their doors open during this so-called WHO “pandemic.”

Steve Mnuchin has now moved Tax Day from April 15th to July 15th, which is an anomaly for this country and absolutely unnecessary for the “pandemic” total of Americans affected by Covid-19.  We have entered the twilight zone with how this virus is being treated.

There are 14,371 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the US.

  • There are 217-250 deaths blamed on the coronavirus.
  • The current mortality rate from confirmed cases is 1.5%, and we know that’s too high.
  • There are no official numbers that include the number of citizens who had the virus but were not sick enough to seek medical attention.
  • There are an estimated 22,000 flu deaths and 36 million cases in the US each year.

So why the panic?  Why the shutdown of schools, businesses, restaurants, sports, doctor’s offices, etc.? What is the true reality here?  Are American citizens being played?  Why the loss of civil rights?  And why has AG Barr’s DOJ asked Congress to expand legal authorities to circumvent those pesky civil liberties that are already being excessively curbed and destroyed?

We truly are in dangerous waters…stay tuned.

P.S.  Everyone is suffering because of the Covid-19 outbreak. NewsWithViews needs funds to continue to operate and bring you daily truth about what is happening in America…truth the mainstream media never reports.  We count on donations to survive.  Please help us by donating whatever you can every month.  And ask your friends to sign up to receive the daily reports.  You can donate here.

© All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Texas Abortion Clinics Close After Governor Orders a Halt to Non-Essential Medical Procedures

Protecting America’s Borders Is Critical to Combating Coronavirus

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In mid-March, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador closed his country’s borders to foreigners. At that point, his country had zero confirmed cases of COVID-19, commonly known as the coronavirus.

Bukele closed down schools, temporarily shut down the international airport, and banned flights from Mexico when he believed the Mexican government allowed corona-positive passengers to board El Salvador-bound flights.

While these measures might seem extreme, to date El Salvador has only one confirmed case.

El Salvador’s actions demonstrate that borders play a key role in combating against the coronavirus.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

On Friday, the U.S. and Mexico announced a joint agreement to close their shared border for nonessential travel over the next 30 days.

This means that for the next month, the U.S. Border Patrol will immediately return illegal immigrants across the border instead of processing and holding them in immigration facilities. Points of entry across the border are operational only for trade and commerce.

Closing the border to nonessential travel while still allowing trade was the right move by President Donald Trump.

The U.S. and Mexico are each other’s largest trade partners and with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, there are safety guarantees to protect lawful cross-border trade. Americans should be confident that necessary supply chains like food and manufactured goods are well-protected.

More importantly, this travel restriction protects border agents from unnecessary exposure to the coronavirus and reduces the workload they are experiencing from the border crisis.

It is also a smart move as it allows Customs and Border Protection to redirect manpower and sanitary resources that would have gone to inadmissible migrants toward first responders and critical industries.

Border agents are at the front lines and put their lives at risk every day protecting the country. With the coronavirus, they are now unwittingly risking their family, friends, and Homeland Security co-workers. Trump was right to give them this momentary reprieve and, should the crisis continue, the travel restrictions should be extended.

A recent Politico article reported that “nearly 500 Homeland Security employees are quarantined because of the novel coronavirus, and at least 13 are confirmed or presumed COVID-19 positive.”

Despite what partisan pundits in the mainstream media want you to think, travel restrictions are not racist or xenophobic. Currently, 41 countries have implemented travel restrictions or border control policies.

It is important to note that Friday’s border action was a joint agreement with Mexico. Hopefully, the Trump administration is deepening cooperation with Mexico on their domestic efforts to counter the coronavirus.

As cases of the virus increase in Mexico, the Mexican government is seriously falling behind on developing and executing a plan.

The capital city has only prohibited events larger than 1,000 people and recently allowed a concert of 70,000 people to take place.

Flight restrictions from high-risk countries are not in place and President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador continues traveling around the country, hugging and kissing supporters.

Recently, around 400 Mexican businessmen chartered private planes to Vail, Colorado, for a skiing trip. Upon return, a few tested positive for COVID-19. The Jalisco government is looking for them and asking them to self-isolate.

Should Mexico’s lack of internal enforcement continue, the U.S. should also consider banning flights.

In the midst of a highly contagious global pandemic, definitions of normalcy are rewritten. Viruses do not respect borders or boundaries. What was extreme a month ago is now prudent and responsible.

COMMENTARY BY

Ana Quintana

Ana Quintana is a senior policy analyst for Latin America and the Western Hemisphere in The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies. Twitter: .

Lora Ries

Lora Ries is a senior research fellow specializing in homeland security at The Heritage Foundation. Twitter: .

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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

Doing Nothing is Doing Something

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Helen Freeh on COVID-19 and us: Genesis has a beautiful line in which Joseph says to his brothers, “you meant it for evil but God has turned it to good.”

In the face of an assault, natural disaster, or act of war, humans have an overwhelming desire to do something.  Here in Nebraska, we suffered historic floods last year and our citizens united to work hard in sandbagging, cleaning, donating food and water.  There was something for us to do in response to the catastrophe.  Tornadoes recently struck Nashville, Tennessee, and killed twenty-five people and devastated parts of their downtown.  Thousands of people came out to assist in the rescue and clean up of Nashville. So many, in fact, that the FEMA authorities had to turn people away.

We are hardwired to do something in response to suffering, loss, attacks, and threats to our community.

Yet now in the greatest disruption to global life since World War II, the very thing we are called to do is – nothing. We cannot mobilize to confront the global assault of the Wuhan Coronavirus.  We cannot sign up at the local recruiting office.  We cannot donate our steel and rubber products to the war effort.  We cannot even march in protest to or solidarity with government policy.

Our mobilization is the mobilization of isolation.

To do something now is to stay home, not go to work, school, parties, sporting events, concerts, or – most sadly for many of us – Mass.  Our civic and even moral duty is to do nothing.  Here in the middle of Lent, three weeks before the great Triduum and Easter celebration of the Church, we have been called by our government to enter a cloistered, monastic life within our individual homes. The spiritual significance of this cannot be overlooked.

In his book, God or Nothing, Cardinal Sarah warns against the “heresy of activism” in which we have forgotten that the heart of our life lies only in God.  The activity of contemporary life creates blindness or deafness to the reality of our reliance upon God.  We are wayfarers in this world and most of our life is outside of our control.

The coronavirus situation reveals a reality that always has been.  This virus, like other natural disasters, is beyond our control. But, we are able to control our reactions to the situation.  Our false sense of control has been stripped from us and we are laid bare.  This stripping of power reveals beautiful life hidden beneath our outward trappings.  Our response must be docility, trust, abandonment to Divine Providence, and most of all charity. As Colossians 3:14 and 1 Peter 4:8 declare, charity binds all the other virtues and rules as queen over them.

Our situation is full of ironies with deep symbolic spiritual significance.  To do something against this contagion, we must do nothing.  To strengthen our global alliance, each nation must close its borders to others.  We have never been so globally connected in spirit by physically disconnecting ourselves from each other. Out of love for our neighbors, we must not visit them.  To keep our communities strong, we must break them.  Our very society is now made out of isolated households.  And spiritually, we are drawn closer to God and his body by being kept away from his sacramental presence.  Our greatest offerings at this time are our sacrifices.

The cloistered life has challenges and benefits.  A benefit is we can all be discalced!  Yet we’ve been thrust into our cells unwillingly and without proper preparation.  Even within our cells, however, we are still able to “do” something.   How we mobilize, the ways we can “do” something now are to help our own family and friends be holy monks.  This includes through the encouragement of others, known and unknown, through social media channels.  Build up the body of Christ now, don’t continue to rip it apart.  Our first thoughts towards others should stem from charity and be seen first through charity.

One of the truths this virus emphasizes is the isolation of our older population.  There are practical solutions that we can implement in response. One I am urging my own parish to begin:  Healthy, young parishioners and families should be matched with older or vulnerable ones.  The healthy would contact their adoptees daily to see if they need anything, even if what they need is simply the daily contact with another.

Isolation is difficult enough for a family; consider how more difficult it is for those already alone.  Our parishes can help with this now by beginning “adopt-a-parishioner” programs to reach out to those most likely to be at risk, and thus most afraid right now.  Such charity would itself save lives.

We are all required to experience severe fasting.  Recall, we don’t fast from sinful things but good in order to draw closer to God, the source of all our life.  We must fast from the good of communal life.  Fasts do not last forever, though.  Consider how much we will rejoice as a global community when we can end this fast?

We take our communion with our fellow human beings for granted and we take our spiritual Communion at the Mass for granted.  How much this daily communion meant has been shown to us through this evil of separation.  Genesis has a beautiful line in which Joseph says to his brothers, “you meant it for evil but God has turned it to good.”  The coronavirus and its effects are an evil and our own response can further and worsen its effects, or we can cooperate in God’s turning evil to good.

Social isolation is everyone’s cross to take up now.  But if we embrace our cross, it will lead to a fullness of life we never could have known.

We have been given a great gift within this historic experience of communal suffering – the gift of time to pray, reflect, and – if we can live it as such – leisure.  Let us embrace what we cannot escape and accept that our “doing nothing” is the very something all of us must do.

COLUMN BY

Helen Freeh

Dr. Helen Freeh received her B.A. and M. A. from the University of Dallas and her Ph.D. from Baylor University. She has taught at Hillsdale College, where she met her husband, John. She is now in temporary early retirement, raising and homeschooling their children in Lincoln, Nebraska.

RELATED ARTICLE: Staying Free and Faithful in a Pandemic

EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2020 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

PODCAST: Trump Bets the Pharma on U.S.

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“The world owes China a thank you.” To most people, the words from the Xinhua news service, hit like a ton of bricks. With the entire planet in crisis and leaders scrambling to stop another Great Depression, the communist regime is wrong. What the world is owed is an apology.

Because China kept the world in the dark about its outbreak, tens of thousands of people are dead. National economies are on the brink. The world, as we know it, has come to a halt. Now, Chinese officials, with their already fragile reputation in the gutter, is looking for somebody to blame. “They clearly mishandled the coronavirus,” Asia expert Gordan Chang explained on “Washington Watch.” “They kept it secret for at least six months, maybe even more. And now they need to say it wasn’t us. It didn’t come from us. We are the victims.”

Now, furious at the flood of criticism world leaders are directing their way, China is responding the only way they know how: with threats and lies. “There have been a series of propaganda pieces [coming out of] Beijing which say that if the United States doesn’t do this or that, China could cut off the supply of pharmaceuticals and medical protective gear — and throw the U.S. into ‘a mighty sea of coronavirus.'”

To a lot of experts, Gordon included, the important thing isn’t whether China will go through with it, but whether they could go through with it. And given their stranglehold on American supply chains — everything from gloves, masks, gowns, and medicine — the risk is a serious one. Believe it or not, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) pointed out, “up to 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients in American drugs are sourced abroad.” In places like China, that gives the community party incredible leverage over the U.S. — especially if we get to a point of widespread shortages or dire need.

And while a global pandemic isn’t how most leaders would choose to deal with this, one of the positive things about this crisis is that it’s forcing government to reevaluate its supply chains. America is “dangerously reliant,” Rubio (R-Fla.) warned, on “important lifesaving goods.” This problem isn’t new to President Trump and his team. For his entire first term, he’s tried to bring the manufacturing of American goods back home. Now, staring down a savage Chinese regime, bent on bringing disaster to America, that becomes an even more urgent priority.

Earlier this week, one of the president’s key trade advisors, Peter Navarro, said he was drafting an executive order that would limit America’s dependence on foreign manufacturers for medicine. When the president signs it (which may be this week), a big chunk of our essential pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and equipment productions would come back to U.S. soil, where it can’t be exploited by bad actors like China. “The movement of supply chains and production and essential medicines to the U.S. is not just a matter of public health and economic security, it’s a matter of national defense,” Navarro insisted.

In response to the pushback from Big Pharma, which seems to care more about keeping costs down and profits up than keeping America safe, Navarro made it clear: “Nothing in the order will prevent us from getting what we need, when we need it, and from wherever we need it.” Our country has too many vulnerabilities, Rubio argued — at a time when it can afford none. Taking back control of our own medical destiny will “help stabilize the U.S. economy, potentially help save American lives, and strengthen our ability to mitigate the effects of disease. Most importantly, it would be a high-return investment in our long-term capacity and independence from China during a moment when supply chains are up for grabs.”

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

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Is This a PANDEMIC or a DEMPANIC?

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VIDEO:

Now that we’re in a de facto Martial Law mode––a shutdown of entire industries and small businesses, nighttime curfews, social isolation, a run on goods, huge sports events cancelled, a “shelter-in-place” mandate in California, releasing prisoners in New York (God forbid these  miscreants get a flu!), Broadway gone dark, and a craven media inciting and delighting in the panic they’re causing, it is relevant to ask:

  • Are the powers-that-be withholding information about a deadly germ-warfare attack on the entire world, started by an aggrieved Chinese Communist nation that was perfectly happy with the Bush1 and Clinton1&2 and Bush1&2 and Obama1&2 regimes that kowtowed to their outrageous demands and unfair trade deals but is now existentially threatened because a Patriot President expects more equitable deals?
  • Isn’t it both alarmist and immoral, as reported in American Thinker by Andrea Widburg, that the fake-news media have never told the American people that the scary statistics from Italy are the result of Italy’s recent Silk Road Project agreement with China, which resulted in more than 300,000 Chinese workers entering Italy?
  • Is it just one of those strange coincidences that one of the four richest men in the world, the uber-leftist and population-control fetishist Bill Gates––just weeks after the corona virus hit in January––stepped down from the Microsoft giant he founded in 1975, and just weeks earlier, in December, sponsored a “fictional” simulation of such a corona virus catastrophic event which spread wildly and caused 65 million deaths worldwide? Just asking.
  • What are the powers-that-be not telling us? The worldwide population is nearing eight billion. America has between 330-370 million people (the last 40 mil being illegals). Every day in America, 130 Americans die from an opioid overdose, 102 people from car accidents, and 2,500 from heart attacks. And yet, so far in America, 19,000 people have contracted the corona virus and 256 have died from it. Got that? Over 330-million people; 256 deaths. The swine flu of 10 years ago caused 60.8 million illnesses, and 12,469 deaths.
  • Or is this yet another hysterical, sky-is-falling anxiety attack by the hand-wringing left designed to convince the American public that either Communist Bernie Sanders or a clinically cognitively-diminished Joe Biden––both inveterate tax-and-spend liberals––would be just the man to help America recover from this traumatic event and revive the stock-market they both revile?

Of course, neither one of these Big Government hacks would be capable of such a feat. Thank God for the cool, calm, collected and seasoned business mogul, President Donald J. Trump, who is guiding us through the corona virus scare with decisive action and great success––with no less than 56 bold initiatives––and who not only brought us the greatest economy and employment record in the 243-year history of our country, but will revive it when this virus scare passes into history––shortly, I predict!

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

All praise to the brilliant graphic artist (above) who captured so perfectly what we are witnessing today––the last-gasp efforts of:

  • A crazed, out-of-ammunition Democrat Party,
  • A doddering presumptive Democrat presidential candidate,
  • A deranged leftist media, furious at their low and devolving ratings,
  • Socialist/Communist/Islamicized Europeans,
  • Huge investors in the Globalist economy,
  • Angry Chinese leadership,
  • Failed Trump saboteurs Michael Avenatti (now in jail), Michael Cohen (now in prison), Anthony Scaramucci (now in nowheresville),
  • The Russian-collusion hoaxers of Obama’s FBI, CIA, State, Homeland Security, et al.
  • The exposed liars in the Ukraine phone-call hoax,
  • The losers of the crashing failure known as the impeachment hoax,
  • The cringe-producing sore-loser Hillary Clinton, who “lost” $6-billion dollars when she was Sec. of State, and presided over the tragic loss of American lives in the Benghazi catastrophe––and then lied about it!

These are just a few of the forces who have been working overtime for the past four years to sabotage, undermine, and ultimately destroy both candidate and then President Trump, the man who single-handedly exposed:

  • The Left’s seditious and I believe traitorous anti-American agenda and behavior,
  • The criminality they’ve engaged in for decades with absolute impunity,
  • The gouging of the United States’ economy for their own ideological and personal benefit, extorting billions that was laundered and stuffed into their own pockets,
  • Their devoted allegiance to colossal hoaxes like Global Warming,
  • Their abject neglect of blacks in education and where ignorance leads––ta da––prison,
  • Their seething contempt if not downright hatred of the United States of America.

And yet, with all their impressive advanced college degrees, fancy credentials, exalted titles, tenure-for-life government jobs, social-media collaboration with leftist Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al, and the flagrant abuse-of-power they’ve gotten away with––but not for long!––such as illegal FISA warrants, lying witnesses, shadow-banning, rigging elections, the list goes on…they still could not bring down THE. SMARTEST. GUY.IN.THE.ROOM.

TEARING THEIR HAIR OUT

Now, almost eight months from a presidential election, all of these forces are desperate, anguished, just-about suicidal with frustration. What can we do, they are asking themselves, to stop President Trump from winning a second term and then crushing for all time the remaining malignant remnants of the leftist agenda?

While none of them are smart enough to have created the corona virus threat, they secretly celebrated the fact that this crisis would prevent the president from conducting his two or three rallies a week around the country, where upwards of 50,000-75,000 people line up for days on end to applaud and support their president.

Well, they got their wish. Now he is on TV every single day, showing the entire country (and world) what genuinely strong and effective leadership is all about––which is why his approval ratings are skyrocketing!

Undaunted, the frantic left is spending untold billions, not to help the deserving people affected adversely by the corona virus, but, as Daniel Greenfield documents exhaustively, “to smear President Trump and undermine the administration. How patriotic of them.”

Greenfield cites the SuperPac which leftist billionaires––Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, financier George Soros, the list is long––are using to attack President Trump over the corona virus. Many if not all of them are more successful and savvy than most people in the world––but I repeat, none of them a match for THE. SMARTEST. GUY.IN.THE.ROOM!

WHERE ELSE THE OPPOSITION COMES FROM

Three years ago, I wrote an article called “The Hate-America Death Squads” in which I described the forces we are witnessing today, all of whom exult when America has trouble.

DEATH SQUAD #1 is the Cloward-Piven Strategy, begun in 1966 and flourishing to this day. In short, the founders of this plan, from Columbia Univ., loathed America and insisted that capitalism could be collapsed by overloading the government with financial demands that could not be met. They also formed voter-fraud schemes like Project Vote, ACORN, etc, still extant only with different names. And surprise, surprise – ACORN’s lawyer was none other than Barack Obama. Birds of a feather, and all that.

DEATH SQUAD #2 Saul Alinsky, a community organizer from Chicago, wrote the bible for hate-America leftists: Rules for Radicals. Hillary Clinton wrote her Wellesley thesis about Alinsky and remained close friends with him years after she graduated, and Barack Obama became a community organizer in the Alinsky mode. Both of them shared Alinsky’s real goal––to destroy capitalist America and turn it into the socialist-cum-communist regime they preferred.

DEATH SQUAD #3 is and was the leftwing media––or what Dr. Drew Pinsky calls  “the corrupt, uninformed, morally reprehensible American press––notorious for skewing the “news” in a Marxist direction. Remember, most media anchors and news readers take their marching orders directly from bosses who are extremely invested in the global economy and not in President Trump’s economy, which has brought millions of jobs and manufacturing and profits back to the United States in order to Make America Great Again and Keep America Great!

DEATH SQUAD #4 is the Muslim Brotherhood which seeks the downfall of America, a phenomenon writer Linda Goudsmit explains in explicit and exquisite detail: “Islam is an expansionist socio-political movement with a religious wing created 1400 years ago.” Then and now, Islam “seeks world dominion––the establishment of a worldwide Islamic caliphate ruled by Islamic sharia law,” which is incompatible and anathema to American law and the U.S. Constitution.

DEATH SQUAD #5 is comprised of leftwing billionaires, mentioned above, who fund the hate-America groups like Occupy Wall St., Antifa, et al, as well as the politicians who have brought us Sanctuary Cities, no-bail laws, and attempts to rob Americans of their First Amendment right of Free Speech, Second Amendment right to bear arms, the power of capitalism to lift all boats, and belief in God.

THE GOOD NEWS

  • Medications to treat the corona virus are now being discussed, as Scott Johnson from Powerline reports, among them is the anti-malaria drug, The Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva is donating six-million doses of the medication to U.S. hospitals starting March 31st, and by the end of April 10 million will be shipped. President Trump has asked the Food and Drug Administration if it can expand the use of the drug as an experimental treatment for coronavirus patients. A related article in Gateway Pundit reported that a chloroquine study showed a 100% cure rate for patients infected with the corona virus.
  • And just as I’m writing this article, an explosive article is broadcast reporting that three international studies from China, Australia and France show that chloroquine with the antibiotic azithromycin shows100% success in treating corona virus in six days!
  • The ridiculous ban on plastic grocery bags is being temporarily lifted because, as John Tierney reports, the reusable tote bags “that politicians and environmentalists have been so eager to impose on the public…can sustain the COVID-19 and flu viruses…[a fact] that was clearly demonstrated in a 2018 study published in the Journal of Environmental Health. “
  • Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, an American-British-Israeli biophysicist who teaches structural biology at Stanford University…offered the public reassurance during the peak of China’s coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak. “Levitt did not discover a treatment or a cure…he crunched the numbers” and predicted that the spread of the virus would come to a halt. “His forecasts turned out to be correct: the number of new cases reported each day started to fall as of February 7. A week later, the mortality rate started falling as well.”
  • Here is a good way to track the progress of the corona virus.
  • Here is an imporant video on the origins of the Chinese corona virus.

All this is devastating to Democrats, but there is a solution. Simply plaster this poster in every newspaper and all over the Internet and watch how quickly the corona virus scare vanishes into thin air!

© All rights reserved.

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Panic Has Led to Government “Cures” That Are Worse than the Disease, History Shows

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Let’s take the novel coronavirus seriously, but let’s not throw reason, prudence, or the Constitution out the window.

Anyone who’s seen the John Hughes movie Ferris Beuller’s Day Off probably remembers the scene where Ferris’s economics teacher (Ben Stein) explains the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act to a roomful of bored, sleeping students. The scene is brilliant for many reasons, perhaps most so because it perfectly demonstrated how some of the most boring things in history are also the most important.

Smoot-Hawley was, of course, one of the great blunders in history.

Passed in 1930 over the objection of more than a thousand economists, the legislation increased tariffs (which were already high) on imports to protect US industries and farmers, sparking a trade war that deepened the Great Depression. It’s a perfect example of authorities taking decisive action to alleviate a crisis—and making things much worse.

What many forget is that Smoot-Hawley didn’t cause the Depression. It was a response to the Depression. Indeed, it may never have passed at all without the catalyst—the Stock Market Crash of 1929—that sent the nation into a frenzy. Senate Republicans had defeated the legislation the previous year, but trade restrictionists found a convenient crisis in Black Tuesday, which triggered widespread hysteria, allowing the law to squeak through.

Designed to protect Americans during the economic crisis, Smoot-Hawley proved disastrous. Imports fell from $1,334M in 1929 to just $390M in 1932. Global trade fell by roughly 66 percent, government data show. By 1933 unemployment was 25 percent, the highest in US history.

To “correct” things, Americans elected Franklin D. Roosevelt, who launched a series of federal programs—which made the crisis even worse. The rest, as they say, is history.

Smoot-Hawley and the New Deal are hardly the only examples of government actions making a panic worse.

In his book Basic Economics, the economist Thomas Sowell recounts several instances in which governments turned small problems into major ones by using blunt force—often price controls—to respond to public panic about rising costs of a given commodity.

One of the more famous examples of this is the gasoline crisis of the 1970s, which started when the federal government took a small problem (temporary high costs of gasoline) and turned it into a big one (a national shortage).

It began when OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), a newly formed oil cartel, cut oil production, causing fuel prices to rise. To address the rise, the Nixon administration (and later the Ford and Carter administrations) resorted to price controls to keep fuel prices low for consumers.

The result? Mass fuel shortages across the country that led to long lines and many Americans unable to buy fuel. This “energy crisis,” as it was dubbed at the time, in turn wreaked havoc on the automotive industry.

As Sowell explains, however, there was not an actual scarcity of gasoline. There was nearly as much gas sold in 1972 as the previous year (95 percent, to be precise). Similarly, Americans in 1978 consumed more gasoline than in any other previous year in history. The problem was the resources were not being allocated efficiently because of state-imposed price controls.

The energy crisis was entirely predictable, two Soviet economists (who had vast experience in the arena central planning-induced shortages) later observed.

In an economy with rigidly planned proportions, such situations are not the exception but the rule—an everyday reality, a governing law. The absolute majority of goods is either in short supply or in surplus. Quite often the same product is in both categories—there is a shortage in one region and a surplus in another.

No one likes high gas prices, but the energy crisis of the 1970s wasn’t truly a crisis until the government created it. Nor was the result unique. Similar examples kind be found throughout history, from the grain shortages in Ancient Rome brought about by Diocletian’s “Edict on Maximum Prices” to the mortgage crisis in 2007 and the financial crisis that ensued.

This might seem obvious in hindsight, yet similar mistakes are made today during crises, just on a smaller scale. To address alleged crises in housing, California and Oregon recently passed rent control laws that will surely have a devastating impact on residents in those states. Similarly, anti-price gouging laws (and social pressure) regularly lead to mass shortages during national emergencies.

As America endures the most frightening pandemic in a century, the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s important that decisions affecting the lives, liberties, and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people are being reached through reason, not collective fear.

Pandemics are clearly different from economic depressions and fuel shortages, but some of the same lessons apply. Like an economic panic, pandemics incite mass fear, which can lead to flawed and irrational decision making.

We know that human beings by nature are prone to crowd-following, especially during periods of social unrest and panic. This instinct has resulted in some of the greatest tragedies in human history.

COVID-19 may very well prove to be every bit as dangerous as we’ve been led to believe. Epidemiologists, vaccine researchers, and other medical experts agree it’s highly contagious and deadly, especially for certain at-risk demographics (the elderly and people with compromised immune systems and lung damage, for example). Yet many of the same experts disagree on the scope of the COVID-19 threat.

One of the problems medical professionals are encountering is they simply don’t have a lot of reliable data to work with.

“The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable,” John P.A. Ioannidis, an epidemiologist and professor of medicine at Stanford University who co-directs the university’s Meta-Research Innovation Center, recently wrote in Stat.

Let’s face it: pandemics are scary. This is probably doubly true in the age of social media, when the scariest models tend to be the ones most shared, which fuels even more panic. Because of the heightened level of fear, it’s not unreasonable to think public officials could “follow the crowd,” which is a bad idea even when the crowd isn’t totally petrified.

“Crowds do not reason….they tolerate neither discussion nor contradiction, and the suggestions brought to bear on them invade the entire field of their understanding and tend at once to transform themselves into acts,” wrote Gustave Le Bon in his seminal 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.

It’s no secret or coincidence that crises—foreign wars, terrorist attacks, and economic depressions—have often resulted in vast encroachments of freedom and even given rise to tyrants (from Napoleon to Lenin and beyond). In his book Crisis and Leviathan, the historian and economist Robert Higgs explains how throughout history, crises have been used to expand the administrative state, often by allowing “temporary” measures to be left in place after a crisis has abated (think federal tax withholding during World War II).

“When [crises occur] … governments almost certainly will gain new powers over economic and social affairs,” wrote Higgs. “For those who cherish individual liberty and a free society, the prospect is deeply disheartening.”

Let’s take the novel coronavirus deadly seriously, but let’s not throw reason, prudence, or the Constitution out the window while doing so.

If we do, we may find the government’s “cure” for the coronavirus cure is even worse than the disease.

COLUMN BY

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, and Fox News. 

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

White House Coronavirus Task Force Updates and Important Links.

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President Trump and the White House Coronavirus Task Force announced additional actions today as part of the ongoing, government-wide response to the global pandemic:

  • To help American families and businesses, the Treasury Department announced that Tax Day will be moved from April 15 to July 15. No interest or penalties will be charged for filing during this extended window, but any American expecting refunds or credits may claim now to get their money sooner.
  • To minimize impact on our nation’s students, the Department of Education is temporarily waiving all interest on federally held student loans. Secretary Betsy DeVos has also directed federal lenders to allow borrowers to suspend their student loan payments without penalty for at least the next 60 days.
  • Early, decisive travel restrictions helped slow the spread of Coronavirus to our country. Today, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States and Mexico have agreed to restrict non-essential travel across their border.
  • More help is on the way. The Trump Administration worked with Congress last week on a bipartisan deal to deliver economic relief and support for American families, which the President signed into law on Wednesday. More legislative action is expected in the coming days.
  • As a reminder, this week, President Trump issued a nationwide call to action for every American to help slow the spread of Coronavirus over the next 15 days. We encourage you all to continue to put these guidelines into practice and share them with your communities to help save lives.

Share with us:

  • Know of an inspirational story? We know that Americans have gone above and beyond to serve their communities during this time. If you would like to share with us any inspirational stories in your communities, let us know and send them our way.
  • Who else needs this information? Please send us any names with organizations and e-mails for other faith leaders that would benefit from receiving these updates.

Important Links:

© All rights reserved.

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School Closures—and Accidental Homeschooling—Continue. Here Are More Resources for Families

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As of today, 91,000 public and private schools in 39 states with more than 41 million students collectively, have closed because of the coronavirus, according to Education Week. 

As parents continue to navigate their new role as homeschool instructors, resources are being made available online to meet the needs of families.

Some schools have begun live-streaming PE classes. Others are delivering virtual content to students, and at some—such as Success Academy in New York—teachers begin the day with phone calls to each of their students and hold virtual office hours later in the day. Families, schools, and free markets are rising to the challenge of schooling during a worldwide pandemic.

Here are 10 resources to check out for your own family:

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

  1. Project Gutenberg is an online library of more than 60,000 free eBooks of the world’s great literature. These great works are available in full online for free because they are older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.
  2. The Ashbrook Center’s Teaching American History Project is a treasure trove of history resources that “explore themes in American history and self-government through the study of original historical documents.”
  3. Mike McShane of EdChoice recommends Brain Pop, which offers online resources, interactive activities, quizzes, and lessons in everything from science and social studies to art and engineering.  He also recommends the Cincinnati Zoo’s page, which offers a Facebook Live safari every day at 3 p.m. Eastern.
  4. The entire Core Knowledge Foundation curriculum is now online for free.
  5. Get a crash course in homeschooling through the Home School Legal Defense Association’s homeschooling through high school page.
  6. The Space Foundation partnered with Peanuts to create 10 free lesson plans, in its “ongoing quest to catalyze the next generation of space explorers, innovators, and entrepreneurs.”
  7. Beginning next Wednesday, Code Break will offer a live, weekly webcast to teach students computer science at home, even offering learning options for students without computers.
  8. The Bill of Rights Institute has a wealth of history curriculum resources.
  9. More advanced students can check-out the University of Dallas’ Arts in Liberty courses in Logic, Rhetoric, Geometry and Arithmetic, and Astronomy.
  10. Open Culture provides access to free online courses from universities worldwide as well as audiobooks and documentaries, and EdX offers free online courses from universities on topics such as language, business management, and engineering.

COMMENTARY BY

Lindsey Burke

Lindsey M. Burke researches and writes on federal and state education issues as the Will Skillman fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation. Read her research. Twitter: .

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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

Coronavirus Is the Chinese Government’s Curse Upon the World

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The World Health Organization and other sensitive souls have instructed us to stop referring to the new strain of the coronavirus as the “Wuhan” or “Chinese” flu because of the racist connotations.

I’m disinclined to curb my speech to placate Chinese propagandists, and it seems to me the aversion to those terms is less about racism than about averting blame. But in the spirit of comity, and avoiding disparaging an entire nation, I’m happy to call it the ChiCom Flu moving forward.

There are many traditional naming conventions that don’t really make that much sense. Somewhat weirdly, for example, we often name diseases after the people who “discover” them—Hodgkin’s disease after Thomas Hodgkin, Parkinson’s disease after James Parkinson, and so on.

But naming viral diseases after places—Guinea worm, West Nile virus, Ebola, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, etc.—is probably just intuitive. Viruses “come” from someplace, after all, and thus people gravitate to those names. I doubt we came up with “Lyme disease” because of some deep enmity toward Connecticut.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Anyway, “COVID-19” or “H1N1” don’t exactly roll off the tongue.

The latter was, until very recently, widely referred to as the “Spanish flu,” a virus that killed around 675,000 Americans and tens of millions of others around the world in the early 1900s.

“Spanish flu” has now retroactively fallen into disfavor as well. And to be fair, there is some historical evidence that the virus may actually have originated in China or France, so if we must call it the French flu moving forward, so be it.

But while the Spanish have a good case to be annoyed, the Chinese government does not.

As Jim Geraghty notes, the communist Chinese have been far more effective in stopping the spread of information about the coronavirus than in stopping the spread of the coronavirus itself. Today, for example, China expelled most American journalists from the country.

Early on, the communists destroyed samples and suppressed vital information that could have helped mitigate the damage of this new strain of the coronavirus.

The government also silenced doctors who warned about the disease. Some were censured for “spreading rumors” or sharing test results with colleagues, and some were forced to write self-critical public letters—a Marxist mainstay—admitting that the warning “had a negative impact.”

The Chinese communists probably let 5 million people leave Wuhan without screening, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Chinese communists, like all communists, hide societal problems. There is no crime, disease, or addiction in the collectivist state. This kind of secrecy and dishonesty can be disastrous, especially in a highly interconnected world.

Though millions of Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty through free trade, with modernity comes some basic responsibilities—for instance, not killing everyone in the world with preventable zoonotic diseases.

The Chinese regime is perfectly capable of administering an array of authoritarian policies to suppress the rights of its own people. But it’s apparently unable to exert even mild cultural pressure warning them that their eating habits can be extraordinarily dangerous and hold the potential of creating massive socioeconomic problems.

If reports are correct, it was in Wuhan’s popular “wet markets” that vendors were selling the bats—and possibly snakes—that may have caused the COVID-19 outbreak. “Wet” because the meat sold in its unsanitary stalls was only recently slaughtered.

This kind of thing happens quite often. And not always in China, of course. But the avian influenza was likely transmitted to humans from chickens in a “wet” market.

Scientists have been warning for years that the eating of exotic animals in southern China “is a time bomb.” Acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) also originated in China, and probably jumped to humans through bats. Other coronavirus strains are also likely connected to bats.

I hate to thrust my Western cultural values on anyone, but maybe it’s time to stop eating bats.

It’s important to stress that it’s not the Chinese people who are the problem. Just look at their success in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United States. The ChiComs are the problem.

If the Chinese government spent as much time working on educating its people and regulating dangerous markets as it does on secrecy and propaganda efforts, maybe it wouldn’t have to worry as much about diseases being named after it—or about the catastrophic death and economic pain their negligence helps cause.

COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM

COMMENTARY BY

David Harsanyi

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review and the author of “First Freedom: A Ride through America’s Enduring History With the Gun, From the Revolution to Today.” Twitter: .

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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

How Long Will Americans Tolerate Corona-Madness

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A usually level-headed Christian conservative lashed out on Facebook scolding everyone they thought was not taking the Corona virus seriously enough. Fake news media has successfully infected many with irrational fear.

Hearing Gov Larry Hogan on my car radio announcing his executive order to close bars, restaurants, gyms and theaters sounded like the script of a 1950s horror movie. “We will stop the spread of this deadly disease!”, dramatically proclaimed Hogan. Little more than 100 have died in the U.S. and under 9,000 worldwide. According to the CDC, during the 2018-2019 flu season, an estimated 16.5 million people got sick and 34,000 died in the U.S.

When Hogan mentioned plans to restrict church gatherings, a chill went up my spine. In the United States of America, government is mandating that people not attend church. Wow!

CDC data confirms that the martial-law-light mandates steamrolling across America are disproportionate to the threat of the virus. Some governors and most corporations are responding to media-mob pressure to halt life in America. Others see an opportunity to land a death-blow to the Trump Administration.

Insidiously ignoring the CDC’s no-need-to-panic-data, fake news media created and is gleefully fueling Corona-madness. Using their huge bully pulpit, fake news media says anyone who dares to contradict their you’re-all-gonna-die narrative will be dragged into the high tech public square, stripped naked, branded an irresponsible idiot with a hot iron and their career will be canceled.

It is disturbing that there is practically zero push back against governors instantaneously overruling our constitutional freedoms. Sadly, many youths are clueless regarding their constitutional freedoms. They grew up in public schools where progressive teachers taught them that the Constitution is an out-dated piece of paper written by racist, sexist, homophobic and Christian dead straight white men.

We have far too many Bernie Bro youths who say, “If the government is going to give me free stuff, I am down with whatever controls government deem necessary.”

A gentleman said this about Democrats/fake news media in an email, “…they are willing to destroy hard working people’s jobs to accomplish their power play.” This guy is spot on correct. This is why I regard Democrats’/fake news medias’ gleeful spread of Corona-madness so loathsome and evil.

Democrats and fake news media are 100% committed to destroying Trump, their greatest Nemesis. Collapsing the U.S. economy and even the loss of American lives is acceptable collateral damage in their quest for power to control every aspect of our lives. They believe Corona is their highly sought after kryptonite to kill We-the-Peoples’ superman president.

A wise woman emailed me, “I think a lot of people are willing to do social distancing, etc., but they’re unwilling to live in perpetual fear.”I say, “Amen sister.”

How long can fake news media/Democrats successfully keep Americans at a fever pitch level of irrational panic and fear? How long will U.S. businesses allow media to bully them into losing billions of dollars simply because they hate Trump. How long will it take Americans to say screw this nonsense, “I’m going out for a burger and a beer.” I believe there will be a tipping point when Americans say enough is enough, I’m going to resume my life.

My baby boomer generation is still the largest demographic. We know our constitutional rights and will fight for them. We will not go gentle into Democrats’ snap-of-their-fingers repeal of our constitutional freedoms intended to collapse our economy.

The simple truth is the Corona virus has had very little affect, causing less than 125 deaths nationwide. What has caused the unprecedented closing down of America is media-hype about the Corona virus. We are suffering the consequences of deranged Democrats and fake news media willing to sacrifice everything to stop a president from implementing his America-first agenda.

Democrats and fake news media view the Corona virus as blood in the water to create a feeding frenzy of criticism of Trump.

Remarkably, every crazy, illegal and evil scheme to remove Trump from the White House has failed. So will Corona-madness. Why? Because God put Trump into the White House and only God will take him out.

Two buddies of mine said the hysteria is causing seniors in nursing homes to be isolated from visits from their loved ones. But Democrats/fake news media do not care. All they ever care about is furthering their socialist, communist and progressive agendas and damaging Trump. Thank God Trump caught and denied Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s sneaky attempt to hide abortion funding in Trump’s Corona relief spending.

In response to a 50 degree temperature day after people who have been cooped up in their homes because of a brutally cold winter, people rush outside wearing t-shirts and flip-flops. I believe Americans will eventually respond the same way, becoming emotionally-burnt out over Corona-madness. This will spark a huge economic boom.

Folks, the light I see at the end of the Corona-madness tunnel is the strong will, spirit and instincts of the American people. Without analyzing their feelings through a lens of political ideology, Americans will begin demanding to have their lives back; working, weddings, kid’s birthday parties, restaurants and so on. We are Americans!

Trump is the perfect man in office when that day comes. He will gladly say, “I am with you folks. Let’s get back to keeping America great!”

Trump Clears Way to Use Malaria Drug Against COVID-19

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VIDEO: Tucker Carlson discusses Chloroquine with Dr. Greg Rigano.

In what he called a “game-changer or maybe not,” President Donald Trump on Thursday directed the Food and Drug Administration to clear regulatory hurdles and move toward expanding use of a malaria drug to battle the coronavirus.

The drug chloroquine has shown “very, very encouraging early results,” Trump said during the daily press conference on the coronavirus disease, which health officials call COVID-19. The drug has been used to treat malaria since 1944.

“If treatments … in Europe, Japan, or other nations are known to be safe against the virus, we’ll use that information to protect the health and safety of the American people,” Trump said, later adding:

This is a common malaria drug. It’s also a drug used for strong arthritis. If somebody has pretty serious arthritis, [he] also uses this in a somewhat different form. But it is known as a malaria drug. It has been around for a long time, and it’s very powerful.

The nice part is it has been around for a long time. So we know if things don’t go as planned, it’s not going to kill anybody. When you go with a brand new drug, you don’t know. You have to see and you have to get a long test. But this has been used in different forms, a very powerful drug, and it has shown very encouraging, very, very encouraging, early results. And we’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately.

That’s where the FDA is so great. They’ve gone through the approval process. It has been approved, and they took it down [in availability] from many, many months to immediate. So, we are going to be able to make that drug available.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

As of noon Thursday, there were 10,442 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States and 150 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s up from 97 deaths reported on the site the day before.

FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said his agency is providing American innovators “regulatory flexibility with scientific oversight” to expedite development of other safe drugs that could be a bridge until a vaccine for COVID-19 is fully developed.

Hahn, a physician, noted that phase one of vaccine trials are happening.

“We expect that to take 12 months to get to completion, to get to a time when we can actually approve a vaccine. These are all things to bridge to the prevention part of this with the vaccine,” Hahn said of medicines. “It’s exciting work, and the president is right. This is record-breaking time for the development of a vaccine and impressive public-private partnership.”

Hahn said the FDA will continue to explore whether “experimental or an off-the-shelf drug that is used for something else can safely and effectively treat patients” infected with the coronavirus.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

VIDEO: The Vortex — The Last Chance

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TRANSCRIPT

No one in America who really, deeply cares about the future of the United States misses the point that what people on both sides are actually voting on is the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court.

For decades, and largely while political conservatives — including a hefty number of Catholics — were asleep at the switch, the Marxist Left was implementing a takeover of the country through judicial fiat. The Left resorted to the courts because they could not get done what they wanted through state legislatures. So, in an effort to usurp the will of the people, they populated the nation’s elite law schools with social radicals, some of whom, after decades, were able to rise high in positions within the federal judiciary.

By the time political conservatives caught on to the plan, it was too late. The Left sufficiently controlled the courts, including the Supreme Court, to force its will on the people. Once something becomes legal, in people’s minds, it tends to be more readily viewed as acceptable, even moral. Even formerly controversial issues take on an air of respectability, and opposition to them now becomes seen as narrow-mindedness.

But the composition of the High Court — the ages of various justices — brought the issue to a head in the 2016 presidential election. It was almost a certainty that the court could shift to the right, even marginally, if Trump was elected. So while the Left was alarmed, the Right was ecstatic at the possibility. After decades and decades of hard, grinding, thankless work, the possibility was coming into focus that Donald Trump in the White House might finally hand the brass ring to the cause of political conservatism.

And the issue was abortion. If Hillary were to win, it would be game over, potentially forever. And recall, during the 2016 race, there was already one vacancy on the court — the seat of Antonin Scalia — a conservative seat. Securing that seat with a liberal, as Obama had nominated in the person of Merrick Garland, would have been the death-knell.

Fast forward to 2020 and a rapidly aging, in-poor-health Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. As one expert told Church Militant, “The old gal will last one year. She isn’t going to last five.” If Trump wins re-election it is virtually guaranteed that he will replace Ginsburg, one of the most Marxist-minded, pro-abortion, anti-God justices ever to sit on the bench.

But here’s a question — something to consider: If the court tips from its current 5–4 to 6–3 conservative bent — or even possibly 7–2 — before Trump’s second term is over, and then would overturn Roe v. Wade, what would happen?

Pondering that possibility, and even planning for it to some degree, the Left is arming itself and speaking openly of rebellion. It seems not that far-fetched that the same crowd that starts fires on college campuses when conservative speakers arrive and violently riots in the streets under the banner of Antifa would have little compunction about making blood run in those same streets if the Court toppled abortion. Current whispers of civil war might become louder than just whispers.

If that happens, if something like that — even on a somewhat limited scale — were to occur, it would, by definition, become a noble cause: the defense of innocent life.

There is not an honest man or woman walking who does not know that the Left supports child-murder. That is the central motivating issue around which all of American politics have evolved since the days of Ronald Reagan. That has been the central issue of the attempt to unseat Donald Trump for going on three years now, even up to the relative Marxist-media hype surrounding the coronavirus scare.

This is relative to what, you may ask? It’s relative to the swine flu epidemic that went on for more than a year under Obama and killed thousands of Americans. Nothing was done by the media giants in that case like is being done now. They have seized on a serious issue and are perfectly happy to use it to try and destabilize Trump — they’ll try anything to destabilize him — and it’s all because abortion is always playing in the background.

Abortion is and has been the topic that has been responsible for shaping the national debate for more than 40 years. It caused the bedlam surrounding the Brett Kavanaugh hearings — even the pounding on the doors of the High Court once he was confirmed. It was the admitted issue when New York Sen. Chuck Schumer hurled his invective and threats against both Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch — actually threatening them —for which he never apologized. The case he was talking about? Abortion.

But this is what pro-lifers need to note, and note hard: Given the rapidly changing demographics of the country — an essentially morally rudderless young population, opposed to religion and unfamiliar with natural law, this election is the last chance to secure and lock down a pro-life court. Pro-life voters will simply be overwhelmed by sheer numbers of the socialist-loving lefties by 2024.

In the midst of all this — with everything on the table — do not look to the U.S. bishops to make this point. Too many of them are registered Democrats themselves and do not possess supernatural faith. They are enamored with the Party of Death — even child-killers who are baptized Catholics they love schmoozing with.

The marriage between political conservatives and theologically orthodox Catholics has brought this moment to reality. It has been a gigantic, uphill struggle — a fight for the ages — and is now the last great clash over the future direction of the nation we will see in our lifetime. The Right has arrived at a point of equal footing, or at least as equal as it’s ever going to get. The victory must be secured and it must be secured now, because the moment will never arrive again as long as any of us are breathing.

In 233 days, we will know our future.

Pray, fast and act like you’ve never done before.

It is your solemn duty before the Lord of Life.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant video is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.