Mind Control via Confusion, etc. This will only get worse, so get educated!

I periodically attend an online weekly Zoom meeting of medical experts. It was originally set up by Dr. Stephen Frost (England) to discuss COVID-19 policies.

They now discuss various healthcare policies and the related politics. Over the past two years, they have had some interesting presenters (e.g., RFK jr). They’ve even compromised their standards and had me talk. Twice. It makes me think of Groucho’s comment “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”

In any case, last Sunday Jason Christoff was featured. I wasn’t familiar with him, but attended as I am interested in the subject matter of his talk: Mind Control. After watching, I thought that it was VERY worthwhile — so I’m sharing this with you.

Here is the just-released video of his talk to the Frost group. Start at 8 minutes and listen to when he is done with his talk (– 1 hr. 10 min). (After that is an hour or so of Q&A, so it’s your call if you’d like to also watch that.)

He made a variety of excellent points, that can probably be better understood by watching the video. For example, he said that all mind control is based on weakness.

Surprisingly, when you are arguing, he said that some concessions are actually about showing people how gullible they are — which is subtly instilling weakness… Contradictions instill confusion and confusion begets weakness…

The Government wants you to question your reality and accept their reality… One way they accomplish this is that they take advantage of citizens who seek safety over happiness or freedom… Group pressure is a major weapon here (e.g., follow the consensus… They use repetition to weaken our defenses…

These are usually successful as the tactics involved are subconscious. Unless you are consciously looking for them (and using Critical Thinking), you will likely be fooled.

He played this 2-minute video of Justin Trudeau as an example. Please watch it.

Among other good observations, Christoff said “Evil spares no one and uses everyone.” I could go on and on here, but if you’d like to understand this better, please watch the hour talk.

So, what should we do about this?

  1. Get educated about the tactics used by anti-American bad actors,
  2. Have solid (e.g., Judeo-Christian) moral standards, and
  3. Be a Critical Thinker!

Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.orgdiscusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.infocovers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.infomultiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2023 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

CFACT’s 2023 Impact Report

2023 was one of CFACT’s best years yet! Thanks to the generosity of friends like you, CFACT was able to impact the public-interest debate as never before, both in the United States and around the world.

I’m therefore so pleased to present you our brand new 2023 Impact Report!  From our activities challenging political correctness on America’s college campuses through our Collegians program, to our calling out of corporations and their harmful ESG policies through our shareholder activism, to our special reports and media appearances, and to our take down the global warming extremists through our award-winning Climate Depot news and information service, CFACT continues to be a leader in the energy and environmental debate.

Rest assured, CFACT will continue to rise to the challenge of protecting our freedoms, providing education, and promoting progress.  We can’t do what we do without your help, and want you to know we are sincerely grateful to have it!

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

Dem Claims Men ‘Don’t Compete in Women’s Sports’ as Stolen Titles Near 300

Does Rep. Jerry Nadler (D) live in New York or an alternate universe? People certainly wondered after a House Judiciary hearing where the 76-year-old declared, “Men do not compete in women’s sports.” Is the president’s senility contagious or is Nadler living in complete denial of a global phenomenon that’s plunged communities into chaos? Not only are men competing in women’s sports, they’re winning women’s titles — a fact Riley Gaines was more than happy to point out.

“Ironic he says this on the EXACT 2 year anniversary of this photo being taken,” the former University of Kentucky swimmer posted alongside a picture of Lia Thomas holding a trophy he never should have had the chance to race for. “This 6’4” man isn’t fooling anyone with any amount of common sense,” Gaines fumed. “2 years ago today I had a fire lit under me and communists like Nadler continue to fuel it.”

And yet, Nadler was so determined to suppress reality that he actually moved to have evidence of the debate stricken from the record. Republican Rep. Harriet Hageman (Wyo.) had catalogued a number of times that biological boys had stolen girls’ titles and opportunities in the last several years. The group SheWon puts the number at an eye-popping 292 stolen first-place podiums. “I ask for unanimous consent to submit for the record instances of men hijacking women’s sports and the various examples that we have demonstrating not only injuries that have been suffered by women as men have participated in girls’ sports, but also the women — the girls and women who have been affected by this, including Riley Gaines, when Will Thomas decided to join the … women’s swimming team in Pennsylvania,” she requested.

Nadler, the committee’s ranking member, fired back, “I object to concluding these mistruths in the record.” Shocked, Hageman replied how telling it was that he didn’t want the facts included in the record — to which the New Yorker replied, “Men do not compete in women’s sports.”

That’s news to the 25 (going on 26) states who’ve stepped in to stop this madness from overtaking their girls at the pool, track, court, field, and gym. If it wasn’t happening, then this was sure a monumental waste of legislative time.

Slack-jawed, conservatives kept up the pressure, giving a passionate defense of girls and the opportunities, safety, and privacy they’re losing by this absurd introduction of men in women’s sports. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) showed a video montage of girls who’ve been physically injured playing against biological boys in volleyball, field hockey, and basketball. From Massachusetts to North Carolina, members watched as girls screamed in pain, lost teeth, were carted off with head injuries. One of the victims, Payton McNabb, still suffers from blurred vision, partial paralysis, and memory loss.

We have examples, Spartz insisted, of “much stronger guys playing sports against biologically not-as-strong women.” “Girls actually get hurt by biological males playing sports,” she argued. “I mean, it is really unbelievable for me that this is an issue that we cannot stand with women and girls on.” Instead, Spartz went on, “the other side tries to really deter the conversation in a different direction and divert it. … Let’s talk about how we are going to protect our women and girls.”

When the talk turned to privacy rights, Democrat Eric Swalwell (Calif.) joined Nadler’s delusion, claiming that men in girls locker rooms “is not a thing.”

Tell that to the 16 plaintiffs suing the NCAA. One of them, Gaines’s teammate and SEC champion Kaitlynn Wheeler, describes in agonizing detail how they were put in a “fundamentally unfair situation that no student-athlete, let alone a teenage girl, should ever have to face.” The collegiate sports body “did not simply make my teammates in the 100-, 200-, and 500-yard freestyle races face a biological male swimmer in the pool,” she insisted. “The NCAA also decided that Lia Thomas, a 6-foot-4-inch, 22-year-old transgender swimmer with a male body and full male genitalia, would be undressing with us.” She writes of that traumatizing experience in a new Washington Examiner op-ed:

“The moment I realized Thomas would be sharing our most private space, I was engulfed by a whirlwind of emotions — shock, disbelief, horror. The sanctity of our locker room, a space that should have been ours and ours alone, was shattered without warning. The presence of male genitalia in a space that was supposed to be safe, where we were vulnerable and exposed, was not just uncomfortable; it was a visceral invasion of our privacy and dignity.

“Feeling my stomach churn as whispers turned to silence, I stood there, naked and exposed, not just physically but also emotionally, grappling with a reality I couldn’t comprehend. The NCAA’s decision to transform our sanctuary into a ‘unisex’ locker room without our consent felt like a betrayal of the highest order. It was a stark reminder that our voices, our comfort, and our boundaries did not matter.”

And yet, the effort to protect these girls is what Swalwell called “creepy” — not forcing innocent teenagers to share a room with a naked man. That’s what really stings, the girls say. No one has their backs. As so many female athletes admitted to Senate Republicans, they feel “helpless.” “This is kind of a theme that we got,” Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said of his committee’s investigation on trans inclusion in sports: “‘Why am I even trying? I don’t have any hope whatsoever.’” “Our voices as women were completely silenced,” another admitted.

Fortunately for Wheeler and the thousands of American daughters living this nightmare, Republicans do care. Over the objections of Democrats, conservatives on the House Judiciary Committee passed Rep. Greg Steube’s (R-Fla.) Protection of Women in Olympic & Amateur Sports Act last Thursday. To Wheeler, who watched Thomas stand on top of a podium meant for her sport, maybe it will mean the end of the silence of the adults in the room. “That silence spoke volumes of the injustice, pain, and anger brewing in the hearts of not just the competitors but of every woman forced into silence by a system that refuses to listen.”

Until then, she vowed, women will “stand against the erasure of our voices,” whether or not this president or his party stands with them. “We demand a future where female athletes are respected, where our safety and privacy are not just acknowledged but fiercely protected.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Does Transgender Visibility Day Override Resurrection Sunday?

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

DeSantis Signs Bill Targeting Addictive Social Media and ‘Digital Trafficking’

The Sunshine State is moving to protect children from “addictive” social media and the “danger” of online predators. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill into law on Monday prohibiting minors under the age of 14 from opening or operating social media accounts on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others.

H.B. 3 bars children under 14 “from creating new accounts” and requires “social media platforms to terminate certain accounts and provide additional options for termination of such accounts.” The legislation also requires minors aged 14 and 15 to obtain parental consent before creating social media accounts and mandates “age verification measures for internet sites that contains [sic] obscene or ‘harmful’ content, unsuitable for minors,” such as pornographic websites.

“Documentation of the deleterious effects of social media on children abounds, and yet we still seem hesitant to place governmental authority over this powerful force. I am glad to see efforts like the one in Florida,” Family Research Council Senior Fellow Meg Kilgannon said in comments to The Washington Stand. “The need to protect children from online predators specifically is very real, but the general effort to rein in social media in favor of authentic relationships and in-person engagement is more important than ever.”

In a brief speech before signing the legislation, DeSantis said, “One of the things that I know a lot of parents have had concerns about is the role that the internet and social media play in the upbringing of young kids.” He continued, “Now, with things like social media and all this, you can have a kid in the house — safe, seemingly — and then you have predators that get right in there, into your own home. You could be doing everything right, but they know how to get and manipulate these different platforms.” Referring to his own family and his role as governor, DeSantis noted, “One of the things that informs me on issues relating to children is just being a dad of young children.”

Following DeSantis, Florida House Speaker Paul Renner (R) said, “Knowing what I know now, none of us can afford to be on the sidelines when it comes to social media, when it comes to hardcore pornography that our kids are being exposed to.” He explained, “We know from law enforcement, we know from our prosecutors, that social media is the primary platform in which children are trafficked, in which pedophiles … pretending to be children, come after our children, and that more crimes against children happen on these platforms than any other venue.”

“Our bill is focused on addiction, and when you think about it, children are not set up to handle the addiction that some of us as adults have had to face and step away from,” Renner continued. “A child in their brain development doesn’t have the ability to know that they’re being sucked in to these addictive technologies and to see the harm and step away from it.” Referring to social media as “digital trafficking,” the speaker asked, “If I said to you that a company was going to take children, use addiction that causes them harm for profit, what does that sound like? Sounds like trafficking to me.”

Florida Senator Erin Grall (R), who sponsored the Senate version of the bill, stated that social media companies “have made our parenting difficult by addicting our children.” She said that although she expects the law to be upheld if challenged in courts, “it always comes back to the parents,” who she said have “abdicated our responsibility” and allowed addictive social media platforms to serve as “babysitters.”

Grall’s original bill was vetoed earlier this month by DeSantis, who wanted stronger language protecting parental rights and addressing internet anonymity. The new law will take effect on January 1, 2025.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

POST ON X:

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Christ Is King and Every Knee Shall Bend

Almost since the beginning of recorded history, men have sought power: Caesars and shahs, kings and sultans, princes and khans, presidents and prime ministers, emperors and generals. Kingdoms and empires, dynasties and nations have risen and fallen, memorialized in poems and art and the annals of history. Some dominated entire generations, others sprawled across centuries. Only one has stood the test of time, covering every continent and thriving over 2,000 years: Christianity.

Over the weekend, this well-chronicled historical fact became a subject of discontent and dispute for the armchair philosophers and amateur pundits of social media — many of them self-professed conservatives and even Christians. According to these self-appointed arbiters of theological, historical, and social truth, the admission “Christ is King” is clearly a hateful, anti-Semitic slur. That is to say, claiming that the Messiah foretold by centuries of Jewish prophets, born to a humble Jewish carpenter and his wife, who illuminated and fulfilled the Jewish Scriptures, could be the King of the world is … hateful towards Jews. Luckily for Christians, nearly two millennia ago, a Jew famous for prosecuting and executing Christians actually addressed this argument:

“Because of this, God greatly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11).

The chief argument against “Christ is King” is that the proclamation of the fact is offensive to those of the Jewish faith, and thus anti-Semitic, a slur against a race of persons. As for the racial component of this argument, Christianity necessarily holds that God does not create anything evil — evil is, rather, an absence or a perversion of good in something — and, since every person is not only made by God but is in fact made in His image and likeness (Genesis 1:27), no human can be created evil.

It is for this reason that Christianity has, from the beginning, served as the driving force of civilization. It was St. Patrick, himself sold as a slave in his boyhood, who first condemned the slave trade, some 1,400 years before the American Civil War was fought. It was St. Remigius of Reims who, after the fall of Rome, baptized Franks, Goths, Galls, and Celts, giving those who the Romans derided as “barbarians” a new name, “brother in Christ.” It was Christian missionaries who brought the gospel to Africa, Asia, and South America, establishing peace in regions which had previously been dominated by tribal and racial wars, often culminating in slavery and human sacrifice.

History baldly contradicts the argument that Christianity condemns any particular race, but especially the Jewish race. Christ Himself was ethnically Jewish, and his earthly father, Joseph, was descended from the line of the great King David, as affirmed by the Gospels of both Luke and Matthew. Declaring then that a humble carpenter’s son of the Jewish race is, in fact, the King of the entire world hardly seems to be a means of deriding the Jewish race. The first Christians were Jewish fishermen, so devoted to Christ and the gospel that, with the exception of John the Evangelist, they all willingly died for their faith. The first act of the apostles was to evangelize the Jews, to welcome thousands into the church, to call their own people to recognize the kingship of Christ.

By its very nature, Christianity demonstrably rebuffs the claim that Christ’s kingship — and its proclamation — is somehow an instrument of violence, hatred, or oppression towards any people, but especially the Jews. The fact that some vocal pundits and influencers have attempted to affix the phrase with their racially-charged messages does not alter or mitigate the truth that Christ is King, and it does not warrant the broad effort to suppress proclaiming Christ’s Kingship regardless of intent. Instead, the real case against “Christ is King” is a theological one.

Christ did not come to end the Mosaic covenant, but to fulfill it. He Himself said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17). In other words, He came that He might be the continuation of that covenant: not its death, but its fruition. The prophets of old predicted that a Messiah would come to save the world from its sins and eternal damnation. Christ is that Messiah. There is no longer the promise of a Messiah, there is not some other savior waiting in the wings like an understudy. This does not abolish the Mosaic covenant, but continues it, rather as a young boy maturing into a man does not kill the boy, but fulfills the promise of his youth. There is not now, though, the same boy running about playing while the grown man works and weds and raises his own children. Just so, there are not two extant covenants: an old one and a new one. Rather, the old covenant was made to mature into Christ, who is Himself the new covenant, just as the boy was made to mature into the man.

This point is an important one to understand, for if Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection were merely offering an alternative covenant to the Mosaic covenant, then what would be the point? If the Mosaic law were sufficient for one to attain Heaven and eternal salvation, perfect and beatific communion with God, then God becoming man, taking on the form of a mere creature, suffering an excruciating and ignominious death, and then conquering the grave would be rather superfluous.

Very well, but what if the Mosaic covenant was for the Jews and the new covenant established in Christ is for the Gentiles? Then Christ’s ministry, carried out entirely within the Jewish community, would have been fruitless. Christ was not born in Rome, fulfilling prophesies written hundreds of years before in Jupiter’s temples. He was not born in Athens, claiming to be the son of Kronos. He was not raised studying the sacred texts of the Persians or the Babylonians. He was born in Bethlehem to a Jewish carpenter whose royal lineage would mean nothing to a Gentile, He grew up studying the Jewish Scriptures, and He called Himself the Son of God. But He was rejected by those who, for centuries, awaited His coming.

Christ Himself acknowledges this throughout the gospels. In one instance, He tells a parable to the Pharisees and Jewish priests and leaders, of a landowner who leases his vineyard to tenants and sends numerous servants to ask them for his vintage. After the tenants beat and kill the servants and messengers, the vineyard owner sends his son. When he arrives, Christ says, “But when the tenants saw the son, they said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and acquire his inheritance.’ They seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him” (Matthew 21:33-39).

Christ rarely explained His parables to anyone other than the Apostles, but He did explain this one to the Pharisees and priests:

“Did you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; by the Lord has this been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes’? Therefore, I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit” (Matthew 21:42-43).

Matthew records, “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they knew that he was speaking about them” (Matthew 21:45). Christ also knew the thoughts of the Pharisees and priests (Luke 5:22-23), which makes His summary of the tenants’ thoughts all the more damning. He knew, of course, that He would be rejected, and He knew why. Christ did not reject the Jews and God did not replace them with Christians. Rather, Christ brought the promise of the Mosaic covenant to fruition through His life, death, and resurrection, calling His chosen people to enter into the covenant which He Himself is.

The conclusion this argument against “Christ is King” reaches is, essentially, that Christ is not King. If He were King, of course, then there would be no harm in declaring Him thus — but if He is not, then boldly and proudly proclaiming His Kingship would be a sort of spiritual colonization of those who do not call Him a King, especially the Jews, since Christ claimed to be the Messiah their Scriptures prophesied. Instead, if this argument is accepted, Christ is relegated to merely one king among many. In short, the argument’s conclusion is that there are multiple avenues to what Christ offers: eternal salvation. Christians, of course, recognize that this is patently false.

Once again, Christ Himself declares, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, then you will also know my Father” (John 14:6-7). There is no other way, there is no other savior, there is no one else whose blood might wash away sin and whose life might conquer death itself. As St. John Chrysostom asks, “Could I produce a witness more trustworthy than the Son of God?” The campaign against Christ’s Kingship is nothing short of an overture to pantheism, an effort to declare that Christ is not only not King, but is not the way or the truth or the life.

Atheism is given pride of place among the social, political, and academic elites of the West: the declaration “God is dead” is met with smiles or applause and is ingratiated into Western nomenclature. The violent religion of Islam is endorsed and promulgated, with even those whom Muslims would deride as “infidels” serving as some of Islam’s most ardent evangelists. Judaism used to be more vigorously defended, with any critique of the religion instantly labeled racism and anti-Semitism. But the Kingship of Christ is denied, spurned, and rejected. The only One who truly is the way, the truth, and the life is silenced, as He was silenced upon a cross nearly 2,000 years ago.

Christians have a responsibility, a solemn commission, to proclaim that Christ is King. It is not anti-Semitic, it is not a slur, it is not a “dialectical trap,” as some have called it. It is a crucial tenet of the Christian faith. Our King commanded us not to shirk and shrink from name-calling, but to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19), reminding us that the world will hate us for declaring that Christ is King, just as it first hated Christ our King (John 15:18-19).

Over the centuries, Christian martyrs have faced far worse than criticism, accusations of racism, and social ostracization in their efforts to preach the gospel and expand Christ’s kingdom. Let us not cower before the self-negating arguments of pantheism nor allow any smear to keep us from courageously proclaiming that truth in which both Heaven and earth rejoice: Christ is King.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Elon Musk Ignites Birth Control Conversation On X

Fat and sick: that’s what Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX, says birth control will make you.

The X owner has made waves over the past few weeks with his comments on his social media platform concerning the harms of hormonal birth control.

It all started on January 30, when conservative commentator Ashley St. Clair tweeted:

“Doctors hardly, if ever, advise women that it may be their birth control making them depressed or even suicidal, despite documented risk of both on the pill. Instead, doctors prescribe an anti-depressant and tell them this pharmaceutical cocktail will solve their problems.”

Her tweet captured the attention of Musk, who replied:

“Wow, I just searched medical research papers and it turns out that birth control meds triple the risk of suicide!! I never heard that before you posted.”

Of course, Natural Womanhood has been reporting on hormonal birth control’s ability to increase a user’s risk for depression and suicide for the better part of a decade; 2016, after all, is the year a landmark Danish study found a significant correlation between women who had been prescribed hormonal birth control and were later prescribed an antidepressant.

While many still downplay the risk of depression with hormonal birth control use, the fact remains that we’ve had astonishingly good evidence of the brain-altering effects of hormonal birth control for many years now. But St. Clair’s viral tweet seemed to cause something of a revelation for Musk, who, on February 16, made his own tweet about the dangers of hormonal contraceptives:

“Hormonal birth control makes you fat, doubles risk of depression & triples risk of suicide. This is the clear scientific consensus, but very few people seem to know it.”

Musk’s tweet has since gone viral, with thousands of comments from others weighing in with their own negative experiences on birth control, including many additional harms Musk missed, including cervical cancerpseudotumor cerebri, and the way it alters women’s attraction to men.

Right on cue, however, mainstream media sources have been quick to call Musk’s comments “misleading,” “divisive,” and have even warned that women “shouldn’t look to Musk’s tweet as a source of credible information because there’s a lot he got wrong.

While I agreed in my own comments to Our Sunday Visitor that Musk’s tweets needed contextualizing (as did other fertility awareness advocates and experts like FACT’s Dr. Marguerite Duane, and Anna Halpine, CEO of FEMM), there’s no doubt given the significant amount of data we have concerning the risks and side effects of hormonal birth control that the gist of Musk’s tweets–namely, that these drugs carry significant risks to the health and well-being of girls and women everywhere–are painfully, obviously true.

In fact, in our own comments on Musk’s tweets, Natural Womanhood pointed out that hormonal birth control use also has an association with the development of certain autoimmune disorders, such as Crohn’sMultiple Sclerosis (MS), and Lupus, and why, exactly, the Pill might cause some women to gain weight. As part of a group that published a comprehensive petition to the FDA on the harms of hormonal birth control, Natural Womanhood has long been at the forefront of informing as many women as possible about the sinister realities of these so-called “empowering” drugs and devices.

As more women share their stories about the negative realities of hormonal birth control, the facade around the drug’s safety continues to crumble. While women have been gaslighted for generations that the Pill’s negative effects are “in their head” or that “the Pill doesn’t do that,” Musk’s tweet (and the huge response to it) proves otherwise.

Now imagine if we could just get Elon’s attention on the benefits of fertility awareness as a healthy, effective alternative to hormonal birth control–and all the important reasons why women need to ovulate and have periods, which birth control suppresses.

This article has been republished from Natural Womanhood with permission. Want more of Natural Womanhood’s take on birth control in the news? Be sure to follow them on X @naturwomanhood

AUTHOR

Grace Emily Stark, M.A., is the Editor-in-Chief and Public Relations manager at Natural Womanhood. Grace holds a M.A. in Bioethics & Health Policy from Loyola University Chicago and a B.S. in Healthcare Management & Policy from Georgetown University. She is an alumna of both the Paul Ramsey Institute Fellowship and the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship, and together with her husband, is a certified Sympto-Thermal Method Teaching Couple for the Couple to Couple League. When she isn’t writing or cleaning up after her four small children, Grace loves to relax by baking and hosting barbecues with her husband.

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Critical Race Theory: A Species of the Ideological Thought Genus Marxism

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.


Dr. James Lindsay, mathematician, cultural critic, political analyst, and prolific anti-Woke/anti-Marxist writer, presents an extraordinary and original analysis of the existential threat facing Western Civilization. He introduces Marxism as a genus of ideological thought, and categorizes classical economic Marxism, Maoism, radical feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, Post-Colonial Theory, and Woke as species in the genus of Marxism. It is a magnificent discourse that identifies Woke as the 21st-century species of Marxism evolved to attack the West, signaling our entry into the transformational stage of education, the final phase of Outcome-Based Education (OBE), discussed in Chapter 6.

Lindsay addressed the European Parliament at its Woke Conference on March 29, 2023[i]. It is a stunning speech in which he states unequivocally, “Woke is Maoism with Western characteristics.” The complete transcript follows.

[Transcript]

Woke: A Culture War Against Europe | James Lindsay at the European Parliament

March 29, 2023 [posted May 30, 2023]

Hello. Thank you. I’m glad to be here. I want to address something Tom just said, which is, in fact, that woke is supposed to advance equity in Europe. So, here’s the definition of equity and see if it sounds like a definition of anything else you’ve ever heard of.

The definition of equity comes from the public administration literature. It was written by a man named George Frederickson, and the definition is “an administered political economy in which Shares are adjusted so that citizens are made equal.”

Does that sound like anything you’ve heard of before—like socialism? They’re going to administer an economy to make “shares” equal. The only difference between equity and socialism is the type of property that they redistribute—the type of shares. They’re going to redistribute social and cultural capital, in addition to economic and material capital.

And so, this is my thesis: When we say, “What is woke?” Woke is Maoism with American characteristics.

If I might borrow from Mao himself, who said that his philosophy was Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics, which means woke is Marxism, and it’s a very provocative statement. It’s something you will certainly hear. It is not that it is different, and the professors and the philosophers will spend a large amount of time explaining to you why: “No, no, it’s about economics when it’s Marxism. This is social, this is cultural, this is different.” It’s not different.

I need you to think biologically for one moment, and I don’t mean about your bodies. We could do that—that’s a different topic. I want you to think how we organize plants and animals. When we study them, they are species, but above species they are the genus of the animals. So, you think, like the cats, all the cats, but you have tigers, you have lions, you have house cats, you have whatever, leopards, many different kinds of cats.

If we think of Marxism as a genus of ideological thought, then Classical Economic Marxism is a species. Radical feminism is a species in this same genus. Critical race theory is a genus—or, sorry, a species in this genus. Queer Theory is a species in this genus. Post-Colonial Theory that’s plaguing Europe is a species in this genus. And they have something that binds them together, called intersectionality, that makes them treated as if they are all one thing. But the logic is Marxist, and I want to convince you of that because Marx had a very simple proposition, but we get lost.

We think that Marx was talking about economics because he often talked about economics. He wrote a book called Das Kapital [1867–1883]. It’s very famous book. We think, well, this is about economic theory, but this isn’t true. It is only true on the surface.

If we go below the surface, what Marx was talking about was something different. We know what Marx’s hypothesis was. That we must seize the means of production. If we’re going to bring socialism to the nations, to the world, we have to seize the means of production.

So, we have to ask, what does he mean? And if we think that it’s about capital, then we miss what he means. If you think it’s about the means of production in the factory with a hammer, and it means a production in the field with a sickle, then you miss what it means. Because Marx explained what makes human beings special in his earlier writings. And what makes human beings special is that man is a being that is incomplete, and knows that he is incomplete.

He is a man whose true nature has been forgotten to him, which is a social being. He is a socialist at heart who doesn’t realize it, and the reason he doesn’t realize it is because of the economic conditions operating as a means of construction or production, not just of the economy, but of him. But of man, of society, and particularly of history. Marx said that he had the first scientific study of history.

How is history produced? By man doing man’s activity, and man’s key activity was economic activity as he saw it. And so, economic production doesn’t just produce the goods and services of the economy, it produces Society itself—and Society, in turn, produces man. He called this the inversion of praxis [practice as distinguished from theory].

And so, when he says we must seize the means of production and he’s talking about factories and fields, he’s actually talking about how we construct who we are as human beings, so that we might complete ourselves. So that we might complete history, and at the end of history mankind will remember that he is a social being and we will have a socialist society—a perfect communism that transcends private property. That’s how he put it. He said, in fact, that communism is the transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement. That’s a quote from the economic philosophic manuscripts of 1844.

So, Marx was interested in controlling or understanding and controlling how man produces himself. He writes about this exclusively in the 1840s—very deeply—how do we do this. And he looks at the economic conditions and he says this is where it is, and that’s why we get economic Marxism. And that’s why we think Marx was an economist, but Marx was never an economist; he was a theologian.

He wanted to produce a religion for mankind that would supersede all of the religions of mankind and bring him back to his true social nature. This is the true fact of Marx, and what the goal was, like I said, was to complete man.

So, what he said is, well, how are we building man currently? All of his economic analysis is about how are we building man at present through what he called material determinism. And he said, well, what we have is a special form of private property in our society. Our society is organized around private property, so all of our thoughts organize around private property. In other words, there’s a special kind of property that the bourgeois elite class has access to, and then they organize society to exclude everybody else from access to that property through exploitation, through alienation, through estrangement, through oppression.

And so, what Karl Marx was proposing is the economics becomes a vehicle to separate society into a bourgeois class that has access to a special form of property. The people who have access wish to retain that, so they oppress people and keep other people out of that special form of property. They erect a system of classism to do that; it’s enforced by an ideology called capitalism that believes that this is the right way to engage in the world, and what we have to do is awaken the underclass, the proletariat, to the real conditions and the fact that they are historical agents of change, and bring them to do a revolution and transform society so that we would have equity or socialism, whichever word you want. They have the same definition.

Now let’s say that we step out—that is, we step back from this species, this economic species, Homo economicus, and we step back to the genus, and we look at this idea as a special form of property that segregates society into people who have, the Bourgeois, and the people who do not have, who are in class conflict with an ideology that keeps this in place. And the underclass must awaken with Consciousness to fight back, and to seize the means of production of that form of deterministic property.

And now we say change out class, put in race, and watch—we get critical race theory that falls out of the hat—just like that—very simple. In 1993, Cheryl Harris wrote a long article for the Harvard Law Review called “Whiteness Is Property.” She explained that whiteness, or white privilege, constitutes a kind of cultural private property. She says it must be abolished in order to have racial justice, just like Karl Marx said in The Communist Manifesto. He wrote, “Communism can be summarized in a single sentence: The abolition of private property.”

Well, this is why critical race theory calls to abolish whiteness, because whiteness is a form of private property. People who have access to this property are whites, or “white adjacent,” or they “act white.” These are words out of the American lexicon that they’ve used to describe how people gain access to the private property. People without that are people of color, and they are oppressed by systemic racism. Systemic racism is enforced by an ideology of white supremacy instead of capitalism.

If you think of whiteness as a form of cultural capital, white supremacy, as they define it, is identical to capitalism. It’s the belief—it’s not believing that white people are superior, it’s believing that white people have access to the control of society and should maintain that.

Even if you don’t actually believe that, if you merely support that, you have adopted the ideology of white supremacy into your mind. And so, you have the exact same system and the goal is to awaken a racial consciousness in people so that they will band together as a class, and seize the means of cultural production so that white cultural production is no longer the dominant mode.

It’s a big mystery in Europe. I know in the UK, throughout Europe, I hear this question again and again. Why on Earth is this very American phenomenon about slavery and so on that doesn’t apply to our country, why is it popular here? It’s because it’s not about history at all, it’s not about slavery at all. Those are excuses that they use.

It’s about creating a class consciousness that’s against this form of property called whiteness. That is against the dominant culture that may just be a matter of fact, say, if you’re in Europe. That’s why, because it becomes a sight by which people can come together and they can channel resentment and try to claim power. I wrote a book called Race Marxism, and I defined critical race theory as it really is in that book. On the first page I said that critical race theory is calling everything you want to control racist, until you control it. But couldn’t we say the same about Marxism? It’s calling everything you want to control bourgeois until you control it.

But those mean the same thing. They mean exactly the same thing. But what about, say, Queer Theory? How is that Marxist? It’s very strange, all this gender and sex and sexuality. Well, Tom said, what is woke attacks the idea of being normal. Well, the Queer Theory thinks that there are certain people who get to set the norms of society. They are privileged. They call themselves normal. They say this is normal—it’s normal to consider yourself a man and look like a man and act like a man and dress like a man and eat meat like a man. And then there are women—this should be feminine and pretty and all these things.

And so, they get to define what is normal. They’re heterosexuals, so they get to define the heterosexuality as normal, and other sexualities are abnormal. And so, you have a conflict across this cultural property of who gets to be considered normal and who is a pervert or a freak or some other term that gets used in their literature.

But technically, who is a queer? Which sounds like a slur, but they adopted it, and it’s a technical academic term now. It means an identity without an essence. By the way, an identity that is strictly oppositional to the concept of the normal, as defined by queer theorist David Halperin in his 1995 book,Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. I didn’t make that up. I’m not extrapolating. So, you see, Queer Theory is just another species of the genus of Marxism.

What about Post-Colonial Theory, which is plaguing Europe thanks to Franz Fanon and his biggest European fan, Jean-Paul Sartre. What about this? Well, it’s the same—you have the West as the oppressor. They have access to the material and cultural wealth of the world because they’ve decided their culture is the default and have gone and colonized the world to bring culture to the world, as they say. And so, the oppressed natives around the world, the people, have to band together, and their activity is going to be called decolonization.

They have to remove every aspect of Western culture, so when they come to Belgium or they come to France or they come to the United States and they say, we’re going to decolonize the curriculum, or they go to the UK and say we’re going to decolonize Shakespeare—this is what they mean. We’re going to remove the cultural significance of your cultural artifacts because those cultural artifacts themselves are oppressive to us. This is the same system. It’s another species and the exact same genus—and that genus is Marxism, which is a way of thinking about the world.

And the goal is always to seize the means of control of the production of man and history and society.

Marx merely believed it was through economic means. Now it’s through socio-cultural means. The evolution into this, sometimes called Western Marxism, began in the 1920s. We had a Russian Revolution in 1917 and this did not happen in Europe, and the Marxists in Europe were confused. And so, Antonio Gramsci sat down and wrote out some things, and George Lukács sat down and wrote History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics [1972] after the failure of the revolution in Hungary. And they wrote what became Cultural Marxism—the idea that we have to enter the cultural institutions in order to change them from within, because Western culture has something about it that’s repelling socialism.

So, we have to go inside and change the culture to make it socialist. Now, you aren’t allowed to talk about Cultural Marxism now. They’ve categorized this as a conspiracy theory. They say that it is anti-Semitic—this is not true. Antonio Gramsci wrote books. George Lukács wrote books. You can read those books—they have a philosophy. If they don’t like the name Cultural Marxism, we can use the name that other people at the time used, Western Marxism.

So much like, I don’t know, a virus adapting to the conditions, it changed. It changed to try to infect a new host. It worked in feudal societies. Marxism took over in Russia, it took over later in China. It took over in all of these kinds of agriculturally driven feudal societies, but it wouldn’t work in actual capitalist nations, because Marx was wrong.

Then several Germans from the Frankfurt School started to study this phenomenon in more depth, and they evolved the idea further. They evolved the idea into what’s called Critical Marxism, they developed what’s called the Critical Theory, and Max Horkheimer, who designed the Critical Theory, explained the Critical Theory. And what did he say?

He said, well, what we came to realize was that Marx was wrong about one thing. Capitalism does not immiserate the worker, it allows him to build a better life. So, I developed the Critical Theory because it is not possible to articulate the vision of a good society on the terms of the existing society. So, Critical Marxism criticizes the entirety of the existing society. Everything is somehow needing to be subjected to Marxist conflict analysis, but how is that to be done?

They sought an answer through the middle part of the 20th century, and World War II breaks out. The Frankfurt School comes to America, which in this metaphor is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because gain of function began to happen on the Marxist virus very quickly.

In America, American universities adopted these professors from Germany, and Herbert Marcuse, writing in the 1960s, said extremely clearly, this writing in 1969. Not only did he say capitalism delivers the goods, gives people a good life, makes them wealthy and comfortable and happy. He also said that the working class is no longer going to be the base of the Revolution because of these things.

In other words, we don’t have to be responsible to the working class anymore, which opens up the ability for Marxists, who are seeking power, to make friends with the corporations. The bosses are no longer the enemy, they’re an opportunity, because the working class is irrelevant.
He said the energy is somewhere else, he said it’s in the racial minorities, the sexual minorities, the feminists—the Outsiders. That’s who he said have the energy for a Marxist revolution in the West, not the working class. And so, Marxism was able to evolve to abandon the working class.

So, what did they do? Well, all they had studied for thirty years was what they called the culture industry, an industry that commodifies and packages culture and sells it back to people. So, supposedly stripped of what it actually is, empty, abstract now, and so what, of course, did they do? They seized the means of production of the culture industry, because that’s what they do, and so they started to transform the culture industry to sell racial, sexual, gender, sexuality-based agitprop, as though that were genuine culture, and so we get concepts like cultural appropriation.

We get concepts like cultural relevance—cultural this, cultural that, cultural everything, and it’s all provided in pastiche. It’s all provided as a mockery of what’s really going on—and this evolved in America’s highly racialized context, and we ended up with woke—a form of identity- based Marxism. A constellation of Marxist species that all work with the same operating premise, but locate themselves in different, and I’ll use the German term here for this: Volk. LGBTQ is a volk, and they get volkish identity there and become activists.

The black community is a volk. How do I know? That’s what W. E. B. DuBois said. It would be when he laid down the foundations that became critical race theory later. They think of themselves as nations. Don’t they all have flags? Don’t they put them on your buildings like colonizers? Don’t they hang them in your streets?

They think of themselves as occupying nations, but they see themselves as bound together, just like the various colonized nations around the world, and seeking liberation from Western Civilization. And so, we end up with Western Marxism taking many forms, but with one overarching approach, and the approach that they use, I started off by saying, is Maoist, not merely Marxist.

Now you know the theory is Marx. It’s just evolved into different species to attack the West at its weakest points, through our tolerance, through our acceptance, through our openness, through our generosity, through our best traits—actually, the things that we should be proud of being, the things that we are proud of being. But Mao Zedong knew how to use identity politics.

I don’t know how you study in Europe, but in America we have very red-washed education, as we might say. The communists have stripped out all education about communism entirely. You don’t learn about it in America at all. So, we don’t learn anything about Mao, and maybe you don’t know this, but I tell this to American audiences and they’re shocked.

Mao used identity politics. He created ten identities in China. Five he labeled red for communist, five he labeled black for fascists, and he categorized people into these identity categories. What they are doesn’t really matter. Of course, they were communists, they were things like landlord and rich farmer, and things like this—right-winger is a bad category in and of itself. By the way, conservatives, all of them bad, bad influences, that’s another one; you could be a bad influence for just thinking the wrong thing or saying the wrong thing at any time, or because the government decides it doesn’t like you. These are the bad categories, and if you have a bad category, very importantly, your children have a bad category by default.

So, they create a social pressure for your children to identify as revolutionaries, at which point they get a red identity, a communist identity, a good identity, and they get rewarded for it. And the youth led the revolution in China because Mao did this identity politics through the children, in the schools. This should feel very uncomfortable to you because here we have, at least in the United States, we tell our children being white is bad, being white is oppressive.

You automatically hurt people of other races by your very existence, but, by the way, if you become queer, we’ll celebrate you, and you can create a radical army of people who identify as gender minorities and sexual minorities at seven years old. You can lead them into paths of puberty blockers in transition, medical transition, which of course Big Pharma profits off of, at seven years old, behind their parents’ backs.

There’s a reason for this. It’s the same program that Mao Zedong used to radicalize the youth in China. The only thing different is the identity categories have shifted. It’s Maoist cultural revolution with American characteristics, and it’s being exported to Europe. And just like how critical race theory has come to Europe, even though it doesn’t make sense, it will come to Europe whether it makes sense or not, and you will have a cultural revolution here too.

You guys even had a kind of offshoot one in 2020. George Floyd dies in Minnesota, which has nothing to do with you, and you guys have statues coming down in Europe. Total nonsense. It doesn’t matter, though; the point is to destroy Western Civilization from within, using Maoist techniques.

One last point about Mao to kind of drive that point home. Mao said in 1942 that his formula to transform China was called Unity Criticism Unity. First you try to create the desire for Unity. Then you criticize people for not living up to that. Then you bring them into Unity under a new standard.

Does that feel like what you’re being put through? But the words are different. We use words like inclusion and belonging. We’ll have a place where everybody feels like they belong, we just want to have an inclusive space, but unfortunately you have racist ideas, and we have to criticize you for those. You need to criticize yourself for those. You need to go study shuishi, in Mandarin, exactly like Mao said. And then we can bring you into Unity under a new standard, which Mao called socialist discipline, which we in the West would not buy. We call it in the West “inclusion.” And so, we have this new program. And within inclusion we have—or above inclusion, actually—we have sustainability. We have a sustainable and inclusive future.

I see the Agenda 2030 here with an X over it. The sustainable and inclusive future is the new socialist standard that we will have freedom under socialist discipline. And Mao said the way that that will work is through what he called Democratic Centralism. We call that Stakeholder Capitalism. And my shot at the World Economic Forum is taken because it’s one of the things coordinating this. My shot at the United Nations is taken because it’s one of the things that’s coordinating this.

So, woke is Marxism, it’s advancing through Maoist cultural revolution. It’s using Americanized identity categories, and while some of those will not work in Europe, I guarantee you the colonial aspect will. They will find your weakness. They will adapt the theory to fit, because it’s like a virus that will evolve to its host, and Europe is at great risk.

The last thing I’ll mention is this risk is twofold. When you endure Marx’s provocation, Marx’s strategy is always of the same type. It’s called middle-level violence. They don’t come at you with full-blown Bolshevik assault very often. It’s middle-level violence they provoke. Which means if you give in, and you do like Jean-Paul Sartre said in his forward to Wretched of the Earth[1961] by [psychiatrist] Franz Fanon, the post-colonial book.

He said the violence is coming, so Europe’s best bet is to give it away so that they don’t kill you. They’ll murder you and take it, or maybe you can give it away. Give your culture away, give your countries away, and they’ll let you live. They’re coming for you, and this is what Europe needs to learn. That’s what he says in the forward of Wretched of the Earth, you can read it for yourself, probably in the original French that I can’t read. And I think that’s the path Europe has followed.

So, you can give away, that’s one side because they provoke at the middle, or you can react and overreact. Which, sadly, Europe has had a rough history in the last century with overreactions and if they, if you, overreact, what will they do? They will weaponize your overreaction for a century, forever, and gain moral authority so that you end up having to give it away later anyway.

So, stand firm in your principles. But you have to do so cleverly, you have to do so understanding that you’re being provoked. Which means you don’t react as the provocateur wants you to react. You have to outsmart them, which is not possible unless you know the diagnosis of your problem.

It’s a Polish proverb: Never attempt to cure what you don’t understand.

Woke is Marxism evolved to attack the West. If you don’t understand that, you will not act correctly. You will not cure it, and it will conquer your countries. It will conquer all of Europe, and we will have a very, very long sustainable and inclusive future with absolutely no freedom, because the goal is to make us into what they call “global citizens.” Have you heard this term?

This term is nonsense. There’s no global sovereign, so there is no global citizenship. There’s no relationship because there’s no ruler, and we don’t want a ruler of the globe. It’s a nonsense term. But they tell you, if you actually read their literature, what is a global citizen. It’s somebody, I kid you not, I make no joke, they say this themselves, it’s somebody who supports the 17 sustainable development goals of the United Nations Agenda 2030.

That’s a global citizen, and they say what are the rights of a global citizen. This is in a book about global citizenship education published two years ago, what are the rights of a global citizen? And the answer one paragraph later is, we’re not that interested in rights with global citizenship, it’s more about global responsibilities. In other words—slavery.

This is a pivotal moment in the history of the western world. The model that they are pushing us toward using the means and mechanisms of that place is the model we see in China. If you want to know what your future looks like if we don’t stop the woke, look at China.

Look at the social credit system. Look at the oppression. Look at people disappearing for having the wrong opinions. One of their greatest billionaires, Jack Ma, said the wrong thing about the government and disappeared. A billionaire.

If you want to know what the future of Europe and America, and the five eyes or whatever the countries, it’s China. That’s the model. So, we have to fight back against woke, but to fight back against woke we have to understand it, and I will close by restating my thesis:

Woke is Marxism evolved to take on the West, and it’s been very successful so far because we haven’t known our enemy, we cannot name our enemy, and I’ve come here to name our enemy.

So, thank you for your time and attention and letting me do that.

[End of speech]

The importance of James Lindsay’s speech for Americans is twofold. First, Lindsay names our enemy––Woke. Second, he identifies the enemy’s motive––Cultural Revolution. History is repeating itself. Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, led the Cultural Revolution in China from 1966–1976. Mao was an ideological supremacist who believed in the superiority of his particular species of ideological Marxism, Maoism.

China had been under dynastic rule for over 3,000 years until its last dynasty, the Qing dynasty (1636–1912). The Boxer Uprising in the summer of 1900, along with the revolutionary ideas of Sun Yat-sen, destabilized the established dynastic order. Mao came to power during the Soviet-Sino split when China and the Soviet Union went their separate ideological ways.

Mao was a pragmatist who realized he could not use the rich v. poor Russian model for revolution in China. He decided that, for Chinese communism to succeed, it required a Cultural Revolution, the obliteration of the old China by purging any remnants of traditional Chinese society—old ideas, old values, old artifacts, old habits, old religion, and old customs, including family loyalty and reverence for ancestors. Mao was determined to replace individual Chinese family loyalty with loyalty to the collectivist Chinese Communist state.

Chairman Mao was a supremacist selling a replacement totalitarian ideology, who conveniently failed to mention that Maoism is a binary sociopolitical structure of rulers and ruled. In America, Woke Marxists are selling the same replacement totalitarian ideology, and also failing to mention that American Marxism is that same binary sociopolitical structure.

Every species of ideological Marxism is binary regardless of its name. Socialism, communism, Marxism, Maoism, democratic socialism, all are species of ideological Marxism. References to socialism are particularly misleading because they disguise the binary structure of the incremental stages moving America backward from constitutional republic to medieval feudalism.

The 18th-century Age of Enlightenment inaugurated a period of great tolerance for differing opinions and was the beginning of liberalism as a movement. Freedom of religion, upward mobility, equality of man, all secular ideals of the Enlightenment, were incorporated into the Constitution of the United States. The liberalism of the Enlightenment has morphed into the leftism of today and has replaced Western Judeo-Christian organized religion as the “religion” of Western youth.

Woke is the vanguard of the 21st-century Cultural Revolution in America. Like Chairman Mao, it seeks the obliteration of the old America by purging any remnants of traditional American society. The idea is to rid American society of old ideas, old values, old artifacts, old habits, old Judeo-Christian religion, and old customs including honoring parents and family loyalty. Woke is determined to replace American family loyalty with loyalty to the new American Marxist state.

What ultra-conservatives fail to recognize when they blame atheists for the social chaos in America is that Millennials and Gen Xers are not without religion; they have embraced leftism as their religion. The god of leftism is not an anthropomorphic superpower; it is globalism, and its tenets are Woke. Young people do not seek unity with God, they seek unity with all people of the world. Leftism is a colossal humanitarian hoax that exploits people’s desire for Unity to sell the fiction of freedom in globalism’s planetary totalitarian Unistate.

©2024. Linda Goudsmit. All rights reserved.

Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com and website: lindagoudsmit.com

DAVID BLACKMON: New EPA Auto Emission Rules Reflect The Madness Of King Biden

In a move that is certain to be challenged in the courts, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency enacted a de facto ban on many gas-powered cars this week in the form of a final regulation on allowable tailpipe emissions.

The regulation is designed to force two-thirds of new light-duty cars and 46% of medium duty autos sold in the United States to be electric vehicles by 2032, one of the more hare-brained schemes that make up the Biden Green New Deal energy policies.

In the press release accompanying the new rule, the EPA boasts that the new mandates “will avoid more than 7 billion tons of carbon emissions and provide nearly $100 billion of annual net benefits to society, including $13 billion of annual public health benefits due to improved air quality, and $62 billion in reduced annual fuel costs,” all of which is so much nonsense that no one really believes it. But this kind of fantasy narrative forms the very foundation of current Democrat party thinking on energy and climate policy.

In a statement, Tom Pyle, President of the American Energy Alliance, fired back at the EPA talking points, calling the regulation “another example of President Biden’s assault on the middle class.” Pyle correctly points out that the new rules “will make cars more expensive and ultimately make fewer cars available for Americans. By now, we have gotten used to incredibly damaging and stupid rules from the Biden administration, but this one is in a class by itself.”

But of course, raising the price for a new car in the United States is a feature of the Green New Deal policies pushed by Biden and his regulators, not a glitch. According to data kept by the St. Louis office of the Federal Reserve, the consumer price index when Biden assumed office in January, 2021 stood at 150.131. By February of 2024, that had skyrocketed to 179.311, a rise of 14% in just three years. By contrast, the index rose by just 1% during the first term of Donald Trump.

It is no secret that increasing the cost of energy is a central goal of the climate-alarm activist movement, not just in the United States but across the globe. The conceit there being that if you can force energy costs high enough and fast enough to make them unbearable to ordinary consumers, you will force people to conserve, i.e., do without. As Pyle correctly points out, it is a direct assault on the middle and lower classes in society, given the fact that rising energy costs essentially function as a regressive tax that impacting the poorest classes the hardest.

This is the core belief system that controls policy in the Democrat party today. It is simply beyond question at this point – literally every action this administration takes related to energy policy is designed to intentionally increase the cost for energy for every American. Consumers see it in the rising price for gas at the pump – more than 50% higher today than it was when Biden took office. They see it in skyrocketing home utility bills. They see it in irrational Biden policy actions like pushing offshore wind industrial projects, where big developers continue to demand more subsidies and higher rate guarantees before moving forward. They see it in the administration’s policies designed to depress the domestic oil and gas industry. They see it in policies intentionally designed to destroy reliability on the nation’s power grid.

And now they see it in this new EPA power grab. It comes after U.S. automakers have spent the last half year scaling back their plans for EV development and begging the administration to reconsider its irrational, destructive approach in light of the slowing demand for such cars and the ensuing massive financial losses. The vast majority of Americans simply do not want to own an EV, and forcing automakers to manufacture them regardless of market demand is the surest way to create the “bloodbath” in the domestic industry that Trump predicted last week.

It is madness, plain and simple, and if voters give this administration another four years in office, disaster will become inevitable.

AUTHOR

DAVID BLACKMON

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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


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‘Total Abomination’: $1.2 Trillion Bill Funds Teen Trans Programs, Abortion to 22 Weeks

A sprawling, $1.2 trillion government funding bill includes funding for abortion facilities, as well as LGBTQ activist centers that carry out transgender injections, target minors, hold drag shows, and help illegal immigrants who identify as gay or transgender gain U.S. citizenship — a bill one congressman calls “a total, total abomination.”

The “Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024” funds the Departments of Defense, Education, Health and Human Services (HHS), Homeland Security (DHS), Labor, and State until the end of the fiscal year, September 30. Congressional leadership released the text of the 1,012-page bill at 2:30 a.m. Thursday, giving members of Congress just hours to read before an anticipated vote to head off an impending government shutdown at midnight Saturday.

As of this writing, the bill contained the following earmarks:

  • $400,000 requested by Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) for Briarpatch Youth Services in Fitchburg, Wisconsin. The group promises to hide minors’ struggle with gender dysphoria from their parents while indoctrinating teens in extreme gender ideology. Its “Queer 101 Training” promises to teach “an intersectional understanding on queer oppression” and aims “to demonstrate how limiting the ‘male’ and ‘female’ binary is.” The organization offers “individual counseling services” for children “ages 12-17,” in which a “[c]ounselor can work with children on exploring identity, resiliency, and creating a Gender Support Plan for school support and advocacy.” The group’s website says, “Youth do NOT need parent/guardian permission to join Teens Like Us. We understand not all youth are at a point in their lives where they can safely and confidently ‘come out.’” (Emphasis in original.) The group’s “Queer 101 Training” aims “to demonstrate how limiting the ‘male’ and ‘female’ binary is.”
  • $400,000 requested by Senator Bob Casey (D-Pa.) for the Mazzoni Center in Philadelphia, which carries out transgender hormone shots, clears the way for transgender surgeries, advertises transgender services for minors, and holds drag show fundraisers. Mazzoni carries out cross-sex hormone injections and provides medical letters for transgender surgeries. The center begins targeting teens with its Pediatric & Adolescent Comprehensive Transgender Services (PACTS). Its “Youth Drop In,” which is held each Wednesday night, is aimed at teens “ages 14 to 24” and notes, “Patients under 18 can receive confidential care regarding sexual and mental health without parental permission.” The Mazzoni Center both contributes to and profits from the LGBT movement. Mazzoni invited donors to mingle with “a wide range of acts that include drag queens, drag kings, trans-identifying, bearlesque, and burlesque performers” at its December 3 Code Red fundraiser. “In December, fundraising for Mazzoni Center truly was a drag,” the center cracked. “Drag entertainer Cherry Pop and her fabulous friends united for the 10th annual Code Red fundraiser, a drag/variety show,” which it described as a “powerful night” for a “vital cause.”
  • $1,808,000 requested by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed (both D-R.I.) for Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, which carries out first- and second-term abortions at its Family Planning Clinic. “If you need to discuss abortion care for pregnancy, please feel free to contact the Family Planning Clinic,” states its website. Its “services” include “[s]urgical abortion under general anesthesia in the operating room for people up to 22 weeks pregnant” and “[m]edication abortion (the ‘abortion pill’) for people up to ten weeks pregnant.” The facility will also implant a potential abortifacient inside women after the abortion, advertising a “[p]ost-abortion IUD or contraceptive implant.”
  • $650,000 requested by Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) for Dartmouth Hitchcock Nashua in New Hampshire. “We routinely provide both medication and procedural abortion care up to 22 weeks of pregnancy,” the group declares. The facility describes surgical abortion as a procedure “ending a pregnancy by having the pregnancy removed by doctors.”
  • $780,000 requested by Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) for Amador Health Services in Las Cruces, New Mexico, which boasts that it “can provide transgender/gender non-conforming (GNC) health education, therapeutic counseling and referrals, and additional LGBTQ+ support that puts your safety and comfort first. If you’ve felt rejected by family and loved ones, isolated from your community, or are just in need of an ear to listen, we’re here.” It also decries the “social stigma” surrounding “undocumented immigration” (e.g., illegal immigration). “[W]e’re working every day to eliminate that stigma and make all feel like they belong.”
  • $146,000 requested by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) for Apicha Community Health Center, for facilities and equipment. Apicha’s two locations in Manhattan and Queens advertise “transgender and gender-affirming services” — specifically “initiation and maintenance of hormone replacement therapy,” “letters of support for gender-affirming surgeries” and “help with name change process.” They also distribute potential abortifacients Plan B and IUDs.
  • $706,000 requested by Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) for Entre Hermanos, an LGBT group that helps put illegal immigrants on a path to U.S. citizenship. It offers legal counseling and “free immigration clinics” to illegal immigrants who identify as LGBTQ to obtain U.S. citizenship and hosts workshops on “the many identities” under the transgender “umbrella” and strategies to minimize “transphobia.” The group’s website currently advertises the upcoming “Drag Brunch” on April 28.
  • $850,000 requested by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) for LGBTQ Senior Housing, Inc. (“The Pryde”), in Massachusetts, a controversial funding provision that House Republicans stripped out of a Transportation funding bill last year.

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, also listed the following concerning earmarks:

  • “Sen. Bennet (D-CO), $845,000 – Envision: You, CO (SAMHSA) – LGBTQ advocacy.”
  • “Sen. Shatz (D-HI), $550,000 – Hawaii Health and Harm Reduction Center, HI (SAMHSA) – LGBTQ services and syringe exchange.”
  • “Sen. Schumer (D-NY), $1,000,000 — SAGE, NY (ACL) – LGBTQ advocacy.”

The “earmarks in it for abortion facilities” make the bill a “total, total abomination,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told Steve Bannon’s “War Room” on Thursday.

“We continue to fund abortion tourism, we continue to fund transgender surgeries at the Department of Defense,” Roy continued. “It busts the [spending] caps … funds the FBI headquarters, doesn’t secure the border, funds the World Health Organization.”

Even these dedicated funding streams do not cover the full extent of the bill’s harmful funding, say its critics. “I have multiple concerns, among them are the many new social services that this bill would create for the millions of illegal immigrants streaming across our border. Additionally, it would fund facilities providing routine abortion services, including late-term abortions,” said Aderholt.

Experts say the short time frame legislators have to review such massive legislation makes it more likely wasteful or immoral spending will find congressional approval. “Lawmakers are using arbitrary deadlines and shutdown politics to extort the American people and force lawmakers to vote for a bill they don’t have time to read,” said Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation. “Conservatives were told that the days of omnibus spending bills shrouded in secrecy were over. But this process and the bill it produced are indistinguishable from typical Swamp behavior that’s taken our economy and country to the brink of disaster.”

Principled lawmakers seem to agree. “This is not the bill that my subcommittee produced and supported,” the chairman added. “The Senate has taken liberties with their Congressionally Directed Spending requests that would never stand in the House.”

“Under no circumstances should [House Republicans] vote for this bill,” said Roy. “A vote for this bill is a vote against America.”

“In good conscience, I cannot and will not vote for these projects or this bill,” Aderholt concluded.

The bill is expected to pass Friday.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

J.K. Rowling Slams Trans Activists After UK Bans Use of Puberty Blockers on Minors, Citing Safety Concerns

The UK has banned the use of puberty blockers on minors “dealing with transgenderism,” on the grounds that there is not enough “evidence on the procedure’s safety or clinical effectiveness.”

J.K. Rowling, who has herself been victim of abuse for speaking out against the most aggressive elements of the trans lobby, discussed the vulnerability of children and how they are being used by the system. Despite this ban, UK children will be used as lab rats:

The hormones will be only available for children with gender dysphoria through clinical trials intended to fill gaps in medical knowledge, though provision is expected to be made in exceptional circumstances on a case-by-case basis.

In America, puberty blockers continue to be allowed by the Food and Drug Administration, and thousands of kids are taking these risky drugs, with many more lined up for them, even against the wishes of parents in many cases. They are referred to by some in the woke system as “estranged parents.”

At least 121,882 children ages 6 to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria from 2017 through 2021.

In America, puberty blockers along with gender transitioning for kids is supported “at the highest levels” of the Biden administration, with psychological and physical risks dismissed.

J.K. Rowling Shreds Puberty Blockers After U.K. Ban: ‘Well-Funded Lobbying Groups Drunk on Their Own Power

by Paul Bois, Breitbart, March 18, 2024:

J.K. Rowling ripped into the activists who pushed puberty blockers after the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) banned their use on minors dealing with transgenderism.

NHS England based its decision to ban puberty blockers for children this week on there not being enough evidence on the procedure’s safety or clinical effectiveness. The U.K. government also endorsed the “landmark decision,” hailing at as being in the “best interests of children.” NHS England proposed a ban on the procedure last June and issued the definitive decision following a review from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).

Author J.K. Rowling, who has been an outspoken critic of transgender radicalism since 2020, celebrated the decision on social media and called out the activists who pushed this on children.

“How was this allowed in the first place… no words,” one user on X said in reply to her post highlighting the policy change.

“Well-funded lobbying groups drunk on their own power, politicians closing their eyes rather than suffer social media pushback, idiot celeb cheerleaders who’re about to go very quiet, pharmaceutical companies chasing profit, medics who abandoned ethics and should be in the dock,” she replied….One self-identified ‘de-transitioner’ said, ‘It breaks my heart it was allowed to go on for so long. The damage done is untold, and the number of detransitioners who have broke down in pain to me will live with me forever.’”

Continue reading.

AUTHOR

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

The Vice President Visits an Abortion Clinic—And the People Yawn?

For more than 50 years, the left has promoted abortion in America. But last week we saw something new in this battle. For the first time ever, a vice-president actually visited a facility where unborn babies are systematically killed when Kamala Harris toured a Planned Parenthood abortion facility in St. Paul, Minnesota.

She called laws restricting abortion in other states “immoral.” She also said that abortion and religious commitment were compatible, not incompatible: “One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree that the government should not be telling women what to do with their body.”

The left, including Harris, call abortion “healthcare for women.” Healthcare? Healthcare is about healing, not taking life. These are not blobs of tissue. These are preborn babies.

A number of pro-life leaders spoke out following Harris’s visit to Planned Parenthood:

  • Gary Bauer, founding president of Our American Values, had a headline on this story in his “End of Day Report” (3/4/24): “Hide Your Babies—the Vice President Is In Town.” Bauer wrote: “Politicians of both parties have long tried to show how loving they are by kissing the babies handed to them by proud parents on the campaign trail. Biden and Harris prefer going to places where babies go to die.”
  • Susan B. Anthony (SBA) Pro-Life America’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, said: “Kamala Harris has spent her whole career in the pocket of Big Abortion. When brave citizen journalists exposed Planned Parenthood’s selling of baby body parts, then-Attorney General Harris prosecuted the whistleblowers. The corruption continues as the Biden-Harris DOJ throws nonviolent pro-life activists in prison.”

And Dannenfelser added, “Nearly 70% of women who’ve had an abortion say it was unwanted, coerced or inconsistent with their own values and preferences.”

  • Eric Scheidler, the executive director of the Pro-Life Action League, told me: “Sadly, I can’t think of a more appropriate place for Kamala Harris to appear than an abortion facility. The Biden-Harris administration is devoted to aborting every unborn child they can — especially the children of the poor. Harris seems to take offense at the idea that a poor woman might embrace her right to motherhood. She couldn’t care less that most of those mothers turn to abortion only in desperation, not as a free ‘choice.’ That’s why faithful Christians need to show up at abortion centers themselves, to offer compassionate help to the mothers Harris won’t listen to and to mourn for the precious children Harris has turned her back on.”
  • Father Frank Pavone, the founding president of Priests for Life, sent me this response to VP Harris’ visit: “First of all, the pro-life side is doing better at showing solidarity with their base. Years ago, under the Trump Administration, the VP [Mike Pence] visited a pregnancy center. Secondly, VP Harris didn’t get the full experience at Planned Parenthood. Did they show her the forceps that rip the baby’s arms and legs off? Better yet, did they show her the arms and legs that have to be reassembled in the tray? Did they even describe the abortion procedure to her? The Democrats are pretending. If they want to bring abortion forward as an election issue, then talk about abortion and show voters what it is. It’s actually the last thing they want to do.”
  • Jim Harden, the CEO of a Buffalo-area crisis pregnancy center that was firebombed in 2022, emailed me this response: “Receiving $1.8 Billion in federal funding over the last three years demonstrates Planned Parenthood is a de facto government agency. And given the Biden/Harris campaign plans to get re-elected on abortion it only makes sense she would visit the largest abortion business on the planet, perpetrating over 40% of all abortions in the U.S.”

I believe that anyone who supports abortion rights should at least be knowledgeable about how abortions are actually performed, including in the first trimester. It’s a bloody mess.

As to later abortions, actor Kevin Sorbo (“God’s Not Dead”) has voiced a 5-minute video explaining what actually happens in those type of procedures.

The video is called, “The Procedure.” It’s unconscionable that people celebrate these things. The video is only graphic in its descriptions, not images. Yet it is hard to realize this is what people on the left not only push, but celebrate.

Life is a gift. When the founders wrote our nation’s birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence, they said the Creator has endowed us with certain inalienable rights and among these are the right to life. For more than half a century, abortion has been at war the right to life in America.

The presidency and vice-presidency are bully pulpits. Too bad they use their powerful influence to promote death, not life.

©2024.  All rights reserved.

WORLD HAPPINESS REPORT: The U.S. Happiness Ranking in 2020 was #18 ― In 2024 it is #23. Why?

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” ― Dalai Lama XIV


The 2024 World Happiness Report has been released and it contains some very useful, informative and very shocking scientific outcomes.

First, please watch this short video explaining the background of the World Happiness Report:

After reading the results of the 2024 World Happiness Report (2021-2023) we decided to compare it with the last report the 2020 World Happiness Report (2018-2020).

Living in America we of course focused at the ranking of America in both reports.

What we found was sad but understandable.

Here are the rankings of America for the last two World Happiness Reports:

Why?

The 2024 World Happiness Report found:

  • [I]n North America happiness has fallen so sharply for the young that they are now less happy than the old. 
  • Happiness fell significantly in the country group including the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, by twice as much for the young as for the old.
  • In 2021-2023 negative emotions were in every region more prevalent for females than males. Almost everywhere the gender gap is larger at older ages.
  • The frequency of positive emotions in every region is highest for those under 30, thereafter steadily declining with age in every region except North America, where positive emotions are least frequent for those in the middle age groups.
  • In most countries life satisfaction drops gradually from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. Globally, young people aged 15-24 still report higher life satisfaction than older adults. But this gap is narrowing in Western Europe and recently reversed in North America due to falling life satisfaction among the young.
  • As between generations, those born before 1965 (Boomers and their predecessors) have life evaluations about one-quarter of a point higher than those born after 1980 (Millennials and Gen Z). Within each generation, life evaluations rise with age for those in the older generations and fall with age for the younger ones, with little age effect for those in between.
  • Figure 2.2: Ranking of Happiness – the Young (Age below 30): 2021-2023 shows the United states ranked 62nd.

America’s youth and America’s females, in particular, are less happy.

According to Tufts Tisch College

In 2024, Gen Z youth alone will make up over 40 million potential voters—including 8 million youth who will have newly reached voting age since 2022—making up nearly one fifth of the American electorate. Together with the youngest Millennials, young people ages 18-34 are poised to be a potential force in the next presidential election.

The Tufts Tisch College poll found that half of of America’s youth are struggling mentally. The poll found that close to half of young people say they’re struggling with mental health issues like loneliness or lack of confidence, and those who do are less likely to vote.

America’s youth are most worried about:

  1. Key Issues: Economy, Climate, Guns. Young people’s top issues are inflation/cost of living, jobs that pay a living wage, gun violence, and climate change.

America’s youth are confused because they have been indoctrinated by their teachers from K-12-20.

Here’s why:

  • America’s youth believe that the world is ending because of their own actions. They feel responsible for the climate changing when in fact there is nothing they, or mankind, can do to impact the weather, let alone the climate. They are now the children of the religion of climate change.
  • Boys and girls have both been brainwashed to believe that they can not only choose their personal pronoun but that gender affirming surgery is safe and necessary.
  • America’s youth aren’t being taught how to think, rather they are being taught what to think. Instead of learning the three R’s they are taught how not to think for themselves. How to create new knowledge, new wisdom and new understanding of themselves and the world.
  • Today’s youth believe that Communism is good and Capitalism is bad. They aren’t being taught the failed history of Communism.
  • Today’s white youth are being told that they are racists and evil. That they must pay reparations even thought they never owned a slave.
  • Today’s Jewish students are being attacked by their teachers, professors and physically to the point of being in fear if their lives.
  • Today’s Christian youth are being bombarded with devil worship and evil everywhere that they look. Be it pornography on social media sites like TikTok to films like “Poor Things.”
  • Today’s youth are not being hired because of their qualifications but by their race or gender. Diversity, equity and inclusion is more important and replaced the standards of knowledge, hard work and professionalism.
  • Today’s American youth have increasing debt, both personal and national, are more unsure that ever about their futures.
  • Today’s young men and women are not thinking about marriage and having children. Rather they have become more and more self-centered and frivolous.

America’s youth are in a downward spiral and they are depressed, lonely and lack confidence because they have been lied to, and subjected to myths rather than the truth.

Abraham Lincoln wrote, “Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”

America’s youth can’t make up their minds because big government, social media, Hollywood, corporations and colleges and universities don’t want them to. They just want them to obey.

America’s youth are suffering from “The Seven Social Sins”:

  1. Wealth without work.
  2. Pleasure without conscience.
  3. Knowledge without character.
  4. Commerce without morality.
  5. Science without humanity.
  6. Worship without sacrifice.
  7. Politics without principle.

Parents and grandparents must take back our youth and return to them the one and only thing that will cure them — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

©2024. Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.


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DAVID BLACKMON: The Energy Transition Has Become A Big Green Hot Mess

We spend a lot of time talking and writing about the green energy subsidies contained in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. That’s appropriate given that bill’s content of a raft of incentives and subsidies the CBO estimated would amount to $369 billion over 10 years, a number that some analysts have estimated will be a small fraction of the real final price tag of that bill.

Receiving less attention is the set of similar subsidy programs that were contained in 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), one of which allocated the princely sum of $5 billion to the Departments of Energy (DOE) and Transportation (DOT) to serve as grant money to subsidize the installation of fast-charging EV charging stations around the country. In late February, Nick Pope reported at the Daily Caller that, more than two years after passage of the bill, this government program has resulted in the opening of just two locations – in Ohio and New York – that include only 8 such charging stations.

The slowness of this process should not come as a surprise to anyone, given that this subsidy program incorporates the massive bureaucracies at two federal departments. It is the nature of government agencies to find ways of slowing whatever process over which they have purview, not to speed them up. That’s not a slam on the people who staff those agencies, but a simple recognition of the realities they face in attempting to conform their actions to the complexities of the laws they are required to enforce, of which the IIJA is merely one.

This tension between the nature and complexity of western law and the need for speed the Biden White House hopes to achieve with the setting of hyper-aggressive goals and timelines related to the adoption and enforcement of its Green New Deal policies always has been and remains the central conundrum of the energy transition in the United States. The pace of the multi-faceted, $300 trillion transition is already drastically behind schedule, both in the US and across the rest of the world. There is little prospect for that pace to catch up to the desired timelines anytime in the future.

This reality is not unique to the world of electric vehicles and their associated infrastructure needs, which are massive and hugely expensive. There is also the need for dramatically expanding the electric grid, which provides power to every aspect of not only the transition but to society as a whole. The needs there were already unimaginably huge even before the rise of AI, a power hog of unprecedented proportions.

While the IRA and IIJA included incentives and subsidies that address a subset of the thousands of moving parts of an integrated energy transition, many major elements – such as the gigantic transmission expansion needed for the power grid – were left out entirely.

When the IRA was passed, I warned that the Biden White House viewed it as not a stand-alone subsidy bill, but merely as a down payment for what it viewed as a series of even larger subsidy efforts to come. If one accepts that the climate is really in an emergency condition – as the climate alarm lobby’s propaganda claims – then the passage of a perhaps unending series of debt-funded subsidy bills becomes a moral imperative, after all.

One of the big dangers there is that the momentum behind this fear-driven need for speed begins to be used as justification for the limitation or even abrogation of guaranteed rights of all stakeholders. We see this already starting to happen in states like California and Massachusetts, where Democrat Governors Gavin Newsom and Maura Healey are pushing efforts to overrule the rights of local governments to deny permits for new wind projects and other “green” energy priorities.

The slowness of federal bureaucracies only serves to heighten this sense of alarm, the worst possible motivation to justify the allocation of trillions of debt-funded dollars. It is the worst of all possible worlds, one in which policies motivated by politics promote investment decisions free markets would never create on their own and result in outcomes that do not begin to solve the problem allegedly at hand. It is, in a word, a mess.

The views and opinions express in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

DAVID BLACKMON

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

AWED MEDIA BALANCED NEWS: We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.

Welcome! We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.

Here is the link for this issue, so please share it on social media.

Checkout the 2023, 2022, 2021 & 2020 archives, plus asterisked items below.

FYI, here is the subscribers history to my Critical Thinking substack, since day 1.

If you like the Newsletter, please signup. My weekly commentaries are free!


— This Newsletter’s Articles, by Topic —

If You Only Have Time to Read Some Select Articles:

*** Thoughts On The Present State Of American Affairs

*** The 2024 Election Will Be Neither Free Nor Fair

*** Election Integrity Depends on a Virtuous and Engaged Citizenry

*** Mom and political newbie defeats incumbent NC Education Superintendent

*** 60± RNC Staffers Asked to Resign

*** It Begins: AI Is Being Used To Deceive Voters, Disrupt Elections Worldwide

*** Will We Reach Peak Stupidity Before Peak Corruption and Does it Really Matter?

*** Fabulous talk by Dr. Scott Atlas re Fauci, et. al.

*** Short video: The Great COVID Cover-Up | Rand Paul

*** A Tinfoil-Hat Conspiracist no Longer

*** New report blasts government’s COVID response, warns of repeating same mistakes

*** Medicine Has Lost Its Way

*** House Committee Report: The Weaponization of the National Science Foundation

*** French Council of State annuls wind turbine permits, major impact on energy future

*** Irish High Court Slams Wind Turbine Operator for Noise “Like planes that Never Land”

*** Short video: Energy and the Poverty of Nations

*** These 10 Charts Caused an NGO Hissy Fit at NARUC

*** Expect the Evil

*** Alarming Religious Freedom Trends in Democracies Demand Attention

*** The Truth Is The Truth

*** Jordan Peterson Issues Warning about Govt Surveillance and Future ‘Secret’ Police

*** Trudeau Demands Life In Prison For Speech Crimes

*** Google’s Gemini AI exposes tech’s left-leaning biases

*** Not So Free-lance: Fed Rule Takes Effect March 11th

*** Experts: Trillions Spent on ‘Climate Change’ Based on Faulty Temperature Data

*** 5 Tips for Teaching Your Child Humility

Secondary Education Related:

*** Report: The Key to Fixing the US Education System

*** Mom and political newbie defeats incumbent NC Education Superintendent

*** NC Ed Super Loses to Mom Opposed to Radical Agendas

*** What’s going on with America’s public schools? Enrollment drops and chronic absenteeism tell a dramatic tale

*** Moms for Liberty’s UNCENSORED 60 Minutes Interview

When Classical Learning Meets Public Education, the Dialogue Isn’t Always Socratic

Artificial Intelligence:

*** Google’s Gemini AI exposes tech’s left-leaning biases

Musk To Start His Own Non-Woke AI Company To Compete With OpenAI

AI chat bots are automated Wikipedias warts and all

Top scientist warns AI could surpass human intelligence by 2027 – decades earlier than previously predicted

 Unreliables (General):

Report: Green Guardrails

America’s Energy Scam

Green Tyrants Get Horrible News as Finance Giants Pull Out Left and Right

High Costs, Greenlash Hit Europe

Transition? What Transition?

Wind Energy — Offshore:

CFACT says offshore wind violates Clean Air and Clean Water Acts

Renewed push to put wind turbines in Lake Erie gets blowback in Hamburg

Wind Energy — Other:

*** Taking the Wind Out of Climate Change (referencing 60± studies)

*** French Council of State annuls wind turbine permits, major impact on energy future

*** Irish High Court Slams Wind Turbine Operator for Noise “Like planes that Never Land”

Solar Energy:

US Solar Factories Are In for ‘Rude Awakening,’ Report Warns

Fossil Fuel Energy:

Policymakers are clueless that all energy sources came after the discovery of oil

Electric Vehicles (EVs):

EVs lose market share across Europe in January

Misc Energy:

*** Short video: Energy and the Poverty of Nations

*** These 10 Charts Caused an NGO Hissy Fit at NARUC

*** Net Zero Emergency Power

America Is Running Out Of Power, Is Rationing And Soaring Energy Prices Ahead?

America’s Energy Scam: A Deliberate Exploitation of Humanity that Only Increases Emissions!

Heat Pumps Could Quadruple Your Electricity Consumption

Robert Bryce: A Sunday Roundup

When Technocrats Intentionally Sabotage A Nation’s Energy Supply

Manmade Global Warming — Some Deceptions:

*** Experts: Trillions Spent on ‘Climate Change’ Based on Faulty Temperature Data

*** The “climate disclosure” fraud

The Continuing Albedo Change Warms the Earth More Than Twice as Much as CO2

The Sad Joke of Climate Change Politics

Did Exxon Make It Rain Today?

Manmade Global Warming — Misc:

Climate Fact Checks: 2024

Methane is Responsible for 30%± of the Current Rise in Global Temperature

New Book: Everything Reminds Me of Tim: Biography of Tim Ball

Manmade Global Warming — Farming:

Why Not to Worry about Farming’s Contribution to Global Warming

The Battle for our Grasslands and Livestock

The Big Squeeze: Over 140,000 U.S. Farms Lost In 5 Years

US Election:

Election-Integrity.info (10 major election reports by our team of experts, plus much more!)

*** Election Integrity Depends on a Virtuous and Engaged Citizenry

*** The 2024 Election Will Be Neither Free Nor Fair

*** 60± RNC Staffers Asked to Resign

Let My People Go” Full Length Documentary

House Republicans Probe Education Department’s ‘Partisan’ Bidenbucks Scheme

Highlights: Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on a Bill That Puts the DOJ in Control of Elections

US Election — State Issues:

Early Voting in Michigan a Big Flat Flop

RNC Sues Michigan Secretary of State

Misc US Politics:

*** Not So Free-lance: Fed Rule Takes Effect March 11th

*** The Truth Is The Truth

Mr. President, What About Day 1,461?

Censorship:

*** Jordan Peterson Issues Warning about Govt Surveillance and Future ‘Secret’ Police

*** Trudeau Demands Life In Prison For Speech Crimes

*** The Broad, Vague RESTRICT Act Is a Dangerous Substitute for Comprehensive Data Privacy Legislation

CHD, John Stockton and Censored Doctors Sue Washington Medical Commission

Societally US:

*** Thoughts On The Present State Of American Affairs

*** Tyranny Is Rising As Freedom Falls

*** 5 Tips for Teaching Your Child Humility

GOP lawmakers rip VA for memo to remove iconic WW II victory kiss photo, demand author be fired

Globalism:

*** It Begins: AI Is Being Used To Deceive Voters, Disrupt Elections Worldwide

*** Will We Reach Peak Stupidity Before Peak Corruption and Does it Really Matter?

Irish voters, I salute you

Childless China: Coercive Population Plan Implodes

Religion Related:

*** Expect the Evil

*** Alarming Religious Freedom Trends in Democracies Demand Attention

Science:

*** House Committee Report: The Weaponization of the National Science Foundation

Doing statistics can be difficult but understanding them can be fairly simple

Harvard achieves consensus by eliminating those who disagree

When Science Journals Become Activists

Health:

*** Medicine Has Lost Its Way

*** A new Report exposing dangerously pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments on children, adolescents, and adults

Achieving quality in clinical decision making: cognitive strategies and detection of bias

Cancer risk assessment, its wretched history and what it means for public health

Why are so many young people getting cancer? What the data say

The Yin and Yang of traditional Chinese and Western healthcare

Ukraine/Israel:

Latest Developments in Israel: March 17th

Latest Developments in Ukraine: March 17th

The Consequences of Good Intentions: Ukraine

Pray for the safety of the Ukrainian people

A well-rated source to make a Ukraine donation

COVID-19 — Misc:

*** Fabulous talk by Dr. Scott Atlas

*** New report blasts government’s COVID response, warns of repeating same mistakes

*** Short video: The Great COVID Cover-Up | Rand Paul

*** A Tinfoil-Hat Conspiracist no Longer

“Long Vax” Finally Enters The Lexicon


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Copyright © 2024; Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (see WiseEnergy.org).

Artificial Intelligence in Political Campaigns: Benefits, Risks, and Ethical Considerations

Have you ever wondered how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the world of politics? The topic is as fascinating as it is potentially concerning. AI influences political campaigns in many ways, from analyzing voter sentiment to tracking campaign costs and conducting opposition research.

AI’s impact on politics is far-reaching. Imagine understanding voter preferences and outreach strategies in real-time, thanks to AI’s ability to analyze social media trends and sentiment. By examining influencers, trends, and public sentiment, campaigns can better tailor their messages to connect with voters. It’s like having a real-time pulse on the electorate.

Not only can AI help campaigns understand voters, but it can also assist in measuring the effectiveness of various campaign activities. AI can track everything from advertising to canvassing and events, providing insights into what’s working and what’s not. Campaigns can make data-driven decisions to optimize their strategies and maximize their impact.

But that’s not all. AI isn’t just about understanding voters; it’s also about understanding the money. It can track campaign spending by identifying discrepancies and patterns in politicians’ spending habits. This is crucial for maintaining transparency and accountability in the political process. AI-powered auditing tools can streamline the financial oversight process, making it more efficient and accurate.

Let’s remember the advantage it gives political parties in opposition research. AI can dig deep into opponents’ voting records and past statements, providing valuable insights to gain a competitive edge.

However, there’s a darker side to AI in politics. Privacy and ethical concerns loom large. For instance, using AI to gather and analyze personal voter data raises serious privacy and data protection issues. We’re talking about your personal information, and the potential for misusing it should not be underestimated.

Moreover, there’s the unsettling prospect of AI making political campaigns more deceptive. AI can be used to create fake images and audio. I am sure you know about deepfakes, which are synthetic media that appear to be real but are actually manipulated. Such powerful methods can be employed to launch misleading campaign ads targeting other candidates. AI can be used to spread disinformation and propaganda. Governments and powerful elites can use AI to standardize, control, or repress political discourse, undermining the fairness and quality of political discourse.

AI algorithms can inadvertently perpetuate existing biases. For instance, if the data used to train the AI is biased, the AI’s outputs can also be unfair. This can lead to unjust targeting of specific demographics or communities. Indeed, it’s a digital battleground where authenticity can be blurred, and the line between fact and fiction becomes hazy.

But then, AI can bring several benefits to political campaigns beyond tracking costs and conducting opposition research.

Here are some potential benefits:

  • Enhancing Communication: AI can improve communication by providing personalized messages to voters. It can analyze the preferences and behaviors of individual voters and tailor the communication accordingly. This can lead to more effective campaigns and better engagement with voters.
  • Improving Campaign Strategy: AI can analyze large amounts of data to identify trends and patterns that can inform campaign strategy. This can help campaigns anticipate potential challenges and develop effective responses.
  • Facilitating Transparency: AI can help campaigns maintain transparency by objectively analyzing their activities. This can help campaigns manage their reputation and respond to criticisms effectively.
  • Generating Political Messaging: AI can generate political messaging based on public discourse, campaign rhetoric, and political reporting. This can help campaigns develop effective messaging strategies and reach a wider audience.
  • Creating Political Parties: AI could be used to develop political parties with their platforms, attracting human candidates who win elections. This could revolutionize the political landscape by creating new political parties based on AI-generated platforms.
  • Fundraising: AI is capable of fundraising for political campaigns. It could take a seed investment from a human controlling the AI and invest it to yield a return. It could start a business that generates revenue or political messaging to convince humans to spend their own money on a defined campaign or cause.

It’s intriguing, isn’t it? The world of AI in politics is both a boon and a minefield. It can empower campaigns and voters but also carries risks of manipulation and deception. As we continue to explore the vast landscape of AI in politics, it’s crucial to tread carefully, adhere to ethical guidelines, and protect personal data from unauthorized access.

So, the next time you follow a political campaign, remember that behind the scenes, AI might be at work, shaping the discourse, analyzing voter sentiment, and, in some cases, creating an illusion of reality. How AI and politics interact is a complex and evolving story, and it’s up to all of us to stay informed, vigilant, and engaged in this digital age of politics. The journey is far from over, and the questions are still unfolding. What will we discover next?

©2024. Amil Imani. All rights reserved.

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