How the Militant Left Uses Fear

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In depth analysis of the left’s catastrophic practices …

“A technique the Left uses to increase control through public anxiety is to “set multiple fires along the ridgeline.” The public notices that the flames are spreading. Which fire does one run to first? What must be sacrificed and allowed to burn?”

How the Militant Left Uses Fear

By, Christopher J. Farrell, The European Conservative. July 30, 2022:

The objective of the militant political Left—whether in Hungary, at the European Union (EU), or in the United States—is to keep the public in a state of perpetual, acute, neurotic anxiety. They employ this form of psychological conditioning as a means of control. In the last century, socialists—National Socialists but particularly Communists—specialized in the technique to impose totalitarian control over whole societies.

Their goal is to manipulate the population into a series of fear-based decisions that disconnect people from their traditions, history, and values—and from each other. Separation from reality, inducing neurotic behavior and developing disordered environments—while simultaneously extinguishing individual independent thought and behavior—work together to create ‘learned helplessness,’ leaving a vacuum for government to step in and ‘save the day.’

This type of strategic psychological combat, aimed at directing and swaying public attitudes, is not new, nor is it merely the product of the last 100 years. Sun Tzu also stressed the importance of destroying the enemy’s will to fight in his 5th-century BC writings on military affairs. Lenin’s 1920 “Conditions for Admission to the Communist International” discusses this technique as “demoralization”—the far-stronger German term is Zersetzung—meaning break-up, decomposition, and disintegration. In the late 1920s the German communist party had specific operational detachments, referred to as Apparat, specifically for Zersetzung and Terror, working together in powerful combination. The German communist cells took orders from Moscow, agitated for class warfare, deconstructed society for political advantage, and subverted the authority of the Weimar constitution. You are the modern-day target for this exact same treatment.

The mind has always been one of the most important battlegrounds—this is especially seen in Lenin’s dogmatic interpretation of Marxism. Lenin stresses throughout his writing that there can only be one right belief and that any dissent is a threat meriting terrorism at home and aggression abroad. This ideology has given, and continues to give, the militant Left license to deploy its full arsenal of techniques to destroy its opposition. The Left wants you to give up and comply.

As disconnection and dependance contribute to the breakdown of family, community, and national identity, the general population is to be driven into the arms of an all-knowing, all-providing, homogenizing global society. Global citizens will find rest, comfort, and direction through compliance and in their ruling parties.

Balázs Orbán, political director to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, details a compelling case for how the EU seeks to impose and enforce cultural structures, as well as moral and legal norms, across all of Europe without dialogue or debate. He discusses the phenomenon of “universalist thinking” demanding fetish compliance, in the context of the EU operating as a 21st-century empire, in the Winter 2021 edition of The European Conservative. The elite rule, and all subjects must comply. Dissent is often punished. Disagreement is barely tolerated and frequently sanctioned economically. The essence of sovereignty—representative government—is dismissed as a quaint relic inconsistent with the rigid orthodoxies of Leftist ideology.

As Balázs Orbán points out, “only 8% of the EU’s senior officials come from Central and Eastern European states, though those states make up 40% and 20% of the EU’s population, respectively.” When the EU leadership criticizes and sanctions Hungary for wanting to enforce (Schengen) border security or for affirming the God-given right of Hungarian parents to decide what their children are taught in school, then something is very wrong. Political intimidation and economic coercion are the tools of fear leveraged against a nation in an international campaign to compel universal compliance.

The Left seeks to destroy and reshape national consciousness so that life is reduced to an obsessive list of things that are either ‘forbidden’ or ‘mandatory’—and are enforced by either subsidized or punitive state control.

Furthermore, eager compliance with state diktats is encouraged and rewarded with privilege and status. Virtue posturing and social demonstrations promoting state-sponsored group-think are ironically promoted as being bestowed with a keen awareness meriting the now-tired trope ‘Woke.’ In the United States, Hollywood stars posture while American cities burn and 2 million illegal aliens cross the southern border. Citizens are reduced from being the sovereign authority to a state resource that funds their own destruction.

Militant Leftist attacks—both ideological and physical—are launched against history and facts. Traditions and foundations are besieged and undermined. Most recently in the United States, that effort has manifested in the so-called ‘1619 Project,’ which seeks to rewrite America’s founding, and everything that comes from it, as based on slavery and racism. It is not merely a social commentary—it is an attempt to destroy our Constitution.

Beyond the ideological and physical attacks, society is also subjected to political and social group psychoanalysis that, in a perverted way, allows for the mass production of complexes and traumas. The counterfactual and increasingly hysterical claims of America’s ‘systemic racism’ is an example of the tactic. Again, the American public is attacked with the goal of inculcating feelings of error, guilt, shame, and fear, as well as desires (by some) for repentance and revenge.

Another technique the Left uses to increase control through public anxiety is to manufacture crises or “set multiple fires along the ridgeline.” The fires represent crises and controversies that are presented to the public via compliant media as urgent and threatening. The public (down in the ‘valley’) notices that up above them, on the hillside and ridgeline, there are multiple ‘fires’ burning at different spots, and the flames are spreading—sweeping across the terrain. Which fire does one run to first? How many can be put out? What must be sacrificed and allowed to burn? How can the public sustain these challenges and losses? Who will save us all from burning? The ‘firemen’ of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 set fires to destroy outlawed books. This ridgeline scenario is merely a variation on a theme. Control, compulsion, threats, and crises all dominate the public’s psyche.

Let us review a partial list of the cascading crises of the Biden administration: COVID pandemic, vaccine mandates and ultimatums, business shutdowns, 40-year high inflation, labor shortages, supply chain crisis, record illegal immigration and drug smuggling, the collapse of border security, record high fuel prices, return to foreign energy dependance, Ukraine, Afghanistan, FBI and Justice Department targeting parents, record homicide rates across 16 major US cities, Fentanyl as the number one killer of Americans aged 18-45, renegotiating the Iran nuclear “deal” with Russia at the table, radical promotion of pro-transgender agenda at the expense of women’s rights and protections for women in sports, hysterical ‘insurrection’ claims of the January 6th Commission, baby formula shortages, the complete collapse of the Democrat’s sweeping climate and social spending agenda, Monkeypox, Biden’s multiple verbal gaffes and apparent diminished mental acuity. This list is not exhaustive. It goes on and on.

More crises are sure to come. Guaranteed. Some domestic, some international, some imposed, some initiated, some clandestine, some overt. The point is that they exist, and they are hyped and manipulated and presented to the public as imminent threats. Not solutions, not victories, not ways to overcome adversity. Threats. Each one is a brick of fear in the fortress of terror in which we are to be imprisoned.

One of the most disturbing examples of America’s new state-sponsored punitive tactics is the politicization of the justice system. America now has a two-tiered system of justice. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has, without exaggeration, become the ‘secret police’ of the Democratic Party. Brief examples will illustrate the FBI’s disparity of treatment between conservatives and leftists. Compare and contrast the FBI’s treatment of conservatives: Presidential Advisor Dr. Peter Navarro, Project Veritas journalist James O’Keefe, and political consultant Roger Stone against the treatment of Democrat operatives: former Attorney General Eric Holder, who was held in contempt of Congress by a bipartisan majority; and the serial lies of former FBI Director James Comey, FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe, and senior intelligence officials James Clapper and John Brennan. The public’s loss of confidence in the justice system gravely undermines democracy. Polling suggests a steady decline in public trust of both career and politically appointed government officials.

There are several other tactics and techniques the Left uses against the people to push them to abandon hope and faith. Once the people are broken through engineered crises, then the Left pounces to implement the radical, ‘fundamental transformation’ that makes things ‘better.’ Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven of the Columbia University School of Social Work outlined this strategy in an article in The Nation magazine in 1966, entitled: “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” The Cloward-Piven strategy looks to deliberately “break the system” in order to create an opportunity for even greater centralized control. Obama presidential advisor Rahm Emanuel summed it up best when he said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” How many times have we seen this? Yet there seems to be recurring, generational amnesia concerning the brutality of this process and the deadly consequences.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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

Anne Frank Trust Invited Islamist Who Called for Murder of Jews

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“Death to you Zionist scum.”

The real lesson of the Holocaust is killing Jews.

Nasima Begum does not like Jews very much. Past tweets include heartfelt thoughts such as “Death to you Zionist scum.”

This didn’t stop her from getting work with the BBC or being brought on board by the Anne Frank Trust UK to train the “youth” in the arts of tolerance.

Despite the name of the murdered Jewish girl, the Anne Frank Trust UK was seeking trustees with “lived experiences” of “anti-black racism, disabilism, homophobia and transphobia” and was “particularly keen to address anti-black racism as a priority” as “highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement”. Those merely concerned about matter of anti-Semitism need not apply.

Organizations with Anne Frank’s name, but having nothing to do with her, Holocaust victims or the Jewish community have proliferated around the world. These organizations, generally not even Jewish, have instead served as incubators of antisemitism in exactly this sort of way.

The Anne Frank Foundation in Switzerland funds BDS hate groups. An Anne Frank center in Frankfurt Germany compared ISIS terrorists to Jews. At the Anne Frank Center in Berlin, a Muslim guide compared Israel to Nazi Germany. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam removed references to Anne’s Jewishness, banned a guide from wearing Jewish clothing and attacked Israel. An exhibit placed a photo of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon side by side with one of Hitler.

And yet this may be the first time an Anne Frank organization invited a speaker who had called for the murder of Jews. So many Anne Frank groups had tiptoed around it, but the Anne Frank Trust UK actually went out and did it.

“We are excited to welcome performance poet, producer and creative practitioner, Nasima Begum, to our special workshop this evening.” the Anne Frank Trust UK announced.

Begum’s job was “youth empowerment”.

Not surprising when the Assistant Director for Youth Empowerment at the Anne Frank Trust is Amna Abdullatif who tweets enthusiastic support for antisemitic politician Rep. Ilhan Omar.

Under pressure, the British organization announced that Begum “may have views that are not consistent with our values” and promised that it would launch an investigation even though  controversies over Begum had already been aired in the past and would have been known to it.

There is a reason that this keeps happening at organizations named after Anne Frank.

Anne’s story was hijacked early on with a play, The Diary of Anne Frank, by Lillan Hellman, a Hollywood Stalinist, who turned it over to Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, the Communist-linked married couple who purged most of the Jewish references.

Since then, Anne Frank has been reinvented in the form of various races, most recently as an illegal alien hiding from ICE, and another production which sought a “multi-racial cast representing many heritages.” The elimination of Anne’s Jewishness, much like the universalization of the Holocaust, presages antisemitism. Once the Jews have been replaced in their historical role, it becomes all too easy for antisemites to turn Jews into the new Nazis.

And their killers, whether the PLO, Hamas or ISIS, into the new Jews.

Nasima Begum claimed that Israel’s resistance to Islamic terrorism was “the Holocaust all over again” with “Palestinians” as the victims and “Zionism scum” as the perpetrators.

The Anne Frank Trust UK may find this sort of explicit wording vulgar, but it’s no coincidence that the same ideas have manifested themselves at the Anne Frank centers in Berlin and Frankfurt, at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and now in the UK. It’s what happens when the story of the Holocaust is reframed in terms of general principles detached from the Jews.

Or as the Communists who rewrote Anne’s story had her say in the play, “We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer.” The fictionalized version of a dead Jewish girl declares to applause. “Sometimes one race, sometimes another.”

Transforming the Holocaust into a general story about intolerance and prejudice all too easily becomes a partisan story whose broader lesson is the moral supremacy of leftist virtues.

And those virtues are routinely used to call for the death of Israel and the murder of Jews.

Rewriting the Holocaust as a struggle between the Left and the Right is itself Holocaust revisionism because it ignores the Soviet mass murder of Jews, the Hitler-Stalin pact and the collaboration of western Communists, including Lillian Hellman, in that Communist crime.

Hellman, had defended the Hitler-Stalin Pact and participated in the Communist-front “Keep America Out of War Committee”, making her a Nazi collaborator, and yet was allowed to play a role in transforming the story of a murdered Jewish girl into leftist agitprop.

While Hellman was suppressing Anne’s Jewishness, the Soviet Union was suppressing the Jewish elements of the Holocaust. True Jewish commemorations of the Holocaust were banned in the Soviet Union. Any discussion about the mass murder of Jews was tightly controlled. Even while it was covering up the Holocaust, the Soviet Union launched a propaganda campaign against the newly reborn State of Israel whose key elements, including the apartheid smear, are still widely in use among leftists, including those operating at Anne Frank centers, today.

Before Islamists were shouting, “Death to you Zionist scum”, Communists were shouting it.

The Soviet regime’s favorite taunt though was slurring Zionists as “fascists” or “Nazis”. A Communist regime that had massacred Jews and collaborated with the Nazis originated the smearing of Israel, of Zionists, and of Jews as Nazis.  The latest such incident at an Anne Frank Center is the long legacy of the leftist hijacking of the Holocaust to justify the murder of Jews.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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

World Economic Forum, Totalitarian Enslavement

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“All technologies will be directly embedded into our bodies by 2030.” — Nokia boss, Pekka Lundmark at WEF

“Irrational thinking and the embracing of absurdity as a way of life has spread to every corner of the globe—way beyond the first-world countries to the most remote islands in the world. There is no normal anymore, anywhere. Insanity has infected the entire human population.” —  Dr. Peter McCullough

“To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”  – Klaus Schwab

“Totalitarianism strives not to despotic dominion over the people, but to establish such a system in which people are completely unnecessary.” —  Hannah Arendt

“If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'” —  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Great Reset is caused by government manipulation, with the guidance of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations, and other elites, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, etc., who believe they have the right to steer nations and economies into a new “totalitarian world order.” All of this is being fueled by green energy policy lies.  The Greta Thunberg fools of the world are so propagandized with fear, it is impossible to reach them with truth.  Unfortunately, many Americans have fallen prey to these lies.

The very core of the evil we’re seeing is a hatred of God and His Creation and a desire by those promoting this evil to be in control of humanity and become gods themselves.  They belong to their father, the devil, and like those before them, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Ceaușescu and so many others, their time is short.

Too many Americans surrendered their God-given freedoms out of fear of a lie, a lie promoted by evil entities throughout the world.  “Protocols” were installed and millions were murdered in hospitals because we were told there was nothing that could save them except a vaccine!  Millions have died and many more are disabled from the dangerous C-19 inoculations.  Newstarget recently reported that Pfizers own documents admit that mRNA covid vaccines will result in mass depopulation.

The FDA has now approved these injections for children under five, roughly 18 million youngsters.

Our citizens have lost their ability to think logically and to reason for themselves that governments rarely have good intentions for their subjects.

The First Seeds of Terror and Totalitarianism

Holocaust survivor, political philosopher and author, Hannah Arendt, published her first book in 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism.  Her work describes what we are seeing in America today. She discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the non-totalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.

Terror regimes use isolation as a weapon of oppression, and terror arrived in America in 2020 via the mainstream media’s fear propaganda.  Even the conservative stations segregated all their hosts and spoke of nothing else but COVID.  Anthony Fauci struck even more trepidation in Americans with his constant updates and statements of how dangerous the Wuhan virus would be to everyone.  Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield echoed Fauci’s doctrine of lies.

Families were kept apart, children were kept from grandparents, nursing home elderly were sequestered from their loved ones, people were locked in their homes for months, and fearful mothers masked their toddlers.  We were kept from each other, kept from standing close, kept from hugging others, kept from coffee and conversation.  We were alone out of fear.  We stood six feet or more from each other and mask Nazis raged at those who didn’t comply with face diapers.  Fear promoted loneliness.

Hannah Arendt spoke of loneliness as the capacity to think and to know ourselves, even when in isolation, depends, in part, by making meaningful connections with others.  How much has technology, the internet, smart phones and social media affected how we relate to others?  It is obvious when you see people out to dinner or at a gathering, and instead of being engaged in conversation, they are looking at their phones.

Ms. Arendt believed that totalitarianism was able to institute a regime of total terror because modern individuals had lost the ability to trust their very selves since they had abandoned any sense of relation to one another.

She stated, “Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pre-totalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together…; isolated men are powerless by definition.”

In John Miltimore’s March 2018 article, Hannah Arendt on How Loneliness Breeds Terror, he states, “What we see here is that, according to Arendt, loneliness is not the absence of people but an absence of self-identity, which is attained through companionship and community. But loneliness is preceded by social isolation, and it is in this first stage of isolation where the first seeds of terror and totalitarianism are sewn.”

Two years of living hell for Americans did much to cement fear and compliance, even with those of us who saw through the lies…even though we saw the dangers. Fear and loneliness had embedded itself in our loved ones, friends and neighbors.  “Don’t forget your mask,” was the call with the wave from neighbors in their yards.

What does the Lord say?  That fear is NOT from Him.

But whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and be quiet from fear of evil.  Proverbs 1:33

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.  2 Timothy 1:7

Remembering History

Nazi Germany, in the 1930s and 1940s, promoted fear to rule the people, and that fear was directed at another group of people, a group who meant nothing to the hierarchy in charge.  Men and women were used as slaves until they became too weak to work and then they were murdered, cremated and gone.  Babies were bludgeoned or shot with their families and dumped into huge burial plots, plots they were forced to dig before being shot.  Mothers tried to shield their infants to no avail.

Millions of Jews died, I am convinced far more than the common tally of six million.  Yes, the Germans kept excellent records, but they hired townspeople to round up the Jewish citizenry and murder them, many were never recorded.  Millions more died, Romany (gypsies), homosexuals, dissenters, one of the most famous being anti-Nazi Lutheran preacher, Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was hanged by Hitler only days before liberation of Flossenburg.

It is so necessary to remember the Holocaust when speaking of the events of the last two years with the COVID Plandemic.  Americans no longer know our own or world history.  Revisionists write what they want us to believe and the statues and heroes of the past are destroyed.  The very memory of the Holocaust should cause us to avoid future human tragedies, yet we find ourselves in the throes of a new and horrible worldwide tyranny that is gaining speed every day.

Build Back Better, aka The Great Reset

Now we have our dementia ridden illegitimate president writing Executive Orders that are dictatorial edicts.  EOs are only for administrative purposes, but the executive branch now ignores that fact which makes the president the most powerful person in the land…certainly not what our founders had in mind.  Joe’s Special Envoy, John Kerry, has let the world know that, “The notion of a reset is more important now than ever before.”  Kerry thinks this will be an exciting time.  It sounds potentially lethal for most of humanity.

Ahh, the lovely state of our world. Good ole’ Joe, he’s been on the New World Order bandwagon all his life.  And now, WEF member Joe Biden is the puppet in charge of this country with his “Build Back Better.” Our fate is sealed unless we fight.  The BBB slogan isn’t even his.  Of course not, Joe is an infamous plagiarist.  It’s the mantra for “The Great Reset” a la Schwab, Harari, WHO, the world’s leaders, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, Fauci, the Democrat Party and the majority of the Republican Party.  Those who defy the globalists are destroyed or eliminated.

Schwab’s Advisor, Yuval Noah Harari

Klaus Schwab tells us that we will never return to normal after COVID.  He states, “Nothing will ever return to the ‘broken’ sense of normalcy that prevailed prior to the crisis because the coronavirus pandemic marks a fundamental inflection point in our global trajectory.”  I highly doubt most patriotic Americans felt we lived in a “broken” America before the Wuhan virus hit, and what if we don’t want to go on Schwab’s Orwellian chosen course?

All these globalists, including their counterparts in China want to “Reset” the entire world and they call it the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” but how many people will be left after their depopulation schemes?  Far too many died with the fraudulent hospital “protocols,” and now many more are dying from the COVID injections, jabs that didn’t protect anyone from contracting or dying from C-19.

Pfizer CEO, Albert Bourla, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel, and Johnson and Johnson’s Alex Gorsky are all members of the World Economic Forum.  Albert Bourla tells Klaus Schwab that he wants compliance of the populations for his inoculations.

Schwab tells us we’ll never return to normal, but his top advisor, WEF and UN spokesperson, Yuval Noah Harari, tells us in his book, Homo Deus (man god), “The era of free will is over.”  Yuval is praised by Klaus Schwab, Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, who reviewed his book on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.  And Bill Gates, who wants to depopulate the world is funding and running the vaccine industry.  If this doesn’t make you back away from every needle, I don’t know what will.

Yuval Harari is considered by Klaus Schwab to be a brilliant futurist. Both claim that by 2030, “You will own nothing and be happy!”  Mr. Harari says the Bible and thousands of years of faith in God and Jesus is fake news.  He is openly gay and married to Itzic Yahav, who is also his personal manager. They married in a civil ceremony in Toronto, Canada.

Harari’s website homepage states, “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”  Harari believes in massive surveillance, even surveillance inside our bodies.  In fact, under the skin surveillance, and even surveillance via ingestible medications that will alert authorities when the medication has been taken.

In January of 2020, Yuval Harari made a blistering speech to Davos.  He states:

Old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but then the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish. Whereas in the past human had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than exploited.

Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new “useless class” – people who are useless not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.

The AI revolution might create unprecedented inequality not just between classes but also between countries.

There’s that word again… “useless.”  Unless we fit into the slave mentality of these globalists, we are expendable.

The global elite are obsessed with over population and want six billion people to die.  If their dreams come true, it is a return to feudalism.

Most of us just want to be left alone, to raise our families, make our own choices, and live our lives in peace.

Conclusion

Men Who Just Want to be Left Alone — Soviet Dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“The most terrifying force of death, comes from the hands of Men who wanted to be left Alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love.

They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know, that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over.

The moment the Men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be. Which is why, when forced to take up violence, these Men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play-acting at politics and terror. TRUE TERROR will arrive at these people’s door, and they will cry, scream, and beg for mercy… but it will fall upon the deaf ears of the Men who just wanted to be left alone

And having done all, we must STAND as ONE against the onslaught of evil.

©Kelleigh Nelson. All rights reserved.

Charging an All Electric Car Uses 4 Times the Electricity of a Home Air Conditioner

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Watch as Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) puts Biden’s Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg on the spot during a hearing on the cost to charge all electric vehicles on Tuesday, July 18th, 2022.

Congressman Massie states, “Numbers are important. It would take four times as much electricity to charge the average household’s cars as the average household uses on air conditioning. Do you think that could be — so, if we reach the goal by 2030 that Biden has of — of 50 percent adoption instead of 100 percent adoption, that means the average household would use twice as much electricity charging one of their cars as they would use for all of the air conditioning that they use for the entire year.”

Tesla Model charging
Tesla Model Energy required to charge battery (kWh) End charge of battery (kWh)
Model 3 Long Range 88.541 kWh 78.557 kWh
Model 3 Performance 94.242 kWh 80.818 kWh
Model S** 118.366 kWh 103.892 kWh
Model S Plaid 116.344 kWh 99.287 kWh

NOTE: Most air-conditioning units run on a cycle of 15 minutes twice per hour. The actual power consumption is at 7.7kWh.

CLICK HERE: Access the Global Energy Tracker on CFR.org

In a December 21st, 2021 column titled Electric Cars vs. Gas Cars: Is the Conventional Wisdom Wrong? Bill Wirtz reported,

Electric vehicle batteries need a multitude of resources to be manufactured. In the case of cobalt, the World Economic Forum has called out the extraction conditions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where more than half of the world’s cobalt comes from. Miners as young as seven years are suffering from chronic lung disease from exposure to cobalt dust. Not only does battery manufacturing account for 60 percent of the world’s cobalt use, but there are also no good solutions to replace it, which is something Elon Musk is struggling with.

This does not even address the extraction procedures, complications, ethical conditions, and emissions produced by the need for aluminum, manganese, nickel, graphite, and lithium carbonate.

With a European market estimated to reach a total of 1,200 gigawatt-hours per year, which is enough for 80 gigafactories with an average capacity of 15 gigawatt-hours per year, that need is set to increase exponentially.

The renowned German research institute IFO declared the eco-balance of diesel-powered vehicles to be superior to electric vehicles in a study released in April.

In an April 7th, 2022 column titled The Environmental Downside of Electric Vehicles Michael Heberling reported,

An electric vehicle requires six times the mineral inputs of a comparable internal combustion engine vehicle, according to the International Energy Agency.

At one time, “Saving the Environment” and “Fighting Climate Change” were synonymous. That is no longer true. The quest for Clean Energy through electric vehicles (EVs) epitomizes “the end justifies the means.”

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an electric vehicle requires six times the mineral inputs of a comparable internal combustion engine vehicle (ICE). EV batteries are very heavy and are made with some exotic, expensive, toxic, and flammable materials.

The primary metals in EV batteries include Nickel, Lithium, Cobalt, Copper and Rare Earth metals (Neodymium and Dysprosium). The mining of these materials, their use in manufacturing and their ultimate disposal all present significant environmental challenges. Ninety percent of the ICE lead-acid batteries are recycled while only five percent of the EV lithium-ion batteries are.

The Bottom Line

All electric vehicles (EVs) are costly to manufacture, use exotic, expensive, toxic, and flammable materials, harm the environment and harm those children working in the mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where more than half of the world’s cobalt comes from.

Now we learn that Biden’s Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has not idea what it costs the ordinary American family to own, charge and maintain EVs. If you purchase a Tesla is will cost $45 for their outlet, and an estimated  installation cost of between $750-$1500.

You see it’s not about the environment, saving the planet from climate change or what is best for the American family.

It’s all about their green agenda and its ideology. The ends justifying their nefarious means!

The American consumer be damned.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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Yes, Elisjsha Dicken Is a Good Samaritan—and He Deserves a Medal

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On Sunday evening—July 17, 2022—at the Greenwood Park Mall in Indiana, a gunman opened fire in a food court. He killed three people and wounded two others. He might have murdered many more but for the quick work of a man named Elisjsha Dicken, who pulled out his own gun and blew away the assailant.

Dicken, who was legally carrying a firearm under the state’s constitutional carry law, was hailed as a “Good Samaritan” for saving lives. The next day, the Greenwood police chief added, “Many more people would have died last night if not for the responsible armed citizen.”

Gun control advocates immediately condemned the police chief for his “Good Samaritan” reference, drawn from a famous parable told by Jesus Christ. A local reporter exclaimed,

The term, ‘Good Samaritan’ came from a Bible passage of a man from Samaria who stopped on the side of the road to help a man who was injured and ignored. I cannot believe we live in a world where the term can equally apply to someone killing someone.

Who is correct here, the police chief or the reporter? A related question is, Did Jesus support self-defense, or the taking of a guilty life to save the lives of innocents?

In Chapter 10 of the Book of Luke in the New Testament, Jesus tells his parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan is judged “good” because when he came upon a man who was beaten and robbed, he chose of his own free will to help the injured man with his own resources. As I wrote in my 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist?, if the Samaritan had ignored the man or expected the government to help him, we would likely know him today as the “Good-for-Nothing” Samaritan.

The Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable did not commit a violent act himself. The injured man’s assailants were presumably long gone. He stepped in to assist the assailed. So strictly speaking, the Greenwood police chief’s reference was not entirely analogous to Elisjsha Dicken’s action in taking down the shooter at the shopping mall.

For centuries, many people have employed the term “Good Samaritan” to describe anyone who isn’t compelled to come to the aid of the innocent but takes the initiative to do so anyway. A Good Samaritan takes charge of a bad situation, improves it as best he can, and prevents further harm. That is exactly what Elisjsha Dicken did in Greenwood.

Undoubtedly, the critical reporter in this instance is a person of good intent. He can’t imagine Jesus endorsing Dicken’s action because Jesus was a man of peace. He might even cite Matthew, chapter five, in which Jesus urges us to “turn the other cheek” if someone insults us or physically slaps us in the face.

“The question of rendering insult for insult, however, is a far cry from defending oneself against a mugger or a rapist,” writes Lars Larson in Does Jesus Christ Support Self-Defense?. To “turn the other cheek” means to refrain from a needless escalation of a problematic situation. Elisjsha Dicken did not escalate anything; in fact, he dramatically and decisively de-escalated it in the only possible way, given the circumstances.

The reporter likely shares the widely-held, radically pacifist or “namby-pamby” view of Jesus—the view that he would never endorse an act of violence for any purpose, even if it’s necessary to save lives. It implies that Elisjsha Dicken should have run for cover and allowed the Greenwood shooter to kill another dozen or two people. That’s wrong, if not downright blasphemous.

When Jesus dined at The Last Supper, he gave his disciples specific instructions, including this one (Luke 22:36):

He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. 

Note that he did not advise anyone, then or at any other time, to stand idly by and allow wanton slaughter of innocents. And he offered support for the threat of force to prevent the theft of property as well. In Luke 11:21, Jesus said:

When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are safe. But when someone stronger attacks and overpowers him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted, and divides up his plunder.

This is the same Jesus who, in Luke 12:39, says, “If the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into.” It’s the same Jesus who never criticized anyone for possessing a lethal weapon such as a sword, though he certainly condemned the initiation of force or the impetuous and unnecessary use of it.

In Jesus, Guns and Self-Defense: What Does the Bible Say?, Gary DeMar maintains that

Being armed and willing to defend ourselves, our family, and our neighbors is not being unchristian or even unloving. Self-defense can go a long way to protect the innocent from people who are intent on murder for whatever reason.

The Greenwood reporter’s errant perspective is not untypical of people who think they know Jesus and Christianity but spend more time criticizing them than learning about them. I see evidence of this all the time, most recently from a speaker at an April 2022 conference in Prague, Czech Republic.

“When it comes to the source of individual rights,” the speaker pontificated with misplaced confidence, “there are only three possibilities.” One, he said, is a Creator (God), which he summarily dismissed as a ridiculous, untenable proposition. The second is government, which he ruled out as equally ridiculous and untenable. The only logical option, he said, was “nature”—something which he suggested evolved out of nothing from nobody. As I listened with the largely student audience, I thought to myself, “This supposed expert hasn’t even considered a fourth option, namely, a combination of the first and third—which is to say that God, as the author of nature, is in fact the author of individual rights as well.”

The speaker added another uninformed dig at Christianity by claiming it was stupid for Jesus to ever suggest you should love your neighbor. “What if your neighbor is an axe-murderer? How much sense would that make?” he asked derisively. If he had known of the passages I cite above, he would have been embarrassed by his own ignorance. As a general principle, Jesus argued, you should love your neighbor but the same Jesus would urge you to arm yourself if your neighbor threatens your life or property.

In The Life and Death Debate: Moral Issues of Our Time, Christian theologians Norman Geisler and J. P. Moreland write:

To permit murder when one could have prevented it is morally wrong. To allow a rape when one could have hindered it is evil. To watch an act of cruelty to children without trying to intervene is morally inexcusable. In brief, not resisting evil is an evil of omission, and an evil of omission can be just as evil as an evil of commission. Any man who refuses to protect his wife and children against a violent intruder fails them morally.

When Elisjsha Dicken pulled out his gun to stop a shooting spree, he had every reason to believe he might attract the shooter’s aim and be killed himself. Fortunately, he was not, and he is among the living whose lives he saved.

If Elisjsha Dicken had been killed, the rest of us could at least take comfort in the words of Jesus as quoted in John 15:13. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

Elisjsha Dicken is not only a Good Samaritan. He’s a very good one. Give him a medal.

Science is Affirming Creation, Not Accident by Lawrence W. Reed

What Does the Bible Say About Self-Defense?

Was Jesus a Socialist? by Lawrence W. Reed

AUTHOR

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is FEE’s President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty, having served for nearly 11 years as FEE’s president (2008-2019). He is author of the 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist? as well as Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow on LinkedIn and Like his public figure page on Facebook. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com.

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

Lies, Damn Lies and Big Abortion

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“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics” — Mark Twain

“Now is the time to make life for the unborn universal.” — Dr. Rich Swier

LifeNews.com in an email wrote the following:

They are liars. I don’t use that word lightly but there is no other way to describe Big Abortion, their liberal media cheerleaders and their Democrat allies in Washington.

And it’s no surprise because abortion activists have been lying to you since Roe v. Wade.

They lied about Norma McCorvey and used those lies to kill 63 million babies in abortions but their lies were exposed and her true story revealed.

They lied and claimed unborn babies are not human beings, but ultrasounds showed a window to the womb and proved a child before birth is an innocent baby.

They lied and claimed there was a Constitutional right to kill babies in abortions, but the Supreme Court made it clear there’s not and overturned Roe v. Wade.

They lied and claimed women would die if abortions are banned. But Texas has banned abortions for 326 days, Oklahoma has banned abortions for 60 days and several states have banned abortions for 30 days. ZERO women have died.

They lied and claimed women would die because abortion bans would stop treatment for topic pregnancies. But pro-life doctors exposed their lies and and showed how they care for women every day.

They lied and claimed women would die because abortion bans would stop treatment for miscarriages. But pro-life factchecks have proven these claims false over and over again.

In a July 22nd column titled BOYCOTT: Major Companies Providing Travel Expenses for Employees Seeking Abortions Royal A. Brown, III listed the following twenty-six companies who are part of Big Abortion, along with radical pro-abortion groups like Ruth Sent Us, Act Blue, Jane’s Revenge and the Democrat Party.

MICROSOFT

Microsoft (MSFT) extended its financial support for “critical healthcare,” including abortions and gender-affirming care, to include coverage for travel expenses for such services, after the draft opinion overturning Roe was first leaked.

APPLE

The company’s existing benefits package allows employees to travel out of state for medical care if it is unavailable in their home state, according to an Apple (AAPL) spokesperson.

META

The tech giant intends to offer travel expense reimbursement “to the extent permitted by law” for employees seeking out-of-state health care and reproductive services, according to a spokesperson. “We are in the process of assessing how best to do so given the legal complexities involved,” the Meta (FB) spokesperson said in a statement.

YELP

Yelp’s existing healthcare plan for US employees pays for women, family members and partners to travel out of states with strict abortion laws, such as Texas and Oklahoma, which ban abortions after 6 weeks.

“This ruling puts women’s health in jeopardy, denies them their human rights, and threatens to dismantle the progress we’ve made toward gender equality in the workplaces since Roe,” Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder of Yelp (YELP), said in a statement Friday. “Business leaders must step up to support the health and safety of their employees by speaking out against the wave of abortion bans that will be triggered as a result of this decision, and call on Congress to codify Roe into law.”

DISNEY

Disney (DIS) employees who are unable to access medical care in one location will be given affordable coverage to access the same care in another location, according to a company spokesperson. The benefit covers family planning and pregnancy-related decisions.

UBER

Uber’s US insurance plans already cover reproductive health benefits, including abortion and travel expenses to access healthcare. The rideshare company will also reimburse any drivers sued under state law for providing transportation to a clinic through the app, according to an Uber (UBER) spokesperson.

NETFLIX

The streaming company offers travel reimbursement coverage for US full-time employees and their dependents who need to travel for healthcare treatments including abortions and gender-affirming care, a Netflix (NFLX) spokesperson told CNN. The company provides a lifetime allowance of $10,000 per employees (or their dependents) per service.

BUMBLE

Bumble (BMBL), a female-driven dating app, said Friday that it will support its employees’ ability to access “the healthcare services they need,” including abortion care. A Bumble spokesperson added that the company will donate to the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

“Abortion is healthcare, and healthcare is a human right. We are deeply troubled by the Supreme Court decision,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

MATCH GROUP

Dating app company Match Group (MTCH) in October established a partnership with Planned Parenthood Los Angeles to provide abortion access for its Texas employees and their dependents. The company is currently considering expanding that benefit to all its US staff, including remote employees in states with trigger laws that may soon ban abortions, according to a Match spokesperson. Match healthcare plans also help to cover travel and lodging costs for employees who need to travel to receive care, the spokesperson said.

BOX.COM

Box.com will cover employee travel and medical expenses incurred by employees while seeking reproductive services.

LEVI STRAUSS

The denim company said through The Levi Strauss Foundation that it is providing grants to the Center for Reproductive Rights, Afiya Center and ARC-Southeast which provides direct assistance to women and communities in need of care. The company previously said that under its benefits plan, employees can be reimbursed for travel expenses for services not available in their home state, including abortion. Part-time staff and others who aren’t included in the company’s benefits plan are also eligible for reimbursement, it said.

COMCAST-NBC UNIVERSAL

Comcast (CCZ) has an existing healthcare travel benefit for all employees that covers up to $4,000 per trip, up to three trips per year, with a maximum coverage cap of $10,000 per year. The amount paid out depends on the type of health care procedure, but abortion care is covered, according to the company.

WARNER BROS DISCOVERY

Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns CNN, on Friday expanded healthcare benefits options to include expenses for employees and their covered family members who need to travel to access abortions and other reproductive care, according to a company spokesperson.

CONDÉ NAST

The media company said Friday it will reimburse travel and lodging for employees who need abortion, infertility or gender-reaffirming services and cannot obtain them locally. CEO Roger Lynch said in an internal memo the Supreme Court decision was a “crushing blow to reproductive rights” and said the most powerful way the company can respond is through its content and journalism.

JPMORGAN CHASE

JPMorgan (JPM) on Friday said that its health care benefits have long covered abortion care. And starting in July, abortion will be included in the company’s health care travel benefit that covers services that can only be obtained far from home, according to spokesperson Joseph Evangelisti.

NIKE

The sportswear company said in a statement that it covers travel and lodging expenses in situations where healthcare services are not available close to home, according to a statement Nike (NKE) released Friday.

“No matter where our teammates are on their family planning journey — from contraception and abortion coverage, to pregnancy and family-building support through fertility, surrogacy and adoption benefits — we are here to support their decisions,” the statement reads.

STARBUCKS

The coffee company is providing employees enrolled in its healthcare plan a medical travel benefit to access an abortion, according to a public letter to employees by Sara Kelly, Starbucks (SBUX) acting executive vice president of partner resources.
“We all need to process this in our own way, and as you do, here is what I want you to know: no matter where you live, or what you believe, we will always ensure you have access to quality healthcare,” Kelly said in the letter.

DICK’S SPORTING GOODS

For employees who live in a state that restricts abortion access, Dick’s will provide up to $4,000 in travel expense reimbursement to travel to the nearest location where care is legally available, the company said in a statement Friday. The benefit will be provided to any employee, spouse or dependent enrolled in its medical plan, along with one support person.  Note that Dick’s is also a non-supporter of the 2A and stopped selling firearms in their stores.

KROGER

The grocer’s healthcare package includes travel benefits of up to $4,000 to facilitate access for reproductive healthcare services, including abortion and fertility treatments, according to a Kroger (KR) spokesperson.

ALASKA AIRLINES

Alaska Airlines said in a statement that it has always provided travel reimbursements for “certain medical procedures and treatments if they are not available where you live.”

“Today’s Supreme Court decision does not change that,” it said.

GOLDMAN SACHS

Goldman Sachs (FADXX) on Friday extended its healthcare travel reimbursement policies to include all medical procedures, treatments and evaluations, including abortion services, in areas where a provider is not available near to where its employees live, a benefit that will be effective July 1, according to an internal memo obtained by CNN.

ZILLOW

Zillow (Z) said in a statement Friday that its health benefits cover a wide range of reproductive health services, including abortions. The company said that as of June 1, its health plan has been updated to include a reimbursement of up to $7,500 “each time significant travel is necessary to access health care, including reproductive services.”

HP

The technology company said in a statement that its existing healthcare plan covers a “wide range of reproductive health services,” including abortion and related travel costs.

HPE

Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which spun off from HP several years ago and moved its headquarters earlier this year from Silicon Valley to Texas, offers a medical plan that covers out of state care, including abortions and related travel expenses, according to a company spokesperson.

“Restricting a woman’s ability and choices in obtaining health care is inequitable and harmful to the advancement of women,” HPE CEO Antonio Neri said on Twitter Saturday.

ACCCENTURE

Accenture’s existing healthcare plan includes “a full range of reproductive healthcare benefits” and travel assistance for “covered medial services” that are not located within 100 miles of an employee’s residence, a company spokesperson told CNN.

CHOBANI

The yogurt company updated its healthcare policy for employees in May, following the leak of the draft opinion on Roe, to cover transportation and lodging expenses for any employee or dependent (as well as one caregiver) who needs to travel to receive specialized healthcare, including abortions. The policy also includes reimbursement for childcare costs incurred from the travel, according to a memo Chobani COO Kevin Burns sent to employees in May, which was shared with CNN.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

Hunter Will Skate

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The investigation of Hunter Biden has reached a critical stage, with prosecutors weighing whether or not to bring charges.  Their focus has narrowed to tax violations and making a false statement to purchase a firearm.  Apparently, the juicy stuff from Hunter Biden’s laptop and business dealings – money laundering, failure to register as a foreign lobbyist, and such and the like – has been left behind.

Which is too bad, because it leaves a lot of questions unanswered – not only about Hunter but, more importantly, about Joe Biden.  Tenacious investigator Peter Schweizer, author of a book documenting how communist China has captured American elites, asserts it is undisputed Hunter Biden received tens of millions of dollars from Chinese businesses having ties to Chinese intelligence when Joe Biden was in the White House as Vice President and the Obama administration’s point man on China policy.  It is believed Joe Biden—the ‘Big Guy’—gets 10 percent from Hunter Biden’s business dealings. This raises a whole host of major questions, like: Was Joe Biden selling his office when he was Vice President?  Was U.S. China policy affected?  Was national security compromised?  Is Joe Biden in the pocket of Red China today?  Unfortunately, it looks like we’re never going to know because prosecutors can only get interested in whether Hunter Biden lied when he bought a gun.  And they want us to believe we don’t have a two-tiered justice system in this country – one for the high and mighty and another for us little people.

But no matter how you slice it, Hunter’s business dealings and kickbacks to Joe Biden still stink to high heaven.  In recent weeks, it’s been conceded Hunter Biden’s laptop is genuine, not Russian disinformation as ridiculously claimed.  Information from the laptop documents the Biden-Burisma connection and a pay-to-play scheme in Ukraine, how Vice President Joe Biden intervened to get a Ukrainian prosecutor off Hunter’s back, and Hunter’s questionable activities in Moscow, China, and Kazakhstan. The laptop also shows Hunter Biden met with Vice President Joe Biden at the White House or the Vice President’s residence at least 30 times, often just after returning from overseas business trips.  A Hunter Biden business associate attended 21 of those meetings.

Emails on the laptop and now available online show a Mexican billionaire received access to the White House because Hunter Biden requested it.

Joe Biden claims to this day he doesn’t know anything about Hunter’s business dealings, a claim which has been thoroughly debunked.  Recovered files from the laptop show, not only did Joe Biden know about Hunter’s business dealings, but Joe Biden offered to help more than once and even referred more business to Hunter Biden.  The White House won’t answer any questions about the laptop (more here).  Gee, I wonder why.

A recovered text message from Hunter Biden raises questions about why he was working with China’s chief of intelligence, and whether China arrested CIA sources in retaliation for the Justice Department arresting Hunter’s Chinese business partner.  Emails show Joe Biden wrote a college recommendation letter for the son of Hunter Biden’s Chinese business partner.  Bank records released by two U.S. Senators show Hunter Biden has financial ties to companies linked to the Chinese Communist Party or government.  One of the companies wired $1 million dollars to a Hunter Biden company the same month the Chinese company’s lobbyist was arrested by U.S. authorities for bribery and money laundering.  He was later convicted.

Most recently, the Biden administration sold China a million barrels of oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve.  This was oil set aside to help Americans but Joe Biden sold it to China, specifically to Sinopec in which Hunter Biden has a financial interest. Our China policy is, what again?

Finally, we’ve been hearing for a long time Hunter would divest himself of a financial stake in a Chinese oil company.  The latest report from two days ago is he still hasn’t done so.

In 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace after a scandal involving a $10,000 bribe. My, how times have changed, and not for the better.

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

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Bennie Thompson Falsely Claims Police ‘Killed’ in January 6 Capitol Chaos

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At the opening of the January 6 Committee hearing on Thursday, Committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) claimed falsely that former President Trump was indifferent to the “beating and killing” of police officers.

“Donald Trump ignored and disregarded the desperate pleas of his own family, including Ivanka and Don Jr.,” Thompson stated. “Even though he was the only person in the world who could call off the mob he sent to the Capitol, he could not be moved to rise from his dining room table and walk a few steps down the White House hallway into the press briefing room, where cameras were anxiously and desperately waiting to carry his message to the armed and violent mob savagely beating and killing law enforcement officers revenging [sic] the Capitol and hunting down the Vice President and various members of Congress. He could not be moved.”

All false. In fact, of the five people who died in connection with the chaos, only one, protester and Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, was killed, shot by a law enforcement officers. Three other protesters died of unrelated causes. One Capitol Police officer, Brian Sicknick, passed away after January 6 from natural causes.

Thompson also claimed falsely that Trump “sent” a violent mob to the Capitol; in fact, the chaos began even before Trump told the crowd at his “Save America” rally a mile away “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Thompson also claimed falsely that the protesters were “armed.”

To sum up, the Chairman of the January 6 Committee did nothing but lie about his political opponents and the events of that date.

Bennie G. Thompson

Chairman of the January 6 Commission

On July 1, 2021, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi named Thompson to chair the January 6 Commission, a special congressional panel investigating the causes and ramifications of the January 6, 2021 protest during which several hundred supporters of President Trump had illegally entered the U.S. Capitol building to express their objections to the result of the 2020 presidential election. “January 6 was a devastating black eye on our democracy, and we have to make sure that it never happens again,” said Thompson…

To learn more about Bennie Thompson, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Shocking New Studies On The Dangers and Serious Side Effects Of Covid Vaccine

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Disturbing new vaccine data:

TRANSCRIPT:

Good evening and welcome to “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” We’re still shocked. Everyone else seems to have moved on to the next thing, but we still can’t get over what we saw yesterday when Joe Biden stunned the world and announced during a press conference with no warning at all that he has a potentially fatal disease. “I have cancer, “Joe Biden said. “I got it from living in Delaware.”

It turns out that Joe Biden’s home state is so thoroughly polluted, so supernaturally filthy, that even lepers living in public sewers in Calcutta refuse to go there. It’s too unclean. How dirty is Delaware? It is so dirty, Joe Biden said, that when it rains, it rains oil. That’s why everyone in Delaware gets cancer. They get it from the oil rain. Now, Joe Biden has it, too.

Looking back, voters probably should have known a little more about Joe Biden’s Delaware-related risk factors before he became president. It’s too late now and it just got worse. Not only is Biden sick from Delaware oil rain, now he’s got COVID. The White House announced it today. So, it’s been a tough week, overall. Wednesday, it was cancer. Thursday, it was the coronavirus. Tomorrow, you’ve got to think it’s going to be monkeypox. If you or someone you know has recently had unsafe sex with Joe Biden, please seek precautionary medical attention. God knows what you might have picked up.

At the White House, they are genuinely upset by today’s news, not because they’re worried about Joe Biden’s health. Everybody who works at the White House already knows he’s so thoroughly unwell he can barely speak. These are the people who run his teleprompter. They’re the ones who put the little pieces of tape on the floor so he knows where the door is.

These are not people who have any illusions at all about Joe Biden’s condition. What they’re upset about is the fact that Joe Biden just stepped on their message and from day one, that message has been consistent and unrelenting: “Get the vaccine or else.” Get the vaccine or you can’t have a job or an organ transplant or Thanksgiving with your kids. Get the vax or you can’t visit your mom as she dies in the hospital. Get the vax, prole. It’s the most important thing that you can do and you’re a monster if you don’t.

So, people obey. They did it. “Okay,” they said, “We’ll take the vax. It doesn’t look like we have a choice, but are you sure it works? It’s pretty hard to make a successful vaccine against a coronavirus. In fact, nobody’s ever done it. We tried with SARs almost 20 years ago and that failed completely, so you are absolutely positive this stuff works? Are you sure it’s safe and effective?”

“Of course we’re positive,” screamed the mannequin. We’re the U.S. government. We know these things. We don’t make mistakes. Stop asking questions. Questions have no place in science. Just take this shot and you will not get COVID. That’s guaranteed.” Joe Biden said that. He didn’t just say it once. He said it many, many, many times.

BIDEN, OCTOBER 2021: The fact is, this has been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Unvaccinated.

BIDEN, JULY 2021: The Delta virus, which is much more transmissible and more deadly in terms of non-unvaccinated people… The various shots that people are getting now cover that. You’re okay. You’re not going to, you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

BIDEN, JANUARY 2022: If you’re unvaccinated, you have some reason to be alarmed. Many of you will, you know, you’ll experience severe illness in many cases if you get COVID-19, if you’re not vaccinated. Some will die. We have in hand all the vaccines we need to get every American fully vaccinated, including the booster shot. So, there’s no excuse, no excuse for anyone being unvaccinated. This continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

Yeah, there’s no excuse. And if you don’t get the vax, you’re going to die from COVID. You’re going to get COVID if you don’t get the vax. Now, if you’d said that once or maybe like 11 times, you could say he’s got dementia, whatever. He said it pretty much every day, and he’s not the only one. They all did, beginning with Lord Fauci.

So, it turns out once you get vaccinated, you can feel safe. You’re not going to get infected. You’re not like the dirty people who didn’t get the vax, the anti-science people who are all going to die, and when they do, we’re going to laugh at them because they deserve it. And by the way, it wasn’t just Biden who’s just reading the script. It wasn’t just Fauci who will say whatever it takes and is, of course, covering up his own role in creating the virus in the first place. Even actual doctors, even the head of the CDC, even Rochelle Walensky herself, said the same thing.

WALENSKY: Our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick, and that it’s not just in the clinical trials, but it’s also in real world data.

Yeah, it’s not just in the clinical trials. It’s in real world data. Just look around observed reality. You don’t know anyone who’s gotten the vaccine and then got COV– oh, wait, everybody who got the vaccine got COVID. How does that work? Well, they never explained. They stopped telling you it was a pandemic of the vaccine because it was so obviously untrue.

You got the vaccine, you still got COVID, so they stopped saying anything at all, and they hoped you would forget about what they said for a full year and all the thousands of people whose lives they destroyed on the basis of that lie, but what they didn’t do ever was apologize for it. They hope they wouldn’t have to. But then last Friday, Joe Biden, again the president of the United States, became visibly symptomatic with something during a speech in Jerusalem. Watch.

BIDEN: I was making a speech and I had a terrible headache, excuse me, a terrible headache and sorry, but I had a terrible headache six years ago and I did a very stupid thing.

Remember, when you’re a kid, all the public health authorities try to stamp out cigarette smoking, and they printed these huge posters of up a wino dying of cirrhosis, tugging on a Pall Mall. They said smoking is very glamorous. In other words, don’t be this guy. Well, if we ever have another pandemic, let’s hope we don’t, but if we ever do, play that tape. That’s what you don’t do. Remember, the CDC in its guidance, when you develop symptoms, you isolate immediately.

You don’t cough on people at press conferences. Those are the rules that your kids lived by at school. That’s why they wore the little masks. They couldn’t breathe. Your children were also told to scan QR codes for contact tracing purposes if they ever developed COVID a dry cough, but today, Joe Biden gets COVID, and when reporters asked how he got it and why he didn’t isolate after getting symptoms, the response the White House press secretary was and we’re quoting here, and we’re quoting her, “I don’t think that matters.” It just doesn’t matter. Turns out it doesn’t matter. Go ahead and super spread if you want to.

So, if you’re on Air Force One yesterday or you went to a big press conference in Massachusetts or if you were the recipient of a fist bump in Saudi Arabia, you may have the Rona, but nobody cares. I don’t think it matters, says Karine Jean-Pierre, the president’s glass ceiling shattering publicist. So, obviously they’re hypocrites. Did you know that? Had you heard that before? Well, now you can mark that down as confirmed. That’s only part of the story and we don’t want to ignore the fact that the real story is the president of the United States is 79-years-old and has a, how to put it, complicated medical history and now he’s got COVID.

So, what does that mean? Well, sincerely, we hope he’s going to be okay. We do know he’s going to lose his sense of smell, maybe forever. What does that mean? No more sniffing little girls. If you’re Joe Biden and your main source of pleasure at this late stage in your life is sniffing the hair of unsuspecting, defenseless little girls and now you can’t even smell it, imagine that. Let’s say you’re riding your bike and you see a little girl and you think “I’d love to sniff her hair. Oh, man. No sense of smell.”

So, actually the costs of COVID are a little more profound than sometimes we understand. What’s kind of weird from a political perspective is that Biden got infected with COVID at exactly the moment his approval rating has reached its lowest ebb, not just with normal people, with Democrats. He’s 19% among Hispanic voters. Red alert, anyone and this also comes exactly the same moment that his son faces possible felony charges, huh? And also, needless to say, at the moment that his dementia has become so obvious that no one can possibly deny it.

I’m in Israel to honor the Holocaust, he just said. Oh, it’s so awful. So, what does this mean? Well, this incites the blood instincts of others in his party. Gretchen Whitmer, probably sitting in her rec room right now polishing her resume. “I could replace him,” but the real story here is the medical story. Joe Biden and a whole lot other people have gotten pretty sick with COVID after getting multiple shots. What is that about exactly? How did that happen? It’s easy to just mock that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. That’s clearly untrue, but is there a connection between getting most multiple COVID vaccine shots and getting sicker?

Is it possible that the vaccine actually can hurt you, especially if you keep getting boosted? Can it weaken your immune system? Well, that looks possible. Multiple studies have looked into this. Just last month, the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology published the findings of several MRNA researchers and we’re quoting, “In this paper, we present evidence that vaccination induces a profound impairment in type one interferon signaling, which has diverse adverse consequences to human health.”

Well, that seems like a headline. Did you read that in The New York Times? No, you probably didn’t. Kind of weird since hundreds of millions of people got the shot. The researchers continue that in their studies of the COVID vaccine, “We identify potential profound disturbances in regulatory control of protein synthesis and cancer surveillance. These disturbances potentially have a causal link to neurodegenerative disease… myocarditis, Bell’s Palsy, liver disease, impaired adaptive immunity, impaired DNA damage response, etc.”

So, it’s possible. In fact, it’s looking likely that the vaccine might suppress the immune system. This fact, the authors concluded, will “have a wide range of consequences, not the least of which include the reactivation of latent viral infections and the reduced ability to effectively combat future infections.” Now again, we sincerely hope that’s not true, but it’s not just the conclusion of one scientific journal.

The Lancet may be the most famous scientific journal in the world, released similar findings in February. The Lancet’s piece was entitled “Risk of infection, hospitalization and death up to nine months after a second dose of COVID 19 vaccine.” A physician called Kenji Yamamoto made this observation about the data from The Lancet. He wrote this in a letter to the Journal of Virology and we’re quoting “The study showed that immune function among vaccinated individuals eight months after the administration of two doses of COVID 19 vaccine was lower than that among the unvaccinated individuals.”

Now your first response, if you’re a humane person to a line like that, has got to be deep sympathy because people were misled. They were forced. They were forced, medical ethics thrown out the window. People were forced to take medicine they didn’t want and some of them have been hurt by it and you don’t have to take this man’s word for it. Pull up the Lancet study yourself. You won’t find anything of the text of the article saying what Kenji Yamamoto said, which is weird. Why would the Lancet want to hide a major finding like that? We can’t say, but if you look at table three in the piece, here’s what you’ll find buried in the data.

Among people around the age of 80 who have been double vaccinated, that would include people like Joe Biden, the per capita rate of medical incidences, including hospitalizations for death, is nearly twice as high as the rate of serious incidence for the unvaccinated. This is 180 days after vaccination. What is that and why is no one interested? The piece also includes a chart showing negative vaccine efficacy for all ages after eight months for all participants in the study. So again, this is sad news for a lot of Americans, but it’s also a profound indictment, maybe the greatest indictment in our lifetimes of our leaders, their recklessness, their pig headedness, their dishonesty.

Given this, how is the D.C. government, among many others, still requiring schoolchildren, public and private schoolchildren, to get a COVID vaccine? That’s a question that no one asked at today’s White House press briefing. How are members of the U.S. military being dismissed without their pensions because they won’t take this same vaccine, in light of these study results. Is no one paying attention? How is this allowed? But instead, today at the White House briefing, all the questions are about the proof of life video that Joe Biden’s office released today. Here it is.

BIDEN: Hey, folks, guess you heard this morning I tested positive for COVID. But, I’ve been double-vaccinated, double-boosted. Symptoms are mild and I really appreciate your inquiries and concerns. I’m doing well, getting a lot of work done. I’m going to continue to get it done.

Here’s a question. Is there a single public statement Joe Biden has made since Inauguration Day that he did not read off a teleprompter? Is there one? Find it.

So, the question they come up at today’s press briefing was, after seeing that is who shot that footage? Is that person in danger?
placeholder

Well, once again, the president’s glass ceiling shattering publicist, Karine Jean-Pierre, was asked that question and she said it’s totally fine because the video was taken outside and there’s no risk outside that we will arrest you for paddleboarding in California. But then an hour earlier, to make this even messier because it’s inherently messy, because it’s Biden-related, the White House released this picture and it shows Joe Biden, brace yourselves, indoors at his desk, no mask.

So, who shot that picture? Is that person still alive? Does that person have monkeypox? Presumably, the White House photographer is vaccinated. That’s got to be a requirement working there. But as we just saw, that may make the photographer more vulnerable to infection and in fact, and we hate to say this, it might mean the photographer is now more likely to face serious health complications.

So, underlying all of this is a really ominous fact, and that is a lot of people have been hurt by this. You hate to say it. Germany’s Ministry of Health found that 1 in 5,000 Germans have suffered “serious side effects after a COVID 19 vaccine.”

Now, one in 5,000 may seem like a lot or a little, but extrapolate forward to the United States, a country with our population. That would mean that in the U.S., if that number holds constant across countries (and why wouldn’t it?) it would mean more than 100,000 Americans may have been seriously injured by the COVID vaccine.

Why does no one talk about them? Why does nobody care and what happens to them now? If Joe Biden accomplishes a single thing as president, it will be getting more people to ask that question today and it’s a fair question and to end, science is about questions. Science is questioning. So, anyone who tells you, you’re anti-science for asking a question doesn’t understand what science is.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLES:

Natural Immunity Offered More Protection Against Omicron Than 3 Vaccine Doses, New England Journal of Medicine Study Finds

Computing forever: A synopsis of the climate-Covid con for communism

Antibodies From Vaccines Interfering Instead of Neutralizing Because of Spike Protein Changes: Dr. Risch

Australia: The More “Vaccines” You’ve Had, The Sicker You’ll Be

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

Trump Ahead By 30 Points in the 2024 Primary Poll

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Joe Biden or any other Democrat Party candidate has no chance against President Trump in 2024. That is why the Left will stop at nothing to prevent Trump from running in 2024.

TRUMP AHEAD BY 30 POINTS IN 2024 PRIMARY POLL

By RSB, July 21, 2022

President Donald J. Trump leads the Republican 2024 presidential primary field by 30 points, according to a new Morning Consult/Politico poll.

The survey results released Wednesday showed that, if the primary were held today, 53 percent of potential Republican primary voters would support Trump over 15 other candidates. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was the second pick, receiving support from 23 percent.

Without offering additional commentary, Trump shared the poll results via his Truth Social account Wednesday.

AUTHOR

Geller Report Staff

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

NYC Mayor Asks for Biden’s Help After Being Flooded With Biden’s Illegal Aliens

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New York City, like D.C., is experiencing a little of life as a border state after Biden’s unprecedented open borders surge of illegal aliens flooded the city.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday demanded the federal government help pay for what he said was a wave of asylum seekers pouring into the city, claiming its safety net was being strained by busloads of people coming from border states and elsewhere.

But as opposed to D.C., the problem in New York City is exacerbated by its “right to shelter” mandate, which means any homeless asylum seeker who comes to town, by any means, has to be put in a bed somewhere.

It worked in San Fran and it’s doing wonders for NYC.

“Currently, New York City is experiencing a marked increase in the number of asylum seekers who are arriving from Latin America and other regions. In some instances, families are arriving on buses sent by the Texas and Arizona governments, while in other cases, it appears that individuals are being sent by the federal government,” Adams said in a statement, adding that more than 2,800 asylum seekers had entered the shelter system in recent weeks.

Adams knows perfectly well that Arizona and Texas aren’t sending buses to NYC, they’re sending buses to D.C. But blaming Biden and, more accurately, the leftists who turned the federal government into a coyote busing program for illegals would be politically dangerous.

It’s safe to blame Ducey and Abbott, even though it’s a lie.

But the offices of both Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey denied Adams’ claim, saying in separate statements that they were in fact sending asylum seekers to Washington – but not to New York City.

In turn, a spokesperson for Adams responded to those pushback claims, saying that the governors “should have more compassion for those seeking asylum in this country,” and repeated the city’s request for federal assistance.

Doubling down on a lie with some virtue signaling is perfectly of this decade.

According to the New York City Department of Homeless Services, there were 28,885 individuals classed as a member of a “family with children” in the shelter system as of Sunday. That’s about 12% higher than the daily average in March, the last month for which such data are available, and also about 12% higher than this time last year.

Open borders work.

The Legal Aid Society slammed Adams for blaming the shelter crisis on asylum seekers, saying the real problems were bureaucracy and a lack of affordable housing.

Sure. Let’s just provide free housing and free everything to all of Latin America. And the rest of the planet. The Legal Aid Society will pay for it.

Meanwhile, Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin, who recently won the Republican primary in the race for New York governor, pinned the blame on the Biden administration.

“Their weak border policy is then made worse by what amounts to a travel agency flying the illegal immigrants to destinations all across the country, including New York,” he said. “The obvious consequence is that New Yorkers are now stuck dealing with the consequences. The solution is that the surge of illegal entry across our southern border needs to be shut down, the Remain in Mexico policy must be enforced.”

And we all know that’s not happening for some years now. Meanwhile America is being destroyed.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

RELATED ARTICLES:

SCOTUS Blocks Biden Admin’s Attempt To Limit Immigration Enforcement

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‘Opening the border to a hostile terrorist army violates Biden’s obligation to protect states from invasion’

Mahmoud Abbas Called For Israel’s Destruction in Front of Biden

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

VIDEOS: The View from Israel

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The View from Israel brings you accurate pro-Israel information.

We explain Israel’s legitimacy that cannot be disputed.

We introduce you to Israelis with seemingly unique stories but, within democratic Israel, they are not rare or unusual – only to outsiders.

Please help us get out the message by clicking the ‘Like’ button and sharing the videos on your social media sites.

This helps increase our recorded viewership and drives more people to our pro-Israel messages.

Thanks! Now sit back and enjoy the videos.

Whose Land?

I talk with film-maker, Hugh Kitson, about his important movie. We have included excerpts and details of how you can watch the full movie. Please note! If you are in Jerusalem on July 27, try to get to the Begin Center at 6.30 pm to meet High Kitson at the premier of Whose Land?

How Minority Israelis Make a Case for Israel

Often the best advocates for Israel are not Israeli Jews but members of Israel’s rich and varied minorities. Meet Jonathan Elkhoury. Listen to our conversation, and his unique story.

©Barry Shaw. All rights reserved.

The Mindless Expansion of Assisted Suicide Laws

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California reported 486 assisted suicide deaths for 2021, a 12 percent increase over initial reports from the year before.  The increase is understandable, given the fact California loosened its assisted suicide law in two important respects.  First, it reduced the 15-day waiting period between two oral requests to two days. Second, it forced doctors who oppose assisted suicide to make referrals anyway against their conscience, just one of the many ways the authoritarian Left is advancing its cause through this issue.

Euthanasia deaths are also up in the Netherlands – 10.5 percent – and in Belgium by about the same percentage.  The authoritarian Left won’t be happy until we’re all eating bugs while we’re alive and the state can tell us when to die.

The authoritarian Left is still on the march, expanding assisted suicide and euthanasia laws wherever it can.  It tried to argue California’s assisted suicide law permitted euthanasia where lethal drugs are administered by others, but was shot down by a court.

In Canada, euthanasia for mental illness alone will go into effect in 2023.  Canada is also the place where a climate activist asked for euthanasia based solely on his anxiety about climate change.  People in Canada are applying for euthanasia based on chronic but not terminal conditions and even poverty.  A good reason, a bad reason – if the authoritarian Left gets its way, it will soon be no reason at all.   Wrong direction.

People in Colorado are being approved for assisted suicide for anorexia.  A doctor there falsely attests anorexia is fatal when obviously it is not.  So much for the original justification assisted suicide is reserved for cases of imminent death.   Small matter to the authoritarian Left. Given that the wish to die is most closely associated with loneliness and depression, we can see where this is headed – no reason for assisted suicide needed, no questions asked.

Which is why euthanasia advocates want to remove psychiatric review from the process.   They also want to let nurses and other non-physicians approve assisted suicide requests and automatically grant applications from anyone in hospice even though hospice residents are often discharged because they are no longer close to death.

There’s been a shift in the rhetoric on this issue – what were once ‘safeguards’ in the law to keep assisted suicide from spinning out of control are now ‘barriers to a good death’. The pretense is gone; the authoritarian Left WANTS assisted suicide to spin out of control. One reason is they want your organs.  Organ harvesting on demand is big business in communist China, so why not bring it to America by having more people kill themselves and sign organ donation cards right before they do. Activists in California are fighting for the free speech rights of death advisors – ‘death doulas’ as they are called – to counsel people their time is up.  One can easily envision a future where death doulas will become mandatory and spew a government line that organ ‘donation’ is really the way to go.

The Left used to be able to pretend assisted suicide would be rare and carefully bounded by safeguards in the law.  Anyone who warned we were on a slippery slope was just crazy.   No longer.  Assisted suicides are up and the safeguards are systematically being dismantled.  The experience of Canada and the Netherlands shows assisted suicide and euthanasia laws expand their reach until no limits are left, the laws trample conscience rights, and they threaten vulnerable populations like the mentally ill who aren’t even considered competent to consent to a car loan.

What are we doing to ourselves?  Not enough people are stopping to ask.

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

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

If Climate Change Is a Dire Threat, Why Is No One Talking about Nuclear Power?

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A common (legitimate) concern with nuclear is unhealthy radiation, its usage actually emits less radiation than the burning of coal.

There is a deafening silence surrounding nuclear energy. Yet, if you are to believe the current climate alarmism on display, the world’s future is hanging by a thread. Indeed, the forceful climate marches in London last week, the Greta Thunberg-ization of the world’s youth, and David Attenborough’s new Netflix documentary are all symptoms of a growing call to arms. According to them, climate change is real and impending, and, in young Greta’s words, they “want you to panic.”

The situation appears dire. Yet, assuming it is, there seems to be a gap in reasoning. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling for a “Green New Deal,” which would seek to remove America’s carbon footprint by 2030 by “upgrading” every single one of the 136 million houses in America, completely overhauling the nation’s transport infrastructure (both public and private), and somehow simultaneously guaranteeing universal health care, access to healthy food, and economic security—without any consideration of cost. In other words, a complete pie-in-the-sky scheme that is more concerned with virtue-signaling than with pragmatic reality.

But if these people truly care about the environment and the damage being caused by climate change, why is no one talking about nuclear?

Nuclear is fully carbon-free and therefore a “clean” energy source in carbon terms. This is crucial considering the primary villain of climate change is CO2; switching to nuclear would directly cut out carbon emissions and thus represent a significant step forward, except for the construction phase (which would create a one-off nominal carbon debt about equal to that of solar farms). It has successfully contributed to decarbonizing public transport in countries such as Japan, France, and Sweden.

It is also often overlooked that nuclear is the safest way to generate reliable electricity (and far safer than coal or gas) despite Frankenstein-esque visions of nuclear meltdowns à la Chernobyl, which are ridiculously exaggerated and exceedingly rare.

Nuclear is also incredibly reliable, with an average capacity of 92.3 percent, meaning it is fully operational more than 330 days a year, which is drastically more reliable than both wind and solar—combined.

Finally, whereas a common (legitimate) concern with nuclear is that it creates unhealthy radiation, its usage actually emits less radiation than, for example, the burning of coal. Moreover, the problem posed by waste is more psychological and political nowadays than it is technological. Despite the Simpsons-inspired image of green, murky water, nuclear waste is, in fact, merely a collection of old steel rods; the nuclear waste produced in America over the last 60 years could all fit into a single medium-sized Walmart. Furthermore, it is not only securely stored in concrete-and-steel casks in the middle of deserts, but it also loses radiation over time and can actually be recycled to extend the life of nuclear production by centuries.

There are explicit success stories that attest to the power of nuclear. France and Sweden, which have some of the lowest per capita carbon emissions in the developed world, both rely heavily on nuclear (72 percent and 42 percent, respectively) rather than on wind or solar power. France generated 88 percent of its electricity total from zero-carbon sources, and Sweden got an even more impressive 95 percent. At the same time, these countries have some of the lowest energy prices in Europe, whereas renewable-heavy countries such as Germany and Denmark have the two highest energy prices on the continent—without much carbon reduction to show for it relative to France and Sweden.

So why, if people such as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez care as much about the climate as they claim to, are they seemingly so blindly attracted to over-ambitious, unrealistic proposals? Indeed, a near-utopiazation of renewables fails to take into account many of the issues associated with these while neglecting the advantages of nuclear.

Renewable energy isn’t always reliable, as mentioned (which makes sense when you consider the fact that the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow). When the reliability of these renewables falters (wind turbines only provide energy 34.5 percent of the time, and solar panels an even lower 25.1 percent), expensive and carbon-heavy stop-gap measures act as backup.

There are also ecological problems. Wind and solar farms require tremendous amounts of wildlife-cleared land and are often protested by local conservationists. Electricity from solar panels on individual homes, on the other hand, a plan AOC apparently endorses, is twice as expensive, thus making it unaffordable for many American households. Though the debate rages, there is also a case to be made for the fact that wind turbines represent serious hazards to rare and threatened birds such as eagles and other birds of prey. They also threaten marine wildlife such as porpoises and coral reefs.

When compared more directly with various forms of renewable energy, the narrative also skews in nuclear’s favor. Solar farms require 450 times more land than do nuclear power plants; nuclear plants require far fewer materials for production than solar, wind, hydro, or geothermal; and solar produces up to 300 times more hazardous waste per terawatt-hour of energy than nuclear.

Yet the issues aren’t merely technological and ecological. Indeed, there is an argument that renewables such as solar and wind will become more and more efficient and cheaper over time, which is certainly true (though some experts dispute the net validity of this claim). A different problem, however, is that the context within which they are promoted, such as the “Green New Deal,” often translates into economic madness (the GND would cost up to $90 trillion according to some). It is striking how the Green New Deal encapsulates not only climate change but also health care, jobs, and housing.

Indeed, it goes much further than simply combating the issues facing our environment, incorporating a much wider agenda of socio-economic transformation. And this is why some, such as Michael Shellenberger (president of Environmental Progress—a pro-nuclear, climate change NGO), argue that left-wing politicians in the mold of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez idealize renewables: they provide an environmentalist façade for increased government intervention in areas far beyond the climate.

Of course, nuclear isn’t perfect; it is still very expensive (though this is increasingly solvable through more standardization and long-termism), the risk of Fukushima-like disasters will probably always exist, and the localized environmental impacts are concerns to be addressed. Most importantly, the political will is still lacking.

Despite the fact that the public and private sectors spent a combined $2 trillion between 2007 and 2016 on solar and wind power, solar energy still only accounted for 1.3 percent, and wind power 3.9 percent, of the world’s electricity generation in 2016. Operating at a scale of 94 times more in federal subsidies in America for renewables than for nuclear, this looks like an unsustainable trend. Imagine if it had been invested in nuclear instead.

Rather, the Ocasio-Cortezes of the world, who are by far the most vociferous when it comes to climate change, should put money where their mouths are. Though this article is far from exhaustive and was unable to account for all the nuances and intricacies of environmental and energy policy, it seems that, at the very least, nuclear deserves a spot at the table if we are serious about saving our planet.

AUTHOR

Christopher Barnard

Christopher Barnard is the Head of Campaigning & Events for Students For Liberty UK, as well as a final-year Politics & International Relations student at the University of Kent. He tweets at @ChrisBarnardDL.

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

The Semiconductor Industry Is Coming for Your Wallet. As Usual, Congress Is Complicit

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The Chips Act is a classic case of the government helping special interest groups at the expense of taxpayers.

Of all the problems in the world right now, the chip shortage probably isn’t the chief concern for most people, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a serious issue. The auto and tech sectors have faced unprecedented delays and rising prices in recent months. Some used cars are even selling for more than their new counterparts because of the delays, a sure sign that production has slowed dramatically.

To address this, Congress is contemplating bipartisan legislation known as the Chips Act, which would provide $52 billion in grants and $24 billion in tax credits to the US semiconductor industry. Thanks to a last-minute bipartisan amendment, the bill will also put tens of billions of dollars toward various federal agencies, bringing the total price tag to $250 billion.

Because why not…

The Senate voted to advance the bill on Tuesday, which means it will likely hold a vote on final passage in the coming days. If passed, the bill will then go to the House for passage, and assuming that is successful it would then go to President Biden for signature into law.

The main arguments for the bill were summarized earlier this week in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed penned by Jim Farley and Pat Gelsinger, the CEOs of Ford and Intel, respectively.

“The pandemic supply-chain shock exposed a problem that had been mounting for years,” they write. “The U.S. share of global chip manufacturing has declined to 12% from 37% in 1990. South Korea and Taiwan, notably, have spent years actively investing in [read: subsidizing] their own chip manufacturing, creating an uneven playing field for U.S. chip makers that harms our economy and global competitiveness.”

They go on to list the disruptions that have occurred in the auto, consumer-electronics, and healthcare industries because of the shortage, and they warn that national defense is also at stake.

“Fortunately, a solution is within reach,” they continue, referring to the Chips Act. “In addition to boosting production of leading-edge and legacy chips, the act would help level the playing field with global competitors…This legislation is vital to many American industries, including ours, that have dealt with significant disruptions.”

“By funding the Chips Act,” they conclude, “Congress will help consumers, protect patients and strengthen the American economy and national security.”

At first glance, that Op-Ed might seem innocuous, even well-intentioned. But it doesn’t take much to realize what’s really going on here. The companies run by these CEOs stand to gain billions of taxpayer dollars—not just tax credits, but government grants—if this legislation passes. Do you really think they wrote that because they care about the American economy and national defense? Give me a break. They wrote it because they want the money, and they will make whatever arguments they think people will buy in order to get it.

So, what’s wrong with their arguments?

For starters, there’s the classic problem of opportunity cost. Fifty-two billion taxpayer dollars being poured into these industries is 52 billion taxpayers dollars that can’t be poured into other industries. The government is not creating resources, it is simply reallocating them, and it’s by no means obvious that this is the best use of these funds. Notably, the free market tends to allocate resources much better than the government because, unlike Congress, it is guided by actual consumer demand.

Additionally, the CEOs conflate strengthening their businesses with strengthening the American economy. In reality, these are two very different things. If it’s cheaper to buy semiconductors from companies in foriegn countries, it would be economically inefficient to produce these products in America. It would be better to let the domestic producers take losses and ultimately fail so their capital could be reallocated to better uses.

Here, of course, the lobbyists have a rejoinder. “The only reason it’s cheaper to buy semiconductors from foreign countries,” they say, “is because foreign governments subsidize their semiconductor producers. We need a level playing field.”

People who are otherwise proponents of free markets are often sympathetic to this line of reasoning. After all, it’s not really the case that American producers are inefficient, right? If only there was a level playing field, they could compete just fine.

Rothbard tackles this thinking head-on in his book Making Economic Sense.

“Whenever someone starts talking about ‘fair competition’ or indeed, about ‘fairness’ in general,” he writes, “it is time to keep a sharp eye on your wallet, for it is about to be picked.”

Sure enough, that’s exactly what’s happening here.

After addressing some other arguments, Rothbard turns to the issue of foreign government subsidies that allow foreign companies to engage in “dumping,” that is, selling products to American consumers “below cost.”

“Another charge claims that Japanese or other foreign firms can afford to engage in dumping because their governments are willing to subsidize their losses,” he writes. “But again, we should still welcome such an absurd policy. If the Japanese government is really willing to waste scarce resources subsidizing American purchases of Sony’s, so much the better! Their policy would be just as self-defeating as if the losses were private.”

Swap out Japanese Sony’s for Taiwanese semiconductors and Rothbard might as well be writing in 2022. The point is, economic well-being is ultimately about consumers, not producers. If foreign governments are willing to subsidize semiconductors, making them cheaper for Americans, then we might as well take the gift. True, it’s not a free market, but it doesn’t help to adopt bad public policy simply because other nations are also doing it.

What’s curious about corporate subsidies like this is that large swaths of both the left and the right are opposed to them. Right-wingers oppose corporate subsidies because they are funded with taxpayer dollars and have the government picking winners and losers in the market. Left-wingers oppose corporate subsidies because they help big corporations at the expense of the little guy.

So if both sides of the political spectrum have good reasons for opposing this measure, it’s worth asking ourselves, who exactly is promoting this?

The answer is: the establishment.

It’s important to understand that the real world of politics is somewhat different from the ideological debates we see online and in the news. Sure, politicians know how to say the right things, but when it comes down to it, most of their job is about appeasing special-interest groups, from semiconductor companies to the military industrial complex to farmers to unions…the list is long.

Ambrose Bierce has a great quote that really captures this idea. Giving a satirical definition of politics in The Devil’s Dictionary, he writes, “POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

We’re told that politics is about competing philosophies of government. In theory, each party has its own vision of what good government looks like, and they are trying to live out those principles as best they can.

But most of the time, that’s not what happens. In practice, it is a strife of special interests. For most politicians, the principles they espouse are merely a pretense, a facade. The real work of politics is about placating donors and lobbyists and voting blocs. This is why we see things like corporate subsidies. They aren’t part of some grand governing philosophy. They are simply the inevitable result of a system that is run by the special interests and for the special interests.

Is that cynical? Sure. But it’s a very justified cynicism, and it gets reinforced every time a story like this comes out.

The good news is that we can do something about it. Once we see the corrupting incentives inherent in politics, we can begin to work towards change. But the key is to not be wooed by the politicians, pundits, and executives when they tell us their schemes are designed for our benefit.

AUTHOR

Patrick Carroll

Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

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