What is happening in Iran these days is world-historical. The entire country is rising up against a brutal, violent, repressive regime that the people of Iran have endured for over forty years, and the most courageous of all are little schoolgirls who have their whole lives ahead of them and thus the most to lose. Yet while practically the entirety of what used to be called the free world is cheering on the demonstrators who are standing unarmed against ruthless security forces, one imam in Texas is not happy at all. Yasir Qadhi, one of the most prominent Muslim clerics and Islamic apologists in the United States, recently likened the protests in Iran to protesting for the right to walk around nude in Texas. Yes, he really did.
The East Plano Islamic Center’s YouTube channel, EPIC Masjid (which has nearly 300,000 subscribers), recently posted a video of Qadhi explaining that to oppose Iran’s mandatory hijab law, which some women have received ten-year prison sentences for violating, is tantamount to opposing public indecency laws in the good old USA. Qadhi said:“In the last two weeks, I have been inundated with dozens of emails with one particular focus or theme… regarding the enforcement of the hijab in a particular country, and apparently, it caused the death of somebody and whatnot.” Qadhi explained that he wasn’t a political commentator, and so he said he wasn’t going to name the country or get into the political issues involved.
Qadhi said that he received a question from one of his followers, a high-school girl: “Is it true that our religion forces the women to wear the hijab? Can an Islamic government have this right? Shouldn’t worship be done freely?” Qadhi responded by warning about getting involved in hypothetical issues that are far beyond our own responsibility: “I am not responsible for something happening five thousand miles away.” He then launched into a lengthy critique of Western secularism, comparing it unfavorably to Islamic law, and argued that all countries, including those in the secular West, enforce codes of morality; they just differ in their content.
On that basis, Qadhi then advanced a curious argument: “Even in the West,” he explained, “there are laws against indecency, and there are moral prescriptions about what one can and should and must wear.” He added: “If you show certain parts of the body, and if you show certain organs of your body, you shall be fined, and if you continue to do so, you shall go to jail. Now, the issue therefore is not over, Can the state control what you can or cannot show. The issue is, How much can you show? So some Middle Eastern countries might have a lot more. And, uh, here in America, it is a lot less. But the notion of the state telling you a minimal amount that you can wear, that is pretty much universal.”
That’s true as far as it goes, but Qadhi is ignoring the fact that women have received draconian and disproportionate sentences for not wearing the hijab, and 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed in police custody after being arrested for not wearing her hijab properly in the eyes of the security forces. That already takes the protests in Iran far beyond any question of the right of the state to make laws regarding public indecency. Nor is brutality against Muslim women who dare not to wear the hijab limited to Iran. Aqsa Parvez’s Muslim father choked her to death with her hijab after she refused to wear it. Amina Muse Ali was a Christian woman in Somalia whom Muslims murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Forty women were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab. Alya Al-Safar’s Muslim cousin threatened to kill her and harm her family because she stopped wearing the hijab in Britain. Amira Osman Hamid faced whipping in Sudan for refusing to wear the hijab. An Egyptian girl, also named Amira, committed suicide after being brutalized by her family for refusing to wear the hijab. Muslim and non-Muslim teachers at the Islamic College of South Australia were told they had to wear the hijab or be fired. Women in Chechnya were shot with paintballs by police because they weren’t wearing hijab. Other women in Chechnya were threatened by men with automatic rifles for not wearing hijab.
Elementary school teachers in Tunisia were threatened with death for not wearing hijab. Syrian schoolgirls were forbidden to go to school unless they wore hijab. Women in Gaza were forced by Hamas to wear hijab. Women in London were threatened with murder by Muslim thugs if they didn’t wear hijab. An anonymous young Muslim woman doffed her hijab outside her home and started living a double life in fear of her parents. Fifteen girls in Saudi Arabia were killed when the religious police wouldn’t let them leave their burning school building because they had taken off their hijabs in their all-female environment. A girl in Italy had her head shaved by her mother for not wearing hijab.
In the face of all this and more, Yasir Qadhi scoffs at “this notion of fetishizing the hijab and the headscarf, and saying ‘Oh, they have the right to not wear it,’” and asks, “Well then, why aren’t these same people fighting for the rights of nudity here in Texas? Why aren’t they fighting for the rights of no man and woman — or sorry, every man and woman — to wear nothing in every single state in Europe and every single country and city across the world?”
Maybe because no one is killing those who are guilty of public indecency in Texas. In fact, sometimes they get to play James Madison’s flute. The issue in Iran is all about a barbaric, brutal, repressive regime that kills its own people. Qadhi is just obfuscating, although he does raise an important question: can someone who supports Sharia as fully as he does accept the existence of a secular society on an indefinite basis?
EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
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http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00John Droz, Jr.http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJohn Droz, Jr.2022-10-10 05:58:172022-10-10 05:58:17AWED MEDIA BALANCED NEWSLETTER: We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.
A group of Australian doctors, scientists, and leading academics aims to “end mandates and social coercion, and stop lockdowns happening again.”
People of a certain age will remember only too well Pastor Martin Niemöller’s poignant lament that as the Nazis hunted down groups one by one, those outside the target groups kept their head down and voice quiet in order to stay out of trouble. “Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.”
In the Covid equivalent, since 2020 first they went after the lockdown critics, organising “devastating takedowns” of “fringe epidemiologists” just as with the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, forging semi-fascist alliances between state and corporate power involving Big Government, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Media and Big Philanthropy.
Then they went after the mask mandate resisters, othering them as selfish far right-wingers with no thought for the welfare of the collective community. Next they moved seamlessly to the vaccine-hesitant, tarring and treating them as germ-carrying walking biohazards too diseased and unclean to be fit for society.
No middle ground
Justin Trudeau talked the banks and financial service providers into freezing the funds and accounts of anyone supporting the truckers’ Freedom Convoy and PayPal UK most recently demonetised Toby Young and the Free Speech Union. Stung by the immediate, powerful and growing backlash, they’ve cancelled their own cancellation, but that doesn’t detract from the new chilling low of attacking an organisation that took no position of its own but merely defended the right of everyone to speak freely.
Australia was not immune to the galloping authoritarianism of Western democracies. Melbourne was Ground Zero for some of the most draconian restrictions on individual freedoms and civil liberties, as most routine daily activities were criminalised for people and small businesses.
Victoria became the world leader among democracies in police excesses, as peaceful protestors (yes, you read that right) were bashed with batons, fired upon with rubber bullets, a pregnant young woman was arrested and handcuffed in the presence of her toddlers while still in pyjamas for posting on Facebook about a planned peaceful protest with people asked to be masked and respect social distancing, and so on. Sydney streets were patrolled by the military.
A handy compilation of these scenes can be seen in this sober yet partly fun interview with Jay Bhattacharya when he was recently in Melbourne.
Excessive legislation
Yesterday, September 28, I received a press release from the Australian Medical Network (AMN). A bill before the Queensland Parliament is to be debated and voted into law on October 11.
It will compel doctors to refrain from saying anything that reduces “public confidence in safety.” According to the AMN, the new law means (1) “government health bureaucrats will determine how doctors should approach treatment recommendations for their patients” and (2) would give to the health regulators “the power to sanction doctors for expressing their professional opinion based on their assessment of the best available science.”
Furthermore, by legal provisions I don’t fully understand but a couple of lawyers examining this have assured me is a correct understanding, once enacted, the state law will become more or less the national law.
The collapsing official narrative
The debate is over, the verdict is in: lockdowns did not work in reducing Covid infection and mortality burdens but did cause enormous and lasting damage on health (especially through cancelled operations and deferred screenings for treatable-if-detected-early killer diseases like cancers and heart conditions), mental health, children’s development, youth well-being, and employment, poverty, food security, and economic outcomes.
Dr Scott Atlas from Stanford University’s Medical Center and later the coronavirus adviser to President Donald Trump, explained how policies of total isolation prevent the development of population immunity which prolongs the problem. The harm/benefit balance of lockdowns, school closures, masks and universal instead of age-segregated vaccines is tilting increasingly toward net harms.
A US assessment released in September showed school closures had wiped out decades of progress in math and reading. Numerous studies show little correlation between the severity, timing and duration of lockdown either for countries or for US states. Age-adjusted mortality of Florida today is no worse than that of New York.
Much-maligned Brazil’s mortality rate is less than half that of hard and extended lockdown Peru, significantly lower than Czechia, nearly identical to Chile and only slightly higher than UK and Italy. Its cumulative cases per million people is currently less than half that of Australia and the pandemic’s hermit kingdom New Zealand, and lower than highly-masked Japan and South Korea.
In July 2020, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said: judge me in a year. Two years later, he stands vindicated. Sweden’s cumulative Covid deaths per million puts it 30th of 47 European countries. Many hard lockdown countries fared worse: Czechia, Italy, Belgium, UK, Spain, France, Austria. Sweden’s cumulative excess mortality is lower than these seven. Its cumulative cases per million people is lower than Australia, New Zealand, the EU, the US and South Korea.
Crucially for my purposes today, Tegnell explained in April 2020 that lockdowns have no “historical scientific basis.” Scepticism toward lockdowns and masks was the reigning scientific and policy orthodoxy before 2020. The UK Pandemic Preparedness Strategy, for example, acknowledged that:
“Although there is a perception that the wearing of facemasks by the public in the community and household setting may be beneficial, there is in fact very little evidence of widespread benefit from their use in this setting.”
Western governments were impressed by dubious claims of success from Beijing in eradicating the virus, on the one hand, and panicked by the doomsday predictions of models using flawed assumptions, on the other. But “settled science” built up over a century cannot be overturned in weeks and all the data since early 2020 reinforces the prevailing pre-Covid scientific and policy consensus.
Last December, Hillsdale College in Washington, DC announced the creation of the Academy for Science and Freedom. Its mission is “To combat the recent and widespread abuses of individual and academic freedom in the name of science.” In the effort to enforce a nonexistent consensus, dissident scientists were “silenced, censored, and slandered” as the single-viewpoint-dominant public health community actively engaged “in intimidation and false declarations of consensus.”
Many health experts made profound errors in judgment, failed to adjust based on growing data and continued to pronounce their initial assessments as forever correct.
Australians…
On September 21, Drs Conny Turni and Astrid Lefringhausen published an Australia-centric peer-reviewed article on Covid vaccines in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Immunology. They decry the dismissal of robust and durable natural immunity, the banning of treatment using low-cost repurposed drugs recommended by many US doctors and the dogmatic rejection of the claim that, like existing coronaviruses that became endemic even without vaccines, Covid-19 too would do so.
They hold that under-18s are more than 50 times likely to die from mRNA vaccines, which cause more side effects than any other vaccine, than from Covid. Their very final sentence asks: “Who gave bureaucrats the means to destroy the fundamentals of science and tell scientists not to argue the science”?
Good question.
In July, Denmark banned Covid vaccines for healthy under-18s and in September also for under-50s. Norway has banned them for healthy under-65s. Both are among the world’s most aggressive countries in public health measures. Meanwhile on July 19, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration approved a Moderna vaccine for children aged 0.5-5 years, followed by a Pfizer vaccine on September 29. They cannot all be following The Science™.
NSW Health data back Denmark’s and Norway’s conclusion that Covid poses grave risks only to the elderly. In the last four months (May 22–September 17), just 0.1 and 1.5 percent of the 2,134 Covid deaths were under 20 and 50, respectively. Among those with known vaccination status, only 16 of the 7,857 hospital and 10 of 730 ICU admissions were unvaccinated, compared to 5,769 and 538 boosted, respectively.
This is consistent with the results from an Oxford study published in Lancet on June 30 which found that two doses of the vaccine increase the infection rate by 44 per cent (supplementary Table 7). The strain on the health system — the only justification for coercive mandates — is much greater from the numbers of healthcare staff who’ve been fired for refusing the jab than from the great unvaxxed.
… For Science
The combination of growing numbers with natural immunity from infections, the protective benefits of vaccines for high-risk elderly, and diminished lethality of newer virus variants of concern mean we are at a good place for reevaluating the relationship between good science, good policy and good politics.
I am part of a diverse group of Australian clinicians, academics, lawyers and social, economic and policy commentators united in growing disquiet at federal and state responses to the pandemic. Our main purpose is to reflect on mistakes made and lessons to be learnt in order to avoid repetitions in the future of policy interventions that rely on social coercion and population-wide mandates.
We believe good science leads to good policies and good politics must underpin, not undermine free societies.
The name of the group is yet to be settled. “Academy for Science and Freedom” could cause confusion with the US group and also worry those disillusioned with academe as the incubator of cancel culture and viewpoint conformism (“‘University’ is the antonym for ‘diversity’”). “Australians for Science and Freedom” broadens the group beyond the academy, yet keeps the intellectual and philosophical links with the US group through the common acronym ASF.
Driven by intellectual curiosity, questioning existing knowledge and the fit between theoretical frameworks and empirical data is the essence of the scientific enterprise. In July 2021, an article in the Wall Street Journal explored how science lost the public’s trust. A poll by the respected Pew Research Center on February 15 mapped falling confidence in medical scientists between April 2020 and December 2021. Journalists and elected officials fared significantly worse.
… and Freedom
The freedom side of the agenda has three components.
First, free inquiry, including the freedom to be sceptical and question established wisdom or the dominant worldview and set of beliefs, is integral to scientific advance and progress. Without this, we would all still be flat-earthers.
Second of course and, if anything, even more important, is the meaning, practices and survival of a free society instead of a command-and-control society with a China-style social credit system for rewarding compliant and punishing deviant behaviour.
Finally, freedom is integral to the practice of medicine.
It underpins the sacred Hippocratic Oath of “First, Do No Harm.” It is indispensable to the principle of informed consent to treatment options, if necessary after second and third opinions. And it is fundamental to the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. It’s deeply unethical for the health bureaucrat and drug regulator to insert themselves as disinterested third parties into that relationship. There is absolutely no substitute for the combination of doctors’ formal training, clinical experience and intimate knowledge of the patient.
Recalling Ronald Reagan’s 1986 bon mot about the nine most terrifying words in the English language, I would have much more confidence in my doctor giving me their best professional advice without a nanny state as a controlling third party in the relationship.
Conversely, the Queensland bill may be our Stalingrad moment, our line in the sand, if I may mix my metaphor about a place that is synonymous with deep snow. If most Australians remain apathetic to this level of state control and not enough doctors say: “Thus far but no further,” then we will surely cross over into the Age of Dystopia.
Ramesh Thakur, a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, is emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University. More by Ramesh Thakur
RELATED TWEET:
Minnesota Democrat Rep. Angie Craig:
"I will never stop standing up for Big Pharma and standing against my constituents.”
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Caroline Farrow was arrested for online harassment. This is simply demented.
British police are being inundated with social media-fuelled hate crime claims, including a large rise in transgender complaints. Hate crimes motivated by transphobia have risen 56 percent in one year.
Statistics collected by the Home Office show that English and Welsh police forces had 4,355 of these incidents in the year to March – up from 2,799 in the previous 12 months. Hate crimes as a whole, including crimes motivated by hostility towards race, disability, sexual orientation, religion and transgender identity, rose 26 percent, reaching a record high of 155,841.
However, the Home Office commented that because of significant improvements in recording crime, it was unclear if the increase was a genuine rise, or because more victims had the confidence to come forward. “Transgender issues have been heavily discussed on social media over the last year, which may have led to an increase in related hate crimes.”
Alison Lowe, the diversity and equality head of the APCC, the police and crime commissioners group, called these figures “shocking”, saying: “We expect the police to fully investigate these hateful attacks and make sure the cowards who commit them feel the full force of the law.”
Someone who has personal experience of “the full force of the law” in such matters is Caroline Farrow, a mother of five in a village in Surrey. Ms Farrow is married to Robin, an Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism. For several years she has been a prominent voice in the British media on Catholicism, feminism and current affairs. (Editor’s note – Ms Farrow is also a MercatorNet contributor.)
On Monday, October 3, at 4.45pm Ms Farrow was preparing dinner for her family. A burly policeman knocked at the door and announced that she was to be arrested “for the offence of malicious communications and harassment”. Do you have a warrant? Asked Ms Farrow. Don’t need one, the policeman replied. “Basically, an allegation has been made that you are harassing someone because of the stuff that you’ve been posting online.”
The police barged in, frisked her, confiscated all her electronic devices, hauled her off to the police station, locked her up in a cell for three hours, and interviewed her for another two. She was released under investigation and returned home after midnight.
Ms Farrow’s alleged crime involves nothing more serious than a Twitter spat. Whatever the rights and wrongs of her online argy-bargy, it seems demented to treat a mother of five as a dangerous criminal. She claims – and she has lots of company in this – that local police are so busy chasing up so-called hate crime that they have no time to investigate burglary, car theft, vandalism, and drugs.
“I have suffered the most awful harassment and abuse for four years from trans rights activists and each time I have complained to the police they have done nothing to help me,” Ms Farrow told The Daily Mail. “And yet, those same activists are able to use the police as their own private militia. It’s ridiculous.”
Like many others, she is taking a very dim view of Britain’s increasingly woke constabulary. “The police are supposed to act without fear or favour. But I’m an easy target because I don’t subscribe to their LGBTQ agenda. I’m meant to be a protected minority too but they don’t give a toss about Christian views. On social media I have had the most vicious abuse for being a Catholic.”
The Express’s Home Affairs Editor, Michael Knowles, suggests that to keep police from being drawn into social media rows, Big Tech should create “mechanisms for vile abuse to be removed quickly. There must be a way of using technology to recognise racist abuse to remove it from their sites.”
Does that make any sense? Instead of the police chilling free speech with their heavy-handed tactics, social media companies will become censors.
It takes no imagination at all to guess who will be censored – not those making “vile” remarks, but those like Mrs Farrow making reasoned and/or religious comments on the protected woke issues.
To be arrested and have one’s house searched and equipment confiscated, in a Kafkaesque atmosphere of not knowing what crime one is supposed to have committed, all for complaints of hate crime that will not stand up in court, smacks of a totalitarian state intent on chilling legitimate debate about issues of serious public concern.
Amid public concern about the need for police to fight crime rather than spending time and effort stifling free speech and curbing civil liberties, the new Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has said “police must focus on catching criminals rather than intervening in online spats”.
Watch your language, Ms Braverman. You, too, could hear the dreaded 4.45pm knock on the door.
Ann Farmer, mother of three, grandmother of five and permanently disabled, is based in Woodford Green, Essex. She is a poet, illustrator, writer and pro-life feminist devoted to defending the natural family… More by Ann Farmer
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2022-10-10 05:32:462022-10-10 05:32:46The ‘full force of the law’ falls on a British mum. Her crime? Being rude on Twitter.
A forgotten British anthropologist has some surprising answers.
Stable institutionalised man-woman marriage has the capacity to transform and strengthen society. Through our support for marriage, we can change society for the better. Marriage is an arena where the personal really is political, in an intimate but transformative way.
We have control over marriage because it is not dependent on our legal system, but precedes it. The desire for some kind of union with a person of the opposite sex symbolised through ritual is a human universal. It is one of the most deeply felt human needs.
Our man-made law (until recently) reflected our unwritten and unchanging natural law. And no matter what harm that man-made law tries to inflict on marriage, marriage is something which we can support and strengthen through our relations with friends and family and in our own private lives.
There is extensive evidence that marriage benefits married individuals and their children in all sorts of ways.
Marriage has been found to be the most significant contributor to life satisfaction in the UK second only to health.
Health is itself influenced by marriage. Some have suggested the impact is as large as giving up smoking.
The beneficial effect of marriage on mental health has been estimated at $100 000 dollars a year.
Perhaps most importantly, marriage has significant benefits for the children of married parents, who are less likely to suffer from the mental health problems which can otherwise caste a long shadow over that child’s life.
These are the benefits of marriage to the individual. But it is the benefits of marriage to society which I would like to talk about here.
A pioneering anthropologist
First, I want to talk to you a little bit about the findings of British anthropologist J.D. Unwin. J.D. Unwin conducted extremely rigorous research into the relationship between sexual freedom and cultural development in 86 different societies, and in 1934 published his 600-page book Sex and Culture .
What he discovered was that monogamous one man, one woman marriage affects society in fundamental ways. He found that there was a strict relationship between those societies which practiced absolute monogamy and cultural flourishing in those societies. It turned out that sexual restraint was associated with hugely productive cultural energy.
The key factor appeared to be pre-nuptial chastity. A society which practices pre-nuptial chastity is much more likely to maintain the monogamy essential to cultural flourishing. Once the chastity goes, the monogamy follows soon after.
Unwin found that sexual constraints always lead to cultural flourishing, whereas sexual freedom always led to the collapse of a culture three generations later. There were no exceptions.
Now we can put his theory to the test. Sexual liberation started in our own culture in the 1960s. Unwin estimated a generation to be 33 years. If he’s right, by the middle of the 21st century, we can expect to be in a state of complete cultural collapse…
Why does monogamous marriage bring about this cultural flourishing?
Marriage and the creation of society
One of the features of contemporary society is that individual feelings, needs and wants are regarded as a legitimate compass to guide our actions and understanding.
But where each man is his own ultimate authority, this will not make for a harmonious life.
Marriage, I suggest is the first step in transcending the individual, and it is this aspect of marriage which makes it the cornerstone of society.
Jordan Peterson tells a useful little story. Friends of his were getting married. Part of their particular ritual involved the couple holding a candle up above their heads. The symbolism of this was that they were together subordinating themselves to something which was a source of light and illumination and had authority over them. This was their marriage and the sum was greater than its parts.
The Bible tells us that man leaves his mother and his father and is united with his wife and together they become “one flesh”. They are no longer individuals; marriage turns them into a greater whole.
Thus marriage, through a contract, creates a unit which is greater than the individuals involved. Marriage creates a situation where we put another person first. In this way, marriage becomes a building block for the wider society.
In some ways, it reminds me of the Hobbesian world where in order to transcend a constant state of war men unanimously renounce a portion of their liberty through a process of covenanting with each other. They transfer their power to an elected sovereign who becomes a representative of them all. In my version, this elected sovereign is the marriage itself.
Unwin notes that deism develops under the cultural flourishing which follows absolute monogamy. As men and women learn to put another before themselves, society develops. So does a belief in God.
Submitting to marriage compelled us to be focussed on the wants and needs of others, firstly through the contractual tie which focussed us on the needs of our spouse, then the physical tie which focussed us on the needs of our children.
Submitting to marriage, then to children, meant that it was the family and not the individual which was the ordering principle of the world. Legal systems, systems of inheritance and political representation were arranged to support the family. For the family, men and women subordinated their interests and worked so hard.
Marriage and fatherhood
The second thing which only marriage can do is create fatherhood. While of course the biological links would still exist without marriage, society would be reduced to mother and child units. And fatherhood as we know it and the family which follows from it, would not.
But fatherhood lies not just at the heart of the family. It was the provisioning done by fathers which helped us to develop into homo sapiens. For example, human juveniles take significantly longer to mature than other primates, facilitating the acquisition of language, culture, social cooperation and numerous skills. The possibility of an extended childhood was ensured by male providing and protecting, which would have created a safer framework for children to take longer to mature.
So why is marriage so essential to fatherhood?
Firstly, marriage binds a man to a woman, and it is only through this formalised link with a woman that fatherhood in its fullness can occur.
This is because of the primacy of the mother-child bond. For example, the social scientist Andrea Doucet researched stay-at-home dads in Canada and was struck by the extent to which even among this group of fathers there was a belief in the primacy of the mother-infant bond.
Thus if parents split up, the father’s relationship with children can be severely attenuated or even ended. That mothers are the gatekeepers is confirmed through plentiful research.
Marriage also creates the roles and responsibilities which sustain fatherhood.
It is the institution of marriage which encourages men to take on the obligations of provisioning and providing. Married men accept an enduring obligation to provide for and protect any children born into the union and see their employment in these terms.
This is not the case with cohabitation, where equality and competition rather than difference and complementarity rule the day.
Marriage has traditionally defined the husband’s role as head of the family. So for example in 1993, 91 percent of married individuals defined the husband as the main householder, i.e. the person through whom the house is owned or rented. While feminist laws have been systematically eroding the legal effects of marriage, the tradition still remains. Where an opposite-sex couple live together, the man is counted as the head of household to this day.
Research shows that fathers do not need to spend equal time to mothers to be incredibly important to their children. Love, respect and attachment to fathers is created even where fathers spend all day out at work. Thus fathers teach children how to love even in the absence of direct care and attention. In terms of Christian eschatology, it might be possible to suggest that it is not just that the Christian concept of God the Father teaches the love of the father, but love of the absent but providing and protecting father is the first step in teaching the love of God.
Marriage and identity
Marriage is crucial to identity, because marriage underpins the family and it is the family which tells us who we are.
Mary Eberhardt discusses this in her book Primal Screams. She explains how the huge attention given to identity politics is because the family, the prime identity-making institution, has almost irretrievably broken down.
She shows how children from intact and divorced families exhibit a starkly different concepts of identity. Children of divorced parents felt like a different person with each of their parents. They felt as if they had two families. The evidence suggested a self torn in two.
We develop our identities by knowing our relatives. But when so many live in patterns of serial monogamy with shifting sets of family members, this becomes increasingly difficult to do.
But marriage doesn’t just help us identify “our people”. Marriage is key to identity, because marriage lies at the heart of establishing sex differences. And a fundamental building block of identity is knowing our own sex.
The importance of sex differences has been disastrously misunderstood. For the past three generations, we have been labouring under the illusion that any expression of sex differences is the product of discrimination and oppression against women.
Consequently, there has been a persistent effort to erode sex differences and prevent their expression from infancy upwards . This was presciently encapsulated in Monty Python’s 1983 film The Meaning of Life where the mother asks, following the birth of her baby:
“A boy or a girl?” The doctor replies: “I think it’s a little early to start imposing roles on it, don’t you?” Forty years later, that is exactly the world we are living in.
Yet, knowing whether we are male or female is essential to healthy human development in a number of ways. Visible sex differences or stereotypes play an essential role in helping children develop their awareness of “sex constancy”.
Sex constancy is an understanding that things don’t change their essence when they change their appearance. And actually, it takes a long time for a child to achieve. But when there is a constant denial that males and females are actually different, that essence is going to very hard to find.
Identity is formed through a process of identification and differentiation. But how can children know whether to identify or differentiate from mothers, fathers and siblings and so on, when we are intent on denying all the clues which help us to identify sex?
This is where marriage plays such a crucial role. Male and female differences are likely to be more evident in the household than in other settings. This is because the public realm of work has been built on the model of the individual, which transcends our sex differences. But because the family based on marriage is usually intimately concerned with reproduction, these differences will come to the fore.
What about cohabitation?
With cohabitation, the individual rather than the family remains primary; the father is a more peripheral figure; and the role stability and role differentiation which we find in marriage simply do not occur.
Marriage is a public commitment shored up by social norms and sanctions. These normative structures and social expectations subtly constrain the way married people behave even when our exceptionally permissive divorce laws don’t.
As a result, marriage provides the security which allows a couple to take risks. It allows individuals to invest in the partnership with less fear of abandonment. Men may be more likely to invest their money in joint purchases and women may be more likely to invest in the couple’s children. If they were not married, he might prioritise private purchases and she might shore up her security by investing in education. This makes marriage a much more stable relationship.
The hard evidence is that whereas 24 percent of couple parents who are married before having children split up before the child is aged 16, 69 percent of parents who remain unmarried do so. Most couples who marry stay together whereas only a minority of unmarried cohabitees do so.
And it is the increasing rate of cohabitation which explains why fatherless families are on the rise.
Prenuptial chastity
So we can see why Unwin’s findings about monogamy makes sense. But what about prenuptial chastity? This seems a much harder pill to swallow.
Unwin found that once pre-nuptial chastity went, monogamy would fall like a house of cards. This makes sense. If sex outside marriage is acceptable the steps to infidelity are more easily bridged. Where sex outside of marriage is stigmatised adultery involves the breaking of two significant social taboos. Where sex outside marriage is acceptable, adultery only involves the breaking of one.
But it goes further than this. The Nobel Prize winning economist George Akerlof showed in his research on contraception and abortion that once pre-marital sex was seen as acceptable, out-of-wedlock births followed close behind. When contraception became widely available, women who made sex freely available set the standard because others felt that when it came to the dating market they would be left behind. Once sex outside of marriage was seen as acceptable, single parenthood followed and the family started breaking down.
It is also worth pointing out if sex outside of marriage had never become widely accepted, homosexuality would not have flourished.
Where does all this leave us?
I think there will be a return to marriage. Because cohabitation is “normal”, those who do marry have an acute sense of the responsibility involved. And victims of divorce often seem to make a really concerted effort to stay married.
But this will not happen unless we privilege pre-nuptial chastity. This seems impossible, but it has to happen. Unwin found that it only required a portion of society to practice pre-nuptial continence and monogamy for civilisation to take root. He explained that “the group within the society which suffers the greatest continence displays the greatest energy and dominates the society”.
Akerlof’s research suggested that women gave up on pre-nuptial chastity because they feared missing out in the dating market.
However, as Louise Perry shows in her new book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, all this has changed. It is the women who have made themselves sexually available, who have engaged in hook-up culture and other contemporary practices who are most emotionally confused and devastated as a result. They are also the women whom men are least likely to choose as their life long mates.
Tomorrow belongs to those who take these values seriously.
As more and more people realise the value of pre-nuptial chastity, marriage will become an increasingly desirable social institution and behaviour will start to change.
This was a speech given at the first Heritage Party conference in the UK. If you are interested in knowing more about The Heritage Party, please click on this link.
Belinda trained in social anthropology then studied the collapse of communism in Poland identifying family and religion as playing key roles in bringing this about. She has written extensively on the… More by Belinda Brown
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http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2022-10-10 05:15:452022-10-11 06:59:17Why Marriage is the Cornerstone of Society
Americans tend to see our nation divided into red states and blue states. They see political parties like: Democrat, Libertarian, Independent, No-Party Affiliation and Republican. This has fundamentally changed since January 20th, 2021.
Those with vision and wisdom see America divided into two distinctly different political parties, one is made up of traitors, the other of patriots.
The traitors hate America, the patriots love America, it’s as simple as that.
One party believes the U.S. Constitution is racist and was written by white supremacists. The other party is dedicated to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
One identifies with Antifa and BLM. The second with MAGA.
Acclaimed life, business and corporate coach Rasheed Ogunlaru said, “In leadership, life and all things it’s far wiser to judge people by their deeds than their speech – their track record rather than their talk.”
Whether in one’s personal life, in business or in politic, actions always speak louder than words. We must judge by one’s actions to understand if they are traitors or patriots.
To understand what separates the traitors party from the patriots party we looked at their actions, not just their words over time.
Actions of the Traitor’s Party
Here is a list of actions taken by the Traitor Party members at every level:
Replace God with government.
Kneel when the National Anthem is played.
Stomp on, desecrate or burn the American flag.
Tear down historical monuments.
Rewrite history.
Put selfishness above selflessness. Better to give than to receive.
Seek power and control.
Demand compliance.
Use force and violence.
Loot, burn, ransack and create havoc in communities.
Bully others to achieve their goals.
Label, name call and defame their political opponents.
Produce propaganda.
Judge people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.
Tell the Big Lies and repeat them over and over again.
Deny that they lie.
Create myths.
Cheat and steal.
Create the conditions that lead to public discord.
Use all means available to denigrate the many into submission.
Use pejoratives like: racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, white supremacist, semi-fascist, fascist, etc.
Use the law against their enemies.
Use disorder in their communities.
Divide rather than unite.
Hate all things American.
Actions of the Patriot’s Party
Here is a list of actions taken by the Patriot Party members at every level:
Place God above government.
Stand, put their hand over their heart and, if a veteran, salute when the National Anthem is played.
Display, embrace or wave the American flag proudly.
Build and restore historical monuments.
Study history.
Put selflessness above oneself.
Seek love and affection.
Embrace individual freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Use passion and compassion with others.
Build, restore, expand and create loving communities.
Honestly debate others to achieve mutual understanding.
Embrace political opponents as part of this nation but agree to disagree.
Tell the truth in all things.
Judge people by the content of their character not by the color of their skin.
Tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and repeat it over and over again.
Never lie, cheat or steal.
Embrace reality and scientific truth.
Create the conditions that lead to prosperity for all.
Use all means available to love one another in order to move forward.
Use words like: God, life, love, truth, chastity, equal justice under the law and one nation under God.
Use the law against the criminal elements.
Create order in their communities.
Unite rather than divide.
Love all things American.
To answer the question: Is America on the verge of a second Civil War? For the Traitor Party the answer is yes, they are at war with the patriots.
For the patriots the answer is no, the patriots just want to live in peace, raise their families, do well in their chosen profession and job and keep America great!
If you have other actions that you would like to add to our lists for the Traitor Party and the Patriots Party please do so in the comments section below.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2022-10-09 14:37:202022-10-09 16:14:47General Ulysses S. Grant Said: ‘There Are But Two Parties Now, Traitors and Patriots’—His Words Ring True Today.
Anti-Americanism in Vietnam is less pronounced than in many other parts of the world, and it likely stems from Vietnamese views about wealth and capitalism.
You would be forgiven for thinking—and it would be all too understandable if they were—that the people of Vietnam are anti-American. But the opposite is true.
One reason for this might stem from the culture’s views on wealth: the Vietnamese people admire the rich and experience very little social envy.
As most people know, the consequences of the Vietnam War were devastating for the country. The chemical weapons used by the United States, including the defoliant Agent Orange, not only struck the North Vietnamese Army, they also hit the civilian population. Napalm bombs also inflicted heavy casualties among the civilian population. The South Vietnamese alone lost 1.5 million people, including 300,000 civilians. The US military suffered 58,200 combat deaths, plus another 300,000 wounded. Civilian casualties in North Vietnam were far lower than in the South, but they lost far more soldiers.
In the north, major industrial centers and much of the infrastructure were destroyed. The region’s industrial manufacturing plants were decimated. Three of the six largest cities, 12 of the 29 provincial capitals, and two-thirds of all villages were destroyed. Virtually all power stations, railroad stations, ports, bridges, roads and the entire railroad network were also totally wiped out. In southern Vietnam, two-thirds of villages were also obliterated, five million hectares of forest were razed, and 20 million farmers lost their homes.
Little Anti-Americanism in Vietnam
Given all of this destruction and suffering, it would not be surprising if Vietnam was a hotbed of anti-Americanism. But anti-Americanism in Vietnam is less pronounced than in many other parts of the world. In fact, anti-Americanism is not only stronger in Arab countries and Russia, it is also quite prevalent in many European countries, such as Germany and France.
In 1998, the US ambassador to Hanoi married a Vietnamese woman. He had flown 60 bombing raids on North Vietnam during the war before he was shot down in 1966. He then spent seven years in Vietnamese captivity as a prisoner of war. His wedding attracted a lot of attention at the time, but very little hostility.
This is not uncommon. I was in a relationship with a woman for several years whose parents were from Vietnam. I never once heard her or her parents talk badly about Americans.
Dinh Tuan Minh, a scholar from a think tank I met in Hanoi a few days ago said, explained to me why so many Vietnamese people have a positive attitude toward America.
“We Vietnamese do not look back to the past, but to the future. Unlike with China, we have no territorial disputes with the US. Many Vietnamese people also appreciate the fact that working conditions in US companies that invest here are often better than in Asian companies that invest in Vietnam. In addition, people in Vietnam know that the US has become our most important export market.”
Indeed, in 2020, Vietnam exported as much to the US as it did to China and Japan, its second and third largest export markets, combined.
I also spoke on this subject with the entrepreneur Xuan Ngyuen, who is from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).
“I was born in 1987. The war had already been over for 12 years. My parents and grandparents did talk about how terrible the war was, but they never had a bad word to say about the US and Americans,” Ngyuen told me while I was in Hanoi. “On the contrary, they told me, ‘You must learn to speak English, dress like Americans, eat the same food that Americans eat, and above all, learn to think like an American. Then you will be successful.’”
Independent surveys support these anecdotes.
In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 76 percent of Vietnamese said they had a positive view of the US. Among more educated Vietnamese, the figure was as high as 89 percent, and among respondents aged 18 to 29, 89 percent had a favorable opinion of the US. Even among those over 50 who had lived through the war, more than 60 percent viewed the US positively.
Perceptions of China, which has frequently waged war against Vietnam in the past and also has territorial disputes with the country today, are a different story. Surveys show Vietnamese people have much more negative attitudes toward China.
In a survey also conducted by the Pew Research Center, 64 percent of Vietnamese said, “China’s growing economy is a bad thing for our country.” By comparison, only 36 percent of the survey’s respondents in Japan said the same, 23 percent in Australia and 49 percent in South Korea. In addition, 80 percent of Vietnamese in the same poll also said, “China’s power and influence is a threat to our country.”
I admire people who manage to look more to the future than to the past. Such people are usually far more successful in life than those who constantly focus on the past.
This applies not only to individuals, but also to nations.
‘Doi Moi’: The Road to a Market Economy
In 1975, the Vietnamese defeated the Americans, and this already proud country became even prouder, for they had defeated the greatest military superpower in history. But their pride suffered over the next ten years as the introduction of a socialist planned economy had a devastating effect on the south of the country. Vietnam was the poorest country in the region. While other Asian countries that took the capitalist path – South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore, for example – achieved incredible growth and escaped poverty, most people in Vietnam lived in bitter poverty, even ten years after the war had come to an end.
Forced collectivization of agriculture had been no more successful in Vietnam than it had in China or Russia. In 1980, Vietnam produced only 14 million tons of rice, despite the fact that the county needed 16 million tons to meet its own population’s basic needs. During the period of the second five-year plan (1976 to 1980), Vietnam was forced to import eight to nine million tons of rice and other foodstuffs.
Production stagnated, and state-owned industrial production actually declined by 10 percent from 1976 to 1980. Until 1988, only small family businesses were allowed as private enterprises in Vietnam; otherwise, everything was state-owned.
The Vietnamese realized that they were at an impasse. At the VI Party Congress (incidentally, the party still calls itself “communist”) in December 1986, the country’s leaders adopted a comprehensive package of reforms known as “Doi Moi” (“renewal”). As in China under Deng Xiaoping, private property was allowed and the party increasingly focused on the development of a market economy.
Today, Vietnam has shaken off its past and reinvented itself. GDP per capita has increased six-fold since the reforms (in constant dollars), from $577 to $3,373. Vietnam is now one of the world’s largest rice exporters, after India and only slightly behind Thailand. But Vietnam has long been much more than a country that exports agricultural products and textiles. It has now become a major producer of electronic goods and exported $111 billion worth of electronic products in 2020 alone.
Under the socialist planned economy, the majority of people in Vietnam lived in extreme poverty. As recently as 1993, 80 percent of the Vietnamese population were still living in poverty. Over the last decade in particular, poverty declined sharply in Vietnam, falling from 16.8 percent to 5 percent, lifting an estimated 10 million people out of poverty, according to the World Bank’s formula.
Poverty in Vietnam was not eliminated by wealth redistribution, but by a more free-market economy. Redistribution has never been a successful tool in the fight against poverty anywhere in the world. Capitalism works, and most workers in Vietnam benefit from tax rates that are comparatively low, ones that can only be dreamed of in Germany or New York. Sure, the top tax rate for individuals in Vietnam is 35 percent, but for that you have to earn about 14 times more than an average earner. In any case, social envy directed at the rich is a foreign concept in Vietnam. Here, wealth is admired and celebrated.
Of eleven countries where I commissioned Ipsos MORI to conduct a survey on attitudes toward the rich, Japan was the only other country in which opinions were as positive as in Vietnam.
In a paper from the Vietnamese social scientists Nguyen Trong Chuan, Nguyen Minh Luan and Le Huu Tang, which was published in the book Socioeconomic Renovation in Viet Nam, the authors explain how labor incentives work in the country.
“Those households who have good opportunities, better experience, talent for working and trading, and healthy labor, will be richer. Thus the polarization does not represent inequity but equity,” the authors write. “Those who work hard and well earn more, while those who are lazy and work inefficiently and ineffectively will earn less.”
The scholars also strongly oppose redistribution strategies: “In comparison with the subsidy system, where distribution was egalitarian, the current polarization between the rich and the poor shows the reestablishment of social equity.”
Inequality is not worthy of criticism and the pursuit of wealth should be encouraged, they argue: “Polarization has itself become an important motivating force behind the recent considerable economic growth.”
It would be a mistake to abandon the pursuit of free-market reforms simply because inequality between rich and poor is increasing, the Vietnamese sociologists and philosophers conclude. You won’t often find similar remarks from sociologists in the US and Europe.
The Vietnamese do not look enviously on rich people; they aspire to be rich. One of the questions in my aforementioned study in Vietnam was, “How important, if at all, is it for you personally to be rich?” The result: In Europe and the US, on average, only 28 percent of respondents said it was important to them to be or become rich. In the four surveyed Asian countries, in contrast, the figure was 58 percent. And nowhere did as many people say it was important to them to be or become rich as in Vietnam, where it was 76 percent.
Although Vietnam calls itself a socialist country, the way people here think is more in tune with capitalism than is the case in Europe. Incidentally, the ratio of government expenditure to gross national product in the US was 41.2 percent last year. In Vietnam, it was 21.2 percent.
Dr. Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and sociologist. He is also a world-renowned author, successful businessman, and real estate investor. Zitelmann has written more than 20 books. His books are successful all around the world, especially in China, India, and South Korea. His most recent books are The Rich in Public Opinion which was published in May 2020, and The Power of Capitalism which was published in 2019.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2022-10-09 13:26:422022-10-09 13:28:39Why the People of Vietnam Have Surprisingly Warm Views of Americans, Despite the History
From Israel to America and lots of places in between, government schools are failing. This should not surprise us.
“Our schools,” reports a knowledgeable observer, “are producing ignoramuses.” The average graduate, he explains, “does not know how to read critically, write expressively, or debate intelligently and politely.” Meantime, the unions are opposing huge, proposed increases in beginner-teacher salaries because, instead, they want higher pay for teachers with seniority, regardless of individual performance.
Are we talking about America here? No, though Americans can sadly and credibly claim similar circumstances. What you just read comes from writer Amotz Asa-El in the July 29-August 4 issue of The Jerusalem Post. In his article titled “How can Jewish Schools be Bad?”, the country whose schools he excoriates is Israel.
For more than 2,000 years, a thirst for learning has been a core element of Jewish culture. Asa-El writes,
So obsessed with education were the Jews that Jewish law decreed that a town that did not give its children a teacher must be excommunicated. And so unique did education make the Jews that a French monk noted in the 12th Century that “a Jew, however poor, if he had 10 sons would put them all to letters…and not only his sons, but his daughters” [too].
Education was a legacy, a quest, and a supreme value that went with the Jews wherever they wandered. That’s how the penniless immigrants who proceeded from Europe’s shtetls [Jewish enclaves] to the Lower East Side’s sweatshops produced by 1937 half of New York’s doctors and two-thirds of its lawyers.
One could reasonably assume that such a deeply rooted heritage would produce good public schools in a country defined by its Jewishness. But instead, says Asa-El, they are a “disgrace.” Not only are they academically bad, they also “nurture indiscipline.” He points out that it “is most commonly reflected in students’ total disregard for their teacher’s very presence in the classroom.” Moreover,
In worse cases, this indiscipline breeds vandalism during field trips, not only in Israeli parks, but even in places like Birkenau [a notorious Nazi concentration camp], where Israeli students carved their names into barracks’ walls.
The performance of American public schools, on average, is nothing to write home about either. Their disgraceful shortcomings are well-known and hardly need to be recounted here. You can check the Education section of Just Facts for the details. But guess what? I’ve heard the same complaints in almost all the 87 countries I’ve visited over the years. Even people who think their local public school is OK will decry the lousy and expensive outcomes in everybody else’s public school.
If a chain of private restaurants served bad food at high prices, it would be history in a hurry. Better eateries would spring up in their place, and customers would welcome such “creative destruction” as perfectly natural and beneficial.
Even in education, we can find excellence. Private schools and home schools are generally flourishing. These are the schools in which no parent or child is trapped by zip code. No unhappy customers are forced to patronize these options year after year. Distant bureaucracies and self-serving unions cannot bully their way into the classroom. Teachers are freer to get the job done. Fractious, distracting, intractable controversies are avoided because everybody pays for what they get and gets what they pay for—or they take a walk.
Public schools are government schools. Their common denominator is politics. Who in their right mind would even think to suggest that to improve restaurants, we should assign people to eat at restaurants by geography or zip code? Would a bad restaurant improve if we threw more money at it, rewarded its staff according to seniority instead of merit, or put politicians in charge of its menu? The reality in Israeli schools proves that politics can take even an impressive cultural heritage and trash it in just a few generations.
From Israel to America and lots of places in between, government is not the answer to problems in education. It is the paramount problem itself. Government politicizes education. It foists compulsory unionism on teachers. It rewards mediocrity and frustrates innovation and success. It stifles the very forces of choice, incentive and accountability that produce progress in every other walk of life where they are employed. The answer is more freedom, not more politics and coercion. Why is such common sense so infuriatingly uncommon?
Perhaps government conveniently forgot to teach it to us.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2022-10-09 13:11:142022-10-12 15:38:35The Root of Today’s Worldwide Education Problem Is Staring Us in the Face
The roots of socialism’s tragedies can be found in Marx’s famous Manifesto.
I recently had occasion to re-read Karl Marx’s seminal Communist Manifesto. It had been nearly twenty years since my first reading of the text in graduate school and I remembered little beyond class antagonisms, Marx’s materialism, and the exploitation of the proletariat. But the ongoing crisis in Venezuela led me to once again reflect on the Socialist and Communist Philosophy underneath the unfolding crisis.
What I Found
At a mere 60 pages, the Manifesto is surprisingly light compared to most canonical philosophy. After expounding on the history-shaping role of class antagonisms and the formative nature of production within society, Marx gets into the details of what it takes to form a new Socialist society.
It is in the second section of the Manifesto that Marx notes ten measures required for bringing about a Socialist State. These include the abolition of private property and the abolition of inheritance rights. Marx then calls for the centralization of both production and credit in the hands of the State.
Even more, he calls for the State to wield an “exclusive monopoly” on all credit and all means of production. Number six on the list asserts that all communication and “transport” is to be centralized and controlled by the State. Whereas, measure eight notes that there is an “Equal obligation of all to labor” with “industrialized armies” established for the carrying out of necessary labor.
Marx recognizes that these measures cannot be achieved peacefully.
“Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property,” he writes.
In other words; by force. Force is concentrated in the hands of the State and then leveraged to bring about a new Socialist order.
Where Marx Goes Wrong
What rights do individuals have to protect them from all the power Marx’s Socialist State wields? Beyond the rejection of the right to property, the right to free speech, the right to non-State controlled information, the right to choose one’s labor, or the accumulation of individual wealth, Marx says nothing about what rights citizens of this new State do have.
Marx offers only a vague allusion to a “vast association of the whole nation” that somehow negates the needs for constitutionally guaranteed rights or democratic processes.
What is worse is that Marx’s Socialist State is so singularly powerful that there is no recourse for citizens once power has been centralized. Marx’s expectation of the relinquishing of power into this “vast association” is not given a mechanism by which it is supposed to happen. The crucial step by which Marx’s Socialist power becomes one of the people rather than one of the State is not even spelled out on paper.
Why It Matters
The disturbing reports coming out of Venezuela’s significant and widespread human rights violations was not Socialism misapplied, misexecuted, or misunderstood.
It was, step by step, the implementation of Marx’s Socialist State as called for by Marx himself. From the early attack on private property and the redistribution of wealth to the nationalization of communication, energy, finance, and industry, we see Marx’s call to centralize power to the State. Marx’s belief that the Socialist State would not wield that power simply for power’s sake was a grave miscalculation.
Marx’s call to centralize so many key functions to the state so empowers the state that there is no check or balance to that power. We cannot be surprised that Marx’s State does not wield that power to the benefit of any but itself; to the sustaining of the system that so feeds it. There is no ideology that will protect a people from abuses of unchecked power. History has tended to show that ideology is irrelevant. Where power has been amassed and unchecked, it has been abused. These are facts of human nature so embedded in history that they ring more true than any other.
Venezuela’s call to forced labor on farms is not some unforeseeable response to unforeseeable food shortages. Both the famine and the call to forced labor, Marx’s “industrial armies’’ are explicit in the text, embedded in the ideology.
So long as we continue to point fingers at all causes beyond the philosophy itself, we allow society to continue its romance with Socialist and Communist Ideology. We fail to see where the ideas themselves set the stage for the retraction, rather than expansion, of human freedom and flourishing. We fail to see Venezuela before Venezuela happens.
To our TGP readers: We had the honor and pleasure to speak with and interview Victoria White on Sunday. We hope you take the time to watch this riveting interview. Victoria is a wonderful American, a committed mother, a victim of unbelievable police violence, and a beautiful person.
Here is the shocking description of her attack released earlier by Attorney Joseph McBride. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) commander Jason Bagshaw is the officer who brutally beat Victoria that day. Bagshaw was promoted after he nearly killed Victoria White after she was pushed into a crowd of police officers and gassed until she could not see.
The monster was promoted.
Our hearts go out to Victoria White. What a courageous woman.
Victoria White from Rochester, Minnesota attended the Stop the Steal rally in Washington DC on January 6th. Like many Americans that day it was her first time she ever visited Washington DC. She was excited to attend the rally and stand with President Trump at the Ellipse.
What started as a wonderful trip with family and friends turned into a bloody nightmare. Victoria White was nearly killed by DC police officers during the rally. The police officers beat her in the face and shoulders nearly 40 times with sticks and their fists. Then they dragged her through the US Capitol shoeless and forced her to wait outside without a phone, a coat, or a ride after they released her hours later.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Royal A. Brown IIIhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRoyal A. Brown III2022-10-09 10:34:182022-10-09 10:41:46In Riveting Interview J-6 Victim Victoria White Describes Unbelievable Bare-Fisted Beating by D.C. Police and the Nightmare that Followed
Every decent and rational American must get behind the re-election of President Trump. If this country has any chance of being saved, President Trump must be re-elected in 2024. America cannot withstand a second term of the Biden Administration. #Trump2024!
President Trump’s remarks begin at the 2:36 minute mark.
Saturday, October 8, 2022: Join the RSBN broadcast team LIVE in Minden, NV for all day coverage of President Donald J. Trump’s SAVE AMERICA rally.
President Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America, will hold a rally in Minden, Nevada on Saturday, October 8, 2022, at 7:00PM PDT.
Saturday, October 8, 2022, at 7:00PM PDT
President Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America, delivers remarks in support of endorsed candidates and special guests Sheriff Joe Lombardo, Republican Nominee for Governor of Nevada and Adam Laxalt, Republican Nominee for U.S. Senate in Nevada, and the entire Nevada Trump Ticket.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2022-10-09 06:56:062022-10-09 10:44:46VIDEO: President Donald J. Trump’s Save America Rally in Minden, Nevada
And still the diabolical Democrats are mandating the controversial, failed shot.
Illinois Rep. Sean Casten revealed his teenage daughter Gwen suffered a cardiac arrhythmia in June when she died in her sleep
‘She had a big, beautiful, kind, loving heart. And it stopped, as all must,’ the family said in a statement
According to the CDC, about 2,000 young, healthy people under the age of 25 die of sudden cardiac arrest in the United States each year
Gwen was following in her father’s footsteps as a political activist prior to her sudden death
She served as a co-director of the March For Our Lives Illinois chapter, a youth-led movement aimed at tackling gun violence
The list of complications, conditions, and diseases resulting from the COVID shots is nearly endless and can affect any organ system in the body. Pfizer knew. Here’s their document.
Look at the last 8 pages, which lists more than 1100 serious side effects and life-threatening illnesses Pfizer knew would happen from the first shot. We posted an article on The Tenpenny Reports about it: They All Knew.
“This mini-review focuses on the mechanisms of how SARS-CoV-2 affects the brain, with an emphasis on the role of the spike protein in patients with neurological symptoms.
“Following infection, patients with a history of neurological complications may be at a higher risk of developing long-term neurological conditions associated with the alpha-synuclein prion, such as Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia.
“Compelling evidence has been published to indicate that the spike protein, which is derived from SARS-CoV-2 and generated from the vaccines, is not only able to cross the blood–brain barrier but may cause inflammation and/or blood clots in the brain.
“Consequently, should vaccine-induced expression of spike proteins not be limited to the site of injection and draining lymph nodes there is the potential of long-term implications following inoculation [vaccination] that may be identical to neurological complications seen in patients who were infected with SARS-CoV-2.”
It is important to mention, we now know the spike proteins do not remain localized in the arm.
Let’s drill down on this article, starting with some definitions:
Alpha-Synuclein: These are the major component of Lewy bodies, which are characteristic of Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia. There is much speculation on what the primary function of alpha-synuclein may be under healthy conditions. However, the accumulation of this protein when it has folded abnormally seems to be central to neurodegeneration. Since the culprit of chronic illness has been widely described as being the spike protein, a 2021 study of monkeys provided compelling evidence that the spike protein associated with SARS-CoV2 is responsible for Lewy body formation.
Parkinson’s disease: A long-term degenerative disease of the central nervous system, affecting the motor system. The most obvious early signs are resting tremor, rigidity, slowness of movement, and difficulty walking.
NOTE: This column was originally published on Friday, December 19, 2008.
The utopian ideal of equality of circumstances has captured people’s imagination since ancient times. If only everybody could have the same of everything the world would be different. There would be no envy, no crime, no poverty, no greed, and no unhappiness. From Plato to Karl Marx, many thinkers looked to the state for the creation of that heaven on earth. In our own times, this dream has remained alive in the form of the welfare state, and today it shows itself most distinctly in the appeal of government-managed health care.
Isn’t it obvious, many ask, that government can supply medical care more fairly and less expensively than the selfish profit-oriented free market? Let us remind ourselves that in the Soviet Union the road to medical-care hell was paved with the same good intentions. In October 1917, the Marxist dreams of coming to political power came true in Russia. Now that everyone was to be equal in all aspects of their lives, people would no longer die in the streets from illness. Free medical care would be available for all, rather than reserved only for the “greedy rich.”
But what did the Bolsheviks destroy and what did they create?
In Old Russia, medical care was a consumer-oriented business. Doctors’ incomes and their standard of living were totally dependent upon professionalism and reputation in the wider community. Patients decided which doctor to use, which hospital to go to, and which pharmaceutical products to trust. Doctors worked hard to establish their reputation, an important part of which came from providing charity care for the poor. As in the West, all Russian doctors upon graduation from medical school took the Hippocratic Oath, in which they swore never to reject anyone who needed medical assistance—and as a rule they were loyal to their oath.
In Russian urban areas, there were charity hospitals and out-patient care for the poor and their families. In rural areas, peasants would often pay doctors with a chicken, potatoes, bread, or in the form of domestic services—or received their medical treatment for free. Under the private medical system in Old Russia, doctors were able to earn a comfortable living and therefore could afford to be generous in supplying charity services to those who were in need.
Expectations of high income, along with the status of being a member of a respected profession, generated strong competition for acceptance into medical schools. The best were accepted as students, and the most qualified were hired as professors. At the beginning of the 20th century, the quality of Russian medical care and medical research was internationally recognized. Was it a perfect system? Of course not. But contrary to the socialist myth-makers, medical care in Imperial Russia was widely available and provided in a fairly cost-efficient manner. Both the profit motive of the competitive marketplace and the spirit of charity assured the provision of quality medical services throughout Russian society.
This, then, was the system the Bolsheviks wanted to destroy. Unfortunately, many Russian intellectuals, including medical doctors themselves, were infected with the socialist disease. Seeing so much poverty in a still underdeveloped Russia, many doctors turned their back on the free market and came to believe that government management could create a better society through planned equality of living conditions, education, and certainly medical care. Thus, guided by wrong ideas, the members of the medical profession helped to destroy with their own hands a health-care system that, while certainly not perfect, provided people with skilled treatment, regardless of their income or social background.
Equality for All
In 1917, like everything else, medical services were nationalized by the new socialist government. Gradually, small medical practices disappeared and a network of big, factory-like hospitals and out-patient clinics were established all around the country. Everyone was registered in both out-patient clinics and hospitals according to their government-assigned residence. Patient choice was completely taken away by the Soviet State, which took full responsibility for centrally planning each individual’s medical expenses and health care.
With the elimination of private expenditures for health services, the form and amount of medical care were now dependent upon the budgetary priorities of the State. All members of the medical industry were put on low fixed monthly salaries and were mandated to examine and treat an overwhelming daily quota of patients. Medical research became dependent upon inadequate annual budgetary allocations from the government. Doctors’ and nurses’ incomes no longer depended on their professional skills or the number of patients they treated. Total unionization of the medical profession made it practically impossible for anyone to be fired. Without markets and prices determining the value and availability of health care, the government imposed a rationing system for medical services and pharmaceutical products.
Specialized services (mammograms, ultrasounds, and so forth) were available only in a few select hospitals where the doctors were supposed to treat patients as well as participate in research. For example, in the case of brain or cardiovascular surgery and treatment, there were only a few specialized hospitals available in the entire country. People sometimes died waiting in line to be admitted for these treatments.
Medical care became a producer-oriented industry, instead of the consumer-oriented market that it had been in Old Russia. But even the State cannot kill the market, just as the State cannot repeal the laws of God and nature. The market was simply driven “underground,” and thus became the black market. The black-market response to State-rationing occurred immediately. Doctors’ services and pharmaceutical products (both domestic and foreign-made), as well as access to medical-testing equipment, became available for bribes. Unfortunately, only the wealthy elite could afford expensive black-market medical services, while the poor majority could no longer count upon charity.
In the world of “free” medical care in the Soviet Union, people often had to have connections to obtain many of the medicines prescribed by physicians to save their family members and friends. Indifferent and often hostile nurses and orderlies had to be bribed to change a patient’s bedpan or to provide ordinary attention that any American would take for granted during a stay in a hospital.
Hospital wards were crowded and far from antiseptically clean. Anesthetics and basic painkillers were frequently unavailable. The crying of patients in pain could sometimes be heard from outside a hospital by passersby.
Some Are More Equal than Others
Not surprisingly, those in the political elite did not want to be treated in the medical system provided for “the people.” One of the greatest myths about the Soviet Union was its supposed equality for all. No society was so divided into privileged groups and classes as was Soviet society. Where an individual stood in the political hierarchy of the Communist Party and the bureaucratic structure of the socialist economy determined his access to all the essentials as well as the luxuries of life.
Special hospitals were created all around the Soviet Union. These were reserved for the members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Council of Ministers, the local and regional Party elites, and so forth. The “servants of the people,” as a result, received a qualitatively different level of medical care than “the masses.” The privileged few had access not only to Soviet-made drugs and medications but also to Western European and American medicines and equipment, which could never be within the reach of the ordinary “proletarian” patient.
Affirmative Action, Soviet Style
The nature and quality of medical education were affected, as well. Bribes and connections determined both the hiring and admission processes in medical schools. Skills and professionalism mattered very little, and service to the community did not matter at all.
This poor medical care was reinforced by the fact that entrance into higher education in the Soviet Union was dictated by a system of affirmative action that had been introduced shortly after the triumph of the Socialist Revolution in 1917. At first belonging to a social class —worker, peasant, or intellectual—determined the entry quotas into colleges, universities, and technical schools. But the Soviet affirmative action system was soon expanded to include gender and ethnic classifications as well. A young person’s professional and career opportunities were greatly influenced not by his individual merit but by whether he was, for example, a Russian, an Uzbek, a Georgian, a Lithuanian, a Jew, or somebody else. Every class, gender, and ethnic group had its own quota for admission and hiring into institutions of higher learning.
Connections, bribes, class, gender, and ethnicity heavily determined who were admitted into and graduated from medical schools throughout the Soviet Union. Thus the supplies of hospitals, physicians, medical equipment, and pharmaceuticals all became victims of socialist central planning and political priorities just like everything else in the “workers’ paradise.” At the end of the 20th century, Russia was infamous for having one of the worst health-care systems in the world.
In bitter situations, Russians often respond with jokes and anecdotes. In one of them, an American and a Soviet doctor are talking. The American says, “Dear colleague, our profession is imperfect. You treat the patient from one disease and he dies from another.” The Soviet doctor replies, “No, dear colleague, this is not the case with me. Mine die from whatever I treat them.”
It is easy to say that the present system is imperfect and a radical change will make it perfect in a relatively short period of time. But there are always lessons from history from which to learn. Sometimes, your neighbor’s history warns you which path never to follow.
AUTHOR
ANNA EBELING
Anna Ebeling was born, raised, and educated in the former Soviet Union. Living much of her life in the heart of what Ronald Reagan called “the evil empire,” she experienced first hand the reality of “the workers’ paradise.” Her stories of the absurdities of life in the collectivist utopia are many. Anna met Richard Ebeling in Moscow in May 1991 and married him later that year. Together they joined the defenders of liberty and faced Soviet tanks at the Russian Parliament in Moscow during the attempted hard-line communist coup d’état.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2022-10-09 06:11:312022-10-09 06:12:11Socialized Health Care: The Communist Dream and the Soviet Reality
This indicates how deeply threatened the Iranian regime is, and how fearful of what could happen if the truth about its bloodlust becomes widely known. But it is already widely known. That’s why the mullahs are dealing with an uprising in the first place.
Relatives of a girl who died during protests in Iran have been forced into making false statements, a source close to the family has told BBC Persian.
Nika Shakarami, 16, went missing in Tehran on 20 September after telling a friend she was being chased by police.
On Wednesday night, a state TV report showed her aunt, Atash, saying: “Nika was killed falling from a building.”
Her uncle was also seen on TV speaking against the unrest, as someone seems to whisper to him: “Say it, you scumbag!”
The source told BBC Persian that these were both “forced confessions” that came “after intense interrogations and being threatened that other family members would be killed”….
Wednesday night’s state TV report also featured footage in which Atash was seen confirming that her niece’s body was found outside the building mentioned by the judiciary, even though that contradicted previous statements made by her and other members of the family.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2022-10-09 05:51:472022-10-09 05:56:02Islamic Republic of Iran: Authorities force family of girl killed by security forces to lie about cause of her death
“The trend is forcing doctors who exhibit critical thinking to face an existential choice: join the mob and support what many of us believe are dangerous policies without a sound scientific basis, or stand up and risk losing your livelihood.” — Dr. Pierre Kory
“The truth will eventually come out; you can’t hide it forever. And everything they have said, everything, from masks from lockdowns, from social distancing from vaccination, from Remdesivir, from Paxlovid is a big fat lie. They have a real problem with the truth.” — Dr. Paul Marik
“Covid has shown an absolutely bright light on the corruption in medicine. I’ve realized now that almost everything I was taught in medical school was wrong. I have to unlearn everything I was taught because it’s dominated by Pharma and it’s completely and utterly false. It’s a fraud.” — Dr. Paul Marik, four-minute interview with Del Bigtree
“Medical knowledge is always evolving. No one has a monopoly on good ideas. Our leaders in government should encourage doctors to pursue new ideas and innovate, not threaten to end their careers for disagreeing.” — Dr. Pierre Kory
American socialists have long been promoting the nationalization of health care. After Democrats took control of Congress in 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” gave us Medicare and Medicaid Act, also known as the Social Security Amendments of 1965.
With nationalization, small medical practices disappeared into group practices, factory like hospitals and out-patient clinics were established throughout the country, and many insurers restrict physician availability.
With the form and amount of medical care dependent upon budgetary availability, slowly but surely, the state-controlled benefits are diminished. After Obama Care, the costs have risen exponentially to where yearly deductibles are rarely met, with out-of-pocket costs soaring.
The goal is total control of the US medical industry and with COVID, there has been a giant leap forward in the destruction of America’s once highly touted health care.
Not only have the medical Stasi been active, but Gestapo like tactics against physicians have cost them their careers. Senator Ron Johnson exposed so much of this in his five-hour January 2022 roundtable. Apparently the Senator is the only DC politician who cares. Too many of them are funded by Bill Gates and are members of the World Economic Forum.
Corporate medicine run by the state has arrived. Marx would be proud.
It does make clear that all 18 intelligence communities will have the ability to spy on American citizens.
Steven Fishman wrote, “‘Signals Intelligence’ means A-I or ‘Artificial Intelligence.’ All our freedoms and privacy are now gone and in the toilet. But it’s far worse than that. Spying is only part of the equation. It gives the 18 intel agencies the right to label each and every one of us a domestic terrorist arbitrarily.”
Every government agency is owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the American Stasi.
Subversion and Sabotage
Starting with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans have been continually subjected to an endless stream of totalitarian medical orders by the highest-level officials of the United States government and state governments from both political parties; by federal, state, and local public health authorities; by life scientists; and by doctors.
The COVID jabs and their related mandates violate the Nuremberg Code on Medical Experimentation that the United States government used to prosecute, convict, and execute Nazi doctors at Nuremberg. The inoculations and their related mandates are a Nuremberg Crime against Humanity under international criminal law.
Yet, only the dissident docs are courageous enough to speak out.
We must stop dead in its tracks this developing American medical police state and hold legally accountable those responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic lies and its lethal consequences for millions of our fellow Americans.
Gates media announced their decade of vax collaboration in 2010. Their first paragraph tells the whole story:
“The World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced a collaboration to increase coordination across the international vaccine community and create a Global Vaccine Action Plan. This plan will build on the successes of current work to achieve key milestones in the discovery, development and delivery of lifesaving vaccines to the most vulnerable populations in the poorest countries over the next decade.”
In December of 2020, the first COVID jabs were administered in New York City.
Lockdowns ruined the economy; 26 million jobs were lost along with countless American lives and not just from COVID. Millions were driven into poverty and government dependence and have never come back.
All but seven state governors were influenced by the medical Stasi to trash the Bill of Rights, “making a mockery of its very existence.”
How pleased the police-state Stasi must have been when the masses donned their masks, locked their doors, kept six-feet apart and abstained from worshipping together. Americans eagerly fell in line with the medical tyranny to keep themselves “safe.” The obedient little Nazis made sure they scorned and verbally attacked every person free of a face diaper.
The God hating globalist elites were thrilled, and our deliberately dumbed down citizenry went along with the entire evil scenario.
Fauci remained in the spotlight to sell fear throughout the nation. Two million will die!
Pence gave us that little self-aggrandizing worm along with Fauci’s lying cohort, Deborah Birx.
Trump listened to his Deep State advisors and didn’t give Fauci the boot until the damage had been done. What took Trump three years to build was wiped out in a matter of weeks. Had he listened to his gut instincts that the virus was nothing more than a bad flu which could have been treated with repurposed drugs, he would have saved us from two and half years of a hellish nightmare. Instead, he listened to Big Pharma’s toady and galloped headlong into pushing his Operation Warp Death jabs.
As President of the greatest nation on earth, the buck stopped with Trump.
When Fauci announced his retirement, Florida Governor DeSantis slammed him saying, “someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.”
Muzzling Physicians
Dr. Paul Marik is board certified in Internal Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, Neurocritical Care and Nutrition Science. He has written over 400 peer-reviewed journal articles, 80 book chapters and authored four critical care books. He is the 2017 recipient of the Outstanding Educator Award from the American College of Physicians for his work with medical residents and fellows.
Dr. Marik, MBBCh, the East Virginia Medical School (EVMS) Foundation Distinguished Professor in Internal Medicine and Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, believes he has developed a cure for the life-threatening infection of sepsis. His innovative treatment breakthrough – a product of medical intuition and serendipity – promises to revolutionize sepsis care worldwide and produce results that are nothing short of astonishing. This was in January of 2016.
Watch this 2½ minute video of Dr. Marik’s discovery:
Today, Dr. Marik no longer practices medicine at EVMS because of his stance on the COVID hospital protocols.
He is a believer in vaccines and took the C-19 injections in November of 2020. He now knows that was a huge mistake and these injections are dangerous to everyone who submits to them.
As a critical care physician for over 30 years, he was treating COVID patients with repurposed drugs and having far better results than his colleagues. But then the hospital system sent out a memorandum to the entire 18 hospitals, essentially targeting Dr. Marik, but basically saying the pharmacy would no longer dispense the medications he had been using to save lives. These were all FDA approved drugs including Vitamin C. All the good doctor was left with was Remdesivir, a toxic drug which kills patients.
Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia was sued by Dr. Marik, but the lawyers and witnesses lied and he did not prevail. Then the hospital did what is called peer review. It’s a sham peer review where Dr. Marik was accused of many things and was guilty until proven innocent. He wasn’t even allowed legal representation. The American Board of Internal Medicine even accused Dr. Marik of spreading misinformation.
Ultimately, he had no choice but to leave the hospital. In doing so, the patients he could have saved lost their lives. Sentara Norfolk General Hospital went out of their way to destroy Dr. Paul Marik’s stellar career.
The hospital care was all about the bottom line, it had nothing to do with the proper care of the patient. If the patient was on Medicare, and treated with Remdesivir, the hospital received US tax dollars from the federal government of 20% of the hospital bill, which usually would run about $400 to $500K. The incentivization was to allow patients to die. The Board of Medicine accused Dr. Marik of prescribing Ivermectin to non-existing patients when he never prescribed IVM to any patients in Sentara Hospital. The corrupt medical power elite saw to it that Dr. Marik’s brilliant career came to an end. Big Pharma, the CDC, NIH, FDA, AMA, and medical journals, are the authorities listened to by hospital and group administrators.
State Medical Boards, Hospitals and the American Board of Medicine will go after any physician who thinks on his own in treating COVID patients and fails to follow the set protocols from the Stasi hierarchy.
Watch Dr. Marik’s three-minute testimony at Senator Ron Johnson’s Roundtable.
Video here:
The bottom line was money from the federal government (taxpayer dollars) for COVID diagnosis, oxygen masks, Remdesivir, Paxlovid, ventilators and finally death.
Money called the tune, not saving the patients.
Today, Dr. Paul Marik says, “I would not recommend a single living soul on the planet should take any of the COVID injections.”
Drs. Paul Marik and Pierre Kory are working together. Dr. Kory came to the same conclusions as Dr. Marik, but a few months earlier. They are part of Covid19CriticalCare.com which you can also reach via FLCCC.net.
Both doctors, as well as several other physicians in the group, are working to save people’s lives from long COVID and the C-19 injections. Here are their listed protocols and what you can do to help yourself if you’ve taken one or more of the injections.
Dr. Pierre Kory is president of the FLCCC Alliance and has testified to the Senate many times over the use of repurposed drugs to treat C-19, especially the use of Ivermectin. Like Dr. Marik, he is a pulmonary and critical care specialist.
Dr. Kory’s May 2022 Fox News article, is a shocking expose of the horrors that happened during the 2 ½ years of the C-19 nightmare. He tells us that he’s been a lifelong democrat, but in talking to other physicians, he found “conservative colleagues and friends who put politics aside to focus on doing our best at the bedside. It made me more tolerant and understanding of their worldviews.”
He used to view democrats as more open about free speech, but now “with today’s progressive political movement, medical boards are adopting policies that censor opinions, defining such speech as mis- or disinformation, especially scientific opinions around COVID. Medical professionals who refuse to toe the party line risk censorship, cancellation, and even the loss of license—a fate far worse than getting banned from Twitter.”
Dr. Kory is right. The trend is forcing doctors to either join the mob and literally chance killing their C-19 patients with the totalitarian medical industry protocols or risk losing their licenses for trying to save their patients.
Bureaucrats and politicians have now intruded on the doctor-patient relationship. The recent bill on the desk of California Governor Newsom “grants sweeping new powers to the state’s medical board to initiate investigations of doctors whose COVID treatment decisions depart from the applicable standard of care.” And yes, the definition of mis-information is vague but not the consequences…the disciplinary action can be severe and can even lead to the loss of a medical license. Dr. Paul Marik’s September 30th Daily Caller article states, “Not only do the mandates remain in place for medical professionals, but the stakes are poised to get even higher if this bad bill becomes law.”
How obvious does it have to be to see that medical Stasi, who do not treat COVID patients, have taken over physicians’ abilities to judge what is best for their patients. Today’s physicians had best not step outside the box described by the Stasi medical police.
McDonald is a Los Angeles psychiatrist with particular expertise in working with children with autism and trauma, as well as obsessive-compulsive and bipolar disorders. His dislike of masking children was clear when he wrote on his substack page that he had written to the parents of his young patients that they would not be allowed to wear masks in his office. It was not just because we need to see each other’s faces, but because the masks are unhealthy, damaging and do nothing to prevent a virus. He lost a few patients, but he took a stand for truth.
His latest missive, “I Chose to Fight,” tells his substack readers that he filed a lawsuit against AB 2098, the Medical Censorship Bill. “It will become law on January 1, 2023, effectively denying all physicians in the state of California the right to publicly share their medical opinions, under threat of suspension of their license to practice medicine.”
The California Medical Board (CMB) has targeted Dr. McDonald personally and has launched an investigation, “into allegations that I ‘spread medical misinformation’ on my social media pages regarding masks, early treatment, and mRNA injections. This lawsuit, though, is not about me—it is a challenge to the constitutionality of AB 2098, as the law prohibits medical free speech.”
Kristina Lawson, the President of CMB and an attorney has proposed to the California Senate two requests:
More money for the Board’s enforcement program targeting physicians.
Lowering the legal standard required to prosecute physicians.
Dr. McDonald writes, “If AB 2098 becomes law in 2023, every California physician who expresses an opinion challenging the legitimacy of mask mandates, denial of prophylactic or early treatment, or efficacy or safety of mRNA therapeutics will become a target of the Board for license suspension or termination. Ethical physicians who insist on empirically validated treatment protocols and who object to harmful, anti-scientific, and abusive public health policies or medical treatments will simply leave California or take an early retirement.”
He continues and states the obvious. This egregious and despicable law will spread to other states, effectively destroying the ability of physicians to properly care for their patients.
This is the nationalization of heath care. The Stasi are gleeful.
Conclusion
The helm of a free state and a self-ruling people is a reliance on God. The old Roman Empire had a war against both Jews and Christians because their loyalty was to their Creator. They refused to acknowledge the emperor as god. Thus, they worked to destroy the old order, the belief in God, respect for one’s neighbor and property and the bonds of family.
The exact same war has been taking place in America for two centuries.
A totalitarian state cannot allow the people to have a quality academic education any more than it can allow the worship of our Creator. Prayer was removed from American schools in 1962 and the Ten Commandments were removed in 1980.
God has been eliminated, even from many of our houses of worship. Therein lies the core of our country’s rot. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Every facet of our society has expunged any mention of our Judeo-Christian culture including our medical industry.
The war is between good and evil. This is the real battle. Which side will you choose?
Dr. Michael Yeadon, “If you experimentally adopt the position that OUR GOVERNMENT IS ACTIVELY WORKING TO HARM US, TO DISMANTLE MODERN SOCIETY & ENSLAVE ALL PEOPLE IN A DIGITALLY CONTROLLED TOTALITARIAN WORLD, it all fits. Nothing is surplus.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Kelleigh Nelsonhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngKelleigh Nelson2022-10-09 05:39:092022-10-09 05:43:33The Stasi Overlords of America’s Medical Industry
