My Greatest and Most Profound Mistake: Not Seeing the Existential Danger of the ‘Red-Green-Rainbow Alliance’

My greatest and most profound mistake is not seeing the existential danger of the “Red-Green-Rainbow Alliance” to the national security of the United States of America.

I was stationed in Germany, with my wife and soon to be born son, from 1971 till 1974. While there I, my family and my unit were exposed to two terrorist organizations. I at that time did not connect the dots between these two organizations and their clear and present danger to me, my family and our nation.

The Baader–Meinhof Gang

The first terrorist organization was the Baader–Meinhof Group or Baader–Meinhof Gang also know as the Red Army Faction (RAF). This group was made up of hardcore Communists. They attacked U.S. assets, conducted assassinations, kidnappings, bombed a club frequented by American soldiers and robbed banks to fund their Marxist movement.

Because of the Baader–Meinhof Gang’s stated tactic to abduct the children of American military members stationed in Germany the housing complex, that I, my wife and our newly born son Rich, Jr., lived in had barbed wire surrounding it and armed guards patrolling the grounds 24-7.

The Red Army Faction was a very real and direct threat to me and my wife and our son. Today, the Communist ideology has become an existential threat to the American way of life.

Black September 1972

The second group was known as “Black September.” Black September (Arabic: أيلول الأسود; Aylūl Al-Aswad), was named after the conflict between the Hashemite Kingdom of King of Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

On September 4th, 1972 Black September attacked the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany. This Islamic terrorist attack was to become known as the “Munich massacre.” The attack was carried out by eight members of the Palestinian militant organization Black September, who infiltrated the Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli Olympic team, and took nine others hostage. Later, in a failed rescue attempt by the German police, the nine Israeli athletes and one German police officer were murdered. Total murdered: 11 Israelis and 1 German.

After the Munich massacre my unit, the 1st Infantry Division, was called out to provide additional security at the Olympic Village.

What I did not know at that time was that both the Baader–Meinhof Gang (Red Brigade) and Black September were trained by the Palestine Liberation Organization in camps in Jordan.

This was the Red-Green Alliance that has now infiltrated the United States and is causing irreputable harm to our nation and its people. This alliance has grown in strength and power. There are even members of Congress who are followers of Marx and Mohammed.

The Red-Green Alliance is today a much greater threat to me, my family and a “clear and present danger” to our country.

What am I doing differently?

I now spend time speaking, writing and teaching others about the Red-Green Alliance, which has added a third new ultra-radical faction the LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexuals + Allies) movement.

We now have an even more dangerous and deadly “Red-Green-Rainbow Alliance” bent on the destruction of our families, lives, lifestyles and livelihoods.

Each is working, in concert, to destroy our cultural norms, fundamentally transform our society, destroy the traditional family and marriage between one man and one woman, undermine our Judeo-Christian religious foundation and infiltrate all of our government agencies including the Department of Defense.

Each wants more and more power, absolute power over me, my family, my son and our grandchildren.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

RELATED TWEET:

MAJORITY LEADER STEVE SCALISE: Here’s How The 118th Congress Will Be Different

Republicans know that Washington is broken. Over the past two years, Washington Democrats took advantage of their majorities in the House and Senate to usher in trillions of dollars of new taxes and spending at the expense of the American people.

As a direct result, inflation skyrocketed to its highest level in decades, gas is over 30% more expensive than it was two years ago, millions of people have unlawfully entered our country and crime is surging.

Democrats do not seem to care.

In November, more than 54 million people gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives to serve as a check against the left’s extremism.

Since Republicans have won the majority, we have been working to follow through on the plan we ran on in our “Commitment to America” so we can finally get our country back on track.

At the beginning of every Congress, representatives come together to elect a speaker of the House and pass a Rules Package that establishes the governing procedure for the next two years.

The Rules Package for the 118th Congress will make the House of Representatives more accountable and accessible to the American people. One of the biggest changes we made was to end proxy voting.

If hardworking Americans have to show up to their job each day, members of Congress should be expected to do the same.

All Americans should have the opportunity to visit our nation’s capital, explore the halls of Congress, meet with their representative and see their government at work. Unfortunately, Nancy Pelosi locked down the “People’s House” at the beginning of 2020.

Republicans have done what Democrats have refused to do for nearly three years: Re-open the House of Representatives to the public so people can once again see their government work in person.

While Pelosi ignored the rank-and-file members in her party, Republicans want more involvement from our members, not less. That’s why we committed to giving lawmakers more time to read legislation before bills come to the House Floor for a vote.

Under Pelosi’s leadership, thousand-page bills and spending trillions of dollars could be introduced in the dark of night with unrelated policy provisions snuck into the text, and members of Congress would have little time to read the legislation before a vote would be called.

We want our committees of jurisdiction to have a say in what legislation comes to the House Floor for a vote. House and Senate Democrats are both guilty of circumventing committees and putting massive leadership-drafted bills up for a vote, bypassing critical committee hearings and transparency to vet legislation.

Republicans want to empower our committee chairs to take back control of the legislative process and make it easier for our rank-and-file members to offer amendments. That way, all lawmakers can better represent the people who elected them to solve the massive problems facing hardworking families.

In our first legislative accomplishment of 2023, the Republican-led House passed the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act, which would defund the Biden administration’s plan to hire 87,000 new IRS agents. But we didn’t stop there.

We created a select committee to counter the Chinese Communist Party’s malicious agenda and established a select subcommittee that will investigate the weaponization of federal agencies and how they have abused their power by targeting Americans based on their political beliefs.

The House of Representatives voted to condemn violence against churches and other groups that promote life and passed legislation that would protect babies who survived an abortion. Additionally, Republicans and Democrats joined together to stop President Biden from raiding our Strategic Petroleum Reserve and selling our emergency oil reserves to the Chinese Communist Party.

We’ve had a strong start to this new majority, but we have much more work to do for families who are struggling under the weight of President Biden’s extreme agenda.

As the Majority Leader, I’m looking forward to bringing bills to the House Floor that focus on lowering inflation, reducing energy costs, securing America’s border, giving law enforcement the tools they need to keep our communities safe and getting parents more involved in their kids’ education.

But that’s not all. We need to hold the Biden administration accountable for its many failures. The American people deserve a government that is transparent and accountable.

If the last two years have shown us anything, it is that Congress is broken and needs to change. The American people are deeply frustrated about how our government works. Republicans are taking critical steps to make our legislative process more transparent and make Congress work again.

Ending Speaker Pelosi’s heavy-handed, one-size-fits-all approach to government will help get our country back on the right track.

Steve Scalise serves as House Majority Leader for the 118th Congress. 

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

AUTHOR

MAJORITY LEADER STEVE SCALISE

House Majority Leader for the 118th Congress.

RELATED ARTICLES:

House Republicans Are Making A ‘Commitment To America.’ Here’s What It Is

‘A Violent Start To The Year’: Murders Are Already Soaring In These Six Major Cities

New Church Committee Has A Chance To Show How Bad The Federal Gov’t Has Gone Off The Rails

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.

The Cult of Davos

“Davos”, the joke goes, “is where billionaires tell millionaires what the middle class thinks.”

The mega-elites in Davos have invested completely in climate, prompting CFACT policy advisor Joanne Nova to describe the gathering as, “what it would look like if a doomsday cult had a billion dollars to spend on a skiing holiday.”

Headlining Davos this year were the comedy team of Kerry and Gore.

Gore’s global warming exaggeration traveled far beyond the pale:

We’re still putting 162 million tons into it every single day, and the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the Earth… That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land and creating the droughts and melting the ice and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach 1 billion in this century… Look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian trends that have come from just a few million refugees. What about a billion? We would lose our capacity for self governance on this world.

Phew!  Have you been to the ocean lately?  Was it “boiling?”

Maybe Gore and the Davos crowd are confusing the ocean with the hot tubs at their swanky resorts (although hot tubs don’t “boil” either).

Kerry tried to one-up Gore with bizarre rhetoric which soared right off the planet.

“It’s so… almost extra-terrestrial to think about, saving the planet.” President Biden’s Climate Envoy said, “If you say that to most people, they think you’re just a crazy tree hugging and lefty liberal, you know, do-gooder, whatever.”

Kerry’s “most people” are absolutely right about him.

Could Kerry and Gore be any more out of touch with climate reality or the hard-working Americans they purport to speak for?

CFACT’s Marc Morano summed up Davos perfectly on Dan Bongino’s Show on Fox saying, “We’re living in a time now where conspiracy realities outnumber conspiracy theories.”

RELATED TWEETS:

RELATED ARTICLES:

It’s a cult: The WEF are the “select few” touched as saviors of the world to master the future

Morano on Bongino’s Fox News show talking Davos WEF

The Biden Administration finally admits its mistake in canceling Keystone XL

A seismic climate connection?

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

New House Majority Attempts Debt-Defying Feat

Will Rogers used to joke, “Alexander Hamilton started the Treasury Department with nothing — and sometimes I think that’s the closest we’ve been to breaking even.”

Not many people saw the humor in that Thursday when the U.S. bumped its head on the debt ceiling, setting the stage for a titanic showdown over America’s spending. While Uncle Sam has maxed out his credit cards for years, the government has never owed anything close to $31 trillion — a failure the new conservative House majority has zero intention of repeating.

If anyone doubts whether the GOP means business, one look at the speaker’s race ought to tell the skeptics all they need to know. The group forged by five days of adversity over Nancy Pelosi’s successor is a hardened and united front now, determined to declare war on the reckless habits that got our country into this mess. Many believe one of the biggest victories the conservative holdouts won was the promise not to raise the debt ceiling until serious budget reforms are made.

Not surprisingly, Democrats are demanding that Congress raise the borrowing limit — no strings attached. Joe Biden, who called Republicans “fiscally demented” for trying to steer America away from the cliff, is insisting that conservatives who want new spending limits can pound sand. Of course, his refusal to negotiate with the GOP is rich considering that he’s added more to the national debt ($3.8 trillion) in two years than our country did in 61 years (1929-1990).

Biden’s pigheadedness is putting the two parties on a collision course for a knock-down, drag-out fight — the likes of which Washington hasn’t seen since 2011 and 1995 when other House majorities tried to put Congress on the spending straight and narrow. Meanwhile, the prospects of Congress coming to blows over America’s ballooning debt is making the media downright hysterical. The New York Times wrung its hands, writing that “breaching the debt limit would lead to a first-ever default for the United States, creating financial chaos in the global economy.” Other Chicken Littles panicked that Republicans will pull the plug on Social Security and Medicare.

The reality is, America has never defaulted on its loans (despite coming dangerously close under Barack Obama). Even now, the House GOP is working on an emergency plan to keep the government afloat while the two sides hammer out an agreement. Conservatives have said that non-Defense spending will be first on the chopping block, but that doesn’t mean, as Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) joked with me on “Washington Watch,” that “nasty Republicans are going to push grandma off a cliff.” “We’re going to start with non-Medicare, non-Social Security spending,” he insisted. But frankly, Harris said, we should ultimately have “a bipartisan agreement on how to control all our federal spending.”

And yet the media would have you believe that any Republican who wants to leverage the moment to help America sober up after decades of a spending binge is reckless. “Crazy even,” National Review’s Veronique De Rugy writes. The fact of the matter is, our fiscal house is a disaster “and Congress is to blame for it. … These people are upset about the symptom of the disease, not the disease itself.”

Ironically, these same media outlets didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned when it was Biden and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) opposing multiple debt ceiling hikes. Back in 2006 and 2004, the two men could’ve been mistaken for Ronald Reagan, saying such things as “This massive accumulation of debt … was the result of willful and reckless disregard for the warnings that were given and for the fundamentals of economic management.” That was then-Senator Joe Biden before voting against increasing the debt limit. Schumer was so against the idea that he ran ads about it.

Apparently, the press is messaging this debate the same way they did the speaker’s race: demanding Republicans stop whining and fall in line. Conservatives who didn’t earlier this month, who made demands of their next leader in exchange for their support, were “terrorists.” Today, when Republicans ask for everyone to come to the table, Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz (Hawaii) lashes out, “There is no table.”

In other words, Congress should just roll over and rubber-stamp more borrowing to fund the Left’s agenda. If that’s the House’s perfunctory duty, as the critics say, why even vote? Or, could it be that this is a neglected accountability tool for lawmakers to keep spending in check?

I know some Americans will yawn at the country’s predicament. We’ve become numb to the big numbers. Living within our means seems to be an ideal long lost in this age of excess and instant gratification. But as everyone eventually learns, borrowing of this magnitude is ultimately unsustainable — and it’s immoral for us to leave it to our children and grandchildren to pay Washington’s piper. This is a fight that needs to be had, and we need to have it now.

When Ronald Reagan took office, the government’s debt was $650 billion. By 2010, it had skyrocketed to $10 trillion. Now, we’re approaching three times that number. And it’s not because Republicans have been spending angels, and Democrats have been devils. Both parties have been irresponsible. But we can’t keep swimming in red ink as a country and hope to survive. We have to address it.

Some of the ideas floating through the conservative caucus are completely reasonable solutions like “no budget, no pay,” which withhold lawmakers’ pay when they don’t pass budgets. For years, they’ve been kicking the can of appropriations down the road, which has resulted in gigantic, unread, multi-trillion-dollar boondoggles like we saw in the December omnibus. No more, House conservatives said in the speaker’s fight. It’s time to send these 13 budgets through regular order — holding hearings, conducting mark-ups, and giving members time to digest and amend the bills.

In return for a debt ceiling increase, Republicans will almost certainly demand across-the-board cuts and savings. There are calls to balance the budget in 10 years and scale back on glutted entitlements.

“The bottom line is we can’t just keep raising the debt ceiling year after year and just whistling past the graveyard on this,” Harris warned. “[O]ur debt exceeds our entire output of our economy. We are beyond the point where Greece was about 10 years ago when they essentially went bankrupt, so it’s completely unreasonable for the president to not want to negotiate some spending control.”

He compared it to a teenager maxing out his credit cards and telling his parents, “Look, just raise my limit. Don’t talk to me about controlling my spending.” “It’s crazy,” Harris shook his head. “We will discuss it, and the president will have to negotiate … because the debt ceiling is not going to be increased by the House without some spending control.”

At the end of the day, the new majority may not be able to take the credit cards away, but they can put a serious dent in Congress’s allowance. True leadership means “the bucks stop here.” It’s time for Republicans to take charge — and not the plastic kind!

AUTHOR

Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins is president of Family Research Council and executive editor of The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

There’s A Way Out Of The Federal Government’s Debt Pit

Here’s How The 118th Congress Will Be Different

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. 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.

Saudi Journalists: We Must Promote A Modernized Shari’a That Reflects The True Spirit Of Islam As An Answer To The Extremist Model Presented By The Taliban

A number of articles recently published in the Saudi press criticize the extremist model promoted by the Taliban in Afghanistan and by ISIS and the movements of political Islam. This model, they argue, does not reflect the true spirit of Islam and is based on a misguided implementation of the Islamic shari’a. It results from decades of indoctrination that promoted Islamic jurisprudence suited to past eras, before the age of progress and prosperity in the Muslim world. The articles add that the extremism of these movements reflects an “ideological crisis” in Islam, and that there is therefore an urgent need to enact reforms in order adapt the Islamic shari’a to the modern age and foster a spirit of tolerance and love of life.

The following are translated excerpts from these articles.

Saudi Journalist: The Taliban’s Islamic State Model Only Oppresses Women And Produces Jihad Fighters

In a sarcastic article in the daily ‘Okaz, columnist ‘Abdallah Bin Bakhit writes that ISIS, the Taliban and the organizations of political Islam espouse a misguided model of the Islamic state that, instead of promoting progress, only oppresses women and produces jihad fighters. This model, he adds, is the result of the extremist ideas that have been promoted by preachers in the Muslim world for decades. This, he says, is why Al-Azhar, the supreme religious authority in the Sunni Muslim world, refrained from accusing ISIS of heresy. If it did, it would have been forced to direct the same accusation at many other movements and preachers.

Bin Bakhit wrote: “I was glad when Al-Azhar refused to accuse ISIS of heresy. Many intellectuals protested and condemned this [decision], and some even accused this venerable religious university of hatching conspiracies. [But] if we consider the issue in depth, we will see that Al-Azhar took the right decision. It did not find anything in the conduct of ISIS that justified accusing it of heresy. All the decisions taken [by ISIS] and all their actions on the ground conform to the religious rulings we have constantly been hearing about for 40 years. Al-Azhar refrained from accusing ISIS of heresy because this would have meant directing the same accusation at all those who took to the pulpits to preach Islam in the era of the Islamic Awakening that spread through the Arab countries [in the late 20th century]. ISIS realized the vision of the [Islamic Awakening] movement in practice and to the letter. They implemented everything they learned from the books of tradition and everything they heard from the senior clerics. Their problem was that they implemented it too soon. They announced [their state] before they had the necessary strength, and the world pounced on them and defeated them. Nobody wants to remain on the losing side, [so] our honorable clerics distanced themselves from [ISIS], although before this they used to provide [ISIS] with funds and fighters and pray for it with all their hearts.

“I was not among those who yearned for the complete disappearance of ISIS. I wanted the world to provide it with territory to establish a state that would implement the shari’a, [the kind of state] that all the organizations of political Islam have promised [to establish] and which all the Muslim peoples have been yearning for. Whenever one of our honorable preachers is asked why the Muslim states are not leading the world, he ascribes this to the fact that we are not implementing the true Islam. Thankfully, the world continues to turn and the dream is now about to come true, because, after the world deprived ISIS of the honor of implementing the shari’a, history gave us the Taliban to perform this duty… Let’s wait and see how they implement the shari’a and how this affects the development, prosperity and welfare of the Afghan people and guides the entire world to the right path.

“The Taliban has [already] uprooted women from the universities. This is the first glimmer of the Afghans’ success. Women have no place in the university and in the job market. Keeping them at home will officially transform them into [perfect mothers] to raise the coming  generations. A woman does not need to study at all, because she has nobler and more important roles, chief of which is to obey her husband, fill his heart with joy, preserve his wealth, keep anyone from entering his home without his permission, including her own parents, and refrain from giving alms without his consent. She must not take a single step outside the home without his permission, and she must dress only according to his taste and wishes. [The home] is her realm, where she sits enthroned, tall and proud, and one of her main roles, for which she was created and which suits her natural inclinations, is to care for [her husband’s] children. Her male children will become sources of creativity, production and invention, and constitute the exclusive circle from which jihad fighters and officers in the religious police [are selected]. The world is waiting [to see] the Afghans’ successful attempts at producing missiles, planes, computers, semiconductors and everything that leads to progress and [develops] culture, after the plotters deprived ISIS of the opportunity to do so.”

Read The Full Report

EDITORS NOTE: This MEMRI report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Davos: What the International Authoritarian Left Has Planned for You

“He who obeys, does not listen to himself!” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra


Imagine a world where you can’t eat meat, voters are to be ignored, and speaking your mind is forbidden.  That’s what the globalists who showed up at Davos last week have planned for you.  It gets worse.  Betcha didn’t know you were just a guinea pig and your purpose in life is to satisfy these people’s lust for power.

What gathering of the international elite would be complete without Al Gore raving like a lunatic about global warming?  He was in rare form at Davos last week, ranting about boiling oceans, atmospheric rivers, and how global warming is like setting off 600,000 nuclear bombs a day.  Sounds awful, but this would be the same Al Gore who predicted all the ice would be gone from the North Pole by 2013.  The problem is people still believe his shtick and want to stick it to you so Al Gore can profit from his green energy investments.

So, in the future, according to one presenter at Davos, you will have to ask to use a car and the cloud will monitor – and eventually control – your every move.  Another presenter said flatly, “There will be no cars,” only environmentally friendly transportation running on renewable energy.  Kumbaya.  Already, ’15-minute cities’ are in the works in Britain and France.  Everything you need will be within 15 minutes of where you live and you will not be allowed to go outside of your zone more than a certain number of times a year, or you will be fined.  The government will enforce this through cell phone tracking and facial recognition technology.  Sign me up!

But more is required to stop global warming.  Capitalism, the great scourge of humanity that has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system, must be ‘overcome’ or the planet faces “extinction”.  That’s according to Colombia’s far-left President, a former Marxist guerilla fighter.  He would turn everything over to the U.N. which would become the central planner for the entire global economy.  Central planning has been a complete disaster wherever it’s been tried.  Just ask the Soviet Union.  Oh, you can’t.  It’s defunct.

Then we were treated to the spectacle of FBI Director Christopher Wray at Davos openly calling for fascism, more partnership between tech companies and the government to suppress information.  National security depends on it, he claimed.  Apparently, he’s not the least bit embarrassed by recent revelations his FBI conspired with Twitter to censor free speech it did not like.  This man is scary.

Tony Blair called at Davos last week for a “National Digital Infrastructure” to keep track of who has and who has not been vaccinated in future pandemics.  Thus, he joins those previously calling for global digital health certificates and vaccine passports.  The World Health Organization is already at work on all this.  The U.N., again – world government, all bow down.

All these would-be Masters of the Universe want to run your life.  They think they know better than you and possess secret knowledge that will end all human suffering.  Wannabe puppet master Klaus Schwab set the tone for all this when he opened the conference by calling on the elites present to “master the future.”  John Kerry spilled the beans when he said he is part of a “select group of human beings” whose job it is to save the planet.

What’s laughable about all this arrogance is that it’s been around for a very long time.  It’s the Gnostic fantasy which goes back to ancient times – the belief,

the world and humanity can be fundamentally transformed and perfected through the intervention of a chosen group of people (an elite), a man-god, or men-Gods, Übermensch, who are the chosen ones that possess a kind of special knowledge (like magic or science) about how to perfect human existence.

Kerry, Schwab, and the others may have a sick psychological need to believe they are special and are here to save us from ourselves, but we don’t have to believe them.  I call them the “Delusionati” – derived from the ‘Illuminati’ secret society – because they suffer from delusions of grandeur and lack the self-awareness to realize they have fallen into the age-old trap of unjustifiably believing they’re better than everybody else.  Even if they are, my message to them is the same: Keep your grubby hands off my life.  This planet doesn’t have your name on it.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

RELATED ARTICLE: Behind Push To Legalize Government Drug Dens, $300+ Million Soros Investment

Inside The Democrats’ Newest Election Takeover Scheme

They just don’t stop. And nothing and no one stops them.

Inside Democrats’ Newest Election Takeover Scheme: Report Unmasks ‘Dark Money’ Group You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

The report reveals how the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence is a venture by left-wing nonprofits to ‘influence every aspect of election administration.’

By: Shawn Fleetwood, The Federalist, January 21, 2023:

After flooding local election offices with private money to alter election operations in key battleground states ahead of the 2020 presidential contest, Democrat-aligned groups have been looking for new ways to take over America’s future elections — and a new bombshell report reveals just how they plan to do it.

Released by the Honest Elections Project (HEP) and the John Locke Foundation, the shocking report reveals how the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence — a self-professed “nonpartisan collaborative” claiming to bring together election officials for the stated goal of developing “a set of shared standards and values” — is actually a venture by left-wing nonprofit groups to “systematically influence every aspect of election administration” and advance Democrat-backed voting policies in local election offices across the country.

The Alliance’s efforts are similar to those orchestrated by groups such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which, after receiving $400 million from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, poured millions of dollars into local election offices to change how elections were administered in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. As The Federalist previously reported, these “Zuckbucks” were used to expand unsecure election protocols like mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes. To make matters worse, the grants were heavily skewed towards Democrat-majority counties, essentially making it a massive Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.

Unsurprisingly, CTCL is one of the main groups partnered with the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence.

While CTCL’s actions in the 2020 election were intrusive enough to provoke 24 states to pass laws banning or restricting Zuckbucks, the Alliance seeks to take CTCL’s election-interfering tactics a step further. According to membership and grant agreements obtained by HEP, the Alliance’s “unusual and complex structure” appears to be “designed to thwart meaningful oversight and accountability.”

“For instance, after the Alliance had recruited its first cohort of members it announced plans to begin charging offices to join. However, the Alliance also created ‘scholarships’ to cover those membership costs, which are instantly converted into ‘credits’ that member offices can use to buy services from CTCL and other Alliance partners,” the HEP report reads. “As a result, offices receive access to funds they can spend exclusively on services provided by left-wing companies and nonprofits, entirely outside normal public funding channels.”

In other words, existing Zuckbucks bans wouldn’t necessarily prevent local election departments from contracting with the Alliance to obtain services ranging “from ‘legal’ and ‘political’ consulting to public relations and guidance on recruitment and training.”

Such services are already being utilized in places such as Brunswick County, North Carolina, where the locality’s board of elections director used “talking points and hyperlinks provided by the Alliance” to push back against criticism of the county’s acceptance of CTCL funds. In a series of emails obtained by HEP via public records requests, Board of Elections Director Sara LaVere is documented defending the acceptance of the grants and admitting that The Elections Group — an Alliance partner — assisted her in writing articles published during the 2022 election cycle.

“I have personally worked with the Center for Tech and Civic Life, Democracy Fund, Elections Group, and the Center for Civic Design in the past,” LaVere wrote. “The two election columns I published for this election? Those were written with assistance from the Elections Group. Most of my social media posts during the general election came from templates provided by the Elections Group.”

Legislation banning Zuckbucks and other types of private funding in North Carolina’s elections successfully passed the Republican-controlled legislature in 2021, but was vetoed by Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper.

But Alliance doesn’t provide its “benefits” to local election offices without expecting something in return. As described in the report, election departments that become Alliance members “are expected to work with the [coalition] to develop and implement an ‘improvement plan’ that reshapes the way each office functions.” This requirement allows the Alliance to gather significant data on the internal operations of participating offices.

“No matter what it claims to be, the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence is nothing more than a dark money-fueled scheme to push liberal voting policies and influence election administration in key states and localities,” said HEP Executive Director Jason Snead in a statement. “Nobody should be able to manipulate the democratic process for partisan gain. … This report should make clear that a private funding ban, vigorous oversight, and complete transparency from officials are essential to restoring trust in our election system and making it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

To date, the Alliance-connected CTCL has committed to distributing $80 million to 10 counties (including Brunswick) over the next five years in states such as Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan, among others.

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLES:

Florida Dems Are Still In Total Disarray After DeSantis’ Massive Midterm Win

Doocy Asks Jean-Pierre Point-Blank If Biden Is Involved In A ‘Cover-Up’

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

Elon Musk: ‘Felt Like I Was Dying’ After COVID Vaccine

CDC V-safe data show 7-8% of Americans get so sick they have to go to the hospital. And still these Democrat villains are mandating the vaccine. It’s war-fare.

Elon Musk: ‘Felt Like I Was Dying’ After Second COVID Booster

By Sandy Fitzgerald | Newsmax, 21 January 2023 11:22 AM EST

Twitter CEO Elon Musk, a frequent critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci and COVID-related mandates, says he felt like he “was dying” after he got his second COVID booster vaccine, and that a cousin of his suffered myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, after getting his shot.

“I had major side effects from my second booster shot,” Musk said in a tweet Friday. “Felt like I was dying for several days. Hopefully, no permanent damage, but I dunno.”

In a subsequent message, Musk said that his cousin “who is young & in peak health, had a serious case of myocarditis. Had to go to the hospital.”

The second booster shot, he explained in another tweet, wasn’t his choice but a requirement to visit one of his Tesla locations in Berlin, Germany.

Musk also said that he had contracted COVID-19 before the vaccines came out and “it was basically a mild cold,” and then he had the Johnson & Johnson vaccine with “no bad effects, except my arm hurt briefly.”

He added that his first mRNA booster “was ok, but the second one crushed me.”

His posts came after a Rasmussen Reports tweet saying that about 12 million people may have had “major side effects” after getting the COVID vaccines.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been “rare cases” of myocarditis or pericarditis” that have occurred, most often among adolescent and young adult males ages 16 and older within a week of getting a second dose of an mRNA COVID-19 Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine. However, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has not had similar reports.

Read more.

AUTHOR

RELATED TWEET:

RELATED ARTICLES:

35-Year-Old Middle School Coach and Teacher Dies Suddenly in Front of His Class

Mind Blowing: CDC Forced to Tell How Deadly the COVID Jab Is

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

Ten Topics You Rarely Hear Discussed Openly and Rationally on Mainstream Media

Many of us are familiar with the ideological and political biases of mainstream media, in particular the media’s uncritical embrace of leftist commitments on issues like inclusive language, hate speech, transgenderism, abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration, the Christian faith, education, and pandemic policies.

It’s par for the course.

Much of the mainstream media does not simply defend its favoured positions; it also refuses, all too often, to give a fair hearing to opposing viewpoints. The silencing, censoring, and exclusion of opinions that newspaper, radio, and TV editors deem politically incorrect impoverishes our public square by making open and candid discussion of a wide range of issues practically impossible.

This would not necessarily be the case in an ideologically and politically diverse media system, because the one-sided and exclusionary editorial policies of one media organ could be checked and balanced by the diverse biases and editorial policies of another. However, in practice, many mainstream media do in fact speak with one voice on lots of important issues, including issues that are by no means settled in the general population.

Sometimes the silencing of dissenting viewpoints is achieved through overt censorship – as we saw when Facebook suppressed arguments that entertained the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis, or when Twitter censored pretty much any assertion that could be construed as even slightly unfavourable to Covid vaccines. But more often than not, it is achieved by refusing to give any airtime to arguments from “the other side.”

In many ways, this is more sinister than overt censorship, because it is subtle and may easily go completely unnoticed.

I have had personal experience of this “from the inside,” so to speak. I used to write occasionally for a prominent national newspaper in Ireland, as well as a regional newspaper in Spain. Soon after I began to seriously question Covid measures or the science behind lockdowns, my contributions at both newspapers ceased to be published, quite abruptly. There was simply no editorial interest in questioning the fundamentals of the national response to the virus.

The average newspaper reader or TV viewer knows nothing of this filtering process. They just pick up the newspaper or switch on the TV and assume that there are “serious” people and experts who will be given a platform to express themselves. They will naturally assume that if no credible voice defends this or that position, it must be because the position is weak or indefensible. It will not occur to the average reader or viewer that the reason there are no “credible voices” on the other side is because they have been filtered out in advance.

Mine is one of those voices. There are many others.

It is not that mainstream media never discuss contentious issues. Rather, media “debate” on contentious issues is often bland and uninspiring, due to its near total exclusion of reasonable voices from the other side. Officially sanctioned positions are echoed uncritically by talking heads on TV and radio, and the “other side” is dismissed as a bunch of crazies or “extremists” in op-eds and on chat shows, even though moderate dissenting voices are refused airtime or never invited to participate in the debate in the first place.

This is bad for citizenship and bad for democracy, because citizens are exposed to one set of pat answers on the issues of the day, and not taught to process complexity and nuance. Citizens who should be learning to think for themselves are instead encouraged to passively imbibe a set of one-sided slogans, slogans that most journalists do not even think to interrogate or put to the test, like “I’m personally against X, but would never impose my opinion on someone else,” or “I am spiritual but have no time for organised religion,” or “Populists are a looming danger to democracy,” or “We must do everything possible to combat misinformation and hate speech,” or “The unvaccinated are granny-killers.”

The top ten

Here are ten topics that most mainstream media cover from a broadly leftist-progressive perspective, with almost no consideration of dissenting arguments, no matter how evidence-based and no matter how qualified or credentialed their author happens to be. In other words, ten topics that most mainstream media cannot or will not discuss openly and rationally:

  1. The birth shortfall across a large part of the Western world and its contribution to the ageing of our populations – barely mentioned, let alone debated.
  2. The ethics of administering transgender hormone therapy to children and adolescents – seems to be taboo for many editors.
  3. Religious faith as a personal commitment and way of life – almost invariably, this is either ignored, treated superficially, or discussed as a wholly subjective “lifestyle option,” rather than a serious truth claim.
  4. The ethics of abortion and techniques of assisted reproduction and their impact on women’s lives – the pro-life perspective is almost never given a fair hearing.
  5. The difficulties and challenges surrounding the accommodation and integration of refugees – anyone questioning refugee policies is dismissed out of hand as “anti-immigration” or bigoted or racist.
  6. The evidential basis and ethical merits of Covid policies like lockdowns, mandatory masking and mandatory vaccination – government advisors were essentially given a free pass to say whatever they wanted, while dissenters were either silenced or dismissed as enemies of public health.
  7. The steep increases in excess mortality in 2021 and 2022, and its possible underlying causes – it has been reported on, but strikingly, not discussed to even a fraction of the extent that Covid deaths were.
  8. The claim that reducing our “carbon footprint” can reverse global warming, and that this will avert a global catastrophe – you will rarely if ever hear this topic treated in a rational, critical and scientific manner, just uncritical repetition of a set of pre-packaged climate crisis mantras.
  9. Populist and anti-establishment political movements – instead of engaging rationally with their claims, these movements are generally dismissed as “alt right,” “hard right,” or “demagogic” and anti-democratic.
  10. The perspective of stay-at-home mothers or women who choose to sacrifice their careers or accept more modest careers, in order to be more available to their children – apparently, most mainstream journalists are unable or unwilling to discuss such a choice sympathetically.

This article has been republished from David Thunder’s Substack, The Freedom Blog.

AUTHOR

David Thunder

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society. More by David Thunder

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

The Rise of the Single Woke [and young, Democratic] Female

Single women are reshaping American society, education and public policy.


Soccer Moms are giving way to Single Woke Females — the new “SWFs” — as one of the most potent voting blocs in American politics.

Unmarried women without children have been moving toward the Democratic Party for several years, but the 2022 midterms may have been their electoral coming-out party as they proved the chief break on the predicted Republican wave. While married men and women as well as unmarried men broke for the GOP, CNN exit polls found that 68 percent of unmarried women voted for Democrats.

The Supreme Court’s August decision overturning Roe v. Wade was certainly a special factor in the midterms, but longer-term trends show that single, childless women are joining African Americans as the Democrats’ most reliable supporters.

Their power is growing thanks to the demographic winds. The number of never-married women has grown from about 20 percent in 1950 to over 30 percent in 2022, while the percentage of married women has declined from almost 70 percent in 1950 to under 50 percent today. Overall, the percentage of married households with children has declined from 37 percent in 1976 to 21 percent today.

The single wave

new Institute for Family Studies analysis  of 2020 Census data found that one in six women do not have children by the time they reach the end of their childbearing years, up from one in ten in 1990. Single adult women now total some 42 million, comparable to the key African American voting bloc (46 million), while vastly larger than key groups like labour union members (14 million) or college students (20 million).

The Pew Research Center notes that since 1960, single-person households in the United States have grown from 13 percent to 27 percent (2019). Many, particularly women, are not all that keen on finding a partner. Pew recently found that “men are far more likely than women to be on the dating market: 61 percent of single men say they are currently looking for a relationship or dates, compared with 38 percent of single women.”

There’s clearly far less stigma attached to being single and unpartnered. Single women today have many impressive role models of unattached, childless women who have succeeded on their own — like Taylor Swift and much of the US women’s soccer team. This phenomenon is not confined to the United States. Marriage and birthrates have fallen in much of the world, including Europe and Japan. Writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, columnist Emma John observed, “Singleness is no longer to be sneered at. Never marrying or taking a long-term partner is increasingly seen as a valid choice.”

Rise of identity politics

The rise of SWFs — a twist on the personal ad abbreviation for single white female — is one of the great untold stories of American politics. Distinct from divorced women or widows, these largely Gen Z and Millennial voters share a sense of collective identity and progressive ideology that sets them apart from older women.

More likely to live in urban centres and to support progressive policies, they are a driving force in the Democratic party’s and the nation’s shift to the left. One paradox, however: Democrats depend ever more on women defined in the strict biological sense, while much of the party’s progressive wing embraces the blurred and flexible gender boundaries of its identity politics.

Attitudes are what most distinguish single women from other voters. An American Enterprise Institute survey shows that married men and women are far more likely than unmarried females to think women are well-treated or equally treated. As they grow in numbers, these discontented younger single women are developing something of a group consciousness. Nearly two-thirds of women under 30, for example, see what happens to other women as critical to their own lives; among women over 50, this mindset shrinks to less than half.

This perception of linked fate stands in contrast to survey results regarding single men, who report that they are increasingly disconnected from each other while women bond more closely. This is not a temporary phenomenon, and it is much bigger than the bohemian movements of the past.

There is even a sense in which women are redefining families, and themselves, by choosing to neither get married nor have offspring. And social observers such as Bella DePaulo, a University of California, Santa Barbara professor and singles advocate, are all in favour. As she told Nautilus magazine:

“[It’s] a tremendously positive thing! Once upon a time, just about everyone in the United States thought that they needed to squeeze themselves into the heterosexual nuclear family box, even if they weren’t heterosexual or weren’t interested in getting married or had no interest in raising kids.

Now, people can create the lives and the families that allow them to live their best, most authentic, and most meaningful lives. They can choose to put friends at the center of their lives. Or they can assemble their very own combination of friends and family to be the social convoys that sail beside them as they navigate their lives. They can have kids in their lives without having children of their own.”

The key driver of these attitudes may be universities, where feminist ideology often holds powerful sway. Women now predominate on college campuses. In the late 1960s, they were about 39 percent of college graduates; now they are about 59 percent. The percentage of full-time female professors has risen dramatically; at the full professor level the percentage has grown by roughly one-third.

Women now earn more than half of advanced degrees, not only in education but health and medical sciences, and are making great strides in engineering and law. With this growth, a feminist agenda has become increasingly de rigueur in colleges. According to the  National Center for Education Statistics, the number of women’s and gender studies degrees in the United States has increased by more than 300 percent since 1990, and in 2015, there were more than 2,000 degrees conferred.

There are widespread movements to establish women’s centres almost everywhere, even as men are abandoning college and university life in record numbers, and those who remain are hit with messaging about behaviour and status from diversity, equity, and inclusion offices along with various student life offices that regularly call them toxic, aggressive, and born misogynists.

More recently, anti-family attitudes have become more pronounced. “Queer studies” often advocate replacing the “nuclear family” with some form of collectivised childrearing. Progressive groups like Black Lives Matter made their opposition to the nuclear family a part of their basic original platform, even though evidence shows family breakdown has hurt African American boys most of all.

The economics of singleness

While both married and unmarried women have made impressive gains in the workplace, family status appears to be driving a big cleavage in politics among women. Research shows that having children tends to make one more conservative — critically, divorce does not change this calculus decisively, although it moderates leftism.

The AEI 2022 data shows that divorced women — of all age cohorts — tend to be more conservative than liberal. In aggregate, 23 percent of divorced women are liberal while 31 percent are conservative — the plurality (38 percent) are somewhere in the moderate middle.

The fault lines, however, run deeper and appear to be generational. The data show that 40 percent of Millennial women — those born between 1981-1996 — identify as liberal and 20 percent identify as conservative. For single women of the baby boomer generation (born between 1946-1963), the number of liberals drops to 25 percent and the number of conservative women increases to almost 30 percent.

We are witnessing, as sociologist Daniel Bell noted a half-century ago in The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society, a new type of individualism, unmoored from religion and family, something fundamentally transforming the foundations of middle-class culture. This echoes what the popular futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970 described as a growing immersion in work at the expense of family life. He envisioned a revolution in marriage that would result in a “streamlined family,” and, if children are in the picture, relying on professional child-raisers. The ideal of long-term marriage would give way, he expected, to more transient relationships and numerous partners at different stages of life.

There is a clear economic divergence between married and unmarried women, if for no other reason than that two incomes provide more resources and children present different demands. There are plenty of renting couples and home-owning singles, but married people account for 77 percent of all homeowners, according to the Center for Politics. Married women tend also to do far better professionally and economically, and their rate of marriage has remained constant, while those without spouses have declined by 15 percent over the past four decades, notes the Brookings Institution. Single-parent households, they find, do far worse.

This economic reality impacts political choices. Not part of an economic familial unit, they tend to look to government for help, whether for rent subsidies or direct transfers. The pitch of Democratic presidents as reflected in Barack Obama’s “Life of Julia” and Joe Biden’s “Life of Linda” — narratives that advertised the government’s cradle-to-grave assistance for women — is geared toward women who never marry, with the occasional child-raising addressed not by family resources but government transfers.

Critically, unmarried women also tend to be employed heavily in “helping professions” like medical care and teaching, an expanding field even as many traditional male jobs, particularly in manufacturing, construction, and transportation, have disappeared.

Whereas high taxes and regulation pose problems in the general economy, women predominate in fields that actually benefit from more government spending. This now includes the once GOP-leaning medical profession, nurses as well as doctors who now lean Democratic. In contrast, heavily male professions like engineers, masons, and police officers tend toward the GOP.

These differences are also showing up in backlashes against left-wing education policy, epitomised by such programs as Drag Queen Story Hour for K-12 students. Parents have been at the forefront of movements to replace progressive school board members from Virginia to California.

Geography is destiny

The divisions between married and unmarried women are reinforced and amplified by the geographic divisions in the country — what some call “the big sort” — as Americans increasingly settle into distinct communities of likeminded individuals. Urban centres, for example, are particularly friendly to singles.

In virtually all high-income societies, high density today almost always translates into low fertility rates, led by San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Boston. In urban cores like Manhattan, single households constituted nearly 50 percent of households, according to American Community Survey 2019 data.

And with many businesses and cultural opportunities moving away from cities and diffusing and becoming more diverse and family friendly with varied amenities, the polarisation between cities and their narrowly left residents and the rest of the nation may increase.

According to the recent AEI data, even married women in the Northeast are conservative. This gap, unsurprisingly, widens in the South and Midwest. But the major divides are in terms of type of community. Married women who live in urban settings are evenly split between conservative and liberal, but among single women, just 18 percent are conservative with 44 percent liberal (the rest identify as moderate or refused to say).

In the suburbs, the key political battleground, 35 percent of married women are conservative and 22 percent liberal. For unmarried women, 23 percent are conservative and 34 percent are liberal. In rural areas, 42 percent of married women are conservative compared to 14 percent liberal, while single women divide evenly.

Unlike the wave of immigrants or rural migrants who flooded the American metropolises of the early 20th century, urbanites today generally avoid raising large families in cramped and exceedingly expensive spaces. According to analysis by demographer Wendell Cox, households in suburbs and exurbs are roughly four times more likely to have children in their household than residents of the urban core.

The lowest birthrates are found in ultra-blue cities and states, magnets largely for singles and the childless. Six years ago the New York Times ran a story headlined “San Francisco Asks: Where Have All the Children Gone?” and stories abound about the Golden Gate City having the fewest children of all major American cities. Many other major cities lost families with children during the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2021, Manhattan saw a whopping 9.5 percent decline in the number of children under 5 — and many families are not returning.

Some of this reflects policies associated with driving housing prices up more than elsewhere. Like other blue states, California has adopted policies that discourage single family housing favoured by married couples with children in favour of dense, usually small urban apartments. Given the political orientation of single women, urban areas can be expected to go further left, while the suburbs, and particularly the exurbs, with their concentrations of married families, will likely shift towards the centre and right.

The great demographic race

In the near future, American politics, both national and local, may turn on the degree to which people remain single, and also whether they decide to have children. Right now, the short run demography favours the Democrats. People are getting married at the lowest rate in American history and the birth rate remains depressed. The longer people stay single, and perhaps never marry, the better things will be for the Democrats.

The wild card may be age — specifically whether historic patterns hold and women, like men, tend to become conservative as they get older. This is hard to gauge as the evolution has usually taken in place of the context of marriage and motherhood. Unmarried women, in particular, may hold onto their youthful ideology far longer than those whose lives are transformed by marriage and parenting.

In many places, particularly on the coasts, single women have become a politically rising force. Twelve women were elected governor in 2022, a record. Maura Healey’s election as the nation’s first openly lesbian chief executive shows that in states like Massachusetts, once a Catholic conservative bastion culturally, there is enough support for single women in politics to overcome traditional reluctance to elect childless and non-heterosexual candidates.

“It’s thrilling to see Maura break down historical obstacles to both women and LGBTQ candidates to lead Massachusetts,” says Janson Wu, executive director of the Boston-based GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders. “It really shows the progress we’ve made as a society, in understanding that what counts is really the quality of the leader and not who they are.”

Future policy conflicts

Public policy may have a strong influence on this dynamic. The single, the unattached, and the unmarried are already demanding state provisions to guarantee “affordable” urban housing, more money for transit, and steps toward a guaranteed income for individuals — all of which will, in turn, provide incentives to remain unattached. In contrast, the demands of family-oriented voters may be more focused on economic growth, safety, improving basic education, and ways to save money for their offspring.

If the policy preferences of singles become more significant, the United States may have to brace for the kind of long-term demographic decline already evident in Japan and parts of Europe. Some suggest that one possible solution, attractive to some on the left, would be to adopt the “Nordic way” which encourages reproduction (if not marriage) by transferring much of the burden of child-raising from families to the state.

Other countries have also adopted pro-birth policies — like free or low-cost childcare, or even cash payments. These schemes have been applied in places as dissimilar as Poland and South Korea, as well as Quebec. But according to United Nations data, all of them, including the Scandinavian states, still suffer well below replacement rate fertility rates.

Some women in particular embrace singleness not just as a lifestyle, but a chance to redefine the role of women in society. Author Rebecca Traister, herself married with children, has followed this movement, calling it a “a radical upheaval, a national reckoning with massive social and political implications …  a wholesale revision of what female life might entail.”

“We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood as a norm, not an aberration,” she adds, “and the creation of an entirely new population: adult women who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry.”

The likely best way to overcome the demographic decline may lie instead in boosting the economic prospects of the next generation. This includes steps that could allow for easier purchase of homes or lower cost apartments suitable for families. As Richard Florida, among others, has suggested: Efforts should be made to lower housing prices, which correlates to higher rates of fertility.

Reforms that encourage home-based businesses could spark greater fertility rates, as historian Alan Carlson suggested almost two decades ago. The rise of home-based businesses and work, now taking off, offers a unique opportunity for increased family formation. Indeed, a recent study by the Federal Reserve of Kansas City suggests that the current rise in remote work could spark a family-friendly housing boom, as people can live further away, and spend more time being parents. For that to occur, however, it would require that such housing can be constructed, which would require loosening of regulations that seek to restrain construction both in cities and suburban areas.

Ultimately the question remains what kind of society Americans want to have. Historically, here in the US and elsewhere, the family perspective has generally been prevalent and tied intimately to the sense of a common polity. But as the country changes and becomes ever more single and female-influenced, the historical pattern is likely to be challenged and significantly modified.

This article has been republished from Real Clear Investigations with permission.

AUTHORS

Joel Kotkin

Joel Kotkin is Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. More by Joel Kotkin

Samuel Abrams

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.  More by Samuel Abrams

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

Mind Blowing: CDC Forced to Tell How Deadly the COVID Jab Is

CDC Aware of Hundreds of Safety Signals for COVID Jab.


STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • In September 2022, The Epoch Times asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining results. The CDC refused. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has now forced the release of these data, and they are stunning
  • The CDC’s PRR monitoring has identified several hundred safety signals, including for Bell’s palsy, blood clots, pulmonary embolism and death. In individuals aged 18 and older, there are 770 safety signals for different adverse events, and more than 500 of them have a stronger safety signal than myocarditis and pericarditis
  • In the 12- to 17-year-old age group there are 96 safety signals, and in the 5- to 11-year-old group there are 66, including myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction, cardiac valve incompetency, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis and appendectomies, Kawasaki’s disease and vitiligo
  • The proportions of deaths, which were only provided for the 18-plus age group, was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines
  • The FDA is also required to perform safety monitoring, using empirical Bayesian data mining. The Epoch Times asked the FDA to release its monitoring results in July 2022 but, like the CDC, the FDA refused, only to admit in December 2022 they’d confirmed the Pfizer shot was linked to pulmonary embolism

In September 2022, The Epoch Times asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining results. PRR1 measures how common an adverse event is for a specific drug compared to all the other drugs in the database.

According to the standard operating procedures2,3 for the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is run jointly by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC is required to perform these data mining analyses.

Not only did the CDC refuse to release the data, but it also provided false information — twice — in response to The Epoch Times’ questions about the monitoring being performed. As reported by The Epoch Times back in September 2022,4 the CDC initially claimed PRR analyses were “outside the agency’s purview” and that no monitoring was being done by them.

Eventually, the agency admitted it was doing PRRs, starting in February 2021, only to later claim they didn’t perform any PRRs until March 2022. The Epoch Times also cited several papers in which the FDA and/or CDC claimed their data mining efforts had come up empty handed.5 Now, we find that was all a pack of lies.

CDC Monitoring Reveals Hundreds of Safety Signals

In reality, the CDC’s PRR monitoring reveals HUNDREDS of safety signals, including Bell’s palsy, blood clots, pulmonary embolism and death — all of which, according to the rules, require thorough investigation to either confirm or rule out a possible link to the shots. As reported by The Epoch Times in early January 2023:6

“The CDC analysis was conducted on adverse events reported from Dec. 14, 2020, to July 29, 2022. The Epoch Times obtained the results through a Freedom of Information Act request after the CDC refused to make the results public …

PRR involves comparing the incidence of a specific adverse event after a specific vaccine to the incidence after all other vaccines. A signal is triggered when three thresholds are met, according to the CDC: a PRR of at least 2, a chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and three or more cases of the event following receipt of the vaccine being analyzed. Chi-squared tests are a form of statistical analysis used to examine data.

The results obtained by The Epoch Times show that there are hundreds of adverse events (AEs) that meet the definition, including serious conditions such as blood clotting in the lungs, intermenstrual bleeding, a lack of oxygen to the heart, and even death. The high numbers, particularly the chi-squared figures, concerned experts.

For many of the events, ‘the chi-squared is so high that, from a Bayesian perspective, the probability that the true rate of the AE of the COVID vaccines is not higher than that of the non-COVID vaccines is essentially zero,’ Norman Fenton, a professor of risk management at Queen Mary University of London, told The Epoch Times in an email after running the numbers through a Bayesian model that provides probabilities based on available information.”

Myopericarditis Is Far From the Only Problem

One of the few side effects of the COVID jabs that the CDC has actually acknowledged is myocarditis (heart inflammation), and a related condition called pericarditis (inflammation of the heart sack). Alas, the PRR monitoring results reveal there are more than 500 other adverse events that have stronger warning signals than either of those conditions.

Josh Guetzkow, an Israeli professor trained in statistics at Princeton University told The Epoch Times:7

“We know that the signal for myocarditis is associated with something that is caused by the mRNA vaccines, so it’s more than reasonable to say that anything with a signal larger than myocarditis/pericarditis should be taken seriously and investigated.”

Guetzkow expanded on his commentary in a January 4, 2023, Substack article.8 Below is a summary list of some of the key findings from the CDC’s PRR analysis. Guetzkow goes deeper in his article, so for more details, I suggest reading it in its entirety.

For even more analyses and commentary, see Fenton’s Substack article, “The CDC’s Data on COVID Vaccine Safety Signals.”9 If you want to investigate the PRR data for yourself, you can download them from The Epoch Times’ January 3, 2023, article.10 You can also find them here.11

In individuals aged 18 and older, there are safety signals for 770 different adverse events, and two-thirds of them (more than 500) have a stronger safety signal than myocarditis and pericarditis. Of those 770 signals, 12 are brand-new conditions that have not been reported following other vaccines.

Topping the list of safety signals are cardiovascular conditions, followed by neurological conditions. In third and fourth place are thromboembolic conditions and pulmonary conditions. Death is sixth on the list and cancer is 11th. Considering the uptick we’ve seen in aggressive cancers, the fact that death tops cancer really says something.

The number of serious adverse events reported between mid-December 2020 and the end of July 2022 (just over 19 months) for the COVID jabs is 5.5 times greater than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the U.S. over the last 13 years (approximately 73,000 versus 13,000).
Twice as many COVID jab reports were classified as serious compared to all other vaccines given to adults (11% vs. 5.5%), which meets the definition of a safety signal.
The proportions of reported deaths, which was only provided for the 18+ age group, was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines. As noted by Fenton,12 “If the CDC wish [sic] to claim that the probability a COVID vaccine adverse event results in death is not significantly higher than that of other vaccines the onus is on them to come up with some other causal explanation for this difference.”
In the 12- to 17-year-old age group, there are 96 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, Bell’s Palsy, genital ulcerations, high blood pressure, menstrual irregularities, cardiac valve incompetency, pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrhythmia, thrombosis, pericardial and pleural effusion, appendicitis and perforated appendix, immune thrombocytopenia, chest pain and increased troponin levels (indicative of heart damage).
In the 5- to 11-year-old group, there are 66 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction, cardiac valve incompetency, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis and appendectomies, Kawasaki’s disease, menstrual irregularities and vitiligo.

It’s worth noting that the CDC didn’t perform its first safety signal analysis until March 25, 2022 — 15 months after the shots were rolled out. Why the long wait — especially since the CDC had announced it would begin monitoring in early 2021? Just consider, for a moment, how many lives have been lost because the CDC failed to properly monitor safety, and still drags its feet when it comes to warning people about the risks involved.

FDA Still Refuses to Share Safety Data

The FDA is also required to perform safety monitoring using another technique called Empirical Bayesian data mining. The Epoch Times first asked the FDA to release its monitoring results back in July 2022,13,14 but like the CDC, the FDA refused and insisted the data showed no evidence of serious adverse effects. In other words, “Just trust us. We’re experts.”

According to the FDA, the only potential signal they’d found through April 16, 2021, was for raised body temperature.15 Then, in mid-December 2022 — just four months after The Epoch Times tried to get these data — the FDA announced that pulmonary embolism (blood clots that block blood flow in the lungs) had met the threshold for a statistical signal, and continued to meet the criteria after in-depth evaluation, but it was only linked to the Pfizer jab.16

As noted by The Epoch Times,17 pulmonary embolism is also identified as a signal in the CDC’s PRR analysis for individuals as young as 12, which really ought to strengthen concerns.

The FDA also admitted it had already evaluated three other warning signals: lack of oxygen to the heart, immune thrombocytopenia (a blood platelet disorder) and intravascular coagulation (a type of blood clotting), but none of these continued to meet the threshold after analysis.

If the FDA was evaluating four warning signals, why did they tell The Epoch Times there was no evidence of ill effects, and why did they claim the only potential signal they’d found was slight fever? Are we to believe they discovered these signals after The Epoch Times asked for the monitoring results and then completed four in-depth investigations in four months?

Whatever the truth, it’s clear that both the CDC and FDA are not being transparent. Worse, they’ve hidden data, knowing it could mean the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands of people.

CDC Has Ignored Clear ‘Death’ Signal

The CDC ignoring a clear signal for death is probably the most egregious example of its failures as a public health institution. As early as July 2021, Matthew Crawford published a three-part series18,19,20 detailing how the CDC was hiding safety signals by using a flawed formula. In August that year, Steve Kirsch informed the agency of these problems, but was ignored.

Then, in an October 3, 2022, article,21 Kirsch went on to show how “death” should have triggered a signal even when using the CDC’s flawed formula (which is described in its VAERS standard operating procedures manual22). Here’s an excerpt:23

“The formula the CDC uses for generating safety signals is fundamentally flawed; a ‘bad’ vaccine with lots of adverse events will ‘mask’ large numbers of important safety signals … Let me summarize the key points for you in a nutshell: PRR [proportional reporting ratio] is defined on page 16 in the CDC document24 as follows … Table 4. Calculation of Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR)

A ‘safety signal’ is defined on page 16 in the CDC document as a PRR of at least 2, chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and 3 or more cases of the AE [adverse event] following receipt of the specific vaccine of interest. This is the famous ‘and clause.’ Here it is from the document: 2.3.1 Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR)

Only someone who is incompetent or is deliberately trying to make the vaccines look safe would use the word ‘and’ in the definition of a safety signal.

Using ‘and’ means that if any one of the conditions isn’t satisfied, no safety signal will be generated. As noted below, the PRR will rarely trigger which virtually guarantees that most events generated by an unsafe vaccine will never get flagged.

The PRR value for the COVID vaccines will rarely exceed 1 because there are so many adverse events from the COVID vaccine because it is so dangerous (i.e., B in the formula is a huge number) so the numerator is always near zero. Hence, the ‘safety signal’ is rarely triggered because the vaccine is so dangerous.”

A Fictitious Example

Using a fictitious vaccine as the example, Kirsch explained how an exceptionally dangerous vaccine will fly under the radar and not get flagged, thanks to this flawed formula:25

“Suppose we have the world’s most dangerous vaccine that causes adverse events in everyone who gets it and generates 25,000 different adverse events, and each adverse event has 1,000 instances.

That means that the numerator is 1,000/25,000,000 which is just 40 events per million reported events. Now let’s look at actuals for something like deaths. For all other vaccines, there are 6,200 deaths and 1 million adverse events total.

Since 40 per million is less than 6,200 deaths per million, we are not even close to generating a safety signal for deaths from our hypothetical vaccine which killed 1,000 people in a year … The point is that a dangerous vaccine can look very ‘safe’ using the PRR formula.”

Calculating Death Signal for the COVID Jab

Next, Kirsch calculates the PRR for death for the COVID jab — using VAERS data and the CDC’s definitions and formula. As of December 31, 2019, there were 6,157 deaths and 918,717 adverse events total for all vaccines other than the COVID shot. As of September 23, 2022, there were 31,214 deaths and 1.4 million adverse events total for the COVID jabs. Here’s the formula as explained by Kirsch:26

“PRR = (31,214/1.4e6) / (6,157/918,717) = 3.32, which exceeds the required threshold of 2. In other words, the COVID vaccine is so deadly that even with all the adverse events generated by the vaccine, the death signal did not get drowned out!

But there is still the chi-square test. Chi-square test results were 18,549 for ‘death,’ which greatly exceeds the required threshold of 4. The CDC chi-square test is clearly satisfied for the COVID vaccine. Because the death signal is so huge, it even survived the PRR test.

This means that even using the CDCs own erroneous … formula, all three criteria were satisfied:

  1. PRR>2 [PRR greater than 2]: It was 3.32
  2. Chi-square>2 [Chi-square greater than 2]: It was 18,549
  3. 3 or more reports: There were over 31,214 death reports received by VAERS … which is more than 3

A safety signal should have been generated but wasn’t. Why not? … Hundreds of thousands of American lives have been lost due to the inability of the CDC to deploy their own flawed safety signal analysis … It’s been known since at least 2004 that using reporting odds ratio (ROR) is a better estimate of relative risk than PRR.27 I don’t know why the CDC doesn’t use it.”

The CDC is also hiding the severity of side effects in other ways. As explained by Fenton,28 the way side effects are categorized by the CDC help obfuscate the scale of certain problems. For example, “cardiac failure acute,” “cardiac failure,” “infarction,” “myocardial strain” and “myocardial fibrosis” are listed as separate categories, even though in real life they’re all potential effects of myocarditis.

By separating them, you end up with fewer frequency counts per category, thereby giving you an underpowered chi-square test so that a warning signal is not triggered. If related categories were merged, far stronger safety signals would likely emerge.

CDC Has No Reasonable Defense

The CDC is responsible for monitoring both VAERS and V-Safe, and between these two databases, there’s no possible way they could ever say they didn’t know the shots were harming and killing millions of Americans.

The CDC also has access to other databases, including the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), which (before it was intentionally altered29) showed massive increases in debilitating and lethal conditions, including a tripling of cancer cases.30

The findings in these databases have never been brought forward during any of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meetings or the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meetings, at which members have repeatedly voted to authorize the jabs to people of all ages, including infants and pregnant women.

They even added these toxic shots to the childhood vaccine schedule — which allows states to mandate them for school attendance — without addressing any of the 66 safety signals found in the CDC’s PRR analysis. The fact of the matter is that the CDC has known about these risks all along, and there’s no excuse for not sharing and acting on these data.

Help Spread the Word

Mainstream media are ignoring all of this, so help spread the word. Everyone needs to know what the CDC’s safety data reveal. To that end, here are a few suggestions for how you can help:

  • Write or call your members of Congress and ask them to investigate the CDC’s safety monitoring — We cannot have a public safety agency that is incapable of monitoring safety and taking appropriate action when problems are found, be it correcting a flawed formula or announcing that a safety signal has been detected. Of course, they must also publish their findings once an investigation has been made.
  • Contact your local newspaper and urge them to investigate and report on the CDC’s failure to act on safety signals.
  • Share the data on social media and ask why no one in the media, Congress, academia or medical community is investigating these matters.
  • Share this information with your doctor and members of the medical community.
  • Also share it with university administrators, and ask them to explain how and why, in light of these data, they are still mandating COVID shots.

RELATED ARTICLES:

UNDERCOVER VIDEO: Pfizer Scientists Knew That mRNA Covid “Vaccine” Was Likely Cause of Myocarditis, Heart Attacks

The WHO’s Proposed Amendments to the International Health Regulations

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

VIDEO: Billions of Dollars for Lost Wages During Pandemic Went to Improper Payments

Billions of taxpayer dollars for the COVID-19 Lost Wages Assistance program went to improper payments that the Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to control.

Open the Books founder Adam Andrzejewski joined The National Desk’s Jan Jeffcoat Friday morning to discuss the money.

“The president, by August of 2020, authorized FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to provide extra unemployment payments to people who had real needs,” he said. “It was up to $44 billion worth of extra payments. And eventually, very quickly, within 11 days, about $37 billion was allocated from the Federal Emergency Management System into the state’s unemployment aid system to provide additional dollars … There was $3.7 billion basically stolen from the program on these improper payments.”

It’s yet another case of economic fallout from pandemic-related programs.

Andrzejewski says it comes down to a “lack of control” that led to so much cash getting into the hands of the wrong people.

“Through the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, they piggyback off the state unemployment aid programs. And those add a complete lack of accounting control and fraud,” he said. “This is the greatest public fraud in the history of the country that came out of our unemployment state programs … Congress had allocated $800 billion to the Unemployment Aid Program, again to serve people who had real needs. And now we know that up to half of it, $400 billion, was stolen by criminals, cons artists and crime syndicates around the world.”

Andrzejewski says it’s a prime issue for the new Republican majority in the House to investigate within their fraud committees.

RELATED: Map: Congressional Earmarks in 2023

EDITORS NOTE: This Open The Books expose is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Moshe Dayan’s Great Mistake

In June 1967, Israeli paratroopers under the command of Mordechai (Motta) Gur broke through the Jordanian defenses and captured the Old City, where the Jewish Quarter, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount – the holiest site in Judaism – are all contained. Many Israelis believed that after 19 years of being denied access, they, and Jews everywhere, would again have unfettered access to the Temple Mount, where they would be able to pray. Alas, it was not to be. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, a secularist, who was intent on mollifying the defeated Arabs, had other ideas. Meir Soloveichik writes about Dayan’s tragic blunder here: “Moshe Dayan’s Tragic Blunder,” Commentary, February 2023:

There is an argument to be made for permitting wider access and the right to pray for Jews at the site of the biblical Temples. In part, this argument charges that defense minister Moshe Dayan, in electing not to fully realize Israel’s sovereignty over the Mount immediately after its breathtaking capture in the 1967 war, helped facilitate the resonant Palestinian lie that the Jews have no connection to our ancient homeland—for surely, if the Temple Mount was historically ours, religiously ours, we would not have handed it back to them.

Dayan had the perfect opportunity to end, once and for all, the Arab attempt to cut Jews off from the holiest site in Judaism. When east Jerusalem, and the Old City, were under Jordanian control, from 1949 to 1967, no Jews could visit the Temple Mount or the Western Wall. Dayan might, in the heady aftermath of that spectacular victory in June 1967, have declared that from now on, Jews could visit the Temple Mount, at any time of day, and on any day of the week, just as the Muslims could. He might have insisted that Jews could say their prayers on the Temple Mount, just as the Muslims did. But instead he strictly limited Jewish “visiting hours” on the Mount to four hours a day, and then on only five days of the week. And more terrible still, he decided to forbid Jewish prayer, open or silent, at the holiest site in Judaism, a policy that has been dutifully followed by every Israeli government since Dayan’s day.

Anxious to avoid a full-on confrontation with the entire Muslim world [but just how, following Israel’s stunning victory against three Arab states, would that Muslim world be able to summon the strength to “confront” Israel?], and utilizing the halachic argument that Jews should not set foot on the Mount for fear of defiling the sacred ground where the Temple and its Holy of Holies once stood, he allowed Jordan’s Muslim Waqf to continue to administer the compound’s holy places.

It was not wrong to let the Waqf continue to administer the Muslim holy sites. What was wrong was Dayan’s not asserting the right of Jews to visit the Temple Mount at any time, “just as Muslims do,” and especially, in not insisting that “Jews of course will now have the same rights as Muslims to pray on the Temple Mount.” Put that way, it would be hard for the Western powers to reject such a reasonable, and modest, request.

Netanyahu, David Horovitz [editor of the Jerusalem Post, writing in a recent article] continued, had “wisely” adopted Dayan’s approach previously, but now the prime minister had “sanctioned” an act of “potential pyromania.” This is a reference to [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir’s visit to the Temple Mount. Horovitz’s account leaves out the fact that the decision of the ardently secular Dayan was founded on total disregard for what the Temple Mount meant to religious Jews.

Horovitz, another left-wing secularist, calls on Netanyahu not to change Dayan’s policy on the Temple Mount, but to continue to limit Jewish access and to block Jewish prayer. He preposterously calls Ben-Gvir’s visit to the Temple Mount an act of “potential pyromania.” There were all sorts of Arab threats, that if Ben Gvir made that visit, there would be an “explosion” of Arab violence. But he visited, walked around the perimeter of the Compound, steered clear of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, did not pray, made no statement, and left after 13 minutes. And no upsurge of Arab riots and violence resulted from this so-called “pyromaniac’s” visit.

After his paratroopers broke through Jordanian lines in 1967 and reached the site, Mordechai Gur exultantly exclaimed that “the Temple Mount is in our hands.” Dayan, in contrast, infamously reflected, “What do I need this Vatican for?”As the Israeli journalist Nadav Sharagai has documented, Dayan’s actions were based in the presumption that the Temple Mount is not of any religious significance to Jews at all:

Dayan thought at the time, and years later committed his thoughts to writing, that since the Mount was a “Muslim prayer mosque,” while for Jews it was no more than “a historical site of commemoration of the past…one should not hinder the Arabs behaving there as they do now and one should recognize their right as Muslims to control the site.”…

Dayan was a brilliant military commander, but otherwise he left much to be desired. He did not feel any religious attachment himself to the Temple Mount, which, given that he was an atheist, can be understood, but what he also lacked was any comprehension of how much that site meant to others, not just to religious Jews, but even to many secular Jews less dogmatic than he. He did not feel along his pulse that the Temple Mount was the holiest site in Judaism, and was unable to empathize with the millions of Jews who felt that it was such. Nor did he see the Temple Mount as the site not just of religious significance, but of the greatest historical importance to the Jews, the place where both the First and Second Temples had stood. Dayan’s description of the Temple Mount only as a “Muslim prayer mosque,” and his dismissal of the Jews’ 2600-year-old attachment to the site, are shocking. He famously, and unforgivably, wrote that “one should not hinder the Arabs behaving there as they do now” and “one should recognize their right as Muslims to control the site.” He was sympathetic to Muslim claims, but not to those of the Jews, to the Temple Mount; he was unable to grasp the depth of the Jewish attachment – that is, of Jews other than himself – to the Temple Mount. And that led to his unforgivable blunder, in forbidding Jewish prayer on the Mount, at the very time when allowing it would have been accepted by the defeated and thoroughly demoralized Arabs.

The Palestinian attempt to insist that there never was a Jewish connection to the Haram al-Sharif (as Muslims call the Temple Mount), even denying that there ever were two Jewish temples at the site, despite what even non-Jewish historians have written, has had the effect of pushing religious Jews, and some secular ones too, to more forcefully stake the Jewish claim by visiting the Mount in much greater numbers than before the Palestinian denial.

The hysteria over the “far-right” members of the Netanyahu government, expressed by Jews and non-Jews alike, is hardly warranted. And so far these incessant cries of alarm, that “Israel is no longer a democracy,“ that “Israel has lost its soul,” and suchlike alarm, overlook the obvious: the new government that is being called “an enemy to democracy” was itself elected democratically, and can be turned out anytime the voters of Israel chose to do so. That Israeli electorate has, after all, gone through ten governments since 2001.

Now is the time for Israel to state clearly its case for undoing Moshe Dayan’s historic blunder. Prime Minister Netanyahu can speak thus to the world:

“For 2600 years, even before the destruction of the First Temple on the Temple Mount in 586 B.C., and the destruction of the Second Temple on the same site in 70 A.D., what we Jews call the Temple Mount and the Muslims call Haram al-Sharif was the religious and historical center of Jewish life. Under the Babylonians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, and the British, Jews maintained their right to visit and pray on the Temple Mount. During these thousands of years, it was only during the period from 1949 to 1967, when Jordan held east Jerusalem and the Old City, that Jews were forbidden to visit the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. In 1967, Israel came into possession of the Old City, and once again Jews could visit the Temple Mount. But it was the decision of one man, Moshe Dayan, in June of 1967, that deprived Jews of the right to pray on the Temple Mount. And ever since, we Jews have had to endure the paradox of not being able to pray at the holiest site in Judaism. Now that prohibition has been lifted, and Jews will again be free to pray — as Muslims have been able to — just as they did before 1949, on the Temple Mount.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLE: Sweden permits Qur’an-burning, Turkey says Swedes must fight those who ‘target Islam’ if it wants to join NATO

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

The Making of and Dealing with Jihadists

Bewildered by what fanatic Muslims do, some conclude that Muslims are brainwashed. Otherwise, how can their totally illogical belief system and barbaric behavior be explained? But the notion of “brainwashing” that is bandied about is the stuff of science fiction and Hollywood movies such as the Manchurian Candidate.
The human person arrives in this world with his brain already washed in the sense of being what John Lock called tabula rasa, a clean slate—ready for an experience to imprint its script on it. John Lock was only partly correct. The brain also arrives with numerous predispositions already in place. It is a combination of life’s influences and a person’s own decisions that determine which of these dispositions develop and which ones fail. It is through this process that a unique human being is formed.

Many animals come with already in-place programs that automatically run much of their lives. Birds’ migration, mating courtship, and thousands of other complex behaviors are instances of this type of specific programming. A catchword for this type of behavior is “instinct.” As a general rule, the higher the organism the less is its rigid pre-programs and the greater its latitude to exercise choices.

Making choices depends on what there is to choose from and to what extent a given choice appeals to the person. And the human newborn enters the arena of life without the means of being other than a passive recipient of “things” already chosen for him.

It is like the old joke by Henry Ford who reportedly told his customers that they could have the choice of color for their car as long as it is black. Things are almost as bleak for the new arrival. He didn’t have a say in choosing his parents, his socio-economic condition, his environment of birth, and much more. All are already in place and he is to start in life from the context of his birth.

The development of a newborn in any family is influenced by many factors, among them how hands-on the parents are; how religious they are, and how severely they micromanage him in an attempt to make him not only a good person but also a person better-one than they themselves.

Parents tend to live vicariously through their children by programming them, the best they can so that they become or achieve much of what they had failed to become or accomplish. This attitude covers all areas of life such as giving the child the education they didn’t have, helping him with fame and fortune, nurturing him to become a top-notch athlete, and so forth.

It is a fact that early influences play a cardinal role in shaping a person. For this reason, for instance, the overwhelming majority of Muslims have been born into Muslim families, Catholics into Catholic families, Hindus into Hindu families, and so on. It is also a fact that the degree of religiosity ranges from mild to strong, with most people falling somewhere between the two extremes.

Interestingly, two siblings raised by the same set of parents under the same influences may end up at the opposite extremes in their religious views and practices. Here, the human dynamic of freedom of choice comes into play and steers one to one extreme and the other to the other extreme. Occasional extreme deviations notwithstanding, the great majority of siblings of a given family end up with various degrees of that family’s overall religious and other values. The same general principle of subscribing to a set of common values exists in all human groupings, in some cases with broad flexibility and inclusiveness while in others with rigidity and exclusivity.

In order to enjoy the privileges of belonging to a group, the person must also pay his dues of membership.

The very young human faces, beginning with the minute he can make some sense of the world, a bewildering array of mysteries, challenges, and enticements. There are questions at every step, fears, and hopes entangled with the need to survive and possibly thrive.

Who am I? What is this world all about? What’s the purpose? What am I supposed to do and how? Where am I headed? People die. Where do they go? And on and on and on. The information booths available to him in the fairground of life provide him with answers that may help relieve his innate existentialistic anxiety. And it is here that religion plays a critical role and holds a great appeal. Religion provides a surefire answer to those who are willing to take it on faith.

And Islam is a powerful magnet for the masses that are unable to deal with the uncertainties of life and death on their own. It is from this population, many already thoroughly indoctrinated from birth, that the majority of diehard jihadists emerge.

It is the bargain the jihadist makes. He surrenders totally to the religion of surrender in exchange for blanket security. Islam gives him all the answers he really seeks for dealing with this world and promises him a lush and eternal paradise of Allah once he leaves it. And leaving this world in perfect submission as the foot-soldier of the paradise’s creator gives the faithful unimaginably glorious sensual eternal reward in his next life. It’s a bargain that some buy in whole, some in part, and some refuse and seek other means of dealing with their questions and the unrelenting existentialistic anxiety.

The great majority of jihadists emanate from the ranks of those born into the religion of Islam, simply because they are the ones who are most thoroughly indoctrinated and influenced by the Islamic dogma in their most receptive early years. Yet, there are others who embrace Islam in adulthood, on their own and enlist themselves as devoted jihadists for the same rewards that Islam offers them.

Islam has a great advantage of the first call on the new arrival. It is an omnipresent system with masses of believers, mosques, madrasahs, and a host of other social and economic organizations that overpower the person and steer him into the same fold; it is a sea of people who seem to know what they are all about, what life and death are all about, and what one must also do.

Within this sea of surging humanity composed of some 1.5 billion Muslims, each individual believer—a drop—through a combination of choice and forces beyond his control, ends up in one of its many waves. It is the jihadist wave that is highly attractive to the deeply indoctrinated and poorly adjusted in dealing rationally and independently with life. Here, he finds the iron-clad perfect solution to his anxieties and perplexities.

To a jihadist, death is nothing more than casting off a shell of the worthless earthly existence and donning the suit for winging joyously to the life of bliss promised by none other than Allah’s beloved final emissary, Muhammad.

The eradication of jihadism is a daunting task since Islam is a virulent persistent pandemic disease. Massive education efforts, combined with a resolute confrontation of all sources and people that support and promote this deadly philosophy, hold the best promise of dealing effectively with this affliction of humanity.

In addition to the family, places such as mosques and madrasahs, Islamic associations and charitable organizations, prisons, and the like are incubators for jihadists. Massive efforts are required, on the one hand, to drain the breeding swamps of the Islamic virus, while on the other hand helping Muslims adopt an alternative perspective of life that addresses their perplexities and offers a degree of comfort that religions dispense without pitting one segment of humanity against another.

In the monumental task of dealing with jihadism, every individual, group, and government must combine their resources and energies to prevail. The destiny of civilized life hangs in the balance. It is an unpardonable act of shirking responsibility for anyone to adopt the attitude of “let George do it.” George is you. George is I. George is every enlightened human being and organization that values human liberty and dignity.

©Amil Imani. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: UK: Teen converts to Islam, plots jihad massacres in London

The Cancer that is Public Health

“Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.” — Vladimir Lenin, Russian politician, communist theorist and the founder of the Soviet Union


There’s no doubt why Obama and the Democrats pushed so hard to get it passed and nationalize the greatest medical institution in the world. The barbarians took a wrecking ball to it.

First part of an incredible story that shows just how broken our public “health” apparatus is — very, very broken.

The Cancer that is Public Health

By David Bell, January 17, 2023:

Sometimes an institution or movement turns on the society that supports it, harming the whole for its own benefit. A public bureaucracy can forget its underlying purpose and focus on perpetuating itself, or an organization comes to believe that the rest of society owes it special privileges. When an organ within the body of society becomes thus corrupted, and proves itself unwilling to reform, society must excise the diseased tissue before it spreads.

Cancer and its causes

Cancer starts when cells within an organ begin to operate outside the strictures and rules that the body’s cells were programmed to follow. This can be triggered by environmental factors such as chemicals, radiation, or viral infections. It can also occur due to structural errors in the DNA that determine the body’s growth and function.

Immune mechanisms often control and eliminate early cancerous change, with the person remaining unaware that there was even a threat. Sometimes however, the cancerous change is too great for these inbuilt checks to overcome. Its growth is beyond what the body was designed to address, or the body has become so sickened by age, attack or neglect that it can no longer mount an adequate defense.

As a cancer grows, it slowly corrupts the organ it arose within, impairing or changing its function. Demanding more nourishment to support its own rapid growth, it saps the body’s ability to support the rest of its billions of cells. In time the whole body deteriorates, though the cancer continues to grow and extract nourishment to the end, effectively repurposing the body solely towards its own support.

Death may be averted by removing the offending cancer, or even the entire organ from which it arose. But if the organ is vital to survival or the cancer has infiltrated other vital organs, excision is not possible. Sometimes the cancer may be poisoned or killed with radiation or immunotherapy without killing the entire body. But if it cannot be so dealt with, it takes the entire body down with it. This is a relatively common way to die.

Society is in many ways like the human body. Its various organs perform their functions to support the whole, all interdependent for survival. Corruption of one organ will, if left unchecked, corrupt the whole body. Most societal organs have rules that keep them in line with society’s needs. When external influences poison or degrade them and these rules are broken, the organ grows to the detriment of the whole. If society is healthy, it may be able to reform or replace the offending organ. If it is not, or if the corruption has infiltrated too deeply, society will become increasingly sick as its lifeblood is sucked away, and in time it may die.

A cancer on society

The international public health sector comprises the World Health Organization (WHO), a growing bevy of other international health agencies and numerous non-governmental organizations and foundations. Ostensibly its role is to support global society in maintaining overall health. By WHO’s definition, health is the ‘physical, mental and social wellbeing’ of all people, in equal measure. For reasons of promoting equality and human rights, the sector focuses on populations in low-income countries where life expectancies are lower and resources most limited. Various rules on conflict of interest, together with the traditional unprofitability of poor people’s healthcare, had once kept the private sector mostly uninvolved and uninterested. WHO’s lifeblood funding was restricted to assessed national contributions of its Member States.

Over the past two decades, the growth of mass vaccination has provided a viable way to extract profit from the healthcare of these low-income populations. Reflecting this, private interests and corporations have become keen to fund WHO’s work. These sources follow a ‘directed funding’ model through which they specify how and where their sponsorship will be used. Private money and corporate direction also heavily influence new organizations set up in parallel including Gavi and CEPI, focused on supplying commodities from which these sponsors profit. This has changed international health from a horizontal, country- and community-driven approach to a vertically-driven commodity-based model.

While the international public health sector is still heavily dependent on taxpayer funding, the funding of corporations and their investors has won them great influence over this increasingly commoditized agenda. Public funding thereby shifts wealth from the average taxpayer to the wealthy who have invested in these goods. An organ nourished by and designed to support the whole has been repurposed by these external influences into acting like a cancer on society, still fed by the body but directed to its own benefit.

Cancerous growths sicken the body

If this cancer analogy seems a stretch when applied to the ‘humanitarian’ sector, it is instructive to review recent history. In 2019, after a structured process laid out for guideline development, WHO published their guidelines for pandemic influenza. These specifically state that contact tracing, border closures and quarantining of well individuals should not occur during an established pandemic. At most, sick people could be confined at home for 7-10 days. School closures, if used, should be short-term. Restrictive measures, as WHO noted, would not significantly reduce mortality but would disproportionately harm low-income people and raise major ethical and human rights concerns.

A few months after publishing these guidelines, senior WHO executives recommended restrictive measures far beyond those that their own guidelines had warned against. To appreciate the gravity of the harms inflicted on the billions of people in low-income countries, we must understand that those orchestrating them knew that these populations were at very low risk from Covid-19 itself.

The massive skewing of Covid mortality towards old age was published in the Lancet in early 2020. More than half of the 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa are under 20 years of age and therefore at near-zero risk, whilst less than 1% are over 75 years. The average age of Covid-associated deaths in Western countries is about 80 years.

The WHO, CEPI, Gavi and other public health organizations knew that rapid health service access and good nutrition are fundamental to reducing child mortality. They knew that infant mortality in low-income countries is strongly tied to gross domestic product (GDP) and therefore harming economies would kill millions (which it is, with UNICEF noting over 200,000 lockdown deaths in South Asia in 2020 alone).

In advocating for measures to restrict health service access and disrupt supply lines, they knowingly caused an immediate and sustained increase in malaria, pneumonia and other acute infectious disease. By restricting access to tuberculosis and HIV care, the death rate of those already infected would increase whilst also promoting transmission, locking in greater future mortality. These diseases kill at a far younger average age than Covid.

Recommendations to close workplaces in cities left millions of workers in the same crowded living conditions as before, but with no income to buy food and medicine for their families. Closure of markets further reduced access to nutrition, whilst also reducing farm earnings. Knowing the importance of tourism to the service and retail industries that support millions of women’s education and independence, advocacy to block international travel further impoverished these people.

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

RELATED TWEET:

RELATED ARTICLES:

25-Year-Old Doctor Who Ran Multiple Vaccine Clinics Suddenly Dead

After 464 Days, CDC Finally Coughed up Covid-19 Vaccine Safety Data Showing 7.7% of People Reported Needing Medical Care

Utah Doctor, Others Charged With Giving Saline shots Instead of Controversial Covid Vaccine

21 Year Old Surfer Evan McMillen Dies Suddenly

Young Fox News Exec Dies Suddenly

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