U.S. Economic Growth Slows Down Massively, Well Below Expectations

/in , , , , , , , , /by

The U.S. economy grew at a rate of 1.6% in the first quarter of 2024, according to gross domestic product (GDP) statistics released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on Thursday.

Slower growth in the first quarter follows above-trend growth in the third and fourth quarters of 2023, which measured 4.9% and 3.4%, respectively, according to the BEA. Economists expected that GDP growth would be around 2.2% in the first quarter, in line with typical U.S. economic growth rates.

High rates of growth at the end of 2023 have worried analysts about a possible “no-landing” scenario, where the economy remains hot with an elevated rate of inflation and substantial gains in GDP. Prices increased at a rate of 3.5% year-over-year in March, far faster than the Federal Reserve’s target range of 2%, and have not declined below 3% since peaking at 9% in June 2022.

The Fed has set its federal funds rate to a range of 5.25% and 5.50%, the highest range in 23 years, in an attempt to cool the economy, which would slow growth and bring inflation down. An increase in the federal funds rate has raised the cost of credit throughout the economy, disincentivizing spending and investment.

The Federal Open Market Committee is scheduled to announce whether it will cut the federal funds rate in May, depending on whether inflation is moving in the right direction, which could positively contribute to economic growth. A majority of investors currently do not expect a rate cut until September, according to CME Group’s FedWatch Tool.

The number of jobs added in recent months has also been running hot, totaling 303,000 nonfarm payroll positions in March and 275,000 added in February. Despite above-trend topline growth, gains in part-time positions have dominated total increases, with the number of people employed in full-time jobs declining by more than 1.3 million in the last year as of March, while part-time employment jumped by nearly 1.9 million.

Job gains have also been fueled by government positions, which totaled 71,000 in March, higher than the monthly average over the last year of 52,000. The federal government has also continued to pile on debt, which currently totals nearly $34.6 trillion and contributes to GDP, according to data from the Treasury Department.

A Gallup poll from March showed that the economy continues to be the most important issue for 30% of voters going into the 2024 presidential election. Nearly 60% of respondents to a recent AP/NORC poll found that President Joe Biden has “hurt” Americans’ cost of living, while only 40% said the same of former President Donald Trump.

The 1.6% figure is an advanced estimate and will be updated as additional data becomes available, according to the BEA.

AUTHOR

WILL KESSLER

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Oil And Gas Industry Might Be What’s Keeping Biden’s Economy Humming On Paper Despite ‘Regulatory Assault’

POST ON X:

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.

INTERSECTIONALITY VIDEOS: The ‘Queer Gnostic Cult’ — Factual Content

/in , , , , , , , , /by

Perfect example of intersectionality…

Two words the dialectical left use we need to understand.

“Intersectionality” and “queer.”

We understand the word queer to mean gay or better, homosexual. But it has been repurposed by the left to mean a kind of corralling of all deviant sexual identities to weaponize them as battering rams against classical civilization and healthy values. Intersectionality, means the point at which various dialectic attacks which are on the surface quite different such as feminism and Islam, but both have the intention of destroying the West. This may be given different names in order to hide the intention somewhat, like “the patriarchy” or “Dar al Harb” the world of war where the infidels rule. But intersectionality is where all groups no matter how different work together to the same purpose.

Below, is just too good an example not to post.

For a much better explanation of the nature of Queer as a concept, please search out James Lindsay’s video on the subject. If I get time, I will add it to this post later on.

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column with videos posted by  is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

More God, More Peace

/in , , , , , , , /by

These are crazy times. How does one retain sanity in these tumultuous days? Read the world’s best seller—and read it often—and it will give a great deal of comfort. Indeed, many of our great American leaders have found comfort and solace in the Word of God.

Want to change your life? Here’s a simple practice, which I have engaged in fastidiously for the last four years or so. Everyday, in addition to other personal Bible reading and studying, I read the chapter of Proverbs for that day. There are 31 chapters in Proverbs, just as many months have 31 days.

As I began this column on April 19th, I read my corresponding Proverbs for the day and came across Proverbs 19:23, “The fear of the Lord leads to life; then one rests content, untouched by trouble.”

But many are troubled today, because they have rejected God and the church. In that connection, there was a recent article by Ira Stoll in theeditors.com, which provided evidence that the lack of church attendance may be bad for mental health.

After mentioning the potential deleterious effects of social media on children, Stoll pens, “Yet there’s another, non-technology possible contributor to the mental health crisis that’s getting less attention but may be just as significant. That is the decline in church attendance.”

Hmmmmm. Interesting. Church attendance goes down. Mental health problems go up.

Stoll cites a Harvard Public Health study which suggested that the decline in church service attendance from 1991 to 2019 could account for nearly 30 percent of the rise in depression among teenagers.

Stoll also notes that a major review in 2022 of 215 studies (each with more than 1000 participants), showed that: “weekly religious service attendance is longitudinally associated with lower mortality risk, lower depression, less suicide, better cardiovascular disease survival, better health behaviors, and greater marital stability, happiness, and purpose in life.” More God, more peace.

Stoll adds, “plenty of mental-health clinicians I know see in religious-service attendance some of the habits and attitudes that can help to combat depression and anxiety. There’s the supportive community, the face-to-face interaction, the getting out of bed and out of the house, the sense of purpose and meaning, the expressions of gratitude and humility.”

In a blog for Psychology Today, Harvard professor of epidemiology Tyler VanderWeele notes the downturn for today’s youth: “Relatively speaking, young people are not doing as well as they once were. They report being less happy and less healthy; having less meaning, greater struggles with character, and poorer relationships; and less financially stable compared to their older counterparts. The differences in well-being with age were, in fact, much larger than they were for gender or for race. Some of the issue may also pertain to a crisis in meaning.”

Life can be painful. Life without meaning and purpose can be unbearable. But life has meaning because there is a God, and He has revealed Himself in creation and in the Holy Scriptures. Through the years, many noteworthy Americans allowed themselves to be shaped by the Bible.

George Washington read the Bible so frequently, that many of its phrases come out in his speeches and writings. Appendix 2 of the book I co-wrote with Peter Lillback, George Washington’s Sacred Fire, demonstrates this. It’s as if you were to cut him, he would bleed Scripture.

When Thomas Jefferson’s daughter Polly died in 1804, his other daughter Martha came upon him, and remarked that she “found him with the Bible in his hands seeking consolation from the Sacred Volume.”

Abraham Lincoln read the Bible all the time. It comes out in his speeches too. Chiseled in stone at the Lincoln Memorial are some of them, including his Second Inaugural Address. That speech alone has three direct Bible quotes.

When he received a gift of a Bible, the 16th president noted, “All the good the Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this book. But for it we could not know right from wrong.”

Ronald Reagan once said, “Inside the Bible’s pages lie the answers to all the problems that mankind has ever known. I hope Americans will read and study the Bible.”

Despite those who would reject virtually anything Christianity would have to offer, the invitation of Jesus to those who will listen still stands: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30).

Even in our highly secular age, multiple studies show that good things come from walking with God, in prayer, through His Word, and attending church.

©2024.  Jerry Newcombe, D. Min. All rights reserved.

Roughly Half of Gen Z Voters ‘Are Sympathetic to Hamas’

/in , , , , , , , , /by

Last weekend, multiple anti-Semitic protests broke out on college campuses including Ohio State University, Columbia University, and Yale University. The demonstrators tore down American flags, chanted about the death of Israelis and praises of the October 7 attacks, as well as some injuries and arrests. Ever since the war between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas broke out, intense targeting of Jews in the U.S. sparked as well.

Initially, people questioned whether the anti-Semitism was new or simply uncovered by the Hamas terrorist attack. But now, as more protests occur, many worry that colleges have become a breeding ground for not only leftist agendas at large, but also for much of this resurgence of Jewish hatred. Considering the amount of anti-Semitism displayed on college campuses in recent months, the news that a survey found roughly half of Gen Z voters “are sympathetic toward Hamas” is, for many, not a shock.

Summit Ministries and RMG Research released data on Monday showcasing “the startling difference between the sentiments of all voters and Gen Z voters specifically, those born between 1997 and 2012,” Breitbart reported. These particular results, which involved 1,003 registered voters, highlighted Gen Z’s terrorist sympathies with the label, “Landmark poll: Gen Z sides with Hamas.”

The respondents were asked, “Do you believe that Israel’s wealth and military power make its campaign against Hamas unjust?” According to Breitbart, “While most voters across the board, 58 percent, believe that Israel’s campaign is ‘just’ — compared to 21 percent who believe it is unjust — only 42 percent of voters aged 18-24 believe Israel’s campaign against Hamas is just. A plurality of voters aged 18-24 believe Israel’s campaign against Hamas is unjust,” Breitbart reported. This is despite the fact that roughly 60% of Gen Z voters “agree with the U.S. government classifying Hamas as a terrorist group.”

The survey also revealed that “one-third of Gen Z voters believe Israel does not have the right to exist as a nation. Across the board, just ten percent hold that same sentiment, showcasing the radicalization of America’s youth.” Comparatively, a Pew Research Poll from March found “roughly six in ten Americans (58%) say Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are valid,” even if they did not all agree with how Israel responded to Hamas.

However, even though the majority of the U.S. voters appear to side with Israel amid the war, the poll from Monday made it unmistakenly clear that almost the majority of young voters do not.

Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Education Studies, shared with The Washington Stand, “When colleges and even primary and secondary schools are educating their students in the ‘oppressor/oppressed’ paradigm, it’s little wonder that Gen Z will identify with Hamas as indigenous and believe that Israel is a ‘colonizing’ force.”

She continued, “We know that this is totally and biblically inaccurate, but this is a generation that has been formed by social media very profoundly where these ideas are pervasive.” As such, it leads to “a situation where there is very little downside for being a pro-Palestine protestor on a college campus in most states,” especially considering the fact that “universities have policies where they provide the police force and the court system to meet their need for (social) justice.”

Unfortunately, Kilgannon concluded, “this horrific situation is sadly not surprising.”

 

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

France: Young Jewish Girl Kidnapped, Raped Migrant Messaged Her Mother That He Was Going to Prostitute Her “For Palestine”

WATCH Biden Praise AOC’s Vile Defense of Violent Anti-Jewish Pogroms on University Campuses

Columbia President’s on 9/11 Attacks : ‘Terrorism is a Form of Protesting’

Expel and Deport Ivy League Terrorists

Columbia University: Protestors Call Jews ‘Pigs’ As Qur’an Says

RELATED PODCAST: The Struggle Between Liberty and Authority

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.

Where Is the Safe Space for Jews?

/in , , , , , , , , , , /by

A recent trend on college campuses is to install “safe spaces,” places where students — or certain identity-group subsets of students — can go to feel safe. These safe spaces are exclusionary by design; they protect students by insulating them. In extreme cases, safe spaces have been deemed to cover entire campuses, leading to the exclusion or disinvitation of undesirable visitors.

This “safe space” trend has been rightly ridiculed for its tendency to protect college students’ feelings from exposure to opposing viewpoints. Such exposure serves to sharpen the mind and used to be college’s main virtue. Thus, protecting students from “harm” by sequestering them from intellectual diversity undermines the whole point of college education.

But the silly “safe space” trend adopted the language of harm and safety because those are important considerations. Sticking with the collegiate context, students can’t devote themselves to their studies if they take their life in their hands every time they walk across campus. Fertilizing their mental acreage is orders of magnitude more difficult when outside sounds like a warzone, or a rock concert, or both at the same time.

The safety of college campuses — most of whom have a department devoted to preserving it — is often taken for granted, else loving parents would think twice before sending sweet Suzy off to a dormitory. Basic physical safety should be a guarantee on which all students can rely, regardless of their background. Unfortunately, that guarantee is no longer universal.

Where is the safe space for Jews?

On Sunday, Rabbi Elie Buechler of Columbia University’s Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC) strongly recommended that Jewish students “return home as soon as possible and remain home until the reality in and around campus has dramatically improved.”

“The events of the last few days, especially last night, have made it clear the Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme anti-Semitism and anarchy,” wrote Buechler. “It is not our job as Jews to ensure our own safety on campus. No one should have to endure this level of hatred, let alone at school.”

Last Thursday, anti-Semitic activists took over Columbia University’s central quad, turning it into a tent city overnight. The activists, many of whom are students, have praised Hamas’s military arm Al-Qassam, called for the destruction of Israel, and openly invited the killing of counter-protestors. Despite more than 100 arrests on Thursday, the rabble have only grown bolder.

Now, university administrators appear to have given up any hope of reasserting control of their campus property. The rabbi’s counsel to Jewish students was “the reason why classes went virtual at Columbia today,” Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, said Monday on “Washington Watch.” By Tuesday, Columbia University announced it was switching to hybrid classes for the remainder of the semester.

“There was one professor, Shai Davidai, who was having none of it,” Menken continued. “He said, ‘I am bringing 10 students and alumni with me Monday morning. We’re going to go on to the campus. We’re going to go right into the middle of that anti-Semitic demonstration, and we insist you keep us safe.’”

Rather than keep him safe, “Columbia deactivated the access card of their professor,” Menken related in disbelief. “Professor Shai Davidai of Columbia University had his access card deactivated by the university to prevent him from interfering with the anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas demonstration at that campus.” Columbia University COO Cas Holloway personally appeared at the campus gate to prevent Davidai from entering the.

Davidai is an assistant professor in Columbia Business School’s Management Division, and he also leads Columbia’s anti-Semitism task force. Columbia administrators had to know that barring the head of the anti-Semitism task force from campus would provoke outrage, yet they chose to confront the backlash rather than confront the unruly mob that has taken over their campus. “Columbia was confronted with a clear choice either the anti-Semitic barbarians or the Jews. They expressly chose the anti-Semitic barbarians,” exclaimed Menken. “The entire administration of Columbia is utterly compromised by Jew hatred.”

Where is the safe space for Jews?

Certainly not at Columbia University, nor at Yale. Sahar Tartak, a Jewish student at Yale who is also a conservative reporter, was physically assaulted and blocked by protestors while attempting to film the pro-Hamas demonstration — which included taking down an American flag on a university flagpole — at that university. After demonstrators surrounded and blockaded her, a keffiyeh-garbed man stabbed Tartak in the eye with a Palestinian flag he carried.

At this point, the terrorist groupies aren’t even pretending to be motivated by non-violent, humanitarian concern for Palestinian civilians. “Anti-Semitism is always about finding a façade, a pretense, and then moving on to their end goal, which has always been ethnic cleansing and genocide,” argued Menken. “They were never anti-Israel protests. They were always anti-Semitic protests that glorify terrorism, that glorify atrocities, actual beheading of babies and rapes and holding hostages. These are not decent human beings.”

Where is the safe space for Jews?

You won’t find one at MIT, NYU, University of Michigan, Ohio State University, UC Berkeley, or Boston University. I’m sure that’s only the tip of the iceberg, since the anti-Semitic protests have reached even smaller, lesser known schools like Cal Poly Humbolt or UNC Charlotte.

At this point, it seems like American Jews are safest anywhere that isn’t a college campus. But that’s obviously not a workable solution in the long run. Today’s students are tomorrow’s lawyers, bankers, and politicians — not to mention professors. Are American Jews simply supposed to accept a second-class status, where they don’t get to go to college and are governed by those who hate them? How well did that work in 1930s Germany? If Jews aren’t safe on American college campuses, then ultimately they won’t be safe anywhere else in America.

Where is the safe space for Jews?

Jews could perhaps find a safe haven on other shores. But a cursory glance around the world shows the same violent anti-Semitism on shameful display in American universities. Judging by U.N. voting records, America sits near the top of the list of pro-Jewish countries. If Jews can find few countries friendlier than the U.S., and they are hated here, where can they go?

Where is the safe space for Jews?

The obvious exception is the world’s only Jewish-majority nation-state (although two million Arabs also live there peacefully), the postage stamp-sized parcel of seacoast known as Israel. Established in 1948 in response to the Holocaust, the modern state of Israel has provided a safe haven for persecuted Jews of every nationality.

Yet Israel’s Jews are not safe even within their own paper-snowflake borders. Hamas proved that on October 7, 2023, when they launched an unprovoked invasion on a Jewish holy day, slaughtering more than 1,200 Jews, kidnapping more than 200 prisoners, burning, raping, and pillaging wherever they could. Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group supported by America’s geopolitical adversary Iran, openly calls for Israel’s “annihilation” and has broadcast its intention to repeat its October 7 attack as often as it is capable.

Hamas is not Israel’s only threat. Hezbollah, another Iran-backed terror group, operates out of Israel’s northern neighbor Lebanon, and it has kept up frequent rocket barrages against Israel to divide its attention. “There are, I believe, about 80,000 Israelis who can’t go home every night because the rockets being shot in by Hezbollah out of Lebanon,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wisc.) remarked on “Washington Watch.” “Obviously Israel cannot permanently tell 70 or 80,000 of their citizens, ‘you can’t go home at night.’”

Behind these groups lies Iran, a global terror sponsor, which is close to developing a nuclear weapon and is avowedly committed to Israel’s destruction.

Where is the safe space for Jews?

But perhaps the campus mobs openly supporting Hamas are ignorant of Hamas’s goal and merely want American Jews to return to Israel. If that were true, they would also have to be ignorant of the words coming out of their own mouth.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine is almost free,” they chanted. That’s a strange twist on their classic, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” By “free,” they mean free of Jews. By “from the river to the sea,” the chant invokes (and confuses) the boundaries of the land God promised to give to Israel in Deuteronomy 11:24, “from the River, the River Euphrates, to the western sea.” The technical term for seeking to drive all people of a given ethnic group out of a given territory is “ethnic cleansing.”

Again, they chanted, “There is only one solution: intifada, revolution.” “One solution” echoes the Nazis’ “Final Solution to the Jewish problem”: extermination camps. Intifada and revolution — both terms for riots or armed uprisings — are the means by which this chant proposes to achieve its end: the annihilation of all Jews everywhere.

No, the protestors know very well what unthinkable barbarity these chants call for. They share the end of Hamas.

Where is the safe space for Jews?

The utmost irony is that these disgraceful displays of anti-Semitism were sparked by the attack on Israel. When most sovereign nations suffer an unprovoked attack by an international terrorist outfit, they receive universal acknowledgements of sympathy, solidarity, and solace, even from parties who usually maintain a frosty distance. But when Israel was attacked, that outrage provoked not only sympathy for Israel but also expressions of solidarity with those who attacked her — even before Israel had mounted any military response.

This has led some Jews, even non-Zionists, to the inevitable conclusion that Israel’s demise would only result in further attacks on Jews everywhere. “The idea that Jews can be safe anywhere if they’re not secure in Israel has just been shattered,” said foreign policy expert Caroline Glick. “It’s very clear that the security of all Jews everywhere is contingent on Israel defeating our enemies in Israel.”

Under the Biden administration, Israel’s closest and most powerful friend is working overtime to snatch that rightful victory away from them. If that happens, it will lead right back to the question we’ve been asking all along.

Where is the safe space for Jews?

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Remembering the Passover in Troubled Times

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.

It’s Not Hypocrisy & It Isn’t Corruption

/in , , , , , , , , /by

At this point its past undeniable that a communist revolution has taken place in North America, and frankly over a great deal of what was Western Civilization overall.

It has become so obvious that the word communism as an adjective for various events and policies, which mere months to a few years ago caused grimacing and smirks in all listeners, has now become a common descriptor, even among the less aware commenters out there. (No offence meant to the linked hosts. They point out important aspects of the revolution and show clips of Trudeau that all need to see)

A large part of this revolution has been the imposition of pseudo-realities, and forcing people to play along with them. This strategy has been applied to everything from immigration to covid to the created Trans-issue and the created climate ‘crisis’.

Governments across the world are rapidly criminalizing expressing opposing views to government dialectics on things like Global Warming using the ‘hate-speech’ catch-all.

Opposing one of these efforts is what made Jordan Peterson famous and influential. He came on the scene because as a Prof. at U of T, he objected to being forced to use pronouns that people chose for themselves. He referred to this as compelled speech. A much more severe form of communist control than mere censorship. And of course he was entirely correct, even if he himself could not see through the same strategy as it applied to Covid and the Vaxx.

As a commenter said below this excellent example of the captured institution, Scientific American under its article on Gender:

“If a man wants to pretend he’s a woman, that’s up to him.

If that man wants me to pretend he’s a woman, that’s up to me.

No actually it isn’t. It is now up to the state. This is an excellent juxtaposition of Socratic thinking Vs. Hegelian. Anyone who likely reads this site would find what he said to be a pithy and accurate description of the nature of free thought. One actually worth fighting over. Which it certainly is. But in order to do that and win, we need to understand where we actually are now on a political map. And where we are on that map is well demonstrated on the Scientific American article to which the tweet above is a Response:

One of the complains quite often made on this site is when people confuse hypocrisy with dialectics. The difference is subtle, and yet it isn’t.

Here is a fumbly attempt to explain the difference:

Hypocrisy, like corruption, all exist within a single overarching system. Corruption is when a person or group takes advantage of a position, or weakness within the system to advantage themselves in some way.

Hypocrisy is similar. A person speaks or even leads people in a way that indicates self sacrifice, or claims to behave in a way that results in delayed gratification, or advocates for other morally superior behaviours, while in secret they behave in exactly the way they advise others not to do. In both examples, the hypocrites and the corrupt require our Western system to be intact, in order to take advantage of it.

But the system we all knew and grew up with has been replaced with another one.

Therefore, the advocates of that system are not corrupt. They are in fact ideologically pure, but of another system altogether.  They may, and usually do, speak in a way that lets their fellow travellers know what they really mean and intend, (with Trudeau being an excellent example), while knowing full well how the uninitiated will understand their words.

For example, when Trudeau says that those who will not take the mRNA gene therapy shots are racist, misogynists who take up space, he is really saying they are counter-revolutionaries and must be eliminated, or at least their views must be, with the people who refuse government directives being marginalized and disenfranchised. No travel, no leaving or entering Canada, no restaurant access etc.

As an example of what corruption actually is or better, corruption Vs. revolution, The MAFIA requires that the banks and other institutions work as they always have as they need a place to store their own wealth. They need to know that they can build their own homes with cement that will not fall apart after 6 months. They need to know that the cancer that they often are on civilization, does not fully metastasize. Because organized crime, even regular crime for that matter needs a healthy host.

I read a story recently about gangs of people in the US robbing stores, and opening their own sidewalk stores to sell the goods they just stole. I couldn’t help but wonder when gangs will rob those sidewalk shops and set up their own shops with that same merch another block away.

Now while that would make for a decent comedy sketch, we all know why it won’t happen.

The initial robbers who stole the merch from the legal owners, are unencumbered by the rules that stop actual legal merchants from using force against thieves.

In other words, you can rob from the stores with total impunity in many places in the US. Leftist places. Blue cities and states. But try and steal from the thieves and you will be hurt badly or killed.

The following Tweet by president Trump is a powerful indicator of how the courts and justice overall is now dialect as opposed to, well justice based.

The trial isn’t rigged. Trials no longer do what we all thought they did.

Courts, like the CPSO hearings, like the Helen Grus hearings, like many many processes in the Western World which have been captured have re-tuned their entire process to create a pre-determined political outcome, and no longer exist to determine what is true, or lawful or in the interests of society as a whole.

It is no longer using evidence and reason to a rational outcome, but a needed outcome that determines what reasoning and evidence will be allowed.

Looking at the take-over of the Columbia U campus, and other campuses by leftists and Muslims:

We all know that if anything even 10% as antisocial as this happened by Trump supporters what would happen. Or people opposed to Trudeau mandates in Ottawa. What is being permitted on campuses, like what was permitted in 2020 in Seattle and in many cities where the Marxist revolutionary group wearing a beard of Black victimhood called BLM is not hypocrisy.

It is the product of a fundamentally changed system. We need to understand this going forward.

This means there is no changing things back to individual rights and a truth based system by using the system, even if there are partial and occasional victories in the courts.

We need to see first how those victories translate into policy that actually is put into effect to know if our institutions still have any meaning as we thought, and many still think they do.

We, as freedom minded people, as classical liberals perhaps, as believers in the rights of the individual including the right to private property, and raise our children according to our own values, cannot develop effective tactics if we cannot understand the enemy strategy, and more importantly or at least more immediately, know where we are on the game board and what stage of the game is being played.

Senator Babet in Australia does a decent job of listing some of the dialectic attacks for which their system is being re-tuned. Censorship is the new normal now. It has been for decades really, but its enforcement is now overt and exponentially more common. The focus is the same though. Again, David Suzuki and Nuclear Winter as a stunning example of how dozens if not hundreds of hours of TV appearances by Canada’s Fruit Fly Scientist who was banging a drum daily about how Western industry would block out the sun and cause an ice age, are impossible to find. Al Jolson videos from the 1920s. But nothing from Suzuki’s Nuclear Winter narrative attacks from the 1970s. There was video tape by then. Two kinds.

Read the full text by clicking here.

Canada does an excellent job of demonstrating dialectical enforcement of protests for or against narrative positions:

Gender identity protestors face arrest in BC if law bans demonstrating at schools

British Columbia’s NDP government is considering new legislation that makes it illegal to demonstrate within 20 metres of school grounds to block gender identity curriculum protests.

Premier David Eby said that the Ministry of Education “has documented 18 major disruptions” of protests at schools in the province since the start of the 2023-24 school year, which he claims disrupt educational activities and intimidate students. 

“We’ve had people banging on school windows in British Columbia,” he said.

“It never crossed my mind to be worried that a grown adult would be waiting on the school perimeter to yell at my child about pornographic books or about puberty blockers,” added Eby.

In fact, the Government of BC is passing a law creating bubble zones around schools in the same way the Fed Guv did around abortion clinics.

Laws which are enforced strictly enough that a man who stood with a sign which merely read: “Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of our civilization” was arrested for holding it across the street and yards down the block from an abortion facility. And now, you won’t be able to protest the state sterilizing your own children near a school. Interestingly, both policies have the same outcome. No babies. Quell Coincidence non?

Meanwhile, at NYU:

Columbia U:

Not Hypocrisy.

Revolution.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Russian Political Scientist Ivan Timofeev: ‘The Idea Of Jointly Countering The U.S. Finds Support In Both Moscow And Beijing’

Biden Admin Resurrects Failed Obama-Era Policy To Increase Overtime Pay Eligibility

Biden’s Former ‘Disinformation’ Czar Teams Up With Liberal Operatives For New Gig

Trump Pins Blame For Pro-Palestinian Campus Protests On Biden: ‘Disgrace To Our Country’

Anti-Trump Legal Commentators Are Reportedly Coordinating Their Media Talking Points Behind Closed Doors

RELATED VIDEO: Biden Administration Argues It’s Racist to Not Hire Criminals | TIPPING POINT

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column posted by Eeyore is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Why Young Men and Women in America ‘Have Every Reason To Be Outraged!’

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

“For the first time in our nation’s history, a 30 year old isn’t doing as well their parents were at 30. They see exceptional wealth across my generation… and we’re running it up on their credit card.” — Scott Galloway

We have been warning for over a decade that there is a war being waged in America against our youth. From kindergarten, to trade school, to college, to university our children are not being taught the skills to make them healthy, happy and prosperous.

Add to this the growth of bigger and bigger government from the city to the county to some states and to Washington, D.C. politicians have put up more and more roadblocks that have kept our youth from being prosperous. From getting a job, to purchasing an automobile to buying an home, government has piled on more and more regulations, higher taxes, added mandates that keep our young from achieving what their parents did.

Scott Galloway, bestselling author, NYU professor, and co-host of the Pivot podcast, has published a new book titled The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Financial Security. 

The Algebra of Wealth is a must-have guide to optimizing our youth’s lives for wealth and success. Click here to read the introduction to the book.

Watch Scott on MSNBC explain why our youth are suffering.

Today’s workers have more opportunities and mobility than any generation before. They also face unprecedented challenges, including inflation, labor and housing shortages, and climate volatility. Even the notion of retirement is undergoing a profound rethink, as our life spans extend and our relationship with work evolves. In this environment, the tried-and-true financial advice our parents followed no longer applies. It’s time for a new playbook.

In The Algebra of Wealth, Galloway lays bare the rules of financial success in today’s economy. In his characteristic unvarnished, no-BS style, he explains what you need to know in order to better your chances for economic security no matter what. You’ll learn:

  • How to find and follow your talent, not your passion, when making career decisions.
  • How to ride and optimize big economic waves (hard truth: market dynamics always trump individual achievement).
  • What small steps you can take that pay big returns later, including diversification and tax planning.
  • How stoicism can help you minimize spending and develop better financial habits.

Bursting with practical, game-changing advice from one of the world’s most popular business school professors, The Algebra of Wealth is the practical guidebook you need to win today’s wealth game.

WATCH: The Algebra of Wealth | The Prof G Show

ABOUT SCOTT GALLOWAY

Scott Galloway is a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. A serial entrepreneur, he has founded nine firms, including L2, Red Envelope, and Section4. He’s the author of many best-selling books, including, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning, and most recently, The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Financial Security.

Watch this extensive interview with Scott Galloway with Ryan Hawk host of the The Learning Leader Show.

©2024. All rights reserved.

POSTS ON X:

Columbia University’s President on 9/11 Attacks : ‘Terrorism is a Form of Protesting’

/in , , , , , , , , /by

Who hired her? Why hasn’t she been fired?

The leftist/Islamic cabal, a.k.a. Red/Green Alliance, has hijacked every major institution, government agency, and legacy media outlet in the cause of America’s ruin and destruction.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Columbia University’s current president, Minouche Shafik, sparked controversy by referring to terrorism as ‘a form of protesting’ during an event just two months later.

This statement has ignited a heated debate on social media, with various users questioning the implications of such a characterization and expressing a range of opinions from outrage to support. The discussion has touched on broader themes of terrorism, its victims, and the perception of protest in the context of violent acts.

WATCH: Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik call the 9/11 attacks a ‘form of protest’ just two months after thousands of Americans were killed.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: France: Young Jewish Girl Kidnapped, Raped Migrant Messaged Her Mother That He Was Going to Prostitute Her “For Palestine”

RELATED VIDEO: Qatari official explains the intention to murder the world’s Jewish population

POST ON X:

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

WATCH: Biden Praises AOC’s Vile Defense of Violent Anti-Jewish Pogroms on University Campuses

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

AOC, speaking alongside Joe Biden at a climate hoax event, endorses the pro-Hamas takeover of college campuses.

This is the awful depths America has sunk to under the party of tyranny.

AOC lauded by Biden after she applauds ‘peaceful’ student protests at Columbia, Yale, and Berkley

By Ryan King, NY Post, April 22, 2024:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hailed the “peaceful” student-led protests at Columbia University Monday, one day after campus rabbi Elie Buechler warned Jewish students to leave due to “extreme antisemitism.”

The “Squad” member’s praise for the demonstrations on Morningside Heights came as she introduced President Biden at an Earth Day event at Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, Va.

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLES:

Columbia University: Protestors Call Jews ‘Pigs’ As Qur’an Says

Columbia President’s on 9/11 Attacks : ‘Terrorism is a Form of Protesting’

France: Young Jewish Girl Kidnapped, Raped Migrant Messaged Her Mother That He Was Going to Prostitute Her “For Palestine”

POSTS ON X:

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

On Israel, Soros Funds the Protests and the Protested

/in , , , , , , , /by

What’s the real difference between Biden and Hamas supporters?

Outside the mob of Hamas supporters were chanting “Genocide Joe” while inside Joe Biden was trying to raise more money.

Yet the terrorist supporters and the president both shared a funding source.

The Soros clan has been accused of providing an estimated $15 million to the pro-terrorist groups storming cities in support of Hamas, and an estimated $758,000 already to Biden.

Both of those are only partial estimates of much larger spending by the family of radical billionaires which have simultaneously been funding the anti-Israel movement, trojan horse Jewish groups and the Democratic Party politicians whom they are busy pressuring.

No accounting of Sen. Schumer’s infamous speech attacking Israel can overlook the fact that Alex Soros, the son of the elderly former Nazi collaborator who has defended Hamas, has met at least nine times with Sen. Schumer and called him “his good friend”. The younger Soros has continued meeting with Senate Dem candidates on whose victory Schumer’s Senate Majority Leader role depends.

The outside game of pressure campaigns, street blockades and violent attacks in the streets may get more attention, but is subsidiary to the inside game mastered by the Soros family.

$60 million has been pumped from the Soros network into its own Democracy PAC to help Democrats win. Millions from that PAC have gone to the Democratic Party’s Senate Majority PAC and House Majority PAC. And so when the Soros clan speaks, top House and Senate Democrats like Sen. Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries listen closely and then take action.

George Soros was always known as a savvy investor, but his son Alex has been even savvier as a political investor, building a spectrum of political funds that are not only vital to the election prospects of the Democrats, but that also cover an array of anti-Israel groups with different brands and tactics.

The Soros fortune extends to funding Linda Sarsour’s Arab American Association which took part in a rally celebrating the Oct 7 attacks where the pro-Hamas mob attacked police officers, Jewish Voice for Peace, a fake Jewish group which has blocked traffic to stop Israel from attacking the terrorists, J Street, which falsely claims to be “Pro-Israel” and “Pro-Peace”, but has actually lobbied against Israel’s fight against terrorists, and Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, a vanity group co-founded by Alex Soros, which tries to provide Jewish cover for members of the antisemitic ‘Squad’ while accusing their Jewish critics of “weaponizing antisemitism”.

Meanwhile, in Israel, Al-Haq, a Soros funded Muslim group tied to terrorists, had described Oct 7 as a case of “Palestinian armed groups engaged in an operation in response to escalating Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people” while the International Crisis Group has become so entangled with Iran that its members have been described as agents of the regime.

Viewed separately, JVP, J Street, Al-Haq, the Arab American Association, the Crisis Group and many others appear to represent different views, but actually represent different fronts in the war on Jews. While the groups may appear different, they follow the usual Soros tactic of networking smaller groups together into larger ones to create not just organizations, but a movement.

Soros money funds Muslims, leftists and people of Jewish ancestry who support killing Jews under a variety of banners and names, but they share the traditional hateful Soros agenda.

What Sen. Schumer or J Street believe about Hamas, may be less relevant than what George Soros thinks about Hamas. And what does Soros think about the Islamic terrorist group?

“America and Israel must open the door to Hamas,” Soros had once urged in an editorial. “Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah can be treated merely as targets in the war on terror because both have deep roots in their societies,” he argued in yet another editorial. “AIPAC must bear its share of responsibility for aiding and abetting policies such as Israel’s heavy-handed response to Hezbollah last summer and its insistence on treating Hamas only as a terrorist organization.”

Following the money is always a good idea and the profound shift made by many Democrats and liberal organizations from supporting Israel after Oct 7 to opposing it can be seen as a reflection of the agenda of their funder. Soros-funded groups quickly rallied after Oct 7 to undermine support for the Jewish State using everything from street violence to fake claims of Islamophobia and atrocities. But the invisible inside game is no less real even if it leaves behind no fingerprints. There is no way to know what happened behind the scenes at some organizations where the reversals were fast enough to make heads spin.

On Oct 9, J Street had issued a statement denouncing the attacks and stating that “we stand in solidarity with the Israeli people and with the Israeli armed forces that have been battling desperately to protect them. Two days later, J Street was back on track, condemning the “occupation of Palestinian Territory” and ten days later was labeling Israel’s campaign to stop Hamas as an “escalation.” What happened behind the scenes at the leftist group?

What we do know is that Alex Soros has continued his father’s tradition of elemental hostility toward the Jewish State.

On August 7th, months before the Hamas attacks, Alex Soros co-signed a letter falsely accusing the “current Israeli government” of a “campaign is so severe and so consequential that it merits a proportionate reaction by Israel’s chief ally, the United States of America” such as voting against Israel at the UN and other ways of undermining the Jewish State.

Despite the attacks of Oct 7, all 7 of the demands for actions against Israel were either enacted, moved forward or otherwise entered consideration by the Biden administration.

While the pro-Hamas mobs may condemn the Biden administration, both ‘Genocide Joe’ and the Hamas supporters share a common anti-Israel agenda and a common funding source.

The difference between the inside and the outside game, lies in the facades. What’s the real difference between Biden and Hamas supporters? Appearance. The combination of internal and external pressures, mob violence and massive checks, is a campaign of total warfare against Israel that is designed to appear as if it were coming from many diverse voices.

But behind many of the facades lies one agenda.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

RELATED ARTICLES:

Israel Carefully Measured Its Response

After Iran Killed 3 US Soldiers, It Promised to Stop. Now It’s Attacking Again.

Harassing Chelsea Handler

How the Neo-Nazi Left Brainwashes its Recruits to Kill

POST ON X:

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

WATCH: Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Passover Message

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

“We will overcome those who seek our lives.” 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began his Passover message with the eternal question, “What makes this night different from all other nights, citizens of Israel?””

“On this night, 133 of our dear brothers and sisters are not around the Seder table, and they are still held hostage by Hamas in hellish conditions,” he continued.

“But why is this night not different? … This time as well, we will overcome those who seek our lives – thanks to the faith of our people, the daring of our fighters, and the unity among us.”

WATCH: Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Passover Message

PM Netanyahu and wife hosted IDF “Lone Soldiers” at Pesach seder

PM Netanyahu wrote on his Telegram account about his seder with “lone soldiers” – Soldiers whose parents live abroad.

“Sarah and I hosted individual soldiers and female soldiers for an exciting Pesach seder night.

The soldiers who immigrated from the USA, Canada, Great Britain, France, Italy, Russia and South Africa are serving in combat units, and most of them fought in Gaza.

We left an empty chair in the center of the seder table and on it we displayed photos of all 133 hostages who are still in Hamas captivity.

I am committed to returning all the hostages home.

I congratulate the soldiers for choosing to tie their fate to the State of Israel, and to take part in the generational effort to prevail over those who “rise up against us to annihilate us”.

RELATED VIDEOS:

Dr. Jeff Meyers: Young Christians Have Been Lied to About the Israel/Hamas War

Marxist & Terrorist Ties of Palestinian Agitators Explained | TIPPING POINT

POST ON X:

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

Former AG Bill Barr: ‘Biden Administration Is Greater Threat to Democracy’ than Trump

/in , , , , , , , , /by

A one-time Trump ally is pointing out that the former president is not a threat to America, but the radical agenda of the Democratic Party is. In a Saturday interview, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr explained that he will be voting for his old boss Donald Trump in November, despite his criticisms of the former president.

“I’m not happy with the choice,” Barr said, referring to a Trump-Biden matchup. “But it is a choice, and at the end of the day we have to select between two individuals. … I think it’s my duty to pick the person I think will do the least harm to the country and … that’s clearly Trump and a Republican administration.”

“I think getting control over the border, stopping the lawlessness in our cities, building up the strength of the United States in an ever-more-dangerous world … these are critical things that have to be done,” Barr opined. “And we’ll get them done under a Trump administration.” The former AG added, “At the same time, I think the Biden administration is, in fact, the greater threat to democracy. I think they have a totalitarian temper, they have bought into the progressive movement, and they’re trying to squelch opposition and freedom of speech.”

Upon leaving the Trump administration, Barr became a critic of the former president, calling him “a consummate narcissist” and a “fundamentally flawed person,” largely in relation to Trump’s handling of the 2020 election results. Referring to his prior criticisms of Trump, Barr said Saturday, “I don’t think Biden should be anywhere near the Oval Office, that’s the fact.” He later said, “At the end of the day, you have to remember, serving in his administration, I was fine with his policies. I think his policies were good policies. My problems came with his behavior which I found very troubling after the election.” Barr added:

“And I think the idea that he’s going to be an autocrat and take over power like some right-wing dictator is not the threat facing our country. The threat to our country is from the far-left and the drift that’s been occurring toward really a socialistic system and one that brooks no opposition, that cancels people, that has only one viewpoint taught in colleges, that tries to push parents out of the picture when it comes to the education of their children. It is a heavy-handed bunch of thugs, in my opinion, and that’s where the threat is.”

Barr made similar, though less certain, comments in February. Addressing the Forum Club of Southwest Florida, Barr said, “Voting for Trump is playing Russian roulette with the country. Voting for Biden is outright national suicide.” Ex-Republican Representative Liz Cheney immediately lashed out at Barr, saying that the former AG was “absolutely wrong” in his assessment. Failing to address incumbent president Joe Biden’s growing unpopularity and his administration’s abuses of power, she quipped, “So electing Donald Trump’s not Russian roulette — electing Donald Trump would mean putting in power a man who’s committed to unraveling our constitutional framework. So Bill Barr is just wrong on that.” Cheney also added that, this November, “the most important thing is to defeat Donald Trump, and I’ll do whatever it takes to do that.”

Barr reiterated this position in an earlier interview last week. Barr posited, “I’ve said all along, given two bad choices, I think it’s my duty to pick the person I think would do the least harm to the country. And in my mind, I will vote the Republican ticket. I will support the Republican ticket.” He continued, “I think the real danger to the country — the real danger to democracy, as I say — is the progressive agenda. Trump may be playing Russian roulette, but a continuation of the Biden administration is national suicide in my opinion.”

Barr served as attorney general during the last year of Trump’s presidency. Previously, he had served as attorney general from 1991 to 1993 under President George H.W. Bush.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

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

RELATED ARTICLES:

Judge Imposing Double Standard By Gagging Trump But Giving Michael Cohen Free Rein, Legal Experts Say

‘This Week on the Hill’: Scalise Talks Impeachment, Border Security, Voting

House Passes Bill Banning TikTok despite Chinese Lobbying

RELATED VIDEO: The Sad Reality: Republicans Never Had Real Control of the House With Speaker Johnson

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.

‘Just a Disaster’: Biden’s Title IX Rule Empowers LGBTQ Movement, Erases Women and Justice

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

The Biden administration’s revision of a civil rights statute designed to protect women’s rights in education erases women’s protections, rewrites landmark civil rights legislation to advance the LGBT agenda by federal fiat, and waters down legal standards for those falsely accused of sexual harassment.

The Biden administration obliterates the unique rights intended for women and girls by claiming Title IX’s prohibitions of discrimination against females in education apply to men who identify as women — regardless of their outward appearance — as well as those who identify as homosexual. Its “unofficial final rule,” released on April 19, now claims LGBTQIA+ activists may cite protections intended for women to accuse their fellow students of discrimination based on “sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

The term “gender identity” appears 289 times in the 1,577-page document.

The new rule also requires that these “discrimination” allegations only meet the lowest standard of proof, known as the “preponderance of the evidence.” The rule — announced by Catherine Lhamon, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights — also establishes “equitable grievance procedures.”

“They have completely demolished protections for women,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm last week. “It’s just a disaster.” The new proposed rule “impacts speech. It impacts a free and appropriate education.”

In a comment emailed to The Washington Stand, Alliance Defending Freedom Legal Counsel Rachel Rouleau called the new rule “a slap in the face to women and girls who have fought long and hard for equal opportunities.” The Biden administration’s “radical redefinition of sex turns back the clock on equal opportunity for women” and “will have devastating consequences on the future of women’s sports, student privacy, and parental rights.”

The Biden administration’s federal fiat — never approved by legislation — rolls back regulations instituted in May 2020 by then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that reestablished legal norms and standards for those accused of sexual harassment.

Obama administration rules — also drawn up by Lhamon, a former ACLU attorney — allowed college sexual harassment investigations to be carried out by a single investigator, who acted as judge and jury. Vague definitions proscribing any “unwelcome conduct,” whether verbal or “nonverbal,” led school districts to punish students for unwelcome staring.

Under the Trump administration’s revised Title IX rules, anyone accused of sexual harassment on campus enjoyed the presumption of innocence, as in any other legal proceeding. The defendant also had the right to know the charges against him or her, examine all the evidence presented in the proceedings, have an adviser cross-examine any witness’s testimony, and appeal the ruling. The administration had to meet the more robust and normative legal standard of “clear and convincing evidence.”

At the time, Lhamon asserted that the Trump administration’s revised guidelines would make it “permissible to rape and sexually harass students with impunity.” No epidemic of unpunished campus rape followed.

The Biden administration’s new Title IX rule eliminates all these elements, which are standard in other consequential accusations.

“The final regulations restore and strengthen vital protections for students,” Biden’s Department of Education contended in a press release Friday.

All parties seem to acknowledge these rules will supercharge the number of sexual harassment cases on campus after it takes effect on August 1. “This rule is designed to encourage reporting,” a Biden administration official told journalists on a call Thursday.

Newly empowered with looser regulations, activist bureaucrats in the federal government, and on college campuses nationwide, “are going to enforce this rule, and they are going to enforce it aggressively,” predicted Kilgannon. “The Education Department laid down their marker and said, ‘Yes, indeed, you will face a penalty for this.’” States that refuse to implement the strategy will “be losing federal funds for your education programs in your state.”

Since more affluent areas, like the D.C. suburbs, rely more on property taxes to fund their schools, the threat of losing federal education dollars falls heaviest on the most vulnerable students living in underprivileged districts. “It is the poorest places who will be most harmed by this, because they rely the most on federal funding,” Kilgannon added.

To avoid running afoul of an activist bureaucracy’s interpretation of the newly broadened rule, education officials may shut down any speech that could turn into litigation, and threaten federal funding.

“This change reverses decades of progress toward equality, open discourse, due process, and parental rights,” observed the Southeastern Legal Foundation. The new rule will cause students to “self-censor rather than risk being reported for harassment” and “significantly undermines the role of parents — who should be the primary caregivers for their children and who are entitled to raise their children to share certain values and beliefs — by requiring conformity to the federal government’s views on biology and so-called gender identity.”

The regulations drew fire from Congress over these specific concerns. “Evidently, the acceptance of biological reality, and the faithful implementation of the law, are just pills too big for the Department to swallow,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee.

The new regulation pulls off a trifecta of administrative harm, as it “attacks the definition of sex, due-process rights, and free-speech rights,” said Inez Feltscher Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum.

The regulation also continues the decades-long trend of rewriting legislation through executive action. “Title IX was written in 1972 when ‘sex’ meant male and female, and no amount of interpretive jiujitsu permits a cabinet agency to rewrite the plain language of the law. Efforts to do so have failed repeatedly in Congress for one simple reason: Such an expansion of law is deeply unpopular, with opposition to these changes spanning both political and racial lines,” said Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, in a comment to TWS. Numerous polls have shown a supermajority of Americans oppose the extending of women’s rights to men, regardless of their self-identity.

“It is grotesque that the White House has chosen to capitulate to extremists in his party, sacrificing the First Amendment” in the process, Neily told TWS.

Women’s rights activists promise not to take the loss of their distinct place in the law lying down. “This is going to be the subject of lawsuits,” Kilgannon told Backholm, citing direct knowledge of multiple civil rights attorneys and organizations. Neiley told TWS explicitly, “This betrayal of students will not soon be forgotten by American parents, and we look forward to suing the administration over this policy soon.” Likewise, Rouleau told TWS that the “Alliance Defending Freedom plans to take action to defend female athletes, as well as school districts, teachers, and students who will be gravely harmed by this unlawful government overreach.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Admin Wants To Send American Tax Dollars To Train Army Of Transgender Activists In India

RELATED VIDEO: James Lindsay SHATTERS Woke Ideology: EU Parliament Speech

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.

Hatred of Trump Is Rooted In Contempt For Ordinary Voters

/in , , , , , , , , , , , /by

Trump is our proxy. Everything thrown at Trump is thrown at us. If they can destroy Trump, what shot does any of us have?

‘E pluribus Trump’ = “Out of many, Trump”

“Far from the bully, Trump is the champion of those who have been bullied relentlessly and mercilessly by a self-appointed elite who holds them in contempt. In Trump, they have found a modern George Bailey….”

Opposition To Trump Is Rooted In Contempt For Ordinary Voters

By: Louis Markos, The Federalist, April 22, 2024

In Trump, his supporters hear a spirited defense of the hard-working despised and a fearless denouncing of the fashionable despisers.

A complaint I hear increasingly leveled at contemporary American politicians is that they are out of touch with voters, if not downright contemptuous of them. On a number of core issues, politicians seem less concerned with pursuing policies that are deeply unpopular with ordinary Americans than with upholding the ideologies and self-interests of the ruling elite. Two dramatic examples of this political disconnect with average citizens are the refusal of urban governments to prosecute violent criminals, which has caused a surge in crime, and the White House’s tolerance of mass immigration, which threatens jobs, security, and the rule of law.

As I survey the current political and intellectual landscape, I cannot help but see a resurgence of the arrogance and disdain of the 18th-century French revolutionaries for those they considered to be incapable of rational thought and moral behavior. But I am moving too fast. Let me slow down and give some historical background.

In The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (2004), Gertrude Himmelfarb distinguishes, convincingly, between the French philosophes, who championed reason; the American Founding Fathers, who concentrated on liberty; and the British moral philosophers, who emphasized human nature, benevolence, and our shared, internal moral sense.

While the English reformers showed compassion for the poor and uneducated and treated them as members of the same human race, and the American framers sought to ensure freedom for all classes, most of the French intellectuals looked down on the peasants, dismissing them as bestial and irrational, filled to the brim with the prejudices and superstitions of the Catholic Church. To the philosophes, the common people were neither honorable nor moral, but ignorant and unteachable, enthralled by religion and profoundly non-progressive. They were not citizens but the rabble. Even Rousseau, who extended some sympathy to the masses of the countryside, felt they needed to be guided by those who were enlightened to adopt the “general will.”

“In his article on the Encyclopédie,” Himmelfarb writes, “Diderot made it clear that the common people had no part in the ‘philosophical age’ celebrated in this enterprise. ‘The general mass of men are not so made that they can either promote or understand this forward march of the human spirit.’ In another article, ‘Multitude,’ he was more dismissive, indeed contemptuous, of the masses. ‘Distrust the judgment of the multitude in matters of reasoning and philosophy; its voice is that of wickedness, stupidity, inhumanity, unreason, and prejudice. … The multitude is ignorant and stupefied. … Distrust it in matters of morality; it is not capable of strong and generous actions … heroism is practically folly in its eyes.’”

As a citizen in a representative democracy, I expect our political leaders, including Donald Trump, to be held up to public scrutiny and questioned, even investigated, when the facts warrant it. What I do not expect, and find increasingly troubling, is the widespread and ongoing demonization and character assassination of all those who support Trump and approve of his candidacy and his policies.

I am old enough to remember how roughly the political establishment treated supporters of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, especially if they identified with a conservative branch of Christianity. Reagan and Bush supporters routinely had their concerns ridiculed, motives suspected, and intelligence doubted. Still, the dismissal of Reaganites and Bushies as boobs and rednecks pales in comparison to the viciously sanctimonious profiling of Trump supporters as authoritarian, narcissistic white supremacists utterly unconcerned for the common good.

Whereas the liberal progressives of the 1980s expressed some compassion for the needs and struggles of the working man, the woke philosophes of today express only contempt for those who work with their hands. While carrying on the oppressor/oppressed identity politics of Karl Marx and his heirs, they have reduced America’s blue-collar proletariat to a racist, sexist, transphobic rabble who must be suppressed, managed, and reeducated.

Convinced, as the philosophes were, of the “wickedness, stupidity, inhumanity, unreason, and prejudice” of the rabble, today’s progressive philosophical, political, and social engineers have appointed themselves the task of redefining for the masses what it ought to mean “to be a man, a citizen, a subject, a father, a child, and when it is suitable to live or to die.”

The ironic difference between the philosophes of the past and the progressives of the present is that the latter have jettisoned reason altogether in their anti-scientific embrace of transgenderism and other uprootings of natural law. The superiority they claim over the masses is not, like that of Diderot, based on their more refined power of reason. On the contrary, their claims of superiority rest on the dubious ground of rejecting truth, logic, and reason as the product of white, patriarchal, heterosexual, and cisgender minds.

No wonder the majority of working men and women in America look to Trump as their advocate. He not only defends their traditional family values, common sense, and God-given humanity. His seems to be the only voice in Washington speaking up for, or even understanding, the joys and woes, hopes and fears, victories and struggles of that “rabble” that the political establishment, on both the left and right, seems only to dismiss, disparage, and despise.

Read the whole thing here.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLES:

Trump Slams Double Standard of Treatment Between Violent Genocidal Jew-Haters and Peaceful MAGA Demonstrators

Judge Approves Trump’s $175 Million Bond in New York Civil Case Despite Letitia James’ Campaign of Terror

Biden Regime To Announce Sanctions Against IDF Unit

Mayorkas Shrugs Over Americans Killed By Illegals

POSTS ON X:

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

An Overlooked Trump Cabinet Pick Could Upend The Left’s Grip On Power

/in , , , , , /by

President Joe Biden summed up his education vision last year with a few words.

“There is no such thing as someone else’s child. No such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children,” Biden said while honoring the 2023 teacher of the year.

Biden’s remarks triggered a firestorm among Republicans, education activists and parents alike.

Now those Biden critics are strategizing for a potential second Trump administration. Priorities have been outlined, shortlists have been drawn. Some are preparing to join the administration.

But it’ll be up to Trump to make his pick for the unheralded but critical cabinet spot of education secretary.

“It’s pretty much impossible to overstate the importance of the education secretary. Not just to Americans today, but to America’s future,” Angela Morabito, spokesperson for the Defense of Freedom Institute, told the Daily Caller.

“It is not a secret that our country is falling behind while we’re spending more per student on education than nearly anywhere else on Earth. And yet, our results are mediocre to put it generously,” Morabito said.

There’s been no shortage of anonymously sourced conjecture on who might take other cabinet roles. But the Secretary of Education has flown under the radar despite being a hot-button issue for Republican voters — and a position that influences the future of the country in a way that’s unique from any other.

The issue of education has exploded into the spotlight during Biden’s term after accelerating at a slow burn during the Obama years, which prompted a pendulum swing under Trump. Conservatives now have a set of priorities ranging from reeling in Title IX to rooting out bias from academia and teacher training.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced students into their homes and onto their computers for months of remote learning. In the summer of 2020, the killing of George Floyd sparked racial outrage throughout the country. In response, higher education institutions raced to affirm their anti-racism and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bona fides.

The takeover runs deep — in just a handful of years of full-blown DEI capture of higher education, universities have churned out a generation of insubordinate anti-American bureaucrats, Orwellian tech overlords and a protester industrial complex. The ideological opponents of conservatives virtually all share one common trait: they were trained and equipped on American college campuses.

Colleges and universities across the country implemented racial quotas, dropped standardized testing requirements and added segregated graduation ceremonies all in the name of DEI.

“I think, looking at all the DEI programs in higher ed is extremely important and starting to deny funds to colleges, who do the DEI programs. That way they either have to scale them back as we’re seeing some state schools doing like Texas and Florida, they’re scaling them back to stay there and try to hide the program or there’s abolishing the program altogether. But either one is incredibly important,” founder of the 1776 Project PAC, Ryan Girdusky, told the Daily Caller.

By 2023, the downstream effects of DEI and remote learning brought communities to a boiling point.

In K-12 education, a grassroots movement was born. Parents had become exposed to what their children were learning at school as lessons took place in the living room via Zoom. Concerned guardians cried out against critical race theory (CRT) lessons teaching students to value each other on the basis of their skin color. Communities sought to prevent their kids from being exposed to literature that could confuse them about sexuality and gender.

But it was too late. In K-12 education, students have fallen grade levels behind in math, reading and civics. Numerous jurisdictions have implemented policies allowing students to use bathrooms and join sports teams on the basis of their gender identity, rather than sex. Other K-12 schools host student clubs on the basis of race and themselves have implemented DEI initiatives.

“The idea of deconstructing, decolonizing math and decolonizing science are coming out of these teachers colleges, to get teachers who are just promoting critical theory in all its forms into K through 12 education. So the teachers colleges are essential place to look at,” Girdusky said.

The Biden administration has pushed many of the efforts rankling conservatives. The Department of Education has finalized a rule that would modify Title IX to protect students from discrimination on the basis of gender identity, a change that would allow boys — identifying as girls — to enter the ladies’ restroom.

On the higher education front, DEI policies have thrown out merit, experience and qualification, all things the nation’s universities were once highly renowned for. Student groups and activities on campuses have been divided into different racial groups. And in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, college students protested Israel at universities across America, in some cases threatening the lives of Jewish students.

Former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz MaGill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth sat in front of Congress on Dec. 5, 2023, fumbling through attempts to condemn antisemitism and explain how their institutions had become a cesspool of hatred.

“Our schools can and should be the best in the world. And they’re not,” Morabito told the Daily Caller.

Gay was ousted from her position after conservative journalists and activists uncovered numerous instances of alleged plagiarism in her academic writings. One of those conservative education activists, Christopher Rufo, told the Caller he’d like to see the next education secretary pursue an aggressive anti-DEI campaign nationwide.

“I think the next education secretary should be very aggressive in withholding or even terminating expenditures to universities that don’t meet a basic standard of fairness, equal treatment and compliance with American civil rights law,” Rufo told the Daily Caller. “This would send shockwaves through the entire public and private university system and start getting some of these ideologues who have captured University bureaucracies to start thinking twice before they administer discriminatory and illegal programs, which they do flagrantly at the moment.”

He added the next education secretary should make it clear to universities that if their policies fall out of line with the administration’s priorities, funding will be stripped.

Transforming America’s education system to meet conservatives’ vision will require the right person running the Department of Education. Numerous current Republican elected officials and activists have interest in the job, if offered, the Daily Caller has learned.

“I think when the country calls you to service, you have to listen. And when the president is looking to assemble a team to advance these ideas, these principles and these policies, he’s going to need the best people he can get. And I think something like that would be an offer that would be very difficult, if not impossible to refuse,” Rufo told the Daily Caller about the education secretary job.

“Me, I would do it,” Tiffany Justice, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told the Daily Caller. “I think that there are a lot of other people that I’ve met over the past three years who would be willing to serve in the next administration for the purpose of putting the focus back on academic achievement and meritocracy across America.”

Moms for Liberty has grown into one of the most prominent grassroots organizations advocating for parental rights in the nation’s K-12 schools. Focused on school board races and policies enacted at the state level, Moms for Liberty has become known for its battle against age-inappropriate gender ideology lessons and the implementation of CRT.

Justice added that she has been working with a team of individuals through the parental rights movement that she thought would make good leaders in the education department for the administration, including Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, Arkansas Secretary of Education Jacob Oliva and Florida Rep. Byron Donalds’ wife Erica.

Grassroots activists aren’t the only candidates to lead a potential Trump Department of Education. A who’s-who of elected Republican officials have the support of education groups that spoke to the Daily Caller, and there were indications some might be interested in the job.

One education group listed several current and former government officials on their shortlist for the position, including former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, former New Mexico Secretary of Education Hannah Skandera and Louisiana Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley.

“From her perspective, it’s something that she is interested in,” a spokesperson for Reynolds told the Daily Caller.

“Is this satire?” said a former campaign aide for Sasse, who is still close with the now-President of the University of Florida.

Walters, who didn’t indicate whether he would accept the position himself, listed Heritage Foundation President Dr. Kevin Roberts, PragerU CEO Dennis Prager, Youngkin, former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Sanders as his ideal candidates.

“First, I will do everything I can to support and help get President Donald Trump reelected,” Walters told the Daily Caller about whether he would accept the education secretary role if offered.

“I am focused on my role to ensure Oklahoma schools are rid of woke indoctrination, liberal union strangleholds, and reawaken a love for our country. The focus must be on firing Joe Biden and ending the culture for hating America,” Walters continued.

Another Oklahoman, Gov. Kevin Stitt, is “open-minded” about the position, an operative in the state told the Caller.

“I don’t have a firm answer on a yes or no, that he would take it. I do know that his reason that he got into public policy was because of the vitriol he has for the Department of Education and his number one personal goal in life is to see it completely dissolved,” an adviser to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts told the Daily Caller.

Though the Heritage Foundation doesn’t have a formal endorsement for who it would like to see in the administration, there are role models the organization thinks are good examples for the movement.

“I know we’ve had multiple conversations with a handful of the current state superintendents, who I wouldn’t on the record say these are people that we would recommend or who we’d like to see, but people like Ryan Walters in Oklahoma, Manny Diaz in Florida, Ellen Weaver in South Carolina,” Crystal Bonham, a senior advisor to Roberts in communications at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller.

“They’re all doing work that we have pretty much wholesale endorsed and someone with their kind of character and background that would be ideal, if not Dr. Roberts. Or Lindsay Burke, she’s phenomenal,” Bonham continued.

As for Youngkin, his camp suggested he is very focused on continuing his leadership in Virginia.

“He’s got a clock behind his desk, in his office, in the Patrick Henry building where the governor’s suites are. It’s a countdown clock, because it’s only four years, you can’t run for reelection. So you know, this would all be just speculation. I certainly haven’t heard it. And I don’t know of any conversations that have occurred, but I do know that that his focus is definitely on Virginia,” Zach Roday, a former political adviser to the governor, told the Daily Caller.

The governor’s spokesperson pointed to how proud Youngkin is of his education track record in a statement to the Daily Caller.

“He’s focused on doing that right here in Virginia during his remaining time as Governor,” Christian Martinez told the Daily Caller.

Others are looking back for the best path forward.

“Secretary DeVos would be fantastic — I can’t think of anyone better and more battle-tested for the job,” school choice activist Corey DeAngelis told the Daily Caller. “She would be able to continue the momentum she started when she was at the helm of the department last time. If she is not interested in stepping back from private life again, the next Secretary of Education should be someone who will show a similar commitment to students.”

DeVos provided the Caller with several priorities she would like to see in a second Trump administration, including school choice legislation and undoing changes to Title IX that the Biden administration is eyeing. DeVos did not indicate whether she’d return to her old job, or if she had discussed it with the Trump team.

Girdusky was unsure who he would like to see in the education secretary role, noting that many contenders have a focus on school choice — a topic he thinks should be a priority but not a hyperfocus.

What the next Secretary of Education does will be even more critical than who it is. While right-leaning education advocates have been able to make progress against DEI policies and gender ideology, leading activists had different takes on what the department should prioritize if Trump takes the White House.

But rather than use federal power to enact change to the nation’s education system, some think the best solution is to get rid of what they consider to be the very problem.

“We need to dismantle the Department of Education,” Justice told the Daily Caller.

“Over the past 40 years that the federal government has really inserted its tentacles into every crack and crevice of American public education. And we need to tear it out root and branch so we are working at Moms for Liberty to ensure that we have a lot of advocacy at the state level. And in the counties where local control is so incredibly important,” she continued.

Justice added she wants to rid education of influence from outside agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In addition to dismantling the Department of Education, Walters told the Caller that he wanted the potential education secretary to drive DEI, CRT and transgender ideology out of schools, while also working to take down teachers’ unions.

Above all, Laurie Todd-Smith, director of America First Policy Institute’s Center for Education Opportunity, told the Daily Caller that she hoped a Trump education secretary would close the nation’s learning loss gap that students suffered after the pandemic. Todd-Smith also stressed the importance of undoing the Biden administration’s changes to Title IX.

In Texas, the state legislature has laid out the blueprint for using the government to rid universities of race-based initiatives, like Girdusky, Rufo and others have advocated.

Introduced by Republican state Sen. Brandon Creighton in March 2023, Texas State Bill 17 quickly passed through the state legislature to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, where it was signed into law in June 2023. Under the legislation, an institution is not permitted to spend money appropriated to the institution for a state fiscal year until the Board of Regents submits to the legislature and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board a report certifying that it has complied with restrictions on DEI.

The Texas law bans DEI offices and initiatives at state-funded higher education institutions. The law also prohibits institutions from considering diversity statements from job applicants and bans mandatory DEI training for staff.

Now, Texas universities are facing consequences because of the law.

In April, the University of Texas Dallas laid off nearly two dozen of its DEI faculty in an effort to comply with the law, CBS News reported. The University of Texas at Austin eliminated 60 jobs and its Division of Campus and Community Engagement (previously called the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement.)

While Justice and Rufo have priorities focused on their expertise, some education activists have a two-pronged approach in mind.

Girdusky said he hoped to see the future education secretary prioritize both K-12 learning loss while tackling issues in higher education.

“But really what there is, is there’s a two-step priority, one is going to be higher ed and the other one’s going to be lower education K through 12. A huge priority has to be to go after the teacher’s colleges. Because a lot of the problems that we’re seeing as far as education goes comes from teachers and colleges,” Girdusky told the Daily Caller.

In the same vein as Girdusky, Morabito expressed that the future education secretary should withhold funds from institutions or K-12 schools that engage in divisive activities.

“The first and the most powerful is federal civil rights law. It is unlawful for any federally-funded program or activity to discriminate based on race or sex, or perceived national origin. So federal funding should not be going to anywhere that discriminates based on sex or race or discriminates against the Jewish students based on shared national origin or perceived ancestry,” Morabito told the Daily Caller.

As for what Trump plans to focus on in a potential second administration, Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, pointed the Caller to the former president’s already-released education plans.

Under the former president’s priorities for a second administration are several education focused initiatives. To tackle higher education, Trump says he will “fire the radical Left accreditors” and impose standards to remove all “DEI bureaucrats.”

Trump also released his 12-step plan for K-12 education, which would include passing legislation to prioritize “curriculum transparency and a form of universal school choice.” The priorities note that Trump would “keep men out of women’s sports,” an indication that he would undo any changes the Biden administration makes to Title IX.

Several education groups and activists that the Caller spoke with said they had not had any engagement with the Trump campaign about their vision for education.

Leavitt referred the Caller to a December 2023 statement from advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita on media speculation over transition team efforts. The statement, Leavitt said, makes it clear “that outside groups do not reflect official campaign policy or strategy.”

“People publicly discussing potential administration jobs for themselves or their friends are, in fact, hurting President Trump…and themselves. These are an unwelcomed distraction,” the statement from Wiles and LaCivita reads. “Second term policy priorities and staffing decisions will not – in no uncertain terms – be led by anonymous or thinly sourced speculation in mainstream media news stories.”

“I think it’s very important that we need an education secretary who is youthful, aggressive, intelligent, and ruthlessly determined to shatter the status quo. And so, establishment figures will no longer make the cut, and even Trump’s ambitious policy agenda on education, he’s going to need a leader who can step in day one, with the courage to get things done,” Rufo told the Daily Caller, also noting that he has a very good relationship with the former president’s policy team.

Girdusky said he asked the Trump campaign about the position around the turn of the new year.

“He had not gotten the nomination at the time and it just wasn’t the biggest priority at the time, which it was probably like, January when I spoke to them, maybe December even. So the nomination process hadn’t even come up. And I was just talking about the idea of education secretary or whatnot, and they didn’t have a list of names. It was a very informal conversation,” Girdusky told the Daily Caller.

Three prominent education groups that the Daily Caller spoke to had not had much communication with the Trump campaign about the issue. DeAngelis, Defense of Freedom Institute and Freedom Works’ education initiative “B.E.S.T’ all told the Daily Caller that they had not spoken with the campaign about their priorities or their short list.

Roberts, while in touch with the Trump campaign regarding Heritage’s transition project, has not spoken with the campaign about serving in the administration himself, a senior adviser told the Caller.

“Not at this point. They do talk fairly regularly. Most of that has to do with Project 2025 and kind of general, kind of getting ready for the transition period. So at this point, they haven’t yet talked about specifics in terms of if he’d be willing to take a cabinet position or if that’s even been offered,” an adviser told the Caller.

The same could be said for Justice.

“I’m throwing my hat in the ring now. How’s that?” she said.

AUTHOR

REAGAN REESE

White House correspondent.

RELATED ARTICLES:

More Universities Jump On Trend Of Holding Race-Based Graduation Events

At Yale, ‘Peaceful Protesters’ Hit Jewish Student in the Face with a Flagpole

Columbia University: Protestors call Jews ‘pigs’ and proclaim ‘We are Hamas’

Columbia University Descends Into Pure Racist Hatred

University of Michigan: ‘Freedom for Palestine means Death to America’

Yale: Police storm campus with riot gear, arrest students at pro-Hamas protest encampment

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